River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  “The money.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “I’ve got two scripts going. One sort of autobiographical, the other more of a fantasy thing. Maybe you want to take a look at them.”

  “Sure,” Thaddeus said. “I’d be honored.”

  “I’m calling my boss and yours,” Klein said.

  “Who’s my boss?” Thaddeus asked.

  “I’m a present, right? So a present has to be from someone.”

  A couple of the caterers—a Celtic-looking middle-aged man, with graying hair combed back and dark circles under his wide blue eyes, and a young girl whose russet braids were pinned up on her head, like a Norwegian milkmaid—were seated at the table, chatting and sipping Spanish white wine, now that all of the food preparation and most of the serving was finished. Nevertheless, both rose from their chairs as soon as they saw Thaddeus. The girl, wiping her hands on her apron, said, “Can we help you with something, Mr. Kaufman?” while the man, who in fact had only half-risen from his seat, sank down again and swirled his wine in his glass, peering into it as if looking for a flaw.

  “No, no, no,” Thaddeus said. “We’re just making a quick phone call—we won’t be in your way.”

  “The way is yours, Mr. Kaufman,” the man said, in a brogue so lilting and pronounced that Thaddeus was sure it was exaggerated, a subtle way of keeping Thaddeus in his place, keeping the boss at bay. The boss! He was the boss. It seemed preposterous.

  Consulting a piece of paper, Klein dialed. While he waited, he said to Thaddeus, “We ought to hang out sometime. I’ll cut you in on how things work around here. Oh, hi there,” Buddy said into the phone, in a soft, insinuating voice. “This is Jay, Mr. Klein’s personal assistant. He wanted you to know that he has arrived at the party. We’re going to set up his amplifier, and we’ll do a sound check and Mr. Klein’s performance will commence in the next fifteen minutes.”

  Thaddeus heard some sort of reply.

  “He wants to talk to you,” Klein said, in Jay’s voice, handing the phone to Thaddeus.

  “Hello?” Thaddeus said.

  “Well, happy housewarming, Thaddeus,” the Canadian director Neal Kosoff said. His voice was hard and bright as a croquet ball.

  “Neal, man, I can’t believe you did this.”

  “That was him, wasn’t it? On the phone?”

  “Really, Neal. I’m overwhelmed.”

  “Yes, well, he was supposed to be there an hour ago. I think he’s still living in the sixties. But I’m glad you’re happy. I’d be there myself but I’m in Toronto visiting my mother. She’s gotten round eyeglasses and chin whiskers. She’s actually starting to look like Trotsky.” Kosoff laughed at his own remark. Thaddeus had been taught as a youth that laughing at your own jokes was coarse and ought under all circumstances to be avoided, but he found the practice rather winning in Kosoff, a kind of vulnerability.

  “That makes two of us,” Thaddeus said. “I’m just coming in from Chicago. My father is having some health problems.”

  “Really? Well, those old Lefty Louies are a tough lot.”

  He couldn’t remember telling Kosoff that his parents were hard-charging leftists. What had he been currying, what silence had he been trying to fill when he told Kosoff about his parents’ political life?

  “Anyhow, I’ll let you get back to your party,” Kosoff was saying. “But there’s one more thing I wanted to tell you about—and it’s a piece of fantastic news. Scooter Morris has come on board to work on Hostages.”

  “Scooter Morris? You’ve got me at a disadvantage on that one,” Thaddeus said with a lilt, still feeling insouciant, still riding the crest as he waited for the good news—the fantastic news.

  “Not surprised you don’t know the name. Scooter Morris is one of the business’s best-kept secrets,” Kosoff said. “The total professional. Starts work at three in the morning and writes until seven, takes his son to this special school for retarded kids, then it’s back to work until two. He’s got the whole thing down to a science.”

  “What whole thing?” Thaddeus asked.

  “Seven of the movies he’s worked on have been nominated, and two have won. His box office numbers are fantastic. He literally gets as much as me on a movie.”

  “Wait a second. You’re getting a new writer? I’m fired?” Thaddeus noticed that Klein had left and the two caterers were suddenly looking at him, and he turned his back to them. The telephone cord wrapped around his shoulders, a plastic python.

  “No, no, listen to me, if they’re bringing in Scooter that means the studio is going to make your movie. This guy doesn’t get involved in development deals. If he’s in, it’s on. This is better than pay or play, or getting Hoffman, Redford, and Newman all wrapped up together with a bow on top.”

  “But am I fired? That’s what I’m asking you.” The cord slipped off his shoulders and wrapped around his throat. He was having difficulty drawing a decent breath, and turned counterclockwise to extricate himself.

  “Fired,” Kosoff said, as if the word were childish, absurd.

  “Inasmuch as I won’t be working on the script. On my script.”

  “You’re going to get your start money, your price is going to go up. Watch what they offer you for your next script. This is how careers are made. And you’ll almost certainly receive full credit. Scooter doesn’t usually even want a credit, and anyhow the Guild always finds in favor of the original writer. I’m sure they will back you in arbitration.”

  “Arbitration? Now I’m in arbitration?”

  A strategic silence indicated that Kosoff had now finished trying to put a good face on all of this. “Here’s what I think,” he finally said. “Go enjoy your party. Listen to Buddy Klein. And I will ring you Monday or Tuesday and I can guarantee that you’ll be feeling differently about this.”

  “You know, Neal,” Thaddeus said, but then stopped. There was a certain deadness in the sound of his own voice. “Neal? Are you still there?” He flicked the switch hook once with his index finger and as soon as it was depressed he heard the dial tone. Fine. Fuck him. What could you expect from a man who makes fun of his own mother’s facial hair?

  Life is the worst parent imaginable, embracing you one moment, throttling you the next. As Thaddeus replaced the phone into the cradle, he saw, or half-saw, a flash of light, and heard a kind of fizzing crack. It stopped him from moving, thinking, or breathing. A moment later, Grace was calling his name. She was standing just inches away from him. A lizard-shaped wet spot was on the front of her blouse. Her eyes flashed; they seemed to see everything and nothing. It was how he had imagined the eyes of the student fanatics in his make-believe country of East Tigris.

  “Call the fire department!” she said, with one hand over her pregnancy, the other gesturing chaotically, opening, closing, pointing, shaking. “And an ambulance.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Call!”

  He dialed. “And say what?”

  Her face moist with perspiration, her eyebrows knitted so tightly that they looked as if they were being wrung out, Grace took the phone out of his hands.

  “Hang on, Hat,” a voice from the party called out. “Hat? Hat?”

  “His feet are . . .” His feet were something or other, or maybe his face. Thaddeus was having a hard time understanding what people were calling out as he moved out onto the patio, past Buddy Klein, who was seated on a folding chair, his guitar on his lap, and past a couple of the caterers who were holding their empty trays limply at their sides, staring out at the mighty oak, where one of the floodlights burned a path through the darkness, a bright yellow cone full of moths and other night flyers swooping and darting, oblivious to the human drama. Hat Stratton was thirty feet above the ground, his legs straddling one of the oak’s thick, gnarled limbs.

  Hat had suffered a long sizzling jolt of electric shock from one of the lights he was attempting to put in the tree. There was a smell in the air, a post-thunderstorm pungency of ozone—metallic, sligh
tly chlorinated.

  The crowd took it upon itself to awaken Hat from his shocked stupor. First a few of them began to call his name, over and over, and soon virtually everyone was part of the chant, as if they were in a stadium urging their team on. To Thaddeus’s ears there seemed something larky about the whole thing, some shameful nugget of irony in the chant. And really—was that even the man’s name? Could he not in what might be his last moments on earth be granted the dignity of his given name?

  THE CARETAKER’S COTTAGE, THE YELLOW house where Hat lived, and where Jennings and Muriel now lived, too, while saving money to rent a place in town, had been built in the summer of 1902. It was a cheerful, welcoming place, snug in the winter and cool in the hot weather. The walls were covered in floral wallpaper, roses in the parlor, a riot of huge pink sensuous peonies in the dining room. Hat was certain the yellow house’s wall coverings were of historical significance, and to his great displeasure, the wallpaper in the upstairs hallway and bedrooms had not survived, and there the walls had been painted a somber gray.

  Most of the time Jennings and Muriel spent in Hat’s house was cloistered in their bedroom, to give Hat his privacy, and to avoid any spontaneous lectures that might come geysering out of the maddeningly erudite old fellow. Now, with Hat busy at the housewarming party at the big house, they luxuriated in the parlor.

  “If you wanted to go over and check out the party, you could do that,” Jennings said to Muriel. “There’s all this food and champagne.” He was stretched out on the old green velvet sofa, his feet bare, his trousers rolled to the knee, while Muriel massaged him. She pressed her thin, but surprisingly strong fingers into the bottoms of his feet, where the trigger points for all of the body’s internal organs resided. She said it was like a switching station for the whole nervous system, as well as digestion, heart health, even eyesight.

  “Can I move this?” Muriel said. The floor lamp was right behind her, its tawny shade scorched from the 150-watt bulb Jennings had put into it years ago. Hat refused to change the shade, left it there as a reminder to Jennings that when his father said 75 watts he meant 75 watts.

  “Of course you can. You live here.”

  “I guess I’m still getting used to it.” She lifted his foot, regarded it. “You’ve got beautiful feet.” She ran her hand over the dorsal hump. “And so smooth.”

  “Fresh shrimp at the party,” Jennings said. “Champagne. And all these little sandwiches, you know, the kind they cut the crusts off.”

  “The crust is the best part. Best tasting and best for you.” She lowered his foot with inordinate care, and folded her hands around it, holding it as if it were a bird she was trying to warm back to life.

  “You want to check it out?” Jennings asked.

  “Up there?” She shook her head. “I don’t need to do that. Anyhow, we weren’t invited.”

  “I thought you liked champagne.”

  “I really wouldn’t feel comfortable.”

  Jennings slapped his hands against his stomach, grabbed at the flesh. “I’m getting fat,” he said.

  “You’re the most beautiful man I have ever known,” Muriel said.

  He lifted his shirt. “Still think so?”

  She knitted her brows, tapped her finger against her lower lip. “Hmm,” she said. “Maybe not.” She waited for his reaction and then dove upon him, kissing his chin, his neck, and half-kissing and half-biting his belly. “I wish you were a total stone fatty,” she said. “I wish no other woman would give you a second look.”

  “You’d like that, huh.”

  “Oh, I would totally feature that.”

  “Wait,” Jennings said. “Shhh.” He put up a silencing hand. From a distance, he heard a crowd of people chanting his father’s name, over and over as if it were a joke.

  IN MOMENTS, JENNINGS WAS AT the main house, racing down the slope of the lawn, toward his father in the tree. “Dad,” he called out, his voice ragged and frightened. The intensity and terror in his cry was not enough to silence all the guests, but those standing closest to Jennings got the message and they stopped chanting, and each subsequent calling out of Hat’s name became weaker and more tentative, until, at last, there was silence, save the transistorized twitter of insects and tree frogs. Hat was sitting in a shocked stupor, high in the tree, and everyone stared upward.

  “They’re on their way,” Grace said. “The ambulance.” She touched Thaddeus’s elbow.

  “If he’s dead, it’s our fault,” Thaddeus said.

  “We were paying him extra,” Grace said.

  He didn’t want to ask her, What is that supposed to mean? If this was anyone’s fault it was his.

  A long flat cloud moved away from the moon and suddenly Hat was bathed in light. He looked like a man hanging on to the mast of a sinking ship.

  “I just cut the power from your fuse box,” a voice next to Thaddeus said. It was their real estate broker, Sawyer Halliday.

  “Good idea,” Grace said.

  Jennings, barefoot, his trousers still rolled, moved a ladder from one side of the tree to the other, resting the top of it against a leafy branch. The ladder was wooden, designed for orchard work, and was broad on the bottom, tapered on top, and Hat was at least fifteen feet beyond its reach. Jennings climbed while they watched in silence.

  Suddenly, a collective cry went up. It sounded almost joyous, like the voices trailing out of a roller coaster as it makes its great giddy plunge. All they saw was the moving darkness of Hat’s falling body. He sped past his son and landed flat on his back. He did not make a sound, nor a movement, but lay there in stillness, not even twitching. No one cried out. No one except for Jennings moved.

  “Dad, Dad, Dad,” cried Jennings, as he scrambled down the ladder, jumping off when he was five rungs from the ground. He ran to where his father lay, fell to his knees, held his hands near his father’s body, but did not dare to touch him.

  There was no ambulance, not yet. No squad car, no fire truck, no doctor in the house. Everyone was paralyzed, waiting, waiting.

  There was music rising up from the moonlit water as a boat outlined in twinkling white lights floated past, blasting Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me.” The captain of the party boat cranked up the volume, defying the people in the big houses along the river, all of whom detested the party boats, none of whom believed other people knew how to treat the river.

  Jennings was in an aboriginal crouch, head down, hands folded between his knees. Suddenly Hat stirred. His feet gave a little fluttering kick, and he lifted himself on his elbows. A moment later he was standing straight up, smiling shyly, waving with one hand and rubbing the small of his back with the other. Jennings stood up, and the ladder came whomping onto the grass, barely missing Hat.

  “Nothing to worry about, folks,” Hat said in a reedy voice. And then to demonstrate just how all right he was he began to dance a kind of jig, with his elbows out and his elbows in and his elbows out again, his head ducking this way and that, as if he were passing under a series of low branches. He grinned with embarrassment and tried to hold on to his pride.

  Buddy Klein began to play “Boil the Breakfast Early,” the only authentically Irish song he knew.

  As his father danced his reassuring jig, Jennings sat with his back to the tree and wept into his hands. Eventually, he looked up toward the guests who were cheering Hat on. He could not tell the drunk from the tipsy, the vigorous from the faltering, the finger snappers from the back slappers, the easy lays from the ice queens, the fat asses from the squash champs, the rich from the crazy rich, the hustlers from the straight shooters, the ones who thought they might be better than the Stratton family from the ones who just absolutely knew they were, and the ones who wanted lights in their trees and thought a fat tip turned you into the next Jesus. Right now, they were all in it together, all of them chanting Hat’s name, all in on the humiliation, up to their chins in it, up to their eyeballs, over their fucking heads, all of them, all of them.

  I
F YOU INCLUDED THE HIS and hers sitting rooms, their bedroom was almost exactly to the square foot twice as large as their apartment back in New York. Grace had found a store that sold good wooden hangers and their clothes were at last in a closet. But the work of actually furnishing the place was still in front of them. Chairs, sofas, carpets, lamps, dinnerware, pots and pans, room after room waited to be filled. It was fun at first but it became tedious, and this persistent need to shop created a division of labor between them. Thaddeus had to work on a new script and he also needed to look for what came next—it turned out that being well off was expensive—and so most of the shopping fell to Grace, who was feeling not only the sluggishness of pregnancy but the slowly mounting realization that without so much as a minute’s conversation about it she had been relegated to the role of housewife. So far, she had furnished the bedroom with a couple of easy chairs, a small bookshelf, four lamps. The king-size mattress was on the floor because she hadn’t found a frame for it yet. It would take thousands of dollars, perhaps tens of thousands to furnish just this one room, and there were many, many others even emptier.

  Thaddeus waited on the mattress, running his hand over the new sheets that were still a wash or two away from the softness he had hoped for. He was eager for the comfort of Grace’s body, but when she finally emerged from the bathroom, unself-consciously naked, the swell of her pregnancy glistening from her nightly application of apricot kernel oil, her bangs darkly wet from her face-washing routine, which ended with fifteen dutiful lukewarm rinses, she walked past the bed and through the French doors that led to a small balcony. Naked himself, Thaddeus scrambled out of the bed to follow her.

  “I can’t see a thing,” he said, standing behind her, pressing himself against her backside. “We could be anywhere. We could be dead.”

  “So you’d be trying to fuck me even in the afterlife?”

  “That’s true.”

  Someone was having a birthday celebration on one of the party boats and it was still going on despite the hour. They could hear the laughter as the boat moved north, laughter you could tell was mad and drunken, even from a far distance.