“I want everyone to stop calling me Horse. I’m not some kid. It’s disrespectful.”
“Okay, Todd. You got it. Hey, I hear you might be trying to get yourself elected sheriff. Is that true?”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Grace.”
“Yeah?” Todd smiled unpleasantly. “Who told her that?”
There was something in the question that momentarily sickened Thaddeus. His stomach dropped, as if he were sitting in a plane that was suddenly losing altitude. “You want to try some chicken? It’s good.”
“I do loves me some chicken,” Todd said, in his deepest voice, and opened his eyes to their widest aperture, his concept of how a black person would respond to chicken.
“Comes from Johnny Cake Ho,” Thaddeus said.
Todd had been just about to take a piece for himself, but suddenly his hand veered over to a giant bowl of potato salad. “I need carbs,” he announced. “When you’re working with free weights, you need a lot of carbs. Protein, too, but carbs give you energy for workouts.”
“You really should try the chicken,” Thaddeus said.
“I’m good,” said Todd. He piled potato salad on his plate, and then a wedge of lasagna.
“But I insist,” said Thaddeus. “I want everyone to know how good their stuff is so they can stay in business.”
“I don’t really much care if they stay in business or not,” said Todd.
Thaddeus flushed red for a moment, stepped back as if pushed. “Jesus, Horse, it’s chicken.” A queer feeling went through him, as if a ripple of cold water rolled through his brain.
“Horse is over, man. I told you. And I like the way my wife makes chicken anyhow. And if you want to know the truth, I don’t go for it when people come here and put locals out of business.”
“Well, they’re local now, too, Todd. They live right above their shop.”
“I’m going to tell you something,” Todd said. “You can’t have a place where the majority of the people feel like they don’t even belong. Okay? Either we turn things around or this place is going to blow sky high.”
“This place?”
“You’re a nice guy, Thaddeus. You made a nice donation for Brandon. That doesn’t get forgotten. And you took care of Hat, we all know that.”
“Who is this ‘we’?”
“Just keep your eyes open, Thad, that’s all I’m saying.”
HAT SAT IN AN ARMCHAIR in the front room, with a plaid blanket over his knees. His tarnished hair was wet and combed straight back, and his clothes—a Harris tweed jacket, a white shirt, blue gabardine trousers—hung so loosely on him that they didn’t seem as if they were really his. Muriel was holding his beer while Hat carefully fed himself grapes, eating them simian style, chewing out the meat and carefully extracting the skins from his mouth. It was the only food on his plate.
Had Muriel colored slightly upon seeing Grace? Grace wanted to study her face, but did not dare. Yet she was struck by the thought that Muriel knew everything that was there to be known, and had known all along. Maybe it was perfectly all right with her. Marriages were mysterious, each written in a secret code. A marriage was its own anthropology, similar enough to all the others to fool you into believing you understand it. Yes, it did not strain credulity to consider that whatever passed between Jennings and Grace was fine with Muriel. Maybe Grace was really nothing much more than the safety valve through which the steam of simple human discontent could safely rise. Maybe Jennings was constitutionally unable to sustain fidelity and in Muriel’s view Grace was a safe outlet for all that pent-up errant energy, a little fenced yard in which he could run. Or maybe Muriel herself had someone else in her life. She did not act it, and did not look the part. But then: who did? Everyone is inscrutable.
Except to deliver pies, Muriel rarely left the property. She moved freely around Orkney, not only on Hat’s swath, but the entire estate—at times it seemed to Grace that whenever she looked up from her drafting table to see if she might draw a modicum of inspiration from all the natural beauty out her window (never worked), or checked to see what her dogs were barking about (never could figure it out), she would catch a glimpse of Muriel, winding her way down to the stand of oaks where the wild mushrooms sprouted after any decent rain, or gathering thistle and rose hips for her witchy teas, or working the orchard with a hacksaw and pruning shears. Her hair seemed always wet, curling down her back in a kind of doomy pre-Raphaelite swirl, and an expression of contentment, a half smile as she gazed at the sky. But maybe that contentment was a pose, or just the way her face looked at rest, the way Thaddeus always seemed to be smiling when all he was doing, or so he claimed, was listening. Yes, Muriel seemed serene. But how could she be serene if she suspected anything was seriously amiss in her marriage? How could she glide around Orkney on her long hairless legs if her heart was broken? She must not know a thing, or must not care.
At any rate, the good and perfect hippie wife held her father-in-law’s paper plate while Hat busied himself with his beer. Grace, feeling she must say hello to him, prepared herself for Hat’s odd exhausting brand of courtliness and condescension. But the old man’s vitality had slipped down another notch or two, and he barely registered her presence. His attention was fixed on the dark sweaty bottle of beer in his hands.
“You look so pretty today,” Muriel said. She herself was dressed in an old-fashioned cream-and-orange polka-dotted dress she’d gotten at a thrift shop in California years before. It emphasized the pioneer plainness of her features, her long chin, her aquiline nose.
“Thanks,” Grace said. “I think I’m coming down with a cold or something.” She couldn’t help it; she had a perverse need to complain when she spoke to Muriel—she was either exhausted, unwell, or unable to cope with the dailiness of motherhood.
“Oh! Poor you,” Muriel said. “I chew two cloves of garlic when I feel something coming on. If I’m really feeling punk, I Scotch-tape cloves on the bottoms of my feet before I go to sleep and just let it soak into the wrinkles. I’m lucky Jennings doesn’t mind. I don’t even think he’s got a sense of smell sometimes.” She reached over and took the beer from Hat. “Here you go, Dad. Let’s get some of this good food in you. You can’t live on grapes.”
Muriel’s remark about Jennings’s sense of smell went directly counter to Grace’s experience of him. She had never had a lover more attuned to the scent of her. He noticed the smell of her shampoo, and even knew when she had switched from Crest to some ridiculously overpriced toothpaste Thaddeus bought from Caswell-Massey. Once, meeting Jennings at the Morpheus Arms, a jokily named but otherwise modest motel about an hour away, she had dabbed a bit of perfume (Obsession, as she recalled) and Jennings had licked her pulse points clean of it, saying he wanted to get down to her natural scent. Why would Muriel point out her husband’s lack of a sense of smell when the very opposite was true? Did it mean she knew nothing, or that she knew everything?
Grace was standing close enough to Muriel to see the spidery red zigzags in the whites of her eyes. Muriel, poor Muriel, inconvenient Muriel, blameless Muriel, Muriel the Wronged, Muriel the Innocent, Muriel the Sphinx, Muriel the Sprite, Muriel who heard voices, Muriel the homegrown Hindu, with her long flexible legs and rubber spine, Muriel for whom the world was a yoga mat. Grace had never really hurt another person. The worst emotional damage she had done was failing to love her own mother. A mere sin of omission. But hurting Muriel was different, hurting her was a sin of commission. Yet as bad as it made Grace feel and as much as it filled her with pity and remorse and a desire to protect and somehow repay, it also made her want to never hear Muriel’s voice or see her face or even her shadow cast on the long sloping lawn as she trod the deer path, wicker basket in hand, on her way to her weekly rendezvous with the river, to collect stones and wildflowers.
Muriel’s basket sat on the table next to Hat’s chair, filled with the little treasures she had gathered. Dried lichen, milky white stones, moss-covered bark, tiny pinecones, a bear claw,
deer velvet, as well as things she must have had to dig for—a Krugerrand, a shard of pale green and white cameo, a half page of an old manuscript, a scrap of an old map.
“Did you bring David and Emma?” Muriel asked.
“No, they’re home,” Grace said. She stopped short of with Vicky. A Salvadoran woman lived with them now and looked after the children. Maybe not for long. Thaddeus was starting to make noises about economizing.
“Well, too bad,” Muriel said. “Jewel was looking forward to playing.” Jewel, wearing a child’s tiara, a little white dress and blue tights, was across the room, gently shaking the stroller in which somebody’s baby peacefully slept.
“Oh,” said Grace. “Look at her, she’s so good.”
“She misses him,” Muriel said.
“David?”
“They used to be inseparable.”
“Well, you know they get weirdly busy when they get older,” Grace said. It was the truth. David was busy with music lessons and horseback riding, and the school he attended was three towns over and with travel to and from that meant his day was two hours longer than the kids who went to Leyden’s public school. Yet all of this might be better unmentioned. Sometimes the little privileges were as private as bodily functions. “I don’t see Henry,” she said.
“He’s real shy,” Muriel said. “He keeps pretty much to himself.”
“He’s so cute,” Grace said. She feared that at any moment Muriel might start in on the lead paint thing, and Henry’s many health issues, and so she picked up the basket. “This is beautiful, Muriel. All this stuff!”
“Oh, there’s so much around,” said Muriel. “I just think there’s so much out there we don’t see.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, tell David he’s got a real fan in Jewel. She’d love to see him.”
This is where I am supposed to make a playdate for them, thought Grace. But she could not do it. She could not summon the will, the audacity. Her stomach was churning and she was becoming more and more concerned that something was going to show in her expression.
“How are you doing, Hat?” Grace said, turning away from Muriel. “I really like what you’re doing with your hair. Sweeping it back like that. It looks great.”
Hat appeared to be somewhat confused as to who Grace was, and accepted her remark with a curt nod. “I want to go to my quarters,” he said to Muriel.
“Oh come on, Dad,” Muriel said. “Jennings wants you to be here for this.”
“I’m not one for parties. I’m not one of the party people.”
“I’ll take you up in a little bit,” Muriel said. “We’re all going to help come up with a name for Jennings’s company. Won’t that be fun?”
Hat’s expression was sour. He extended his lower lip, and slowly shook his head. “I still would like to know where he came up with the money to buy all that equipment. That’s what I want to know and that’s what no one is talking about. What we have here is an old-fashioned conspiracy of silence.”
Thaddeus stood with Jennings near the front window with its sublime view of the maple, ash, and oak in full autumn color, all the blazing crowns gathered by a ribbon of bright blue sky.
“Color change is early this year,” Jennings said.
“Yeah,” said Thaddeus, who could not help but notice that none of the other guests had helped themselves to the chicken from Johnny Cake Ho. Was there some sort of boycott? Did these fuckers have some problem with black people? Or was it really the price of the platter that exercised them? Jennings’s friends were consuming potato salad, macaroni salad, Doritos, and Larry Sassone’s blazingly hot practically inedible salsa, made from a recipe Larry had learned years ago in Santa Fe.
“Did you try the chicken?” Thaddeus asked the guy standing to his right, a stocky man in his thirties with a somewhat feminine hairdo, a kind of page boy that was in stark contrast to the rest of him—the missing front tooth, the unshaved face.
“Hey! There’s my princess,” Jennings called out, and pointed.
For a moment Thaddeus thought it was Grace he was talking about. But of course that was impossible and absurd—Jennings was referring to Jewel. And yet the momentary misapprehension continued to unfold within Thaddeus, just as the ripples created by a stone thrown into still water will continue to unsettle the surface whether or not the stone was thrown in on purpose.
Grace and Jewel filled their plates and sat down to eat, each with lasagna and a roll. Was Grace, too, avoiding the Johnny Cake Ho chicken? Awfully suspicious . . . But it was always there, this wondering if his wife and Jennings were lovers, or at least had once been. He did not wish to ask Grace because he did not want her to lie. He didn’t want to know—what would he do with the confirmation of his worst suspicions? Leave her? Wouldn’t that only make everything worse? Wouldn’t that only deprive him of the consolations of her presence, leaving him not only betrayed but bereft, with nothing to distract him from ceaseless contemplation of her unfaithfulness? If he made love to her a hundred times without her making love with anyone else, all adultery would be eradicated. He did not believe this absurdity, but also: he did. Not everything made sense, not everything that was true was, strictly speaking, true. But this was: she was his wife. They lived in the same house, slept in the same bed, they were a unit, papers had been signed, no one would ever know him as she did, and he knew her, too, he was sure of it. That was something that needed to be protected, not prodded and pushed. He did not need, nor would he seek confirmation of his suspicions. What he would do—and by now he was actually good at it—was bury those suspicions in sex, meals, laughter, domestic routine, vacations, and plans for the future. The whole fluttering mess encased in money and property, like a bird of prey in a cage.
When Jewel scampered off, Grace collected her plate and threw it into the trash, took a celery stick and went to the window, peering into the dusk, chewing. She was checking on their dogs, better expressed as the dogs, since they were not family dogs whatsoever. The reality was, they were her dogs, the Weimaraners, a fairly recent acquisition that had quickly turned into a virtual obsession. She went from one window to the next, hoping to catch sight of them, and when she went out to the porch, Thaddeus followed her and saw the dogs were there—Finn with his large paws on her chest, Molly busily cleaning her own nether region.
“Such a drag,” she said. She moved away from Finn and when his forepaws hit the porch, the thud almost moved one of Muriel’s flowerpots off the railing.
“What is?”
“Jennings. Doing this. I mean, asbestos is poison. It gets in your lungs. Cancer.”
“They wear masks,” said Thaddeus. He nudged Molly with his foot to stop her incessant licking.
“He’s giving up his life, is what he’s doing. He’s just completely giving up his life.”
“We all do, one way or the other,” Thaddeus said. “And I guess we all wear masks.”
“Thaddeus,” she said, shaking her head.
The dogs heard something quite compelling that was broadcasting on the canine frequency and they bounded off the porch, airborne for a moment, and streaked toward the orchard, where the deer often gathered, eating the fallen rotting slightly alcoholic apples. Moments later Molly and Finn were barking Come on, we’re not going to hurt you to the disappearing deer.
“We should go in,” said Grace.
“Your dogs are out there going crazy.”
“They’re okay.” She made a move toward the door. She drew her hands into the sleeves of her dark purple sweater.
“Hey,” Thaddeus said, stopping her. “Kiss?”
They faced each other. A wind came in from the east. He felt it go down his shirt like water. The force of it flattened the fabric of Grace’s pants, and he noted the shape of her legs, the bony bulge of her knees, her thighs. She shook her head but he continued to look at her and at last she was forced to say it, the word, a word consisting of just two letters, and the letters were next-door neighbors in the alphabet, but
the word was devastating.
BY THE TIME THADDEUS AND Grace were back, Jewel had collected all of the suggestions and handed the bowl to Jennings. He stood next to Hat now, with one hand on the back of Hat’s chair, moving his hand in circles, touching the chair as if it were an extension of his father, and he handed the bowl to Hat, who plucked his hardware-store readers out of his shirt pocket, licked his lips, and cleared his throat.
“Hey, Jennings,” called out Andy Clark, a baseball star in high school, now working for the town, plowing snow and salting the roads in the winter, and in the summer clearing brush and spraying pesticide on county road weeds at night. “What bank you go to for the money? I’ve got business ideas, too.”
“I saved my pennies, Andy,” Jennings said. “Anyhow, it wasn’t so much.”
“All that equipment?” said Andy. There was a time when he and Jennings were rivals, both handsome boys, Andy on the straight and narrow, with his letter jacket and good grades, and Jennings on the margins, with his truancy and his truculence. The only prizes they could compete for were love and popularity, and in those high school days love was narrowly defined, and was really about permission, finding girls who would allow access to the body’s secret places. Jennings and Andy competed then and they still competed, though now Andy was losing ground: his twelve-year-old son had been caught with marijuana and got sent to a juvenile detention center, where the very first night he hanged himself. He was cut down in time to save his life but there was some kind of brain damage. Andy’s older brother John had served in Vietnam and tried to convince Andy that the chemicals in Roundup were the same deadly chemicals used in Agent Orange, and the inconvenience of this information enraged Andy; he and his brother, upon whom he had depended for most of his life, and from whom he was renting his house, were no longer speaking. Added to the unlucky slant of his life, it was almost certain that the town, strapped for cash, was going to cut Andy’s hours in half. That Jennings would begin to rise as he felt himself sinking was more painful than failure itself to Andy. He had been fully aware that Jennings had been serially unsuccessful in securing a loan from any bank in the area, and these turndowns had all kinds of reasons—Jennings had no credit history, no credit cards, and not even a lease. And of course there was the personal dimension, too, meaning that Jennings still bore his old reputation as a wild man, and a seducer. Yet now he had somehow gotten his hands on enough money to make a serious capital outlay and Andy was grimly curious about where this money had come from. Did the Orkney Jews give it to him, just as they had given crazy old Hat a house? Had Jennings talked his poor, dying father into using the yellow house as collateral and gotten some bank money after all?
River Under the Road Page 34