A Week as Andrea Benstock

by Lawrence Block

  “And I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Then on the plane I started feeling guilty because I hadn’t said anything to Cal, and I decided I would call him some night, but I never did. And then one day I thought about the people in the neighborhood, seeing how well I remembered them, and I realized that they would never notice that I was gone, I knew that early on. They just wouldn’t see me, and after a while they would forget me. It had been very easy establishing myself in the neighborhood, getting to be a part of it, but the roots were all shallow ones and you could pull them up without a moment’s notice. And I guess that was when I knew for sure that it was right for me to come back. And this was after I had been back for some time already. I knew it was right in certain other ways, for Robin’s benefit for example, and also because I evidently couldn’t maintain any emotional stability in New York. I needed to be here in order to keep myself sane, or at least relatively sane. But I didn’t know it was right for me until much later.”

  “This is where you belong, Andrea.”

  “Yes, it is. It really is, and I still have trouble coming right out and saying that and making myself believe it. Why is that, do you suppose? Why do I have to keep learning the same damn thing over and over? God, I envy you.”

  “You envy me? That’s crazy. The other way around, sure. I envy you in a lot of ways. Not in a sense of wanting to change places, but in other ways. Why in the world would you envy me?”

  “Because you know who you are. You’ve always known who you are.”

  “That’s just not having much imagination, that’s all. But I envy you. Going to New York, having the nerve to do it. Getting a job. Meeting people. I never could have done that.”

  “Maybe you know better than to try.”

  “Aren’t you glad you went, Andrea?”

  “I’m sorry I hurt Mark the way I did—.” Up to a point they’d been even-up in at least that department. … And Robin, she seems all right but how do you ever know with children?

  “But aren’t you glad you did what you did?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course you are. Don’t forget it,” said Eileen Fradin.

  The last guests left shortly after midnight. Mark offered to help her clean up but she told him she wasn’t going to bother. “Everything can wait until morning.”

  “Tired?”

  “I guess I am. It wasn’t really that much work and I didn’t have much to drink tonight but I seem to be exhausted. Let’s go upstairs.”

  But halfway upstairs, she changed direction and went to the kitchen for cigarettes. When she got to their bedroom he was standing in front of his dresser removing his cufflinks. She slipped an arm around his waist and settled her head against his shoulder, meeting his eyes in the mirror over the dresser.

  “We don’t look so bad,” she said. “For a couple of old farts.”

  “I think we look pretty good.”

  “Love me?”

  “No, I’m just crazy about your ass.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I love you. Twelve years.”

  “Not until Monday.”

  “Twelve years. Ten wonderful years. Cass, a funny man.”

  “I think that line came out of some nightclub comic’s routine.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. It was funny, though, the way he said it. After everybody decided it would be all right to laugh.”

  “Oh, I think you’re exaggerating, baby.”

  “Probably.” She yawned daintily. “‘To Mark and Andrea, an inspiration to us all.’ What do you think he meant by that?”

  “Just something to say.”

  “Sure … Are you glad you picked me?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Even if I’m a pain in the ass?”

  “Everybody’s a pain in the ass sooner or later. Hey, don’t cry, baby.”

  “I can’t help it. I don’t even know what I’m crying about. Hold me? That’s better. Oh, Mark.”

  “It’s all right, baby.”

  “I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass.”

  “I know, most of us don’t.”

  “Yeah, sensational. Hitler didn’t mean to be a pain in the ass either. Is it a good average?”

  “Is what?”

  “Ten out of twelve.”

  “I think we’re closer to eleven out of twelve, and that’s a hell of a good average.”

  “Can we go to bed, Mark?”

  “I think that’s a great idea.”

  “Can we screw a little?”

  “Even better.”

  And, after lovemaking, after a warm silence had settled over them, she said, “Mark? Are you awake?”

  “A little.”

  “I just figured out something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know if it makes sense. I just figured out what I’m going to be when I grow up.”

  “What?”

  “Exactly the same.”

  He didn’t say anything, and she thought that he had fallen back asleep. Then he said, “Yeah, it makes sense.”

  “Does it?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s scary, isn’t it?”

  “Yes it is. But it’s a relief too. Mark?”

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing, I guess. Just good night.”

  “Good night, baby. See you in the morning.”

  A New Afterword by the Author

  Athena, goddess of wisdom, emerged full-blown from the head of Zeus. Jill Emerson sprang similarly from my own self, but whether from the head or some lower organ is a matter of some speculation.

  The woman has had a checkered career. Her first two novels, Warm & Willing and Enough of Sorrow, are sensitive fictional explorations of the lesbian demimonde of their day. A few years later she wrote three distinctly erotic novels, Thirty, Threesome, and A Madwoman’s Diary. She followed with a fat Peyton Place-type book, The Trouble with Eden. And then she published A Week as Andrea Benstock.

  It was clearly her most ambitious work, and her most successful. And, at least so far, it’s her last appearance in print.

  I can trace the origin of A Week as Andrea Benstock to two distinct sources. The first inspired my attempting the book, while the second inspired its form.

  Let me consider the second first. In 1949, the Belgian author Georges Simenon published a novel called—well, who knows what he called it, but the English translation bore the title—Four Days in a Lifetime. I must have read it sometime in the late 1950s because what I recall of the experience is that I was in my parents’ house on Starin Avenue at the time.

  Besides its title, all I remember of the book is its structure. It consisted of four parts, each taking place entirely within a single day of its protagonist’s life. And those four days were all you needed. They gave you the full picture of the man’s existence . . . or, at least, all Simenon felt like giving you.

  I thought it was brilliant, and the device—if not the plot or characters—stayed in my mind.

  If Simenon gave me the structure of Andrea Benstock, a woman named Peggy Roth pointed me at the book’s subject matter and at the same time made me believe I was good enough to write it.

  Peggy was a highly-placed editor at Dell Publishing—editor in chief, if I remember correctly. My own editor there, Bill Grose, reported to her, and on one occasion in the early 1970s the three of us had lunch together. I’d written a batch of sex fact books that Dell had published (sexual case histories, truth to tell) and would soon begin the Matthew Scudder series there, but at the time I don’t believe Dell had published any of my fiction. I don’t remember much about our lunch except that it was typical of publisher lunches of the time in that we all had a lot to drink. The conversation wandered all over the place, and at one point Peggy asked me who my favorite writer was. I replied (and would very likely still reply) that it was John O’Hara.

  “Oh, you’re a much better writer than he ever was,” Peggy Roth said.

 
; Now that could only have been the martinis talking, and I’m sure I knew it at the time and surely know it now. She couldn’t possibly have believed it, and if she did, well, she was wrong.

  But her words, even if I recognized them as outrageous and alcohol-driven, nevertheless allowed me to believe that I might try to play in that league. I’d never get a Golden Glove or hit for the circuit, but I might be able to sit on the bench. Maybe pitch batting practice, say.

  Then Peggy asked me about my background, and I said I’d grown up in a middle-class Jewish family in Buffalo, New York. “Then that’s what you should write about,” she said.

  I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that anyone would want to read a novel with such a setting or that I would ever want to write one. But Peggy Roth, a perceptive and intelligent woman, thought that was what I should write. That didn’t send me rushing to my desk, but it was something to think about.

  I don’t remember when it all came together, but eventually I found I had a book in mind. Like Simenon’s novel, it would consist of scattered days in a life—not four but seven of them, the titular week in the protagonist’s life. And they’d be strewn over a decade, beginning with her wedding, when she takes her husband’s name and becomes Andrea Benstock. The days chosen wouldn’t necessarily be the days on which major events in her life happened but would rather be representative days. And there’d be no elaborate recapitulation of what had transpired in the months and years between one day and the next; we’d get that information, but only insofar as it would be apt to come to her mind at each present moment.

  I don’t keep journals, so I can’t say just when I started work on the book or even when I finished it. It took a while. Because of its utterly episodic structure, it was easy to put it aside between sections and turn to something else, something with the promise of immediate income. I was married to my first wife when I began the book, and that marriage ended in the summer of 1973.

  I moved into a studio apartment on West Fifty-Eighth Street, and that same year Peggy Roth took ill and died far too young of pneumonia. When I finished the book, she was one of its two dedicatees; the other was my stepfather, Joe Rosenberg.

  My agent, Henry Morrison, sent the book around. I don’t know if Arbor House was the first place he sent it, but that’s where it landed; Donald I. Fine, who had created Arbor House, wanted to meet the writer and was surprised when Jill Emerson turned out to be a man.

  He wanted me to use my own name on it. He felt strongly about it—Don was a man who felt strongly about most things, if he felt about them at all—but I was adamant that I wanted the book to have Jill’s name on it. We each had reasons for our feelings. Don believed, and you can make of this what you will, that a novel would be taken more seriously if a man wrote it. I believed that a novel told from a woman’s viewpoint would receive a warmer reception if a woman were its author.

  Who was right? Damned if I know. He could point to George Eliot, I suppose, and Madame Bovary. I would probably find someone to point to, if I worked at it. One thing we both agreed on was that it was my call, and I didn’t waver. The book was published in 1975 as A Week as Andrea Benstock, by Jill Emerson.

  Don was good at whipping up enthusiasm for subsidiary rights sales, and he did a couple of good things for Andrea Benstock. The novel was serialized in Redbook and paperback rights went to Ballantine Books. He was famous for getting book club sales, but I don’t believe he managed that this time.

  I would have told you then, and would have believed it myself, that I wanted a pen name for sound commercial reasons. And I may have had commercial reasons, and they may or may not have been sound, but hindsight lets me see they were largely beside the point.

  I’d never really used Buffalo as a background before—except as a setting for genre fiction that might as easily have taken place in Butte, Montana, or Boca Raton, Florida. Nor had I ever written about Jews, except as some minor characters here and there were so designated. But Andrea Benstock was set specifically in the Jewish community of Buffalo. It was by no means a roman à clef, none of these people were even loosely based on real Buffalonians, or real Jews. But it was my own background I was drawing upon, and that was much closer to the bone of personal inner and outer experience than I was inclined to go. So when I used that background, I made the character—and author—a woman.

  Andrea’s surname, by the way, was that of a family I knew in Buffalo: Mel and Pearl and their daughter, Marcy. None of them had any further connection to the book or to any of its characters. I just liked the name. Andrea Benstock—I still like the name.

  —Lawrence Block

  Greenwich Village

  Lawrence Block (lawbloc@gmail.com) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.

  A Biography of Lawrence Block

  Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.

  Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.

  Block’s first short story, “You Can’t Lose,” was published in 1957 in Manhunt, the first of dozens of short stories and articles that he would publish over the years in publications including American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and the New York Times. His short fiction has been featured and reprinted in over eleven collections including Enough Rope (2002), which is comprised of eighty-four of his short stories.

  In 1966, Block introduced the insomniac protagonist Evan Tanner in the novel The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. Block’s diverse heroes also include the urbane and witty bookseller—and thief-on-the-side—Bernie Rhodenbarr; the gritty recovering alcoholic and private investigator Matthew Scudder; and Chip Harrison, the comical assistant to a private investigator with a Nero Wolfe fixation who appears in No Score, Chip Harrison Scores Again, Make Out with Murder, and The Topless Tulip Caper. Block has also written several short stories and novels featuring Keller, a professional hit man. Block’s work is praised for his richly imagined and varied characters and frequent use of humor.

  A father of three daughters, Block lives in New York City with his second wife, Lynne. When he isn’t touring or attending mystery conventions, he and Lynne are frequent travelers, as members of the Travelers’ Century Club for nearly a decade now, and have visited about 150 countries.

  A four-year-old Block in 1942.

  Block during the summer of 1944, with his baby sister, Betsy.

  Block’s 1955 yearbook picture from Bennett High School in Buffalo, New York.

  Block in 1983, in a cap and leather jacket. Block says that he “later lost the cap, and some son of a bitch stole the jacket. Don’t even ask about the hair.”

  Block with his eldest daughter, Amy, at her wedding in October 1984.

  Seen here around 1990, Block works in his office on New York’s West 13th Street with, he says, “a bad haircut, an ugly shirt, and a few extra pounds.”

  Block at a bookstore appearance in support of A Walk Amo
ng the Tombstones, his tenth Matthew Scudder novel, on Veterans Day, 1992.

  Block and his wife, Lynne.

  Block and Lynne on vacation “someplace exotic.”

  Block race walking in an international marathon in Niagara Falls in 2005. He got the John Deere cap at the John Deere Museum in Grand Detour, Illinois, and still has it today.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.