The Trouble with Eden

by Lawrence Block

  “No. Unless you do, in which case you’ve got it. For me, no.”

  “Even if I screwed a guy tonight?”

  “Even if you did. I hate it that you did, but what right have I got?”

  “Suppose I made a habit of it.”

  “You mean with one particular guy?”

  “No, I don’t mean with one particular guy and I don’t mean walking around town with a mattress on my back. I mean doing what you do.”

  “Sauce for the goose,” he said.

  “Not exactly, but I’ll tell you, I needed what I got tonight.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, as to how would I feel, I don’t know how to answer you. As far as people talking I never paid attention yet, but how I’d feel, hell, I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know.” She got to her feet. “I’m kinda sleepy,” she said. “How about you?”

  “I don’t know. Tired, but I don’t know if I could sleep. But I know I should. I’ll come up with you.”

  He lay in bed beside her trying to figure out how he felt. It was a strange feeling and he could not understand it. She had been with another man and he felt that it ought to bother him more than it did. It was on his mind, it was very much on his mind, yet it did not genuinely bother him, and he wondered why that should be.

  After awhile he said, “You won’t tell me who it was?”

  “No. Would you tell me who was the last girl you laid?”

  “You tell me and I’ll tell you. No, come to think of it, I see what you mean. Tell me this. Do I know him?”

  “I don’t know who you know and who you don’t know.”

  “Well, tell me who he is and I’ll clear that little point up for you. Just joking. Where did you go with him?”

  “A motel.”

  “Meaning he’s married. If people stopped fucking each other’s wives they’d take motels and make parking lots out of them. Was he good? You already said he was good. What motel did you go to?”

  “So you can check the register?”

  “Jesus, I wouldn’t do that. I don’t even know why I asked. I was just trying to picture it.”

  “Well, just picture me in a room with somebody and let it go at that.”

  “How many times?”

  She sat up. “Hey, what is this?”

  “How many times did he screw you?”

  “What do you want to know that for? Twice.”

  “Two times. You come both times? I guess you did, enjoying it that much.”

  She was silent for a few moments. Then she said, “I came the first time and not the second time. I don’t have to come to enjoy it.”

  “He go down on you?”

  “Next time I’ll take movies. I don’t—”

  “Did he or didn’t he?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Some gentleman you picked. How about you? You go down on him?”

  “Jesus, I don’t believe it. Yes, as a matter of fact I did. What’s the next question? Was he circumcised? Yes, he was. Did he come in my mouth? No, he didn’t. I don’t get it with these questions.”

  “I don’t get it myself,” he said. A few minutes later he touched her arm and said, “Come here a minute.”

  “I was just falling asleep.”

  “Not until you see the present I brought you.”

  He took her hand and put it on his penis.

  “Well, what do you know about that?” she said. “Where did that come from?”

  “Damned if I know. Is two times all you can handle tonight, or do you want to see what happens?”

  “Let’s see what happens.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  Afterward she lit a cigarette and offered it to him. He shook his head. She took another drag and put it out.

  She said, “What did it?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “Thinking about me with him? That must of been what did it.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Well, whatever it was, I’m not complaining. Tell me something and make it the absolute truth.”

  “Did this ever happen before? That’s the question, isn’t it? The answer is no, it never did.”

  “Once you couldn’t make it with them, you could never make it at all.”

  “Right.”

  “Then I wonder what it means.”

  “Beats me,” he said.

  EIGHT

  One Sunday Linda met Tanya in the hall. The actress had just closed Bill Donatelli’s door. “He wants to get some painting done,” she said. “He says I distract him.”

  “I imagine you do.”

  “I wanted him to paint me. He only does abstracts, but I thought I could pose nude and he could look at me while he painted an abstract, and it would give him inspiration. He said it always gave him the wrong kind of inspiration.”

  “I didn’t know he ever said that many words all at once.”

  “Billie talks to me. He’s very shy with most people, but he talks to me. By the way, I guess you took my advice.”

  “What advice was that?”

  “About, you know, physical needs.”

  She was confused at first, her mind fixing on a conversation she had had with someone recently who had been trying to convince her of the virtues of organic vitamins and a vegetarian diet. Then she remembered Tanya’s theories of sexual requirements. Her advice, as far as Linda could remember, was that she ought to go out and get laid.

  She said, “What makes you think I took your advice?”

  “Well, I’m not saying it was anything I said that made you change your mind. It was a matter of speaking. You know, to make conversation. Not that I had anything to do with what you’re doing.”

  “What am I doing?”

  “You’re sleeping with Peter Nicholas.”

  “I’m what?”

  “Sleeping with—”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “You’re not?”

  “Of course not. Who told you that?”

  “Gee, Linda, don’t bite my head off. Nobody told me anything. It’s just that he’s up here all the time two of you spending so much time together Gretchen the way she is and I put two and together.”

  “First you have to know how to add.”

  “Linda—”

  “Because I know it must be news to you, but it’s possible for a man and a woman to spend time together with, out having sex together. That may come as a shock to you. Two people in a room without so much as a television set and yet they manage to keep their clothes on. Strange as it may seem—”

  “Linda, what did I do?”

  The girl looked on the point of tears. “I’m sorry, Tanya,” she said.

  “I mean I didn’t do anything.”

  “I know you didn’t, and I’m sorry. It just threw me. Peter’s the one person I can relax with completely, the one man, because he wants my company but doesn’t want anything more than that.”

  “Well, I didn’t know, Linda.”

  “I hope you didn’t say anything to anybody.”

  “Of course not. Well, except for Billie.”

  “I guess the secret’s safe with him, since you’re the only human being he talks to. Not that there’s a secret to be kept safe.”

  It was two nights before she saw Peter. She was on the point of mentioning Tanya’s conversation to him and his mood changed her mind. Gretchen had had a bad day and when Gretchen had a bad day, Peter wound up in a bad mood.

  Often she thought how unusual was her own special perspective on the situation. No one heard so much about the ups and downs of Gretchen Vann and spent so little time with the woman. She was often invited to stop at their apartment or to accompany them to the Raparound. At first she had tended to accept those invitations, and then she began to find excuses to decline them. She baby-sat for them occasionally, enjoying Robin’s company and happy to do them a favor, but she spent less and less time in Gretchen’s actual company.

  The woman m
ade her uncomfortable. She recognized this before she knew why. Gretchen was brittle and unstable, an enervating companion on her best days, but that didn’t explain it. Later she sorted it out. She didn’t like Gretchen’s company because Gretchen disliked her, and ultimately she guessed the reason for Gretchen’s dislike. It was suddenly obvious.

  “Gretchen doesn’t like me,” she told Peter. “No, I’m serious, she doesn’t.”

  “It’s just her way.”

  “It’s more than that. God knows she has the right to like and dislike whomever she wants. But when I know someone dislikes me I can’t enjoy their company much.”

  “Why would she—”

  “Because she’s jealous.”

  “Of you?”

  “Of you and me.”

  He was incredulous. “But that’s ridiculous!”

  “Of course it is, but she doesn’t think so.”

  “She knows we talk all the time, she knows it’s innocent, she never says anything—”

  “And she can’t stand me. Didn’t she pull a scene awhile ago with Warren Ormont?”

  “I don’t think that was jealousy, for God’s sake.”

  “Well, you said he’s always making a play for you.”

  “Oh, that’s just Warren’s way.”

  “Yes, that’s Warren’s way and the other is Gretchen’s way. She doesn’t like Warren or me because she’s jealous, and of course it’s ridiculous but that doesn’t change the way she feels. Peter, she’s fifteen years older than you. That might not matter to either of you and there’s no reason why it has to but don’t think she’s ever going to forget about it. She’s not able to forget it. And the fact that I’m older than you myself won’t mean anything to her, because all she can see is that I’m still ten years younger than she is.”

  He thought it over. “I guess I ought to stop inviting you to join us, then.”

  “Yes. And maybe it would make sense if we spent less time together.”

  “‘Darling, we have to stop meeting like this.’ No, I won’t buy that. That’s a little too much.”

  “Well, at least don’t keep telling her how relaxed we are with one another and how easy it is for us to talk to each other. We are and it is, and the reason is we’re friends and couldn’t ever be more than friends. Gretchen is never going to see it that way.”

  “You may have a point there.”

  So she still kept posted on Gretchen’s emotional equilibrium but saw very little of it first hand. Item: Gretchen was off speed completely and clean. Item; Gretchen was cutting down on the tranquilizers. Item: Gretchen was working and the work was going well. Item: Gretchen was not satisfied with the work. Item: Gretchen had yelled at Robin. Item: Gretchen had met him after the play and they had gone to Sully’s with some members of the company, and she had handled herself very well. Item: Gretchen had been very good with Robin and seemed to be taking a genuine interest in the child for the first time in a long time. Item: Gretchen was drinking. Item: Gretchen was still drinking but seemed to be able to handle it. Item: Gretchen had left Robin alone for three hours one afternoon. Item: Gretchen had taken him to her shop to show oft her latest work, which she said was far and away her best. Item: Gretchen had been mean-drunk, passed out, and started in drinking again when she woke up. Item: Gretchen had gone drunk to her shop on the Towpath, where she smashed the piece of work she had been so proud of, along with all her other ceramic work and various craft items on consignment from other artisans.

  There was one item after another, until sometimes Linda wondered if she really wanted to be kept so well posted on Gretchen’s rise and fall. Peter’s own views on Gretchen (and Gretchen’s Problem) varied with whether the most recent item was good or bad. When it was good his optimism was heartwarming, if not precisely contagious; Linda doubted the woman would ever achieve anything approaching stability. When the item was on the minus side, Peter would turn moody and introspective, admitting that Gretchen and he and Robin in the bargain, were trapped in an up-and-down cycle that had no end to it.

  While she sometimes found Gretchen less than fascinating as a primary topic of conversation, she never tried to change the subject at those times when Peter needed someone to talk to. He could talk to her, and evidently could talk as intimately to no one else. His confidences concerned the present, or at least were limited in time to the extent of his relationship with Gretchen. Her own, on the other hand, hardly ever concerned the present, or even the immediate past. When she felt the need to talk she was more likely to speak of something that had happened in childhood or adolescence or, on one occasion, of her marriage to Alan. At such times he was more than an interested listener. Without seeming to probe, he could draw her out so that she could say the things she wanted or needed to say.

  They were friends, and yet they were more than friends because they performed a service for one other which transcended simple friendship. She thought it might be said that they played a mutually psychoanalytic role with one other, the part of therapist shuttling back and forth between them. Or was that a common function of friendship? She had never had that sort of friendship before, but then she wondered if any of her past associations had been a true friendship at all. She thought of Olive McIntyre as a friend, felt that she could turn to the woman if she ever had to, enjoyed her company immensely, and yet Olive’s conversation comprised little more than a compendium of the most scandalous Bucks County gossip of the past several decades. Linda enjoyed it well enough, found it increased her sense of belonging in and to the town, but she could not reply in kind and indeed barely replied at all. A conversation with Olive was essentially a monologue.

  It did not fail to amuse her that her first genuine friend in twenty-seven years was a young former homosexual living with a thirty-seven-year-old emotional basket case.

  She was at the shop on a midweek afternoon when a man walked in and began to browse the shelves. He looked faintly familiar, but after a second look she decided it was the type that was familiar and not the individual. He looked around forty-five and had a vaguely professorial aspect to him. He wore an Irish tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and a pair of faded chinos. He had glasses with heavy rims and a small beard confined to his chin and upper lip. He carried but was not smoking a large briar pipe with a curved stem.

  She noticed that much about him and then ignored him, because she knew he was not going to buy anything. She could not automatically spot a buyer, that was umpossible, but she could identify a non-buyer, and he was definitely one. He had time to kill and was killing it in the Lemon Tree. That was all right, and might lead to a sale sometime in the future, but it meant she could safely ignore him unless he happened to request her attention. She did so, returning to the novel she had been reading.

  “Why waste your time on Markarian?”

  She looked up at the interruption. It was the man with the patched elbows and he was pointing to her book.

  “I realize he’s local talent in these parts,” he continued. “But that’s no reason to subject yourself to that garbage. Which one is that? Caleb’s House. I think I missed that one, praise be to God.”

  Gratuitous conversation was one of the hazards of the job. Sometimes, if you ignored these people, they went away. She nodded pleasantly and said, “I see,” and turned her eyes back to the page. But he didn’t go away. She had rather thought he wouldn’t.

  “You read much of his stuff?”

  “I think I read one or two others.”

  “Glutton for punishment. Enjoying that one?”

  “It’s interesting.”

  “Cardboard characters and predictable themes. A book a year out of his assembly line, and every year he writes more and more about less and less. What do you like about him?”

  This was annoying. She kept her eyes on the page and said, “He takes my mind off things that bore me.”

  “By boring you in black and white? That’s a small blessing. What do you like about his books?”

  �
�The stories are interesting. In this one, anyway. I get interested in what happens to the people. I’m not an intellectual.”

  “Whatever that means.”

  “Whatever it means, I’m not one. I gather you are.”

  He grinned. “I suppose I come closer to the category than Hugh Markarian, for whatever that’s worth. He did write one good book, though.”

  “Did he.”

  “You must have read it. One If by Land.”

  “I haven’t read it.”

  “His first novel, the war novel. Of course you read it.”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “The World War Two novel.”

  “I’m not really interested in World War Two.” She looked up from the book and made her expression as unpleasant as she knew how. “It’s one of the things that bore me. There are other things.”

  He seemed immune to insult. “In that case I’ll tell you a secret. One If by Land is even worse than the rest of his swill. The critics are just denser than the reading public, that’s all. You’re lucky you never read it. Have the sense to stay away from it”

  And he left.

  He returned the next day about the same time, wearing the same jacket and carrying what looked like the same pipe. She was within twenty pages of the end of Caleb’s House when he popped in.

  “I see you’re still wasting your time with the same mind rot,” he said. “At least it’s a library copy, and you’re not contributing to his royalties.”

  She raised her eyes and gazea benevolently at him. “I think you’re making a mistake,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “Confusing the author with his books.”

  “Oh, I’m willing to concede he may be a decent enough fellow. That’s neither here—”

  “No, it’s the other way around.”

  “Oh?”

  “I think so,” she said, thoughtfully. “After what you said yesterday I read the rest of the book more carefully. With the idea of trying to figure out the man who wrote it.”

  “And what did you figure out?”

  “That his books are a great deal better than he is. And that what might seem to be flaws or weaknesses in his writing are just the flaws of his own personality coming out.”