Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  Cole stared straight in front of him. He slowly raised his left fist in the air and then, one at a time, opened his fingers until the thumb and forefinger were left holding a dangling car key.

  Madelyn screamed.

  Cole turned around in the seat and said, “Madelyn, will you please get in the fucking car?”

  Her hands were shaking so badly that Cole had to reach over and open the door for her. She got in and moved the seat forward until she could reach the pedals. She took the key and started the engine. It purred like a leopard. She revved it, looked at the tachometer, and realized she couldn’t see for the tears in her eyes. “How…?” she said. “What… when…?”

  “The Cotillion advance finally came in last week. The check cleared our bank account today. I found this a month ago and gave the guy a big deposit to hold it for me.”

  “But… but…”

  “I don’t want you taking the bus to school anymore. You can get there in half the time in this. I’ve rented you a space in a garage two blocks from here. And we might want to think about moving into a place of our own.”

  “Oh, Cole,” she said, and reached for him.

  He hugged her and kissed her lightly and pointed forward. “Drive.”

  *

  By late April, Alex could see that something was not right with Denise and Tupelo. Denise had been a more or less constant presence in the Castle since classes had started again in September, her raucous laugh part of the ongoing soundtrack. When the laughter stopped, the tension began.

  Being around somebody you were no longer having sex with was weird enough. Alex had handled it okay when she and Tupelo were going through the first obsessive phase of their relationship. Being apart for the summer had brought things back to a boil in the fall, but by Christmas Denise was down to room temperature and Alex had caught her looking at him a time or two with memories on her mind. Alex was not without memories of his own.

  The tension came to a head on a Wednesday. Tupelo had a language lab Wednesday afternoons and was typically gone from eight am until suppertime. Alex was fixing himself a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch when Denise came in and perched on the kitchen counter.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” Alex said.

  “I’m having my period and I’m cramping like nobody’s business.”

  Denise’s desire, Alex knew all too well, ran especially high during her period. And, Denise being Denise, Alex knew that Tupelo had an old-fashioned repugnance toward menstrual blood. Whereas Alex had always been happy to throw an old towel over the sheets.

  It had been a while for Alex. What was it about sex with an ex? The combination of the forbidden and the familiar was nearly irresistible.

  “Joe asked me to marry him,” Denise said.

  Alex turned to look at her. “What did you say?”

  “I told him I needed to think about it.”

  “Do you?”

  “No, not really. It’s not a question of thinking. It’s about feeling, and…”

  “You’re not feeling it.”

  “Not marriage, no. He’s a wonderful guy and I really care for him, but… I’m not the girl he thinks I am.”

  The very air in the kitchen was combustible. The slightest spark could set it off. Alex turned off the burner under his sandwich. “What kind of girl are you?”

  Denise bounced her legs on the counter. “I’m bad,” she said. “I have bad thoughts.”

  They looked at each other.

  Alex told himself that he was not going to take Denise to bed. He’d never been as close to Tupelo as Cole had been, but they were all living under one roof. He wanted to believe that he was not capable of that kind of betrayal.

  He was, however, capable of kissing her. Just to see. Just to find out if she was feeling what he was feeling.

  He took a step toward her. She stopped jiggling her legs and slowly opened them. Alex stepped in and kissed her and her arms went around his back. She moved her lips across his cheek and then giggled in his ear. “This is a really bad idea,” she said, and bit his earlobe.

  “Yeah,” he said. He was going to pull away, or at least he was starting to think about pulling away, when Denise said, “Oh, shit,” and suddenly let him go.

  Alex turned to see Tupelo Joe in the doorway of the kitchen. He still had the remnants of a smile on his face, fading fast. He backed away, nodding, as if somebody had answered a question. Alex supposed that in a way they had.

  “Wait,” Alex said. “It’s not what you think.”

  “Really?” Joe said. He turned and ran lightly up the stairs.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Denise said.

  Denise followed Joe upstairs and Alex gripped the edge of the counter, staring at the sandwich in the frying pan, slowly oozing orange cheese, for which he had lost all appetite.

  Joe’s bedroom was above the kitchen. Alex heard the floorboards creak as Joe moved around, heard Denise outside his door, pleading, then ordering him to let her in. Alex stood paralyzed with self-hatred.

  Ten minutes later he heard Joe on the stairs and went to intercept him. Joe had a suitcase and his eyes were distant. “Get out of my way,” he said to Alex, and something in his voice made Alex step aside.

  Denise, on the landing, slid her back down the wall and started to cry.

  Alex watched Joe gently close the front door behind him. He felt nine years old again, staring down at the shattered hand mirror that his mother had inherited from her grandmother and that Alex had been pretending was a tennis racket. This time there was nobody to spank him and send him to his room. He would have to find his punishment on his own.

  *

  Alex got a call from Denise on Saturday. She’d got hold of Joe’s mother, who told her Joe had flown home on Wednesday night, and on Thursday morning he’d volunteered for the Marine Corps. He’d left a few hours ago on a bus for Parris Island, South Carolina. His father was upset, and his mother was terribly proud.

  In the silence, Alex tried to think of consoling words. Sooner or later Denise would have broken it off. Joe would have reacted the same way. Maybe the words were even true. But the words he kept hearing in his head were, “We’ve killed him.”

  In the end he didn’t say anything except to thank her and tell her goodbye.

  *

  Cole took down his wall calendar and wrote down the dates as Graham gave them to him over the phone. The album was scheduled to hit the streets on Tuesday, July 1. They had in-store appearances that day in New York City, radio interviews that evening, a gig Wednesday at the Bitter End, then shows Friday and Saturday at the Fillmore East, second on the bill to Iron Butterfly. On Thursday night, Graham promised to take them backstage to meet Jeff Beck—after they bought their own tickets, of course.

  For reasons Cole didn’t entirely understand, he was reluctant to tell Madelyn about the trip. After a day of sitting on it, he forced himself. They’d finished dinner and for once the other guys were not around. Cole laid out the order of events and, to his profound disappointment, she said she couldn’t come.

  “It’s the second week of the summer session. And Kindred has an opening that weekend.”

  This, Cole saw, was what he’d been afraid of.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this is a big deal for you.”

  “It’s not just a big deal ‘for me.’ It’s a big deal period. It’s an album on a major label, a showcase at a famous club, and our first Fillmore show where we’re not the opening act.”

  “If there were any way…”

  “Where there’s a will,” Cole said, “there’s a way.”

  “I’d just be underfoot. None of the other guys is bringing a girlfriend, right?”

  “The other guys are planning to take advantage of the more than abundant local resources.”

  “I see.” Cole recognized this phrase as an amber warning light. Not an indicator, yet, of mortal danger, but definitely a sign of thin ice. “That’s what this is really about,
isn’t it? There’s going to be a lot of ego stroking going on and you want to make sure you get laid at the end of the day.”

  “I had assumed,” Cole said, “you would prefer that it be you I’m getting laid by.”

  As soon as the words were out, Cole wanted to take them back. Madelyn’s face turned hard. “So that’s the choice now? Either I fuck or somebody else will?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Cole said.

  “It’s damn well what you said.”

  “I was counterpunching. I didn’t mean it. What I’m trying to say—”

  “I think it was the truth slipping out in an unguarded moment.”

  “What I’m trying to say,” he repeated, talking over her, “is that there are only so many pivotal moments in a person’s life. This is one of them. I want you there because you’re my wife and I love you.”

  “You know what I wish? I wish that in this new, hip, egalitarian, psychedelic world you guys are building that there was a place for women that wasn’t flat on their backs with their knees in the air.”

  She must have known she’d now gone too far herself because she pushed her chair back violently and retreated to the bedroom and banged the door.

  Cole went downstairs and headed on foot into the sunset, toward the Haight and Golden Gate Park and the Pacific Ocean. A full moon hung in the darkening sky behind him. He wondered if he and Madelyn were coming to the end of their road together. She didn’t want to be a sex object, but she still wanted him to desire her and her alone. And sex was one of the few things they had in common.

  He thought about the lavender-scented girl in Guanajuato, and how miserable he felt afterward. Yet the thought of leaving Madelyn was equally intolerable. As was the thought of more and more fights like the one they’d just had.

  The thing that he wanted most in life was to feel wholehearted. To give himself to the people and things he loved without being undercut by doubts and second thoughts. Apparently even that small thing was too much to ask.

  Their fights usually ended with tears, apologies, and especially satisfying sex. The bedroom door was still closed when Cole got home, light showing through the crack underneath. If she was waiting for him, it was with a textbook in hand. He did not feel invited. He got out La Pelirroja and played a few Mexican songs, songs he’d once played to a laughing girl with dark, scented hair.

  *

  When the band arrived in New York, Cole found himself in a restless, dangerous mood. He and Madelyn had gone through the motions for the last month, everything normal on the surface, tensions still pulling at them underneath. They’d kissed, even made love a couple of times, without anything being resolved.

  As he carried his guitar through LaGuardia and out to the limo that Cotillion Records had sent, Cole felt himself being watched. Some of the attention was from women—curious, possibly interested—and some was from envious men. By the time they got to the Warwick Hotel on 54th, Cole had fully accepted the role of rising star on the brink of fame. He’d been waiting all his life to play it. If anything, it made him feel more dangerous, more capable of something drastic.

  Not so the others. Tommy was awed, craning his neck to look up at the buildings. Gordo was acting out, swaggering and talking too loudly. Lenny’s nervousness was the worst Cole had seen it, walling him off from the world. And so it fell to Cole to make small talk with Ahmet Ertegun when they toured the Atlantic offices on Tuesday morning, to make a connection with the promo man who took them to the record stores, to do most of the talking in the radio interviews, to push “Easy Go,” the first single from the album.

  He and Lenny were sharing a room, so Cole sat in the bar downstairs Wednesday night while Lenny had his way with a woman he’d met at the highly successful Bitter End show. An elegant blonde in her thirties in a skin-tight knit dress brought her drink to Cole’s table and started talking to him, and he took ten minutes to realize that she was a professional. He was mildly curious as to what it might be like with her, but sex, like rock and roll, was not something where he valued a detached and polished performance. He explained that he was married and not in the market, and she raised her glass to him and moved on. Maybe, he thought, he was going to make it through the whole trip without seriously being tempted. The idea left him vaguely sad.

  Meeting Jeff Beck was also a letdown. The band was coming apart, Beck and Rod Stewart not speaking to each other, and the live show featured mostly music from their new Beck-Ola album, which Cole thought inferior to Truth. Beck himself was nice enough, though Cole found they had little to talk about.

  And so, on Friday night, after a terrific first set, Cole was into his second beer before his sweat dried. Unlike the San Francisco halls, the Fillmore East was a former theater, with seats still in place. They’d gotten most of the audience on their feet, a few of them dancing in the aisles, yet the vibe was distinctly different.

  One more night, he thought, then he would be home, waiting for the next fight to start. Then what?

  He was leaning against a brick wall outside the dressing room, looking down at the beer bottle. When he looked up, he was staring into a pair of enormous, heavy-lidded brown eyes. They were set in a narrow face with a longish nose and wide, swollen lips that were turned up in an easy smile. Her dark brown hair was disheveled and her breasts were on the verge of spilling out of her low-cut black T-shirt.

  “I don’t know how many times I came while I was watching you play,” she said. “I think I lost track around eight or nine.”

  “Now that,” Cole said, “is what I call an opening line.” She wore an intoxicatingly musky scent. She was at least Cole’s age, Italian or Jewish, a classic New York tough chick.

  “I’d like to return the favor,” she said. “A quickie in the bathroom if that’s what gets you off. Or I would really like to go back to your hotel and fuck you all night long.”

  Cole, going under, made one last attempt to grab a lifeline. “I should tell you, I’m married.”

  “I should tell you, I don’t really give a shit.” She stepped into him, put both hands in his hair, and pulled his mouth down onto hers. The kiss was soft, and her lips and tongue fully enveloped him and moved with a slow hunger. He felt her breasts and pubic ridge press against him, and if they’d been alone in a room with a bed, he would have already been tearing at her clothes. They were in public, however, and that thought made him break the kiss and look up to see Bill Graham watching him with a big grin on his face.

  “I don’t want to interrupt,” Graham said. “I’ll catch you later.”

  “Wait,” Cole said. He looked at the girl. “I got to go.”

  “I’ll be around,” she smiled.

  Graham walked him toward his office. “I see you met Sandy. Did she tell you about her orgasms?”

  Cole blushed and nodded.

  “I can’t speak from personal experience,” Graham said, “but she comes highly recommended.”

  Cole, hating himself for it, suddenly visualized what Madelyn would think of Sandy, what she would think of Cole if he had sex with her. As much as he tried to tell himself that Madelyn’s opinion didn’t matter, in the end it did. “I think maybe I better pass. What’s happening?”

  “I wanted you to meet this guy, John Morris, who works for me. I got you into this festival he’s part of.” He opened the door to an empty office. “Looks like he’s already split.”

  “Festival?” Cole asked.

  “Yeah, middle of August, upstate. It’s called the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair.”

  *

  Madelyn slowly slipped from hair-trigger anger into a deep depression. The emotions felt like someone else’s, as if she’d gotten lost inside a John O’Hara novel. Not that there was time in her life for fiction; she’d been without the consolations of literature since January. It was the thing she missed most.

  On a Wednesday afternoon, August 6, she agreed to go to dinner after her Early Renaissance Drawings class with a boy named Gregory Baxter. Baxter,
sandy-haired, freckled, full of moneyed confidence, had made his interest clear since the start of the summer semester; Madelyn had diverted his previous invitations by holding up her left hand and letting the light catch her wedding ring. That Wednesday she only wanted to delay going home as long as possible because she knew Cole would be there.

  Baxter’s goal in life was to become, by means of his father’s money, the sort of art collector whose name was whispered at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Irene would have thought him a parasite; Madelyn noted that he was amusing, well read, and had lovely manners.

  Even so, she failed to be fully present during dinner. She was distracted by the thought that, having admitted that she was happier away from Cole than with him, she would now have to deal with the consequences.

  Baxter finally dropped her off at her car at 8:00. They were alone in the parking garage and Baxter got out to open her car door for her. She knew what was coming and yet somehow failed to entirely avoid his kiss. She did then gently push him away, and Baxter said good night and waited while she backed out.

  On 101 North, the chilly night air swirling inside the car, she came to her senses. Women were raped in parking garages every day, often by privileged boys like Gregory Baxter. She was lucky that Baxter was in fact a gentleman, or it could have gone another way. What in God’s name had she been thinking?

  Cole and Lenny were laughing on the couch when she got home; the minute she came through the door, the laughter died. In the ominous silence that followed, she walked straight into the bedroom and closed the door.

  She woke in the night to Cole’s lips on the back of her neck and his hand gently stroking her belly. Half asleep, she let herself respond and rolled over. Then, once he was inside her, her last shred of involvement evaporated and she felt herself go inert. Cole immediately sensed it and froze. “Madelyn?” She was too far away to answer. Her head was turned toward the wall and her eyes were closed, so she didn’t see as he slowly pulled away, then got out of bed. She heard a rustling of clothes and the sound of the bedroom door.