Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  She studied him for a few long seconds and then looked away. “What I wouldn’t do,” she said, “for a cigarette.” She slurred the words. Her fierce internal energy kept her blundering on, wide awake and hurting, despite the heavy dose of morphine dripping into the crook of her elbow. Cole would have surrendered to it gladly.

  Susan, seeing that her initial conversational gambit had failed, squeezed his hand. “Cole. How the hell are you?”

  He pulled up a chair, still holding her hand, and told her about his house, directly under the flight path from Mueller Airport, and how he’d gotten it and the vacant lot next door for next to nothing, and how he’d learned to sleep with earplugs. About his vegetables, and the music room he’d added on in back. About his contracting job, and playing out at Antone’s or Liberty Lunch. The longer he talked, the more relaxed she became, as if their six months as lovers in Guanajuato had never happened, as if they were sitting around the Montoyas’ dining room table with the crucifix looking down on them, catching up the way they’d done a dozen times before, minus the flirtation, minus any input from her, as if the wounds they had opened in each other had, if not healed, at least slipped both of their minds.

  In half an hour she was snoring softly. Cole put her hand on the bed and retreated to the hall.

  Alex was gone. His father said, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  They made small talk, Montoya still more tentative than Cole would have liked. Finally Cole said, “What did she say about me?”

  Montoya tried to evade the question and Cole dug in. “Go ahead, she can’t hurt me anymore.”

  “She said… well, for one thing, she said you forced her to sell her mother’s house. That you kept all the money and then put her on the street.” Montoya looked like it hurt him physically to get the words out.

  Cole smiled. “We were both living in that house when I broke up with her. That’s easy to prove. I assumed she sold it, but I wouldn’t have taken any money from it, even if we’d still been together.”

  Montoya interlaced his fingers and put his elbows on the table, like he was praying. “She said you were still drinking, maybe doing drugs, and you were hiding it from her. That was the one that hurt the most.”

  “I can take a blood alcohol or a drug test right now if you want. I’m guessing that’s not necessary.”

  Montoya still couldn’t meet his eyes. “She said you were verbally abusive. That you said terrible things to her about being useless and a parasite.”

  “Not me. Those were the voices inside her own head talking.”

  “I didn’t want to believe any of it, but I didn’t want to call my own daughter a liar.”

  “I expect she was counting on that.”

  Montoya finally looked at him. “She’s been this way all her life. So unhappy, always angry, always disappointed.”

  “Well, she had to choose between you and her mother at a very young age.”

  “That may be how she remembers it. What really happened is that her mother didn’t want her. She said she couldn’t take care of Susan and get her law practice going at the same time.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “We tried to keep it from her, but deep down…”

  “She had to know,” Cole said.

  Montoya shifted his bulk in the plastic chair. “She doesn’t have long now. I think it’ll be a relief to her when she goes.”

  Cole could only nod.

  “What kind of terrible thing,” Montoya said, “is that to say about your own child?”

  1999

  Dave got to Tavern on the Green a few minutes early, though not so early that he could walk around and take in the spring that had once again erupted through the concrete and asphalt of New York City. What was the word for being amazed by the same thing over and over again, year after year? He knew that being early might make him look overeager, and he might have cared about that in his twenties or thirties. He was well beyond it now.

  A cab pulled up and Alex Montoya got out, whose photo Dave had found in a Time magazine in the library. They shook hands and sized each other up. Dave was taller than Montoya and had 15 years on him. Montoya was in a pricey suit, and Dave had on a pair of khakis and a brown corduroy jacket over an open-collared checked shirt. They both looked like they could have done with a jog around the park instead of another rich meal.

  “Incredible day, isn’t it?” Montoya said.

  “It makes the heart sing,” Dave said.

  Montoya took his time getting around to business. Dave asked how long he’d been in the city this trip, and it turned out Montoya had been in film school at nyu in the early seventies, along with Scorsese and that crowd, so he had some nostalgia for when it was still a real city and not just a Disneyland for the rich. They ordered and got their salads and then Montoya said, “You’ve at least heard of Mariachi, I assume.”

  “You had the ma7 file compression. Clearly superior to mp3 and it’s a goddamn shame you guys lost out. There ain’t no justice.”

  “Well, thanks. We’ve got a lot of other balls in the air, fortunately, and the stock is hot, so we’re riding high at the moment. Which is why I wanted to talk to you. How would you like to run your own record company?”

  Dave froze with a bite of Caesar salad halfway to his mouth and slowly lowered the fork. He’d assumed Montoya was looking for an endorsement or some other pr fluff. “Did I just hear what I thought I heard?”

  “A boutique operation, maybe half a dozen releases a year. You can farm some out to other producers. I would secure distribution through one of the majors.”

  Lately Dave had cut back to one, maybe two production gigs a year, mostly favors for old friends. He’d been trying to convince himself he was ready to retire. He’d taken Sallie to Paris, to Japan, and, yes, to Patagonia. They had plenty of the world still to see, though the passivity of being a tourist didn’t sit right with him, all that time and effort and nothing to show for it beyond some camcorder footage, identical to the footage shot by thousands of other tourists. Still, what else was there? He would be 64 in September, he’d made whatever mark he was going to make. Or so he’d thought.

  Montoya was still talking, and Dave had missed some of the details. “You would have a complete free hand with the artists,” Montoya finished up, “with one exception.”

  “Mr. Montoya—”

  “Alex.”

  “Alex, then. You are talking about a very expensive vanity project.” If the bubble was going to pop when he poked at it, he thought, let it be now and not later.

  “Well, I wouldn’t be heartbroken if you turned a profit. I’d give you a couple of years before that became an issue.”

  “So who’s the exception?”

  “A guy named Jeff Cole. You produced—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Good luck getting Cole to work with me. That Quirq record was chazerai by the time I was done with it, and all because I wet myself over having sixteen tracks and I didn’t listen to him. Whatever happened to him, anyway? He had a gutsy voice and a nice way with the guitar.”

  Alex shrugged. “I don’t have to tell you that it doesn’t matter how good you are if you don’t have luck, and Cole has always been short in that department.”

  “What kind of budget?”

  “You’d be able to offer competitive advances, like in the thirty thousand range. I mean, obviously, you wouldn’t be going after Springsteen or Madonna.”

  “How about Sallie Rachel?”

  “If she’ll work for thirty K, that’d be great. I loved the Krupheimer record.”

  Dave flinched. “I didn’t do that one. That was Bones Howe.”

  “Sorry,” Alex said. “Sore point, huh?”

  “Used to be,” Dave lied.

  The waiter brought their lunches, risotto for Alex, pastrami and lox for Dave. To make conversation, Dave asked Alex what he listened to, and Alex responded with a few names like Jeff Buckley and Radiohead. Dave suspected that Alex was skipping over some of
the same old Stones and Grateful Dead albums that everybody his age listened to, which was okay, because it was all about painting a picture, setting expectations, giving himself some credibility in the present day.

  “How about you?” Alex asked.

  “Lately?” Dave said. “Lately I’ve been listening to bop records from the fifties. Diz, Monk, Bird, all that.” He laughed. “Not what you wanted to hear, right? Don’t worry. I’ll find you some new bands.”

  “Listen,” Alex said. “There’s one more thing. I don’t want Cole—or anybody for that matter—to know that I’m the one putting up the money for this.”

  “He doesn’t want charity?”

  “I think he would see it that way, yeah. My idea, if anybody asks, is for you to say that you’re being backed by some music industry entrepreneurs who want to remain anonymous. That’s more or less true. Are you okay with that?”

  “I suppose. I take it you’re not going to call it Mariachi Records.”

  Alex laughed. “No, I think that might be tipping my hand. Got any ideas?”

  “How about Official Records?”

  “I don’t know, maybe. Is there a story behind that?”

  “Fischel is my real name, Fischel Cohen. I was kind of robbed of it when I started in the music business back in fifty-seven. So it’s what you might call an inside joke.”

  “Works for me. But now I don’t know what to call you.”

  “Call me Dave. It’s the only name I answer to.”

  “Well, Dave, assuming we can agree on a salary for you, and assuming you can have a few days to sleep on it, what do you think?”

  He thought the business with Cole was hinky and that Alex was underrating Cole’s potential ill will. He thought Sallie would give him holy hell for taking on this much work when she was trying to get him to quit altogether. He thought if it did happen, it could make him happier than anything had since he first kissed Sallie in Zabar’s café.

  “I don’t need a few days,” Dave said, and stuck out his hand. “You’ve got yourself a record company.”

  *

  Madelyn spent the endless drives between Houston and Dallas working out her next project in her head. It started as a prequel to her book on the sixties, but the more she thought about it, and the more she talked about it—to Alex, to her colleagues, to Ava and Ethan—the bigger it got. Her working title was A Crisis of Idealism: Defiance in American Literature 1850–1951.

  She started by taking issue with the Renaissance idea of America as the New Eden, with its innocent Adams and Eves. Instead she saw the defining American trait as an idealism that stood up to dehumanizing authority. The political case was obvious, from “Don’t Tread on Me” to the Boston Tea Party; the literary one was more intimate, starting with Hester Prynne and Bartleby, moving through Frank Norris’s embattled farmers to the Wobblies of Dos Passos to Steinbeck’s Tom Joad, and ending with Private Prewitt in From Here to Eternity.

  Her intent was to place the revolution of the sixties in a continuum, and a noble one at that. The depressing and inescapable conclusion was that the rebellion, like the ones of her beloved protagonists, had failed, and now was in danger of being written off as one of history’s comic interludes. She thought of Peter Cooke in Beyond the Fringe, reading a book about the heat death of the universe and being pleased that the author ended on a hopeful note. “He says, ‘I hope this will not happen.’”

  Madelyn too.

  The book was her great consolation. As in the Road Runner cartoons, where painting a landscape on the side of a cliff opened a roadway into a three-dimensional world, she could fire up her ancient beige Toshiba notebook computer and cross into a universe of her own making, where nothing was more important than art, and learned discourse was the coin of the realm. For hours at a stretch she could forget her ratty apartment—the consequence of her insistence on living on her own salary—and department squabbles and problem students and weekends apart from Alex.

  On a Thursday in early March of 1997, with 14-year-old Ethan at school, no classes on her schedule, no papers to grade, and cold drizzle falling outside, she had sat down to finish the rough first draft. She would still have miles to go—a year or two of rewrites, followed by peer reviews and more rewrites—but halfway through the concluding chapter she knew for the first time, without question, that she’d made her case and the book would stand.

  The phone had interrupted her on the next-to-last page. The voice on the other end belonged to the chair of the English Department at smu, telling her she’d gotten the job that would take her to Dallas at long last, with the promise of promotion to full professor upon publication of the book.

  Her immediate reaction upon hanging up was an exhaustion as profound as anesthesia. She collapsed onto her bed and ran the numbers in her spinning head; the total came to over a thousand hours spent on the road in her own tale of two cities. She tried to remember how long she’d been pushing herself forward on will alone. Since moving to San Francisco with Cole, probably. Nineteen sixty-eight. Nearly thirty years.

  This, then, was the payoff. Full professor, the top of her profession; a first-class faculty that included Marshall Terry, one of her favorite novelists; sharing a house every day, year-round, with her husband.

  And, finally, the chance to spend more time with her father.

  When she wasn’t researching her book, she’d been reading Augustine and Aquinas, Locke and Kierkegaard. Her faith had been sorely tested by the remote and abstract evil of the Holocaust, by babies with aids, by global warming, but nothing had brought home the cruelty of the universe like watching her father lose the vocabulary that he had accrued and honed and savored over a lifetime.

  He was the first one she’d called with the news about smu, and it was the pride in his voice that let her appreciate the magnitude of what she’d accomplished.

  The rest was anticlimax: finishing her last semester at Clear Lake; moving herself and Ethan into Alex’s gated mansion on Inwood Road; splurging on new clothes, a new car, her own copy of the oed, all the luxuries she’d denied herself for so many years.

  None of which compensated her for the day, less than a year later, when she arrived at her father’s house for one of her twice-weekly visits and found him on the front lawn, her mother holding him by one arm as he leaned into the balls of his feet and stared into the distance, ranting in incoherent rage.

  By the time he died, in January 1999, nothing remained of the man who had taught her to love William Blake and Laurence Sterne. The light in his eyes and his secret smile had been replaced by the lost and scowling face of a stranger.

  The night after the funeral, her mother told her that she intended to move to Three Fountains, the same retirement home where Cole’s mother now lived. The house had become a prison where she was confined with the memories of her dead husband and dead daughter. She left it to Madelyn to dispose of her father’s things. The clothes went to Goodwill; Fondren Library at smu agreed to take the books, after Madelyn had plucked out the orange-jacketed Odyssey and a few dozen others; the phonograph records and stereo ended up with Cole, whom she charged to find them homes, via eBay, where they would be appreciated.

  In March she walked through the empty house for what she knew would be the last time, taking a silent inventory of its secrets. Here, barely visible beneath a coat of almond-hued enamel, were the pencil marks where their father had recorded the girls’ heights age 2 to age 14; here was a tiny dent from where she’d stumbled at age 10 and driven one of the high heels she’d surreptitiously borrowed from her mother into the soft wood of her bedroom floor; here was the lingering scent of the cedar sachet her mother had kept in all the closets.

  The Realtor was waiting outside to take possession of the keys. Madelyn had always believed in moving forward, but dear God, this one was hard. When she finally locked the door and started down the sidewalk, she had the absolute conviction that if she turned around she would see her father at the living room window, one venetian blin
d lifted, the way he used to do when she was in high school and headed out for the evening. She couldn’t bear for it not to be true, so she just kept walking, one foot in front of the other.

  *

  By the third day in the cabin, things were getting a mite tense. Joe was not all that sure what he was doing there in the first place, and Cole was not helping.

  It had started with Cole getting a call three weeks before from Dave Fisher, who had produced the Quirq record, saying he was looking for talent for a new label he was starting. That he’d followed Cole’s career, such as it was—that was Cole editorializing there—and that he’d always felt bad about the album they’d made and wanted to know if Cole might want to put together a demo for him. He’d done a pretty hard sell, only to have Cole tell him he hadn’t written a song in years and he didn’t think it was happening, thanks very much.

  Shortly after that, Cole had called Joe down in Tupelo and kind of casually mentioned the demo thing, and it had laid there so heavy in the middle of the proverbial conversational table that Joe had felt compelled to poke at it a little. Why hadn’t Cole written anything? Well, the words didn’t come together for him anymore. Another long silence. Then Cole asked if Joe was still writing his lyrics or poems or whatever he called them. When Joe got him to flat-out admit that he wanted to try collaborating on some songs, Cole still played hard to get, said maybe they could try, to see where it went, and to keep that ripcord handy if either one of them wanted to bail.

  Cole had the bright idea to get the cabin at Lake Travis, north of Austin, supposedly to get them away from distractions. Once they got up there, that was where the planning ran out. Joe had brought a couple of dozen poems, and Cole had read through them and liked them well enough, even said they should be published, though Joe didn’t think he was ready yet to take the chance of being pissed on by some Yankee editor in an Italian suit. But when they sat down with Cole’s guitar and tried to make them into songs, it wasn’t happening. Silences that dragged on for minutes at a time, Cole’s noodling on the guitar that either went nowhere or went into somebody else’s song, Joe making a couple of attempts to sing and vetoing the results before Cole had a chance to.