The Trouble with Eden

  Trouble with Eden

  Lawrence Block

  Writing as Jill Emerson

  TYPICAL COP-OUT

  This is a work of fiction and it’s set in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and that’s really asking for it. None of the characters are based on real people, living or dead. I’d say that anyway to avoid a libel suit, but it also happens to be true. Not that anyone’s likely to believe it.

  I thought of changing New Hope, Pennsylvania, to Blue Pope, Illinois, but all that would do (besides making extra work for me) is encourage people to play the game of figuring out what each invented name stood for, and they would carry this through to the characters, which is precisely what I’m hoping to avoid. None of these people are anybody.

  Years ago I wrote a novel in which a major character was my fictional interpretation of myself. A girl I barely knew stopped speaking to me because she thought that particular character was supposed to be her and she was offended. God knows why on both counts. He also knows I don’t know enough about anybody’s private life to put him in a book. I suppose the intelligent thing to do would be to set all books in New York, where nobody gives a damn.

  —JILL EMERSON

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR

  A BIOGRAPHY OF LAWRENCE BLOCK

  I

  Virgins and Pure Pools

  The all pervasive symmetry

  Of yews spruced up, and bushes trebly sheared

  Offend the eye. Nature has forms

  She chose herself. It’s virgins and pure pools

  That make a garden… .

  —LORETTA KALLETT

  ONE

  “You’re the only one open. But I guess you knew that, huh?”

  She looked up. Interruptions were not likely to startle her. Customers were infrequent during the off-season, and in the time she had worked at the Lemon Tree, Linda Robshaw had learned to lose herself in a book in their absence and to become quickly alert on their appearance.

  She said, “Oh, hi, Tanya. What time is it, anyway?”

  “Five-thirty, quarter of six. I was just getting my hair done.”

  “It looks nice.”

  “Well, it’s the same, but thanks. I just let him wash it. I can never get it as clean as I like it. It seems silly to pay money for what you could do standing under a shower. But I wanted to look decent for tonight.”

  “Tonight? Oh, the play.”

  “The Crucible. It’s the best part I’ve had so far. I don’t understand all of it, though.” Tanya had been walking back and forth in one of the aisles. Now she took a small doll from an eye-level teak shelf. “‘Made in Taiwan,’” she read. “Made in Taiwan by spastics. Who would pay four ninety-five for a dime’s worth of wood and a nickel’s worth of cloth?”

  “The same kind of nut who would buy any of the crud we sell.”

  “Don’t let the boss catch you talking that way.”

  “Oh, Olive says the same thing herself,” Linda said. “She says contempt for your customers and their lack of taste is a form of local patriotism.”

  “What are you reading? Sylvia Plath. She’s the one killed herself?”

  “Uh-huh. A poem at a time.”

  “Oh, poems? Any good?”

  “Very. But depressing.”

  “Why read something that’s gonna depress you?”

  “Good question,” she said. She closed the book, got to her feet. “Wait while I close up and I’ll walk you home.”

  “Well, I was going to the theater, Linda. They want me to go over a couple of things. I could walk you as far as—”

  “No, go ahead,” she said. “I’ll be a few minutes.”

  After Tanya had left, Linda sat for a few moments at the desk, the copy of Ariel in her hand. Then she locked the cash drawer, turned off the lights, closed and locked the door of the little gift shop, and walked down the corridor and out of the small shopping mall.

  The streets were dark, with only a few stores still open. She crossed to the grassy triangle at the corner of Ferry Street, skirted the old cannon with its mound of cannonballs, walked down Main past the playhouse and across the bridge to Mechanic Street.

  She shook her head, thinking of Tanya Leopold. Why read something that’s gonna depress you? Tanya would no more read Sylvia Plath than she would permit herself to be depressed for any other reason. The little actress, who Marc had assured her was as utterly untalented as any he had met, had an unquestionable talent for life. She ate, slept, acted, had her hair done, and made love, approaching all these activities with healthy enthusiasm. She was always in good spirits and generally improved the spirits of those who knew her.

  Whereas Linda Robshaw, who read depressing books, was in turn depressing—

  Spring had come late this year and had not brought her the sense of rebirth she usually associated with the season’s arrival. It was her first spring in New Hope, and she had been looking forward to it through the cold wet deadening winter. Springtime in Manhattan had meant little more than a change in weather—you had to go to the parks for any visible sign of nature returning to life—yet here, with the spring bulbs flowering, with trees leafing out and flowering shrubs showing color, with massive banks of forsythia a golden fire along the Towpath, she still felt no corresponding rush of sap in her own veins.

  She turned right at Mechanic Street and walked a few hundred yards to the large squat buildings where she and Marc were living. The three-story brick structure had been built in 1887 by one Cecil Crofter, who had intended it as a factory for the manufacture of wigs and other human hair goods. The business failed almost before it had begun, and the brick structure ultimately emerged as an apartment house, with two apartments on each floor. Each apartment had since been further subdivided, so that there were now six rental units on the first floor and five on each of the two upper stories.

  An owner during the twenties had named it the Coryell Arms, and that inscription could still be made out, carved into oaken timbers over the doorway. But no one ever called it by this name. Instead it was universally known as the Shithouse.

  Local history had it that someone had commented that the building was built like a brick shithouse and that the adjective had gradually disappeared from usage over the years. But Shithouse residents were inclined to believe that it would have acquired its name whatever materials had been used in its construction. The drabness of its exterior was more than matched by the squalor within. Neither the rooms nor the hallways had been painted within anyone’s memory. Chunks of plaster periodically dropped from the ceilings and were never replaced. The plumbing was noisy and unreliable, and the building abounded in violations that would have appalled a Harlem slumlord.

  The Shithouse was, year in and year out, the most profitable piece of rental property in Bucks County.

  The secret of the Shithouse’s commercial success was simple enough. Sully Jaeger rented his apartments by the week, and he would rent to anyone with a week’s rent in his hand. There was no credit investiga
tion because no credit was ever extended. There were no leases to sign, no security deposit to pay. All tenants paid by the week, in advance, and any tenant who could not come up with the rent the day it was demanded was out on the street, bag and baggage, by nightfall. A landlord renting by the week was not hamstrung by eviction procedures, but could operate on the same basis as a hotel. Sully’s eviction proceedings consisted of advising a rentless tenant he had an hour to come up with the rent or remove his belongings. At the end of the hour Sully would return, change the lock cylinder on the apartment door, and throw whatever remained in the apartment out the window. It was widely rumored that on one occasion the tenant himself had been present in the apartment at end of the standard hour, and that Sully had unceremoniously heaved him out the window after his luggage.

  Linda climbed the Shithouse stairs. The air in the stairwell was stale, flavored with old cooking smells. They ought to get out of the place, she thought. She and Marc had moved in temporarily in September, glad to pay fifty dollars a week rather than hassle with leases and deposits. But the temporary stay had dragged out for almost eight months already. For the same rent they could have a larger apartment in a decent building.

  It would be worth it—if they were going to stay in New Hope. If.

  The apartment door was locked. She fished in her bag for the key, opened the door. She found the note immediately. It was on top of the convertible sofa, where they always left notes for each other. Businesslike notes, some of the time—“Linda, I’ll be late at the theater, go ahead and eat without me.” Cute love notes—” Marcums, I was here. You wasn’t. I misses you. Does you misses me?”

  But she knew as soon as she saw the note what it was going to be. She picked it up and stood by the side of the sofa and read it. Her eyes wouldn’t focus at first, and the words were blurred, but she read it all the way through.

  LINDA,

  I suppose this is cowardly but I can’t help thinking it’s easier all around this way. I just couldn’t handle another scene. Last night was enough.

  I guess I’ll go out to the Coast. I’m getting a ride as far as Chicago which is one reason I’m leaving right now, although it probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer in any case.

  Sorry about a lot of things. It was good while it lasted. Corny but true… .

  There was a little more. He had left some money in the dresser drawer, not much, but all he could spare. She put the note down and went to the dresser to discover that he had been able to spare one hundred twenty dollars. She counted the bills three times, then got her wallet from her purse and counted up her own cash. It suddenly seemed very urgent to determine just how she stood financially. The thirty-seven dollars in her wallet gave her total capital of one hundred and fifty-seven dollars. After work Friday she would receive thirty dollars from Olive McIntyre, her wages for fifteen hours of work at the Lemon Tree. Around noon Saturday Sully would be around to collect fifty dollars rent.

  Problem: If you have one hundred and fifty-seven dollars to start with, and each week you earn thirty dollars and pay out fifty, how long do you last?

  Answer: If you can borrow three dollars from somebody, you can last eight weeks. And that’s long enough, because sometime in the course of those eight weeks you starve to death.

  She moved to the kitchenette, a corner of the room furnished with a hot plate and a small refrigerator. She checked the refrigerator and the cupboards. There were some cans of chili and ravioli and vegetable soup, a box from a health food store, some eggs and cheese, other odds and ends. It somehow didn’t look like eight weeks’ worth of food.

  She opened dresser drawers, checked the closet, all to confirm what she already knew, that he had taken everything of his from the apartment. They had been together for two years, a year and a half in New York and almost eight months here. For the first few months he had kept his old apartment before they decided they were enough of a long-term prospect to live together. Since then they had accumulated rather little in the way of community property. The record player was his, and he had taken it; the typewriter was hers, and it remained behind. He had taken all the records, which was hardly fair in that perhaps a third of them had been hers originally, but she could understand that he would not have wanted to waste time sorting through the stack.

  And she had long ago decided that, were she to leave him, she would have left all the records behind. Except for one Billie Holiday record, which he had taken with all the others and which she rather expected she would miss. Alan had bought that record for her—how many years ago?—and she had taken it with her when she left Alan.

  She would miss that record. It was good get-drunk music, late Billie Holiday, the rusty old voice just getting by, the phrasing covering up the broken-down equipment.

  Do nothin’ till you hear from me … and you never will.

  She picked up the letter, and Tanya’s voice echoed, again in her head, “Why read something that’s gonna depress you?” But did it in fact depress her? It shook her, it had her off-balance, but she was not at all sure that she was as down now as she had been before finding the note. He was not entirely right. It had not been good while it lasted, but it had been good for quite a while, more often than not, and then somewhere along the way, sometime in the cold, wet, gray winter, it had turned a corner and become more bad than good. Since then the end had been inevitable.

  She laughed aloud, an unreal brittle sound that surprised her. “You son of a bitch,” she said, “I was going to leave you, you bastard. Why couldn’t you wait?”

  But it evened out, she realized. He had done the leaving and could bear the guilt; she had been left and could feel worthless and rejected. There would be enough bad vibes to go around.

  There generally were.

  She had always been distant from people. Even as a girl in Dayton, she had lived very much alone in her own world. She was not autistic, and her withdrawal was recognized less by others than by herself. But she had known very early, so early that it seemed to her she had always known, that other people were able to be a part of one another in a way that she was not. An only child herself, her companions in childhood and after were almost invariably only children. With girls, she was most comfortable in relationships that furnished companionship without intimacy, friendship without the sharing of confidences. With boys and later men, her relationships similarly stayed on or near the surface. What intimacy existed was staged, an illusion created by mutual role playing.

  When she was seventeen years old, she began dating a boy named Carl Spangenthal. He was nineteen, a second-year business major at the University of Dayton. He was very tall and very thin, with a narrow, rabbity nose and two high spots of color on his pale cheeks. She did not find him attractive, nor did she like him much,

  But for some reason or another it never occurred to her to decline a date with him.

  “You know what I like about you?” he would say. And then he would praise one or another negative virtue. “Your hands don’t perspire the way so many girls’ do. One thing I can’t take is clammy fingers.” Or he would praise her complexion by assuring her that acne really put him off. “I mean even a couple of pimples, say two or three pimples on a girl’s chin, and that’s it for me.” It seemed to her that his development of their relationship consisted of forever finding new ways in which she failed to turn his stomach.

  One night, giddy and taut-nerved after an evening of petting, she became quietly hysterical in her bedroom at the thought of suddenly breaking out in everything that nauseated Carl. She envisioned herself turning in the course of an evening’s near lovemaking into a creature blossoming with pimples and gleaming with chill sweat, her eyes grown suddenly small and close together (“Just can’t take little beady pig eyes”), her breath foul, her whole body magically transformed into a compendium of everything that he deplored. Then he would turn on the lights and gag and run shrieking from the car, never to be seen again. She couldn’t get the image out of her head, collapsing o
n her bed in silent spasms of giggling.

  However her vision changed her feelings for him, it in no way altered their relationship. He went on taking her out, and presumably would go on doing so until he hit on a flaw and found it in her. And she went on dating him. Few other boys asked her out. She was a high school senior, boys in her classes dated younger girls, and the boys she had dated in earlier years had mostly gone away to college. After she had been going with Carl for two months she turned down all other invitations automatically.

  He was able to thrill her, and he was the first boy to manage this. In the limited petting she had done previously she had never been remotely excited. She had been neither fast nor slow, permitting this and prohibiting that intuitively, guessing at what the boy himself expected her to permit or prohibit. She had never enjoyed being touched or kissed. At times she had thought that no girl enjoyed it, that it was something one did—and pretended to enjoy—for the benefit of the boy. At other times she decided that this pleasure real enough for most people, but that it was denied along with access to the warm and intimate world others.

  Carl, whose conversation at best bored her, whose appearance varied in her eyes from peculiar to near-ugly, was able to excite her beyond belief.

  It was almost as though, when his mouth was on hers and when his hands were inside her blouse or under her skirt, he ceased to exist. He was not there at all for her. The hands on her breasts were disembodied. They were not hands at all; the warmth of her flesh, the urgent stiffening of her nipples, were simply happening.

  It took him over a month to do more than kiss her chastely goodnight at her door. But from the first night he kissed her with passion she never considered denying him anything he wanted. Her capacity for refusal vanished instantly and permanently with the first utterly unexpected wave of excitement.

  Yet it was six months more before he had coitus with her. She never once stopped him, and each time he managed to stop himself. Every night they were together he would go just the slightest bit farther than they had gone before, and she wondered years afterward if he had imagined himself a brilliant seducer, always moving closer and closer to that unattainable goal, never realizing that he could have her at any time simply by taking her.