Community of Women

by Lawrence Block

  She went to the phone.

  She dialed Maggie’s number.

  “Throw some clothes in a suitcase,” she told Maggie. “In a hurry. I’m going to pack in about five minutes and spend thirty seconds leaving a note for Ted. Then I’m going to hop in the Caddy and come by for you. You’d better be ready.”

  “That’s short notice, Ell.”

  “That’s the way it has to be, Maggie.”

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “I’m positive.”

  A pause.

  Then: “I love you, Ell.”

  “I love you, Maggie.”

  Nan Haskell fumbled a cigarette loose from her pack and leaned forward to take a light from her husband. She was breathless now: she had been talking, virtually without interruption, for almost half an hour. Now it was Howard’s turn to say something.

  She waited.

  He said: “I think it’s a damned fine idea, Nan.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “I’ve never meant anything more sincerely. Except when I asked you to marry me. This country life is no good for us, Nan. We’re dying out here. We should get back to the city.”

  “Can we afford it?”

  “We’ll save money. I’ve been … looking at apartment ads lately. We can buy one hell of a fine co-op for less than half of what we can sell this place for. And the monthly maintenance comes to less than taxes and upkeep on this architectural horror. We’ll be way ahead.”

  “You’ve been looking at ads?”

  He nodded. “I’ve thought about moving back for weeks now. But I was afraid you liked it here.”

  “Howie, I hate it!”

  “So do I. But I never knew—”

  And they started laughing together. They laughed heartily and happily for the first time in far too long. They laughed hysterically, and they held each other close, and they hurried the kids off to bed.

  Then they, too, went to bed.

  Much later Nan lay awake, ready for sleep but too happy to close her eyes. Everything was going to be all right now, she know. Howard was her husband and she loved him and he loved her. Ted Carr was a horrible mistake who was no longer a part of her life. He had not even left a scar.

  Everything was going to be all right now.

  The young couple stood at the railway station in Cheshire Point. The man was about twenty-six, with short hair and gray flannel suit. The woman wore a pregnancy outfit, neat maternity clothes which covered a belly due to give forth life in approximately three and one-half months.

  They had looked at a house that afternoon. They were city-dwellers and did not own a car, so they were waiting for the train to take them back to New York. The house they had looked over was a swank split-level colonial on a full acre plot of land. They both liked it.

  “I think we can afford it,” the man was saying. “After all, we’ll be paying off the mortgage the same as we’re paying rent now. And at the end we’ll have something to show for it. It’s a beautiful house, isn’t it?”

  “Lovely. And all that yard for the kids to play in.”

  “Kids?”

  “Well, kid. But kids, eventually. I love it, honey.”

  The man put an arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Just think of it,” he said. “Fresh air to breathe. And we’ll be able to have a car finally. You know, I miss driving a car. It’ll be good to have one again. You can’t drive in Manhattan without losing your mind.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll like it here.”

  “It’s a long way for you to come for work,” the woman said. “Are you sure you won’t mind it?”

  “I’ll enjoy it. Give me a chance to get my brain working in the morning and a chance to unwind at night. I won’t walk in grumbling about the hard time they gave me.”

  “Are you sure you won’t mind? I mean, it’s an hour or so in the morning and the same thing at night.”

  “Better than fighting the subway.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I guess you’re right. Smell the air, honey! Isn’t it divine?”

  They sniffed the air together and agreed that it was divine.

  “Just one thing,” the man said. “You know, you’ll be all alone here with not much to do.”

  “I’ll have the baby—”

  “Besides that, I mean. What’ll you do for friends?”

  “I’ll have loads of friends,” she said. “Women like myself, with husbands who go to New York to work. And they’ll be decent, interesting people. Not like that madhouse of a city where you can live next to a person for fifteen years without saying more than hello and goodbye.”

  “Sure,” he agreed. “We’ll make real friends here.”

  “It’ll be great.”

  “Wonderful.”

  They fell silent, thinking just how wonderful it would be.

  “Oh,” he said suddenly. “Oh, it’s nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Just a thought,” he said. “I won’t mind it at all.”

  “Mind what?”

  “Well,” he said, “it’ll probably be pretty … quiet here, almost a little dull. I guess not much happens in a little town like Cheshire Point.”

  “Will you miss the excitement?”

  “Not me,” he insisted. “How about you?”

  She shook her head firmly. “It will be a pleasure,” she said. “Just peace and quiet. Because what could ever happen in Cheshire Point?”

  THE END

  A New Afterword by the Author

  Ah yes, Community of Women. Both the title and the book’s premise originated with someone at Beacon Books. I don’t know his name, but I would give odds he was a fellow who put on a jacket and tie every morning and drove to the train station. And as his commuter train pulled away from the platform, bound for Grand Central, he found himself looking out the window and thinking about all the woman who were left behind while their husbands went off to earn a living in the concrete canyons of Manhattan. All those women, he thought. Women in the bloom of youth, women beginning to ripen into their full sexual maturity. Women, all of them, with no men around, and here I am stuck on his fucking train …

  How often did he have this thought? Five days a week, you figure? And how many weeks before he picked up the phone and called a literary agent with whom he’d done some business. “I’ve got an idea for a book,” he said. “Oh, I dunno. It just sort of came to me. Maybe that new guy could do it. What’s his name, Sheldon Lord? Maybe he could do it.”

  Indeed.

  I was away from my desk when my agent, Henry Morrison, relayed the call from the horny commuter at Beacon. My desk was in my apartment in Manhattan, and my wife and daughter and I were in Buffalo, New York, visiting family. We were staying in the house I grew up in, on Starin Avenue, and I know that because I remember writing Community of Women on the card table in the sun room, which was what we called the front parlor.

  “They have this idea for a book,” Henry told me, and recounted the title and premise. “But here’s the thing, they need it Right Away.”

  Now this was not the first time I’d been told that somebody needed something Right Away. And here’s the weird thing—I always believed it, and I always acted accordingly. This may stem from my training, during the not-quite-a-year I spent as an editor at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. Every once in a while some magazine editor would call up, having suddenly discovered that he had a hole in an issue that was about to go to press. Someone who’d promised to deliver something had failed, or somebody pulled an ad, or—well, it didn’t matter. Some editorial content was required, and did Scott have a writer handy who could deliver the thing soon? Say yesterday, for instance?

  It was those of us in the office—editors by day, writers by night—to whom these prizes would be offered. One learned the only proper answer to the question, “can you do this?” was, “yes, of course.” Could you write a medical confession story? A male adventure article? Yes, of course you could.
And could you bring it in tomorrow morning? You bet.

  Because, if it was that urgent, it was also a sure sale. You still made sure you turned in something professional and as good as you could make it in the time available, because you wanted them to turn to you again. But it was more important that it be done than it be done superbly, and that was clear to all concerned.

  But there was a difference between a magazine editor with a hole in his issue and a book editor with a hole in his head, and I never learned to make the distinction. Beacon couldn’t possibly need Community of Women right away. But that’s what I was told, and I acted accordingly.

  I think the first time this had happened was in the summer of 1960. I had been married in March and was living at 110 West 69th Street. A mystery writer named William Ard had died at the age of 37, leaving a young widow and an incomplete manuscript. While I couldn’t be expected to do anything about the former, I’d been chosen to finish the book, which was under contract to Monarch Books.

  And they needed it Right Away!

  Oh, like hell they did. What urgency could such a project possibly have. Did they have a cover? A firm publication date? No, of course not. But these were questions that never occurred to me. I rose to the occasion, sort of, by taking a room down the street from our apartment, at a hotel on the corner of Broadway and 69th. (There were two hotels at that intersection, the Sherman Square and the Spencer Arms, and I took a room at one of them. The one on the southeast corner, whichever it was.)

  Ard was a pro, with a string of mysteries and westerns, and he probably would have made the book work; on the other hand, it may have taken some of the sting out of dying to know that he wouldn’t have to finish it. He left behind a couple of chapters and an outline, and I’m sure he’d have departed from the outline and come up with something that made a little more sense. I probably departed from the outline myself, it was impossible not to, but I didn’t agonize over it because the folks at Monarch needed this Right Away.

  So I went to my rented room each morning, and worked all day, and went home to have dinner with my wife, and went back for a few more hours of writing. I don’t know how long it took me to deliver the book, but it had to be less than a week. If the people at Monarch hated it, they kept it to themselves. It was published: Babe in the Woods, a Lou Largo Novel by William Ard. John Jakes, who went on to make a very big name for himself as a writer of historical fiction, ghosted three more Lou Largo novels, but he got to plot them himself; I’m sure they were a lot better than mine.

  I wonder if they told him they needed the books Right Away.

  Well, if Beacon needed Community of Women right away, that’s how they would get it. And to tell you the truth, I welcomed the pressure. It gave me something to do while we were in Buffalo.

  I wrote the book over a weekend. Three, four days. Something like that. It seems to me it went reasonably well, but I can’t say I remember much of the plot or characters. I might recognize elements if I were to read the book, but toward what end? It’s by not reading my early work that I’m able to agree to make it available once again.

  I do remember one character. He’s a writer, and his name is Lincoln Barclay, and he’s the rare man to be found home during the daytime in this suburban wonderland. Which of course gives him opportunities for adventure.

  Oh, really? A writer, you say, getting all that Westchester County action? A writer with the initials LB?

  Hey, the editor on the train had his fantasies. Why shouldn’t I have mine?

  —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 Among 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.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  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.

  copyright © 1961 by Universal Publishing and Distributing Corporation

  cover design by Elizabeth Connor

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-0961-5

  This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  New York, NY 10014

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