The Trouble with Eden

by Lawrence Block

  He stuck it for six weeks and then went to New York. His old firm was perfectly happy to rehire him, which surprised him. He took an apartment on West Thirteenth Street and went to the office every morning and came home every night. It took him two weeks to confirm something he had suspected all along, that had no desire whatsoever to become a stockbroker. He had been perfectly happy before the war with the idea of spending his life selling stocks and bonds. Now every time he sat at the desk he thought of his horrible sister and her horrible husband and he couldn’t stand it.

  He explained this to his boss, who had heard similar stories from other veterans. “You may change your mind later on,” the man said. “Take some time to find yourself. If it turns out that this is the right kind of life for you, come back and we’ll talk about it.”

  He never went back. He moved furniture, cooked at a lunch counter, sold women’s shoes on Fourteenth Street. He would pick up a job and keep it until he couldn’t stand it, and then he would sit around his apartment drinking beer and reading library books until his cash ran out.

  One night a girl was talking about a recent war novel. “You’ve just got to read it,” she said. “It’s unbelievable.”

  “I was over there,” he said. “Why do I have to read about it?” He preferred Westerns, and was at the time gradually working his way through the complete works of Zane Grey.

  “Listen,” she said, “just read it. That’s all. Just read it, it’s unbelievable.”

  The next afternoon he went to the Eighth Street Book Shop and paid five dollars for the book. He’d asked for it at the library, but the waiting list ran clear onto the back of the card. He took the book home and read fifty pages and threw it against the wall. He went around the corner, drank three glasses of beer, returned to his apartment and picked the book up again. He sat down with it and read the remaining five hundred pages at one sitting. By the time he was done it was eleven in the morning but he didn’t even consider going to bed. He showered and changed his clothes and spent the next six hours walking aimlessly around the Village.

  The girl worked as a secretary at an advertising agency. He was waiting on her doorstep when she got home from work. She didn’t recognize him at first. They’d just met at a party, and their only conversation had concerned the novel.

  “You read it already? I’m flattered. Isn’t it something?”

  “It’s unbelievable, all right.”

  “I told you you’d—”

  “It’s unbelievable as a flood in the desert. I read it from cover to cover and it’s the worst piece of shit I ever read in my life.”

  She stepped back and gaped at him as if he were exposing himself in Washington Square.

  “It’s phony all the way through,” he went on doggedly. “Either the biography on the back cover is so much crap or he walked through the war wearing a blindfold. Not to mention the cotton in his ears. Nobody ever talked like that, nobody ever thought like that, nobody ever felt like that—”

  “Now just who the hell do you think you are?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you!” Her voice was pure Bronx now. “You were there in all the mud and blood and so that means you know it all, huh? A man produces a work of art and all you can do is knock it.”

  “If that’s a work of art—”

  “I suppose you could do better?”

  “If I couldn’t,” he said, “I might as well jump off a bridge.”

  “Oh, people like you make me sick to my stomach. You could write a better book than Moby Dick and you could paint better than that idiot Picasso and what the hell did you ever do?”

  “I couldn’t paint better than Picasso. In the first place nobody could and in the second place I couldn’t paint a floor without getting paint on the ceiling.”

  “So what gives you the idear you could write better than—”

  “I don’t know about Moby Dick,” he said. “I never read Moby Dick, and if you think a lot of it I don’t think I want to. I just—”

  “What do you know, anyway?”

  “I know there’s no r in ‘idea.’ And I know I could write better about the war than that moron I read last night.”

  “So go,” she said. “So do it.”

  So he did it.

  It took forever. He thought it would take him a month, maybe two at the outside. He bought a typewriter and a box of paper and put a sheet in the the typewriter and typed “1.” on top of it. Then he skipped few lines and typed “Chapter One.” He lit a cigarette, took two puffs, put it out, skipped a few more lines, and started pecking at the keys.

  He wrote for a week, then took a job, trying to work nights on the book, but after a day’s work he couldn’t concentrate sufficiently to write well. So he established a pattern, working for a week or ten days, then writing for as long as he could make his money last. He taught himself to cook spaghetti and lived on it. He found a furniture mover who would hire him whenever he ran out of money and who would throw all the overtime work his way that he could handle. He could clear a hundred dollars in a week’s work, and he learned to make that hundred last out the month.

  His mother wrote him a letter every week. She had married her dry cleaner and they were thinking about living in Florida, but Ruth was pregnant and she wanted to be there for the delivery. Ruth’s baby was born and his mother was living in St. Petersburg before he typed “The End” at the bottom of page 784. He looked at the two words and wondered what in hell to do now.

  He spent four hours getting drunk and ten hours sleeping. He got up and took the 784 pages to the girl’s apartment. She had moved out four months earlier and he had trouble getting her new address from the building superintendent because he didn’t know her last name and the super’s English was minimal. They worked it out finally and he found out that the girl was living on West Thirteenth just the other side of Sixth. He went over there and rang her bell. She didn’t recognize him. He was thinner, pale from working indoors, and he had a full beard because shaving was a waste of time and nobody cared what a part-time furniture shlepper looked like.

  He put the manuscript in her hands. She looked at it and at him and asked what the hell it was supposed to be.

  “It’s not a better book than Moby Dick,” he said. “I read that one since I saw you and I’d know better than to try to top it. But it’s the best I can do.”

  “It’s you,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

  “I thought maybe you’d look at it.”

  “Listen, I’m no authority.”

  “You sounded like one last time.”

  “I wondered how come I never saw you after that. I figured you left town.”

  “I was busy writing. Fifteen months. I never thought it would take that long.”

  “Writers sometimes spend years and years.”

  “I can see why.”

  She weighed the script in her hands. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “You could try reading it. And tell me if it’s any good.”

  “What’s your phone number?”

  “I haven’t got a phone. I’m only a block away, you could come over when you’re done. The address is on the first page.”

  “I don’t even know your name. ‘One If by Land by Hugh Markarian.’ That’s you?”

  “That’s me.”

  He went crazy waiting. Three nights later she appeared and handed him the manuscript and four single-spaced pages of criticism tearing the book apart. She sat down on the edge of his bed while he read two of the four pages. Then he looked up and asked if he had to read the rest. “It’s obviously a piece of shit and I wasted fifteen months, so why read all this?” She told him to skip to the last paragraph if he wanted. He did, and in the final paragraph she told him that the book was rough and choppy and disorganized and cluttered and vague, and that it was also a better book by far than the one that started all this, and it needed work but that didn’t change the fact that he had written a great book and might be a gre
at writer.

  He asked her if she really meant it.

  She said, “Jesus Christ, you think I’d break my neck typing all that if I didn’t?”

  She spent the night at his place. In the morning she told him his apartment was terrible and he should move in with her. He did, but kept his place to work in. He thought it would take him another fifteen months to rewrite the book but he did it in six, cutting almost a hundred pages and reworking virtually every scene. The editor who saw it took Hugh to lunch and told him the book was great, truly great, but that his house was over inventoried with war novels and the public’s interest in World War II fiction was ebbing fast. “I’d like to scrap half the books we have scheduled and publish yours in their place,” the man said, “but I can’t do it.”

  He went back to Anita dejected. He said, “I’m a genius and he loves the book and they don’t want it.”

  “Well, fuck him,” she said.

  The next editor who saw it took Hugh to the same restaurant, where he ordered the same dish he had had before. The editor started off the same way and spoke in the same prep school accent and Hugh was tempted to finish his sentences for him. But while he was picking at his food and barely paying attention the man was saying that there were a few changes he would recommend, nothing substantial and Hugh of course would be the final judge, and they would like to schedule the book for the following spring if Hugh thought he could make the changes by then, and they would pay an advance of thus and so many dollars, and—

  The next afternoon they took out a marriage license. “I don’t know,” she said. “An Irish-Italian and a Scotch-Armenian. I know it’s the American way but my parents are going to shit.”

  “Well, fuck ’em,” he said.

  “It would help if you were Catholic. What exactly are you, anyway?”

  “I’m an atheist.”

  “Well, no kidding. So am I, but I mean a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist.”

  “A Protestant atheist.”

  “Yeah, I know. It would be so much easier all around if you were a Catholic atheist.”

  “I could pretend to be one.”

  “You could, couldn’t you? While you’re pretending, you could even leave out the atheist part.”

  “There I draw the line.”

  They were married and the book came out in the spring. It hit the charts three weeks after publication day and went straight to the top. There was a movie sale and dozens of foreign sales and reprint offers and all of a sudden it was raining money and he knew he would never have to eat spaghetti again. Which was unfortunate, because it was the only thing Anita knew how to cook.

  The book was still high on the best-seller list when the baby was born. That was in 1953, eight years after the war had ended, seven years after he had started trying to write about it. They told each other that New York was no place to bring up a kid and they looked around and found Bucks County and let a realtor drive them around and show them houses. They bought a stone farmhouse with thirty acres of land five miles out of New Hope.

  Twelve years later Anita flew to El Paso and walked across the border for a Mexican divorce. She came back to the Bucks County farmhouse long enough to collect Karen and to tell Hugh that he ought to read his own books if he wanted to know why the marriage failed. She spent a week in New York before flying to Arizona. There was an architect she’d met in Juárez. He wanted to marry her. She knew he was good in bed but wanted to check what kind of houses he built before making up her mind. Evidently she liked his houses better than she liked Hugh’s books since One If by Land.

  He still lived in the stone farmhouse. On three occasions he had listed the property for sale, and each time he had withdrawn it at the first sign of a serious offer. One local realtor had not spoken to him since. He realized now that he would never leave, that something kept him there, that no matter how far he traveled he would always come back. He lived there and wrote a book every year. Every winter he turned in a manuscript to his publisher, and every fall a new novel by Hugh Markarian appeared in the bookstores. Only a couple had made the best-seller lists and none had lingered there long, but neither had any of them ever lost money. The paperback editions were constantly in print. Reviewers generally noted his smooth professionalism, his ability to tell a story and keep it moving, his facility with realistic dialogue and swift delineation of character. And nine times out of ten they mentioned One If by Land.

  Every now and then he would pick up a copy of One If by Land and try to read it. There was a song from On a Clear Day, the Broadway musical, and it ran through his head during those occasional forays at the book.

  What did I have that I don’t have

  What have I lost the warm sweet knack of…

  Each time he found the book unreadable. The writing was awkward, uneven. The construction of the book, after all that careful revision, was impossibly clumsy. He would read sentences and wince at the thought of ever having written so badly.

  The paradox infuriated him. Every book since One If by Land was better written, and none was as good a book.

  What had he had that he didn’t have now?

  He closed his eyes for a moment. He had turned in his latest novel two months ago and it was time for him to start a new one. Hence it was not a time for negative thoughts. Hence he would stop thinking negatively.

  He picked up his drink and crossed the room.

  FOUR

  Peter was drinking screwdrivers and making them last. He didn’t understand alcohol and never knew what to order on the rare occasions when he had to order something. This time he had tried to order a brandy Alexander. He had had one once and seemed to remember enjoying the taste. But Warren refused to let him order it. “That’s a faggot drink,” he insisted. “Order a man’s drink, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Well, a screwdriver, then.”

  Warren put his head in his hands, muttering that a whole generation of American youth had failed to learn how to drink and the country was going to hell in a hearse. The screwdriver wasn’t too bad. It tasted like orange juice that was beginning to go bad in the carton. He was on the point of telling the waitress that the orange juice was turning when he realized that the sort of varnishy taste was the vodka.

  Warren was drinking Cognac and drinking quite a lot of it. The more he drank, the more he seemed to become himself, with all of his mannerisms more pronounced than ever. As he studied him, Peter saw that alcohol was definitely a high for some people. For him it had never been other than a down, and he was incapable of understanding what people liked about drinking. It tasted terrible and it dulled your mind and eventually it made you throw up and pass out. He could see no stage of the game where it was even marginally pleasurable.

  He had tried most drugs in the course of his twenty-two years. He had done glue in ninth grade and found nothing much to it outside of dizziness and nausea. You reeled around a little, and you threw up. During the next two years he got into cough syrup and grass. The cough syrup was a down, and while there were still times he seemed to require it—especially during bad times with Gretchen—he had never much liked it. Grass was good from the beginning, and for a long time he thought grass was never other than good, until one day he was in a bad mood and smoked a lot and freaked completely. He had never stopped doing grass, it was a part way of life, but there were times when he knew it would be a bad idea to smoke just then.

  Acid was nice. He’d tripped ten times in the space of about two months and was glad he had done it and equally glad never to do it again. It took him to some interesting places and showed him some important parts of his head, but it also scared the hell out of him. He saw how easy it would be to let go completely and just stay inside there with all the pretty colors. What seemed most frightening of all was that he might like it there and want to stay there, and he did not want to want it. Besides, while it taught you to get out of linear paths it also did odd things to memory and perception, and he decided he could live without it. />
  He could also live without scag, which he had snorted once, and barbiturates, which he tried four times in an effort to discover something pleasurable in them. There was no difficulty finding pleasure in scag. It was so overwhelmingly enjoyable that he knew once was enough and twice was too much, and when something felt that good it would be very fucking easy to acquire a jones and very fucking hard to kick it. There were a great many things he did not want to be, and a junkie was high up on the list.

  Speed was beautiful, cocaine best of all. One time after he and Gretchen had been living together for a couple of months she came home with a couple of twists of coke. They each snorted one and jumped into bed. They didn’t get out of bed for sixteen hours and didn’t stop balling for more than five minutes at a time in all those sixteen hours. It was a supergood sex trip but the stuff was expensive and hard to find, and he thought it was probably just as well, because you could literally screw yourself to death on it. It wasn’t supposed to hit everybody that way. It certainly hit him hard, though.

  Other speeds were good, if not sexy. Your brain worked better than ever and you were all ego, absolutely on top of everything. For a while he and Gretchen had been doing a hell of a lot of speed, and it was no good because the stuff had to get to you sooner or later. You lost weight and began to fall apart physically. That part of it he had always been able to control. He took heavy doses of organic vitamins and made sure he ate decently whether he felt like it or not. But Gretchen wouldn’t take the trouble. Even if he put the vitamin pills out for her she wouldn’t get around to swallowing them. And even the vitamins couldn’t protect him from the mental effects of too much speed, the occasional blackouts, the desperate need to crash, to sleep, counterbalanced by the utter inability to turn one’s mind off and escape from consciousness. Finally they both got off it, balanced themselves out with tranquilizers and worked their way clean. He had stayed off, Gretchen had not. He would drop a pill now and then when he had a reason to but he would not ride the high, would not take another pill when the first one ran down. He seemed capable of staying on that plane, but he was still not entirely sure of himself; it was like heroin, you had to be terrified of anything you liked that much.