The Trouble with Eden

by Lawrence Block

  Such moments come one after another in the course of every person’s life, and in the vast majority of cases they approach and are resolved without anyone’s being truly aware of them. They are most commonly recognized after the fact, enlarged a thousand times in hindsight. That had been the turning point. There was the crisis. But even in retrospect most are shrouded from view, for one prefers to regard the good turns as planned and the bad as unavoidable.

  But in this case she saw herself at a critical moment and knew that he shared this awareness. He was so close to her, they were so close to each other, and yet he could still get up and she could still turn away.

  Then he did not get up, and she did not turn away, and then he kissed her, and after that everything happened just as it had to happen.

  They lay a long time together, neither one willing to move first. Then they moved at so nearly the same instant that it was impossible to say who had initiated it. They disengaged and lay very close together but did not touch. She was close enough to feel the warmth of his skin but no part of her body touched his.

  The silence lasted forever. Thoughts kept flooding her head and she tried to find the right words for them but nothing seemed worth saying. There was an increasingly unbearable tension in the silence.

  Finally she said, “I can’t think of anything clever.”

  “I can’t think of anything. Period.”

  “Oh, I can think of a ton of things. All of them wrong.”

  “Oh, wow.”

  “That was one I hadn’t thought of. I think maybe I should have. Oh, wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What I keep wanting to say is I never thought it would be like this but some silly cunt says it in every really bad novel I ever read. What really sucks about cliches is they’re so appropriate. I never did.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Did you ever think about us? Did you ever think to yourself, ‘I wonder what it would be like to fuck Linda?’”

  “No.”

  “If I had any class I’d be insulted. I’m not. That doesn’t mean I don’t. Have any, I mean. Class, I mean.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “How the hell do I know? You honestly never thought about it? Honestly?”

  “Honestly.”

  “Cross your heart and all that jazz?”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I never did until Tanya. Like telling a kid don’t put beans up your nose. It would never occur to her otherwise. Did you ever tell Robin not to put beans up your nose? Up her nose, I mean. Not up yours.”

  “Up yours.”

  “Yeah, I was just thinking that. Did you?”

  “Which? No, I never told Robin not to put anything up her anywhere. No, I never thought about us. No, I never thought it would be like this either, if that’s what you’re asking me to say, but then I didn’t think about it at all.”

  “I did, and you know what I thought? Well, first of all I thought it would never happen in the first place, so it was sheer fantasy.”

  “Right.”

  “And then I thought it would be horribly awkward. You know what I thought? I thought it would be silly. Silly Linda and silly Peter pretending to fuck. Pretending. That’s exactly what I thought. I thought it would be the two of us pretending to be two other people fucking.”

  “That’s very far-out.”

  “You know what I mean, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “But it wasn’t like that.”

  “No.”

  “Are you glad or sorry?”

  “That it happened? I don’t know. Both.”

  “I’m more glad than sorry. I think. It was something that was going to happen sooner or later. I never knew that before, but it’s true. And if it had to happen it couldn’t happen to a nicer evening. I’m not drunk anymore. I wasn’t as drunk as I acted. I don’t mean it was an act. I thought I was that drunk but I wasn’t really. Or I was drunk but it wasn’t just wine. I was drunk on us. Or on you and me. Do you know what I’m saying, because I don’t know if I do or not.”

  “I think so. You’re saying that you … oh, the hell with it. I know what you mean. The hell with it.”

  “Right, the hell with it. God, I’m so glad we can still laugh together. I couldn’t live if I forgot how to laugh. It keeps you going. It wasn’t being horny. I wasn’t horny, Peter, I swear I wasn’t. I didn’t have an urge to get laid. I haven’t had an honest-to-God urge to get laid since January, as a matter of fact. Are you gonna say it or am I? I guess I am. One, we won’t do this again, and two, we can still be friends. God, talk about clichés. Just go ahead and talk about clichés.”

  “We won’t do it again because we don’t have to now.”

  “Jesus.”

  “What?”

  “I do ninety-nine percent of the talking and you make ninety-nine percent of the sense. Peter? We’ll never tell anyone.”

  “God knows I won’t.”

  “I mean ever. No matter who we marry or where we move to or what we wind up doing. It will always be something that nobody knows about. It’s so beautiful I want to cry. I’m picturing two old people who made love once a million years ago and never told anyone and neither of them ever forgot it. Don’t ever forget me, Peter.”

  “Linda.”

  “No. No, I’m all right. Do you want to sleep with me? I mean sleep. You can if you want to. No, because of Robin.”

  “If she wakes up and nobody’s there—”

  “I know. And we wouldn’t just sleep. I can’t talk anymore.”

  “I’ll go.”

  “I want you to go but I don’t want you to go. I’m glad about us. I’m going to say something once and I’ll never say it again.”

  “Let me. I love you, Linda.”

  “Oh, I love you.”

  II

  The Edge of Thought

  Here’s a gray afternoon, bleak as to freeze

  The edge of thought like a hacksaw. Chinese

  Die in the news, this wind on them

  Cold as a garden ….

  —JOSEPHINE MILES

  NINE

  Tannhauser’s was located on the western bank of the Delaware three miles south of New Hope. A large Colonial mansion had been converted into a restaurant, with the entire eastern wall replaced by a picture window. The results of this renovation were much to the advantage of Trude Hofmeister’s patrons, who were afforded a panoramic view of the river. The view was better from the inside; across the river, New Jersey residents called Tannhauser’s “that abortion.”

  Born in Bavaria two weeks to the day before Sarajevo, Trude grew up with a passion for hearty food and equally hearty music. She moved to Vienna when her schooling was completed and at the time of the Anschluss had indulged both appetites generously. A mezzosoprano, she appeared regularly in Wagnerian opera at the Vienna State Opera House. Her affection for Wagner was matched by her enthusiasm for Viennese cuisine, and her figure more than conformed to the standard for her profession. By 1938 she had acquired a strong critical reputation and a not unattractive corpulence.

  She had also acquired a husband. Gunther Loebner was a respected journalist, a boulevardier, a coffeehouse habitué, a man of immense courtly charm and elegant manners. He was also a Social Democrat, and a vocal one. The day the Anschluss was signed he put his wife in a first-class compartment of a train bound for Paris. He would not be persuaded to share the ride with her.

  “I have work,” he told her. “It will not take long “but it is essential that it be done. Perhaps a week, hardly more. In less than ten days I shall be with you in Montparnasse.”

  “In less than ten days you will be in prison,” she said, but she did not speak the words until the train had pulled out of the station, and no tears showed in her eyes while she waved good-bye.

  She was wrong. Loebner was never in prison. Two days after her arrival in Paris he was shot dead by two flint-eyed young Berliners. The official announcement ha
d it that he had died while resisting arrest. In forty-two years Gunther Loebner had resisted any number of things, but arrest had never been among and his sole weapons of resistance had been his pen aad his tongue.

  In the years immediately following, the international audience for Wagnerian opera declined dramatically. Its popularity remained at peak within the Third Reich—indeed, little else was ever aired on German radio—but opera buffs in other countries seemed curiously to have lost their taste for it.

  For a time Gunther Loebner’s widow lost her taste for singing in general. She canceled her engagements and spent most of her time by herself. Two months after her arrival in Paris, she was approached by a young man attached to the German embassy. He explained that he brought condolences for the death of her husband and that it was hoped she would return soon to the Fatherland. The Führer owned all her records and had several times watched her perform, both in Vienna and in Munich. It was hoped a Berlin performance could be arranged.

  She said only that she had ceased to sing. But this was impossible, he told her. One could appreciate that she was bereaved, but time would end her bereavement, and she would perform better than ever.

  “If I sing again,” she said icily, “I shall sing in Paris.”

  He flashed a superior smile. “They sing little Wagner in Paris, Fraulein Hofmeister. Return to Berlin. In two years’ time you shall sing Wagner in Paris and it would not do to be out of practice.”

  She walked into the kitchen and he followed her, talking persuasively. There was a wedge-shaped chef’s knife on the kitchen counter. For a moment she was very near to using that knife to open up his corset-flattened belly. She saw it all in her mind, the mechanics of the act, even the story of attempted rape which would satisfy the sympathetic French police.

  But no. There were too many of them and they were all like this one. If one stroke of the knife would do for all of them—but it would not.

  For the next few months she remembered his prediction. In two years’ time the German Army would be in Paris. She tried to forget the words but every sign and portent assured her they were true. In the spring she sailed to New York, and that September Hitler’s tanks crossed into Poland.

  She spent the war in New York. She sang, but never opera. She sang Kurt Weill, and her most successful number was “Pirate Jenny” from Three-Penny Opera. There was a room in Hitler’s Museum of Decadent Arts where Der Dreigroschenoper was played continually from morning to night. It was the most popular room in the museum; it was the only place in Germany where you could hear the music.

  She gave up singing professionally shortly after the war, married a wealthy German Jew who had left the country early enough to get much of his wealth out with him. He was a widower with grown children and he told her she made him alive again. He was also a great fan of Wagnerian opera; neither its political implications nor the racial theories of its creator, he insisted, had any influence on the way it sounded to him.

  They spent nights listening to records together. In his company she learned to love again the music she had always loved. But she would not sing it for him. Twice he asked her, and the second time she told him of her conversation with the German attaché in Paris. He listened without comment and never repeated the request.

  He died in 1956. He was hospitalized for six weeks after a heart attack and was recovering slowly but surely when his kidneys failed. She had just returned home from the hospital when the phone rang. It was the doctor, the son of close friends of her husband, telling her to come back immediately. Outside his door they told her it was a matter of an hour or so. He was not in pain, he was conscious, and there was nothing to be done.

  “Leave us,” she said.

  She stood at his bedside and held his hand. When she was with him an hour ago his face had life and now it was a death’s head. She said, “David? I will sing for you.”

  She sang Wagner. She sang in full voice while her husband’s doctor stood outside the door with folded arms, fielding one complaint after another. She sang one aria after the next, everything she could remember, and her memory that day was unimpaired. For two full hours she sang without a break, his hand in hers. Nurses moved in and out of the room and she sang uninterrupted. She was still holding his hand and singing when a hollow-eyed nurse took her arm and told her, he was gone.

  She traveled. She bought presents for his grandchildren. In 1961 she bought the present Tannhauser’s from the creditors of the man who had tried to turn it into a restaurant. He had decorated it in an American Colonial motif and matched the decor with a basic American menu. She kept the decor but substituted a Viennese menu.

  She supervised every detail of the operation, bought the produce, greeted guests on arrival and departure. She even did most of the baking. Her chef, with her from the beginning, was excellent, but he could not match her sachertorte, her pfannkuchen, her strudel. She had been too busy to bake for Gunther Loebner, but David Wolf had never ceased to praise her strudel.

  She had opened the restaurant as so many persons opened Bucks County establishments, hoping to enjoy themselves without too great an operating loss. At the end of the first year she was astonished when her accountant reported a net loss of less than two thousand dollars. That first year was the only time Tannhauser’s was ever in the red, and each year her net profit increased.

  On weekends a pianist played old standards in the cocktail lounge from ten until one. Sometimes late at night she could be talked into a song. Something of Weill’s perhaps, or an Edith Piaf song. Never anything operatic.

  Many patrons, including some who came back often, called her Frau Tannhauser. She answered to that name as well as to any other.

  On the first Saturday night in June, Hugh handed his car keys to the parking-lot attendant and led Linda Robshaw up flagstone steps and into Tannhauser’s. It had rained off and on through the day, but by late afternoon the skies had cleared and now the night air was cool and refreshing. Hugh himself felt cool and refreshed. His beard was properly trimmed, its few gray hairs vainly plucked out. His cheeks and neck were clean-shaven and freshly anointed with Russian Leather.

  His suit was a dove gray double:knit he had bought impulsively the previous October in New York and had never worn since he tried it on. He’d been back to work when Wallaeh’s delivered it, hitting his stride in the last stretch of his first draft, and he took it from its box and hung it in his closet without noticing what it was. If they had shipped him an evening gown by mistake he would have put it on a hanger and put it away without complaint.

  Tonight he came across it in the closet, tried it on, and found it flattered him. The cut was younger and more fashionable than his usual style. On his way out the door Karen made a great show of approval. “You look fantastic,” she told him. “If Linda Robshaw isn’t here for breakfast tomorrow morning, then there’s something wrong with her. You really look great.”

  He looked great and felt great. He had planned to take a week or ten days away from the book, and it had been three and a half weeks since he covered his typewriter and he had not yet uncovered it, nor did he intend to for another five days or so. He was not working and it did not bother him in the least. He looked great and felt great and he was taking a bright and charming and damned attractive young woman to dinner, and he was happier than he had been in months.

  “Hugh, Hugh Markarian!” Trude boomed his name, then followed her voice across the room with arms outstretched. She hugged him furiously. “I saw your name on the reservation list and was so pleased. And you look so good! And is this Karen? Liebchen, I have not seen you—”

  “This is Miss Robshaw,” he said. “Linda, this is our hostess, Trude Hofmeister.”

  “Miss Robshaw,” Trude said. “But it is so difficult to distinguish between beautiful young women. Hugh, I have a table for you by the window. It is a such a beautiful night for the view.”

  They went to their table and ordered drinks. Linda said, “When she drops a brick she certainl
y picks it back up in a hurry. Her face didn’t show a thing.”

  “She’s pretty good. I doubt that she’d recognize Karen if she stepped on her, but she must have heard she was in town and came to the obvious conclusion.”

  “Do Karen and I look alike?”

  “Only insofar as it is zo difficult to distingvish betveen beautiful young vimmen,” he said, his accent a good imitation of Trude’s. “Does it bother you being taken gar my daughter?”

  “No. Should it? It’s slightly flattering, but I own a mirror and I know I don’t look—how old is Karen? Eighteen?”

  He nodded. “I’m still old enough to be your father.”

  “Well, you’re not my father, and he’s almost old enough to be your father, as far as that goes. Are you feeling very conscious of your age or is it that you’re getting a kick out of my youth?”

  “Well, it can’t be the first, because I haven’t felt this good in I don’t know how long. I should have gone back to work on the book a week ago and I haven’t even set foot in that room. Excuse me, I went in there the night before last to look something up in the dictionary. And walked on out without even glancing at my desk.”

  “And it evidently doesn’t bother you.”

  “I couldn’t care less. It’s not as if I were stalled on the book, trying to get back to it and unable to get anywhere. But it’s fine, it’s coming fine and sometime next week I’ll start working again. Meanwhile I’m getting to know my daughter. It’s an exhilarating experience, getting to know an eighteen-year-old girl who happens to be your daughter. Girl. I was going to say eighteen-year-old woman: Neither word is right. An eighteen-year-old female?”

  “That sounds like something in a statistical abstract. The percentage of eighteen-year-old female dope peddlers in Elyria, Ohio.”

  “Girl-woman would be the word if it wasn’t so precious. What were you like when you were eighteen?”