The Trouble with Eden

by Lawrence Block

  He made his own breakfast. Mrs. Kleinschmidt had Sundays off, and before Hugh awoke her daughter-in-law had come to take her to church. She would spend the day with her children and grandchildren. Karen’s bedroom door was closed when he passed it. He did not knock, but before putting up coffee he went out and checked the garage. The VW was still gone.

  He was on his second cup of coffee when he heard her turn into the driveway. She came directly into the kitchen, pert and bright-eyed, neat and trim in faded jeans and a striped T-shirt. She said, “Shit, I missed breakfast. I hope there’s coffee.”

  “A full pot. What do you want? I’ll fix something.”

  “I think I’ll just have toast. Have you got a cigarette? I’ve been smoking mentholated ones and I can’t stand them.” She sat down, poured coffee and smoked one of his cigarettes while the bread toasted. “It was late and I was too stoned to drive home,” she said. “A combination of tired and stoned, actually. I wasn’t that stoned. I was hoping I’d have breakfast with you and Linda.”

  “Linda didn’t stay over.”

  “Karen did. She was here then, huh? Or you wouldn’t have said it that way.”

  “As a matter of fact she was. I brought her here to meet you but you weren’t here.”

  She grinned. “That’s a fresh approach. I guess it worked out well enough, didn’t it?”

  “You could say so.”

  “Well, I told you she wouldn’t be able to resist you. Not in that suit.”

  She took it for granted that he had made love to Linda. To correct that impression he would have had to say more than he wanted to say, so he let it stand. She assumed an act had taken place and seemed pleased, even proud of him, and he told himself there was no harm in his enjoying her admiration even under false pretenses. A child, he assured himself, ought to be allowed to cherish certain illusions about her father. Even if they were not the orthodox ones.

  They spent the afternoon walking in the woods. She talked at length about various people she had known at Northwestern. College had been a great change for her and he wondered if she could appreciate how radically different the environment had been. Anita and her husband were determinedly modern parents, desperately enlightened, but their automatic liberalism and furious sincerity had not altered the fact that a middle-class white suburban high school in Arizona was more than miles away from a large Midwestern university. Karen’s recent visits to him in New Hope were better preparation, in a way; she told him how the people she had met on campus reminded her of street people she had run across on earlier vacations in the village.

  They ate fried chicken and drank root beer at a roadplace on 202. Back at the house he made them each a drink. A drink together, generally before dinner when Mrs. Kleinschmidt was home to prepare the evening meal, had become an unannounced ritual for the two of them. “If you’re going to drink at all,” he’d told her, “you ought to do it properly. You don’t like straight whiskey, and it’s a bad idea anyway until you have a fair idea of your capacity. Learn to get used to it with water or soda. One advantage of soda is that it’s consistent. You can’t get a drink of scotch and water in a town where the water’s bad, not any more than you can get a decent cup of coffee.”

  He put on the radio and they listened to an FM rock station. As she finished her drink she announced that she would be going out; she’d promised to meet “some people” in town.

  “You can bring home anyone you like, you know.”

  “So you can meet him at breakfast?”

  “I suppose I could stand it if he can.”

  She looked at him thoughtfully. “I wonder,” she said.

  “If he could stand it?”

  “Oh, nothing. It’s funny.”

  “What is?”

  “All of this. The process of getting used to each other, I guess. If Mother had any idea. She already knew I wasn’t going back home for the summer. We had that out long ago. She didn’t quite say it, not in those words, but she’s glad I’m here where at least you can keep an eye on me.”

  She had said it in precisely those words, to Hugh if not to Karen, but he had not reported on the conversation. Karen tended to make a game out of the two of them combining to deceive Anita, and he did not want to encourage this.

  He was vaguely disappointed when she left. He picked up the detective story he had given up on the night before but it did not engage his interest. He tried other books with the same result. He was lonely, he realized, and restless. He could not sit still and his hands fidgeted with pipes and other small objects. He thought of Linda. “Give me a couple of days.” Yeah, he thought, but what about tonight? And smiled at the old joke, the inconsolable widower on the night of his wife’s funeral, the friend gently trying to ease his bereavement. “Time heals all wounds. In not too many months you’ll be over the shock, you’ll go out and socialize, you’ll meet a woman, in a year or two you’ll be married again.” “Yeah, but what about tonight?”

  Well, what about tonight? He walked toward the bar then changed his mind. Drinking would fit his mood, but solitary drinking would be a bad idea. He had to be among people.

  He drove the Buick across the bridge and parked across the street from a tavern in Lambertville. Liquor could not be sold in Pennsylvania on a Sunday; the old law was still on the books, although each year there was word it would be repealed. This was no great hardship for New Hope drinkers, given their access to taverns on the Jersey side, all of which consequently did almost as good volume Sundays as Saturdays. Several Lambertville restaurants would only sell drinks to dinner patrons on Sunday, but the bulk of the taverns had no such restriction.

  Hugh ordered a scotch and soda and drank it at the bar. Two men a few stools away were discussing baseball, and neither seemed to be paying any attention to what the other said. One reminisced about the great Yankee teams of his youth while the other went on about what was wrong with the Phillies this season. Someone played a Tammy Wynette record on the jukebox. His restlessness did not dissipate. He stayed at the bar for half an hour, then left it and walked around the corner to another place. After two more drinks and a little less than an hour he was ready to get moving again. He bought a fresh pack of cigarettes from a machine, lit one, and walked out into the cool night air.

  Yeah, but what about tonight?

  He could go to Trenton. There were bars there where people on the prowl were apt to run across one another. He did not know Trenton well, but he knew of a few places downtown off State Street that had that sort of reputation.

  But he had never liked Trenton, and didn’t feel like driving that far now. He had already had several drinks, and although he was by no means drunk neither was he entirely sober. The drive to Trenton would be no problem in and of itself. He was in decent shape to drive. If he went, though, he would have several more drinks in Trenton, probably one or two in each of the bars he would go to. At that point it would be no pleasure to drive home, and might not be safe.

  Nor had he ever been much good at picking up strangers. Even on the rare occasions when he had done so successfully, the evening had never been what he had hoped it might be. He always kept a part of himself guarded, nervous that his partner might suddenly turn out to be insane or criminal, that a husband or lover might turn up at any moment, either genuinely jealous or in some prearranged variant of the badger game. If the woman was interested in simple uncomplicated emotionless sex, he either suspected her motives or felt himself degraded by the experience. If she showed some personal interest in him that extended beyond the arena of the bedroom, he couldn’t help worrying she would try to trap him into something he did not want.

  Lambertville was unlikely territory for pickups. Unescorted women were rare in the bars and cocktail lounges. Trenton was not all that far. He was a safe driver, and drink never made him abandon safe habits; if anything, he drove more slowly and carefully when aware he had had too much. And one never knew what one might find in a downtown bar, and if nothing else the drive there
and the barhopping and the drive back would burn off some of the nervous energy that ran through him.

  He walked almost to the car before changing his mind. No, he decided. Not tonight.

  He walked back to the main drag into the bar of the Lambertville House. The place had been a hotel since Revolutionary times. It was now largely residential, renting the bulk of its rooms inexpensively to pensioners. The public rooms downstairs were comfortably and attractively furnished, and the restaurant did a brisk lunch business through the week. The bar, modern and not too brightly lit, was less crowded than he had thought it would be. He stopped briefly at a table to exchange a few words with two couples he knew slightly, sloughed off an invitation to join them, and made his way to the back of the bar. The bartender had just placed his drink in front of him when someone spoke his name.

  He turned. There was a woman in the corner booth looking his way. She looked familiar but he could not

  place her. He picked up-his drink and carried it the booth.

  “You are Hugh Markarian, aren’t you? I thought I recognized you. I don’t think we’ve met, but you were pointed out to me once or twice. I’m Melanie Jaeger.”

  “How do you do?”

  “Sully Jaeger’s wife.”

  “Oh, Sully’s wife. The name didn’t register at first. I gather you and your husband are put scouting the competition.”

  “No, I’m alone,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “I’m not sure where Sully is,” she said. She pushed a strand of light brown hair out of her eyes. “I felt like getting out on my own for a change. I think people ought to do that now and then. Don’t you, Hugh?”

  “Why not?”

  “Of course it gets lonely sitting by yourself.”

  “May I join you?”

  “Do you think you’d enjoy it?”

  He looked at her. There was a feline quality to her face, the pointed chin, the sharply arched eyebrows. She ran the tip of her tongue over her upper lip, her eyes holding his as she did so. He tried to remember if he had heard anything about Melanie Jaeger. Sully’s wife. Not only Sully but Sully’s wife must be above suspicion—

  “Yes,” he said levelly. “I think I’d enjoy it.”

  “Then sit here next to me. These booths are small. I sort of shoved the table that way to give myself more room.”

  “People need all the room they can get.”

  “I know. I try to give myself all the room I need. You didn’t recognize me at first, did you? Of course not, since you never met me. Of course someone may have pointed me out to you, the way you were pointed out to me.”

  “No. I would have remembered.”

  “Because you have a wonderful memory?”

  “Because you’re wonderfully memorable.”

  She turned toward him, smiled -warmly at him. She was wearing cocoa brown hot pants and a matching top. Her midriff was bare, and her skin looked to have the texture of velvet. She was slender and compactly built, and her breasts looked disproportionately large for her frame.

  “I’m not wearing a bra,” she said.

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  “I saw you looking and I thought you might be wondering. But I’m not. See?”

  She leaned against him, her breast pressing against his upper arm. The warmth of her flesh was delicious.

  He began talking, hardly sure what he was saying. Something about the town or the weather, something meaningless. She put her hand on his thigh and squeezed, and he stopped in mid-sentence.

  “It’s silly for us to waste time talking to each other, isn’t it? We don’t have anything to talk about, really. No, I don’t want another drink. I didn’t really want this one. I didn’t come here to talk and I didn’t come here to drink. I already found what I came here for.”

  “Oh?”

  Her hand moved, cupped him. He felt himself growing under her touch. He was staring hard at the opposite side of the booth. He couldn’t speak.

  “I don’t want people talking. They will anyway but there’s no point encouraging them. Where did you park your car?”

  “Forsythe Street. Just across from the funeral parlor.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “A Buick. A white Buick.”

  “Sit in your car and wait for me. Give me five minutes. All right?”

  “Sure.”

  She gave him a little squeeze, bounced her breast a second time against his arm. “Five minutes,” she said.

  He sat in the car with the lights out and the motor running and felt like a Hollywood spy. “I don’t want people talking.” He thought of Mrs. Kleinschmidt: Tongues will wag. Not only Sully but Sully’s wife—

  God, what a forward little piece she was. Hello, you’re Hugh Markarian, let’s fuck. A firm pillow of a tit against his arm and a greedy little hand between his legs and give me five minutes. He would slip into her, and could imagine nothing more comfortable than that.

  His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. He told himself that he did not expect her to show up. When people came on that strong they were likely to be more interested in the game than anything else. It was unlikely that she would deliver. It was not as if he been singularly dynamic, charming her off her feet into his bed. Nor had she come looking for him. For someone, yes, but not for him. She had as much as said that she had come to the Lambertville House specifically to find a man. He had been in the right place at the right time, that was all.

  He thought of Sully and smiled. If ever a man deserved to be cuckolded, Sully was the man. And maybe that was the motive, for that matter. Maybe Melanie had finally found out that her great hairy bear of a husband was running all over town screwing everything with a hole in it, and had decided to get some of her own back. Which was understandable, but it still left room for. her to get cold feet and change her mind.

  He saw her turn the corner and let out his breath. He’d been unaware he was holding it. He blinked the lights once at her and saw her smile. He drove up, stopped for her, and she hopped in beside him and drew the door quickly shut.

  “I was afraid you weren’t coming,” he said.

  “I came, though.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And not for the last time, either. I think there’s going to be a lot of coming tonight.”

  Her hand found him again. “That’s dangerous,” he said.

  “It is?”

  “When I’m driving it is.”

  Her hand did not withdraw. “Oh, I’m not worried,” she said. “This is turning you on—”

  “You better believe it is.”

  “—but not in a way that’s gonna make you lose control of the car. You don’t lose control of things. That’s one of the reasons I’m here.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Because I think we both want the same thing out of the next couple of hours.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Some nice yummy fucking without any hassles. We’re a couple of strangers. I’m from Maine and you’re from California and we just met in a bar in Toledo.”

  “Nobody ever met anybody like you in a bar in Toledo.”

  “You never know. Where are we going?”

  He was driving onto the bridge, slowing the car to the fifteen-mile-an-hour speed limit. “Where do you want to go?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Your place or a motel, whichever you’d rather.”

  “My place, then.”

  “I left my car in New Hope. Drop me and I’ll follow you out there. Then you won’t have to take me home. That’s if I can park the car where it won’t be seen from the street.”

  “There’s a big driveway, and you can’t see anything from the street.”

  “Then let me get my car. If we were going to a motel, I wouldn’t want to take it, but what’s the sense of you having to get dressed and drive me home?”

  He dropped her a few blocks from her house and waited with the engine idling until she backed her sports car out of the
driveway. He overtook her and she followed a half block behind. All the way there he kept glancing in his rearview mirror to make sure she had not turned off.

  When they were in the house he took her in his arms and kissed her. She was considerably shorter than he was and stood on her tiptoes, clinging to him with her arms around his neck. She was wearing a great deal of perfume. He had not noticed it as much in the restaurant, or even in the Buick. He wondered if she had put more on before getting in her own car.

  He kissed her again and they moved over to the couch and sat down clutching at each other. “I’m glad we’re not in a motel,” she said. “Just a bed and a dresser and a chair, and all you can do is get out of your clothes and get down to business. Let’s take our time, okay?”

  “Why not?”

  “Let’s fool around like kids and get each other so hot we can’t stand it, and then we’ll go to your bedroom and fuck like crazy.”

  They kissed. Her mouth was eager, demanding. He put a hand on her bare midriff and stroked her. Her skin was as soft as it looked and stroking her was like petting a kitten. He dipped a finger into her navel and she moaned and writhed against him.

  When he reached to unclasp the halter top she shook her head. “You don’t have to take it off,” she said. “Just pull it up. See?”

  She pulled the top up and her breasts popped into view beneath it. They were large and perfectly firm. He stroked them and she purred, and he lowered his head to kiss her breasts.

  “See? It’s sexier with clothes on.”

  She was right. He did not know her age but knew she could not be more than twenty-five; Sully’s wives were never older than that. In speech and manner she was younger still, and this urgent clothed lovemaking made him feel he was in high school again. He kissed her breasts and put a hand under the band of the hot pants. The skin on the inside of her thighs was the same perfect velvet as the rest of her.