The Trouble with Eden

by Lawrence Block

  “You cocksucker. Yes, there’s a place where I can stay tonight. And I don’t have to pack a few things because I had the foresight to pack a few things yesterday because it occurred to me that you might pull this sort of shit. It’s just as easy for things to end pleasantly, Warren, but you never forget you’re an actor. You always have to play to an audience even when you’re all by yourself in an empty theater.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “What for?”

  “For nothing, I suppose. I don’t know. I’m sorry, Bert. It hurts a bit so I try to hurt back. Childish.”

  “I’m sorry, too.”

  “I’ll tell you what. Let’s neither of us be sorry. It was fun while it lasted, and I’ll always settle for that as an epitaph. For a life or for a love affair. It was fun while it lasted. There’s just one problem. Where do you drop the curtain?”

  “You just lost me.”

  “We’ve already established that, silly. No, it goes back to what you said about my weakness for the dramatic. The charge is true enough. But don’t you see, it’s so much more awkward to part on good terms. Neither party ever knows when to get off the stage. Much simpler with a lot of door slamming and name calling. Still, we ought to be able to work something out. I think I have it. You play the piano. And sing, I do want to hear you sing. I’ll miss that. You play and sing, and I’ll sit in a dark corner listening to you. Before you quite finish I’ll have gone upstairs, and when you finish you may steal off into the night.”

  Bert started to say something, then changed his mind. He seated himself at the piano and studied the keys. Softly he said, “What would you like to hear?”

  “Oh, are you taking requests tonight?”

  “Just so long as it’s not ‘Melancholy Baby.’”

  “Lord. No, you’re better far than I at matching songs with moods. Something that achieves sorrow without reaching slush.”

  “Smiling through tears? That effect?”

  “Winking through tears.”

  He knew it from the first bars of the introduction and thought that Bert had chosen wisely. “Just One of Those Things.” Yes, that was right, every line in it was right. It described a romance that burned itself out quickly, and theirs had been neither that intense nor that brief, and yet the song was singularly appropriate.

  As the bridge ended, he got to his feet and slipped silently from the room. He waited out of sight on the stairs and listened to the song’s last verse:

  So goodbye, love, and amen

  Here’s hoping we meet now and then

  It was great fun

  But it was just one of those things.

  He stood motionless on the staircase until he heard the front door drawn quietly shut. The Volkswagen engine caught, and he listened to Bert driving off. Then he climbed the stairs and went to his room.

  He had wanted to make sure Bert did not stay the night. Had he done so, he would have learned that Anne and Robin were there. While his knowledge would have been dangerous only in the sense that any unnecessary complication was a hazard, that had been reason enough to make the break an immediate one.

  And so he had pretended pain and bitterness that he had not felt at all. It was not a lack of feeling for Bert, he knew. It was simply that he was under too much other pressure to feel much.

  Of course he had shed tears during the song. A statue could not have done less. It was fun while it lasted; and it was just one of those things. They both did nicely as epitaphs. For a love affair or for a life.

  Hugh sat looking at the typewriter. There was only one more page to write, and ne knew precisely what it would say. He had written it dozens of times in his head in the course of the past few months, had mentally edited and shaped it over and over. Now all he had to do was put the words on the page.

  When he began to type, the words came slowly. He measured each phrase. He wanted to get it just right, and at the same time he was reluctant to write the words at all, because once they were written the book would be finished. He wanted to be finished and yet he did not want to be finished. He had thought in the past that it was not unlike sex—you wanted to come, but you didn’t want to come right away. He wrote:

  And so it was over. A man had died, and living men had opened the earth for him and closed it over him. A life which had begun at one specific point in time had ended now at another specific point in time. Lives, like books, have beginnings and endings, first chapters and last chapters.

  But the endings of human lives lack the precision of the endings of books. If death is a last chapter, there is still an epilogue to come.

  For even physical death is a gradual process. The body itself dies piecemeal. Hair and fingernails continue to grow for a time, their functions like the reflexive twitching of a headless snake. Until they too are done.

  A man had died, and was dead. But two women had known him, each in her particular way. Neither knew him as he had known himself. Perhaps their knowledge of him had great gaps in it. Perhaps in certain ways it exceeded his knowledge of himself.

  But all that matters is that they did know him. And as long as either of them is alive, the man will not be utterly dead. It is not merely that he will live metaphorically in memory. His life—and now the event of his death—is a fundamental component of each of these two women. The man he had been is a part of all that they are or will be. Their lives are his epilogue.

  Of course the converse is just as true. Now that the man is dead, neither the wife nor the daughter will ever be wholly alive.

  THE END

  He took the final page from the typewriter and read it through. It did not seem quite right, but he knew that it would not have seemed quite right no matter how he had done it.

  He looked at his watch. He decided that it was not too late to call Linda and was reaching for the telephone when he remembered that it was either far too late or far too early to call Linda Robshaw. She had seemed quite important to him for quite some time, but now that he had finished the book he was unsure if her importance had been more than temporary.

  He fixed himself a drink. He had finished the book, and he ought to be able to tell someone as much. He wanted to talk to someone but there was no one he wanted to talk to. Mary Fradin would be glad to know that the book was done, but there was no earthly reason to call her in the middle of the night. Karen was at Melanie Jaeger’s house and he did not want to call her there. And who else was there? Anita? There had been times, shortly after the divorce, when he had had to fight the desire to call her. He had outgrown the urge long ago, and she came to mind only to complete the list.

  The women in his life. And did they know him as the dead man had been known by his wife and daughter? No, he was not going to think about such things now. There were many personal truths in this book, truths he had not known until he wrote them into his consciousness, and he had carefully held them on the edge of thought while the book evolved. The Edge of Thought. Yes, he liked that title, liked it far more now than before.

  He was working on a second drink when Karen came home. Her enthusiasm took the edge off his own depression. She insisted on reading the manuscript immediately, wouldn’t wait until morning.

  “It’s not that late,” she said. “I’m not the least bit sleepy. I couldn’t sleep now, not knowing it’s done and just waiting to be read.”

  She had a drink with him first. He told her she could read in the study where the light was good.

  “I was never allowed in there,” she said. She kissed him suddenly, her arms tight around his neck. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “Will you still be proud if the book’s lousy?”

  “I know it’s not.”

  “Well, I’m going to bed,” he said.

  She closed herself in the study and he made one more drink and took it upstairs. He did not want to go to sleep. He wanted to sit downstairs and wait while she read the book. His mind was full of thoughts, rolling in and falling back like waves.

  His mind was
also exhausted, weary at the end of a half year’s labor. Its hyperactivity now was an illusion, like the growth of hair and fingernails after death.

  He finished his drink and got into bed, and it was not long before the thoughts softened into dreams.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  On Sunday morning the sun rose into a cloudless blue sky. Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Kleinschmidt left her small apartment and cooked herself a light breakfast in Hugh Markarian’s kitchen. She did not prepare breakfast for the mister or little Karen; neither had stirred by the time her son arrived to drive her to church.

  While Mrs. Kleinschmidt ate her light breakfast, Peter and Gretchen were devouring a huge one. Gretchen had slept poorly. Peter had not slept at all, and he went to the bathroom during the meal and swallowed a spansule, first chewing a few of the bitter time-release grains of Dexedrine to put them more immediately to work. He had two spansules left, and they would last the day.

  Warren slept longer than the others, waking to the sound of Robin amusing herself at Bert’s piano. For a brief moment he thought that it was Bert he was hearing and that something had gone horribly wrong with Bert’s musical ability. He reminded himself that Bert was gone and ultimately guessed the source of the cacophony. Robin had an uncanny ability to strike precisely those chords which made his head vibrate, and his head was vibrating badly enough as it was. He dropped two Alka-Seltzer tablets into a glass of water, waited interminably for them to dissolve, and used them to wash down two Excedrins.

  A glance out the window told him that it was a beautiful day. He couldn’t imagine why it should be. When his headache began to recede he picked up the telephone and placed a long-distance call.

  Linda Robshaw was looking at her own telephone while Warren was using his. She had just awakened for the third time. Twice before she had drawn the bedsheet up over her and burrowed back to sleep. Now she was more completely awake, and it seemed as though she ought to get up and do something. She glanced at the phone and remembered her conversation the day before with Hugh, frowning at the memory of her own part in it. She had been purposely unkind, and in a way that was difficult to understand after the fact. She ought to call him now. There ought to be something she could say.

  Ah, but it was easier to remain in bed, easier to close her eyes against the light, easier to make a cocoon of the bedsheet and huddle in the womblike warmth of her own body heat. Soon it would be time to get up, to dress, to eat, to open the shop, time to give away paintings. In the meantime her bed was warm and secure.

  Gretchen said, “I wish I understood more of the plan. Oh, you don’t have to tell me. We can’t talk about it now.”

  “And it’s easier if you don’t know the details, Gretch.”

  “It sounds as though you don’t trust me.”

  “You know that’s not it.”

  “I know.” She chewed a fingernail. “You and Warren will be with me. That will make it easier, won’t it? I don’t think any power on earth can stop the three of us together.”

  “Not as long as we stick together, Gretch.”

  “I wonder what’s keeping him.” She went to the window, eased the shade aside a few inches and squinted. “I don’t see his car.”

  “He’ll honk the horn when he’s here. You remember the signal.”

  “A long, three shorts, and a Jong.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Dah-dit-dit-dit-dah.” “Right.”

  “I wouldn’t forget that, Petey.”

  When the horn sounded she took his arm, and he led her out of the room and down the stairs. Warren was parked in front with the motor running. Peter held the door for her and sat beside her. They all rode in front with Gretchen in the middle, and in-obedience to the finger at Warren’s lips they did not speak until they had cleared the outskirts of town.

  Then Warren let his features relax in a smile. “We can talk now,” he said. “We’re out of their range.”

  “Warren, you look so different. Your hair! And when did you grow that beard?”

  He did look very different, so much so that Peter would have had difficulty recognizing him. His wig and neatly trimmed brown beard completely altered the shape of his face. Heavy horn-rimmed glasses replaced his usual rimless ones.

  “I am ze master of ze disguise,” he said. With one hand he removed the beard. “You see? A few bits of adhesive tape hold it in place. Here beneath it all is the Warren you know and love, and now”—he fixed the beard in place once again—“we are disguised once more. You’ll excuse me if I don’t remove the wig, I trust.”

  “What a perfect disguise. Petey didn’t even mention it. Isn’t it super, baby?”

  He agreed that it was super. Warren went on driving, heading south and east, keeping up a running conversation with Gretchen. In a burlesque Viennese accent he told her he was Dr. David Loewenstein, the famous Austrian mystic and psychic medium. Gretchen played along, mimicking his accent, while Peter gratefully let the two of them handle the conversation. It was a pleasure to put his mind in neutral and coast for awhile. It would have been an even greater pleasure not to be in the car at all, and he had tried to find reasons not to go along. Warren could have taken her by himself, he had told himself from time to time. But he had never managed to make himself believe this and had not even attempted to sell it to Warren. No, he had to be there. He just hoped he would be able to handle it.

  At least he was past the periodic touches of mania that had afflicted him the previous afternoon. Unwelcome thoughts still came to him, questions occurred that would have troubled him, but he was having less difficulty pushing them aside now. He was growing accustomed to the drug, remembering from earlier times how to use it and how to coast with it. And he was growing similarly accustomed to the role he was playing, managing at once to fit it comfortably while holding a portion of his mind apart from it.

  On the edge, of course, there was the specter of what they were doing. This would not go away. On the contrary, it drew closer with every turn of the car’s wheels. He dealt with it by keeping himself strictly in present time and banishing thoughts of the future.

  It was all as Gretchen said, a matter of will and concentration.

  Warren stopped the car at a gas station. He told attendant to fill the tank, then excused himself to go the lavatory.

  First, though, he placed a telephone call. When he’d been connected to the person he had spoken to earlier, he said, “This is Dr. David Loewenstein. I’m about ten minutes from you at the moment. My patient is presently cooperative.” His voice was neither his own nor the comic-opera voice he’d used with Gretchen, but was quite similar in pitch and inflection to the psychiatrist’s.

  “Her delusion is being supported and she does not know our true destination,” he went on. “I wanted to make sure you would have restraint available. In light of her history I can’t overemphasize that.”

  He listened for a few moments, then rang off. In the washroom he took off the false beard, peeled off the bits of adhesive tape, and fixed the beard properly in place with spirit gum. He swallowed two more Excedrins before returning to the car.

  “Well, this is it,” Warren said. He swung the car through the iron gates and along the narrow macadam road. “We have arrived.”

  Peter heard the words and looked at his own hands, surprised at their steadiness. Warren had spoken in a voice brimming with cheer and anticipation, but Peter heard them echo in his mind in another tone entirely, one of bitter resignation. Well, this is it. We have arrived.

  It was not what he had expected. No guards on the gate, none of the stark gloom he had pictured. The general feel of the place was that of a college campus.

  There had been a sign, though, and Gretchen had seen it. Now, as they passed between tall trees, she said, “This is the State Hospital.”

  “Of course it is. And ze internationally famous Dr. Loewenstein is expected at any moment. Everything’s right on schedule, Gretchen.”

  “But why are we here?”
r />   “Just think about it,” he said. “How can they possibly get to us here?”

  She thought about it, and Peter read the uncertainty in her face. The car reached the end of the narrow road, and he looked out at a broad expanse of asphalt surrounded by a rolling lawn. At the far end of the parking lot were the buildings, uniform piles of darkened red brick. He tried to keep from noticing the iron grillwork on all of the windows.

  “I don’t like this place,” Gretchen said.

  “Of course not,” Warren said. “I knew you would sense it.”

  “Sense what?”

  “The feeling of the place. It’s just right, isn’t it?” He swung the car into a parking spot reserved for physicians and hospital personnel. “Just come with me,” he said. “They’re expecting us.”

  “Warren, I don’t want to go. Petey, tell him I don’t want to go.”

  “You can do it, Gretch. You just have to concentrate.”

  “But this is crazy, Petey! I don’t want to get out of the car. I’m afraid.”

  He said, “Warren, would it be all right if we stayed in the car while you made the arrangements?” He put his arm around her, drew her close. Over her shoulder he saw Warren give him a quick nod, then get out of the car.

  She burrowed in his arms for a moment. Then she said, “That was fast thinking, Petey. I knew we should never trust that man. Now we can—” Her jaw fell. “Petey! He took the keys!”

  “So?”

  She spun around to face him. “Don’t you see? This was Warren’s plan, wasn’t it? He dreamed it up. And he’s managed to fool you. Oh, I should have known this. Oh, my God!”

  “Wait, Gretchen. Hang on.”

  “Maybe we can run.”

  “That would be the worst thing we could do. Don’t you see?”

  “I suppose so. But—”

  “You’re wrong about Warren. You’ll see.”

  He held onto her, trying to calm her. “Just stay perfectly still,” he said. “If it is a trap, all we have to do is be absolutely quiet.”