“I never thought it was. Does the others good to wait a little longer. Improves my image. What can I do for you, Olive?”
“I haven’t slept well since Clem went to the hospital. I haven’t slept at all since he died.”
“I see. Well, that’s one thing we’ve got a cure for.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “Don’t tell the AMA I brought it up, but have you tried any of the nonprescription items? They work for most people, and I like to stay away from the stronger drugs when I can avoid it.”
She said, “I went through the same sort of thing when my father died. I had to take Seconal every day for a month and it worked like a charm.”
“Yes, if does that. I gather you’d like me to prescribe Seconal.”
“Please.”
“Simple enough. Every case should be so simple.” He wrote rapidly on a pad of prescription blanks, tore off the top sheet and handed it to her. “Anything else troubling you? Headaches? Depression?”
“No headaches. Depression? Well, I haven’t been doing handsprings.”
“But nothing you can’t handle on your own?”
“No. George, I’ve never understood why doctors can’t write like everyone else. It’s incomprehensible to me. I can make out your numbers, though. I’m sure it will be more than a week before I can sleep without help.”
“No point in buying more pills than you need.”
“And when these are used up?”
“Just call me and I’ll renew the prescription.”
“That seems like a nuisance.”
“Does it?”
“I’d say so.”
“You’re still a young woman, Olive. You’re attractive, you’re healthy, you have no financial worries—”
“And I’m in good spirits. Four excellent reasons why you can prescribe a larger quantity of sleeping pills with a clear conscience.”
He got to his feet and paced back and forth between his desk and the window. He said, “We’re talking about something without mentioning it, aren’t we, Olive?”
“Then shall I mention it? We’re talking about suicide.”
“Yes, we are. And that’s not the only reason for giving you Seconal in small amounts. It’s a dangerous drug to possess in lethal quantities. It’s very possible to take pills and forget you’ve taken them; that sort of mental haziness is an effect of the drug. There have been so many cases of genuinely involuntary overdoses—”
“I can promise you I won’t take an involuntary overdose, George.”
“Well, that spells it out, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I sent a check a few months ago to an abortion reform movement. Their main argument is that a woman should have the right to do as she wishes with her own body. I see no reason why that right is the exclusive province of pregnant women.”
“I’m not sure how much of that I agree with. In any event, there’s a difference between acknowledging your right and—”
“And making it less of an ordeal for me? Oh, I’m not going to do away with myself, George. There—I’ve stated that categorically. But if I were, do you seriously think you could stop me? I could go to a half dozen doctors and take their prescriptions to a half dozen pharmacists.”
“I could make that difficult for you.”
“But not impossible. I could take these seven pills you’ve prescribed and wash them down with a quart of iron. That’s supposed to do the job. I could put my head in the gas oven. If I made up my mind to do what I’ve been talking about, I could hardly be prevented, but I would want to do it with the least pain and fuss and aggravation.”
“I’m supposed to prolong life, Olive, and you’re asking me to help shorten it.”
“You’ve done that before.”
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I’ll forget you ever said it.”
“I could name names. I could mention a man who took an overdose of chloral hydrate. He got out of bed and walked to the medicine chest for it, I understand, and I also understand that was the first he’d walked in almost three years.”
“Is there anything that happens in this town that you don’t know? That was a terminal case, we couldn’t even reduce the pain anymore.”
“Oh, is that so. And don’t you recognize a terminal case when you see one, George Perlmutter? And do you think you can do anything about my pain? Do you think you can do anything on earth about my pain?”
At four o’clock she signed her will. She did not walk directly home. Instead she wandered slowly around town, taking her time. Autumn was beautiful here, here in this town to which she so completely belonged. Spring has a joy, an affirmation, a rebirth, but autumn had a slendor that no other season could match. Never did like winter.
You didn’t have to wait for winter. You could make it come to you on your own terms. You had that right.
Clem had had the right. He had had a decision to make, and he made it and she never considered interfering with it. She happened to feel it was the correct decision, but even if she had felt otherwise she would have acted no differently. She had never dictated the terms of his life; she could hardly have presumed to dictate the terms of his death.
She walked to her house almost without realizing it. She looked at it from the outside, walked up the driveway to the backyard. The garden was not at its best now. The mums were in bloom and did not look as good this year as they usually did. Someone ought to divide and reset them in the spring.
And no doubt someone would. The house had long ago been bequeathed to her church, and the minister who conducted her funeral service would probably take it over as a rectory; it was a better and more spacious house than he presently occupied. And his wife was a responsible gardener.
Should she have left the house to Linda? She had not even considered it, but now she found herself wondering. It would surely have complicated things for Henry Biedemeyer, but that was not what decided her against it. No, you could not force another person into your own life. The shop, yes, but not the house as well.
She went inside, wandered through the rooms of the large old house. She locked the outside doors. George Perlmutter would call her in the morning. When she did not answer he would grow apprehensive and come over to make sure she was all right. She had left a key under the mat for him.
He hadn’t liked that. No, he hadn’t liked that at all, but that was just too bad. No law said he had to like it. No law said she had to care what he liked or didn’t like.
She sat for an hour or so in the living room, thinking some thoughts in silence and saying others aloud. People who lived alone generally talked to themselves, she knew. Well, she would never be an old lady who talked to herself. Nor was she talking to herself now.
She said, “Well, I guess it’s time, darling. Do you know something? I always hoped you would be the first of us to go. Always. Of the two of us I thought I would be better at getting on. But I’m not so damned great at it, after all, am I?”
She climbed the stairs. She said, “Strange to be doing things for the last time. The last look at the garden, the last trip up the stairs. What’s strange is the knowledge. Do you remember the last time we made love? I can’t remember it. Every time merges into one. We made love once, and it lasted all our lives.”
In their bedroom she undressed and hung up her clothes. She put on a nightgown and went to the bathroom and filled a glass with water and swallowed thirty-six Seconal capsules. After she had swallowed first handful she stopped and studied herself in the mirror. If she was going to change her mind, now was the time. If she felt the slightest hesitation, now was the time to realize it.
“Not for a minute,” she said aloud. “Not for an instant.”
She carried the empty glass back into the bedroom. A half-finished bottle of whiskey was on his bedside table. She poured herself a strong drink and sniffed it.
“I never could abide the smell,” she said. “I always wondered how you managed to like it. All
due success to temperance.”
She drank the glass down. She felt a rush of warmth in her middle but nothing else.
“Nope,” she said, “I can’t see I missed anything all these years. Never knew what you saw in it, but then I never knew what you saw in me, either.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed. “George Perlmutter says I’m young and attractive and healthy and rich. Somehow I wasn’t moved. Oh, darling, it’s no good when it’s no fun anymore. It was always so damned fascinating to watch how things turned out. And to laugh at all the fools. I don’t know how to laugh, Clem. I can’t do it anymore.”
She looked at the blank canvas hung over the bed. It was the only picture remaining in the house.
“Now there’s an example,” she said. “That’s going to be hanging on that wall after I’m gone, and no one alive will have the slightest idea why it’s there, and sooner or later some damn fool will take it out of here and some other damn fool will think it’s a blank canvas and paint some damn fool picture on it. Now that’s as funny a thing as I’ve thought of in I don’t know how long, Clem, and I ought to be laughing. But I’m not. I’m not laughing at all.”
The pills were starting to work. She could feel her tongue thickening in her mouth, could sense the beginnings of fuzziness in her mind. She pulled back the covers and got into bed. She lay on her side of the bed and turned toward his side.
“Now isn’t that better? Oh, of course it is. Do you remember, Clem? Oh, I wanted you to be the first but I wish you were with me now. How I wish you were with me now. Hold my hand, Clem. Hold my hand. Yes, that’s right. Oh, that’s right. I’m all right now, Clem. I’m all right.”
IV
The Trouble with Eden
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.
—HUGH MARKARIAN, The Edge of Thought
Epilogue
THE END
A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR
In late 1968 or early 1969, I moved with my wife and daughters from a house in the center of New Brunswick, New Jersey, to an eighteenth century farmhouse on twelve rolling acres a mile from the Delaware River. We kept a variety of animals and grew things in the garden, and this was as I’d expected. But there were two things I did not anticipate. One was that I would have to go away from there, all the way back to New York City, to get any work done. The other was that I’d open an art gallery to give myself something to do in my rural paradise.
The art gallery was in New Hope, Pennsylvania, right across the river from Lambertville. New Hope, in Bucks County, had had a reputation as an artists’ colony for a few generations and boasted a little theater and a batch of art galleries, along with bookstores and antique dealers and cute little shops to sell cute little things to tourists, most of whom were neither cute nor little.
I found a store for rent in an enclosed shopping mall and signed a year’s lease. I’m damned if I know what led me to think this was a good idea. I knew a batch of artists and figured I could get them to give me things to hang on the walls, and—oh, never mind. Nowadays it’s hard to get me to go see a movie or buy a new shirt, but back then I’d embark on the wildest kind of adventure on not much more than a whim.
I knew nothing about business, but that was okay, because the gallery didn’t do any. Whenever I went into the city to write a book, I closed up shop while I was gone. When I was home, I’d open up and sit there until it was time to go across the street and have a drink at the Logan Inn. That was the best part of the operation, that and hanging out with Jim and Flory Toney, who did my custom framing whenever I managed to sell something.
After a year, my lease was up and I was out of there. It was a learning experience, and I learned not to make that particular mistake again. And I did meet some interesting people, and hear some interesting stories.
And, when it came time to write a big trashy commercial novel, I knew right where to set it.
By this time I’d written three erotic novels for Berkley Books as Jill Emerson; a fourth, Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man, wound up in hardcover with Bernard Geis. Now I don’t know who thought that Jill ought to write a big, juicy, trashy Peyton Place–type of book, but Henry brought the idea to me, and I thought Bucks Country would provide a good setting.
The deal was an attractive one, with a hefty advance. Berkley was a division of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, and the deal was hard/soft; the book would be first a Berkley hardcover, then a paperback.
I wrote most of it in an apartment at 235 West End Avenue. When we first moved to the country, and I found I couldn’t get any writing done there, I went into the city, took a room at the Hotel Royalton—then a modestly priced family-run establishment, before some genius took it over and tarted it up—and wrote a book in a week. Soon after that I leased a studio apartment on West Thirty-Fifth Street, and then Brian Garfield and I took a place together, holding a weekly poker game there, staying over whenever one or the other of us had a late night in the city, and getting some writing done. I believe Brian wrote most of Kolchak’s Gold there. I wrote a batch of things, too, and one of them was The Trouble with Eden.
Some of the characters were based to one degree or another on some of the people I’d known in and around New Hope, and one at least recognized himself. He was an actor and a partner in the mall bookstore, and he did in fact greatly resemble Benjamin Franklin. “Larry put me in a book,” he told people. “But he’s made me bisexual, for God’s sake, and everybody knows I’m a plain and simple faggot. Do you think I could sue his publisher? Would I get anything, do you suppose? And would the publicity be good for the book? Because I wouldn’t want to do it if it would get Larry in any kind of trouble …”
Well, he didn’t sue, which was probably just as well. Would the publicity of a lawsuit have helped? I don’t think anything would have helped. Berkley had commissioned the book with the intention of making a big fat bestseller out of it, but they never put any muscle into it and didn’t sell many copies.
There’d been a big fat bestseller a few years earlier called The Devil in Bucks County, and I’m sure the Berkley folks were aware of it. They probably had it in mind when they made the deal. The title I suggested was The Trouble with Bucks County, and they used half of it. The Trouble with Eden—well, it’s not a bad title.
Reviewers overlooked it completely as far as I can tell, with a single curious exception. In a long article about books in Esquire, a reviewer whose name I’ve long since forgotten launched into a discussion of a book that he (or maybe she) had picked up a week ago without great expectations. It looked like trash but turned out to be far more gripping and involving than he or she anticipated. Well-wrought characters, interesting plot developments—really pretty good.
And then suddenly the review hung a U-turn, and its author said that further on the book turned out to be trash after all and, on balance, a big disappointment. I’ll tell you, it was as though the reviewer read half the book, wrote half the review, ate something that turned his stomach, finished the book, and went on to finish the review. I can’t say I minded—it was, as they say at the Oscars, victory enough merely to be nominated—and I can’t say I disagreed with its conclusion. But it was damn strange.
Ah well. It’s probably not a good book, but I have a warm spot for Eden. Like the curate’s egg, I think parts of it are very good indeed.
—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block ([email protected]) 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 f
rom 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.
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