Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  The man read out the address on the passport. “Is that still correct?”

  “That’s right.” Don’t ask if there’s a problem, he thought. There is no problem.

  A drop of sweat rolled down the inside of his left arm and stopped at his watchband.

  “Open the trunk, please.”

  He had to reach into the car for his keys and he willed his hand not to shake. What if he asks what’s in the shopping bags? he thought. I should have looked. He walked around to the trunk and unlocked it and stepped aside.

  “Are your total purchases fifty dollars or less?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any meat or agricultural products?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  The man nodded. “You can close the trunk. You looking to drive all the way to Dallas tonight?”

  “No way,” Alex said. “I’ll catch a motel in San Antone. Just wanted to get back in the USA tonight.”

  “Sounds like a plan. You have a good trip.”

  Alex put the passport in the breast pocket of his suit coat. “Thanks.” He got in the car and drove through as the wooden barricade lifted. He rolled his window up, put the a/c on high again, and waited until he was well into Laredo before whooping and hollering and bouncing in his seat.

  What a rush. He was ready for one of Álvaro’s women now, maybe all three of them. He wanted to get drunk and stoned and run naked through the streets of North Dallas.

  Instead he kept the music low enough that he could hear a siren over it and held his speed to 60. He got home around four and looked in briefly on Gwyn. Magdalena, sleeping on the day bed in Gwyn’s room, woke and said, «¿Quién es? ¿Qué hora son?»

  «It’s me, Alex. It’s very late. Go back to sleep.»

  The next afternoon Alex drove the Buick to a garage in South Oak Cliff that looked like it hadn’t been repainted since the 1930s. Per instructions, he left an empty briefcase on the front seat. He watched a baseball game in the waiting room on an old black-and-white tv where the picture rolled every few seconds. After half an hour a middle-aged Chicano brought him his keys and said, in English, “I think you’ll find everything is in order.”

  He drove a mile or so before he pulled over and looked in the briefcase. It held ten stacks of bills in various denominations, each secured with a rubber band, each adding up to $1000. Five thousand dollars profit for a long day’s work.

  Holy shit, Alex thought. Holy fucking shit.

  *

  Sunday afternoon was the apex of Madelyn’s week. She parked her battered Pinto wagon under a live oak at the Preston Royal branch library and helped Ava out of her booster seat. The doors had just opened at one. She tucked a stack of books under one arm and led Ava inside with the other hand.

  Madelyn was not a believer in biological determinism, yet the way Ava loved books was uncanny. From the first she had been gentle, almost reverent in the way she handled them; now, at age three and a half, she was sounding out the words. When Madelyn had tried reading her the Odyssey, Ava had made it clear that she would choose her own books and, preferably, read them for herself.

  She waved to Charlie, the librarian who had a crush on her. He was in his thirties, a bit sharp-featured and overeager. She wished she could reciprocate; he was bright and had a high success rate at predicting her taste.

  She fed her books into the return slot and left Ava in the children’s section. Ava went immediately to the letter O, where she’d left off the week before, and sat cross-legged on the carpet with the first five candidates for her selection process, which often involved smelling the pages as well as reading them.

  Madelyn took the current Times Book Review to a table where she could keep one eye on Ava. She read the lead review for Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, then dutifully noted the title in a pocket spiral notebook.

  She’d cut back to 28-hour weeks at the jeans store after Ava was born, and her life was full of opportunities to read: watching Ava at the playground, waiting in the pediatrician’s office, putting herself back to sleep after Ava woke her in the night. Madelyn paid for her own food and helped her mother with the cooking and cleaning; the rest of her pay went into her PhD fund. Four years on, the balance remained depressingly small. Books helped her feel connected to the destiny she refused to forsake, feel that this was a hiatus and nothing more.

  Julia, amazingly, was in New York, getting small parts in off-Broadway shows, soaps, and local ads. At early morning low emotional tide, Madelyn wondered how it had come to pass that Julia was in New York and she was not; that was usually her cue to escape into another book.

  She finished the Book Review with her usual twinge of regret, then browsed the shelves until 3:00 and the end of Ava’s remarkable attention span. Madelyn sat down and they showed each other what they’d found, with Ava seeming particularly interested in a horror novel called The Shining that everyone was talking about.

  At the checkout desk, Charlie said, “How’d you like The Honourable Schoolboy?”

  The truth was that it was hard for her not to think of Cole when she read it. Cole had thought LeCarré “ponderous,” but even so, reading any kind of espionage fiction left her feeling that she had surreptitiously crossed Cole’s borders by dead of night. “Good,” she said to Charlie, with whom she did not share such intimacies. “Not as good as the last one. What do you have for me today?”

  “Two things,” he said.

  The first was a travel book called In Patagonia whose characters he promised she would love. She took it dubiously and said, “What’s number two?”

  “Wait here.”

  He lifted the counter and let himself out, then walked over to a table where a man sat reading a massive volume. Charlie said something in the man’s ear, and the man looked up and into Madelyn’s eyes.

  Her first reaction was purely hormonal. He was ridiculously good-looking: dark, slightly shaggy hair; dark, sparkly eyes; strong nose and full lips. He wore jeans, a pink polo shirt, a sport coat, and tennis shoes. He gave her the sort of easy, confident smile that she was a sucker for and walked over with his hand out. “Paul Kirk,” he said. “Thanks to Charlie, I feel like I already know you.” The voice was deep, soft, and melodious.

  “I’m Madelyn—no, I don’t need to say that, do I? Since Charlie has already briefed you?” She was unable to find the verbal facility she’d had only moments before. Briefed? Dear God, where had that come from? She struggled to remember what Charlie had told her about this person. He was a high-school friend, recently moved back to Dallas, she would like him.

  Paul had squatted down to look Ava in the eye. “And you’re Ava, right? Who’s already reading? That’s pretty amazing.”

  Ava responded by hiding behind Madelyn’s legs. “Say hello, Ava,” Madelyn prompted.

  “Hello, Ava,” she said. It was one of their oldest jokes and rarely failed to make her laugh. Today was one of the exceptions.

  Paul, however, laughed heartily. He straightened up and said, “I hear you read State of Revolution.”

  This was Robert Bolt’s new play, which had opened to mixed reviews in the UK. “Yes, Charlie managed to get me a copy of the script, though I don’t know how.”

  “It was through Paul, actually,” Charlie said.

  Paul shrugged. “I know some people in London. What did you think?”

  “Not to be unappreciative, but… it’s not quite A Man for All Seasons, is it? It was interesting, but it didn’t speak to me emotionally.”

  “I feel exactly the same way. The best hope for sympathy was Trotsky, who Bolt mostly left out of it.”

  “Some might even say that Trotsky was the best hope for the revolution,” Madelyn said, having heard those sentiments from her father throughout her childhood.

  “Exactly!” Paul said, genuinely excited. “And Stalin knew it, too.”

  “Easy, you two,” Charlie said. “This is a library. Big ideas are only permitted at a whisper.”

  “I know this is presum
ptuous,” Paul said, “but if memory serves, there’s a fountain at the drug store across the street. If the two of you happened to like ice cream and you would let me treat, I believe they allow conversation there.”

  For the briefest of moments, Madelyn wondered how much of the preceding dialog had been prearranged. She was not sure she cared. “Ice cream,” she said, “sounds lovely.”

  Madelyn had chocolate chip and Paul and Ava went for the Dutch chocolate. He seemed too good to be true; he kept Ava in the conversation, actively listened and responded to what Madelyn said, and showed minimal interest in talking about himself. After an hour she had only a few bare outlines of his story: He’d graduated from Berkeley in 1968, leaving the Bay area for the Peace Corps around the same time that she and Cole arrived in San Francisco. Something mysterious had happened by the time he got back to the States, and by 1973 he was getting an mba at the University of Chicago. He’d used that to get a job with ge Capital, who had just transferred him to Dallas.

  “I don’t understand,” Madelyn said. “How did you go from Berkeley radical to running dog capitalist?”

  “It’s not the about-face it looks like,” he said. “It’s way too complicated for a first date, and I don’t want Ava to fall asleep and end up with her face in her ice cream dish. Mostly it’s about using my energies to make substantive changes rather than wasting them trying to swim upstream against a flood tide.”

  “I didn’t realize this was a date,” Madelyn said.

  “Ha! Just as I intended. It’s too late to back out now, the deed is done.”

  Ava was quite convulsed by Paul’s adenoidal delivery, and as for Madelyn, she had to admit she was smitten.

  He was gentleman enough to not try to kiss her after walking her back to the library, though he did hold their handshake a trifle long. And he did talk her into giving up a page from her spiral notebook and writing her phone number on it. He drove off in an orange Karmann Ghia, halfway between a Beetle and sports car, and she stared after him, unable to look away.

  *

  For the first three weeks, Cole didn’t move his left arm at all. The only time he took it out of the sling was when he bathed—showers were too risky—and then he let the forearm rest against his chest. When the doctor finally let him do a few simple exercises, like raising and lowering his shoulder, or squeezing a tennis ball, the arm felt like it had no strength at all.

  All the one-handed techniques he’d learned when he was 16, from opening cans to driving a car to washing dishes, he had to learn with the opposite hand. Boots and lace-up shoes were out of the question. He wore T-shirts over the sling rather than try to thread his left arm through the sleeve, wore sweat pants with elastic waistbands rather than wrestle with jeans and belts.

  He had the occasional phone call with Alex, and he kept his monthly phone date with his mother, though he didn’t tell her about the fracture. Otherwise he saw no one he knew. He read and watched tv and listened to records, sleeping as much as 12 restless hours a day. Mostly he thought about Demerol.

  Alex, it turned out, had seen Madelyn. And he’d seen Cole’s daughter. Once he got Alex to confess that he was sometimes babysitting for her, Cole went silent, battered in succession by anger, betrayal, sadness, and guilt. Finally Cole said, “Tell me about her.”

  “She’s got blonde hair and green eyes. She’s smart and healthy and pretty happy.”

  “Pretty happy?”

  “Madelyn is wary of me, because of you. And you can see that Ava’s picked that up from her.”

  “Ava? That’s her name?”

  Alex hesitated. “Yes.”

  “I want to see her.”

  “No way. Madelyn’s going to be pissed if she finds out I let this much slip.”

  “Goddammit, Alex, she’s my daughter.”

  “Will you use your fucking brain for once? Right now you’ve got a situation where somebody who is on your side is getting to see her and maybe put in a good word for you once in a while. If you fuck that up, you’ll have nothing at all, not even second-hand reports, and you won’t see her until she’s eighteen. If then.”

  He’d been thinking lately that he was doing well enough that he could send Madelyn some money. His collarbone had shelved that, but maybe, once he was back with the band…

  “Listen,” Alex said, “I know how you feel. But I gave Madelyn my word and I’m not breaking it.”

  “Yeah,” Cole said. “Okay.”

  After the first Percocet prescription, which Cole had sailed through in three days, the doctor had cut him off. To prove he still had discipline, Cole wouldn’t let himself have his first beer until noon. Once he started, though, he drank all day, and switched to Jack Daniel’s at night.

  Throughout September he wore the sling less and less, and by the end of the month he took it off for good. The problem now was the atrophy of his muscles. The first time he tried to play guitar he could barely form a chord. He wondered if he had it in him to learn to play for the third time.

  Apparently he did. What else was there to do? By the second week in October he had his calluses back and was playing most of the day.

  Valentina hadn’t called to check on him. The band, now known as Valentina and Los Cuervos, showed up regularly on klbj in ads for gigs at Aqua Fest, at the Armadillo, at a new club on Sixth Street called Steamboat. Cole couldn’t help but note that the background music for the ads featured him on guitar.

  It was past time for him to take his job back. He didn’t understand why it was so hard for him to pick up the phone. She’d said, “whenever you’re ready.” Day after day, by the time he’d worked up the courage, he was too drunk to make the call.

  His life had devolved to the point of making deals with himself, so in the end he made another. No booze tomorrow until you get it over with.

  He woke up at ten. At ten-thirty he dragged himself out of bed and got dressed. He had two bowls of Sugar Frosted Flakes and a big glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee. Then he sat on the couch and stared at the phone, where it sat in easy reach.

  He started to sweat.

  This is ridiculous, he thought. He picked up the handset and dialed Valentina’s number. As it rang, he thought, maybe they’re on the road. Maybe—

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Cole. I’m ready.”

  “That means you can drive?”

  “I’m all healed up. I’m a hundred percent.”

  “Come on over and let’s talk.”

  “Should I bring my guitar?”

  “Just talk.”

  He wondered if he should have a beer first. The arbiter of deals in his head said no, that way lay a second beer and a third and a failure to show.

  Valentina answered the door and pointed him toward the living room. Linda was there, avoiding eye contact. Valentina didn’t sit down, so neither did Cole.

  “I felt like I should say this in person,” Valentina said. “There’s no point in dragging it out. It was decided that we should keep Gilda on guitar and let you go.”

  Though he had halfway expected it, Cole felt gut-punched. “Nice use of passive voice,” he said. “It’s almost like it wasn’t your decision at all.”

  “She stuck up for you at Warners,” Linda said. “She said you had the original vision for the band, that we needed your vocals. But Ted said he liked the new direction and we should go with it.”

  “New direction?”

  Valentina looked embarrassed by Linda’s testimonial. “We’re, uh, transitioning away from the Mexican stuff, going for a heavier sound.”

  “Like Led Zeppelin.”

  “That’s right. We’re dropping the Cuervos crap, it’s going to be just ‘Valentina.’ Ted thinks the time has come for an all-girl band that writes their own stuff and plays their own instruments.”

  “Ted?”

  “Our new producer.”

  “Where does that leave Luke?”

  “He quit when we… when the decision was made to let you go.”r />
  “He said,” Linda broke in, “he wasn’t interested anymore if you weren’t going to be in the band.”

  Cole’s eyes stung. “Well.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “One more thing,” Valentina said. “I made Warner’s come up with some bread. Like, severance pay. It’s only a thousand bucks, but it’s something.” She held out an envelope.

  In truth, he needed the money. The civil suit against Zeppelin was dragging on and on, with lawyers eating up any potential settlement money in endless maneuvering. Cole had medical bills and, now, no job.

  Yet he could not bring himself to walk over to Valentina and take the money out of her hand. He saw in her face that she understood. He walked out of the house and got in his car.

  He gripped the wheel and nearly went back in the house to ask for the money. You fucking idiot, he thought. What are you going to do now?

  The answer to that, at least, was simple. He was going to go home and have a beer, and then another.

  *

  The phone was ringing as he unlocked his apartment door.

  “Cole? Bill Graham.”

  “Bill. How are you?”

  “At the moment I am pissed off. The Zeppelin guys pleaded no contest and walked away with suspended sentences. Fucking Oakland, man. Any other city in the US, what they did to Jim would be felony assault. In Oakland it’s a fucking misdemeanor. Like throwing a gum wrapper on the sidewalk.”

  Cole made a noncommittal noise.

  “It sucks, but there’s nothing we can do about it,” Graham said. “There’s still the lawsuit, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Hey, I saw in Billboard that Ted Templeman is going to produce you guys. That could be very big for you.”

  So that, Cole thought, was the Ted they’d been talking about. He’d made a fortune for the Doobie Brothers and would doubtless serve Valentina well. Cole didn’t have the heart to tell Graham that he was no longer in the band. “We can only hope,” he said.

  “All right,” Graham said. “You hang in there.” And then he was gone.