by Alon Preiss
Blake cocked his head to one side. He didn’t seem to believe this, but he was thinking it over.
“Well, I like to hobnob with the literary set,” he said finally.
“Like Eden!” she said. “You finally met Eden. Isn’t she gorgeous? Isn’t she a living doll?”
Alice could tell that Blake was carefully ignoring the question, and she took that as an affirmative response. “What was she saying, about sinking out of the literary world?” he asked. “I didn’t understand.”
Alice smiled, and she began to explain. “It’s quite a sad story, Blake, but I think Eden will pull through.” Eden had written three hundred pages of a mythology-laden, allegedly biographical family epic which she proposed to expand for hundreds of pages more. She had cribbed the mythology — including a story about a talking monkey, one of the major characters in her opus — from a class she’d taken in college. Her own family had lived a rather uneventful life, persisting in minor luxury in southern China for a few centuries, then getting out of the country to England with most of their belongings well before the revolution, so she’d had to swipe a lot of the historical horrors from various college classes as well. She’d never really meant to publish; she was just having a little fun in a creative writing class. But without her knowledge or consent, her boyfriend sent her rough draft to Knopf, where it was scooped out of the slush pile by an ambitious editorial assistant and ultimately acquired by Lance Bartels, a prestigious senior editor, who paid Eden what at the time, and in The New York Times’ publishing column, was viewed as a remarkably generous sum for an unfinished book by a first-time novelist. Bartels died a few months later, and the house reassigned Eden’s project to a new editor, whose loyalty and devotion Eden questioned. Eden also worried about whether upon publication she would be condemned as a fraud by those Chinese who had really suffered, by those who knew the language, and by those with real Chinese accents. She thought about using her Chinese name as a pseudonym of sorts — “Eden” was just the English-language equivalent — but such an idea didn’t seem true to herself, because she couldn’t even really pronounce her Chinese name, not with all the tones. She had also failed to console herself with the thought that, because she spoke with an English accent, she was often mistaken for a Hong Konger. Burdened by these worries, her work had ground to a near halt since her story had stopped belonging only to her. To make extra money, she sometimes wrote poppy little commentaries about her generation and her ethnicity, and she interviewed rock stars for a music magazine. Alice suddenly wondered what the world would be like, three hundred years from now, if Eden never finished her book. Would those three hundred pages take on a sort of mythic grandeur, the great unfinished novel? Was such a thing possible? Or would Eden be forgotten completely, the breathless newspaper articles that had accompanied her lucrative signing just an obscure curiosity? The possibility, Alice thought, was intolerably sad.
“Eden becomes blocked over anything,” Alice said. “She can’t just a skip a scene. And, meanwhile, years roll by. Right now, she’s reached a scene in which one of her male main characters masturbates. She’s completely at a loss, because she’s never seen a man do that. She asked her boyfriend, but he wouldn’t play with himself in front of her.”
“More than I need to know, I guess.” But the story seemed to amuse him.
“I wouldn’t have told you,” she said, “except that I’m completely owled. Eden would kill me if she knew. But it’s research, that’s all. She wants to do something real, and beautiful and poetic and shocking, and she can’t continue her book until she pins this down.”
“How will she make that beautiful?” Maurow asked.
“Well,” Alice said, “that’s the thing, isn’t it? I mean, you guys are all basically disgusting. Like monkeys in the zoo. But in the right hands, anything can be beautiful.” She laughed with drunken surprise. “That was a joke, almost, wasn’t it? ‘In the right hands....’ ” She laughed again. “Hey, Maurow, if I needed it, would you help me with my research?” She was teasing him, and she knew he wouldn’t answer. She moved over closer to him. “Do boys your age still mess around with themselves?”
“You’re bombed, dear.”
“Is that an answer? I guess you’re not going to answer the question.” She put an arm around him, pulled him in closer, and kissed him hard on the mouth, and even from deep within her drunken haze, she worried that it was a big and sloppy kiss, but she enjoyed it, and she hoped that Blake would enjoy the fact that she was enjoying it. She grabbed his hand, placed it on her inner thigh and, in her head, imagined that he had done it himself, and she didn’t stop kissing him and hugging him, and she pushed his hand farther and farther up her leg until it was just almost there, and the cab careened through that rainy night, their intertwined bodies lurching back and forth, bouncing around in the back seat.
They staggered together into the front parlor. A bottle of champagne sat in an ice bucket. A bouquet of roses lay neatly on the table. “For you,” Maurow said. “I chose the roses myself, Alice. And I picked out the champagne.”
Beaming, Alice threw her arms around him, tugged on the hair at the back of his head, pressed her lips against his. Blake tripped backwards, thudding against the opposite wall. She ran her hands down his back and grabbed his ass in a tight squeeze. “Be spontaneous, Darling!” she implored him, almost desperately. Out of control drunk not just from booze but from happiness and joy and a gratifying and passing egomania that was exploding inside her skull, she wanted Maurow to hold the real Alice, not the Alice who always worried and wondered what Maurow was thinking and who’d tried for years to fit solidly and snugly within his world, but the Alice who was adventurous and confident and unpredictable, and just a little bit annoying, and still young, as young as she knew Maurow was too, somewhere down there underneath all his oldness. He was a great Shakespearean actor who’d been playing Hamlet for forty years, and she wanted him to forget all his old stage directions. “Be impulsive!” she demanded, through clenched teeth.
“We’re doing it on the floor tonight,” Alice said brightly, in the same tone that one might use to announce (in a movie or an old play or a book with yellowed pages): We’re having tea on the veranda this evening. Somewhat too automatically, he started to take off his jacket, but she shook her head, reached up and pulled his jacket back over him. “No,” she said. “Leave all your clothes on. Mess up that nice suit. Go crazy, Maurow!” She pushed him away against the wall, stepped back, and she started unbuttoning.
A jazz tune spinning in the CD player. Alice, naked and lost in a drunken dance, reached her fingertips up toward the ceiling and swayed her hips back and forth; trying to be sexy. Her eyes were shut, a woozy smile spreading across her face. The last rays of sunlight spilled over her bare torso and across the wall. “Let yourself go, Captain Wombat,” she whispered.
Alice pulled a stumbling Maurow down to the floor with her, his tie slipped out of his jacket, and it tickled Alice between her breasts. She thought that she could forcibly spread her energy to Maurow, and she half-believed that her enthusiasm would change him; change his face, change his mouth, change that look in his eyes; for a half hour or an hour or an entire frenzied night of passion, she thought she could find within him some pleasing new person, the Blake Maurow who’d always been just a whisper in the shadows, at once an entirely different man and the same old guy she knew and loved and wanted to know and love even more and even better. She flipped over, pushed him to the floor, tugged on his ears, and, whispering something almost angrily ardent, crushed his head between her thighs. His nose filled with hair, and Alice could feel a tiny tickle of air at her crotch, Blake holding back a sneeze.
Alice rolled over onto him, one knee on either side of him, straddling him at the waist. Blake touched white skin which seemed to glow, brushed his fingers through her black hair, invisible in the darkness, Alice writhing drunkenly up and down in the darkness. Alice read a million emotions in her husband’s eyes and on his lips
— he was powerless, happy, frightened, disoriented, excited, relaxed, and drugged by whatever-it-was that shoots into a man’s brain at such times. She saw her own face in the mirror across the room, and for a moment she didn’t recognize herself. She smiled.
When the alarm went off the next morning, Alice woke up briefly and she whispered good morning to him. Maurow huddled closely against her, his skin warm; he smiled with quiet surprise and a confusion that he didn’t seem to mind.
Eden after the party, very drunk, in bed, her eyes staring at the spot where the TV had once been. She remembered waking up, as she had a few weeks ago, to find Roger asleep beside her, the television blaring white noise, a lit cigarette hanging between his fingers. She imagined what would have happened if she had not woken up, if the cigarette had dropped quietly onto the sheets and she and Roger had died in the fire, their skeletons wrapped together like Esmeralda and Quasimodo at the end of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The book, that is; not any of the movies. She stared at the moon through the window, shut her eyes and let the darkness wash over her, felt herself sink into it.
On her stereo, a gently discordant cassette recording of a symphony by an 18th century Finnish composer, a man drummed out of the civil service for some never-proven offense, who had quietly written some sweetly hopeful music at the very end of his life before dying in the cold water of a lake across the woods from the secluded and nearly empty house in which he had lived alone for his entire adult life. In 1954, an obscure Scottish orchestra had announced plans to rehabilitate the composer’s name through a series of concerts that would, they hoped, lead to a recording contract. Ninety percent of the way through the second concert, on February 14, 1955, the violin soloist had collapsed, later dying in the hospital. It was a black market tape of the first concert to which Eden was listening, the one that ended with cheers and a standing ovation and oceans of hope. She also owned the second night’s concert, but she could not listen to it as she tried to sleep.
As the energy of the concert pumped through her apartment, with the day’s sounds and lights swirling across the back of her eyelids, and her hands warming on her stomach, she imagined, without trying to imagine, that she was Alice, lying in Alice’s big bed, feeling Alice’s sheets against her skin, looking out at Alice’s view. She imagined that, in a moment, she would feel the touch of Blake Maurow’s hands. Then she fell asleep.
Alice woke late, at around noon. Blake had left hours before. She remembered the previous evening the way she might have thought of a scene she had just written — carefully constructed, yet sent from somewhere else, from someplace outside of her. She was covered with sweat, and she felt sticky, as though coated head to foot in sex.
She drank an entire pot of coffee. Three or four cups. Her head was throbbing, veins bulging out of her skull. The sunlight blinded her, and she shut the shades.
She put on a pair of dark sunglasses and sat on the terrace for a few hours, listening to Schubert on CD, which drifted out into the sunlight, mixing with the wind in the trees and the squawks and squeals of the ugly-tempered city birds.
The phone rang, and Alice answered, hoping that it would be her husband, calling to whisper sweet sexual nothings into her ear and to reminisce fondly and comically about the passion of the night before and to admit that, sure, he’d enjoyed it.
Instead, it was Alice’s freaky sister, whom she had recently neglected. Her sister sounded surprisingly lucid. They had a nice chat, and Alice eventually hung up the phone feeling a certain cautious hopefulness well up inside of her.
When she turned on her computer, her e-mail blinked, and she saw that she had a message from [email protected], whom she did not recognize. Clicking into the message, she discovered it was from Mark. He explained that he had only recently found out about the Internet, and, subsequently learning that she was on-line, he thought he’d check in. This is what he wrote:
Wrk still gg well. Rumord prmotion maybe. Someone brk into my car last nt, trd to steal my radio. Sylvai tk up metal sculpture. Bt new eqpment. Blowtorch, soldering stuff. Looking forward to her work. Bt your last novel — on sale remaindr at Brns & Nbl. Look forward to reading. Hrd it’s good. Lkd fr yr nu 1. Cnt find. Well, bye. Mark
She wondered why he had zapped her, but she was happy to see that in his haste he’d spelled Sylvia’s name wrong. She wrote back that it was nice to hear from him, she hoped he’d enjoy her book, her new one would be in stores next week, good luck in the job, and she would like to see one of Sylvia’s sculptures someday. Mark did not begin his e-mail to her with “Dear”, only with her name, and then a dash, and so that was the way she replied to her old lover. Because Mark included no closing sentiment in his e-mail, she also did not, and her message ended abruptly. She pressed the “Enter” key on her computer, and her pointless little e-mail message flew out into space.
Across town, Eden was having a dream that was both embarrassing and wonderful, and then the phone rang and woke her up. She heard a voice, low and hushed and embarrassed, and also absolutely gentle, and painfully fragile.
“Did I wake you?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Sort of.” She stretched out in bed. She couldn’t remember who this was. She thought that it was Blake Maurow, and that she’d been expecting him to call her. Then she flushed, embarrassed at the idea. She realized that she must have been dreaming of Blake Maurow. “Why would I do that?” she asked herself, expecting only to think it.
“Why would you do what?”
“Nothing,” Eden yawned.
“You sound nice when you’re sleepy,” the voice said.
Then she guessed who it was. Her rock star. She smiled.
“What do you mean, ‘nice?’ ” she asked.
“Nice to listen to,” he said.
“This is Derek, right?” she asked.
“Yeah. Is this pissing off Roger?” he asked.
“Roger’s still asleep,” she said, glancing over at the empty spot where Roger had not slept for what now seemed a very long time. “When you call, he gets crazy jealous, you know.”
“I didn’t know,” Derek said, his voice still very hushed.
“Are you whispering so you won’t wake Roger?” Eden asked.
“No,” he said. “This is just how I talk in the morning. Why is Roger jealous of me?”
“It’s because you’ve done something, and he’s done nothing. He thinks you’re a rock star. That’s what he calls you. The ‘rock star.’ ”
“Has he heard the song?”
“Your hit song?”
“Yeah.”
“Of course he has, Derek.”
“Hmm.”
“Everyone’s heard it.”
“Oh boy. Come on, Eden.”
“Are you smiling?”
“Yes, I’m smiling. I’m flattered. I’m not really a rock star.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I wasn’t even in the video. I had nothing to do with producing. She hadn’t spoken with me for months before she recorded it. It wasn’t really my song anymore.” He sighed. “Anyway, they don’t really play that song on the radio anymore.”
“Sure they do. Whenever Roger hears it, he goes crazy. He changes the station.”
She didn’t know why she was flattering him. It made her feel good to make him so happy.
“How about that,” Derek said. “Hey, where are you right now, Eden? Right now, as you’re talking to me.”
“Where do you think, Derek?”
“Do you want me to guess?” he asked.
“Okay. Guess. See if you can guess.”
“Are you in bed?”
“Yeah,” Eden said.
“Boy,” Derek said, laughing.
“You woke me up,” she said agreeably. “Bed is where I usually sleep.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That makes sense. So you’re lying in bed, talking to me. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Yeah, sure. You called me up while I was sleeping, and I answered the
phone.” With a little laugh, she added, “Do you find that erotic?”
“I guess, a little.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. And what are you wearing, Eden?”
She laughed. He was teasing her, and for some reason, she was having fun. She didn’t answer.
“If you don’t tell me,” he said, “I’ll just fill in the blanks. I’ll make up my own answer.”
“I should never answer the phone when I’m half-asleep,” Eden said. “I’ll remember this like a dream.”
“Are you going to answer the question?”
She slowly pushed aside the sheet, which slipped over her bare skin and dropped quietly to the floor. She stretched out her left leg, bent one knee. She extended her arms above her head.
“Hello?” he said. “Eden?”
“Okay,” she said. “I’m naked, Derek.”
“Really?” he said, barely changing his gentle, low-key tone. “Or are you kidding?”
“Not kidding. Really.”
“Huh.”
“It was a hot night. Haven’t installed my air conditioner.”
“Boy,” Derek said. “Boy oh boy. Whaddaya know.”
Eden yawned, stretched again.
“Are you going to come visit me?” he asked.
“In Los Angeles?” she said.
“Yeah. Come visit me. Slip away, fly out here. Tell Roger you’re going on business. I’ll send you tickets tomorrow.”
Eden lowered her voice.
“He’s waking up,” she said quickly. “Gotta go. Goodbye ... Mother.” For Derek’s sake, pretending to pretend to hide him from Roger. She wondered why she needed to do that.