The Trouble with Eden

  He had proceeded as far as the index cards and had filled out a series about his lead character before he came to his senses and burned cards and chart in the fireplace. He also burned the book that had involved him in this idiocy, and other books of its ilk, and all the false starts he had thus far made on his second novel. Then he wrote the book as he had written One If by Land, by the simple method of putting the chair in front of the typewriter and his ass on the chair and going ahead and doing it.

  He still didn’t know how he did it. From time to time he tried outlines, only to discard them as overly rigid once the book took on life of its own. All he knew now was that there was a magic that had to happen. The characters had to become real, had to speak their own lines to him so that he could put those lines on the paper.

  The magic was not always there. His best books had parts that lacked it. His worst ones—the ones he liked least, which was no criterion of their critical or popular reception—always had parts that worked perfectly. Sometimes he thought the whole thing was illusory. There was no magic. You got the words down and part was good and part was bad and it didn’t matter what you did or how you did it.

  For seventeen days he wrote every day. That was not uncommon for him at the beginning of a book; he dreaded breaking for a day for fear of losing the handle. In those seventeen days he wrote one hundred and eighteen pages. His novels normally ran close to eight hundred pages, sometimes longer. Cutting reduced this length by as much as a third in some cases, but several of them had been published virtually as written.

  On the eighteenth day he sat at the desk and typed “119,” at the top of a page. For two hours he sat without typing anything further. It was time for a break, time to take a week or more off, and he had known it from the moment he had finished the previous day’s writing. He fought it because he could not begin a book without a fierce urge to see it finished, but he knew better than to fight it any longer. He was drained for the time being. He could not write what he could not imagine, and his imagination was out to lunch. He dropped page 119 in the wastebasket and covered his typewriter. It had not been covered once since he began the book.

  He drove to Trenton, caught an express train to New York. He lunched with his agent, Mary Fradin, an intense woman who chainsmoked and consumed endless cups of strong black coffee. She had represented him far the past dozen years, inheriting him from Jerry Geller, who had retired to Florida and died within two months, presumably of boredom. On their first meeting after Geller’s retirement, she took him to Orsini’s and Downey’s, and he took her to the Algonquin and to bed. All night long conversation had been a trial, and little about her had appealed to him personally or professionally. He made a pass at her less out of desire than with the thought that she might recoil violently, providing him an excuse to find another agent. She surprised him twice, first by going to his room, then by revealing a talent and enthusiasm beyond his fondest dreams.

  After the first time he lay back exhausted, too spent even to laugh at his own astonishment. She said, “Ready to sleep?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s what you think. You look better naked than I thought. A little pudgy, though. You should get more exercise out there in God’s country. Chop some wood, do you good, just like the song.”

  “Song?”

  “Never mind. Let me know if you don’t like any of this.”

  “Any of what?”

  “Shhhh.”

  She began to kiss and lick various parts of his body. For the most part these consisted of areas he had never considered erogenous zones, and for the most part he found out he’d been wrong. At the end he raised his head to watch her mouth working greedily on him. The expression on her face was the most erotic thing he had ever seen. And then at the very end he had to put his head down and close his eyes because the pleasure was too intense to be borne.

  “When you come good,” she said, “you like to make noise, don’t you?”

  “Jesus.”

  “And you thought you were ready to go to sleep. Now you can sleep.”

  He sat up. “I’m not sure I can now.”

  “Of course you can.” She was off the bed and dressing. “God, don’t tell me I shocked you. You should have figured. Cigarettes and coffee all day long. Very oral. Read your Uncle Sigmund. Something you should know, I don’t sleep with clients.”

  “That’s why you’re going home now?”

  “Correction, I don’t fuck clients. But you were obviously ready to look for someone else anyway, and I had the feeling we’d be good together.”

  “So?”

  “So don’t think you have to stay with me so we can do this again. Because if you do stay with me, it means we won’t do this again. Although I have the feeling we wouldn’t anyway. I don’t think you’ll want to.”

  “I want to right this minute, and I haven’t—”

  “Yes, right this minute, but you also have a wife and you’re not looking to get involved with anybody. You won’t pass up a quick jump but you don’t want an affair. Neither do I, as far as that goes. So don’t stay a client thinking we’ll do this on alternate Thursdays, because we won’t. At all. And for that matter don’t find a new agent because you think I’ll unzip your pants every time you walk into the office.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Why should you what?”

  “Stay a client.”

  “In twenty-five words or less? And without the bullshit? Because you were evidently satisfied with Jerry, and I’m twice as sharp as Jerry and a lot more honest. No, he never cheated you, but there were things he did that you never knew about. I’m not going to tell you what. I can get you as good terms as anyone and I’ll never give you any shit. And I’ll leave you alone. Jerry used to call you just to talk and I know you didn’t like it. He was your agent and I already know more about you than he ever did.”

  “I never went to bed with Jerry. Anyway, that’s more than twenty-five words.”

  “I don’t get paid by the word. Think it over.”

  “I already did.”

  “And?”

  “Come to bed one more time and I’m your client far life.”

  She looked at him. Then she said, “Well, I’ve done a lot crazier things,” and took off her clothes again. “I feel a little like a hooker, but that’s not the world’s worst feeling. What do you want to do?”

  “What we just did.”

  “You mean what I just did. I ought to be able to get on the Sullivan show with this. Don’t get used to it, Hugh, this is the last time for us.”

  “Then make it a good one.”

  She did, and it was the last time for them. She was, as far as he could tell, as good an agent as Jerry Geller had been. He stayed away from New York as much as possible, paid minimal attention to contracts and options, but over the years he had learned to trust her. It was possible that Jerry had been cheating him, and it was equally possible that she was cheating him, but there was that possibility with any agent. He trusted her.

  Once, during the turmoil after the divorce, he had tried to get her to bed. She sidestepped neatly. “You don’t want me,” she told him. “You really don’t. I’m flattered, sweets, but I’m not what you want right now. But there’s a friend of mine you’ll love, and she’ll love you. Wait here while I make a phone call.”

  “I couldn’t go through the getting-to-know-you number right now, Mary.”

  “You won’t have to. I have senses about people. ESP. The two of you are going to take a look at each other and jump into bed. Just like that.”

  She sent him to an apartment on East Fifty-fourth Street where a Eurasian girl met him at the door. He spent the next three days and nights in her bed. It was three months later that he found out the Eurasian girl was a hooker and Mary Fradin had picked up the tab. From then on there wasn’t a thing she could do wrong.

  After lunch he walked her back to her office, then took a cab to his publishers. His editor showed him some rough flap c
opy and asked polite questions about the new book. Hugh gave him polite answers in return. His editor was under thirty and wore mod clothes, and could get excited talking about books by New Left activists and aspiring black writers until he remembered Hugh wasn’t interested in them any more than he was interested in Hugh. He left as quickly as he could and checked in at the Algonquin. Then he called a number he had called in the past and gave his name and the hotel and room number and said he could take immediate delivery of fifty cases of hairpins.

  He had just enough time to shower before the girl arrived. Half an hour later he gave her fifty dollars, and she left. He called downstairs for a bottle of Grant’s and some ice and soda. He drank and watched television for four hours, then called the same number again with the same request.

  The woman on the other end of the line read it back in a finishing school accent, then stopped abruptly. “Wait a minute, was something the matter with Trina?”

  “That was hours ago,” he said.

  “You just get off a ship?”

  “A nuclear submarine. Three years under the ocean.”

  “I guess.”

  In fifteen minutes a second girl arrived. He thought at first that she looked something like Trina, then realized that he had forgotten what Trina looked like. In any case she was attractive enough to fill his needs, as Trina had been. She was less hurried than Trina, accepted a drink, and made a certain amount of conversation in and out of bed. It was almost an hour after her arrival when she took her fifty dollars and left.

  He tried to get to sleep but couldn’t. He was drunk but not drunk enough for sleep and he did not want to drink any more. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at himself in the mirror on the closet door. He wasn’t crazy about what he saw.

  He had noticed at lunch that Mary Fradin had gray in her hair. Well, he was getting gray in his beard lately. They were none of them getting younger. His editor talked reverently about One If by Land, whether he had really read it or not. His editor had been born in 1942 and had been three years old when the war ended, the war that One If by Land was about. Worse, his editor gave the impression of knowing nothing about anything that had taken place before his own brief lifetime; as if anything much more ancient than yesterday was unimportant.

  He smoked cigarettes and made another drink withbut wanting it. He had had a number of affairs since the divorce, but only two of them had been of any substance. Twice he had lived with women, once for three months, once for almost a year. Twice they had moved into the old stone house, and each time their entrance and ultimate exit was tactfully unremarked by Mrs. Kleinschmidt. Tongues might wag all they wanted, evidently, chust so they did not wag about her.

  In each instance he had seen marriage as an eventual outcome, though both times he had wanted to be very sure before letting it go that far. And in each instance the relationship had run its course and then broken down. No hard feelings, no regrets or bitterness on either side. Smiles at parting. Cards at Christmas. He had even slept again with one of the two women a year and a half after they separated. It was nothing important at the time and convinced him it had been nothing important before.

  He reached for the phone and found himself starting to dial the same number a third time. The act had been involuntary and scared him. He cradled the phone and forced himself to lie down. He did not want another whore. He had not wanted the first two, much as he had seemed to need them. He wanted a woman.

  He wanted Anita. He had always wanted her and always would, and of course he knew it. But that was one of a great many things he tried not to think about.

  He woke up in the morning. When he ordered breakfast he also asked them to send up a tin of aspirin and a double Bloody Mary. He went back to Trenton on the Metroliner and his headache was gone by the time he boarded the train.

  He spent the next few days as he spent most nonworking days. He drove into New Hope one day and Doylestown another, wandering the streets, looking in store windows, talking to friends and strangers. He drank coffee in his kitchen and half listened to Mrs. Kleinschmidt’s endless stories about various friends and relatives. He could not keep the people straight in her stories and did not try to, as there was no point. Her stories all lacked a time element; she would tell him an anecdote as if it had happened yesterday, and he would later learn it had taken place fifty years ago, and that the daring young people in the story were now sitting on porches while their arteries hardened. Most of her stories concerned people long dead, some of them local characters who had died in her childhood, but her reminiscences all had the flavor of current gossip. Years ago he had learned to let her conversation wash over him, neither listening nor not listening to it. It was astonishing how much of what she said, not consciously noted at the time, would later find its way into one of his books. On more than a few occasions he had realized after the fact that a bit of plot material or a scrap of background he had thought he was inventing had in fact derived from something the old woman had said.

  In the morning after breakfast or in the evening when the sky was still bright he would walk over his property. Eighteen years ago his land had been a farm, neglected for a time but still identifiable as such. The back land was clear pasture to within less than a hundred yards of the creek, where the woods began. With surprising speed the woods had moved up toward the garden behind the house. In ten years’ time the whole meadow had become a young forest of red cedar. Now the cedar forest was rapidly evolving into a hardwood forest; oak and maple seedlings shot up above the short-lived cedars, and as they matured and shaded the cedars they would take over completely. There were deer in the woods, and in season there were hunters who would not be deterred by the signs he posted every autumn. There were also foxes and rabbits and pheasants, and muskrats lived in the creek bed. Now the grackles were nesting, and nine out of ten of the cedars had nests in their branches. He walked through his woods and felt the special pleasure he had felt so many times before and knew as he had always known that he could not sell this land.

  It did not belong to him nearly so much as he belonged to it. For the first two years he had tried to maintain it himself, mowing and planting and pruning with furious energy. He would put in farmer’s hours at these tasks, but when a book took hold, he could put in no time at all. When he wrote he could think of nothing but the book on which he was working and would go weeks without walking over his land, let alone working on it. A garden could not be thus neglected, and eventually he had hired gardeners. They had been busy this spring, and he walked through the beds of flowers and shrubbery and noted the changes. The towering Kieffer pear was in bloom at the kitchen door. Late daffodils vied with the earliest tulips. Most of those flowers were bulbs he had planted. In eighteen years there had not been an autumn when he had not put at least a few bulbs into the ground.

  On one afternoon almost a week after his trip to New York he returned from a walk in the woods just as a car pulled into the driveway. One of the rear doors opened and a girl emerged carrying a suitcase. The driver rounded the circular driveway and headed back toward town and the girl approached the house. She was on the doorstep before he recognized his daughter.

  He was at the side of the house as this happened, and he hurried forward and called to her. She turned to him still holding the suitcase, and her face broke out in a smile that made his chest ache. They met in front of the living room window and embraced.

  He said, “Did you write? I never got your letter. You should have called.”

  “I thought I’d surprise you.”

  “I’ve never had a better surprise. You cut your hair.”

  “I got tired of it.”

  “Let me see. Well, it was lovely long, but I can understand why you got bored with it.”

  “I mean, everybody had long hair.”

  “I know.” He stepped back and looked at her. “You know, when you got out of the car I didn’t recognize you. I wondered who was the beautiful girl and what she was doing here. You grow mo
re beautiful every time I see you.”

  “You just think so because I look like you.”

  “That’s what they tell me, but it looks better on you. How long are you staying?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is I’m here.”

  “Well, I’ll settle for that. How did you get here?”

  “Oh, wow. I was in New York and I took a bus to Flemington and hitched a ride to Lambertville and walked across the bridge and looked around for someone I knew to give me a ride, and I didn’t see anyone I knew. That’s weird, growing up in a town and all of a sudden there’s nobody around that you know.”

  “You still know a lot of people here. Last summer—”

  “Well, they weren’t around today. I took a cab.”

  “It’s a shame you took a cab. You should have called me, but I guess that would have blunted the surprise. What were you doing in New York?”

  “Let’s go inside, okay? I want to sit down in your chair and put my feet up. I hope you still have that chair.”

  “Of course I do.”

  He carried her suitcase. They went into the living room where she sat in his reclining chair. He called in Mrs. Kleinschmidt and the woman made just the right amount of fuss over the girl before retiring to the kitchen. He made himself a drink and was sitting down himself before he thought to ask Karen if she wanted one.

  “I don’t—actually I think I will. If it’s all right.”

  “Of course it’s all right. What would you like?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t drink much.”

  “Well, this is an occasion. Scotch and water?”

  “Just scotch.”

  “Ice?”

  “Just plain.”

  He poured two fingers of scotch in a glass and took it to her. He went to get his own glass for a toast but before he could turn around she had tossed off her drink and was grimacing.

  “You don’t have to drink it like that,” he said mildly.

  “I just wanted to—I don’t know.”