The Trouble with Eden

  “The thing is, the money doesn’t really matter.”

  “It matters to Tony.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me.”

  “Ah. Then give the extra fifteen a week to a charity of your choice. But Tony’s a bad charity. If you work for fifty, you’re personally donating fifteen dollars a week to Anton Bartholomew, and that cocksucker’s no hardship case. Truth?”

  “Truth.”

  “Piss it away on something. Put it toward a Ferrari. Buy Gretch some new pills and a monogrammed needle. I’m sorry, I hit a sore spot, didn’t I?”

  “Kind of.”

  “I’m sorry, Peterkin.”

  “You couldn’t know.”

  “She’s been bad lately, then.”

  ‘‘You could call it that.”

  “Well, reverse the tape and wipe out that line. And profit by my example and avoid developing a reputation for cutting wit. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. Incidentally, we are not walking toward Sully’s.”

  “I know.”

  “Does your knowledge also include our destination?”

  “I left the kid at the Raparound.”

  “I see. Again, forgive me.”

  “Let it go, Warren.”

  “I think I’ll pass on this domestic scene. I’d like to talk with you about it sometime, or rap, as the kiddies say. But not now. Will you come over to Sully’s later and let me buy you that drink?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Oh, come on. You already know whether you will or not. Clue me in and I’ll make plans accordingly.”

  “Well, putting it that way, I had decided not to. But I’ll change my mind. I’ll be over in, I don’t know, half an hour?”

  “I’ll keep a seat warm.”

  Danny had closed the grill at the Raparound. A handful of theatergoers were sitting over coffee. Peter sat down at a table and Anne took a tray of dirty dishes back to the kitchen, then joined him.

  She said, “I took her home. I had her all tucked in on the couch and she started saying she wanted her mommy, so I cut out and took her home.”

  “How was everything?”

  “Gretchen seemed all right. I mean she didn’t throw anything at me. She seemed, I don’t know, in control?”

  “That’s good. What do I owe you?”

  “Just a minute, I have the check here. Here it is. Oh, wow.”

  “How much?”

  “Well, it comes to $4.77.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s including the tax.”

  “Anne, find the right check.”

  “Fifty cents for a large orange juice, a dollar and a half for a bacon burger, a dollar for french toast, and fifty cents each for three glasses of milk.”

  “She drank three glasses of milk?”

  “She was starving, Peter.”

  “Yeah, I can dig it, but you’re charging a three-year-old kid a dollar and a half for less than a quart of milk? That’s beautiful.”

  “Well, this is no place for a meal, Peter. What am I supposed to do?”

  He nodded. “I know. It’s okay, it really is. It’s just that the numbers threw me for a minute.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Okay to give it to you tomorrow?”

  “Well, you’ll have to give it to me. I mean personally, because I’ll cover the check out of my own pocket. You know Danny and credit.”

  “Uh-huh. Same as I know Danny and fair prices.”

  “It’s for the tourists. You know that. It’s to sit over a cup of coffee for three hours or it’s for the tourists.”

  “Sure. New Hope’s a nice place to live but I’d hate to visit here.”

  “Oh, it’s not even a nice place to live, Peter.”

  “I’ll pay you tomorrow.”

  “I kind of hope you do.”

  “I will, Anne. And thanks.”

  “You don’t have to thank me.”

  “That’s the point.”

  THREE

  Sully Jaeger leaned on the bar and looked over the house. The crowd was a little better than usual for a week-night in April. Sully’s restaurant business, like virtually every other retail business in New Hope, was very much a seasonal operation. The fat summer months yielded enough of a profit to cover the rest of the year. But Sully’s place, unlike some others, came out ahead twelve months of the year. While he sold little food off-season, he had a large enough regular trade of local drinkers to cover the nut even in the deadest months of January and February.

  During the summer Sully moved a lot of steaks and chicken and shrimp. But his only food customers were tourists, and for most of them one meal at Sully’s was enough. The steaks at the Barge Inn cost seven dollars a copy and were on a par with those at the $1.49 steak joints on Times Square. His fried chicken cost five times as much as the foxy old franchising colonel’s and wasn’t a fifth as good. His shrimp were too long out of the ocean and a plate of four of them was priced at $4.50. His baked potatoes sat in the oven until they sold, however long that might take. Sully himself never ate at his own restaurant, taking most of his meals at a lunch counter on Main Street.

  Complaints about the food generally brought a sorrowful expression to his face. He was a jowly, bearish man, a little puffy under the eyes, and he had as much trouble getting a clean shave as Richard Nixon. He had a barrel chest and an ample but firm gut. His whole body was thickly pelted with black hair. Each of his four wives had initially found his hairiness exciting, and each had gradually lost her enthusiasm for it.

  Sully first married at thirty-eight, taking as a bride a girl of twenty-two. Since then he had traded in every five years or so, always selecting as a replacement a voluptuous girl between twenty and twenty-five years of age. Sully was now fifty-six and had been married to the current Mrs. Jaeger for a little over three years. No one earth expected it to last much longer.

  Sometimes he became defensive when the quality of” the Barge Inn’s food was brought to his attention. “Listen,” he would say, “let’s be honest. I didn’t open this place for people to have a meal. That’s not what it’s for. This is a place to come have a couple of drinks and talk with your friends and feed cracker crumbs to the ducks on the canal. Summer weekends you do all this and listen to music. The rest of the time it’s the same program without the music. Now some people won’t walk into a place unless there’s food. They got to have food in front of them or they can’t enjoy theirselves. So all right. There’s food. They eat it, it fills their stomachs, it don’t kill them. They don’t like it then next time they can use their brain and eat somewhere else first, or for that matter they can stay out of here altogether. That’s all.”

  He sighed now and took a long drink from the water glass that was always on the bar top beside him during business hours. The glass contained applejack, but it was neither the American commercial brand nor the imported Calvados that he stocked behind the bar. Twice a month a farmer from over in Berks County drove to Sully’s and delivered two gallon jugs of applejack, exchanging them for a pair of empty jugs and a twenty-dollar bill. The farmer was a Pennsylvania Dutchman named Gutnacht; he and his father and grandfather had been making applejack in the same old-fashioned way since long before Prohibition. Sully had been a steady customer for almost twenty years, during which time the price had gone from six to ten dollars a gallon. It was still cheaper than any taxed liquor available, but Sully would have paid three times the price if he had to. It was the only thing he would drink.

  He set the glass down and shook his head. “This fucking town,” he said.

  Hugh Markarian grinned across the bar at him. “A familiar phrase,” he said. “What brings it on?”

  “Nothing in particular. Another of those?”

  Hugh covered his glass. “No, I’m all right. I don’t think it’s such a bad town. Or were you speaking literally? I’m not sure there’s that much more fucking going on here than in the average town. It’s more visible here, of course, and perhaps it runs to more u
northodox forms, but—”

  Sully leaned forward, elbows on the bar top. “You know what it is? Two kinds of people in the town, the young ones and the old ones. The young ones are always figuring out where to go from here, and the old ones are trying to figure out how they wound up here.”

  “How did you wind up here. Sully?”

  “God knows.”

  “You weren’t born here?”

  “Christ, no. It’s a Dutchy name, but it’s Milwaukee Dutch, not Pennsylvania. Except they never said Dutch for German in Milwaukee. Krauts they called you, or Chermans. Christ, if I was born here, I never would of stayed around.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Let me think. I came here two years before I got married the first time. That was to Alicia, I think that was before your time. So that would be something like twenty years in September. Twenty years exactly. I remember I hit this town Labor Day weekend.”

  “I suppose you never thought you would stay. At the beginning, that is.”

  “You kidding? I was here ten years never figuring I would stay no more than another week. Then one day I look around, and there’s ten years gone and I don’t know where the hell they went to, and I realize I’m probably gonna spend the rest of my life in this toilet. It’s the kind of town it is, it sneaks up on you like that.”

  “It’s been good to you, though.”

  “Yeah, I got no personal bitch.”

  “You’ve done well.”

  “I make a living.”

  “You’ve got this place and you’ve got the Coryell Arms and God knows what else.”

  “Not so much else. Not so much as you might think, Hugh. You know something, you’re the first person ever called it the Coryell Arms in my hearing. I had to think a minute to realize you were talking about the Shithouse. Sully’s Shithouse, that’s all anybody calls it. Hell, it’s what I call it.”

  “Twenty years in New Hope. You should throw a party to celebrate.”

  “Hold your breath,” He picked up the glass again his large hand, took a long swallow. “You can almost throw your own party, can’t you, Hugh? You haven’t been around any twenty years but you didn’t turn up yesterday either. What is it, twelve, fourteen years?”

  “More like eighteen.”

  “Is that a fact? Well, I wouldn’t of said that much. If that’s the case you must of been here when I was married to Alicia, but I don’t remember knowing you then.”

  “I didn’t go to bars much back then.”

  “I didn’t have this place at the time, but you would of had to go to a bar to meet me. I worked for old man Lakey who had a place where the mall is now, and then I tended bar for a time at the Inn up in Pipersville. You look empty.”

  “Yeah, you can do it again, Sully.”

  “Same way? Here you go. No, you’re giving me too much, Hugh. What you’re drinking is just a buck ten. Thanks.” A waitress approached with a table order and Sully expertly mixed half a dozen drinks, then returned to Hugh. “This fucking town,” he said.

  “You said that before, I think.”

  “It’s a downhill town, Hugh. There’s towns that are getting better and there’s towns that are getting worse, and this one’s the kind that’s getting worse. The tourists come here because it’s supposed to be an art colony. The good artists have been getting fewer and farther between in these parts ever since the war. The tourist business is still alive because those shitheads don’t realize anything until a hundred years after it happens, so they still come up to look for artists and walk around with ice-cream cones in their fists looking for something to hang on the bathroom wall. Each year there’s more of them in town and each year they spend less and look worse. These days they’re either freaked-out kids with no money in their pockets or Bermuda shorts types who wouldn’t pay a nickel to see Christ ride a bicycle. The fucking tourists keep the town alive and the fucking town won’t put up a parking lot or a public toilet for their benefit. Who the hell wants to come to New Hope as a tourist? If I drove through this shithole I wouldn’t even get gas.”

  “You would if you ate here.”

  “Huh? Oh, very funny, very fucking funny. But why do I have to tell you this, for Christ’s sake? You live here, you know the place is dying.”

  “They’ve been saying that for eighteen years that I know about.”

  “They’ve been saying it for twenty years that I know about, and they’re still saying it, and it was true then and it’s true now.”

  Hugh Markarian was halfway through his drink of Grant’s and water when a voice sounded in his ear. “Why are you not at your typewriter?”

  He turned around, then smiled up at Warren Ormont. “Why aren’t you at the Old Vic?” he countered.

  “Ah, but I didn’t ask why you weren’t writing the Great American Novel. I merely inquired as to why, rather then write anything at all, you had chosen to visit this snake pit. I hope you didn’t eat here?”

  “I ate here once.”

  “Everyone ate here once. How are you, writer? You look good.”

  “I feel good. And you, Warren?”

  “Never better, although God knows I’ve been in better things. Why don’t you grab your socks and join us? I’m telling some dear friends the awful truth about Arthur Miller.”

  “Which is?”

  “That he’s either Rod Serling in drag or Paddy Chayefsky rolled into one. Possibly both, but one can’t be sure.”

  Hugh laughed. “That’s a good line.”

  “And it’s delivered with the full force of my rapierlike wit. Come join us. Solitary drinking is nothing but alcoholic masturbation.”

  “I might. Who’s in the party?”

  “Let me see. There’s Bryce Meredith, who’s directed this little gem. He actually likes Miller, no doubt because he directs him as well as anyone I’ve ever worked with. I think you know Bryce.”

  “Not well, but we’ve met.”

  “There’s also a very pleasant couple named John and Rita Welsh. Or it may be Walsh. Friends of Bryce’s from Baltimore. I gather Bryce knew John in college. They came up to see the play and they’re putting up overnight at the Logan, I think they said. He’s a dermatologist but he has the good grace to keep it to himself. He’s also a fan of yours, by the way.”

  “I don’t have fans. I have readers, but no fans. People apologize for enjoying my stuff.”

  “He didn’t sound apologetic. There’s also Peter Nicholas, who is Gretchen Vann’s current thing, and lucky little her. A face like the little Belgian boy who pisses into the water in those plaster monstrosities people bring home from Europe. And an adorable little ass.”

  “You sound proprietary. Isn’t Bert with you tonight?”

  Warren rolled his eyes. “Gawd,” he said. “I turned queer to escape from all that, Hugh. I’ve been getting ‘Where’s Bert?’ since I walked in here. I feel like a philandering husband who keeps running into all his wife’s best friends. It’s damned annoying.”

  “Where is Bert, anyway?”

  “Bless your heart, you rug peddler. Bertram is auditioning at Upper Black Eddy. He thinks it may lead to Something Good.”

  “Isn’t he happy at Mignon’s?”

  “That’s just Fridays and Saturdays. The people up the river have the weekends covered with a jazz trio and thought Bert’s brand of Bobby Short cocktail-piano-cum-torching might be the cat’s nuts during the week. Or a couple nights thereof. Which I have just explained for the last time this evening. The next person who asks after Bert is going to be told some positively outrageous lie. ‘Bert has terminal acne,’ I’ll say. ‘Bert is in Egypt buggering a camel.’ Coming, Hugh?”

  “Let me get a refill first.”

  “We’re over on the rail where we can throw things to the ducks. It’s fun watching the mother duck and the father duck push the cunning little ducklings aside and hog the food themselves. A graphic lesson in the perfidy of parents, avian division.”

  Hugh finished his drink,
motioned to Sully for another. He hesitated for a moment. That John Welsh (or Walsh) was a fan of his had an effect opposite to Warren’s intention. It was not by any means an inducement for him to join the table. Any fan, however well intentioned, sooner or later wondered aloud when Hugh would write another book of the stature of One If by Land. Not that they didn’t enjoy all his books, of course. Not that they didn’t feel the work he was doing now was as good as anything he had done in the past. But there was something about One If by Land—

  Hugh had just turned twenty-three when Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor. He enlisted in the Army the next morning, was tabbed for OCS, and spent the next three and a half years commanding infantry in North Africa and Europe. After his discharge he returned to the States with no clear idea of what he ought to do. Unlike many returning veterans, he didn’t have the option of killing four years in college while he sorted himself out. He had already graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and had put in half a year as a Wall Street trainee before the war broke out.

  He went home to Westminster, Maryland, and spent six weeks with his mother. By the end of the second week he was starting to feel like Krebs in the Hemingway story. Hugh’s Armenian father had died of a pulmonary embolism about the time of the Italian campaign. His Scottish mother was keeping company with a widower who was thinking of retiring from his dry-cleaning business. The man came over every other night after dinner to drink the Armenian coffee Mrs. Markarian had learned to make. The two of them killed a pot of coffee and played backgammon. Sometimes they coaxed Hugh into playing, and then the three of them would pretend to be enjoying themselves.

  Hugh’s two younger sisters had both married while he was overseas. Emily, the one he’d always liked best, had married a dentist and lived somewhere in southern California. Ruth, the older of the two, lived in Westminster. Her husband sold real estate and insurance and seemed incapable of believing that Hugh was equally uninterested in acquiring either. Ruth had always bored him and now he found her company unbearable. Her husband was worse. They felt obligated to invite Hugh once a week for dinner, and he felt obligated to accept. It was worse than the backgammon sessions.