Jill Emerson - The Trouble With Eden

“And you’re positive none of this was an act.”

“No, absolutely not. I didn’t realize she loved me that completely.” His voice cracked but he checked it. “It’s all so awful. She’s in there and she’ll never get out. She won’t, will she?”

“Dr. Loewenstein would offer hope. No, she’ll never get out.”

“That fucking place. Anybody could put anybody else away. You sign a slip of paper and two dykes from a ladies’ football team take her away. It shouldn’t be that easy.”

“It’s not. Give me a cigarette, will you? Thank you. It’s not that easy. I had to show identification. They were very apologetic but explained it was procedure. And then when I filled out certain forms I forgot a detail and had my nurse called at her home. Anne supplied the missing details.”

“What happens if they call the real Dr. Loewenstein?”

“He’ll have to say the right things. What possible choice does he have? David knew that when he agreed. He also knows there’s little likelihood of it. I made it clear to Moeloth that she was not to be regarded as my patient. No, it was a good charade, Peter. There was never a point this afternoon when I was worried.”

“I thought they’d see the birth certificate was phony.”

“The only changes were two numbers and a letter. The actual certificate is a mess, but the alterations don’t show on the photostat I showed Moeloth.”

“I didn’t know it was a stat. The other thing that got me was when she grabbed your beard. I kept seeing it coming off in her hand.”

“But we talked about that!”

“I know.”

“You knew I attached it properly when we stopped for gas. That was the whole idea, to have her grab it like that.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“But you forgot?”

He shook his head. “No, I was afraid you forgot. All the way there I wasn’t sure if you remembered or not, and when she grabbed it—”

“That would have been something.” He started to laugh, stopping just short of hysteria. “They would have kept all three of us,” he said. “They never would have let us out of there.”

And later: “There was something you said to that doctor. About the two of us being opposite poles in her life.”

“The two of us? Oh, the concepts of Warren and Peter, the dualism. What of it?”

“I don’t know exactly. I was just thinking. I guess we were the two men in her life she loved.”

“And the two who loved her.”

“And the two who did this to her.”

“No one else could have done it.”

“Right. You can’t be betrayed by your enemies, can you?”

“Is it betrayal? I think I did it for her, not to her. Admittedly it’s always a comfort to see things that way. I think we should declare a moratorium on the soul-searching, Peter. For the sake of our own sanity, such as it is.” He sighed heavily. “It ended well. I hadn’t even dared to hope for that.” He smiled, as if at a memory. “You left her with a kiss.”

“Yeah, me and Judas.”

“Oh, stop that, Peter. Just stop that.”

Hugh said, “You know what the trouble is? The trouble is it’s Sunday.”

“Is that bad?”

“Well, I’ll say it is. In Pennsylvania it is. You can’t get a drink in Pennsylvania on a Sunday. And if you don’t think that’s trouble—”

She giggled. “But we just got a drink,” she said. “Drinks. One for each of us.”

“Quite true. The Markarian liquor cabinet does not recognize the blue laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. But Trude Hofmeister does.”

“Trude Whatmeister?”

“Not Whatmeister. Hofmeister. At Tannhauser’s.”

“Oh, right.”

“Which means that either we have dinner without wine or we go somewhere in New Jersey.”

“So?”

“So this is a celebration. The greatest author in the world and the most beautiful girl in the world are celebrating the completion of the finest novel in the world. For that we need good food and good wine. And you can’t get wine in Pennsylvania, and you can’t get a decent meal in New Jersey, and that’s all because it’s Sunday.” He raised his forefinger. “Make a note of that, Miss Markarian.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In the future, significant works of fiction are not to be completed on Saturday night.”

She wrote on the palm of her hand with her fingertip. “Not to be completed on Saturday night,” she echoed. “I shall never forget that, sir.”

“I sincerely hope not.”

“Never ever. Which’ll we do?”

“Which which?”

“Go to Tannhauser’s or go someplace in New Jersey?”

“Ah, that which. A demanding decision, Miss Markarian. I don’t think I can make a decision like that on an empty glass.”

“I’ll fill it up for you.” She walked a few steps, then turned. “You’re happy, aren’t you?”

“How in the world can you tell?”

“Because you’re so silly.”

“‘You silly Daddy.’ You used to call me that when I would joke with you.”

“I remember.”

“Yes, I’m happy, kitten. Deliriously happy. Do you know something? I have never been so happy in my life.”

This was true. There was always happiness in completing a book, always a measure of pride and satisfaction and pleasure, but in the past it had always been qualified by a feeling of loss, a vague discontent. He had often compared it to postpartum depression; a mother feels joy in having brought a living being into the world but cannot always escape the feeling of having given up a part of herself. He had come to recognize in himself that particular sensation, an empty feeling within him where there had previously been substance.

He had felt aspects of that the night before. This morning, when he awoke, he felt nothing so much as the agony of impatience. He’d gone downstairs hoping to find Karen, anxious to know what she thought of the book, and found instead that she was still asleep. The manuscript was on his desk, neatly arranged as he had left it. He assumed she had read it but could find no certain proof. And he had thought then of the mindless tricks of embryonic writers who would submit manuscripts with an occasional page inverted so that they could determine, after having been rejected, whether they had at least been read. “I always leave those pages inverted,” an editor told him once. “Let ’em hate me.”

So he had had the day’s first drink while he waited for her to wake up and come downstairs. The desire for a morning drink surprised him but did not disturb him greatly. If it was not his custom, neither was it something he had passed a personal law against. He was jittery, impatient, and a drink would sand off the sharp edges. It would have been foolish to pass it up and have coffee instead.

And then, after he had finished his drink and washed out his glass, he heard her moving around upstairs. He made himself wait for her in the kitchen, busying himself by preparing their breakfast. As she burst into the kitchen, he turned around, almost afraid to see her reaction.

And she said it was the best thing she had ever read in her life.

“I read it all the way through. I’m a fast reader but I didn’t want to miss a word, and sometimes I would go back and read something over because there was so much to it that I wanted to absorb a second time. And when I finished I wanted to wake you. Then I was afraid I would sleep too long and I was going to leave you a note to wake me first thing in the morning. And then I set my alarm clock for the first time in ages and went to bed and thought maybe the clock would go off before you were ready to get up so I shut off the alarm. There must be a thousand parts of it I want to ask you about. Is it all right to ask things about it? Is that all right?”