Jill Emerson - The Trouble With Eden

This is a work of fiction and it’s set in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and that’s really asking for it. None of the characters are based on real people, living or dead. I’d say that anyway to avoid a libel suit, but it also happens to be true. Not that anyone’s likely to believe it.

I thought of changing New Hope, Pennsylvania, to Blue Pope, Illinois, but all that would do (besides making extra work for me) is encourage people to play the game of figuring out what each invented name stood for, and they would carry this through to the characters, which is precisely what I’m hoping to avoid. None of these people are anybody.

Years ago I wrote a novel in which a major character was my fictional interpretation of myself. A girl I barely knew stopped speaking to me because she thought that particular character was supposed to be her and she was offended. God knows why on both counts. He also knows I don’t know enough about anybody’s private life to put him in a book. I suppose the intelligent thing to do would be to set all books in New York, where nobody gives a damn.

— JILL EMERSON

“You’re the only one open. But I guess you knew that, huh?”

She looked up. Interruptions were not likely to startle her. Customers were infrequent during the off-season, and in the time she had worked at the Lemon Tree, Linda Robshaw had learned to lose herself in a book in their absence and to become quickly alert on their appearance.

She said, “Oh, hi, Tanya. What time is it, anyway?”

“Five-thirty, quarter of six. I was just getting my hair done.”

“It looks nice.”

“Well, it’s the same, but thanks. I just let him wash it. I can never get it as clean as I like it. It seems silly to pay money for what you could do standing under a shower. But I wanted to look decent for tonight.”

“Tonight? Oh, the play.”

“The Crucible. It’s the best part I’ve had so far. I don’t understand all of it, though.” Tanya had been walking back and forth in one of the aisles. Now she took a small doll from an eye-level teak shelf. “‘Made in Taiwan,’” she read. “Made in Taiwan by spastics. Who would pay four ninety-five for a dime’s worth of wood and a nickel’s worth of cloth?”

“The same kind of nut who would buy any of the crud we sell.”

“Don’t let the boss catch you talking that way.”

“Oh, Olive says the same thing herself,” Linda said. “She says contempt for your customers and their lack of taste is a form of local patriotism.”

“What are you reading? Sylvia Plath. She’s the one killed herself?”

“Uh-huh. A poem at a time.”

“Oh, poems? Any good?”

“Very. But depressing.”

“Why read something that’s gonna depress you?”

“Good question,” she said. She closed the book, got to her feet. “Wait while I close up and I’ll walk you home.”

“Well, I was going to the theater, Linda. They want me to go over a couple of things. I could walk you as far as—”

“No, go ahead,” she said. “I’ll be a few minutes.”

After Tanya had left, Linda sat for a few moments at the desk, the copy of Ariel in her hand. Then she locked the cash drawer, turned off the lights, closed and locked the door of the little gift shop, and walked down the corridor and out of the small shopping mall.

The streets were dark, with only a few stores still open. She crossed to the grassy triangle at the corner of Ferry Street, skirted the old cannon with its mound of cannonballs, walked down Main past the playhouse and across the bridge to Mechanic Street.

She shook her head, thinking of Tanya Leopold. Why read something that’s gonna depress you? Tanya would no more read Sylvia Plath than she would permit herself to be depressed for any other reason. The little actress, who Marc had assured her was as utterly untalented as any he had met, had an unquestionable talent for life. She ate, slept, acted, had her hair done, and made love, approaching all these activities with healthy enthusiasm. She was always in good spirits and generally improved the spirits of those who knew her.

Whereas Linda Robshaw, who read depressing books, was in turn depressing—

Spring had come late this year and had not brought her the sense of rebirth she usually associated with the season’s arrival. It was her first spring in New Hope, and she had been looking forward to it through the cold wet deadening winter. Springtime in Manhattan had meant little more than a change in weather — you had to go to the parks for any visible sign of nature returning to life — yet here, with the spring bulbs flowering, with trees leafing out and flowering shrubs showing color, with massive banks of forsythia a golden fire along the Towpath, she still felt no corresponding rush of sap in her own veins.

She turned right at Mechanic Street and walked a few hundred yards to the large squat buildings where she and Marc were living. The three-story brick structure had been built in 1887 by one Cecil Crofter, who had intended it as a factory for the manufacture of wigs and other human hair goods. The business failed almost before it had begun, and the brick structure ultimately emerged as an apartment house, with two apartments on each floor. Each apartment had since been further subdivided, so that there were now six rental units on the first floor and five on each of the two upper stories.

An owner during the twenties had named it the Coryell Arms, and that inscription could still be made out, carved into oaken timbers over the doorway. But no one ever called it by this name. Instead it was universally known as the Shithouse.

Local history had it that someone had commented that the building was built like a brick shithouse and that the adjective had gradually disappeared from usage over the years. But Shithouse residents were inclined to believe that it would have acquired its name whatever materials had been used in its construction. The drabness of its exterior was more than matched by the squalor within. Neither the rooms nor the hallways had been painted within anyone’s memory. Chunks of plaster periodically dropped from the ceilings and were never replaced. The plumbing was noisy and unreliable, and the building abounded in violations that would have appalled a Harlem slumlord.

The Shithouse was, year in and year out, the most profitable piece of rental property in Bucks County.

The secret of the Shithouse’s commercial success was simple enough. Sully Jaeger rented his apartments by the week, and he would rent to anyone with a week’s rent in his hand. There was no credit investigation because no credit was ever extended. There were no leases to sign, no security deposit to pay. All tenants paid by the week, in advance, and any tenant who could not come up with the rent the day it was demanded was out on the street, bag and baggage, by nightfall. A landlord renting by the week was not hamstrung by eviction procedures, but could operate on the same basis as a hotel. Sully’s eviction proceedings consisted of advising a rentless tenant he had an hour to come up with the rent or remove his belongings. At the end of the hour Sully would return, change the lock cylinder on the apartment door, and throw whatever remained in the apartment out the window. It was widely rumored that on one occasion the tenant himself had been present in the apartment at end of the standard hour, and that Sully had unceremoniously heaved him out the window after his luggage.