The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [112]
“But I want to.”
But he was moving her hand from him, shaking his head gently. “Not here,” he said. “Not here, not now.”
“I’m sorry if I—”
“Don’t be silly. I’ll call you.”
On the way upstairs she thought of a dozen things could have said, ranging from a frank explanation of her lie to some gibberish about the cramps normally preceding the onset of her period. There were any number of things she could have said to cover herself, but they were all things she had not been able to think of until his car had pulled away.
She took a shower, washed her hair. She tried listening to the radio but couldn’t find a station she could stand. She wanted to talk to someone and there was no one she could talk to. She looked up Hugh’s number in the phone book and sat at the telephone for twenty minutes before she realized she could not possibly call him, could not possibly find anything to say to him.
She was so fucking neurotic. That was the trouble—she was so fucking neurotic. He had not proposed to her, had not begun to propose to her, and her anxiety about what she might do if he did, her stupid neurotic anxiety, was getting in the way of everything.
In bed, she could not keep her hands off herself. She tried. She did not want to touch herself. Somehow she seemed to have evolved a double standard for masturbation: It was all right in the absence of an outlet, but forbidden if there was someone you were sleeping with. Going to bed with, she corrected herself. She had not yet slept with Hugh.
She gave in ultimately, using her fingers quickly and deftly, her mind blank of fantasies, her manipulation wholly physical. She reached climax quickly but it didn’t seem to do her any good; the same tensions were still there when she had finished.
When he entered the living room Karen closed her book and got up from his chair. “Home early,” she said.
“Linda wasn’t feeling well.”
“Is she all right?”
“Uh-huh. Drinking alone? That’s a hell of a note.”
“Well, you’ve been teaching me bad habits. Is it awful to drink alone?”
“I never saw anything wrong with it. The world is filled to overflowing with men and women who seek out boring company to avoid the stigma of solitary drinking. You could mix me one, though, and that would solve the problem.”
She made him a drink and freshened her own. He sat on the couch and she took a seat beside him. “I thought you were going out,” he said.
“I drove around town but I didn’t see anybody I wanted to spend any time with. It’s all the same people and I didn’t feel like that kind of company.”
“Is it starting to get to you?”
“What? All the same people? Not exactly. Just that most of the time I’d rather sit around here. Am I getting in the way?”
“Of course not.”
“Because if I am—”
“You’re not. On the way back here tonight I was hoping your car would be in the garage. I had to take Linda home early, and I hate being alone on nights like this. I can’t get the damned book out of my head.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“It’s a good sign but it’s not much fun. I’ll have scenes running through my head, whole patches of dialogue, and I can’t shut them off. Ninety percent of the time it’s stuff I’ve already got planned out well enough, or material that happens offstage, conversations that will never wind up in the book anyway. Sitting down at the typewriter doesn’t do any good. I’m already written out for the day and anything I did now would be second-rate. But I can’t get the words out of my mind.”
“It sounds like a speed high.”
“Another part of the collegiate experience?”
“Not in a heavy way. I guess there were kids who were borderline speed freaks. Just on pills, I never knew anybody who shot crystal or anything.”
“Which is crystal?”
“Methedrine. I used to take Dex some of the time. Not for a high but to study for a test. Back when I bothered studying for tests.”
“Did it do you any good?”
“Oh, tons of good. But after awhile it backs up on you. Your mind starts curving in on itself. You get hung up on trivia. Spend hours cleaning the dirt out of your typewriter keys or arranging books on a shelf. Or