The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [122]
It would be fun to turn him on, though. Not now, of course. His book was going well, and the last thing he needed was anything that might push his mind in a new direction before he had finished his work. When the book was done, then perhaps they could smoke together. At that stage it might even be valuable for him. A good head-type high might give him some new perspectives, so that when he went over the book, he might be able to see it from a different angle.
And it would be very heavy, too, the two of them sitting around smoking. He had taught her how to drink, and she cherished the time the two of them sat together drinking highballs and rapping. She had never understood the special pleasures of alcohol before, perhaps because she associated it on the one hand, with her mother and Wayne and their friends and on the other hand with the fraternity-type jocks and their vomitous beer blasts. Perhaps she could return the favor by teaching her father how to smoke, how to go with it and let it take him into his head.
There was a time, before she went away to college, when she had had similar hope for her mother. It was shortly after her own initiation to grass, and she had managed to half convince herself that a few tokes was all her mother needed to turn her head around. Further reflection had forced her to realize that there were certain things grass just couldn’t do, and that this was of them. By the time her mother delivered her little sermon and confessed her own “experimentation” with “pot,” Karen had more or less guessed that the woman must have tried the stuff at one time or another, and that it obviously hadn’t done any good.
She took another drag and let herself go with it. Her mother and Wayne—there were two live ones, she thought. And the most depressing thing about it was that they thought they were so fucking hip. They wore the loud elaborately casual suburban clothes straight out of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, they subscribed to Ramparls and the Free Press, they bought and read all the right books, they went to cocktail parties to raise money for Eugene McCarthy and the Black Panthers and whatever Asian country had most recently had an earthquake or typhoon or famine. They carefully salted their conversation with all the words that had gone out of style about a year ago. Christ, they were depressing.
They thought they were involved. If there was one word her mother would pick to describe herself, that would be the word. Involved. The most totally out-of-it person on the fucking earth, and she thought she was involved.
Too much.
Eyes closed, nape of neck brushing the craggy bark of the tree behind her, she flashed on something she had never put together before. The reason she had taken it for granted that her father had wanted the divorce was that she just couldn’t feature it the other way around. Why would she have wanted to leave him?
She had learned pieces of the answer over the years, and she giggled now at the absurdity of it. Mommy had left Daddy because Daddy was not involved and Mommy craved a life of meaningful involvement. She ran the thought through her brain and worked changes on it and giggled again, hysterical at the whole number. Her father was this enormously together person, doing something was very much his own particular thing, grooving with a beautiful life that all fit perfectly together, and her mother was out in Arizona in the middle of the fucking desert, wearing bells that were too tight in the ass and a peace symbol on a leather thong and running off to Esalen for encounter groups, and that made her the involved one.
And she had an involved husband, too. Wayward Wayne, boy architect. Wayne and Anita got into things together, that was what was supposed to be so beautiful about their marriage. But did Involved Liberal Anita know that Involved Liberal Wayne liked to play cuddle with Karen’s friends? A little fanny patting now and then, and when a girl named Patsy