The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [123]
She giggled again. The tip of the jay was warm between her fingers, and she butted it carefully against her shoe and tucked it into the foil, refolded the foil and put it in her pocket. She didn’t need any more tonight. She was just about as high as she wanted to be, and with her eyes closed and her muscles loose and easy she would let herself float just a little bit higher. And what a nice high it was. The boy had told her it was happy grass. She wasn’t sure if it worked that way or not. It seemed to her that the mood you were in had more to do with what kind of a trip you took than the grass itself. She was happy now, though, loose and easy and giggly.
Anita and Wayne, so uptight in spite of themselves. She could have had Wayne herself—she had realized as much the last time she was home. There was no grabbing, no coy little tongue kissing, but by then she had learned to recognize the hints in men’s eyes, and they were all present in Wayne’s glance. The prospect held a certain appeal at the time; she’d been fighting with her mother, and the idea of taking a man away from Anita had a degree of charm to it. She never seriously considered it, though. Wayne himself was just too much of a turn-off for her to really think about going through with it. It would have to be a monumental down.
She sat up against the tree for a long time, letting the smoke work on her head, thinking her own private thoughts. At one point she unlaced her shoes and did a little dance in the soft grass. She danced herself into exhaustion, then sprawled full length on the ground. She flashed on an imaginary conversation: “Karen? Yon didn’t hear about her? Like she sold out completely, man. Lives with her father, drinks scotch and soda, even cut her hair. When she had that abortion they must have taken out part of her brain, can you dig it?”
The thought delighted her and she laughed loud and hard, laughed until the muscles in her belly ached wonderfully from the exertion of laughter. Oh, I am so stoned, she thought.
When she left the woods and walked back to the house her high was mostly gone, all but a slight buzz that she could easily control.
Did Anita and Wayne go to wife-swap parties? That would probably be just about their speed, she decided. And Anita would go for it, too—all you had to do was tell her it was the latest thing and made for genuinely meaningful interpersonal relations. That would be all the encouragement she would need.
And she could imagine those parties. Wayne and Anita and all their depressing friends. The swapping would really be pointless in that set. Like, how could you tell the difference between them?
She giggled again, but had no trouble getting control of herself as she entered the house. On her way upstairs she paused outside her father’s door. There was silence at first, and then she heard the rattle of his typewriter. She smiled.
EIGHTEEN
At ten minutes past midnight Melanie Jaeger backed out of the driveway, drove through town and headed north along the river toward Carversville. It was a dark night and the road had little illumination once she had cleared the outskirts of New Hope. She itched to drive fast, just as she had itched to leave her house a full hour before she did. She forced herself to drive slowly, just as she had forced herself to delay her departure as much as possible.
She pulled into the graveled parking lot of the Inn, killed the headlights, turned off the ignition. She unrolled the window and sat behind the wheel smoking cigarettes. She watched several couples leave the Inn and drive off into the night. A car arrived and another couple went into the Inn. A young man stalked out, hands plunged into his pants pockets: he gunned his engine before