The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [142]
“I’m glad you did.” She closed the magazine and put it aside. “There’s never anything to read in this anyway. I don’t know why I bought it. I was just looking at the ads.”
“If you’re sure you don’t mind.”
“Of course I’m sure. Pull up a chair. There’s one over there."
“It’s all right to move the chair?”
“Well, sure.”
Karen brought the chair over and sat down alongside the desk. “I went to your apartment first,” she said. “Then when you weren’t there I thought maybe you were finishing up over here. I didn’t mean to interrupt your work.”
“There’s hardly any work to interrupt. Olive couldn’t come in this evening and I had no place better to go so I thought I’d stay open. Cigarette?”
“Thanks.” She inhaled deeply, blew out smoke. “Hugh’s working tonight. I didn’t feel like sitting around alone and I couldn’t think of anyone in town I wanted to see. And then I thought of you.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“He’s really spending tons of time in front of that typewriter. Sometimes I’ll just stand outside his door and listen. He’ll go full blast for like fifteen minutes at a clip, just stopping to change pages, and then other times he’ll sit there without a sound for an hour at a time.”
“It must be very difficult.”
“I don’t know how he does it.”
“Neither do I.”
“I really mean it. When I grew up, you know, he was a writer, but a kid doesn’t think anything about that. He went into a room and made noises on a machine, you know, so big deal. I mean, I don’t know, when you’re a kid you don’t see anything special about it.”
“That’s interesting. I never thought of that.”
“What does your father do?”
“He’s in real estate.”
“In Ohio somewhere, I think you said?”
“Dayton.”
“Real estate. So at least as a kid you could understand what it was that he does. Showing houses to people and that sort of thing. He went certain places and he did certain things; it was the sort of thing that made sense to a kid.”
“I suppose so, yes.”
“Are you very close to him?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“That’s sad,” Karen said. She thought for a moment. “But what I was saying. I used to take it for granted. He went in there and he wrote. But now I don’t know how he does it. As a matter of fact I don’t really know how anybody does anything. Not selling houses or like that, but I don’t know how a writer writes books or how a painter paints pictures. How you get the ideas and decide how to make them happen. Or a composer, that’s the most impossible thing of all to understand. Imagine sitting down to write a piece of classical music. Not just finding the tunes but fitting everything together so that it adds up to something. Figuring out what each instrument in the orchestra is going to do and how to put them all together to get the sound you have in mind. I wonder if it always works out right.”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, Hugh was saying once that the book he writes is never quite as good as the book he had in mind. That sometimes parts of it will actually come out better than what he planned, but that it’s never exactly the way he intended it to be. And I was thinking about music and wondering if it’s the same. Say you’re composing a symphony, and you can hear a certain passage in your mind and you work it out with pencil and paper and then an orchestra performs it, and everybody says it’s terrific and all, but you’re the composer and you hear it performed and it’s not the way you expected it to sound. It may be better or it may be worse, but it’s not the way you expected it to be.”
“I never thought of that.”
“No, neither did I until just now. Oh, Jesus, Beethoven.”
“What about him?”
“Well, he was deaf, right?”
“Toward the end of his life, yes.”
“Well, see, that’s so far-out. He heard it all in his head and put it down, and then he never got to hear it performed, so it could have been miles away from what he figured on and he would never have any way of knowing.”
“That’s a very strange idea.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
Linda nodded. “It’s almost frightening.”
“You know what it is? It’s a stoned idea.”
She thought for a moment, remembering