The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [156]
“Warren?”
“When we get there. Not now. I’m going to need a drink first.” “Something else. I asked you a question before.”
“I know you did.”
“You never answered it.”
“No, I didn’t. Why does she hate me? Oh, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. It’s common knowledge; you’d have heard it yourself except it happened—too long ago to be interesting. We were lovers once.”
“You and Gretch?”
“Is it all that hard to imagine? Yes, she and I.”
“When I was still in diapers.”
“When you weren’t long out of them. She was very beautiful then, and utterly damned. The madness was always there. It was less sharply defined but it was always there. I think I sensed it. Perhaps I did, perhaps that’s hindsight. I left her for … oh, for a man.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t say it so heavily. I had come out long before that. And I had gone through heterosexual phases before Gretchen. None after her, though. Not really.” A pause. “I had to leave her. It seemed less disloyal to leave her for a man than for another woman. I’m afraid she never saw it that way.”
“You and Gretchen.”
“She and I. The Odd Couple—we could each have played either part.”
“You still love her.”
“Yes, of course. I never stopped loving her and she never stopped hating me. There are two sorts of people in the world, those who go on loving and those who hate. It’s always seemed to me that the former half tend to be male and the latter half female, but perhaps that’s just my own special perspective coming to bear.”
“I never would have guessed any of this.”
“Probably not. And neither she nor I ever dreamed of telling you, which is something worth consideration when we have world enough and time. We have neither at the moment, thank God. We have arrived. You’ve never been here, have you? That’s Bert’s piano. It’s only a shame he can’t be here to play it for you.”
“When will he be home?”
“Tomorrow night, I think. Tonight, actually. It’s already Saturday morning. He went to New York some eighteen hours ago on a secret mission. I’m supposed to believe that an aunt of his is critically ill. I hope you can lie better than B. R. LeGrand, Peter, or our mission is doomed in advance. He’s as opaque as a broken window, and I’ll have the job of pretending shock and dismay when he comes home and announces he’s leaving me. Don’t be downcast. It falls miles short of tragedy. And don’t worry that this is all a scheme to put your fair white body next to mine.”
“Christ, Warren. I never thought that.”
“I know. Well, your virtue’s safe. All you can lose tonight is your immortal soul.”
TWENTY-SIX
By five o’clock Saturday morning Peter was in bed at Gretchen’s side. She had not stirred when he entered the room, nor had she made any response when he stood at her side and spoke her name. He had done so on the chance that she was awake, hoping that even so she would pretend to be sleeping. After a few minutes in bed with her he relaxed. This time she was genuinely asleep. He had learned to tell the difference.
He would not sleep himself. He was keyed so tightly that sleep might have been impossible in any case, and the fifteen-milligram spansule of Dexedrine he had swallowed an hour earlier had eliminated any possibility of sleep. He felt the speed working within him now. His mind was working with the clarity that nothing else on earth could supply. He was so much smarter now, so much more capable. And that, of course, was the drug’s blessing and its curse. You could not function so perfectly without wanting that perfection to last forever, and so you piled speed on speed until your system over-amped and your mind’s legs ran out from under you.
Warren had given him a handful of the pills. They’d been discussing the role he had to play, had spent hours putting the details together and fitting them in place, until Peter mentioned that, in his few appearances onstage, he had always felt more competent and surer of himself when he was behind a little speed.
“Then by all means drop some,” Warren had said. “We need all the help we can get.”
“The thing is, I was into