The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [175]
He had felt aspects of that the night before. This morning, when he awoke, he felt nothing so much as the agony of impatience. He’d gone downstairs hoping to find Karen, anxious to know what she thought of the book, and found instead that she was still asleep. The manuscript was on his desk, neatly arranged as he had left it. He assumed she had read it but could find no certain proof. And he had thought then of the mindless tricks of embryonic writers who would submit manuscripts with an occasional page inverted so that they could determine, after having been rejected, whether they had at least been read. “I always leave those pages inverted,” an editor told him once. “Let ’em hate me.”
So he had had the day’s first drink while he waited for her to wake up and come downstairs. The desire for a morning drink surprised him but did not disturb him greatly. If it was not his custom, neither was it something he had passed a personal law against. He was jittery, impatient, and a drink would sand off the sharp edges. It would have been foolish to pass it up and have coffee instead.
And then, after he had finished his drink and washed out his glass, he heard her moving around upstairs. He made himself wait for her in the kitchen, busying himself by preparing their breakfast. As she burst into the kitchen, he turned around, almost afraid to see her reaction.
And she said it was the best thing she had ever read in her life.
“I read it all the way through. I’m a fast reader but I didn’t want to miss a word, and sometimes I would go back and read something over because there was so much to it that I wanted to absorb a second time. And when I finished I wanted to wake you. Then I was afraid I would sleep too long and I was going to leave you a note to wake me first thing in the morning. And then I set my alarm clock for the first time in ages and went to bed and thought maybe the clock would go off before you were ready to get up so I shut off the alarm. There must be a thousand parts of it I want to ask you about. Is it all right to ask things about it? Is that all right?”
It wasn’t just that she loved the book. It was that she liked it for all the right reasons. There were things he had done not knowing whether they would work or not. Some bits and pieces were important to him but would have no individual impact on readers. A book was always quite different for the person who wrote it. Its most perceptive reader could not see it in the same way. He was certain it was the same with the product of anyone’s labor; the fruit tasted differently to the man who planted the tree.
But how close she had come to reading the book through his own eyes.
They talked the day away. Much of the talk concerned The Edge of Thought. She discussed its characters as if they existed, as they did in fact exist for him and for her. Years ago, Anita had read his books with the same single-minded enthusiasm. But Karen read them differently. Anita had always been the critic; she had assumed the role with One If by Land and had always felt comfortable in it. She had been a valuable critic, a sensitive one, but a critic could never satisfy you as a fan could. Even if a critic responded with wholehearted unequivocal approval, it was still an outside view, an objective view, and the success he wanted was of a subjective sort.
So they talked a great deal about the book, but they talked of other things as well. He had felt close to her in all the months since she had moved into his house, had treasured this closeness as he treasured little else, and today he felt far closer to her than ever before. They talked through breakfast, talked over coffee, talked in the garden and in the woods. And when they returned to the house and went to the living room to talk some more she asked him if it was too early for the first drink of the day.
“I already had the first drink of the day,” he had said, and told her how keyed up he’d been waiting for her reaction.
“Then