The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [186]
The pills were starting to work. She could feel her tongue thickening in her mouth, could sense the beginnings of fuzziness in her mind. She pulled back the covers and got into bed. She lay on her side of the bed and turned toward his side.
“Now isn’t that better? Oh, of course it is. Do you remember, Clem? Oh, I wanted you to be the first but I wish you were with me now. How I wish you were with me now. Hold my hand, Clem. Hold my hand. Yes, that’s right. Oh, that’s right. I’m all right now, Clem. I’m all right.”
IV
The Trouble with Eden
And so it was over. A man had died, and living men had opened the earth for him and closed it over him. A life which had begun at one specific point in time had ended now at another specific point in time. Lives, like books, have beginnings and endings, first chapters and last chapters.
But the endings of human lives lack the precision of the endings of books. If death is a last chapter, there is still an epilogue to come.
—HUGH MARKARIAN, The Edge of Thought
Epilogue
THE END
A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR
In late 1968 or early 1969, I moved with my wife and daughters from a house in the center of New Brunswick, New Jersey, to an eighteenth century farmhouse on twelve rolling acres a mile from the Delaware River. We kept a variety of animals and grew things in the garden, and this was as I’d expected. But there were two things I did not anticipate. One was that I would have to go away from there, all the way back to New York City, to get any work done. The other was that I’d open an art gallery to give myself something to do in my rural paradise.
The art gallery was in New Hope, Pennsylvania, right across the river from Lambertville. New Hope, in Bucks County, had had a reputation as an artists’ colony for a few generations and boasted a little theater and a batch of art galleries, along with bookstores and antique dealers and cute little shops to sell cute little things to tourists, most of whom were neither cute nor little.
I found a store for rent in an enclosed shopping mall and signed a year’s lease. I’m damned if I know what led me to think this was a good idea. I knew a batch of artists and figured I could get them to give me things to hang on the walls, and—oh, never mind. Nowadays it’s hard to get me to go see a movie or buy a new shirt, but back then I’d embark on the wildest kind of adventure on not much more than a whim.
I knew nothing about business, but that was okay, because the gallery didn’t do any. Whenever I went into the city to write a book, I closed up shop while I was gone. When I was home, I’d open up and sit there until it was time to go across the street and have a drink at the Logan Inn. That was the best part of the operation, that and hanging out with Jim and Flory Toney, who did my custom framing whenever I managed to sell something.
After a year, my lease was up and I was out of there. It was a learning experience, and I learned not to make that particular mistake again. And I did meet some interesting people, and hear some interesting stories.
And, when it came time to write a big trashy commercial novel, I knew right where to set it.
By this time I’d written three erotic novels for Berkley Books as Jill Emerson; a fourth, Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man, wound up in hardcover with Bernard Geis. Now I don’t know who thought that Jill ought to write a big, juicy, trashy Peyton Place–type of book, but Henry brought the idea to me, and I thought Bucks Country would provide a good setting.
The deal was an attractive one, with a hefty advance. Berkley was a division of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, and the deal was hard/soft; the book would be first a Berkley hardcover, then a paperback.
I wrote most of