The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [45]
He rolled a sheet of letterhead into the typewriter and tried to think of something to tell her. He would again suggest that she might enjoy spending at least part of the summer in New Hope. But he would have to keep it a suggestion and avoid giving it anything resembling the force of a command. There were a few things that had happened recently around town she might find amusing. It was hard knowing just what kind of tack to take with her. He never saw her more often than twice a year, and she was at an age where personality changes and growth in a six-month period could be extraordinary.
From the day she was born he had loved her total and uncritical love, and it seemed to him that loved him in much the same way. It was the totality of his love for her that paradoxically helped make the separation bearable. He was confident of her: No matter how far away she was or how infrequently he was with her, she would always be his daughter.
He began typing, hesitantly at first, then getting into the letter as he got into a piece of fiction. He covered almost all of the page, took it from the typewriter, read it and signed it.
His other first-of-the-month tasks took little time and less attention. He cleared them up and readied himself for work. He stacked a ream of fresh white bond paper at the right-hand side of the typewriter. He had not kept a carbon copy when he wrote One If By Land because it had never occurred to him that you were supposed to. Three books ago he had stopped keeping carbons. It was a nuisance, and he now felt that he could afford a couple of hundred dollars to have the finished manuscript reproduce in quadruplicate by xerography.
He put the first sheet in the typewriter. In the left-hand corner he typed his name and the name and address of his agent. Below it he typed the date followed by a dash; after it he would ultimately put the date on which the book was completed. As he typed the date, the same bit of doggerel again went through his head. Hey, hey, the first of May—
He skipped halfway down the page for the title. He grinned suddenly and typed:
OUTDOOR FUCKING
a novel
by Hugh Markarian
He took the page out of the typewriter, looked at it, and laughed wholeheartedly. Still laughing, he crumpled the piece of paper and dropped it in the wastebasket. The wastebasket was richly covered in leather; it had been a Christmas gift several seasons ago, purchased by his agent from Dunhill’s for $79.95.
On West Thirteenth Street he had torn unsuccessful pages from the typewriter, wadded them viciously into a ball and hurled them across the room. Sometimes that corner of the room had looked like the scene of a snow-storm. Now he had a seventy-nine-dollar wastebasket for failed pages, and now far fewer of them had to be discarded and redone.
Outdoor Fucking starts today. Why were the best jokes invariably ones which could not possibly be funny to anyone else? But he already had a title. It had come to him several books ago but had never quite suited anything he had written until now.
He again prepared a title page. His name, his agent’s name and address, the date. In the middle of the page he typed:
THE EDGE OF THOUGHT
a novel
by Hugh Markarian
He read it through and was happy with it. He placed the title page to the left of the typewriter and prepared a second page, this one containing the epigraph quotation. It was the first stanza of a poem by Josephine Miles and he did not have to look it up in order to reproduce it. Later, when he got around to it, he could check the punctuation.
Here’s a gray afternoon, bleak as to freeze
The edge of thought like a hacksaw. Chinese
Die in the news, this wind on them
Cold as a garden… .
The title was good by itself. The context put it in perspective. And it seemed to fit the book he intended to write. Of course the book might take its