The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [69]
Of course she had shocked him. A dropout in her first year of college, living with a man, not even a man but several men. She had smoked marijuana; she had probably tried other drugs she had not told him about. She had become pregnant, perhaps without knowing who the father was, and had made the question of paternity academic by obtaining an abortion.
(“One piece of advice,” he told her. “How much or how little you tell your mother is between the two of you, but if you have any sense you won’t tell her about the abortion. She may have left the Church when she was younger than you are now, but parts of her are more Catholic than you may realize.” She said it hadn’t kept her mother from divorcing him. “No, but it once kept her from getting an abortion. No, not you, for God’s sake. No child was ever more desired than you. But she became pregnant when you were ten or eleven, and the turn our marriage had taken, a new baby was the worst possible idea. She had a miscarriage and did everything but light candles in gratitude, but that was already after she had ruled out getting an abortion. So don’t say anything to her, will you?” She said, “Oh, hell, she still thinks I’m a virgin.”)
She had shocked him with the first revelations and she shocked him intermittently thereafter, not with new facts but as he increasingly discovered her as a person. It was not that she was a shocking person. Had she been the daughter of a friend he would have found wholly admirable the very aspects that kept disconcerting him now.
And he had to suppress this shock. It was not only that he keep it hidden from her. He had to do more than that; he had to educate himself to avoid seeing her in a harsher light because of what she was to him. Oh, it was a challenge. Here he was with a woman a quarter of a century his junior, and of course there was nothing wrong with him dating a woman that age and nothing wrong with Linda for going out with him. But if his daughter went out with a man as much older than herself as he was than Linda, he doubted he could view it with equanimity. There was nothing necessarily objectionable about a relationship between a girl of eighteen and a man of forty-three. He had picked up a stenographer at his publisher’s office when he was several years older than forty-three, and the stenographer had celebrated her nineteenth birthday less than a month before.
They had both been aware of the age difference, it would have been impossible not to be, but it never occurred to them that it made it wrong for them to have dinner together. He had thought no less of her for dating him. Later that evening he went to her apartment and spent the night with her. They had both enjoyed themselves immensely, and he had in no way considered her foolish or immoral for having casual sex with a man his age. Their relationship never went any further because neither of them had wanted more from it than a night of good company and good sex. But neither thought of it as exploitative or unsound for what it was. He could not judge Karen by a harsher standard than he had judged the girl. More accurately, he could not presume to judge Karen—any more than he made that presumption with others. Intellectually he accepted everything about her as normal, even specifically desirable ; for a girl her age. It was better for such a girl to have healthy sexual experience than to remain a virgin, better to try marijuana than not, better to drop out of a deadening college situation than to hang in and grimly play the game. These were positions he had taken years ago, and he was certainly not going to repudiate them now that his daughter was old enough to live out what he had endorsed in theory. Inconsistency had always irritated him, and it was never more irritating than when he recognized it in himself.
She moved into his house with the understanding that each of them was a free agent. They told each other this and joked about it. Yet neither entirely believed it. Throughout