The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [70]
She said “fuck” a lot. The first time she used the word he was amused at his own sudden prudery, though he doubted it showed. He tried to think of anyone he had known well in the past five years who did not use the word for emphasis. Women he met at Manhattan business lunches always seemed to make a definite point of fitting the word into the first five minutes of conversation, as if it put them on an equal footing, established them as hip and tough and gutsy and to be taken seriously. There had been an undeniable revolution in speech patterns, he knew, and what it amounted to was the whole country was talking as enlisted men had talked during his days in the service. You said “fuck” a lot in the service, he remembered; you used the word as punctuation: So this fucking guy, he was walking down the fucking street, when he fucking runs into this broad—
He fed the word, and others, right back to her. In the beginning his speech was as artificial as her own, but within a week they had accomplished something; they were both talking in front of each other as they would have talked were they not father and daughter but merely friends.
The candor took a variety of forms. She went out with an apprentice from the Playhouse and told Hugh not to wait up for her—“because I might spend the night.” He told her to feel free. He was reading in the living room when she returned a few minutes after one. “He wanted to ball me,” she reported, “but I didn’t really relate to him that way, and I figured I had the right to feel free not to as far as that goes.”
Over coffee Linda said, “That’s the best meal since I came here.”
“It’s probably the first meal you’ve had in New Hope. The first decent one.”
“In a restaurant, yes.”
“You’re a good cook?”
“I’m not terrible. Why does that surprise you?”
“It doesn’t, really. I think I’m going to have a brandy. Would you like one?”
“Yes, I would.”
“One thing I can’t get used to is the fact that the kids don’t drink. I can’t conceive of, the college experience untempered by tidal waves of draft beer.”
“You went to Penn.”
“Wharton. Not entirely the same thing.”
“No, so I hear. That’s an unusual background for a writer, isn’t it? A business school?”
“It was a logical background for a stockbroker. Which seemed like a logical profession. It’s funny. I can’t remember the person I was in college. I remember what that person did but I can’t remember being that person.”
“It changed everything, didn’t it? The war.”
“Yes. it did.”
She was holding her brandy glass and looking off over his shoulder. She said, “I wonder if it takes something that dramatic or if small things can do it. Changing a person’s life completely so that you can point to one moment and know that you were a different person ever after.”
He reached for his pipe, changed his mind and got a cigarette. She took one and he lit them both.
She said, “Before, you were saying that it was odd talking with me about Karen, because I was closer to her in age than I am to you. But that’s not so. The numbers don’t mean anything. It’s a question of identity. It may be a function of age but you don’t measure it in years.”
“It’s what you’ve been through.”
“No, it isn’t. I almost said that but it’s not it. She’s been through pregnancy and an abortion and I haven’t been through either. I’ve been through a marriage but that didn’t make any difference. It made a difference but not the difference I’m talking about. It may be what you go through that does it, but what makes the difference is who you are.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m not saying this well because I’m working it out as I go. Karen’s your daughter.”
“So?”
“No, that wasn’t preamble. It was definition. Karen’s your daughter, that’s who she is. In terms of identity. In those terms I’m not my father’s daughter or my mother’s daughter.