The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [88]
Was she a remarkable woman? He did not know that yet, and would learn only by writing her story. But he did know that her life was not remarkable. He did not know all its details—these would emerge as he wrote—but he knew that she was born on an Eastern Pennsylvania farm, went to New York to be an actress, married a boy who was killed in the war, took a second husband shortly after the war’s end. Her second husband was an advertising man in New York, who then took a job with a Philadelphia agency. They moved to a suburb of Philadelphia, had a daughter, grew toward middle age in a marriage that was neither good nor bad.
In the book’s first chapter the husband suffers a coronary thrombosis and lives through it. Over the next several hundred pages he would have two more coronaries, the last of which would kill him. And after that—well, he knew very little of what would happen after that. If the book took proper form, he would know the story’s ending when it was time for him to write it.
Somehow it lacked dimension, and he did not know exactly how or why.
A little later he put part of it together. Part of the problem—it was the wife’s story, but it was the husband who was doing the dying. So in a sense she was along for the ride, but you never saw him from the inside, never saw him except through her eyes. And yet it had to be that way; she absolutely had to be the viewpoint character.
He sat for a long time, turning the problem over and over in his mind and looking for ways out of it. His fingers never went near the keyboard, and “119.” stared back at him, along with the musings he had typed on it earlier. But he did not mind. He was working now whether he put anything on paper or not. His mind was on his work. While he looked for solutions to the problem he found various scenes sketching themselves out, heard in his mind exchanges of dialogue which would fall into place as the book progressed. He didn’t write them down. He had learned over the years to let them stay there, tucked somewhere in the cupboard of his mind. Some would be bad ideas, superfluous scenes that would only pad the script. Some would be inconsistent with the ultimate plot. The worthwhile ones would stay alive and would drop into place when the time came. When he emerged from the den, late in the afternoon, the problem itself remained unsolved. It was the man’s story and had to be, and the woman’s eyes had to be the window to his soul. He could write it that way. He could sit down and finish it, with no more worries about blocking. But there ought to be a better way.
Perhaps he’d know it the next morning. Sleep often solved that sort of problem. Unless it was too much disjointed by cliffs and ledges and endless flights of stairs.
Karen was in the living room. She said, “Mrs. Kleinschmidt said to call her when you wanted dinner. I said you might want to eat out, but she said to call her and she’ll cook for you.”
“What time is it?”
“A little after seven.”
“That’s at least four hours later than I would have guessed. I thought it was the middle of the afternoon.”
“You must have gotten a ton of work done. Should I call her or what? She made supper for the two of us, but I’ll keep you company.”
“I may just go get a hamburger. I’m not very hungry. What I am is thirsty.”
“You sit. I guess I know how to mix them.”
She brought him a drink and sat down across from him, waiting for his approval. He sipped, smiled. “El Exigente is satisfied,” he said.
She heaved a great sigh of mock relief, then drank some of her own drink. “It must be a great feeling,” she said.
“What must?”
“To be so involved with something that you lose all track of the time.”
“Oh, it is. Even if I didn’t write a word today.” He smiled at her expression. “The book had a problem,” he explained. “I spent half the day figuring out what it was and the other half looking for a way to solve it.”
“And you did?”
“No, but I will. I’m seeing it the right way now.”
“I can’t wait to read it.”
“Have you ever read any of my books?