“You could, couldn’t you? While you’re pretending, you could even leave out the atheist part.”
“There I draw the line.”
They were married and the book came out in the spring. It hit the charts three weeks after publication day and went straight to the top. There was a movie sale and dozens of foreign sales and reprint offers and all of a sudden it was raining money and he knew he would never have to eat spaghetti again. Which was unfortunate, because it was the only thing Anita knew how to cook.
The book was still high on the best-seller list when the baby was born. That was in 1953, eight years after the war had ended, seven years after he had started trying to write about it. They told each other that New York was no place to bring up a kid and they looked around and found Bucks County and let a realtor drive them around and show them houses. They bought a stone farmhouse with thirty acres of land five miles out of New Hope.
Twelve years later Anita flew to El Paso and walked across the border for a Mexican divorce. She came back to the Bucks County farmhouse long enough to collect Karen and to tell Hugh that he ought to read his own books if he wanted to know why the marriage failed. She spent a week in New York before flying to Arizona. There was an architect she’d met in Juárez. He wanted to marry her. She knew he was good in bed but wanted to check what kind of houses he built before making up her mind. Evidently she liked his houses better than she liked Hugh’s books since One If by Land.
He still lived in the stone farmhouse. On three occasions he had listed the property for sale, and each time he had withdrawn it at the first sign of a serious offer. One local realtor had not spoken to him since. He realized now that he would never leave, that something kept him there, that no matter how far he traveled he would always come back. He lived there and wrote a book every year. Every winter he turned in a manuscript to his publisher, and every fall a new novel by Hugh Markarian appeared in the bookstores. Only a couple had made the best-seller lists and none had lingered there long, but neither had any of them ever lost money. The paperback editions were constantly in print. Reviewers generally noted his smooth professionalism, his ability to tell a story and keep it moving, his facility with realistic dialogue and swift delineation of character. And nine times out of ten they mentioned One If by Land.
Every now and then he would pick up a copy of One If by Land and try to read it. There was a song from On a Clear Day, the Broadway musical, and it ran through his head during those occasional forays at the book.
What did I have that I don’t have
What have I lost the warm sweet knack of...
Each time he found the book unreadable. The writing was awkward, uneven. The construction of the book, after all that careful revision, was impossibly clumsy. He would read sentences and wince at the thought of ever having written so badly.
The paradox infuriated him. Every book since One If by Land was better written, and none was as good a book.
What had he had that he didn’t have now?
He closed his eyes for a moment. He had turned in his latest novel two months ago and it was time for him to start a new one. Hence it was not a time for negative thoughts. Hence he would stop thinking negatively.
He picked up his drink and crossed the room.
Four
Peter was drinking screwdrivers and making them last. He didn’t understand alcohol and never knew what to order on the rare occasions when he had to order something. This time he had tried to order a brandy Alexander. He had had one once and seemed to remember enjoying the taste. But Warren refused to let him order it. “That’s a faggot drink,” he insisted. “Order a man’s drink, for Christ’s sake.”
“Well, a screwdriver, then.”
Warren put his head in his hands, muttering that a whole generation of American youth had failed to learn how to drink and the country was going to hell in a hearse. The screwdriver wasn’t too bad. It tasted like orange juice that was beginning to go bad in the carton. He was on the point of telling the waitress that the orange juice was turning when he realized that the sort of varnishy taste was the vodka.
Warren was drinking Cognac and drinking quite a lot of it. The more he drank, the more he seemed to become himself, with all of his mannerisms more pronounced than ever. As he studied him, Peter saw that alcohol was definitely a high for some people. For him it had never been other than a down, and he was incapable of understanding what people liked about drinking. It tasted terrible and it dulled your mind and eventually it made you throw up and pass out. He could see no stage of the game where it was even marginally pleasurable.
He had tried most drugs in the course of his twenty-two years. He had done glue in ninth grade and found nothing much to it outside of dizziness and nausea. You reeled around a little, and you threw up. During the next two years he got into cough syrup and grass. The cough syrup was a down, and while there were still times he seemed to require it — especially during bad times with Gretchen — he had never much liked it. Grass was good from the beginning, and for a long time he thought grass was never other than good, until one day he was in a bad mood and smoked a lot and freaked completely. He had never stopped doing grass, it was a part way of life, but there were times when he knew it would be a bad idea to smoke just then.
Acid was nice. He’d tripped ten times in the space of about two months and was glad he had done it and equally glad never to do it again. It took him to some interesting places and showed him some important parts of his head, but it also scared the hell out of him. He saw how easy it would be to let go completely and just stay inside there with all the pretty colors. What seemed most frightening of all was that he might like it there and want to stay there, and he did not want to want it. Besides, while it taught you to get out of linear paths it also did odd things to memory and perception, and he decided he could live without it.
He could also live without scag, which he had snorted once, and barbiturates, which he tried four times in an effort to discover something pleasurable in them. There was no difficulty finding pleasure in scag. It was so overwhelmingly enjoyable that he knew once was enough and twice was too much, and when something felt that good it would be very fucking easy to acquire a jones and very fucking hard to kick it. There were a great many things he did not want to be, and a junkie was high up on the list.
Speed was beautiful, cocaine best of all. One time after he and Gretchen had been living together for a couple of months she came home with a couple of twists of coke. They each snorted one and jumped into bed. They didn’t get out of bed for sixteen hours and didn’t stop balling for more than five minutes at a time in all those sixteen hours. It was a supergood sex trip but the stuff was expensive and hard to find, and he thought it was probably just as well, because you could literally screw yourself to death on it. It wasn’t supposed to hit everybody that way. It certainly hit him hard, though.
Other speeds were good, if not sexy. Your brain worked better than ever and you were all ego, absolutely on top of everything. For a while he and Gretchen had been doing a hell of a lot of speed, and it was no good because the stuff had to get to you sooner or later. You lost weight and began to fall apart physically. That part of it he had always been able to control. He took heavy doses of organic vitamins and made sure he ate decently whether he felt like it or not. But Gretchen wouldn’t take the trouble. Even if he put the vitamin pills out for her she wouldn’t get around to swallowing them. And even the vitamins couldn’t protect him from the mental effects of too much speed, the occasional blackouts, the desperate need to crash, to sleep, counterbalanced by the utter inability to turn one’s mind off and escape from consciousness. Finally they both got off it, balanced themselves out with tranquilizers and worked their way clean. He had stayed off, Gretchen had not. He would drop a pill now and then when he had a reason to but he would not ride the high, would not take another pill when the first one ran down. He seemed capable of staying on that plane, but he was still not entirely sure of himself; it was like heroin, you had to be terrified of anything you liked that much.