The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [110]
“Then she died, and Jimmy himself was between thirty-five and forty when they buried his mother. Two months later he married a Doylestown girl, and if he ever once stepped out on her for the rest of his life no one ever heard a word of it. Worked hard, fathered four children, and spent his nights at home. He only lived another fifteen years but as long as he lived I think he would have been true to that woman. His heart finally killed him. There were rumors it was the late stages of syphilis that were responsible, that he’d had from his younger days, but you have rumors all the time in cases like that.”
They walked for a few minutes in silence. Then Linda said, “Are you going to tell me the point of the story or do I have to work it out for myself?”
“I’d tell you if I knew what it was. Stories don’t always have a point, do they?”
“I have a feeling this one does.”
“Well, I have the same feeling, but I can’t put my finger on it. Something we talked about earlier must have put it in my head, but I’d be hard put to say how or what or why. Easy enough to say it’s just another example of the strange things people find to do with their lives and let it go at that.”
“I could read all sorts of things into that story if I wanted to.”
“You could, and it might be a good idea and it might be a bad one. Well, that was a better meal than I’d have had alone, Linda. Thank you for keeping me company.”
“It’s my place to thank you, and you know it.”
“You needn’t thank me for the story, though.”
“I hadn’t intended to,” said Linda Robshaw.
When he picked her up she told him she didn’t want to make it a late night. “I haven’t felt well today,” she said.
“What’s the matter?”
“Well, cramps, actually. It’s that phase of the moon. I suppose it’s not so bad, especially when I consider the alternative.”
“The alternative? Oh, I see.”
But it wasn’t that time of the month, not quite. Her period was not due for two days, and she had had no cramps. She wondered why she said she did. Because she did not want to make love, obviously. And yet she had said the words before she had consciously realized that she did not want to make love,
He asked her if it bothered her to sit in the car, and she said it didn’t, and he suggested a ride up Route 32 along the river. She asked how the book had gone, the inevitable question, and he answered that it had gone very well, which had lately been the inevitable answer. He turned north on Main and drove north along the Pennsylvania side of the river, along a winding tree-shaded road banked here and there with old stone houses.
Some twenty miles up they stopped for a drink at a Colonial tavern. They sat at a table in a dark corner and nursed scotch and sodas. He lit her cigarettes and kept his pipe going.
He did most of the talking. This night he talked not about the book and not about his daughter. Instead he was telling her a great deal about his earlier life. The vague and aimless period after the war. The first novel, and his marriage, and elements of his life that followed. She sensed that he was purposely showing her parts of himself which he habitually kept concealed, and she found herself wondering how many other women had found him as open as she did. It was impossible for her to know this, but she felt there had been few, very few. It was a conceit to think that no woman since his wife had known him as well as she herself did now, and yet although she recognized it as a conceit she could not avoid it. The thought pleased her, even warmed her, and at the same time in some indeterminate way it unsettled her.
Her mind kept picking up threads of the story Olive had told her. There was the suggestion of an obvious parallel there, but she suspected the story’s relevance might lie elsewhere. And she did not want to think about it. She knew that much, that she did not want to think about it.
He did want to marry her. She