The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [129]
the lady is
And then she was home, and out of the car and into the house, and he was sitting as she had pictured him, the expression on his face precisely the expression she had visualized.
But she was saying, “Hi, baby. Is there more coffee? Don’t get up, I’ll get it myself.”
And sitting with coffee in the chair across from him; she elaborately crossed one leg over the other and let her tongue play with her upper lip.
“Who?” he said.
“Oh, it was the oddest thing,” she said lightly. “I was shopping this morning, and I was walking along Main Street to where I parked the car, and—”
“Who was it?”
“Oh, I’ll get to that,” she said.
III
A Fire in the Garden
ZSA ZSA GABOR: And so ze entire house was destroyed, darling, everyzing burnt to ze ground. All zat was left was ze garden.
JAYNE MANSFIELD: Well, um, a garden is better than no garden at all.
—An exchange on The Jack Paar Show, 1963
NINETEEN
The rains came in the last week of July. Either July or August was apt to be a fairly wet month, but every few years wet weather struck the Delaware Valley with a vengeance. It was a region not much given to extremes. The heat of summer was always somewhat modulated by the rolling hills and valleys, while in winter the temperature rarely dropped below zero and snow was not often too deep or long-lasting. Rain, endless rain whipped along by high winds, was the greatest source of climatic peril.
By the fifth day of heavy rainfall, local wits made repeated allusions to the biblical precedent of forty days and forty nights. When the rain had continued another three days, the joke no longer seemed remotely humorous. Instead references were made to the summer of ’55, when the swollen Delaware overflowed its banks as if it were the Mississippi in the springtime. Residents with antediluvian memories dined out on anecdotes of the Great Flood, and local newspapers kept their memories alive with photographs of flood damage under headlines like CAN IT HAPPEN AGAIN? The answer to the question seemed to be that it could, and that it was damned well going to.
Recently planted vegetable gardens washed out of the ground. Tomato vines collapsed, their fruits splitting and rotting on the soil. Fruit trees lost the bulk of their ripening crops to the winds, while an excess of moisture in the earth caused them to drop their leaves. The remaining apples and pears cracked and died, and the trees, along with spring-flowering shrubs, went into an unseasonal second bloom. Other trees lost limbs or were uprooted completely. An ancient hickory fell across a secondary road outside of Upper Black Eddy, and the highway crew dispatched to deal with it skidded into a drainage ditch brimful of rushing water.
North of Lambertville, a young novelist and his English wife had invested the proceeds of a Hollywood sale in an almost baronial estate. They had moved in that spring and had devoted all of their time to remodeling and restoration. When the rains came, they discovered the special charm of a sheltered valley on the shores of a rushing stream. Day after day, the stream rushed into the house itself, bubbling up under the wide board pine floors. A tree collapsed onto the house, another upon the guest cottage. The timbers in the pool house, already weak with dry rot, gave up the job and floated downstream. A bridge washed out. An other, just constructed that spring, stayed majestically in place while the stream permanently diverted itself, so that the rugged redwood span now stopped abruptly in midair above the furious waters, resembling nothing so much as an old Roman road, still straight as an arrow and flat as a pancake but going from nowhere to nowhere. “We’ll fix this place up again,” the writer said to his wife. “Don’t worry about a thing.