“Absolutely incredible. Now she goes back home to the hairy old bear with sperm running out of every part of her. I can’t understand why she wouldn’t shower.”
“Maybe she likes to smell like a whorehouse towel.”
“What a thought.”
“Well, to go home to her husband like that—”
“Maybe he’s not living at home. Or maybe she said she was spending the night with a girlfriend and she’s on her way to a motel or some such. Lord, her eyes were swimming in sperm.”
“That’s a beautiful image.”
“Henry Miller thought of it first. Although I’m sure it would have occurred to me sooner or later. It would probably have occurred to me tonight, as a matter of fact. I wonder what’s going to happen to that little girl.”
“No more than she deserves, I trust.”
“And no less, I hope.” Warren sighed heavily. “Actually I think we ought to adopt her. We could keep her as a pet. Dress her in pretty clothes—”
“Walk her on a leash—”
“Don’t be such a bitch. She’d be fun to have around, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think my heart could take it.”
“Christ, nor mine either. I don’t want to so much as hear the word ‘fuck’ for at least a month.”
“Well, you won’t hear it from me.”
“I couldn’t abide as much as a handshake. Unlike Miss Melontits, I think I’m going to treat myself to a shower. My skin has a skin of its own and I just hope soap and water will get rid of it. Perhaps I ought to use Clorox. Ugh. I don’t want company in the shower, in case you thought that might be a cozy idea.”
“I think it’s a revolting idea. You’re perfectly safe in the shower. Just don’t use all the hot water.”
“Bert?”
“Hmm?”
“A memorable evening, what?”
“It’s been that. It’s certainly been that.”
She had intended to drive straight home. Halfway there she was shaking so badly she had to stop the car, She pulled the car over to the side and gripped the steering wheel tight in both hands.
Images battered her mind. She thought of everything that had happened, saw it all as if it were a movie, tried to find a way to fit herself into the picture. It was hard to do this. She could see herself in that movie but she could not understand how it had been her.
She turned the car around, found an all-night diner on 202 and stopped for a cup of coffee. All she wanted to do was to get home to Sully, but she knew that if she went home right away she wouldn’t be in shape to see him. She smoked and drank two cups of coffee and felt the aspects of herself beginning to fit themselves together again.
Before it had consistently been Sully who had been shaken by the new direction their lives had taken. She had been quite calm, quite unshaken. If anything she had wondered at her evident ability to take everything in her stride.
Now things had changed.
She paid the check, ignored the speculative stare of the rheumy-eyed cashier. She did not need his glance to tell her what she looked like. She could guess well enough what she looked like.
That was the song he had played when she walked into the Carversville Inn, and no one could have believed it was coincidental. It had begun as a tactic, a way of holding onto her husband, but after tonight there was no pretending that it was only that. It had become more, much more. She had discovered an appetite she had never realized she had, and every time she fed it it grew stronger, more intense more demanding.
Back into the car, back on the road. She pictured Sully in his chair, eyes dull, but the dullness backed by a hidden glint of anticipation, the ashtray beside him overflowing with butts, his hand wrapped around a cup of coffee or a glass of applejack.
Waiting for her.
She saw herself springing from the ear; hurrying to the door and into the house. The question in his eyes, a- quick shake of her head. And urgently she would say to him, “No, not now, I can’t talk about it now. Just hold me, baby. Just grab me and hold me, just hold me, just take me upstairs and fuck me, do everything to me, fuck me, just fuck me, I can’t talk now, not now, just fuck me.”
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.
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. We’ll fix this place up perfectly, and then we’ll sell this fucking place, and we’ll move back to New York where we belong.”