Outside The Garden Of Eden-With Preston Sturgis’ "The Lady Eve" In Mind  

By Lance Lawrence

Take it from me, from William Demerest, that women are screwy, even two-timing women, or the two-timing woman I am thinking of just now was screwy. Yeah, I still insist that Charlie Pike, the guy old man Pike, yeah, that Pike who has made a ton of money selling ale-not beer, Jesus, not beer not if you don’t want to get an earful about the freaking differences, out of trouble. As best I could which as long as the whacky guy was alone in the Amazon or up the Nile the job was easy and I didn’t have to work up a sweat. Could sit around with the senoritas or whatever their designations were and swill beer (hell there wasn’t a bottle of Pike’s Ale within a thousand miles of where we were, thank God) and getting a little off-hand loving in. Like I said without working up a sweat.   

It was when Charlie, sonny boy, who could have given a sweet flying fuck about where his money came from as long as it rolled in for his various off-the-wall scientific experiments, got back to civilization for more than two minutes that every hustling guy and gal had their antennae set in his direction. Chasing Charlie down was all in a day’s work for a con artist like this Jean Harrington, who was working with her father and his associates on the very profitable trans-Atlantic ocean liner trade (this before a guy named Hitler who we eventually put paid to made it very unsafe for civilians to cross over to Europe or the other way around either for a while putting a big crimp into the con artist community’s source of livelihood).

I was supposed to make sure the “snakes” (not real snakes those Charlie could handle since that was his specialty) were de-fanged but this Jean did an end around and the minute, maybe two minutes, she had Charlie in her clutches, after she tripped him up as he passed her table oblivious to anything and claimed he had ruined her slippers, he was a goner. Had the scent of her perfume, jasmine something probably if I had to guess or maybe it was just bath soap, impressed on his heart and soul. The best I could do was to make sure he wasn’t beaten as clean as a jaybird by this combination. The thing that saved Charlie, saved my job too, was that the purser had photographic evidence that the Harrington entourage was nothing but a clip club. Charlie was bitter about it for a while, bitter than his affections such as they were got jobbed by a twisted hustler that he had intended to marry.        

You would figure case closed but you would figure wrong. This Jean either really had the “hots” for Charlie or she was a vengeful little bitch no matter how innocent she looked or whatever fragrance she was wearing. This is where the two-timing comes in, and maybe I shouldn’t call it two-timing because then you might think she was running after some other guy after Charlie gave her the heave-ho. No, this Jean was still going to plague the boy (man-boy at best). She, or somebody who looked very much like her, showed up at the Pike estate in the leafy suburbs of Maryland, down in horse country under the auspices of Sir Alfred somebody who vouched for her. Except now she was wearing an English accent and calling herself Lady Eve. I swore on a stack of seven bibles and I swear now the two dames were the same-that Jean bitch that Charlie had ditched on the ocean-liner.     

Whatever her motive she got Charlie just as wrapped up in her fragrance as he had been with that Jean on the boat. Except he didn’t even bother to check out her credentials, to see if she was real and married her out of hand a few weeks later. Here is the strange part for some broad who was hustling a guy. On their honeymoon she gave Charlie a story about how many men she had “known” before him. He naturally flipped out and left the train in the middle of the night. Headed back home to sulk over his mistake. Funny though this Eve didn’t want any dough when she could have had half the world, the Pike Ale world anyway and the old man wasn’t even squawking.

I still had my job but I suggested to Charlie that maybe he should head back to the Amazon where he could handle the snakes there a lot better than his recent adventures. He bought my argument and we grabbed the next tub out. Get this though this Jean/Eve somehow got on the tub and pulled the same damn trick of tripping up clumsy Charlie as the first time. And he went crazy for her, and she for him as they kicked me out of his suite. Jesus, women are screwy, or one woman is as far as I can figure. Take my word for it, okay.