Christmas Eve, 2017
I put Adam's face in my hands, resting his jaw against the heel of my palms, and feel his five o'clock shadow rough since he has skipped shaving for two days. The smile on his face is a lazy one, because he is exhausted and full of mischief.
"I got you something else, Doll," he confesses, out here on the fire escape.
My gift from the Gray Family this year was a fire escape, nailed outside my window, and leading down into the bayou on an iron staircase painted flat and rusty black. It creeps up to the third floor, doubling back on itself, and I am standing over the third stair where Adam is lounging, the creases in his slacks finally giving out in the last hours of the night.
His tie is loose, the starch of his shirt wilted, and I've had my hands in his hair too much for it to have kept the shape he's tortured it into with his black comb. Inside, the Victrola is playing Sam Cook in the unseasonable heat, and Adam is wearing a blue suit for what I know is the first of three times this winter.
"You did not," I argue, and he rises to his slow feet, holding his glass in his hand. While we sway, the grating of the fire escape creaks with our weight. The gold light from my room spills out over the darkness of the backyard, lighting him in a glowing square and half a ghostly moon.
"You calling me a liar?" he all but drawls, the ice clinking in his glass while he tries to make me dance.
"Yes," I push him backward, and he laughs as I climb back through the window into my bedroom.
I cross the floor passing all my furniture but feeling like a guest there the way I always do in my bedroom. Gray House is changeable enough that one could never really know every inch of a room the way we begin to know the houses of our childhood, but there's something comforting about that which reminds me more solidly of home than anything else ever has; I was always convinced when I was young that my house could open with gaping wide trap doors and hidden alcoves at any moment.
It means the magic I had hoped for there, is real here.
The threadbare rugs barely mask the official sound of Adam's shoes as he follows me to the velvet and cane barrel chairs on either side of my salon table where in the warm light I pour another drink.
I'm barefoot, wearing old yoga pants and a t-shirt for pajamas, and freshly showered. The day's panties and bra are laying next to the bed, in a pile of laundry I know Dean won't collect until the 26th.
Adam sits in the chair opposite me, and it creaks slightly like the fire escape. It's the arms that creak. I know the names of everything in here, like salon table and cane barrel chair and wood accent sofa because I knew someday I'd have to write it all down. Adam leans his wilting suit against the stained velvet back of the chair the color of cheap wine, and sighs at the ceiling. He never thinks about naming anything any name besides Evelyn. Everything else is my job.
"Well... Eve..." he ponders, kicking his shoes off of with two soft thunks. "How was your day?"
The Christmas Eve before I came home, Adam spent alone in an empty house smoking cigarettes and thinking about his future. He told me about it once, but I can't remember what conclusions he might've drawn. As I watch him now, I can imagine he knew I was coming home in one week, and therefore all his secrets were about to be unraveled. I can imagine his combination of fear and arousal at the idea our clothes would suddenly be allowed to smell like the other, that people would listen to us making love (with any luck), and that he would very shortly look incredibly stupid for an indeterminate amount of time.
The Christmas Eve before I came home, I also spent alone, and writing. I wrote about my solitude the same way I wrote about my feelings the year after, and the year after. Every Christmas since, Adam has tried to the best of his ability to preserve something for us, but that's in his nature. Because in many ways we're still newlyweds, he's always taken each moment between us as seriously as a virgin bride, shadowboxing each thing we share, writing carefully it's date beneath it, smashing it onto glass for later study and revelation. He's been giddy in his new life, since I came home, and careful; every day his actions underlined with the stark punctuation of, "EVELYN!"
Until tonight, when he is sagging drunk and comfortable in my cane barrel chair, in his socks.
"It was wonderful, Adam," I tell him softly. "How was yours?"
Staring at the ceiling, I see a tear escape from the corner of his eye, which he brushes fast away, and clears his throat gruffly. Maybe he's thinking what I'm thinking: that there's a sense between us tonight of having been home... for who knows how long now?
"Well, it's been five years, Evie," he answers for me. "I think I'm finally ready to tell you what I want for Christmas."
I sip the alcohol.
"A divorce?"
He laughs ragged, and lights a cigarette.
Of course it's not fair, that he's in my room. The same way his room transforms me into something which belongs to him, my room does the same. He is now a maudlin version of himself, struggling under the weight of an oppressive sensory overload. Here in my room, the nest of all his obsessions, he doesn't know whether to behave normally, or begin stuffing things into his pockets for later. Instead, he pulls me to the fire escape to dance, gets drunk, and stares at the ceiling while he cries.
My phone on the salon table flashes an alert that I have an incoming message from Jack. For 30 minutes, he's been condescending for no reason, inane and meandering enough I'm sure he's drunk, and insulting to the point I've constricted bile in my throat.
"What does he want?" Adam asks, scooping up my phone with little ceremony. He enters the code to unlock my phone and reads quickly, a grin blooming over his face.
"Oh, you must show this to Improvisation," he gushes to me, and cackles rough in his throat. "I'm an experiment to be ended, is that right, Evelyn? The travails of an author, oh woe."
He jibes at Jack for a few more minutes, explaining his lack of understanding as a fundamental defect of character.
"I think there are men who strive toward knowledge and others whom are threatened by it."
By the way he says "threatened" I can tell he means sexually. I can tell he's talking from his experience as all men, that there are some inside him who don't wish to know anything, actually, but rather destroy that which is unknown in even the most delicate sense, in order to master it according to their own ideals.
"To hammer all nails into the leather of the world and nevermind the holes," he goes on.
There is a part of Adam who is maybe solely the organ of his sex. Not an animal thing, but a creature of terrible pragmatism - a logician who organizes the world into the complementary puzzle pieces of copulation. Sword and wound. Victory and acceptance. Supremacy and submission. Pen and lid. Bucket and well. Key and lock. Some damned electrician looking always for the positive and negative charge. And maybe that exists in all men, this strange monster of single purpose, inelegant and violent. But as always, that monster is one I can reverse and counter in Adam, and not in Jack. In Jack, he's just...
"Despicable," Adam finishes, and I have not heard most of his speech, but it was one I knew already anyway.
"He's boring," I tell him, nodding to my phone as if Jack lived inside it. "I'll bet you he never replies to me."
Adam slouches further into the chair, smug and self-satisfied, and drags hard on his cigarette.
"Evelyn, I can assure you that no matter what Jack has ever said to you, he has never replied," he muses, pressing his fingers to his temple as if the statement were rote. The patterns in the waves of his hair match the unfolding flowers on the wallpaper just beyond him, shadowed by ivy.
The ivy grows in my room of it's own accord, or possibly of my accord, if there's a difference. It's grown wild enough inside that I have lost things beneath it like my trunk of blankets, and my box of records I consider second-string. Nestled into the darkness of the ivy are small jars lit from beneath, and the glow they radiate is a cool purplish-red. Like somewhere between flowers or lanterns, they cast the edges of Adam's frame into soft focus, as if we're sitting in a garden with lights along the path. It's a pleasant enough glow that people often fail to remark on the jars containing human hearts, fished from the cool murk of the Edisto River.
Everything else in my room are baubles a hundred shades of pink champagne; a color I adopted as my own because Adam forced me there with his graphite suits and sheets of antique paper. Beneath the pink floral myriad are the army-green resignations of my true nature, and boy's sneakers, and journals full of my thoughts that all capitulated to this soft place of memory. I was once a boy with him, in a Garden of storied antiquity, until Adam forced me to violent girlhood by saying
"I would like us to be married, actually."
I realize he's asking me for this, for Christmas. I look up at his face, and I see him avoiding mine. He studies his drink, his heavy brow furrowed dark against his skin, the tone of which has always evaded my description. He wilts in his suit, and pretends to study his bourbon, while I gather his meaning from what he has not said.
"We are," I remind him, my voice flat, and he nods toward the rug at his feet.
"Mm. Yes. We did marry, five years ago."
"Four years ago," I remind him, pressing him not to round up. "Four years and eleven months."
"Four years, ten months, and ten days," he counters, raising one single eyebrow in my direction. "And seventeen hours, but you have clearly not been counting."
"I was not," I snap.
"At that time, we were married," he continues, ignoring me. "We were married by Clyde, in the Garden. I would like you to be seen by a priest, or perhaps a Justice of the Peace. I would like it on paper."
I stare at him long enough he looks up, sheepish, the tips of his ears reddening under his hair. His left eye is squinted at me with the look of his stern consideration, but his mouth is raised in a thin and hopeful smile.
The line he's traversing with this reckless and bourbon-soaked frankness is an unspoken divide between us into which all other relationships are destined to fall. Being Adam of Eden means having a strange and sexual fixation with that wholly human institution: Marriage. The dedication of someone to another, under the eyes of their creator, belonging to one another in soul and flesh. He's breathed hot into my ear enough times that couples all over the world were donning our clothes, saying our vows, and undressing each other in celebration of our wedding night.
Of course, I'm just as guilty. Being made for Adam means I've always wanted something to show for it, and it was that which I've always had: Marriage. A rite of our symbiosis, detailed and mimicked the world over. Marrying him is embracing the hope that love has meaning to the continuance of life. So I tell him to slow down, and say it to me again.
Frozen like that, the look between us continues while I cycle through what I'm sure looks like horror, then shock, before settling on suspicion.
We'd had the rite, in the proper place for us, and with the proper deities in attendance: Presided over by Death, witnessed by Dreams and Innocence, celebrated in the place of our birth. But now, he's saying...
"You want to do it like everyone else," I test him, my voice now low and cautious, and he reaches for the bottle to refill our glasses as we speak our blasphemy.
"Yes," he agrees.
Yes, Dionysus is leaving the concubines of Olympus to drive to Topeka and fuck in the cold and stale interior of a Tercel parked outside a Denny's. Yes, the mortician is asking to be embalmed although he's still alive. Yes, Adam is asking me to elope to a chapel where Elvis will have us exchange rings. And he wants to because he's Adam, yes, but before that, he's a man.
"Nothing too fancy," he assures me. "I'll handle everything. You'll just need to find a dress."
Find a dress, sure. I'd only have to look as far as the Modern Bride magazine he has stuffed guilty under his mattress, the pages shellacked in his semen with twice the fervor he's ever shown a Hustler. After all, we were made to do this; made to get married, made to fuck, made to make babies, and made to need the other to do it. It makes sense, on a biological level, and before I can really think about it, I tell him yes.
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