Adam scoffs at my late arrival to his room.
"Oh," he chuffs, rising from his brown leather reading chair and setting down his drink. "Oh, I see. Are we taking numbers? Am I next?"
Gray laces his hair like frost settling over an otherwise brown lawn. His heavy brow is raised in mock concern for me in the slow light of his room; a treasure trove of all that which might make a man into a man.
His expectant face makes him look like Gary Oldman, but Adam tends to, whether he's just standing here, or melting into deaf musicians, fat prime ministers, Carpathian princes, crude pimps, or violent lovers. His suit is pale and steely blue, and there's a sheen to the fabric tonight. He's starched and ironed himself into right angles and sarcastic amusement.
I wilt at his line, which he intended me to do.
"I..."
I hesitate in the doorway. Adam's room is a foreign place full of pools of delicate gold light, strange artifacts, broken machines, and the quiet whispers of his cruelty and his rage. He's grown all these sharp edges and hard thorns for me to soften, now, and he's done it just so. Just because. Just in case.
He moves his jaw to explore his teeth with his tongue, and I by the way the shadows fall, I can see he's skipped a day of shaving. So he's meant to burn me, as well.
Adam's bed is dark and imposing, tall and impossible to climb into without standing on one of the dozens of stacks of books he keeps around it. The items within are crammed into cabinets, and the cabinets make the room feel cave-like. Currently, the bed is tossed with a blanket made of tawny red fur I gifted him once - fox fur.
"Evelyn," he recites my name to me, sliding his hands into his pockets. "Just who the fuck do you take me for?"
"Adam," I tell him, shutting the door quietly behind me, shrugging my way around it with guilty shoulders. "You're mad at me."
"I am, that, Doll," he snorts. "I am, that, indeed."
His tie is navy. The suit is slim-cut, notch lapels, single breasted, two button. The cuffs of his shirt beneath are two button mitered cuffs. I learned the names of everything for him, and he spits out his favorite word at me now in total disdain.
"Evelyn."
"Adam."
"This is our night."
"I know."
I look up at him, my expression blank. Adam's moods are better weathered before response, because he so often talks himself out of his rages. Glasses have shattered in the fireplace and holes have been smashed into the drywall before he looks up sheepish and admits his own fears, and so I say nothing, and I do nothing, while he clips his words short and terse to me in irritation of my blasphemy.
"You see, I had thought," he steps toward me, trying to get a read on my emotions, and I interrupt him.
"I know."
He presses me against the door.
"You know everything, is that right? You know what this all means to me? I see, so there's no need to discuss it further."
"Adam-"
"Evelyn."
"I just-"
"He took you home," he fumes at me, and turns his back on me.
"What?" I ask him, suddenly nervous. "What do you mean?"
Adam stands with his back to me, and I watch his shoulders move and adjust as he unfastens the buttons at his wrist, and on his coat. He shrugs the jacket off without looking at me, and it occurs to me what's happening.
He deposits the jacket on the back of his reading chair and begins to loosen his tie, and I feel panic setting in.
Since I came home to Gray House, there were two things treated as ritual: that Adam and I were Home to one another, and when that was compromised by disagreement, we fought naked. I think subconsciously or even consciously, Adam thought that being naked meant we would be more respectful to our true natures. I can see now that because I hadn't respected the first ritual, I am going to be made to choke on the second.
Of course, I hadn't thought that talking to Brad about Denton, or listening to the mix, or even going there would constitute this level of infidelity he was acting like I'd committed. Sure, I had drawn Brad from some other time and place to sit inside the house we built within each other in order to see how we'd always been together, but that's, like, not a crime. It didn't make that place home any more than it had been when I'd come to Gray House, which was not at all. I mean. Right?
The edges of my nonchalance begin to rankle.
It had been different, and it had meant something this time which it hadn't meant before. Downplaying it now to keep Adam's feelings safe meant undercutting in some way what had happened between Brad and I, and maybe that's how things got this way. Maybe, since I first set foot in Gray House, I've been so scared of losing something I've never really had anything. I take a deep breath and kick off my ballet shoes.
Adam's slacks hit the hardwood floor with the jangle of his belt-buckle. His wristwatch and our wedding ring clink onto his nightstand. He peels off his undershirt and his underwear and adjusts his weight to one foot, crossing his arms over his now bare chest.
I slink my way guilty from my white sundress, and I let it fall to the floor. Adam doesn't bat an eye at my red bra and panties. I add them to the puddle of my dress at my feet. He waits for me to take off my jewelry, also, and I hesitate before depositing my necklace and ring onto the bookcase next to me.
The psychological impulse to crawl into his bed and cover up with the blankets is so strong, I start to move toward the bed surreptitiously, avoiding his eye-contact.
"I've been telling myself there must be some explanation. Some need for this," Adam muses, looking at me like I've stolen his Corvette when he told me explicity not to drive it. I circle my arms and lace my fingers together just under my belly. I touch the relatively new scar on the right side of my stomach.
"There is," I tell him, and his expression shifts from disbelieving back to expectant. Underneath, I can see his concern and fear. "I'm not sure I can explain it," I add.
"This isn't a god-damned obligation, Evelyn, and I won't have it treated as such," he cautions me.
"No, I know, I wanted to come."
He relents to letting me climb into the bed, and the air shifts to one of his need to understand. The fox fur is rough under my legs and I look out over the strange vistas of Adam's bedroom. He has a watch taken to pieces on his writing desk, and a row of vials beside it filled with greenish liquids.
I came to Gray House for Brad, and Brad alone. It was an innocent encounter between two like animals that had drawn me Home, and Adam and I had so catastrophically interfered with everything. Like a car crash, Adam had just happened to me, and we crashed into one another and we kept crashing, loud and heavy enough to drown out the sound of all other things.
In the cramped kitchen of the Old House, we'd collided that night in January, when we were finally alone, and everything Brad and I had been building together, inside, was razed and replaced with a single white tree onto which I had carved the name "Adam." We had tried to pick our way through the landmines of human interaction that is Gray House, but it hadn't really worked, and the River came crashing down the sides of the granite mountains west of Eden, and carried everything else away; even Brad, even Clyde.
"Did you want it that way?" I ask him, and he climbs into the bed beside me. We'd shared this same bed for almost two years, and this bed nearly exclusively. He looks straight ahead, at the wall.
"Well, yes, of course," he admits. "I told you as much, the day I gave you permission to sleep with Clyde. I have no more intentions of being gentlemanly."
"You also told me that you'd never do anything to interfere in my relationship with Brad."
"I lied," he answers me quickly. "And it was an innocent lie, but it was a lie. Any interfering I did, I did in a playful kind of rivalry. I've never done anything to harm you, or him."
He examines his fingernails, neatly scrubbed of engine grease and trimmed to thin white crescents at the ends of his fingers.
"Yet," he adds, his voice light and airy.
It's true he might, someday, abdicating any promise he's made me so far. Adam is by nature treacherous and disloyal, even to me, because he feels infected by me as much as he feels obsessive of me. We both know, sitting in the gold silence, that he might interfere in any one of my other relationships in the future, but that I would also remain chained to this dreadful and politic faithfulness, no matter what he did.
We put first who we put first. The reason we do it probably doesn't matter, because it would dissect the love we have for everyone else, and measure it, and compare it in depth and passion and constancy, and what a fucking distasteful thing to do.
But maybe that's what Adam wants, really, and maybe he wants to be naked when I do. I cringe, and pull the fur over my legs. Whatever slight Adam feels tonight is one tenth of the poison I know is in Matthew's heart, waiting for me far beneath Gray House, in the warmer parts of Hell. Adam has the capacity to play this game, and to walk steady along this high-wire. Matthew does not. Being a ghost, for Adam, meant learning to experience the love between others, in order to possess it for himself. Being one for Matthew meant disappearing from love forever.
Adam rips off the skin of his cuticle with a toothy sneer, and it begins to bleed.
"I can't abide you keeping things from me," he mutters into his lap. Of course, Adam wouldn't have cared if I never came to him tonight, if I'd let him watch me from a dark corner somewhere. If I'd let him possess the actions I'd taken with Brad for himself, to study and interpret. I glance over at him, knowing this is the moment his rage turns to the aforementioned self-pity.
"We're very good together," I remark at him, taking his torn finger and stuffing it into my mouth. He squints his dark eyes at me in disgust, as if I've purposely given him a disease, and maybe I have. I suck the blood from the tear, copper and salt.
"Hardly," he cuts. "You're a... a menace," he argues, taking his hand back.
"I didn't think," I tell him. "I should've told you, I'm sorry. I was with Brad, and I wanted him to... I wanted to show him..."
I hesitate and struggle for words before I begin to cry. It happens to me usually so fast someone not looking directly at me would think I'd begun to laugh. Adam, knowing better, just pushes the fur over me and moves closer to me in the bed.
"You two have always struggled," he sighs. "Living proof, of course, that you don't really love yourself. You're so much better off with someone... well, much less like you, Evelyn. And so is he."
"Maybe we don't really work, but we love each other," I plead to him, like he hasn't been listening to me.
"Well, yes, naturally," he relents as he pulls me to his chest. "Such is it with Nicholas, and I."
Invoking his own twin brother quiets me enough to begin to think about them. Adam and Nick have always had a deep and unrelenting hatred which runs almost as deep as their deep and unrelenting love. You can't know someone, maybe, how we end up knowing each other and not hating them as much as you love them. Or loving them for the truth of who they are, which might actually be the same thing. Maybe we never worked as a couple because I'd spent so much time and energy trying to make us into one, and we just aren't.
In the breadth of human history, we've only ever found three or four relationships to have with someone. Beyond those parameters, only few have dared to tread, and usually have done so famously and disastrously. It leads me to think there are certain inevitable ways a heart breaks, which we can count on. But here Brad broke my heart by removing himself from it, slowly over years, like removing a railroad spike and giving me time to heal.
"When I came to Gray House, Brad and I were already breaking up," I tell Adam. "We broke up and found out we could never ever ever get back together. And then we moved backwards."
"Mm," Adam murmurs, and I feel the sound vibrate in his chest.
"We went backwards, and after we broke up, we were in a relationship with a lot of problems. We had lost our house, but then it grew back. And then we were in a relationship that was kind of good, but we could tell it was going to end. And then we were in a new relationship."
"So. Now. Having gotten to that place, what happens next?" he asks me.
"I don't know," I admit to him. "I've never felt like this about anyone else. I've never gone back in time before. Or even through it all mixed up, like it has been."
"But you took him to the house," Adam protests. "The house which now stands, untouched by your destructions. Isn't that right?"
I nod. Adam lights one of his cigarettes from the case on his nightstand.
"Well, I'd very much like you to show it to me," he decides.
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