Comfort Me With Apples(19)

Adam flushes an ugly color. His lip curls up in disgust. He leans in toward her. “Sometimes, after they talk to the thing in the garden,” he whispers, “they have babies.”

Sophia frowns. “What’s a baby?” She looks around the great table. The six empty chairs. She cannot understand what he could possibly mean.

“Nothing,” Adam says sharply. “A mistake.” He peers at her. “You’ve talked to the thing in the garden, haven’t you? The snake. Cascavel.”

Sophia nods.

“I suppose you’re mad at me now.” Adam pouts into his plate. He is still so beautiful to her. Despite everything she knows, she wants to forgive him. Longs for it like food to nourish herself. They built her this way, that boy and his Father, so that she wouldn’t bother him too much. And she is still faulty. He is an empty hole hungry to swallow her up, no different than the one in the cellar.

Sophia draws a long, ragged breath. She takes her husband’s cheeks in her hands, then wraps his bulk in her slender arms. She buries her face in him, breathes in his smell. Thinks of Mrs. Lyon and all her kittens. Of Mrs. Fische’s silver hair. Of Mrs. Palfrey dancing on the stage. Of life, and long grass, and the sun rising and falling on Arcadia.

“I love you,” she whispers. Her very cells rejoice and stretch toward him. Yes, they sigh. This is right. We were made for him. Without him, we are nothing. Let him save us. He will always save us. “I forgive you. It’s all right. It’s all right. Just let me stay. I’ll be good. I’ll be happy.”

“I’d like to, Soph, I really would. But it’s better like this. A fresh start is always best. Believe me, I know. I’m an experienced guy. You’d always judge me for it. Make me suffer all those little teensy cuts only a wife knows. It would never really be the same. This way, I get what I want and you … darling, you get what you want! To never be apart from me. To be with your friends forever. I’ll come and visit you, I promise. Every night. She never has to know. The next one, whoever she’s going to be. No one will ever know. This is the beginning of the universe and I make the rules. I am the seed of all that comes after and I will never tell a soul you existed. And next time will be perfect. She’ll be perfect. I know it. Because you forgive me. They’ve never forgiven me before. But you do. That’s how close we were. You said so and you can’t take it back. I am free. I can truly start again.” His eyes shine up at her. “Say it again. So I can remember. Say you forgive me.”

Sophia curls her nails into the back of his neck. She tries. She tries so hard. The apples shimmer cruelly on the pie plate and she tries to force herself to say what she wants to say.

Eat it, you fucking pig, eat it.

But she cannot. The atoms of her will not allow it. She was not built to allow it. She grimaces. His blood wells up under her nails. It will leave a scar. It will leave a scar and maybe that will be enough. For the next one. To make her understand. The way the last one made her understand. She will see a wound shaped like a woman’s nails in her husband’s neck and she will wonder. A neck that should be smooth and kind because the world knows no suffering yet.

Does he feel it? Does he see? Her breath comes quick and fractured.

“Eat, darling,” she says through a frozen, devoted, perfect smile. “Your pie is getting cold.”

Adam closes his hands on her throat. He kicks the plate away. It bursts into pieces against the door.

“I love you,” Sophia wheezes, and she does. She loves him so much and she keeps loving him right up until the moment when her pupils blow out and it all burns away, the parks and the pools and the roses in the window boxes and the animals and the wide, generous streets and the amphitheater and the lions yawning on the grass next door beside the silvery fish and the clever minks and the lazy lambs and the busy bees in the market and the roof shingles in Gevurah Grey and the walls of the house that was hers in Innocence. The long stark gate and the desert beyond and that lone and lonely tree bending so low its fruits touch the hungry, waiting earth. Her great soft bed like an inland sea, her great grand mirror like a quiet friend, her sad little soap molds and half-empty pie plate and the bowl of wilted orange roses, white chrysanthemums, and three bright fuchsia hibiscus branches teetering on the edge of the table, frozen in space, about to tumble, about to fall.

The dear, familiar, adored shape of him receding into a gulp of blackness.

It all burns away and the ashes slip from her fingers and she can never love anything ever again.





PINK LADY



I was made for him.

It is morning, which is to say, it is the beginning of all things. It is bright and it is sharp and it is perfect and so is Eve, who wakes alone to this singular thought, as she does every morning; to this honeyed, liquid thought and sunlight and sparrowsong and the softness of green shadows in a house that has always been hers and hers alone. Her husband spoils her and she is grateful.

Eve runs her hand over the place beside her where her husband sleeps every night and thinks it again, with as much joy: I was made for him.