Likes by Sarah Bynum (e novels to read online .TXT) 📗

was grateful, but also that he disagreed. Don’t you see it? Eva asked. She was full of adoration for him. For the way his feet sounded coming up the stairs, the way he kept himself so clean-smelling and neat, for the solo dances he’d perform on the carpet when he was happy. Countless ways and things she adored, innumerable as the stars. Things that of course existed before they were married, but to which she could now fully surrender, abandoning herself to wonder. How did she ever. How did she ever. She could not account for her fortune. She could only note that she had, unaware, held part of her self in suspension before, and now she had let go. The fall was slow, luxurious, and seemingly infinite. It refused to be described. She was reduced to murmuring, almost against her will, You are the best. Words impoverished of their meaning, used most often to thank a person to whom one’s not truly indebted, but when Eva uttered them to her husband, she asked the words to carry the full weight of her astonishment. She wasn’t ever confident they did.

A paradox of growing so close to another person was the doubt that you could impart to them the very closeness that you felt. Eva would awake in the night, feeling someone’s breath on her forehead, hearing someone beside her ask, Do you know how much your husband loves you? Do you know?

Eva would sigh and burrow more deeply next to him, then descend into a dream about the king. He was drawing his sword from his belt. He was turning to face an enemy. The look on his face was grim, and the circle of motion his body described—rough hand on hilt, arm sweeping up, torso pivoting in the direction of danger—had a poem’s grace, its balance and frugality. There was the clang of metal meeting. The hissing sound of tempered weapons slicing through the air. More enemies, their black helmets dull in the brilliant sunlight, came swarming down the wooded slope. They yelped and they whooped, they beat their drums and bared their rotting teeth like dogs, but the expression on the king’s face did not change. One by one he felled his enemies, pressing in on him from all sides, with a bleak patience and determination. Eva flattened herself against a tree and quaked. Not once in her dream did she fear for the king, but she felt acutely the overwhelming odds against him, the extreme peril, the thrill. He would not die, but he might come close. The bark of the tree bit into her skin, her fingers were sticky with pitch, the pine needles yielded beneath her feet. The next time that Eva awoke, in the darkness of the bedroom, her heart was beating very fast.

The mornings made her sad. She didn’t like saying goodbye to her husband when he left for work. She held on to him tightly, and he said to her, We’ll see each other tonight. I know, she sighed, but that seems far away from now. And it was true, the days were long. He was a resident in emergency medicine. He was a lawyer for legal aid. He wrote articles about changes in technology, for which he was paid, and also articles about wars in Africa, for which he was not paid. He worked in a record shop and composed strange, haunting music. It didn’t matter. He was doing something good. Eva, also, had a job. She had high hopes for herself. For both of them. They were traveling the distance, in very small, sometimes imperceptible increments, between where they found themselves now and where they desired one day to be. Soon. It wasn’t happening quickly enough. You’re getting there, they told each other. With brightness in their voices, a true conviction. Over and over they told each other, You’re a rock star. Fuck them. What do they know. You’re kicking ass. I mean it. We’re getting there. Soon.

Eva would see the king when she stepped onto the bus in the mornings. Then she would see him again in the lap of the little boy sitting across from her on the aisle. She would see him behind the glass at the newsstand, and as he flew raggedly down the length of a block. When she walked to the bank she saw him, hair tangled and sword raised, looking out across the city from the top of an office building. Somehow he remained irreducibly himself, even when miniaturized on a lunch box, or multiplied in the pages of a magazine, or flattened and stretched across the side of a bus. Though she saw him everywhere, her spirit would still leap in surprise at the sight of him. Then her heart would unfurl, in petals of flame, and she would burn with a clear, consuming light.

At its peak, before it extinguished itself, the fire made Eva’s vision sharpen. She perceived what was beautiful and fierce in the man who drove the bus, his supple fingers tapping against the wheel, and the man beside her in the elevator, who nodded at her kindly, almost caressingly, before he stepped off at the seventh floor, and the man she saw from her window, crossing the street against the traffic light, a small limp in his step. She stared at each of them and realized, I could love you. The thought filled her with courage. She wondered if everyone around her might feel it, her valor and love, radiating off her like heat. But as quickly as it flared up, her insight faded, and all that remained were the ashes, the unremarkable faces of men.

The nights also made Eva sad sometimes. She tried luring her husband into staying up late, with the promise of movies or cookie dough or card games. I don’t want to go to sleep yet, she’d say as her eyelids grew heavier and heavier. Yet the new sheets were so exquisitely soft. And