Final Vinyl Days Read Online Free Page B

wouldn’t exactly
broadcast
it at home.”
    â€œNo. That’s not it.” Now he was thoroughly confused. He had no good reason. All of the likely ones were there, but they simply weren’t good enough. They weren’t good enough to overlook that rare match that might never happen again. How many awful weddings would he have to attend just to even come close to such a meeting? Still, he felt like a fool, confused and speechless.
    â€œIt’s the Adam and Eve thing,” he finally said later that night when she was almost asleep. “It drives me absolutely nuts.”
    â€œYou’re not serious?” She fumbled to turn on a light and then turned to face him. She was propped up there on her elbow without a stitch on, her thick hair fanned out around her face. “I was going by Evelyn, remember?
You
were the one who started calling me Eve.
Little Eve LynWallace. Little Eve Lyn Wallace
. You said it so often you sounded like a mynah bird.” Her eyes watered, but she fought the impulse with a deliberate laugh and a forced shake of the head. He waited for her to deliver her biggest piece of ammunition, the fact that she had let him talk her right out of her old life and romance and right into his. He could hear it coming, the blame and insult, the imposed guilt and obligation. And then he knew. He knew that what he really wanted was for her to tempt him, seduce him, beg him to marry her.
    â€œYou are serious.” She sat up and pulled her worn-out robe from the floor. She had announced proudly on her first visit that fashion should never forsake comfort. Now she was lost in the loose folds of terry cloth, the belt pulled tightly around her waist, and he found himself thinking about how she had said that as a child she had to sleep with her hand over her navel for fear that the bogeyman would come and touch her there. He realized then that he had already wrapped the blanket around his body like a cocoon. This was not a conversation to have naked. “What if we were Mary and Joseph?”
    â€œThey had better results.”
    â€œI have no intention of being the person you want to step in and ruin your life, be an excuse for you to be screwed up and feel sorry for yourself.” Her speech gaveway to the slow twang he adored. “I know that’s what you’re looking for, and that’s not why I’m here.”
    Now he felt entirely stupid. He felt so incredibly stupid that he tried to turn it all around into a joke. She pulled out that big piece of hard Samsonite luggage that her parents proudly surprised her with (it was a story she often told when she had had too much to drink and was feeling homesick) when she moved to Atlanta, and he felt desperate. He begged her never to leave him. He said they should get married then, that weekend. He suggested they pull out the atlas and look up all of the Edens they could find—Arizona, Maryland, North Carolina, Texas, Wyoming. They could get married in Eden, North Carolina, or Eden, Maryland; maybe they would live there forever. Maybe they would go to Eden, Australia, on a honeymoon, or maybe that was a trip for later, maybe that was for the silver anniversary. He hadn’t meant anything that he’d said; it had been anxiety talking.
    She thought it was all hilarious for a while. She laughed and kissed him, said that he was sweetly weird. She said that there was no reason to rush into anything, that given all that he had been thinking, she felt it best to wait at least a few months and then talk it over again. This made him feel the need all the more; he said he wanted a standard wedding, everything and anything she wanted.She said that she first needed to find an equivalent job; they needed to find an apartment with a clean bathroom.
    When they finally got married, it was in that same country club on a June day just about as hot. The bridesmaids wore lavendar and there was a champagne fountain, but no one passed out