La Vie En Rose

I watched Adam furiously beat the air with that large hand fan. I didn’t think I had witnessed a hotter March in all my twenty-five years of living.

I helped Adam turn the only sofa in our living room towards the window so he could get some more air but it was no use. Sitting across Adam in our dining room, I knew the air came through the dining room window and not the one in the living room window as he thought, but he was adamant.

I almost started to resent him as I saw what the heat was doing to him while I sat in our airy dining room and watched beads of sweat roll down his back as he kept trying to manufacture his own fresh air with that beat-up raffia fan. I did not like the fact that at four o clock on a Sunday afternoon, Adam and I were sitting in the heat and existing as separate entities from each other. I knew that many magical aspects of our love would become rather domestic when we got married, but I did not expect the automatic quality of all the things we used to do together to fade so suddenly. We did not automatically end up in each other’s space anymore. We stopped automatically liking each other’s company. In the early years of our marriage, I did not even have to choose at all. I just ended up in Adam’s space and it was always a delight. My own La Vie En Rose.

Now, even staying together physically was such a hard choice to make. Why was I not ignoring Adam’s foolishness and sweating it out with him on the badly placed sofa? How long would it be before we start to drift farther apart and become those old couples I read about; the ones the husband cheats on the wife, not with other women, but with sports and television, and the wife cheats on the husband with what she would consider some peace and quiet?

What had happened to us?

For some reason, looking at his sweat-shined back infuriated me. Sitting on that couch, Adam could have been any other guy or some old uncle come to visit. The indifference I felt towards him in the room maddened me, but the intense heat softened my anger in a way that made me feel woozy and I almost started to fall asleep. Then I heard Adam speak.

“Evy, let’s go somewhere.”

I was not in the mood to go anywhere, I wanted to sleep.

He was standing in the dining room and blocking my line of view from the sofa. It did not matter anymore since he wasn’t sitting on the sofa any longer. This also meant that I could not fume at his sweaty back anymore.

I was too tired to protest, so I took the dress Adam brought me to wear and I let him lead me outside.

“We are not driving?” I asked.

“No, no… It’s close by.” He said.

Adam locked the front door and we started walking to this place I did not know and did not bother to ask about.

It was this large expanse and most of the trees and grasses were dry. Like the pictures I used to see in my JSS3 social studies textbook entries about certain places in the north. I remembered those pictures because I always thought the most perfect I’d feel was when I sat under one of those dried-up trees on the dry grass on a cool evening watching the sunset and taking in it. I only ever mentioned it to Adam once.

I didn’t realize that I had been staring for such a long time… When I finally became more conscious of my environment, Adam was already spreading a blanket on the grass for us- How did he even get a blanket?

“How did you get that blanket?” I asked as I went over to join him.

Adam chuckled. “You really don’t realize how absent-minded you’ve been all this while, do you? I have been holding this blanket all along.”

“How did you find this place?” I tried to change the subject.

Adam shrugged.

He sat on the blanket and beckoned me to sit. I let out a breath I did not know I was holding and I made for the far end of the blanket but Adam didn’t let me. He pulled me closer before I could protest and eased my head on his shoulder… He did all of these things while humming a tune and looking everywhere but at me. He was breathing fast, maybe it was from all that walking, but his breathing soon evened out and an expanse of silence stretched out in front of us.

Adam broke the silence.

“Evy,” Adam said, “I really wish I don’t have to go to the clinic tomorrow.” I felt his body heave up and come down, the workings of a very deep sigh, the beginnings of a sob. “I am tired of it. I almost want to hate it, but I can’t.” His voice broke, alongside a piece of my heart.

I turned around so I could really look at him. My poor baby, he looked so tired. How could I not have seen it? How could I have been so caught up in my own troubles?

How long had he been that tired? How was I so blind? I said nothing, Adam squeezed my arms. He mistook my silence for fear. He thought I was scared that he would stop going to the fertility clinic where we were trying everything we could to have a child. He did not know that shame; hot, white, and piercing was coursing through my being… For some reason, what our love was beginning to look like warranted more concern from me than the distress of my beloved. Hypocrite that I was, I did not realize that it was practicality we used as a salve for the automated sourness that life could bring; like the pain of not having a child even though you so desperately wanted one. Healing from pain was a practice, choosing to love was a practice, being attentive to your lover was a practice, why did I forget?

It shamed me that while I was still being petulant about being lost and staying set in my ways, Adam, who had wounds from deep within was looking for me. Adam did not let his pain make him forget me, he came looking for me. I forgot Adam, but he did not forget me.

Yet, it was Adam who was sobbing in my embrace, crying about offspring he through no fault of his own couldn’t provide. It was an accident in his childhood that damaged his reproduction.

“I’m so sorry, Evy. I really want to give you a child.”

At that moment, it didn’t matter that we put almost all of the money we worked for in the coffers of a fertility clinic, trying all we could to get a child. It didn’t matter that all my fantasies about love, marriage, and babies were about to be erased and replaced by struggle, work, and effort. Or that Adam and I would go on to live with two children we adopted, and one we finally had when we were not even trying.

We both rocked each other like mothers rocked their children.

In the broken perfection of that evening, love stopped being a fantasy. It stopped being La Vie En Rose. Love, to me, became a person. Love became Adam.