The Demon Lover – a play for two voices by Alysse Aallyn

2 – Cadena – Enchainment

EVAN
A happy guilty day full of betrayals
Kept me in an extraordinary state
Of fascination. I’ve lied to everyone for
So long, I feel certain that truth
Is beyond me.

EVA
I’d rather see you dead at my feet
Than dead ON your feet.
That would be a mercy killing –
The last unbearable agony –
Wondering if you existed at all.

I have small talent for this.
I have disgraced my idealism,
Pretending boredom can be fruitful.
Waiting, waiting for you everywhere. I
Wake one day to find I’ve lost my looks, my hair,
fascination, brain – everything.

EVAN
You’re only waking up
In an empty hotel.
The light is always different
The morning after.
This is what middle-aged people do.
I love the brutality of your world.
You never fade. You are my word made flesh.

EVA
You are my religion.
Until In fell in love with you I was 25 inside.
I lived in a world of dreams and theories.
Your experiences seem realer to me than mine.

EVAN
Social instinct is my religion.
You have the bravery and intelligence
Men are supposed to have
But never do.
To have touched the same places
Is a bond between us.
I never think of my deficiencies –
Or how could I forgive myself?

EVA
Middle-aged people go to weddings
Out of perverse fascination for the bride.
I was that bride –
My day was all champagne.
Anaesthetized
It doesn’t hurt so much.
Such a sense of enormity came over me
I almost fainted. I gave Allen the dirtiest look: “You caused this.”

Without a wedding dress
I was a restless, dowdy snob.
People were falling in love left and right –
Even in decaying marriages.
I wanted that –
He read my subtext.
And I was caught.

EVAN
These dreary parties have a decaying effect.
My loneliness for you is like a whiplash.
Your absence is a bitter injury
But nothing can injure our love –
We’re too strong for them.
I’m silenced till I hear from you.

If I let myself go I would feel desperate.
I can’t bear you’re going to France without me –
But –
isn’t love our country?

EVA
I won’t say “I’ll die if you don’t come”
Because I know you would come if you possibly could.
What a skeleton in the cupboard a wife is.

EVAN
Don’t be jealous of Elayna. You are the only goal
Toward which my life is tending.
You are the meaning of my life.
I could never live for work alone.

EVA
You enlarge my soul.
In your mind is my existence.
You’re more real to me than me.
I’m in a peculiar psychic state.
It’s an atmosphere of illusion.
I envy Elayna all the time.
It drips like an irritant over my nerves.

EVAN
What of Allen? You
Have your worse half too.
I don’t waste my time
Being jealous of him.

EVA
Oh, Allen spends time lost in woods,
Falling in love with trees. He’s
No threat to anyone.

EVAN
To understand one’s destiny
One needs a framework for this mass of experience.
How can I live separated from you?
If I stopped caring for you
I couldn’t care for anything.

I need my wife, her whip-cracking organization.
I loathe living in the squalor I get to on my own.
Having breakfast OUT of bed is the last horror.
Miasmic feelings of impossibility and terror. Help me.

EVA
We help each other
By existing. Except for God I have no help but you.
Our love is growing more formidable as our unshakeable belief
Grows stronger. Like grace, it renews itself.
All yesterday I glowed. My inability to accept your wife
Is my deformity – help me with it.
The light of our love is the only light for me.