SCENE II
EVAN
Do you really love me?
Why should you?
I don’t seem any longer
To be able to cope with friendships.
EVA
It is a horror, an outrage
That we should not be here together. I struggle against
The wound of not knowing where you are each minute.
Everything you do is more important to me than my own life.
The whole of me is with you.
I see and feel you so distinctly,
your beloved cold hand in mine
Your touch on the nape of my neck.
Both joy and agony
– my insides torn by pincers.
A double goodbye would have been awful
– two bites on the bullet of pain.
This love is like something we have given birth to.
We must never blunt our imagination or tenderness.
Don’t get a cold in your soul.
EVAN
I disappoint everyone.
I deliberately left one of your letters for Elayna to find.
With me love is linked with
A need to betray. I invite possessiveness.
She made me promise our love would never be physical.
I lied fluidly.
EVA
Even the thought of
Such a loss of pleasure tears at my heart
Like some medieval torture.
You harrow me unbearably.
My defenses are down.
I’m filled me with a sense of ghastly injury.
How I wish I were more beautiful –
It’s my mouth that ages me.
I want you seeing all of me –
Even if it hurts.
You are your own child,
You preserve your youth with the harm
That you cause.
I am dead and already
Interred – in you.
You are my eternity.
EVAN
You can’t have everything.
I am kept aloft by the conflict of
Unbearables.
I am happy.
EVA
Our dancing life is over –
Shall I enter a convent?
There’s no point in being alive
if we’re not together.
I show my deepest self to you alone.
EVAN
Please – no more shaming conversations
Over Irish whisky. Let’s cut our losses
And get some fun from life.
EVA
The gash in our love might close
But I can’t forget it’s there.
Life with you is a remote happiness to which I cling.
EVAN
And all this time you write
Fantastic books. If you were as unhappy as you say,
You couldn’t write so well.
I am the whetstone on which you sharpen –
I should be thanked for all your works.
EVA
You shed your light around me.
I am always aware of that other world we share
– Or do we? Our pattern seems set –
If treachery can’t break it,
There is no death.
EVAN
I am losing interest in sex.
My bed gets so icy in the small hours of the morning –
I feel I am trying to communicate with the spirit world.
I am in limbo and will never escape this place.
The adolescent remains alive in me, I have a
Panic fear of conformity.
So I cast myself as the elderly rake.
I’m the bore –
Marriage gets me down.
EVA
When you go on and on about yourself
You’re a man I don’t recognize.
I prefer your adolescent self.
The man of the house is a free agent.
A respected prowler
Who looks benevolently upon the faces of his womenfolk.
Then he’s away – with mistresses or boyfriends.
In my attack of loneliness, I’m housebound,
Eating baked beans and drinking stewed tea.
EVAN
In other countries women
Are less bossy and more decorative.
Alysse Aallyn 