Why Eve was cropped out from the left of Adam, I had no clue. I set my apple by my side on the pews and took a long look at the oil-painted apple in Eve’s hand. It was the only item that represented her presence within the altar frame, looking at once discolored and sinewy like a breast. Our priest once said the artwork was commissioned by a renowned male merchant of its time, which made sense. A man could do anything with a woman in those days, he told us with a smile I would do anything to scrub off his face—paint her, marry her, crop her, you name it.
Listening to him, I thought back to my Adam and how I, like Eve, was cut out of the frame of his life overnight. If I got the priest’s words right, my loneliness was most likely the doing of another big angry male deemed in high regard in the world of men, Satan, but perhaps it was God who failed me. One day Adam and I were getting along at a level unmatched by anyone else in my life and the next thing I know he was being unresponsive to my sixteenth text message in a row. I imagined his spidery fingers hovering over his phone all night, at once touching and not touching it like the soft spots of my body. It was those hands that I’d first noticed about him, with which he greeted me into his life and then didn’t let go until the day he ghosted me.
For weeks to come, I wept and wept. In the Old Testament, Gargantua was said to have cried for three months, seven days, thirteen hours, and forty-seven minutes to give birth to a river. Could it be the same oil-painted river that now stood before me, parting the land between the Adam and partially present Eve? “Each mortal,” our priest once told us during Mass, “has an equal right to the use of his or her land and the water in it.” But if that were really the case, I thought, then why the Eves of this world weren’t entitled to their right to the land of men? Why were we deemed secondary to almost anything, like the afterthought of an afterthought?
One day at Mass, long after our breakup, I spotted Adam at church again. He was sitting with his big sister in one of the front pews, switching between smiles and scowls every few minutes. Following the sermon, he found me in the courtyard to say hi. As we shook hands, an electric current traveled across the blackest guts of my body, making me shudder as if we’d never broken up. I felt dirty, sinful again as if I were the only person in the congregation who renounced her share of wine and sacramental bread. The way he looked at me, all thoughts of decency fled out the window. Just in case you were wondering, I wasn’t doing anything to make his dog bark. Thanks to my aligning stars, I’d dyed my hair back to its natural color just the week before, so I felt fairly confident about myself, my looks, and that, I guess, did half the job. When he asked me if I would care to entertain a coffee with him, I blushed. “We don’t have to,” he said, producing his killer smile, “if you don’t want it.” A lot of things happened to me that I didn’t want since our breakup, I wanted to tell him but kept my mouth shut, as always. I just wondered how much of our time together he thought about, if at all. I wondered if he missed me.
To my disappointment, the cafe of his choice was teeming with drunkards and renowned infidels of our small community. Nothing about the place looked particularly godly and the lighting was representative of some recent hype I wasn’t familiar with. We picked the corner farthest to the bar and drank peppermint schnapps, his favorite. He joked about his job while I told him about my sister and how she was offered this fancy college scholarship before accidentally getting knocked up by a Lutheran Computer Scientist and ending up getting married. Adam nodded the whole time, utilizing his smile at all the right moments. If there was an undercurrent of tension in the air, I sure hoped I wasn’t making it up.
Just when I thought Adam would reach over to hold my hand, he sprang up from the table and said that he needed to hit the restroom. I couldn’t decide by the way he looked at me whether this was a fact or another one of his naughty propositions. I watched him disappear into the dim hallway and then decided to go after him.
Adam was whistling a tune from my childhood in one of the stalls when I stepped into the men’s room. He didn’t take notice of my entry or thought maybe I was some other dude. I walked toward his stall in slow steps and stopped right at the brink. That was when he stopped singing and I felt the first pump of adrenaline rushing through my veins. I pressed my fingertips against the swing door but didn’t immediately give it a push. First I tried to imagine what would happen if I did. I thought about all the women in my life for a moment—my mom, my sister, Gargantua, friends. I found comfort in the mental image of Eve as if she were my avatar, my spirit animal. I don’t know what got into me at that moment and made me do all those things that followed. Maybe it was Satan that made me, maybe not. Our priest would later ask me what I meant by it all in the confessional box. A woman can do anything with men these days, I would answer—paint him, marry him, crop him, you name it.