Somewhere East of Eden

Adah searched my face. She said, "You really think I'm pretty?"

I laughed and said fondly, because that's the way I was beginning to feel about her, "You were the belle of the ball tonight Milady."

Her eyes hardened and she said in a growl that was utterly choked with emotion, "I'm not going to fuck you - no matter how nice you're being to me!!" Where did THAT come from?!! Her voice sounded like her heart was breaking.

It finally pissed me off!!! I said angrily, "That's a totally shitty thing to say to me!! Why do you think like that? I truly believe that there's a sensitive and decent human underneath all of that tough cynicism and I'm just trying to get to know that person."

Adah looked at me wonderingly and said, "You're not just saying that because you're trying to get in my pants?"

I chuckled self-deprecatingly and said, "I already made that mistake once and it got me killed. Don't you think that it'd be pretty foolish to turn around and make the same mistake again?"

She looked at me like something was finally sinking in. I added meaningfully, "What did you think about my former partner. Does it seem like she has the slightest clue?" Adah's eyes widened.

I continued, "You're a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, and I just wanted to understand what caused that to happen. What made you so bitter and disillusioned?"

Adah actually looked at me in a sociable fashion and said, "I can't talk about it right now. Maybe I can bring myself to do it after your visit to the Hall of Consequences. Let's plan to get together after that.

With that, she rose with a loud sigh and said, "I'll meet you in at the entrance to this garden and we can find someplace private to talk." Then she walked slowly, head-down toward her room, never looking back.

I was oddly uplifted. My family adopted a pound dog when I was young. People had mistreated the poor creature his entire life. He was skin and bones when we got him, and he'd growl warningly whenever I came near him. But I devoted myself to feeding him and petting him and over time he became my best friend. Adah was a beautiful woman, not a dog. But I suspected that she was my salvation.

*****

I met Gabriel for breakfast at our usual table. It was Eggs-Benedict and Bloody Mary's today. Up here, you get the taste from the alcohol, not the consequences.

Speaking of consequences, I had an appointment to review mine. I was nervous during my walk over to the hall where that was to happen. I knew it would be another ghastly experience.

The Hall of Consequences was a bit more like what you'd expect a modern purgatory to be. It was in the opposite direction from the Hall of Truth and it's ambiance was that of a high-end clinic. Everybody wore white lab coats.

I was ushered into a small dimly lit room that was eerily similar to the one I'd sat in when I'd last visited my optometrist. Except I was hooked to a large medical looking device rather than staring through a gadget at an eye chart.

My attendant was a woman named Azrael. She was as beautiful as Ariel. But unlike Ariel, who radiated sexy competence, this one had the open and welcoming demeanor of a female concentration camp guard, or maybe Grand Inquisitor.

Azrael attached the leads and darkened the room. I heard her voice in the dark say, "Whatever you do don't move from this chair or we will strap you down." Yikes!!!

I was forced to endure the emotions of the people I'd wronged. It was worse than I could have possibly imagined. First, I experienced Rick's heartsickness and despair. I felt his guilt at killing us, his lack of self-confidence at being cheated on, and his endless misery as he awaited his trial.

Next, I jumped to Lilith's head. I felt her anguish at my betrayal, the resultant feelings of abandonment, sadness, and distrust along with her total loss of faith in humanity. I felt her loneliness and uncertainty as she cried in the night.

Then I was transported into the heads of my players and the people I knew in town. I felt their contempt and disillusionment. I finally understood what the loss of honor and respect really meant. I was utterly drained when I finished that part of the experience. But I hadn't seen anything yet.

The visit to my parents was the final nail. They were completely bereft of the happiness they had earned through a life of hard work and decency. It's tough enough for a parent to outlive their child. It's even harder when that child was a well-known cheater and a philanderer. Their devastation was the hardest cross of all to bear.

The tsunami of emotions had almost driven me over the edge. I was sobbing uncontrollably by the time Azrael brought up the lights. I turned to her and whined like a little bitch, "I never meant for any of that to happen. I didn't want to hurt anybody. It was just meant to be a bit of harmless fun."

Azrael gave me a "grow a pair" stare and said, "You sold-out your reputation for your base urges. Nobody wallowing in an affair ever thinks about the impact on others. But things don't happen in a vacuum. There are always consequences. Did you think about the people you might be hurting while you were rutting with that woman? Of course not!! All you could think about was how good it felt."

She added unsympathetically, "It's always the same. The two star-crossed lovers think that what they're doing is beautiful and special. Then they get caught and the chickens come home to roost. THAT'S when they're full of regret."

I had nothing to say in my defense. That was exactly what happened.

Azrael said coldly, "Now that you've actually experienced the effects of your thoughtless actions you can comprehend the true magnitude of your crime. But you also need to keep in mind that the innocent people you hurt will have to carry their sorrow with them for the rest of their lives." That was chilling.

Then Azrael added almost sympathetically, "I'll leave you here to pull yourself together. You can leave whenever you like. This Hall is the harshest experience and the level of remorse you've shown is a sign that you are making progress." Then she turned and left closing the door silently behind her.

Nobody wants to see themselves as a monster. Now, that my true self had been revealed to me... I understood what an arrogant and insensitive prick I'd been. The self-realization made me sick.

Then I thought of Adah. If I'd been horrified by my relatively uninteresting brand of sleaze, I couldn't imagine what she might be feeling. She'd already tried to kill herself once and she hadn't had to endure her consequences. What would she do to herself when she did?!

I threw the door open, bolted out of the clinic and across the meticulously trimmed lawn, running panicked toward the entrance to the Garden. It was another gorgeous day in paradise, sunny and hot with a cobalt blue sky overhead, exactly the same color as Adah's eyes.

I was astonished to see Adah waiting patiently by the garden entrance. She was looking in the direction of the resort as I came up behind her. I said maybe a little too emphatically, "How are you? Are you okay??"

Adah turned and regarded me serenely. That was weird. I expected her to be a wreck, which was why I'd dashed over so alarmed. But either she hadn't undergone the same experience that I had, or she was a total psychopath. Otherwise, there was no accounting for her obvious lack of feeling.

Adah noticed my concern and looked mystified, then a curious new emotion passed across her face. She said, "I was just waiting for you." Her voice was oddly warm. It was the attitude that you'd have with a longstanding friend, or God-forbid a lover. She'd never said anything to me in that tone of voice before.

The sudden change in attitude was scary. But I'd long-ago given up trying to figure out what species of gorilla was mating in Adah's exquisite little head. So I simply said, "Shall we find a place to sit?"

She actually took my hand as we wandered into the garden. It was one of those Versailles fantasies with sculptured bushes, tall hedges, and stone benches in interesting little grottos for privacy. There was even the occasional fountain.

We walked back into the shrubbery for some distance. All I could smell was the earthiness of the cultivated ground and the resinous scent of the carefully manicured boxwood as the heat of the day beat down on it.

It was cool and totally silent in the place where we chose to sit, except for the trickling sound of the little fountain. Adah was on one end of the bench and I sat on the other. Her new attitude was eerie. But I still wasn't going to move any closer until I was sure that she wouldn't go feral on me.

The upsetting aspect was the way she was dressed. Instead of her customary biker-chic outfit, she was wearing a demure skirt and sweater combination with bare legs and Topsiders. It would've looked right at home in Newport, or Hyannis. The abrupt leap from seamy to preppy was mystifying.

Even worse, the dirty and disheveled version of Adah might be beautiful. But the scrubbed and carefully made up one was unearthly attractive. It was like I was seeing an earlier incarnation of the bar-fighting skank that I'd known up until then.

I was trying to wrap my mind around my little friend's sudden transformation when she took my hand in both of hers. The instinct was to protect my fingers. So, I almost grabbed it back. But she said sincerely, "I'm sorry."

I sat there utterly astonished. I finally got enough wits about me to say, "Sorry? Sorry for what?"

She said simply, "I can see that you're waiting for me to do something to you and I probably deserve it. But I understand now. You've been kind to me, and you deserve to hear the details of my sordid life."

Wringing my hand, Adah recounted a narrative of anguish, horror and degradation that belonged in a nineteenth century Russian novel, not twenty-first century America. It all started when she met the wrong guy.

Adah was the only daughter of New England wealth, hence the biblical name. Her parents had made their money the old-fashioned way -- they'd inherited it. And Adah had undergone a privileged upbringing on the classic, blue-blood cursus honorum.

First, she boarded at Portsmouth Abbey. Then she moved on to Mt Holyoke. She said sadly, "It never occurred to me that I couldn't have whatever I wanted. The only thing that kept we a virgin that long was the fact that none of the places where I went to school were coeducational."

That all changed when the first busload of boys from Amherst arrived for a weekend social. It was there that she met Lamech, another lad whose Puritan roots went straight back to the Mayflower. Adah was eighteen by that time and completely out of control.

The guy might have a good old fashioned, straight-out-of-the-bible New England name, but the dude's thoughts were purely carnal. Adah was gorgeous and as innocent as a spoiled rotten little society kitten could be. So, she was easy prey for a twenty-year-old guy with absolutely no moral compass.

Adah quickly discovered that she loved to fuck and Lamech found to his astonished pleasure that he had a wildcat on his hands. Of course, Adah just assumed her man would take care of the contraception and Lamech, for his part, could care less whether he knocked her up. Thus, pregnancy was a given.

Neither set of parents was amused. Adah, who had been given an instant dose of reality, kept ducking the abortion. She simply didn't have the mental wherewithal to commit to something that icky. Finally it was too late, and at 19 years and seven months Adah was a mom.

That set off a pissing contest between two of New England's most distinguished families. The result was that Lamech stepped to the altar, with Adah's father's shotgun shoved figuratively up his ass.

Needless to say, neither one of the newlyweds intended to stop fucking around. But at the same time, Adah had discovered a creature she loved more than herself. That was baby Jubal. He was named after her grandfather, the one who had MADE all the money. She loved her son with all her heart, and she protected him from Lamech with her own body.

The boy's father was a perfect example of over-entitled, arrested development that money creates. Lamech was utterly self-absorbed and a slave to his own base instincts. He resented the shit out of his own kid because the baby clipped his wings. And so, of course he took it out on Adah.

Initially it was just mental abuse. But that very quickly morphed into the physical kind. Adah spent a lot of time hiding her bruises with makeup and making excuses about her clumsiness. She would have left the sadistic varmint if it had just been her. But her husband was very explicit about what would happen to her baby boy if she even thought about leaving him.

Then one day Adah was sitting on a towel watching little Jubal play in the sand of Gooseberry Beach. She had her floppy sun hat on, so she didn't see him approach. He hunkered down next to her and said, "So, what is a pretty lady like you doing out here all by herself?"

She actually gasped. He was the most attractive hunka-hunka burnin' love she had ever laid eyes on; six and a half feet of perfectly muscled masculinity with the dark good looks of Jamie Dornan and the body of Dwayne Johnson. He was clearly a cowboy, not somebody of her social class. But he was waaaay too yummy to blow off. So she fucked him instead.

The fact that Adah felt no obligation to be faithful was based on the fact that her husband viewed his own marriage vows as situational. Yet, up to that point her few trivial transgressions had been with members of her own social class. Esau Jones was her first experience with a guy who didn't mind getting his hands dirty and he rocked her world. It took only a couple of months before she started talking about leaving Lamech.

Jubal was the problem. Lamech had made it clear that he would take her boy if she left him. Adah explained that to Esau. She never told him to do anything about it. But Esau was a practical problem-solving kind of guy and he was "that" close to marrying into all that money. So he cut right to the chase and Lamech disappeared.

Lamech's parents demanded justice and they had a lot of influence with the county DA. The ensuing investigation turned up Adah's relationship with Esau Jones, who had long since departed for places unknown - putting Adah neatly in the frame. The cops had no body and just circumstantial evidence, but people had been convicted on a lot less, and there was plenty of proof of the affair.

That all led to the sensational trial of the woman the press dubbed the "Ivy League Killer." The jury saw Adah as an overindulged amoral slut who thought that money put her above it all. Hence, it looked like she was going to be convicted of murder. As a result, her lawyer advised her to take a plea. The sentence was six to eight for conspiracy.

Adah's parents took the little boy to raise. That was the good news. The bad news was that they would raise him in the same aloof and overindulgent manner that had so thoroughly fucked up Adah. While at the same time, they also disowned their own daughter. It was as if she had never existed to them.

Adah was devastated by the loss of her family. But that was nothing compared to a life locked up with a bunch of female hardcases. Those ladies all knew that Adah was the daughter of privilege. So, every one of them worked out their lingering personal resentments and failures on her. Therefore, her time in prison was a battle for survival and not a day passed when Adah wasn't in a fight.

The warden eventually put Adah in solitary for her own protection. The relentless isolation from even the simplest of human pleasures finished the job. She was batshit crazy by the time she was released. Adah was once a preppie princess. Now she was a wild animal, perfectly adapted to life on the streets.

She was living in a half-way house and earning a decent living as a street corner hooker. What else could she do? She had no marketable skills and a murder rap on her resume. But she was still beautiful, and it wasn't long before she came to the attention of the pimp who controlled that turf. Adah joined his stable after a day-long and very painful session of "training."

The guy running her was making his money appealing to the mass-market, rather than anything upscale. So, Adah's experience with men was of the quick, brutal, and selfish variety.

There was one guy in particular who scared her. The pimp told her to do him anyway since the dude was paying top dollar for the privilege of having somebody to hurt and degrade. Adah finally drew the line and her pimp killed her with all the remorse of somebody swatting a fly. Then, her body was dumped into the Charles like so much garbage.

*****

Adah was dry eyed as she spun that ghoulish tale. Now I understood why she was getting special treatment. I was utterly mortified by what I had thought about her. My life was boring and trivial, and my pain was insignificant next to what she'd endured. No wonder she trusted nobody.

Everybody in Adah's world had failed her, her parents, her husband, her lover, even humanity. They had plundered her and then they had abandoned her; albeit in the case of Lamech it was feet first. I would have been curled into a little fetal ball if half of that had happened to me. But Adah kept on fighting to the very end.

When she finished, Adah was looking at me like she thought she had blown up her last tentative bridge back to humanity. I would have taken her in my arms to comfort her. But I didn't want to make any intimate moves until she said it was alright.

Instead, I gazed into those incredible azure eyes and said, "I'm just so profoundly sorry. You were exploited and betrayed. No wonder you don't trust anybody. I don't expect you to trust me either. But I want to prove to you that people can be kind and decent. Can you at least give me the chance to show you that?" I knew that she was a hopeless case, but I felt obligated to try.

That was the response she wanted. I could see it in her eyes. However, instead of going all girly on me she said hesitantly, "We can hang out. But I'm still not going to fuck you."

I laughed out loud. Adah might have taken one tentative step out of the confines of her past. But orange was still the new black for my tough little friend. It would take time and patience. I said, "Just don't get into any more fights defending my honor -- promise?"

She said chuckling, "I'll remember that. In the meantime let's grab a little lunch." It felt as if a crisis point had been passed. We meandered back through the garden maze and thence to the lobby restaurant. Gabriel was at his usual table. He stood and gestured for us to join him.

We walked up to the table and he said, "Sit." We sat.

He said, "I see that you two are striking up a friendship." Adah mumbled resentfully, "Kind of." Then she added obstinately, "But he's still not getting any of this." And she gestured down her hot little body.

Gabriel did the same thing that I had done, he laughed fondly and said, "That's good to hear Adah."

Then he turned serious for my benefit, "I thought you ought to know that your former lover has been sent back. Her session in the Hall of Consequences was a total disaster. She blamed everybody but herself for her transgressions."

Gabriel sighed and added sadly, "Eve has no concept of the price of hubris."

Then he brightened. He said, "However, I got glowing a report from Azrael about you. Your reactions were totally appropriate and a very good sign that you are coming to grips with the critical factors that have heretofore tainted your lives."

The plural of "life" was aimed at me. I got it. I'd been there before. But I didn't understand why he hadn't included Adah. Had she even had her session?