Chris Adrian - The Great Night

She considered this question through the remainder of their evening together. It wasn’t his sparkling googly eyes, or his rounded biceps, or the stark veins standing out in his forearms, or the little cowlick of gray and white hair that curved down over his forehead. It was nothing about his physical presence, but neither was it the nervous way he flitted from topic to topic in the one-sided conversation he was having with her. They went dancing, but it was not the way he danced, shuffling in place and boxing with unseen enemies in a crowded upstairs club on the corner of Eleventh and Folsom. She didn’t exactly choose to intoxicate the already drunken drag queens and hipsters and costumed freaks, but neither did she withhold intoxication from them. It was a by-product of her mysterious temporary contentment, how the fake beehives hung from the ceiling became real beehives, and the fake stars set on the ceiling brightened and the ceiling became a night sky, how the chubby hipster in a fuzzy bear-eared hat became an actual bear, hopping on his hind legs and stuffing his paws in his mouth for joy. She naturally presided over any dance; the whole club circled them round and round, and a few of the weaker ones swooned into attitudes of frank worship upon the floor. Her date had stopped talking, so she knew it wasn’t his words that kept her suspended between being heartbroken and being heartbroken.

They walked back to his place silently, hand in hand. Actively looking forward to the sex, she conjured a wind to hurry them along, and lift them here and there over a busy intersection. She was sure the fucking would reveal the source of her engagement with him, and though she anticipated that orgasm would put an end to her transient satisfaction and return her to the gloomy depths of her brooding nostalgia, she wanted to get there, so she started kissing him as soon as they got in his door.

“Are you sure you want to—?”

“Oh, yes,” she said.

“But I’m—” She didn’t let him finish. It wasn’t the words, or the stories he told, or his oddly shaped little body, or the clumsy motion of his tongue inside her mouth. It wasn’t his round little arms, or his firm belly, or even the heft of his penis in her hand, though at last she discovered what it was when they were standing naked before his bed. She left him then, absent an orgasm, and went home to the hill. She let him watch her depart unobscured, a gift, because she was fond of him despite his being the occasion for another terrible discovery. She went up the hill in the skin of a lion, with antlers on her head and a single floppy wing on her back and a heavy blunt dragging tail. She had been gone long enough that her courtiers presumed the evening must have been a success, and they prepared a feast, chocolate cocks and marshmallow pussies set upon a table on the top of the hill. They started to sing as she approached, ignoring her defeated form, until she grabbed one of the smallest of them and, ignoring its cries, reshaped it, molding its head into a pair of lips a little larger than human-sized and pulling its body into a hollow tube. She made it a pair of wings and, cradling it in her palm, said, “You are made to a purpose.” Then she breathed on it, and set it winging back down the hill. She sat down at the head of the table, and said nothing else to anyone for the rest of the night.

All this to say she knew right away what was happening when Puck mastered her effortlessly and gave her over to the absurd mortal in the long green coat. The lesson of the peanut-butter-footed man was that it was everything and nothing about him that put her misery in abeyance. By dumb wild luck, Oak had found her someone whom it was possible to love, though that possibility was so remote there existed no measure sufficiently broad to describe it. She’d never again find a mortal lover to destroy in spirit of callous fun. Her realization was ridiculous and obscene, and she ought to have punished her date, not sent him a blow-job faerie magically equipped to suck out some small portion of his loneliness, but she was fond of him even in her despair and found that she couldn’t hurt him. She considered, in her long silence, while her courtiers nibbled agitatedly at their chocolate cocks, that it ought to have pleased her to know she could feel fondness for any creature after the disastrous departures of her husband and her Boy, but the possibility only felt like a looming, destroying threat.

Puck defeated her with startling ease, and then he punished her with startling intuition, creating a hell for her out of material at hand. When he shoved the candy ring upon her finger, she felt it right away, that same fondness she had felt for her lonely little date, but this was only the beginning. Shortly the rest of it came crashing over her, leaving her not enough of herself even to scream. She smiled and put herself hand in hand with this ridiculous — ingenious, alluring — man and said, “What is your will, my love?”

Huff flexed his finger, which was sore, and considered the situation. The Mayor had departed, running away at top speed waving a pair of underwear in his hands, which seemed like an extraordinary stroke of good luck. And he had married Huff to the lovely woman before he left, which was extraordinary, certainly, though it remained to be determined whether it was lucky or not. Huff had been married before, the first time when he was only seven years old. That had been an informal but not unserious arrangement with an older neighbor girl named Julia. He had decided to show her his penis and when he asked her if she wanted to have a look she said she could only do that if they were married. So he got down on one knee and asked her to be his wife. She squinted at him a moment, and flattened her lips together, and finally said, “I suppose so.” He was going to get his five-year-old brother to come be the preacher, but she said, “Stupid. That’s not how you do it.”

She’d fetched a broom and they each jumped over it three times. “That’s how the slaves used to do it,” she said proudly. She liked to remind people that her family had owned them as recently as one hundred years before. Huff could remember her pale face very well, a lingering effect, he supposed, of their marriage, fleeting as it was. She had a wide nose and full lips that she seemed always to be trying to eat, chewing at them with her snaggle teeth or folding them up like she did when she was thinking hard about something. They honeymooned out behind her toolshed, where he showed her his stuff. “It’s nice, isn’t it?” he asked her, because he had just that morning noticed how nice it was, and that was why he suddenly wanted to show it around. She said, “It’s okay.” They divorced later that afternoon after she brought him the certificate she’d drawn up. Hereby , it said, I do divorce you. There was something to be savored, he thought much later, about how brief and entirely to the point it had been, and the near-total absence of rancor in their relationship was its own sort of pleasure. There had been rancor galore in all the subsequent marriages, to Sylvia and Natalie and Carla and Allison and D’Artania.

All that to say he had been married extensively enough to know what it was like, and to know how a person could seem magical and intriguing, like the answers to your prayers and your problems, and then later, twenty minutes or two weeks or three months or a year, have become, while you looked away for a moment, something or someone else entirely. The magic went away, they became bored and boring, and all they cared to notice about you anymore were your many flaws. “You,” D’Artania had told him, for example, in her valedictory address, “are the most selfish person I have ever met.”

If anyone was going to be different, though, it would probably be this lady, who came somewhat refreshingly to her wedding dressed in armor and carrying an ax. Most ladies didn’t bring the ax out until well after the honeymoon. He thought this must mean she was holding her tenderness in reserve, which seemed like a better arrangement overall than to use it all up at the beginning of the relationship — he had always been a person who liked to get the hard part over first. And yet she was looking at him very tenderly already, from beneath her helmet, and her ax was discarded in a tree.