Excerpt from Lilac Mines:
This will become the place they broke up. Felix tries to see it in the past tense: the exposed brick, the goddess painted on the door to the bedroom, the stack of legal books by the couch. This was Eva’s fabulous downtown sublet, across from a hotel where you could buy your own private sushi chef and above Liberty Bail Bonds. Eva moved in last month, and Felix had pictured many more good ones spent here, in artist’s-loft bliss.
“But you said you just liked that she had so many sex toys,” Felix says. “Remember, you said, ‘She’s fun to mess around with, but I could never be in a relationship with a musician.’ You said the hours wouldn’t work.”
Felix hopes that if she can create a precise history—and back it up with quotes, just like her professors always said to—that Eva will reconsider. She’ll renew the vows of their non-monogamy and agree that, while Kate Mendoza-Lishman might have a great drum kit and an industrial strength vibrator and sweet slim hips, Felix is the only one she wants to call her girlfriend.
But Eva just perches on the arm of the couch, angular chin resting on her knees, arms wrapped around her long thin legs. Normally she moves like a dancer, as if she could spin into a pirouette at any minute, but when she’s upset, she pulls in and gets very still. Kate probably doesn’t even know this.
“I guess you accommodate when you really want to be with someone,” Eva says. “We haven’t worked out the details. I just wanted you to know—that’s what we agreed on, right? That as long as we were honest with each other, no one could really get hurt?”
“That’s so…lawyer-y of you. You’re totally twisting it around,” Felix says, wishing she sounded slightly less desperate. “Anyway, I accommodated you with this whole open relationship thing because I really wanted to be with you.”
This is partly true. It was Eva who said that monogamy was archaic and doomed to failure, that it pitted women against each other. But Felix liked the idea of infinite possibility, of trying on different women like outfits in a giant walk-in closet. They would be the too-high heels she strutted around in for a few hours; Eva would be her comfy jeans. She liked the idea of being at the forefront of something. In practice, Felix sat at home liking various ideas while Eva went out and met Kate and Vanessa and Donald, the bail bondsman. The latter has been a bit inconvenient. Donald has seen too much porn. He keeps knocking on Eva’s door and asking if she and her girlfriend want to “hang out.” Felix has endured it all—because she is determined to be progressive; because in their year together there have only been three side-whatevers, all seemingly casual; because she loves Eva.