Free Eve's Men by Newton Thornburg

her eyes suddenly filling. “Maybe then you wouldn’t be angry.”
    “Eve, I’m not angry.”
    “Of course you are.”
    “Then why? Why did you say it?”
    Even though the tears kept coming, she continued to smile at him. And when her face began to crumple finally, as if she were about to cry, she fought it off, straightening up and shaking herself, like a filly twitching flies away.
    “Your brother,” she said. “That’s why. Oh, I guess I can’t really say he cheats, since he makes no pretense of fidelity. Instead he just throws it in your face and says live with it. Which unfortunately I do.”
    Charley was more puzzled than shocked. “Who do you mean? Belinda? Tonight? ”
    “Who else?”
    “But that’s ridiculous, Eve. She can’t hold a candle to you. Why would you tolerate it? You could have any man you want. You must know that.”
    She shrugged indifferently. “But I love Brian. Even now, when I know not only what he’s going to do but why.”
    Charley said nothing, waiting.
    “Your brother’s just not like other people. When he’s like this—I mean in trouble, powerless, angry—he doesn’t want love or support or sympathy. He’d never come crawling for anything. Instead he does this. He says in effect, ‘Here, take a look, here’s my fuck tonight.’ And he dares you to go on loving him.”
    “And you do?”
    Looking rueful and whipped, she nodded. “It’s not as though I didn’t expect it. In the beginning he wouldn’t let us live together because he said this would happen and poison the relationship. He said he loved me more than he’d ever loved anyone, but that he could never be monogamous. Things would happen, he said. He’d be down and depressed or having a great time, and some girl would come along, some girl he would have to have. He was only being honest. In L.A., I think that’s the way it is with most men, the only difference being that they’re not honest about it. And that’s what I told him. I said I could live with it—because I couldn’t live without him.”
    Charley didn’t know what to say. Brian after all was his brother, and he had to admit that if he looked at the matter objectively, Brian’s stand was not without merit. At least he was being honest, which was more than could be said for most men, including Charley himself at the moment. He hadn’t forgotten his response to Eve’s question about whether he had ever cheated on Donna, for the truth was somewhat different. While he had never cheated on her in spirit, never having had an affair of the heart, he nevertheless had had a number of one-night stands during the last eight or ten years, usually when he was away from home, at a convention or the like. Though he was not proud of this, neither did it eat him up, for he believed that marriage met a woman’s needs much more fully than it did a man’s, in that men were more promiscuous by nature, forever frustrating their abiding lust for other women. So, over the course of a marriage, he regarded a few missteps as only natural. But they were also private , he believed, not the sort of thing he cared to share with anyone, certainly not with Donna, and now not with Eve either.
    Still, even though he may have shared his brother’s weakness, he was offended by what Eve had told him. It rubbed him the wrong way. There was just something unsavory about it, almost an element of sadism, the way it virtually institutionalized the infidelity, rubbing the woman’s nose in it, making her live with it. Charley didn’t like it, and he especially didn’t like it if that woman happened to be someone like Eve, who he thought deserved the best.
    Certainly she deserved better than this, sitting in the firelight with her lover’s brother, probably wondering at that moment if Brian and his gaudy snow bunny were making love.
    Charley looked down at his glass, surprised to find it empty again. “My brother’s a goddamn fool,” he said. “But then, I already knew