The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert

Author:Elizabeth Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2009-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

Worst of all, he was losing Valarie.

Consumed with his business and frequently on the road, Eustace was rarely with his girlfriend. She was working hard, too, and she was still in love with Eustace, but she was increasingly feeling that she had lost herself in him.

“I still love this man,”Valarie told me, looking back on the relationship with fifteen years of distance. “I still have every gift he made for me, from a knife sheath decorated with beads to a little hatchet I always used up at Turtle Island to a beautiful pair of earrings. If I died tomorrow, I’d want to be buried in those earrings. I loved learning from Eustace. I loved how he always gave me do-it-yourself birthday gifts. I told him one time that I wanted a pipe of my own for ceremonies and praying, and I came home one day to find a beautiful piece of soapstone on the kitchen counter. ‘What is that?’ I asked. He said, ‘It’s your pipe, Valarie.’ ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘Where is it?’And he grinned that wonderful Eustace Conway grin and said, ‘It’s inside the stone, honey. We just have to get it out of there together.’

“I loved him, but I lost my identity in his, because he’s so overwhelming and powerful. I had my own thing going in life before I met him, but I quickly became the person who was beneath him, and my world started to revolve around his. He was and is a loving but intolerant person. Someone else’s opinion was never welcome. He was obsessed with making money, with buying land, with success, and he was always on the road. It got to the point where I never saw him. The only time we spoke was when he gave me orders.”

Valarie and Eustace had a good mutual friend, a Native American guy named Henry, who often went to powwows with them and who taught at Turtle Island. After a few years of loneliness and dissatisfaction, after feeling more and more that she was nothing but “the First Lady of Turtle Island,”Valarie had an affair with Henry. She hid the relationship from Eustace and denied that it had ever happened, even when, suspicious, he had asked her directly. Eustace, knowing something was up, took Henry off for a private evening to smoke a ceremonial pipe, and asked point blank whether he’d slept with Valarie. It is the most sacred tenet of Native American spiritually not to lie when smoking the pipe, but Henry looked Eustace in the eye and denied the affair.

Eustace was in torment. He knew in his heart that something was wrong and that he didn’t have all the facts. Devastated, he broke up with Valarie because he felt he couldn’t trust her. A few months after they split, Valarie came back, told him the truth, and begged for forgiveness.

But you don’t lie to Eustace Conway and then get a second chance. He was too horrified to even consider taking her back or transcending the injury.

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