Timshel

On Adam Trask

I love the concept of a book boyfriend. Men in books are so easy to fall in love with. The combination of what the author gives us and what we project onto these men can be intoxicating, and emotional attachment to the world you’re reading about is the sign of a “good book.”

I would argue the Big Three of book boyfriends are Aragorn, Mr. Darcy, and Rhysand (with whom I am not familiar). These men are framed explicitly as romantic heroes in their stories.

I just experienced my first book boyfriend. For whatever reason, Adam Trask is “my man my man my man.”

Let me establish something. My emotional investment in Adam Trask is so deep that I legitimately felt jealousy toward his early adoration of Cathy and thought, I’d have loved you right, Adam.

As any woman who has lost her senses to love would do, I googled “Adam Trask book boyfriend” and every variation of it I could think of. To my shock—and delight—the search generated nothing.

“Well, that’s more Adam for me,” was a real thought I had.

And then, almost immediately: what am I seeing that is making me feel this way about Adam? why am I attaching to him?

I hit a point in the novel that had me needing to say this: I love this book. And I fucking love Adam Trask.

He really, really tries. He grows. Slowly—but he does. He isn’t incapable of being tethered to reason.

And because of that, I found myself loving the idea of a world where Adam got to have another story. Where he got to be a father and a husband in a loving ecosystem.

Where his love was given a trellis.

Because love like Adam’s is climbing by nature.

It wants to wrap around something, to grow upward, to expand.

But without structure, it grows wild. It attaches to the wrong thing. It collapses under its own weight.

I imagined a version of Adam—married to me (yes, I know, sue me)—with a little girl because I wanted to test what his love would look like if it had something real to grow toward.

Because in that world—loved right, grounded in something true, with an actual innocent feminine presence in a daughter instead of a projected persona of innocence onto a wife—Adam Trask becomes the perfect book boyfriend.

In conducting this emotional experiment alongside my reading, my understanding of Adam Trask grew deeper. I kept waiting for him to disappoint me, especially because I had created an idealized world for him in my own imagination.

He never did.

He would frustrate me in bursts, but this was always immediately undercut by my compassion for him and my understanding of what he was actually craving.

Adam’s initial wound was a lack of a mother. We see, multiple times throughout the novel, how this wound is transferred onto the women in his life. He will not see them clearly.

When a severely injured, young woman appears at his door—beautiful in a way that implies innocence—Adam’s love blooms in response to fragility. In his own need for a mother, or a nurturer of any kind, he is drawn to something that needs care, something dependent on him.

I can acknowledge where this is emotionally stunted and misguided. That doesn’t erase what that initial scene of him taking Cathy in did to me.

In that moment, Adam is attentive and careful. He asks if she’s okay. He tells her she doesn’t need to try to talk or do anything. She can rest. She can heal. She is safe, and he will tend to her and make sure the doctor cares for her well.

When the doctor arrives, Adam’s care borders on overbearing. The thought of any more harm coming to this small, delicate creature that crawled to his doorstep is unbearable to him.

He interprets this as romantic love, of course. But what it actually reveals is how unguarded and accessible his goodness is.

He and Cathy marry. For Cathy, this is a means to an end. For Adam, it is truly a place for his love to land.

We learn much later in East of Eden that Cathy and Adam were only intimate once. It is heavily implied—through structure and symbolism—that their sons are actually Charles’s children. What I take from this is more of Adam’s goodness.

He did not make physical demands. He allowed her injured body to rest. He accepted that pregnancy was difficult for her, that she needed care, space, recovery. Cathy, of course, makes sure he knows she was never too injured or too ill for Charles.

And still—Adam never hates her.

He sees her clearly. He is free of her. But he never hates her. And when her life ends, his response is one of compassion. He weeps.

In that moment, I felt a flash of something like jealousy. How could he cry out “oh my darling” for her? Was my Adam regressing? Was he not over what had been done to him, even after all those years?

And then the feeling passed.

What remained was the realization that Adam’s reaction was, in fact, deeply human. Grief has a way of collapsing time. Cathy’s death is an act of calculation and cruelty, but grief is not concerned with the technicalities of a death.

In that moment, an unresolved dynamic between two people becomes frozen—forever unresolved.

For a little while, Adam is thirty-seven again, caring for a badly injured young girl he believed was good and sweet. For a moment, he is watching Cathy, pregnant, in the sunlight under a tree in the Eden he was building for her.

His grief is not for the woman she was.

It is for the life that was never realized—and the clarity that, sometimes, no matter how much love we pour into someone, they will not be changed.

Adam’s story is not singularly bound to Cathy, and I reject readings that say, “she ruined his life.” Cathy abandons him midway through East of Eden and dies at the very end. He spends plenty of time in growth and contentment between those two points.

Early in the second half of the novel, we see Samuel Hamilton and Adam’s servant, Lee, quite literally beat sense into him regarding his grief. Lee has been caring for Adam’s one-year-old twin boys. Adam is withdrawn and neglectful—but not cruel. Never cruel.

He can be reasoned with. He wants to do better. He was so caught up in his wounded pride that he couldn’t see how it was causing harm. And when this is shown to him, he accepts that it is not an excuse—and he moves to do better.

Adam never had a parent care for him emotionally. So the next decade involves very little emotional engagement with his sons. This, too, is pointed out to him. And once again, he decides to do better.

And he does.

Around this time, Adam remembers that he hasn’t written to his brother in ten years. He decides that today, he will. The decision is casual. Natural. Entirely lacking in self-consciousness.

This is after Cathy reveals to him that she and Charles had an affair, that the twins are more likely Charles’s than Adam’s.

And still—he chooses to write.

Unfortunately, he is too late. Charles is dead. Time will move whether we act upon its movement or not.

My love for Adam deepened here. How brave it is to decide, after a decade, that someone deserves the dignity of knowing they are in your thoughts. That you care. How big in valor it is to push pride and embarrassment aside and extend a hand across time.

Charles leaves half of his money to Adam and the other half to Cathy, now Kate. Adam, with no caveats or contingencies, tells her what she has inherited. She cannot accept that he is doing this simply to be good—and he does not care.

He doesn’t need her to see him now.

He sees her.

And still, he chooses to be morally righteous.

And again, I fell for him.

He pours his love into his sons, even if imperfectly. But who among us has ever had a perfect father? Perhaps even fewer of us have received what Adam offered: awareness of his faults and an incessant willingness to say, but I can learn.

He invests in ideas, too. Really, ideas are Adam’s one true love. Cathy was, after all, an idea he attached to. And Adam Trask does not engage lightly. He wants to understand things fully.

He learns of a mastodon preserved in ice and becomes fascinated with the idea of frozen preservation. He experiments with small cups of fruit in his icebox, testing how they fare. And I melted—because Adam is still Adam, even when he’s playing scientist.

What was once arrested development becomes, here, something else: a healthier, more grounded form of childlike wonder.

Adam loves like a child. Without bitterness. Without restraint. Without needing anything in return.

And while this begins as something that leaves him unmoored and vulnerable, it also allows him to become the man who never stops choosing goodness.

He chooses.

“Thou mayest.”

It would be impossible for me not to acknowledge the most important element of my love for Adam Trask.

I saw myself in him.

His fixation on the mastodon and the little cups of ice. The way his love pours out of him—achey and rife with symbolism. His reflex to say, tell me everything so I can learn you.

All of it gave me a kind of affirmation: that the way I show up in the world is good, and worthy of love and care. That unguarded tenderness does merit dignity and protection.

If your reading of Adam Trask depends on him receiving the romantic love he deserves, then yes—he will seem tragic.

But when his son Cal and Lee speak of him and say, “I love him.” “I love him too,” the text rewards his goodness in a way that matters more than anything.

Because he could never feel that for his own father.

And the inheritance of choice he passes on—thou mayest—offers something like repair in the Trask family line.

Adam Trask wanted a garden of Eden for his wife, and his children, and his children’s children. He let his land fallow. He moved to a city. He came from Connecticut—east of Eden—to California for this dream that, in a literal sense, went unrealized.

But he did not die unloved or unresolved.

He chose.

Again and again.

My next tattoo will be the word “timshel” on my ribcage—the placement a symbolic nod to Eve coming from Adam’s rib.

I couldn’t change the ending Adam Trask got in East of Eden.

But his arc affected me, and taught me enough about myself that I can pay him in kind—in our mutual language.