Adam & Eve (38 page)

I pictured the Lucy whom I had actually known, the young assistant I had assumed was Gabriel’s girlfriend. “We shared her,” Gabriel had claimed.

A film such as the one Gabriel had tricked me into watching could so easily have been faked. It was pornographic, not artful. Gabriel could have hidden the images on the drive of his computer, coiled in the chip, waiting till he gave it some signal I never noticed so that it would seem to be part of Thom’s memory stick. He could have caused the film to embed itself in Thom’s flash drive, too.

The answer was either yes or no. Thom was the person I had always believed in, or he was not. I thought of the probability problem referred to in physics as “Schrödinger’s cat.” Tonight it seemed more likely that I had been mistaken about Thom. Was letting Adam draw me the way he did, and come to me as he did, the acting out of some feeling of degradation or of revenge on my part? Or was it liberation, joy, therapy, friendship, love, transition? I sighed and closed my eyes.

I remembered the abundance of Thom’s graying, springy hair. My own hair had its graying threads now. No curls. I thought of how Leonardo had loved to draw curls of hair, in angels, in men, in women. Sometimes he had drawn streams of water that swirled and curled like hair. Drowsy relaxation claimed me, and I thought of Schubert’s trout, a fish that smiled. When I slept, I dreamed of Fred Riley standing patiently beside a stream, hoping to catch a trout in a hand terminating in pale claws. Seated at a concert grand, the bedouin fingered ivory keys, interspersed with black ones grouped in twos and threes. Near the piano in a wooden chair, Arielle sat on Adam’s knee. Once again I tucked the viola under my chin.

D
EEP IN THE
night, curled in the cave of sleep, Adam dreamed of himself walking in the garden. Alone, he knelt beside the crisscrossed bark of a palm tree and prayed God to give him Eve. The side of the tree creaked open like a door, and graceful, nameless animals passed before him. A young woman appeared, richly dressed in the desert manner. “I’m here.” With a little gasp, she apologized, and her wide eyes looked afraid. “There will be blood on the sheets.”

Sleepily, he said, “They’re already red, aren’t they?”

He held out his arms to her. Many women had walked willingly into his arms, whether he was sane or not. Rosalie? Always he was a tender lover. He hoped so. This time he would live tenderly with her, too. No betrayal.

This he devoutly intended.

In the morning, Adam heard a light rapping at the door. When he opened it, a slender arm thrust through, holding a lightweight but beautiful dressing gown, purple with gold threads and small mirrors.

“There’s one for everybody,” the voice said—certainly it was Arielle’s voice. “Grandfather brought them on the donkey.”

Adam expected his robe to be too small, but his arms entered the sleeves as though they were entering air. He liked the thin, crisp fabric.

“Come to the library for coffee, please,” she said from behind the closed door to the hall.

Adam crossed into the adjoining bedroom, but Lucy’s room was empty.

When he entered the library, the four of them were already tucked into soft chairs. Their bodies bent this way or that—relaxed, chatting, eating, licking their fingers. It appeared to Adam that they had been talking for hours, sitting in their comfortable chairs grouped together on a lovely woolen carpet. Perhaps the carpet would rise and transport them to perfuméd Arabia.

Their robes and the food—glazed and braided breads encrusted with slivered almonds, goblets shaped like funnels filled with small round golden plums, the sprinkling of pink rose petals over the table—everything spoke of luxury. The word
Venice
formed in Adam’s mind, though he had never been there, and he felt the glide of a gondola.

“Such uniformity—all of us in robes,” Lucy exclaimed, but because the colors of the robes varied from person to person, Adam thought her choice of word to be not quite right.
Unified,
not
uniformity,
he thought. How composed and unified we are, like diverse people in a single painting might be. A Renoir married to a Matisse. He thought of the valise stuffed with art books Lucy had insisted on buying for him as they traveled. “They drew,” she had said, “yes, but, remember, they also painted.”

Lucy’s robe was scarlet shot with gold; Pierre was in verdant green, Arielle in azure, and Adam in royal purple like the prince the grandfather had said he was. Why did the grandfather resemble a turtle? It was the way his head thrust forward almost horizontally from his shoulders. The grandfather’s robe was the colors of sand and birds’ nests.

Quickly, Arielle said, “Beautiful. The robes our dear grandfather has brought on his donkey make us beautiful, one and all,” and Adam loved Arielle for the kindness in her courtesy.

While they ate breakfast together for the first time, their hosts asked how Lucy and he had met and what had happened to delay their arrival in France. Lucy’s sentences seemed curved, Adam thought, then straightened like a drawing that wanted to be a portal more than a picture, and he wondered if
what she said was true. She told her tale briefly, and then Arielle wanted to know his own story before he met Lucy.

The touch of Arielle’s question caused Adam’s history to contract and repackage itself within his brain. His story was like an insect, a roly-poly bug that could curl itself into a smooth gray ball concealing its many legs like small hairs along its side and also obscuring its beginning and its end. Rapidly rolling the small ball of narrative, he spoke even more briefly than Lucy had.

“I was captured, and beaten and left half dead. I found myself in a place, a garden, that seemed like Eden. Like the first day of creation. Like the beginning of my life. I have recovered my health.” After each of his sentences, he provided a space that Pierre filled with Arabic for his father. Neither Lucy nor Adam mentioned the feral boy or how F. Riley descended from the sky in an orange parachute, or his death. Together, they described how Gabriel Plum had betrayed them. Because Adam felt that what he had said had a mistake in it, when they finished their duet, Adam looked into Arielle’s eyes and said, “I should have said, ‘I am recovering my health.’”

Immediately, Arielle translated the reshaped sentence, passing it along—like a well-rounded apple on a platter—for her grandfather. She opened her hand and made the palm flat as she spoke.

Suddenly the grandfather began to speak in Arabic. The strange words bubbled and flowed from his lips. Arielle quickly folded in her fingers and brought her hand, balled something like a fist, to rest in the V of her body, where her legs met. Both Arielle and Pierre sat perfectly attentive, as he talked on and on. He never made the slightest pause for translation.

A long time later, he still was speaking. Who would think, Adam mused, the old man would have so many words in him? The old man was like a mountain spring, and the words from his lips flowed unceasingly over jagged rocks and smooth, flat stones, over toads and watercress. Minnows swam in his words, and then a gigantic whale whose passing was interminable. Yards and yards of gray whale blocked Adam’s vision like the passing of a freight train at a rural crossing, till finally the way was clear and that moving assemblage no longer blocked the vista. Then Adam felt Lucy glancing
at him, no, a steady gaze. In their garden life, her gazing eyes had been a calming hand.

Someplace in another room a clock chimed ten times. Adam realized the grandfather would talk forever. They would die listening to his wet voice, the way it snagged on twigs and ruffled around a sharp rock. It was a room of fathers: Arielle’s father, her father’s father. His own father, the old rancher, might come to stand beside the grandfather, two eagles like harbingers of eternity. The distant clock chimed eleven times, and still Arielle and Pierre sat still as foothills before the mountain. The gonging of noon, twelve strokes after the clock cleared its throat, and a server stood in the door, listened, and disappeared. Very slowly, Lucy rose. She stood behind Adam and put her light hand on his shoulder.

At the stroke of one, the old man stood. In his body, he himself became the figure of a short, straight number 1; and the words ceased. He bowed his head to each of them, and like a sand dune walking, he moved without moving, across the room and away.

Pierre blurted, “My father has told us the history of everything. We must make a pilgrimage.”

Pierre stopped speaking as abruptly as he had begun. He looked vastly uncomfortable, pained, as though his gut cramped him and yet he could not release his bowels. Finally, with a grunt, he said, “You share all but one of my secrets. I must share now my unshared secret with you. My father has said I must take you to a certain place immediately. My secret place. No one but me has been there, not for thousands of years, not for many tens of thousands of years. I am shaken because I had no idea that my father knew this secret. Now we are to go to our rooms. Arielle and I must put on warmer clothes, and we will lend you jackets and caps.”

“Where are we going?” Lucy asked.

“To see cave drawings, paintings, etchings, the bas-reliefs that use the shapes and colors of the rock as inspiration for particular animals. And one small statue.”

“How long will our trip take?”

“A few hours.”

“Why—”

Pierre stopped her speaking by putting his finger across his lips. “In this story,” he said playfully but nervously, “you are allowed only two questions.”

When Adam turned, he saw a flush of anger pass over Lucy’s face. Her face was almost as rich a scarlet as her dressing gown. Had he ever seen her angry? Alarmed, he glanced at Pierre.

Immediately Pierre crossed the three paces that separated them. He took both of Lucy’s hands. “I have made a mistake,” he said earnestly. “It was wrong of me, not clever, to set limits on your need to know. I’m very nervous, too eager to follow my father’s instructions and to begin my task.” Astounded, Adam marveled at how quickly Pierre had understood and analyzed the causes behind his inappropriate speech. Now he was saying he hoped Lucy would forgive him. “Not even for my father’s sake, Lucy,” Pierre said, “would I have enmity come between you and me.”

“You don’t know what cave paintings have meant to me,” Lucy said. She was roused by the imperative to explain. “To me, they’re the emblem of the human spirit. When people first knew themselves to be people, not just survivors, they felt the urge to create. Probably they danced and told stories, too, but what have endured for us are the paintings. When I encourage my patients to paint and draw, I’m encouraging them to know the root of their humanness and that they’re not alone. Their work bridges the space between them and any other human.” Though she seemed to empty herself with her speaking, she added yet one more question: “Why did your father say we must go on this pilgrimage?”

“For Adam’s sake. To heal his wounds.”

Lucy leaned forward and slowly kissed Pierre on each cheek. The anger drained from her face. Pierre reached out both hands to her, and their misunderstanding was over.

Adam’s whole body felt a surge of relief. The cosmos wanted to heal his wounds? Then Lucy would know and forgive what was inevitable and necessary.

Adam held out his hand to Arielle. She received his large hand with her little one, squeezed, and released it more deftly than an expert angler could release a lucky trout.

Pierre said, “My father says we must journey together, the four of us. Perhaps there is danger.”

Well capped and coated for their journey underground, the quartet reconvened. The old man was not with them, but Adam saw the Sufi outside explaining things into the long funnel ear of his donkey. When Adam looked into Arielle’s luminous brown eyes, he fell into their depths and fell and fell, though he knew his feet were still standing on the polished oak floor. Pierre placed flashlights into their hands—blue, yellow, green, and red, their stalwart barrels full of batteries.

“The door to the cellar stairs is in this room,” Pierre explained.

Lucy was surprised. The room was lined with bookcases. Adam quickly looked around but saw no other door. Arielle began to smile.

Pierre took a red leather book from a shelf. Its gold-stamped title read “Revolve.”

“In the original house, the cellar stairs began here, where I built my library room. On an impulse, I made one of the bookcases revolve, like a door.” He opened the book; in the center, pages had been cut away to house a switch. He touched the button, and a bookcase turned on its axis, revealing the stairs.

“My whimsical papa,” Arielle said. “Grandfather will love it.”

“It’s a remote device,” Pierre explained. “It can be activated from anyplace in the house.”

As Pierre began to descend to the cellar, Arielle and then Lucy quickly followed, but Adam paused.

Looking at the elongated flight of stairs, Adam felt his strong legs quiver with uncertainty. The angled tree trunk among the redwoods had seemed less threatening than these down-diving, dusky stairs. Where the original wooden steps ended, earthen steps had been carved as the floor was excavated. At the top of the tall wall of the basement were ordinary half-windows, but the light entering the basement fell so far, it became weak before reaching the earthen floor. Adam hesitated. Below was the land of nightmare. Everywhere, just under the surface, pulsed the possibility of war or violence.