First Man (4 page)

“My father always used to tell me stories. He was a historian and an archeologist, specialized in classical civilization.” Her eyes widened at archeologist and could already see her mind conjuring up images of pyramids and Harrison Ford. “It’s not all Indiana Jones, believe me. It’s a lot of hours digging the hot sun, squinting at the ground while you try to figure out what’s an artifact and what’s actually just dirt.

“He used to read to me from Suetonius’
The Lives of the Twelve Caesars
. I loved Nero and Caligula because he never shied away from telling a six year old the interesting parts.” A faint smile crossed my lips. “He called me his ‘little Centurion,’ and I grew up almost believing he was Augustus.”

“We traveled. My mother and I trailed along behind him, following him wherever his whims took us. I can’t begin to tell you the amount of times I’d wake up to him shoving books into boxes and trunks, telling the both of use to get packed because we were off to some obscure corner of Sicily or Greece. I loved it though. The whirlwind of travel. I never had a chance to grow bored of anyplace. It got to be too much for my mother though.” I saw the question in Lily’s eyes. “My parents divorced when I was thirteen. I stayed with my father. My mother and I have never been close.”

“I’m sorry.” I actually believed that she was.

“Don’t be. You can’t miss what you never had.”

Lily paused, searching for the right thing to say. “If you say so.”

I continued without further comment. “A year after my mother left, my father died.” My voice took on the clipped tone it always did when anyone got close enough to warrant this story. “It was sudden and completely expected at the same time, but no one seemed to know what to do with me at first. At the sites and museums my father worked, no one minded me, but when my father was gone it was like they all suddenly woke up and realized that they had a teenager in their midst.” I rubbed my temples, trying to keep the headache brewing behind my eyes at bay.

“Luckily my father was a man who believed in planning. All his affairs were set in order, and he’d left explicit instructions behind. He was barely cold, and I was shipped back to England for boarding school.”

“Wait-“ Lily interrupted, slowing the tide of words that had been pouring from me. “Where was your mother during all this?”

“No idea.”

Lily gaped at me. “Are you serious?” I nodded. “She never contacted you. . . not even a letter?” She seemed more desperate for a reunion between my mother and I than I had ever been.

I shook my head. “I haven’t heard a word from her since she left when I was 13.” I shrugged, but Lily continued to stare at me with disbelief at my lack of reaction. “I made peace with it long ago, Lily. Some people just aren’t meant to be parents,” I added as an afterthought.

Quickly switching to a more comfortable topic, I continued. “I did my tour of duty – boarding school, Oxford, graduate study. I was all set to start teaching at Corpus Christi with my old flatmate Edwin when I realized that I wasn’t cut out to be “Professor” for the rest of my life, so I went to Greece. After Greece it was Italy, Syria, Cyprus, Turkey, and Nigeria before I went to Egypt. I spent the longest time there, close to a year around Cairo before I came back to Europe. Paris was quite the culture shock after a year in Egypt. I’ve lived in half a dozen other cities, and I’ve visited quite a few more. I was in Spain before I came here.”

“You don’t miss having roots?”

“Not particularly. The last time I really had roots was when before my father died. Everything else is just materialistic trappings. There’s far too much world out there for me to want to tether myself to one spot.”

I wondered idly if she would be one of the ones who would try to change me, to give me a reason to set roots. I almost wanted her to try, and a small part of me wanted her to succeed.

It might have ended there, with a friendly dinner and casual flirtation. I could have driven her home, walked her to the door of her tidy, suburban apartment and left. I could have turned up the charm and gained in invite upstairs for a nightcap or more. I could have left before the sun came up.

I didn’t though. Yes, I walked her to the door of that perfect apartment building with its manicured lawns and well-lit driveways. I paused at her doorway, and I could see her mentally warring with her desires and her self-proclaimed status as a good girl. Taking the choice out of her hands, I curled my arm around her slim hips and pulled her against my body.

Fireworks did not explode when her lips met mine. Bells did not ring and the choirs of heavenly angels didn’t start up a song. The world did not notice.

But I did. I’d built a wall around myself, hidden by an easy smile and a sardonic comment. I was the first to admit that I’d always been guarded, but somehow this tiny slip of a girl had found a chink in my armor and wedged her fingers into it. I knew that she’d tear that wall down, bit by bit, if I let her.

I kissed her breathless, and my brain never stopped asking
‘Why?’
She was beautiful, but the world was filled with beautiful women. She shared my interests, but she was far from the first budding classicist I’d bedded.

She pulled back, dizzy from the kiss, and smiled that open, unguarded smile. And I realized.

It was happiness. Lily exuded happiness from every pore, like the delicate floral perfume that wafted around her. Untainted by loss and lacking the bitter cynicism that came from being let down, she made me feel lighter than I had since I was a laughing child listening to my father’s stories.

“Can I see you again?” I asked, my brain still racing.

She nodded, staring at me with those wide, grey eyes.

I walked back to my car, aware and aching with something I couldn’t describe. A poet might say that I was lost, but I’d spent more years than I could count feeling that way. I wasn’t lost.

I was found.

THE GARDEN

“S
o what’s this one, Adam? Artist, scholar, groupee?”

“There’s no need to be vulgar, Edwin,” I snapped. We had been friends since we were teenagers, and nearly a dozen years had killed any trace of formality between us. “Scholar,” I replied grudgingly.

“Touchy. This one must be special.” Edwin’s tone was light, but I could hear the hope in his voice. When his wife Elene had the twins a year ago, it had become Edwin’s less than private obsession to see me settled down.

“She is.”

Edwin whistled. “I’ve never heard you like this before. Could it be that the world traveler is finally finding a place for himself?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said, quickly realizing that if I let Edwin’s imagination run away with itself, he’d have me married with a litter of children on the way within a month.

We said our goodbyes and ended the call. I knew before he put the phone down, Edwin would be yelling to his wife, “Adam’s in love!”

I was too much of a pragmatist to think myself in love after just a few dates, but I was. . . comfortable. I could easily see how comfort could slip into something more.

She spent at least an hour every Sunday walking in the Atlanta Botanical Garden breathing in the heady perfume of the acres of flowers. On our third date, she invited me to come.

“It’s just something I do every week,” she said shyly. “It helps remind me that there’s a life outside of translations and historical documents.”

I followed her through the flowers, feeling slightly like an intruder. Foolish mortals paid for disturbing a goddess in her garden. Where were the hounds to tear me apart for trespassing?

I might have grown up far from America and the strange mix of puritanism and pornography that makes up American sexual mores, but I was far from unaware of what a third date meant.

Lily watched me as I trailed her through the gardens. She would disappear around a bend, and I’d follow, expecting to find her just a few feet ahead. Instead, I’d find her picking her way through an overgrown path, her face buried in a mound of lilacs. She took a step toward me, close enough that I could smell the honeyed scent of the pollen clinging to her hair.

When she was near enough to touch, she’d kiss me, nothing more than a quick peck on the lips, before racing back into the thicket of wildflowers, ducking my grasping hands as easily as a deer evades a hunter’s arrow.

The flirtation was innocent and silly, and I found myself laughing along with her. When I finally managed to capture her, snaking my arm around her waist, we were both flushed and breathless.

“You’re always so serious,” she said, as I brushed a few golden grains of pollen off her cheek. “I just want to see you smile.”

And I did. The smile that curled my lips wasn’t sarcastic. My arms tightened around her, and, for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to let something slip through my fingers.

I pressed my mouth against hers, and I tasted warmth and the thick perfume of the flowers surrounding us. I felt the heat of her body pressing against mine, alive and aching, and I wanted her with a desperation that set my blood on fire.

No words were exchanged as we followed that winding path out of the gardens to her car. The tension and want simmered between us in the short drive. I felt like a teenager, staring at her tanned thighs as she shifted in her seat, wondering how it would feel when she wrapped them around my hips.

Sex had never meant anything to me beyond momentary pleasure and the occasional temporary companionship. Women entranced me with the mysteries they held behind their eyes, and I had studied my lovers with the same fastidious attention to detail I gave my books.