Adam & Eve (42 page)

“About Adam,” Arielle continued. “Is it wrong of me—I mean, do you—I feel I shouldn’t go on without—”

“Permission granted,” I replied, and instantly, how light I felt!

Walking ahead of us on the path across the slope, I watched my lover, my Adonis, walking beside Pierre, saw Adam’s straight back and his inky hair burnished blue by the sunshine, but it was as though he had become merely an image. His substance evaporated from my interior landscape and left a vacancy.

Why should I need to love any man now? Why not just feel safe here in the south of France, absorbing this sunlit place with my eyes? After the bleakness of the underworld, the contours of this land comforted my eyes. What other image did I need beyond that of beloved land? The firmness of the very path supported the soles of my feet. Across the valley a number of small stone houses and barns, whitewashed, with red tile roofs, basked in their share of sun. Ripening fields lay in the valley below, and in distant places I could see the blue ribbon of a river.
Love the natural world; love being alive,
I counseled myself.

Arielle mused, “The men Adam overcame in the jungle, they feared any contradiction of the literal Genesis story?”

“Yes.”

“And were willing to kill you for the codex? Over a question of religious dogma?”

I left the question hanging in the air. Certainly they had been willing to use force.

“Maybe you’ll find someone,” Arielle said. “Someone you really love. In a way you have not loved before.”

I said nothing. I had loved Adam, but that did not mean I could not let him go.

I listened to the twittering of unseen birds.

We all came home happy, refreshed by the newness of our experiences. A beautiful table was spread and waiting for us in the library. None of us spoke of danger; I don’t think any of us believed in it anymore.

Sitting at the head of the dinner table, the old bedouin said, “In the coming days, while my son reads the message of the ancient writing, I shall read the paintings in the cave. If I study them slowly, perhaps the paintings will have a message for me.”

“It’s unsafe to go alone,” Pierre replied, but he meant only that normal care should be taken.

“So it is in life.” His father smiled; his eyes made the circuit of the table.

I knew what he had said even before Pierre interpreted the Arabic.

Apropos of nothing, Adam remarked, “A path speaks horizontal, a stair speaks jagged vertical.”

F
OR FIVE DAYS
, while his daughter entertained Adam and his father descended to the nether regions, Pierre shut himself in the library. He understood that his daughter and Adam had taken up hiking. Sequestered in the kitchen, I began writing long overdue letters, real ones, on stationery, explaining something about my absence.

The third day, through a window over the kitchen sink, I saw Adam and Arielle in bare-legged sport running side by side down the road away from the house. His daughter’s bright blue shorts were so skimpy, Pierre later told me he felt embarrassed. They were not tight, but so short she appeared to be wearing a silk handkerchief of electric blue. Adam ran in his pale linen pants, cut short and notched, in makeshift fashion.

But Arielle’s father approved. From the beginning, Pierre approved of Adam. Later on, he would explain.
He’s made of beaten gold.

I smiled to see them running together. Adam was clearly about the manly business of courtship, which on that day meant running behind a young woman fleet as Artemis. If Pierre noticed them through the library window, I felt sure he, too, smiled approval. Afterward, he would have lowered his eyes to study a square of parchment covered with signs as incomprehensible to me as Thom’s equations.

An hour later, Pierre came into the kitchen, where I was sitting on a stool close to the counter, writing. When he remarked that I couldn’t be comfortable, I explained I was writing to my childhood friend. “Janet Stimson. I miss her.”

He asked gently, “Has it been long since you’ve seen your friend?” I was pleased that he had sought me out.

“Years and years. We gradually lost track of one another when I went away to Iowa, to the university. Then I met Thom. Janet and her sister left Memphis, too, for Kentucky, for a wonderful small undergraduate college.”

“Invite them to come here,” Pierre said. “To France, to visit you.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised.

“There’s an escritoire—secretary—in the library,” he said. He was smiling slightly in his charming French manner. “I’ll open the desk for you. You’ll be more comfortable.”

“Won’t it bother you—my being in the same room?”

“Not at all. We will agree not to speak.”

He knew there would be plenty of room for me to write at the library table with him, but it seemed more considerate to offer me a private place where I might reconnect with my friends. It was something I wanted to do. Connecting with Janet was something I wanted to do as much as anything.

In the library I watched Pierre settle to his work. Before touching the pages of the codex, he donned thin white gloves to protect the pages from the oils of his fingers. The pages were unbound, a short loose stack looking as casual as a letter. Beside them, he positioned three notepads, two of which held the Arabic and French translations. He worked away now on a preliminary English translation, but after fifteen minutes, he broke the silence. He turned his face toward me and spoke with calm deliberation.

“It makes me happy to have you here. I hope your friends will come.” He paused, then added enthusiastically, “I would like to see you even more happy.”

“Actually, I don’t know their addresses.”

Pierre shrugged. “You will discover it. Use the Google.”

An hour later, Arielle breezed across the library window. Five minutes after her passage, Adam walked by, panting, his hand clenching his side.

“She runs the marathons,” Pierre explained, trying to conceal a smile.

I laughed. “She’ll give him a run for his money. I doubt that she could have kept up with him in Mesopotamia. But he’s reverted to civilization.”

“A
run?
For money?” he asked. “An idiom, no doubt.” He pulled off his white gloves and clasped his hands behind his head to signal his willing detachment from his work. “Explain it, please.”

At the end of his working day, Pierre placed the loose pages back inside the French horn case, into the velvet-lined pocket created just for them. I had long since finished my invitation to Janet and Margarita, but I had sat still, daydreaming, or meditating on my life with them when I was about eleven. We were wearing the crown of childhood then—strong, curious, self-confident, independent within our friendship. I wanted to loop back to those feelings—not to close a circle, but to complete it and continue on in a new trajectory.

Their home had been located at the edge of the civilized world, to my mind, but really only at the edge of a residential section of Memphis, at the end of an unpaved road.

The Stimsons had a great deal more green yard about their home than the houses lined up close together on the regular neighborhood grid. Their home had been far enough from neighbors so that when their father decided to fatten three calves, he simply enclosed a space beside the house and put the calves in it.

For me, the approach to the Stimsons’ property was the approach to paradise. At the top of the dirt road, I would let my bike coast. I would pick up speed and pick up speed, turn from the rough unpaved road onto the top of their long slope of grassy lawn, give the pedals an extra hard push, then swoop and soar down to the land of perfect happiness. Before I flew halfway down the hill, I had spotted the calves and determined to ride them.
Rodeo!
We would be cowboys today. Hooray for Mr. Stimson!

You never knew what Mr. Stimson would think of next. He had made wooden stilts for us. He welded together pogo sticks. He tossed a length of cable high in a tree for our swing. He taught me to fly.

The Metropolitan Opera, brought to you by Texaco, played on the radio while their lovely gray-haired mother tidied the kitchen. As soon as I came through the door that day of the calves, my heart brimming with cowboy excitement, both Janet and Margarita proclaimed in unison, over the music, “Daddy said not to let you ride the calves.”

“How did you know?” I asked. It was the biggest surprise of my life. “How did he know?”

Both girls chortled with delight, while their mother smiled. “We just know you, Lucy. We know you,” they all said.

Dismay kindled up like tinder, but the experience left a glow that warmed me still—to be so well understood!

That afternoon, sitting in the tree near the railroad tracks on thick, horizontal limbs, each of us in her own place, I said, “My parents off in Japan don’t know anything about what I’m like.”

“But your grandmother does,” Janet said comfortingly.

I said nothing. My grandmother let me make up my own mind, to do this or not to do that, and I had become quite good at making decisions. I thought things over carefully. But Mr. Stimson knew what I would want to do even before I did, and he had said no, in advance.

“You’re an open book to us,” Margarita said, not without satisfaction.

Closed
and
open, inside
and
outside;
I liked to think of such oppositions. I thought of the sweep of the Stimsons’ yard; their openness to fun and adventure; Janet’s readiness to discuss any topic while taking a long walk. She and I never argued; we probed. We listened to each other and responded. It was all as natural as breathing.

What else could compare to that balance and intimacy? There was Thom, and now there was Adam and our time in Eden together. Perhaps there would be Pierre, who understood not just my impulses but my needs.

He broke my reverie by remarking on the French horn case, how it had kept the codex safe through thick and thin. He seemed to enjoy the mild incongruity of pronouncing English idioms with his French-Arabic accent. “Through thick and thin,” he repeated. “Why not now?”

At night he slept with the French horn case and the codex beside his bed—easy to grab that way, in case of fire.

At dinner, I looked around the table at Pierre, Adam, and Arielle, their faces bathed in gathering candlelight. They all paused with me to look at one another, at our glowing. Because we always ate by candlelight, we seemed most beautiful, most painted and eternal, at that time of gathering. The bookcase turned on its axis, and Pierre’s father entered from his journeying in the caves.

He carried a fresh-cut curly walking stick, and a few pale green shoots crowned its top. Ceremoniously, because the stick was a gift from his son, he leaned the staff into the corner where the bookcase abutted the wall. The green-sprouting crown of the stick rested near the book titled
Revolve,
and the old man stared at the volume a moment and touched its red leather spine with his finger. While he went away to wash his hands and we sat waiting for him, I think we all revisited the images on the cave walls far below the room where we were sitting.

I thought for a moment how Pierre liked
surprises within:
a codex within a French horn case, a remote control device inside a red book, baby crocodiles in a pit in a room. Even the caves were hidden within the earth. His search was inward, downward into the past, while Thom’s gaze had been outward turned, striving to enter the future.

“Do I know all the details of your life in Paris?” Pierre asked Arielle in a jocular fashion. “For all I know you have hordes of admirers, bohemians of all sorts, who frequent your apartment day and night.”

“Father!” she exclaimed, with a quick glance at Adam.

“So I am wrong,” Pierre said, shrugging his shoulders. “Nor do I know what Adam has done in this interminable war in the Middle East, or what has been done to him.” At this point Adam dropped his head forward as though
he had been struck on the back of his neck, and Arielle reached out to touch his elbow.

The three of us looked at Pierre as though he had lost his mind, or at least his civility. As the bedouin reentered the library, he spoke a quick sentence in Arabic. Arielle translated for Adam and me: “My grandfather asks his son, my father, what has he said to us.”