Adam & Eve (14 page)

“The back of my head got hurt,” he said like a child. Was not Eve the mother of us all?

“Mine, too.” She reached out and stroked the nape of his neck. “Feel better,” she said quietly. When he stretched his hand toward her, she quickly added, “Please don’t touch me.” She withdrew her own hand.

He stopped and bowed his head, reprimanded, quietly sad. He glanced at her body as she sat in the sunshine: breasts neither large nor small, a pleasant pearish shape, a little rounded sag of belly fat around her middle. Her private hair was concealed by the fullness of her thigh and the way her arm crossed her body.

“I’m thirsty and weak,” she said. “Very weak. My burns hurt.”

“I know an aloe plant,” he said, looking into the distance. “At the ranch, my mother put aloe juice on burns.” When the burned woman did not reply, he continued, “You should be in the shade. It was shady here when I fell asleep, but you know the shade moves.” He stood up and felt he was rising successfully from a pool of sadness. “I’ll get the aloe and bring you some fruit. What do you like best?”

“Oranges and pears, if they’re ripe,” she said without hesitation.

“And cherries?”

Unperturbed, she was looking at his nakedness, his height.

He knew how he looked—sculptural and strong—but it meant nothing.

“Thank you,” she said simply.

I
HAD FALLEN
into Eden, despite its floral references and their convincing recapitulations of my local childhood themes. There seemed to be an inaudible music in the air, wafting just under the threshold of my hearing. When Thom had sung art songs to me, my favorite had been Handel’s “Where E’er You Walk.” I heard it now—a song in which the beloved was so adored by both man and nature that even trees would crowd into a shade to protect her from the sun. Whether the music emanated from memory or from the beauty around me, or from the mind of a madman—and surely this naked Adonis, this Adam with an American accent, was mad—I was loath to decide.

I shamelessly watched his naked back as he walked away to gather fruit and balm for my burn: I watched the slight groove acknowledging the presence of a mortal spine hidden under his flesh, the rounds of his moving buttocks, the shapeliness of his strong legs. His head was held high. His bare feet moved him swiftly away as though he had no thought of feet or their necessary work in traversing the short, dry grass. In his physical perfection, he seemed a human worthy of the sky, the complement of its gentle bright blues and satisfying heaps of clouds.

I recognized who he was, or rather I knew where I might legitimately have
expected to meet him, instead of in this demi-Eden. He could have been one of my patients, of the gentle variety. A mental case, someone in whose mind reality shifted its shape more rapidly than metaphors of shifting clouds. Someone who was surely terrified, at times, by uncertainties, and yet someone who loved his own imaginings and where they could take him. Was I myself just a figment of his imagination? Had he been powerful enough to draw me into his reality?

“Eve,” he had called me, as though he were the proprietor of this territory and might name me as he pleased. Was I so weakened that I would let him define me and the reality of my world? No. I had told this Adam, straight and directly, My name is Lucy. Had I let Thom, when I fell into the world of the university, only eighteen, define my reality? Yes. And it had been good. But I could still tell the difference between a genius and a madman.

When Adam returned, I rose to meet him. Though the effort made me feel faint, I wanted him to see me full—no concealment, secrets, or pretense. I stepped forward, out of the shade, into the sunlight so it could reveal and brighten my body. I wanted to establish our nakedness as ordinary, natural as sunlight, not erotic.

He walked toward me with fruit in his hands—three small oranges in one hand, two pears with speckled skins in the other, and cherries hung over his ears. Two steps short of where I stood, he stopped and said, “You are just like me.”

“Yes.” Two human beings. Certainly we were alike.

“But you need to stay in the shade so you won’t get sunburned. You’re already burned.”

He handed me the pears, and then with his hand he removed spears of aloe, having transported them clamped between his ribs and the inside of his upper arm, though I’d not noticed them at first. He had come to me like a painting from the Renaissance—a man whose body was composed of vegetables.

Obediently—because it was reasonable—I stepped back into the edge of the shade, sat down, and leaned forward so he could minister to my back and scalp. I imagined the raw ugliness my back displayed—worse than a painting
of a sore, it
was
a sore. As he knelt behind me and dripped the soothing sap into my wounds, I bit into one of the pears. He had not washed them, and the skin tasted of dust.

“Do you like the pear?” His voice was as uncomplicated as that of a schoolboy. Drip, drip, drip, without contamination, the aloe fluid dropped patiently into my flesh.

“The pear? Refreshing as water, but more enticing,” I reported. “Mealy, a little, but slippery, too.” He had asked me; so why not find the words for the whole truth? What else was there to do? I would not hold back but find the real, precise language for every moment of being alive. I ate some more and offered a new report. “But I feel surprised instead of satisfied when it’s gone. That’s the way it is with eating pears. In your mouth they just disappear.”

When he said nothing, I asked, “Do you want the other one?”

“No. It’s for you. Does the aloe sting your back?”

“Not at all.”

“Lean over more.”

I did, glancing at myself, my hanging breasts and nipples as they pointed toward the ground. I regretted that some of the juice from the pear dripped into the grass. How unremittingly the juice fell straight down. The airplane and I had fallen otherwise—a gentle, slanting glide. We had stepped downward as through dreamy levels of consciousness. When I had released the French horn case outside the open door of the plane, the case plummeted. Straightaway, Pierre Saad’s codex was gone. Lost. Rushing down the straight facade of the seventeenth-century Dutch house, the grand piano had fallen plumb onto Thom. I had always imagined his face upturned, literally facing it, maybe even calculating its velocity with lightning rapidity.

Drip, drip, drip, like fairy pearls, the aloe dripped into my burn and dissolved.

Adam said, “To be honest, I ate the first pear from the tree. I wanted to be sure they were ripe.”

Had I seen any vegetables growing in this garden? Not yet, only fruit and flowers. Perhaps some nut trees. (Already my back and the back of my head were soothing themselves under the influence of the aloe juice.)

The image of my plane smoldering on the beach came to me. Perhaps small flames still smoldered in the wreckage. Should I ask him to fetch fire?

No. I thought not. The natural temperature was so warm I did not want for clothes or any other source of heat. I had had enough of fire, but still I asked, “Do you have fire here?”

“Fire?” he asked as though he didn’t understand the word. Certainly he had earth, air, water in abundance. But fire? It seemed a troubling element.

“Do you need fire?” I prompted. “How long have you been here?”

“I came here …” He hesitated. “I’ve been here some time.”

“More than a week?” I asked. He seemed in such perfect health.

He extended his hands, one of them clasping a stalk of the dripping aloe, over my shoulders for me to see. He seemed to be presenting the backs of his hands for inspection.

“My hands. My hands are no longer blue, you see.”

I said nothing.
Blue?
A small cloud of depression passed through my mind. He had seemed all right enough to be treated as though he
were
all right. Something balked in me about considering him among my patients. I didn’t want to work at redeeming him. Not here. I wanted to enjoy. I was alive—Wasn’t that enough to be? Alive?

At the lower edge of the canopy of the apple tree, Adam inserted banana leaves; the next layer of leaves was woven through those branches slightly higher, and when a third layer was in place, I was provided a roof. The three stages of big leaves were like overlapping shingles. Providing shade or shelter from possible rain, the banana leaves converted the tree into a garden pavilion. Nested on fern fronds, I lay comfortably on my stomach. For three days, and then three more, I slept and ate and dreamed.

Adam brought me grapes and fuzzy kiwi to eat, and water in a large curved leaf. He cracked pecans between two rocks and picked out the meat for me, making sure to avoid the bitter pith. Once he placed an enormous coconut on the lower rock and, raising another stone high above his head, smashed the coconut shell as hard as he could over and over. The blows made me wince, but
he was too intent on his work to notice. Eventually the shell cracked. Though the thin coconut milk was mostly lost, Adam fed me delicious meaty curves of coconut, each a crescent of amazing whiteness.

“Pure as snow,” he said wonderingly, his forehead and cheeks streaming with sweat.

After we had eaten the coconut, the empty shell suggested itself to Adam as a dipper for carrying me water. He made a second coconut vessel, one created more carefully, which was almost the equivalent of a small pot in size, so that I would have a reservoir of water with me always. To hold the rounded container upright, he arranged a supporting ring of stones. Before I drank the water, I usually liked to smell it. Seeing me do this, Adam often squeezed a lemon or a lime into the water to give it a slight flavor.

I considered volunteering to make a basket for carrying fruit, whatever, by weaving together the long grass, if there was suitable grass here, and if not I could use the strong, bladelike leaves of the iris I had seen. But I decided not to make the offer. Let it be this way for a while—that he would bring to me only what I needed in his bare hands, or clamped against his body, or dangling from his ears. I recalled again Renaissance paintings of people composed of robust vegetables.

One day he brought home a section of waxy honeycomb that he had stolen from the bees. He pronounced it to have special healing power. After I had sucked the honey from the comb, I bit off a hunk and smacked away on the wax in a noisy way, like a preteen girl chewing gum—uninhibited oral pleasure.

Another day he arrived with an even larger flat rock balanced on top of his head and steadied with both hands. Protected by a layer of large fig leaves, the upper side of the rock itself was upholstered with a deep pad of green moss. Up till now, I could choose to either stand or lie, or sit awkwardly on the grass. He said the mossy rock was to become my soft seat. To elevate it a foot or so, he brought other rocks to form its legs. He constructed the bench in a particularly shady spot, near the trunk of the tree. Because the pad of moss would dry quickly in the warm air, he explained, he would water it twice a day, to keep the moss happy.

During this time of healing, we talked lightly and sparsely.

My thoughts came and went as uncertainly as clouds. I was never bored. I felt myself to be in the process of absorbing it all—the weather, this strange place, the strange man who presided over it.

And what was my responsibility to this man who called himself Adam?

None, I decided. Not now. I would rest. I would heal. Here in this verdant Eden, surely located somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as they flowed toward the Persian Gulf, if it were located anywhere outside the realm of imagination, I would loaf and invite my soul, as Whitman had written in
Leaves of Grass.

Perhaps I myself had potentials of soul, mind, body, I had neither explored nor recognized. Perhaps it was the same for Adam, and we were both fortunate beyond our wildest hopes.

Adam was, I hoped and then decided again, a gentle soul.

But did I myself even have a soul to invite to this picnic on the grass? Did I have one left? Or had it been allowed to evaporate and disperse into the air? No doubt, someplace in Japan, my missionary parents were praying for me. Surely my absence from the round world had been noted and reported. I wished them Whitman’s encouraging words, “look for me under your boot-soles…. Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.” But I doubted I was waiting for reconciliation with the parents who had abandoned me for their idea of God and duty.

Sometimes in the heat of the day, Adam fanned me with a leaf from the elephant ear plant until I fell into a dazed afternoon nap. Always, three times a day, he treated my burns with the drippings from a spear of aloe. Every other day, he brought tangerines for me to eat, and when he did, he made something of a ritual of it. “I should like to feed you the tangerine sections, one by one,” he said, “and if you don’t mind, I’d like you to feed me, as well.”

“All right,” I answered, a bit uncomfortably. “But why?”

“God sent Noah a rainbow as a promise. To me, God gave a tangerine. He caused me to notice it and to take it for myself. It was juicy and delicious. Its goodness restored me to life.”