Adam & Eve (15 page)

“Where did I come from?” I asked gently. I had disabused Adam of the idea that God had created me from one of his own ribs.

“The sky.”

“And where did you come from?” I asked for the first time.

“The earth. My name, Adam, means that I came from the clay of the earth.”

For a terrible moment I remembered the last morning with Thom, how he had spoken of the Hebrew meaning of the word
adamah.

“I’ve troubled you,” Adam observed.

“No,” I said reassuringly. “I was remembering—” I wanted to say, “I was remembering my husband,” but somehow I could not bring myself to say it. The fact of my former, complicated, and civilized life contradicted this fantasy too flatly. It would be no kind, caring act to crack open this world with the stone of memory.

I was at rest here in this demi-Eden. Not at work. No need to tinker with versions of reality.

“If a storm comes,” he said, all serenity, “I’ll take you to a place I know. There’s a shelter in the rock, and we’ll be safe under it.”

“A cave?” After flourishing in a world of open sunshine, I didn’t like the idea of going into any sort of cold, dank cave. Here everything was sunshine and shadow, gentle breeze and waving grass, a garden of delights.

“Not really a cave,” he said. “It’s an overhang, open on three sides. But it’s a big overhang, and if we’re sitting in the center of it, we’re as safe as though the air around us were a wall. There’s a wall of stone but only at the back.”

Neither of us spoke of the past or the future. I had taken a leave of absence from my work at the hospital in New York. During that long cocooning of marriage, I had made no close women friends. The only people who might worry about me were Gabriel Plum, and Pierre and Arielle Saad. If I could have, I would have relieved their anxiety, but I was not much worried about what worry they might experience. Like an inconsiderate child at camp who has no compulsion to e-mail home, because I knew I was more than all right, I assumed somehow they’d know it, too.

At night, the spectacle of stars enthralled me and made me think of Thom, who had studied them with such ardor. I wished that he could see this contrast of absolute blackness with the sparkling lights. In Mesopotamia, we were about at the latitude of Kentucky, I believed. In Iowa the star view would have been
a little more to the north. When Thom and his parents visited Israel, he would have seen this sky from a slightly more southern exposure. Who would want to murder anyone whose life was the study of stars?
Igtiyal?
During those moments flying the Piper Cub, the question had burned my brain like a brand. Now I gulped the darkness and felt the sparkle of stars tickle my throat as I swallowed.

At night, Adam slept on his own bed of ferns, softer than feathers, at a short distance from me. His pallet was under another small tree, where he had also constructed a kind of roof to match mine. Under our separate shelters, we were a little settlement of two, surrounded by wilderness and bits of garden.
Igtiyal?
The question was more remote than starlight.

Because of the discomfort of my burns—less discomfort all along once I had suffered a peak of pain on the third day—I woke often, though Adam seemed always to sleep till dawn. Throughout the nights, I heard Adam talking in his sleep. The distance between us was great enough that I could rarely catch just what he said; I doubted if it were coherent anyway. His nighttime monologue reminded me of the experience of sleeping to the sound of someone’s low radio in the next dormitory room.

Sometimes he cried out sharply, as though he were terrified or terribly hurt. My heartbeat quickened when I heard him in distress, but always the moment passed and he seemed to drop back into an untroubled dream. If the cries had continued, I would have risen up, made my way to his side, and gently shaken his bare shoulder. Often he slept on his side, facing me, and sometimes I noticed the moonlight illumining one shoulder rounded up higher than the rest of his long body.

My own dreams consisted of colors and textures rather than scenes: Thom’s unshaven chin; the sweet rumple of his curls; a certain thick yellow from the painting of a patient who had lost both parents in the Holocaust. Completely lacking in story or even situation, the entirety of my dream space filled with these magnified details that had been a small part of a more significant whole in my waking life. This close focus dominated the infinite visual field of my dreaming mind from side to side and top to bottom.

I knew the prickly chin and the rumpled curls to be Thom’s, but he was not there. These frame-filling details displaced any larger context or meaning.
I dreamed of the
sensation
of softness—my grandmother’s lap—and of the smooth, worn nap of her flowered aprons. The strings of the viola against the fingertips of my left hand—merely the sensation of touching the metal-wrapped A-D-G or heavy C string—filled hours of dreams, or the sensation in my right hand of the drag of my horsehair bow rubbing through the well-worn groove in my rosin cake.

Colors borrowed again and again from the canvases of my art therapy students filled the shapeless, unending space on the backs of my eyelids, but the vivid hues of paint were only themselves; they suggested nothing of the ornate pitcher or kitchen sink or jewel or car fender they had been employed to depict. Once I spent the night dreaming of a beveled camel hair paintbrush; its fine-grained softness made me want to squeal with wonder.

All these dreams were pleasant ones. The most pleasant ones were of the pink blossoms of mimosa trees—the whole blossom, not just its pinkness—how they swayed in Memphis beside the Mississippi like the skirts of ballet dancers.

The color cherry red repeatedly filled my mind. Only occasionally did it take the shape and shininess of actual cherries hanging over Adam’s ears.

“Six days have passed,” Adam said one morning. “On the seventh day, today, it would be good if you began to walk about. You need to regain your strength.”

I agreed.

He held out his hand to me; I stood up and wobbled out into the open sun. The effort made me dizzy; I would have fallen if he had not held my hand. I realized the seriousness of my weakness; I had tarried too long in my sickbed convalescence. I knew better than to indulge in the horizontal. I knew from my grandmother’s illnesses that patients should be up and on their feet as soon as possible. I knew from the treatment charts of even those with mental ailments how crucial exercise was to the achievement of any kind of health. And yet I had banished such knowledge from my mind. I had not wanted things to change. I had made a demigod of Adam, in whose care I wished to be perpetually cradled.

Our first quarrel occurred when I asked him to bring fresh ferns for my bed. I had never asked him to do anything particular for me before; he had always just anticipated my needs.

He looked startled, but he replied, “Of course,” and left immediately.

I felt annoyed. I hadn’t meant he should do it right that minute. I had thought we would sit down and chat. If we were not to sit together and chat in the shade of the tree, I thought petulantly, then I would sit by myself and think.

What was I to do about my situation? Our situation. Unbidden, the image of his genitalia presented itself to my mind, the pleasant curve of the end of his penis. Immediately I was furious with myself. He was mentally ill. He was practically my patient. Hands off! I was the sane one; I needed to take charge. Nationally, 50 percent of the patients in mental hospitals suffered from religious delusions. Many of them believed themselves to be Jesus—thoroughly divine, not human. Well, it was the same here in the Garden: 50 percent of the population suffered from religious delusions.

Immediately I thought of his gentleness, his sense of my needs, how he had courteously constructed his own bed under a different tree. I thought of the sincerity and simplicity with which he spoke, when he spoke of God. There was nothing proselytizing about it, nothing that pressured me to believe, no coercion. I felt nothing of fear and little of curiosity. Cared for and content, I found it difficult to think of
next.

He made me feel helpless. The situation made me angry.

Then I looked out into the sunshine, the simple way it lay on the grass. It was as though the grass had been mown; it was like a large, civilized park, left to go partly natural. Idly, I thought of Kew Gardens—“It isn’t far from London,” Alfred Noyes had written. “Come down to Kew in lilac time, in lilac time, in lilac time….” In the distance, I saw Adam moving toward me. His arms were heaped so high with fern fronds that it looked as though a pile of greenery, with legs, was making its way across the plain.

I got up from my rock-chair and cleared the shriveled fern from my bed place under the makeshift roof. I didn’t want Adam to have to build a new roof of banana leaves, though a few splits had developed, turning the edges of the
leaves into a coarse brown fringe. Probably the roof would need to be refreshed soon enough, but perhaps piece by piece.

As soon as Adam finished spreading out the ferns, fashioning a thicker mound at one end to suggest a pillowed place, I startled myself by asking him in a rather presumptuous manner, “Do lilacs grow here?”

Adam straightened up and put his hands on his hips. He looked at me in a level and direct way. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll get you some.” And he turned and walked away.

I was glad to have him go. I hadn’t finished thinking about our situation, what we should do.

If he was insane, he was only mildly so. He could cooperate. He could follow instructions. He could
anticipate
instructions. His affect seemed appropriate. He seemed relaxed. Not at all anxious. He seemed as though he wanted nothing, as though he was perfectly content.

These conclusions about my companion awakened a certain sense of frustration. Where was ambition?

Thom had been a person who worked very hard. So had I. We had loved our work, had always kept each other on a loose leash concerning the freedom to work. And Thom knew how to take his pleasures; he made room for attending the concerts we both had loved since our first meeting. After he spent the day at the physics department, Thom enjoyed a good meal and good conversation, even if he came home quite late. Here there was no work, and we might as well be grunting at each other, so monosyllabic were our exchanges. Sometimes I
did
grunt. Thom had focus and insight about everything—art, politics, literature, above all his work in spectroscopy, his knowledge of the starry sky in all its aspects, visible and invisible. He could
listen
to the heartbeat of space, through the radio telescopes.

For the first time since I had fallen into Eden, I touched my talisman, the titanium case that held and protected Thom’s last thoughts. While my fingertips caressed the smooth case, I savored our last morning in the hotel when he had projected his valentine on the ceiling:
To all the Lucys in the Universe.

Could there be more than one? The thought jolted me. Talk among the astrophysicists about parallel universes never seemed very serious. But was
it possible that I had not been Thom’s one and only object of affection? What bizarre language! I was not an
object
of anything! Suddenly I realized my mind had become irritable. It was like a wound that itches as it heals. The patch on the back of my head itched. So did my back. It was irritating.

And yes, we ourselves had known more than one Lucy. One of them was a cousin of Thom, a woman about the age of Adam. Thom had sent her to work with our friend Gabriel Plum in England. She had come to Thom’s funeral and bawled her eyes out. I remembered how Gabriel had taken her into his arms, comfortingly, and even then, at Thom’s funeral, the idea had flickered through my mind that Gabriel and she might be an Item. Maybe I had glimpsed a sliver of their intimacy.

Then I’d forgotten the impression. Apparently if there had been any warmth between Gabriel and young Lucy it had not lasted,
because Gabriel proposed to me.
That moment in the big jet, flying over the spine of northern Italy, the gray Dolomite peaks arranged below like dragon vertebrae, belonged more to a dream than to reality. That scene of Gabriel and me inside the airplane seemed to float like an untethered balloon in insubstantial space.

My train of thought had branched and branched, and now I couldn’t remember what it was I had set myself to consider during Adam’s absence.

Moving across the hot meadow was a lilac bush in full bloom. Its aroma preceded it. I closed my eyes and rapturously drew in a long breath. When I opened them, I began to laugh, for of course the lilac tree had two long and manly legs. It was the ridiculous abundance of the bouquet that had made me laugh. It was like something a lover might offer in a Chagall painting. The bouquet would crowd the lovers to the frame and become the bloated centerpiece itself.

When Adam arrived, I joked, “I’m afraid I don’t have an appropriate vase.”

An anxious expression crossed over his face, then he suddenly knelt and began to place the lilacs around my bed, branch by branch, in a border.