Adam & Eve (16 page)

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll just arrange them here.”

Their color was perfect, purple and deep as Concord grapes, but with edges of lavender that helped to define their texture. There was a robust springiness about the panicles, a lollipop-like delectableness. Only a few of them had
begun to droop from the heat. He held one of the floppy ones up to my nose.

“These have the heaviest fragrance,” he said.

The panicle lacked the turgor to raise its head, but it drooped gracefully over his hand. If I were to paint it, if Chagall had painted it, it might have been titled
The Offering,
with no mention of its wilted nature. I wondered if Adam had an artist’s eye.

“What say you?” Adam asked. “Should the wilted, like the wicked, be cast into outer darkness?”

“Where is outer darkness?” I asked, surprised at the softness in my voice.

“In Greek mythology,” he mused, “sometimes the honorably defeated were placed in the night sky to become constellations.”

“Are you defeated?” I asked gently.

At first he averted his face, but after a moment his gaze returned to meet my own.

“Yes,” he said. “And so are you.”

“And why am I?” I had told him nothing of my losses—of Thom’s existence, let alone his death, of how I had become unmoored, of the loss of meaning in work and the loss of joy in being alive.

I heard myself catch a breath, as though my body were fueling itself to tell the truth, but before I spoke, he began his reply to my question.

“Because you fell from the sky.”

“My plane crashed,” I said, insisting on a literal explanation.

“Yes.”

“You know, it may be the plane is still smoldering on the beach. I’m hungry. I’d like to eat some fish. If we had a fire, we could cook some fish.”

“It’s been many days.”

“And before I crashed, I threw a hard case—a French horn case—out the plane door. Maybe we could find it.”

“You would like to leave here, wouldn’t you?”

“Could you check the wreckage? Maybe something there is still smoldering.”

While he was gone, I peeled back the skin of a banana and ate it. I knew that bananas, like oranges, contained potassium, which I needed for strength.
Without deciding, I knew I had decided: Yes, I wanted to heal and to leave this place that was no more meaningful or serious than a giant playground. I wanted to talk to people who had their own energy and purpose, who could be roughly categorized as sane, who were not defeated. And what had defeated this unbelievably beautiful man, age—I was guessing—thirty? Who was looking for him? Who missed him?

And who missed me?

Pierre Saad and his daughter would worry, I knew. For him, the loss of the ancient manuscript would be an irreparable disaster. But he knew he had taken a risk in giving it to me. He must have felt a great deal of urgency to have initiated such a risk. I had a cool and rational ability to assess risk, but why hadn’t I questioned his degree of risk taking and understood it as an index to his degree of desperation? No doubt he hoped that at least the manuscript had not been destroyed. Perhaps he would hypothesize that I had stolen it to sell on the black market.

No. Pierre Saad had assessed me. He knew I was not a thief, that I would try my best to deliver the codex, as I had set out to do.

And Gabriel Plum? He would have been frantic when I had not returned to Cairo from the Nile cruise. But had I left enough trail for anyone to follow? The tour guide would have reported I had left the group; I had not told him I intended to visit the museum at Nag Hammadi. Gabriel would not have imagined that I had met with a man Gabriel actually knew, the host of the Cairo symposium.

Squinting my eyes against the piercing brightness of the sun, I imagined this triangle of accomplished men, all of whom knew of one another, had had at least conversation—Thom, Gabriel, and Pierre—as a constellation in the night sky. And then there was Adam, relaxed in his mythic nakedness, whom none of them could have possibly imagined, not in their most extravagant dreams.

I imagined Adam crossing their constellation; he was a planet, a wanderer through the night sky, not a fixed star. A loose cannon. Someone who wrestled with his demons at night and cried out when they pinched him or scorched him with their breath. Someone whose day-self carried all the sweetness of the honeycomb. Who called me Eve.

For him, I had no history before my fall. He awoke and found me curled against his side, hurt by the fiery passage into Eden, more like Lucifer than Eve. Once he told me he had begged God for me, and I had appeared.

A bit the worse for wear, I thought ruefully.

Why not leave well enough alone? That question seemed the true answer to the uncertainty that hovered over me. I got up to test the strength of my legs, to take a few steps, literally, on the path that would lead to my restoration. Again I found that I was truly very weak. As I upbraided myself for lounging so long, I imagined my childhood friends—Janet and Margarita—walking on each side of me, encouraging me. “You can do it, Lucy,” they said. “We know you can. Keep going.”

It was what they had said when I tried to learn to walk on tall stilts. And I had become a wonderful stilt walker, their intrepid leader into the challenges of climbing steps on stilts and walking long distances over gravel or through tall grass. When I had suggested we joust like knights of old—riding stilts instead of steeds—we charged each other to see who could knock the other off balance. We had had such a fine time, enacting anything we could imagine. Only when I had talked about walking on clouds had Janet reined me in, pointing out the scientific fact that despite their solid appearance, clouds are insubstantial, consisting of nothing but water vapor catching the light in certain ways that have the power to attract and amaze.

When I saw Adam coming toward me, I decided I would try to walk to meet him. I knew I had been peremptory, practically ordering him to do this or fetch that for me. And Adam had taken umbrage. As he approached, there was a new rigidity, a lack of grace in his body. He seemed hulking, more like a comic-book caveman. His face, too, was concentrated, his brow contracted.

“Do you want to leave here?” he had asked. I had neither answered his question nor offered reassurances. While he was away, scavenging for me, he had perhaps brooded on the matter. Would he try to prevent my leaving?

“Adam, Adam!” I hailed him. “I’m coming to meet you.”

Usually I avoided calling him by his name. I had not wanted to participate too fully in his fantasy of Genesis.

His face filled with happiness. Though his fists were strangely clenched,
he hurried toward me and held his arms out. Fearing that I had signaled acceptance of him and his world, I felt my knees wobble with trepidation as much as fatigue. Before I collapsed, he caught me in those pronglike arms, carefully avoiding my still-healing tender back.

I felt the top of my head fit under his chin, my sun-warmed flesh pressing against his, the utter safety of his support. Our nakedness, and the naturalness of it. I had liked to stand under Thom’s chin like this.

“You made it,” he said, the delight in his voice as warm as his body. He folded an arm across the top of my shoulders and the other across the small of my back, and I gave myself to the bliss of it. “You came to me of your own free will. God said you would. If I was patient.”

Feeling tears gush from my eyes, I took a step back.

“No, I haven’t. I wanted to please you—that’s all. You’ve been so kind and so good to me.”

He was smiling at me. A tear like a clear jewel stood at the corner of his eye.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I insisted. “Everything is the same as it was.”

“I see,” he said. “It’s all right. Don’t be afraid.”

With the back of his still-clenched fist, he wiped away the clear bead of tear. Blood defined the lines between his curved fingers. His hand was bleeding. Quickly I reached for his other closed hand and saw that it, too, was oozing blood from the knot of his fist. For an instant I thought, I’ve crucified him, but then he opened his hands. Amid the blood, his palms sparkled.

“There was no fire left at the plane,” he explained. “But I found this—a broken mirror. We can make a clay base and push the pieces into the wet clay. It can be a mirror again, just a bit cracked. Perhaps we can use it to make a flame.”

As he walked home, he had squeezed the shards into the flesh of his palms.

“There was a mirror on the cockpit door,” I said. “Like a rearview mirror on a car, so the pilot could glance back without turning her head.”

“When we have a fire I’ll catch a fish in the river, and you can cook it.”

Staring at the mess of his hands, I said, “But you’re bleeding.”

Now he looked away from me. “I squeezed too hard. I was angry. At you. You said you wanted to leave. I thought you wanted the fire to make a signal.”

“Not for a long time,” I answered softly. “I need to find the case I threw out of the airplane. It looked like a case for a particular musical instrument, French horn.” Trouble passed over his face. I took a deep breath and said, “This is a beautiful place. It’s beautiful to be here with you, as your friend.”

“Yes,” he answered, and smiled shyly, embarrassed and pleased. But I saw his lower lip tremble a little, though he tried to conceal his anxiety. He seemed newly hatched; he seemed ten years old, not thirty, despite his large and powerful body. He seemed ten years old not mentally but emotionally—fresh and vulnerable, lacking in sophistication and social pretense, wanting to please.

“Let’s go fishing,” I said. “Sometime soon.”

“When you’re stronger, we’ll fish together. Now I’ll fish by myself.”

I began to feel overheated in the sunlight. My mind went dizzy, and I felt my body sway when the slightest breeze touched me.

“Are you strong enough to make it back?” he asked.

“I—I—don’t know,” I stammered.

All at once he dropped down on all fours, his hands still closed over the sharp shards of the broken mirror.

“Climb up on my back,” he said.

“You can’t crawl all the way back on all fours,” I said, though I could easily picture him doing just that, with me astride.

“No. I’ll stand up,” he explained. “Just hold around my neck and shoulders when I start to stand up.”

The arrangement worked. He slowly stood, and with me riding piggyback, we began to progress slowly back toward the shade of the apple trees. I realized the fruit trees had been spaced regularly; we lived in the remains of an old orchard. As soon as we grew comfortable and confident, Adam adjusted his stride to a certain jauntiness. He began to whistle “Oh! Susanna!” through his teeth.

I could not help but laugh happily. I would not spend the energy to sing, but I thought the words,
Oh! Susanna, oh dontcha cry for me.

Still, I was weak and dizzy, and soon I rested the side of my cheek against the stalk of his broad neck. His tune modulated into a slow lullaby,
Hush little baby, don’t say a word; Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.
When he reached the
ferny pallet, he got down on all fours again so I could dismount with ease. As I slid onto my soft mattress and lay on my stomach, the fronds seemed to sigh and yawn.

“Wait,” he said. “Don’t go to sleep yet. Drink a little water before you sleep.” When I moved to lie on my side, propping my head with my bent arm and hand, he lifted the coconut shell to my lips. “We don’t want you to get dehydrated,” he added. “That’s good. Thatta girl,” he crooned.

When he poured the scented water between my lips, my teeth clamped about, looking for wispy shreds of coconut, but only faint flavor was there. I could almost see and taste our fish—flaky, white, and tender. The protein and oils from the fish would make a superb addition to our diet, though we had already gotten protein from the nuts he cracked. Iron, I needed that, too, to strengthen my blood. “We have date trees, don’t we?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered. “I’ve always loved dates and raisins.”

Straightening my arm, I pillowed my head on it, and my mind drifted downward to sleep.

A small sun had come from the dark sky to sit burning in the grass. Alarmed, I sat up in bed. Suppose it started a prairie fire?

No, it was not a visiting sun.

What I saw was a campfire, and the silhouette of Adam sitting beside it. He held a stick in one hand, roasting something over the fire. Now I smelled it, and I could even see its shape.

He was cooking me a fish.

As quietly as possible, I approached him stealthily. With care and patience, I placed each bare foot in the grass. As I grew closer, I could see that he had packed the fish in clay so that it would roast more evenly. The stick, too, was protected by an insulating sleeve of clay that ballooned and became the casing for the fish. I smiled to think that he might have been a Boy Scout, or perhaps a member of 4-H, if he had had a rural background. I slipped up behind him and was just about to put my hand on his shoulder, rosy with fire glow, when, without turning his head, he spoke.

“Is that you, Eve?”

I stopped my hand in midair and withdrew it. “Lucy,” I said. “My name is Lucy Bergmann.”

“Friend,” he answered, keeping his eyes on the roasting fish. “I know you as my friend today. But God willing, someday I will know you as my wife—”

I said nothing. When he had called me “friend,” my heart had wilted in disappointment—I had to admit it. But the word
wife
made me feel as though a cup of scalding water had been tossed onto my flesh.

“—and without sin, we shall dwell in the House of the Lord forever and ever.”

After a long pause, I asked him, in a new key, if he thought the fish was almost done and how he had caught it, and how he had kindled the fire, but I did not listen to his replies. I was monitoring my naughty hand, lest it stray to his shoulder.

When Gabriel Plum had asked me to marry him, I had laughed. Now I felt I was attending a wake. I wanted to cry, to mourn the passing of Adam’s hope. But still, Adam and I were alive, sitting in the dark in a grassland, beside a campfire, an isolated twosome. Reflected flames played orange and rosy on our flesh. He knelt before the fire; I sat on my buttocks, my knees drawn up, my arms hugging my knees. Who knew what might happen next? How much time had really passed? I could feel the thin new layer of flesh stretching between my shoulder blades. Perhaps healing was sped up in Eden. The patch on the back of my head was healing faster than my back.