Adam & Eve (20 page)

I
SLEPT WELL
. I ate well. I exercised.

I dreamed, but I trained myself to wake up when words from Adam’s dreams traveled the discreet distance from the deep shadows under his bed-tree to mine. When I heard the muttered words, I stored them in the granary of memory and promptly went back to sleep. I wanted to help him exorcise his demons. Each morning when daylight worked its way through the woven mat of my makeshift roof, I lay still so that some minute shifting of blood in the vessels threading my brain would not wash away what I had deposited there of his midnight words. Nonetheless, I recovered nothing. When I opened the door to the cupboard of memory, its shelves were bare, with one exception.

I was able to understand and retain the word
sin
as one of his nocturnal utterances.

To know his past, I would have to ask him. However, as I studied Adam striding over the grasslands as though he were the lord of creation, or even when I only considered his handsome, forward-looking face, I knew it would be a sin to drag him back into his past. With every gesture and every cheerful matter-of-fact expression, he was determined to step into the future. He wanted us to inhabit the future.

When Adam called out from his nightmares, terrified, I began to make it my practice to call back, “It’s just a dream. It’s just a dream.” Once—only once—half asleep myself, I had called out, “I’m here!”

He had sat up, half awake. “Are you? Are you here? Eve?”

I had not replied. I breathed as quietly as I could to minimize my presence.

After a while, he lay back down.

One morning as we ate nuts and apples together, I asked Adam if he knew that sometimes in the night he called out the word
sin.

“Do I?” he asked. “Other words, too?”

“Such as?” I smiled encouragingly.

“Names?”

I told him that if he did, I could not decipher them.

“Rosalie?” he asked.

I only shook my head.

“She was my first girlfriend in Idaho. In high school. We fucked.”

I was shocked to hear him use the vulgar term.

“I wasn’t faithful to her. She wanted to marry.” Adam spoke more and more slowly. “I wanted … to know many girls.”

Though I waited for him to continue, he said nothing. So I asked softly, “And did you?” I watched the vague orbs of light projected through the pin-holes among the leaves onto the ground. There was a swarm of the gentle, light disks, visitors from the sun at last arriving onto the earth.

“I had … had a lot of girlfriends. I was thought handsome, you know. Unusual.”

He pulled gently at a few tufts of grass.

Finally I said, “Many young men do, don’t they? Young women, too.”

“So many. I remember some of their names. Probably I might say them in my sleep, sometimes.”

The silence lasted a long time till I looked at him and smiled a little. “And you still feel guilty.”

He flushed.

“One girl’s father complained to my father, and he took me to the barn and beat me. For punishment. He used to punish me, too, if he found my drawings. Crotches, breasts, sometimes myself, erect.”

After he felt the touch of my hand on his, he looked up at me.

“Adam,” I said, “most artists, painters, and poets are inspired by the erotic.”

“He beat my hands.”

I lifted his hand to my lips and quietly kissed his knuckles.

My favorite food became the fish he caught and cooked for me.
Wild-caught,
I told myself smugly, thinking that these fish of various varieties possessed the best of fatty omega oils, good for the mind and good for the body. Now that we had the skillet he had wrenched and shaped from the steel of the Cub’s fuselage, the fish could be sautéed with the tomatoes, and I again congratulated myself on the healthfulness of our diet, knowing that cooking the tomatoes released the nutrients not nearly so available in the raw vegetables.

While the skillet was our most prized possession, I also appreciated the metal skewers Adam fashioned from the cross struts of the wings. To keep the end of the rod from burning his hands as he roasted the fish, he had jammed one end into a short, rotten limb for a handle. Though I had been tempted to taunt him with the idea of rottenness in Eden, I restrained myself.

Instead, I explained that we should let the peppers growing near the straight rows of staked tomatoes ripen to redness because then they would become more nutritious, replete with vitamins. I enjoyed the yellow and green squash as well, but somehow the squash vegetable itself never lived up to the robust promise of the squash blossom. In my mouth, squash melted away, seedy but mostly water. I supposed seeds were worth something and chewed them vigorously.

In the rectangular garden plot, there were only those three vegetables—tomatoes, peppers, and squash—but when I took long walks alone I kept an eye out for wild lettuce, dandelion greens, and watercress. Once I found
a stand of morel mushrooms and remembered how Thom and I had hunted them in the woods south of Iowa City, on a farm gone back to woods called the old Bourjailly place.

Back then, Thom and I had conditioned our eyes to recognize the spongelike texture of the morels by staring first for long minutes at corncobs, which had a similar reticulated surface. Fried in butter, the morels had been heaven to eat, we had agreed. Thom had looked up through his thick glasses, smacked his lips, and simply said, “Heaven.” When I slowly savored the butter-drenched spongy texture of the morel, I had pronounced, “Paradise.”

In our garden, when Adam and I cooked the morels in tomato juice in our battered and blackened skillet, I wished for butter. Without it the morels’ flavor lacked the sinful richness I had relished so much.
Sinful richness
—when I once characterized our sex life that way, Thom had laughed and fed me from a collection of Godiva dark chocolates kept at our bedside. To Adam’s delight, I sautéed our morels in a reduction of coconut milk, and that did add some richness to the flavor.

One day, when Adam and I had just sat down in the grass, a silver jet roared over the plain, not much higher above our heads than the top of a tall skyscraper would have been. The plane slightly rotated its torso as it ripped across the sky, and Adam began to count, “One thousand and one, one thousand and two,” and on up. The grazing wildebeests off to our left jerked their heads up and ran a short distance.

My mouth fell open and stayed open till a fly buzzed close by. Of course I knew the jets were up there, but far above, very far away, thirty or more vertical miles into the stratosphere. It was the large, close-up view, the terrifying speed and sound, that had seemed unreal. When Adam reached one thousand and ten, we heard a soft and mushy thud.

“Impact,” he said. “There are low hills that mark the boundary. About ten miles away.”

“How do you know?”

“Sound travels about a mile a second.”

I felt shaken, as though the reverberation that entered my ear had set off a quake within. “What boundary?”

He lowered his eyes and smiled a slight secret smile. “Eden’s.” He did not look at me.

“And did you meet the cherubim with the twisting fiery sword when you came in?”

“Yes.” He bit his lower lip and looked ashamed.

One day a Jersey cow, lowing pitifully, wandered out of a group of zebra and walked purposefully toward us as we were eating. Butter, I thought.

“The milk wagon,” Adam said. “Look at her udder.”

Though I was not at all a farm girl, even I had noticed the fullness of the cow’s udder hanging so low that it barely cleared the ground. When the cow stopped close to us, I saw her teats were leaking milk.

“She’s in pain,” Adam explained. “Lie down close to her and I’ll squirt milk into your mouth.”

“Really?” I asked. “Can you really do that? What if she steps on me?”

“I won’t let her,” he said. “I’m a farm boy—didn’t you guess? Besides, you won’t be that close, not underfoot.”

Lowing more insistently, the cow fixed her eye on Adam. He petted her neck and then stroked her flank. When his fingertips smoothed her udder, the cow shivered all over.

“Now lie down,” Adam said quietly to me, pointing to a place some five feet away from the cow’s four hooves. “And turn your face this way. Not too much, or the milk will just run out. Open up.”

I obeyed. When a zing of milk tickled the roof of my mouth, I laughed out loud and choked.

“Don’t scare her,” Adam cautioned. “We’ll have to practice till you get the knack. Didn’t you ever see anybody shoot milk into a barn cat’s mouth?”

But I couldn’t answer. I was choking and drooling and smacking the warm milk. Trying to be ready, I watched the milk rhythmically spurt across the short distance toward my face. I marveled at how thin and laserlike came the squirt of milk. Somehow I had expected it to pour obediently in a thick rivulet as from the spout of a pitcher or from the opening in a carton. I had
expected to lie underneath to catch a thick stream twisting slightly, as though it were falling into a wide-mouthed glass. But no. To trap even a little of the milk in my mouth, I smacked my lips and tried to use my tongue to lap the liquid backward into my throat.

“You could practice snapping flies,” he teased.

Occasionally, Adam squirted me in the eye, and I suspected that he did it on purpose.

Soon my face was bathed in milk, and my neck was sticky with it. I tried cupping my hand beside my mouth to catch the drippings, but the method didn’t work well.

“I hate to waste it,” I sputtered. “Can’t you slow down?”

Adam laughed. “You don’t have any idea how many gallons of milk she has. Now watch this.”

He changed his hand position and suddenly the milk squirted upward into his own mouth. He drank and drank and didn’t spill a drop. Finally he paused, then expertly squirted the milk just once more toward his face—up one nostril.

I shrieked, and he laughed, too.

“I guess I’ve had enough,” he said, grinning, and he again took aim at me. The cow was the model of patience through all his antics.

My ineptitude embarrassed me, but I had not gotten enough milk down my gullet to want to quit. I suggested a solution. Adam could just milk into the skillet, and I could drink from that.

“Sure.”

He was perfectly good-natured about it all, and I rolled over playfully, sat up, and fetched the skillet. The burn on my back was so well healed that I hadn’t thought twice about rolling over. When the shallow pan was full, and he passed it with a steady hand to me, the cow looked around reproachfully that her relief had ceased. Adam stroked the veined udder and quietly reassured. “Whoa, Bossy, whoa, girl. It’s not over.”

We made no attempt to tie her up, and after a few days she wandered away. To create a tether, we would have needed to gather grasses and braid a rope. When Adam offered to hollow out a log and make me a churn for butter, I said just the milk was sufficient.

The next week, when a domesticated she-goat wandered by, we enjoyed her milk and let her go, too. So much did we trust our habitat to provide whatever we needed that we made little effort to store up resources for the future.

For exercise, I walked and walked. When I gently reiterated that I preferred to walk alone, Adam willingly complied, respectful of my wish. We woke up together in the morning; we met and ate together in mid-afternoon; before bedtime, we enjoyed a snack of sweet fruit. While we chatted cheerfully over our meals, I decided it might be wise not to spend entire days together. On all my walks I hoped to discover the French horn case with the codex that I had jettisoned, and I earnestly asked Adam to look for the case, too.

I liked to walk at a respectful distance around the various grazing animals as they pastured on the plain. Once I saw our fawn-colored cow at a distance. Once I spotted a lone donkey trotting along right through a herd of Thompson’s gazelles as though he were going home.

Sometimes I saw a pride of lionesses sitting chin-deep in the tall grasses, watching the wildebeest. I never saw them take an animal. Perhaps they can’t, I fantasized, not in the Peaceable Kingdom. Perhaps they’ve been forbidden. Maybe they had been hypnotized, or perhaps in this strange place they’d not yet come fully into their own nature as predators. I didn’t mention the lionesses to Adam.

During this time, I had little sense of time passing. I did not know if it were stretched or compressed. This was Eden. My grandmother had suggested that perhaps a day during God’s creating of heaven and earth equaled millions of our years. My days of strolling and recovering seemed timeless.

While I walked, I often admired the flowers, whom I regarded as friends. Colorful as a circus, a crop of jolly zinnias gazed back at me. As I looked at them, I fancied each straightened up taller to shout its colors at me:
Pick me.
Once Adam had garlanded my bed with lilacs; I felt there was no harm in returning the kindness with the almost articulate zinnias.

While I walked, not only my legs grew stronger but my whole body. Sometimes I carried stones in my hands and exercised my arms as well, doing curls, or exercising my triceps by raising my elbows and kicking back my forearms from the elbows. Sometimes I thrust smooth, heavy stones up over my head,
first one arm, then the other, sometimes both arms. That routine remained challenging for days and days.

While I walked I visited memories—only happy ones, first with Thom, then with my grandmother. The sequences and images from the past seemed almost palpable, as though I could handle them. I felt as though I were folding clean laundry, fresh and warm from the dryer. Sorting my memories had something of the same soothing, almost mindless rhythm. I was tidying up the past, making it as nice as possible, getting ready, perhaps, to put it away.

Often I thought of the good times visiting the Stimson sisters, especially when I strolled in the garden that was reminiscent of the lilacs and roses, the iris, the two pear trees that had bloomed near their house, though the flowers and trees in Mesopotamia bloomed all at once, not in the sequence of seasons I had known in Tennessee.

I rarely pictured my parents, but I sometimes thought of good moments playing the viola, or of orchestral friends, music teachers, and conductors who had gathered our disparate contributions into marvelous bouquets of sound. I considered it healthy and healing to luxuriate in happy memories.