Adam & Eve (3 page)

At the rehearsal I became irritated when the conductor had the violin and viola soloists skip over the unaccompanied duet section of the Mozart
Sinfonia.
The conductor was depriving me and the rest of the rehearsal audience of hearing one of the best parts. I was mad at myself, too, for feeling desolate and missing my friends, especially Janet Stimson, and my grandmother, with whom I lived. (When I was nine, my parents had gone, as missionaries, to live in Japan.) Partly just because I wanted to have contact with somebody, I remarked crossly to the man sitting near but not next to me, “Haven’t they left out the cadenza?”

The man looked startled. He had a large head and wore thick glasses. His hair was curly and soft. “I don’t know,” he answered quietly. “I’m not familiar with this piece.” He turned back to the orchestra. In profile his nose and lips were large—suitable for his large head, I decided. The black temple piece of his thick glasses gleamed silvery in the mellow houselights. I forgot him.

No, after the music had been poignant in the way only Mozart could conceive, I glanced at my neighbor and noticed the quality of his attention. He wore the expression of one who could be moved by beauty. Then I forgot him.

Until, in a pause in the rehearsal, he blew his large nose into the neat white square of a folded cloth handkerchief. As a girl, I had learned to iron by ironing my grandfather’s similar 100 percent cotton white handkerchiefs, but my rehearsal neighbor wasn’t old. Older than I, but not old. Probably a doctoral student.

When I stood to go back to my dorm room, he smiled at me. It was the most purely welcoming smile I had ever seen—free of all intent but sheer friendliness.

“So they left out the cadenza?” he asked.

“A cadenza from eighteenth-century music characteristically ends with trills,” I answered. “We heard the trills, but no cadenza. I’m an old viola player.”

He looked at me quizzically. “Old?” Then he grinned. “Which high school do you go to?”

I knew I looked young: my hair was in two braids. I’m sure I flushed. “I’m a student at the university. From Memphis. Are you a graduate student?”

“I’m an associate professor in the physics department.”

We had both misjudged each other. I laughed, and he smiled.

He waited, and then with unexpected sophistication I realized what I
must say if the conversation was to continue. I must exempt myself from being a student in his department.

“I’m a psychology major,” I said.

“A junior?” he asked, still smiling, and I knew he needed to guess my age.

“I’m a freshman,” I answered, “but they accepted me as a psych major because I aced the advanced test in psychology on the Graduate Record Exam.” It had been difficult to get permission to take the GRE; most high school students took the SAT.

“Did you?” He was obviously pleased for me. Perhaps he was pleased with me.

“I’m eighteen,” I added. “I bet you waited too late to get a ticket to the performance. Like me.” Suddenly my confidence faltered, and I relied on stereotype. “A typical absentminded professor?”

“Actually,” he answered, “I do have a ticket. I just like coming to dress rehearsals. It’s more relaxed.”

“I procrastinated,” I confessed. “I meant to get a ticket.”

“I always get two. Usually the second one goes to waste. Maybe you’d like to have it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

As he handed over the ticket, he remarked, “The two seats are together.”

“Of course,” I answered, though I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

He grinned more broadly, amused at both of us. “I’m forty-one.”

The next day before the concert, I walked to the inexpensive beauty school near the campus and asked for a student stylist who could do an updo with curls. “With wings over the tops of the ears,” I added. For the first time, I wanted to be transformed from a big child into a young woman. Entranced with studies, teachers, and a few good friends, throughout high school, I’d never dated anyone.

While the stylist combed through my hair, I avoided my reflection in the mirror by mentally reviewing the appearance of the physics professor—his steep, rather forbidding forehead, the thick lenses of his glasses—what did he want to see through those glasses? Big black frames. I realized I didn’t know his name. A physicist—someone who wanted to understand the physical
world in mathematical terms—
E=mc
²
: Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.
A physicist was someone whose inquiry concerned the basic nature of the physical world. Probably he didn’t consider psychology to be much of a science, but I wanted to understand the
immaterial
realm—what
were
thought and feeling? What did being human mean?

“Did you bring a clip?” the hairstylist asked.

“No.”

“That’s okay. I can just pin it.”

I enjoyed tipping back my head and fitting my neck against the rounded curve of the big sink. My grandmother always said, “I love going to the beauty parlor—the shampoo.” I relaxed into the warm water flowing through my hair, the impersonal fingertips of the stylist pushing into my scalp and against the bone of my skull; I enjoyed considering how my brain was just beyond the stylist’s touch. Shampoo provided a time to wander effortlessly through one’s sense of self. How smoothly awareness moved from impression to thought to thought! What to make of it all? What did it mean to think? Even to see?

Sitting in the stylist’s chair before the glass, I passively watched how the shaping of my hair was changing the meaning of my face, my future.

On the way back to my dorm on Iowa Avenue, I paused in front of a shop window and immediately decided to buy a white eyelet dress, Edwardian, with a long skirt and a long overblouse. As we shifted hangers along the rack of dresses to find the right size, the dress clerk said to me, “Your hair is lovely. Just add earrings—sky blue. I have some.”

That night, I came to the crowded concert hall only a few minutes early. I was afraid I wouldn’t have anything interesting to say to the professor if we had a lot of time to fill. From a distance, I paused to notice how the professor was shifting nervously in his seat as he waited.

He glanced at his watch; he tucked his chin down and studied his diagonally striped tie; he pulled down the cuffs of his white dress shirt. He wore large midnight blue glass cuff links, arched like two blue-tending-toward-black marbles. He had dressed up, too. He shuffled his feet; he pushed his thick glasses up onto the bridge of his nose. When he saw me at the end of the aisle, he grinned. Happy that I had come, he was at ease with himself again.

As I stepped sideways across the knees of those already seated, he stood up, stretched out his hand to shake hands with me, to welcome me, and said, “My name is Thom Bergmann.”

“I’m Lucy,” I answered, not bothering with my last name, for in the loveliness of the moment, I felt sure my name, too, would someday be Bergmann.

Each year of marriage seemed better than the one before. I grew up, really, within the safe boundaries of a loving marriage. My study of psychology and my deep-rooted interest in the importance of aesthetic expression led to my career as an art therapist for those who suffer a range of mental disorders. Thom went on to be promoted to professor in his department, then to occupy the Van Allen-Bergmann Chair. Coincidentally the hyphenated chair was named for Gustav Bergmann, an eminent professor of ontology and the philosophy of science who happened to be a distant relative of my Thom Bergmann. Eventually Thom became known internationally for his work in spectroscopy, and we traveled the world together because of his lectures and scientific connections.

I still believe the piano crashing into the Amsterdam pavement crushed the best brain in astrophysics in the world—my husband, my gallant lover.

In a few years, with war in the Middle East seeming like an immutable fact of life, my path would take me back among the scientists. At the same time, another story—one I would come to know as well as my own—another connection that would redirect my life, had its genesis.

O
NE MORNING
in Mesopotamia the strong Middle Eastern sun sought to warm the lifeless body of a nude man lying diagonally, like a slash, across an almost flat, bare riverbank. Vulnerable and exposed, he lay on his back on moist, sandy clay. His heels rested in the scarcely moving shallow water of the river. No life stirred in him, but he was not a corpse. To any who looked down and saw him from the sky, the beautifully formed young man would have been a puzzle piece. However, for a time there was no other to look down on his perfect, helpless flesh. A puff of fog hovered over his body for a moment before dissipating in the strong light.

It was the heat of the sun, the discomfort of it, that first caused Adam to stir to consciousness. He wanted relief. While he lay on his back in the mud on the sandy, moist riverbank, the sun of the Middle East baked him till he knew he was done. That was the first thing he knew, even before he opened his eyes, that he was too hot to stay as he was—in the oven, so to speak. He was done.

A cooling breeze passed over him, and he was washed by the coolness, the need of which had awakened him, though his eyes remained closed. The gentle energy of wafting breezes entered his nostrils, and the moving air tunneled
its way as though it had volition through his nose, down his throat, and into his lungs. What had been outside him, and refreshing to him, was now gently invading him. When the breeze moved within him, he believed he was One with what was Beyond him because It had freely visited him. He sucked air into himself and was blessed with life.

As Adam lay on his back, he both felt and heard his breathing—the in and out of it—and he heard also, beyond the quietly flowing river, the sound of not too distant surf, with its own rhythm of coming in and going out.
The sea,
he named that sound, though he had yet to see it.

He knew his parts before he knew the wholeness of his being. There was something that thumped at the center of him. From the inside of his body beneath the bone of his chest, he felt its drumming.

Feeling—touch—was the first sense to awaken fully.

He folded the lobe of one ear and pressed it against the canal that led into his head, that passage to the interior, and listened. He listened patiently. Adam waited. Then he heard it—faintly at first, and then strong and regular, the drumbeats from the interior. Reverently, he placed both hands over his heart.

His feet stirred restlessly. The gentle caress of barely flowing water on his heels was not enough. His whole body wanted caressing, and like any baby, he wanted it
now.
If that was not possible, perhaps he could address that area of his body that seemed to be the origin of longing.

(Not his solemn heart!)

Something boisterous and frolicking, something mischievous and needy, something goatish with grapes in its hair, something laughing, and ready to dance on cloven silver hoofs! That part!

With first one hand and then the other, he reached for the part of his body that called without words to his hands:
Ease me!
Rolling from his back onto his side, Adam curled his body like the letter C so that he might know himself. And Adam touched himself till he was satisfied.

And Adam slept. He dreamed of vast watery heaving; he envisioned it
as a mighty bosom ready to pillow the entirety of himself. Adam was, above all, a dreamer.

When Adam awoke and parted the lids of his eyes, he saw the fringe of his own lashes, both the top and the bottom. They frightened him, for he had an intuitive dread of the legs of spiders. ‘Twas fear that caused his brain to jump. When electricity of very low but important voltage passed from one cell to another, the world beyond his own eyelashes flashed into being.

Thus Adam achieved through fear the sense called sight.

Noiseless, bright beyond belief! Banglike, but silent: behold: the visual world!

Adam looked and there was light.

He felt his heart beating, running, trying to leap beyond the confines of his chest, trying to squeeze itself out through the less solid spaces between the ribs. To leave that cage of self, to be a part, a true part of Out There! That was his frantic heart’s desire.

Before him, the world hung flat as a painted window shade. It hung before him like an Impressionist’s canvas—Renoir, Monet—all a-shimmer with color, but initially the world was without form or meaning. Patches of color: blue shimmered against small red dashes, leaving his eyeballs vibrating; green rested against blue and gave him peace and comfort. And what color was he?

Adam lifted his finger into his line of sight, and he saw that he was blue. Or that his hands, at least, were splotched and streaked with blue.

And why not? he thought. (It was his first fully formed sentence:
And why not?)
Surely I am born of the heavens, and why should I not be as blue as they are? And as sweet? Am I not as sweet as that heavenly hue? Thus began Adam’s meditations on his own nature, but contemplation did not last long.