Adam & Eve (36 page)

I would fly to the cradle of Western civilization, to Greece; we would abandon the plane, buy new clothes, take the train to the south of France. Would they follow? Would they perish in the wilderness? Never mind. Money! New clothes! I laughed hysterically to think of dressing Adam, like Barbie’s Ken, in expensive casual clothes. Myself, too.

I was out of my mind with joy and foolishness.
Run, Adam.
He would look like a fashion model, strong and cruelly handsome. I could not stop myself from giggling; nonetheless, I fastened my seat belt in preparation for takeoff. People on the train to France would surely wonder how I had managed to snag
someone so young and comely.
Run, run!
But he was mine, yes, he was mine! And I would marry him—I vowed it—and make him well.

Adam hurried across the tarmac toward the plane, but he did not run. The sleeves of Riley’s camouflage shirt were rolled up, and I admired Adam’s sinewy forearm and the hand that grasped the black snail of the French horn case. We would take the Genesis codex to Pierre Saad. I imagined Adam had knocked the thieves out cold. Now all three were lying crumpled together among the jungle greenery, stars orbiting the interiors of their skulls. Perhaps dead. Their venomous brains registering blackness. I touched the titanium case of Thom’s flash drive.

With perfect competence, Adam efficiently mounted the Cessna’s stairs, pulled them up after himself, bent to kiss my cheek, assumed the copilot’s chair, and buckled his seat belt as I began the taxi for takeoff.

Glancing over at Adam, I thought he had never looked so handsome. The plane and my propeller heart roared into the sky.

A
RIELLE WAS KISSING
her father’s cheek when a shift in the quality of the light made her glance out the large library window. While the sunlight in the south of France was always alluring, this light had an unusual tint of red in it. “Butterscotch,” she said out loud. To get closer to that rich light before it transformed, she began crossing the room to the window. “We should go to Tanzania,” she said to her father over her shoulder. The exotic quality of the light stimulated a longing for adventure. “See the lions and the big animals sometime.”

“If you like,” Pierre Saad answered nonchalantly. Sometime soon Arielle’s frenzy to create art would be tempered by her desire to find a mate. Their life together would modulate into another key. But he liked the key of father and daughter, and he would prolong it to the degree he could. Since his daughter wanted to go there, Africa—the gigantic bulbous root of Egypt—suddenly seemed appealing. Before the light shifted, she had announced that she would call a cab, go to Lyon, and from there fly back to her studio in Paris.

Pierre took a deep breath and released it. Lucy Bergmann had been missing for nearly nine months.

“Father, don’t sigh.” Arielle smiled as she glanced back at him.

“The human chest is a rudimentary pipe organ,” he said. “No doubt one could breathe very deeply on the African plains.” He took in an enormous breath of air.

“Father, there’s a taxi approaching. From Lyon, its advertisement says.”

“My Sufi father said the rhythmic act of breathing mimicked creation when one breathed in and annihilation when one breathed out.”

“A taxi!”

“To know the divine, we must become nothing.”

“It’s a long drive for a taxi,” she answered. “I might bargain with him for my ride to Lyon, since I’m packed.”

The taxi stopped. From the backseat, a woman popped out, not waiting for the driver’s assistance. Arielle observed she was dressed in beige linen, with caramel-colored high heels and a cocky little hat, with a long pheasant feather jutting out behind—a throwback to the time of Princess Diana. The woman carried a valise, lavishly trimmed on the flap with flat autumnal feathers, but no purse. Her body moved not gracefully but crisply, as though she were stronger and more decisive in every gesture than she needed to be. Before Arielle could decide if this visitor looked familiar, from the far side of the taxi, the head of a man emerged over its roof. He was tall, with blue-black hair.

When he came around the back of the taxi, Arielle noticed that his slacks and jacket were a vanilla color, the complement of the woman’s outfit, but they fit the form of his body with amazing exactness. No one should be so good-looking, Arielle thought.

“Shall I tell the driver to wait for you?” Pierre asked, rising from his desk.

“No,” she answered. “I won’t be going quite so soon, after all.”

That being the case, Pierre took his time in joining her at the window. So Arielle had changed her mind. Restless. Why not savor their moment together in the south of France instead of rushing here and there?

He enjoyed the plushness of the Persian carpet under his feet as he moved. A rug dealer had once told him that in Persia the adage was that you could judge a man’s wealth by the
thinness
of his carpet, but the idea of symbolizing munificence with thinness made no sense to Pierre. For his library, he had bought a carpet that felt like a sponge through the thin leather soles of his fine French shoes.

His daughter stood at the window as though arrested, with one hand raised—but not as though to wave. Of course she looked like her mother in that moment. The explosion that had killed his wife had been so powerful that the largest piece of her found intact had been her little finger. Pierre joined his daughter at the window and placed his hand protectively on her shoulder.

But Arielle stepped forward eagerly.

Pierre looked out and saw the black French horn case, and a young man with matching black hair in a vanilla suit, and the woman.

“It’s Lucy Bergmann!” he said. “She made it.”

Yes, that must be the French horn case and the codex! His joy was only slightly diluted by incredulity. “And it appears they took time to go shopping in Paris.” He wanted to sound offhand, shrewd, and knowing, but his heart was sputtering like a skyrocket.

“Not Parisian fashion—Rome,” his daughter answered. “Or Milan. His hair is Italian dark, but he’s so fair.” Was that anxiety in his daughter’s voice reflecting the reality of her own olive skin? “Who in the world …?” she speculated.

“I don’t know him from Adam’s house cat,” Pierre answered over his shoulder as he turned to hurry toward his front door. Why not begin to use a few American expressions? A Southern one. He liked that one—a house and a house cat in Adam’s garden. The idiom caused the mythic world to jangle in pleasant discord against the bourgeois one.

Right behind her father, Arielle rushed to greet the new arrivals, but when she stepped into the sunshine, she let Pierre hurry on ahead of her. Arielle wished to appear composed—friendly but in nothing of a frenzy. She had liked Lucy Bergmann. She had thought her terribly lost and exceptionally naive for a middle-aged woman, but capable of basic honesty and caring. To what extent did Lucy care about her handsome traveling companion? Arielle wondered.

When he said his name was Adam Black, Arielle could not restrain herself from laughing. “Not Adam’s house cat, but the man himself?”

To her surprise, the young man blushed, looked concerned, and became silent. Hers was just a tossed-off, spontaneous laugh, but she saw he had some strange sensitivity about him. He wasn’t so very young—maybe thirty.
Despite his clothes, he was lacking in sophistication. His mind lacked nimbleness, boldness.

“And where is my father’s plane?” Arielle asked, turning to Lucy.

Both of the visitors answered at once, but Lucy’s reply rang out more clearly. “I wrecked it.” Could it be possible that Adam had mumbled, “In Eden”?

Wary, Arielle could not stop herself from glancing at him askance.

Suddenly her father was shouldering her aside. He held out his hand to Adam, and then enclosed Adam’s hand in both of his. “We are delighted to welcome you.
Enchanté,”
her father said with just his particular mixture of warmth and polish.

In Adam’s face there was open gratitude. She watched their eyes meet—her father and Adam beginning to know each other. Perhaps even trust. He’s all right, then, she thought.

The taxi driver handed out another suitcase, large, to Adam.

“Is there another bag?” Pierre asked Lucy.

“No,” she answered. “We’re sharing.”

Together the quartet—Arielle thought of them that way—walked the stone path toward the house, her father ahead with Lucy, and she beside Adam, who carried the French horn case in one hand and in the other the suitcase that matched Lucy’s valise, though it had no decorative feathers. In the style of her father, Arielle just said, “We’re very glad you’ve come,” and let the rest of the short walk continue in silence. When she glanced back to watch the taxi disappear down the hill, she was glad she was not in it.

Her father walked with one arm loosely across Lucy’s back, his hand resting on the curve of her shoulder. Had he been wearing his Arabic robes, he would never have assumed such a familiar arrangement.

Later that night, after dinner, she would say privately to her father, “To my knowledge, you only met her at Nag Hammadi.” He would reply, “Not so. Remember I had spoken with her in Cairo, when she nearly broke down trying to address the symposium. And that is not all. When the piano fell in
Amsterdam, I happened to be next to her. I put my hand under her elbow to keep her from falling.” Arielle would smile slightly even while giving her father the eye of suspicion. He would redirect her attention to herself: “And what are your intentions concerning the handsome Adam?” Instead of answering, Arielle would ask her father what he made of him, and her father would reply, “He has the perfume of a rare flower. He would require extraordinary care, more devotion than most people are capable of giving.”

But that afternoon, in the hallway to the bedrooms, Pierre asked Lucy in a direct fashion, “Shall you share a room?”

“I think not,” she said, “but would a connecting door be possible?”

“But of course,” Pierre said. “Exactly the arrangement my daughter and I have when we travel abroad together.”

“I don’t think he’s quite young enough to be my son,” Lucy murmured.

“Some people have young souls,” her father replied as he led them down the hall. “Some of us dally along the road to wisdom, or even to age.” Without even looking over his shoulder he tossed back the idea, “Perhaps you yourself have a soul that has rested as much as it has journeyed.” He stopped. “Forgive me.” He turned around to offer an explanation for his impertinence. “My stepfather is a Sufi, and sometimes my own thoughts take a rather mystical direction, that is, when I feel I am with those who might as well be family.”

Lucy said nothing.

Arielle wished her father would zip his lips. She didn’t want them to think either he or she was weird.

“We don’t eat meat,” Adam suddenly said, out of the blue.

After Pierre had telephoned his friend at the restaurant in Bordeilles to bring up his most exquisite fish offering for their dinner, and after the guests had bathed and rested, they all seated themselves at the candlelit library table, Pierre beside Lucy but facing his daughter; Adam beside Arielle and facing Lucy. Pierre explained that he always used the large library table for the rare dinner party, as it saved the expense of building a dining room.

“The table is elegant,” Lucy said. “I can’t think of a better place to feast, literally or figuratively, than in a lovely library.”

“We are a quartet, are we not?” Pierre replied.

Arielle was both surprised and pleased to hear her father echo just what she had thought but not said.

“What instrument would you choose to play in a string quartet?” Pierre asked the table at large.

No one responded. They picked up their white damask napkins and smoothed the cloth over their laps.

“What a relief to be out of high heels,” Lucy remarked candidly.

Arielle was delighted with this down-to-earth, nonsequential response to her father’s whimsy. It was as though Lucy had steadied the boat that held them all. Like old friends, they could just blurt away.

While Lucy had changed from her skirt into linen slacks without changing her blouse or jacket, Arielle had shed her jeans to wear the most richly exotic of her gauzy, flowing gowns. Quite on purpose, she had decided to look as strange and alluring as possible, lest Adam take her for an ordinary person. Like Lucy, he had dressed down by replacing his smart-cut jacket with a casual white cotton knit sweater; a narrow band of pumpkin color encircled his chest and back. Already Arielle wanted to ask if she might sculpt his head, but the impossibility of representing the inky blackness of his hair parried that impulse. She regretted that she knew nothing of the art of love.

How is it possible for merely his appearance to promise so much? she asked herself. And yet it did. His form spoke of his essence, surely.

“Without your heels you are just my height,” her father commented to Lucy. Too much candor, Arielle thought. Too much, too soon. She felt herself blushing for her father’s sake. He really did not understand proper boundaries. Then she censored herself for being censorious. Lucy didn’t seem to mind his comment any more than he had minded her segue from chamber music to foot comfort. The smile Lucy gave her father—Arielle could see perfectly well sitting on the diagonal with her—was sheer friendliness. But Lucy was contained, too. Oddly self-contained, Arielle thought. Lucy had changed.