Ancient of Days (6 page)

“Beats injecting macaques with No-Dōz, huh?” I had begun setting my tables, single-handedly flapping open parachutes of linen and laying out silverware. Just as Nollinger was about to parry my sarcasm, Livia George appeared. As the anthropologist shuffled the photographs of Adam out of her line of sight, I told her, “This is my cousin from Atlanta. He’ll be staying with us a few days.”

“Nephew,” Nollinger corrected me, standing for the introduction.

“Right,” I acknowledged. “Nephew.”

Livia George came over and shook Nollinger’s hand. “Pleased to meecha. You’re too skinny, thoah—all shanks and shoulder blades. Stay aroun’ here a few days and I’ll get you fatted up fine as any stockyard steer.”

“That’s a promise,” I informed Nollinger, “not a threat.”

“Thank you,” he said uncertainly. “Thank you, ma’am.”

RuthClaire did not come to town either of the next two days, and Nollinger stayed after me to drive him out to see her. He was missing his morning classes at Emory, he said, and a colleague at the field station had to oversee the daily amphetamine injections of his drug-addled macaques. He could not stay in Beulah Fork much longer. Did I want him to get Adam out of RuthClaire’s life or not? If I did, I had to cooperate. Had I summoned him all the way from Atlanta only to confine him to my grungy attic-cum-dormitory? Was I
that
desperate for a roommate?

I was ready to cooperate. Entirely at my expense, my counterfeit nephew ate nothing but medium-rare steaks and extravagant tossed salads with Roquefort dressing. Moreover, to amuse himself between his final meal of the day and his own owlish turn-in time, he had brought with him a homemade syrinx, or panpipe, that he played with a certain melancholy skill but an intemperance that sabotaged, early on, my regard. Sometimes (he told me as we lay on our cots in the dark) he played the panpipe for his experimental subjects at the field station, and the strains of this music soothed even the most agitated and bellicose of the males. It was an unscientific thing to do (he conceded) because it introduced an extraneous element into his observations of their behavior, but he found it hard to deny them—completely, anyway—the small pleasure afforded by his playing.

“I’m not a macaque,” I replied. Both the hint and the implied criticism were lost on Nollinger. Anyway, I was not that desperate for a roommate. So, the next day, I swallowed hard and telephoned RuthClaire, explaining that a young man who greatly admired her work had stopped in at the West Bank to request an introduction. Would it be all right if I brought him out? He did not seem to be (1) an art dealer, (2) a salesman, (3) a potential groupie, (4) a college kid with a term paper due, or (5) an out-and-out crazy. I liked both his looks and his attitude.

“Is he your nephew, Paul?”

“What?”

“Edna Twiggs told me yesterday that your nephew was staying with you.”

“That’s right, RuthClaire. He’s my nephew.”

“You don’t have a nephew, Paul. Even Edna Twiggs knows that. That’s because you don’t have any brothers or sisters.”

“I had to tell the home folks
something
, RuthClaire. They don’t rest easy till they’ve got every visiting stranger pigeonholed. You know how some of them can be. I didn’t want it going around that I’d set up house with another guy.”

“Not much chance of that,” RuthClaire said. “But why such petty intrigue and deception, hon? What’s the
real
story?”

I improvised. “I’m thinking of selling out,” I said hurriedly. “His name’s Brian Nollinger and he’s a potential buyer. Neither of us wants to publicize the fact—to keep from confusing everyone if the deal falls through. We’re trying to prevent disillusionment or maybe even gloating. You understand?”

“Selling out? But, Paul, you love that place.”

“Once I did. I’ve only kept it these past fifteen months because I thought we might get back together. But that seems less and less likely, doesn’t it?”

RuthClaire was so quiet I feared she’d rung off. Then: “I don’t understand why your potential buyer wants to meet me.”

“The part about him admiring your work is true,” I lied. “You know the three-dimensional paintings you did for the Contemporary Room in Atlanta’s High Museum? He’s seen ’em four or five times since their debut. Come on, Ruthie. He’d like to see you in person. I told him you would. It might help me cinch the sale.”

Again she was slow to answer. “Paul, there are reasons why I might be reluctant to give you that kind of help.” She let me mull the implications. “All right,” she added, “bring him on. I’ll put aside my work and tell Adam to get lost for an hour or so.”

She hung up before I could thank her.

Throughout this conversation, Nollinger had been at my elbow. “I don’t know anything about the restaurant business,” he told me. “As far as that goes, I don’t know very much about art, either.”

“Do you know what you like?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Never mind,” I said. “Let’s get out there.”

Despite his musical talent and his advanced degrees in anthropology and primate behavior, Nollinger had not been lying about his ignorance of art. I learned the dismaying extent of his ignorance on our journey to Paradise Farm. Anxious that he not tip his hand too early, I alternately quizzed and coached him as we drove. Although not unfamiliar with Renaissance biggies like da Vinci and Michelangelo, he seemed to have abandoned his art-appreciation classes just as they were forging into the terra incognita of the seventeenth century. He knew next to nothing about impressionism, postimpressionism, and the most influential twentieth-century movements. He confused Vincent van Gogh with a popular author of science-fiction extravaganzas, believed that Pablo Picasso was still alive in France, and contended that N. C. Wyeth was a better painter than his son, Andrew, who painted only barns and motionless people. He had never even heard of the contemporary artists whom RuthClaire most esteemed.

“You’re a phony,” I said in disgust. “She’ll sniff you out in three minutes—if it takes her that long.”

“Look, Mr. Loyd,
you’re
the one who concocted this stupid scheme.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

“Why don’t we just tell her the truth?”

“The truth wouldn’t have got you out here.” I eased my car into the gravel-strewn drive before the house. “You’d still be in Beulah Fork playing your panpipe and waiting for your next tactfully mooched meal.”

Nollinger’s jaw went rigid. With visible effort, he swallowed whatever reply he had thought to make. The air of fierce inner resolve radiating from him, much like a fever, began to worry me.

RuthClaire met us on the front porch, shook Nollinger’s hand, and ushered us inside. We stood about in the sculpture-studded foyer like visitors awaiting their guide at a museum. I had not set foot over the threshold since September, and the faint but disturbing monkey-house odor that Adam had left in the West Bank was as hard to ignore here as mold on a brick of cheese. Nollinger noticed it, too, the incongruous scent of macaques in a barn-like Southern manse. RuthClaire was probably inured to the smell by this time, but she caught our sensitivity to it and explained it as the wretched mustiness of a shut-up house after a truly severe winter.

“I’m not an admirer of yours,” Nollinger blurted. His sallow face turned the color of a ripe plum. “I mean, I probably would be if I knew anything about your work, but I don’t. I’m here under false pretenses.”

“Criminy,” I murmured.

RuthClaire looked to me for amplification or aid. I rubbed the cold nappy head of a granite satyr next to the oaken china cabinet dominating the hall. (It was a baby satyr, with a syrinx very much like Nollinger’s.)

“I’m here to see Adam,” he said.

My ex did not take her eyes off me. “He’s outside foraging,” she replied curtly. “How do you happen to know about him?”

“Livia George may have let it slip,” I essayed. “From Livia George to Edna Twiggs to the media of all seven continents.”

“Here,” said Nollinger. He handed RuthClaire the packet of photos I’d taken from the magnolia tree outside the downstairs bathroom. Prudently, though, he saved back three or four of the pictures. Without facing away from me, RuthClaire thumbed through the batch in her hands.

“You’re a Judas, Paul—the most treacherously back-stabbing Benedict Arnold I’ve ever had the misfortune to know. And I actually
married
you! How could that have happened?”

To Nollinger I said, “I’m toting up your bill at the West Bank, Herr Professor. It’s going to be a shocker. Just you wait.”

“You told him about Adam,” RuthClaire said. “You
volunteered
the information.”

“I was worried about you. Grant me that much compassionate concern for your welfare. I’m not an unfeeling toad, for Christ’s sake.”

“When?” RuthClaire asked Nollinger. “When did he get in touch with you?”

“Last month, Ms. Loyd.”

She counted on her fingers as if computing a conception date. “It took at least four months for this ‘compassionate concern’ to develop? Four whole months, Paul?”

“His instincts were right in coming to me,” Nollinger said. “You’ve no business keeping a rare hominid specimen like Adam in your own home. He’s an invaluable evolutionary Rosetta stone. He belongs to the world scientific community.”

“Of which, I suppose, you’re the self-appointed representative?”

“Yes, ma’am, if you’ll just take it upon yourself to see me in that light.”

“First, I’m not
keeping
Adam in my house; he’s living here of his own free will. Second, he’s a human being and not an anonymous evolutionary whatchamacallit belonging to you or anyone else. And finally, I’m ready for you and Benedict Iscariot here to haul your presumptuous heinies back to Beulah Fork.”

Nollinger looked at me knowingly. “Your ex seems to be an uncompromising spiritual heir of Louis Rutherford, doesn’t she?”

“What does that mean?” RuthClaire demanded.

“I think what he’s trying to say is that you’ve got yourself the world’s only habiline houseboy and you don’t want to give him up.”

“It’s a form of involuntary servitude,” Nollinger said, “no matter how many with-it rationales you use to justify the relationship.”

“He comes and goes as he likes,” RuthClaire spat. “Paradise Farm is his only haven in this materialistic world of ours. Maybe you’d like him to live in a shopping mall or a trade-school garage or a tumbledown outhouse on Cleve Snyder’s place?”

“Or a fenced-in run at the field station?” I said, turning to the anthropologist. “So you can dope him up with amphetamines for fun and profit.”

“Wait a minute, Mr. Loyd,” Nollinger said. “I’m on your side.”

RuthClaire tore up the prints in her hands and sprinkled them on the floor like Kodachrome confetti. “These are cheap paparazzo snapshots,” she said, teeth clenched. She next went to work shredding the envelope.

“I still have these,” Nollinger told her, holding up the prints he had palmed. “And Mr. Loyd still has an entire set of his own.”

“She feels better, though,” I said, looking askance at RuthClaire.

“Of course she does. Once we’ve gone, she’ll have her habiline houseboy in here to clean up the mess. It’s not many folks in this day and age who command the obedience of a loyal unpaid retainer. She likes the feeling of power she gets from—”

Surprising even myself, I plunged my fist deep into Nollinger’s diaphragm. I would have preferred to clip him on the temple or jaw, but his wire-rimmed glasses dissuaded me—or, rather, my subconscious. Nollinger finished his sentence with an inarticulate “
Umpf
!” and collapsed atop the photo scraps.

RuthClaire said, “Maybe
you
feel a little better, too. Not too much, though, I hope. His insults pale beside your treachery, Paul.”

“That’s probably so,” I said, hangdog.

“Get him out of here. I’ll start soliciting bed partners on Peachtree Street before your unmannerly ‘nephew’ ever lays eyes on the living Adam.”

I helped Nollinger up and led him outside to my automobile. Still bent over and breathless, he mumbled that my assault was a classic primate ploy—especially typical of baboons or chimpanzees—to establish dominance through intimidation. I told him to shut up. He did. Thereafter he kept his eyes averted; and as we left Paradise Farm, rolling from crunchy gravel onto pothole-riven asphalt, I saw Adam staring out at us from the leafy picket of holly trees between RuthClaire’s property and the road. The half-hidden habiline, I glumly took note, was wearing one of my old golfing sweaters.

It did not flatter him.

At six o’clock that evening, the sullen anthropologist boarded a Greyhound bus for Atlanta, and I supposed that our dealings with each other had formally concluded. I did not want to see him again, and did not expect to. As for RuthClaire, she had every reason to feel the same way about me. I tried, therefore, to resign myself to her bizarre liaison with the mysterious refugee from Montaraz. After all, how was she hurting Adam or he her? I must get on with my own life.

About a week later this headline appeared in the
Atlanta Constitution
, which I had delivered every morning to the West Bank:

RENOWNED BEULAH FORK ARTIST

HARBORING PREHISTORIC HUMAN

SAYS EMORY ANTHROPOLOGIST

“Oh, no,” I said aloud over my coffee. “Oh, no.”

The story featured a photograph—a color photograph—of Adam dismembering a squirrel in the downstairs bathroom at Paradise Farm. Not having reproduced very well, this photo had the dubious authenticity of pictures of the Loch Ness monster—but it grabbed my eye like a layout in a gore-and-gossip tabloid, afflicting me with anger and guilt. About the only consolation I could find in the story’s appearance was the fact that it occupied a small corner of the city/state section rather than the right-hand columns of the front page. The photograph itself was attributed to Brian Nollinger.

“I’ll kill him.”

The
Constitution
’s reporter had created a tapestry of quotations—from Nollinger, from two of his colleagues at Emory, and from RuthClaire herself—that made the anthropologist’s claims, or charges, seem the pathetic fancies of a man whose career had never quite taken off as everyone had anticipated. The press conference he had called to announce his unlikely discovery included a bitter indictment of a “woman of talent and privilege” obstructing the progress of science for selfish reasons of her own. RuthClaire, in turn, had submitted to a brief telephone interview in which she countercharged that Nollinger’s tale of a
Homo habilis
survivor living in her house and grounds was a tawdry pitch for notoriety and more government research money. She refrained quite cagily, I noticed, from an outright declaration that Nollinger was lying. Informed of the existence of photos, for instance, she dismissed them as someone else’s work—without actually claiming they had been fabricated from scratch or cunningly doctored. Moreover, she kept me altogether out of the discussion. And because Nollinger had done likewise (from a wholly different set of motives), no one at the
Constitution
had tried to interview me. Ah, I thought, there’s more consolation here than I first supposed. My ex can take care of herself. . . . She would blame me for this unwanted publicity, though. She would harden herself to all my future efforts at rapprochement.