LOVE AND ART
SAFE IN FRANCE, in the library of Pierre and Arielle, I loved the feel of Adam’s large hand in my own. I knew Arielle was puzzled by Adam’s demeanor. From the front of the house, we heard Pierre welcoming his father and his father’s reply—an ancient, dry voice—then the sound of the donkey’s small hooves entering the house, a quiet clatter on wood, a muted footfall on carpet.
“Grandfather is a bedouin,” Arielle explained. “He would expect his animal to be brought inside, like a brother.”
She rose from her chair as a tiny old man swaddled in flowing robes led his soft-faced donkey into the library. The bedouin’s skin was like leather, and a staff towered above his head. I felt Adam abruptly release my hand. Both Arielle and Adam hurried to the little man. Arielle bent to embrace her grandfather, but Adam fell on his knees as though he knelt before a holy manger.
The old man spoke in Arabic, which Arielle immediately translated: “Here is one come from the West, a young man, a prince, neither king nor magus, who bends the knee and gives reverence not to a babe but to an aged man as though he were the Prophet himself.” (Yes, I thought, Adam is a prince.) The Sufi laid his hand on Adam’s black head and let his fingers play in his hair. “The true Prophet will not come again. That is not promised to us. We are to go to him, to make a holy pilgrimage to Mecca.” His gaze shifted to Arielle, and his face crinkled in a smile.
“And now he is asking me,” Arielle reported, looking at me, “if I have made my pilgrimage to Mecca.” She spoke to her grandfather in Arabic. “And I am telling him that it is my intention to do so, sometime soon.” She glanced at Adam. “Actually I’d rather go to Tanzania and Zanzibar, the Serengeti Plain, and the Olduvai Gorge.”
Pierre spoke to his father rapidly in Arabic and then explained to us that he was inviting his father to sit at the table. “A quintet,” he said. “Do you know Schubert’s quintet,” he asked me, “the one referred to as ‘The Trout’?”
As he spoke the words, playful strains of music filled the air.
“The system is voice-activated,” Pierre explained in English.
I smiled, but I felt unnerved. In the music, the trout gleefully cavorted in the water. My ear followed the viola part, as it always did because I had played the viola in my youth. Adam remained kneeling on the carpet before the tiny Sufi. Surely the others were finding Adam peculiar. He folded his hands in prayer, and his tears bathed his knuckles. Did Adam weep in sorrow or with joy?
Waving his hand at the donkey to shoo him away, the grandfather circled around Adam to claim his proffered place at the head of the table. The obedient animal turned and retraced his steps down the carpeted hallway toward the entrance. I heard someone speaking politely to the donkey in French—no doubt leading him away. Adam’s eyes were closed, and he moved his lips in silent prayer.
I stood up from my seat, my eyes meeting those of Pierre, Arielle, and the grandfather in turn. “Please believe that in no way do we mean to give offense,” I said. “Certainly we wish to do honor to each of you, and especially to Monsieur, who like ourselves has traveled a long way. Nonetheless, for the sake of Adam’s health”—I paused—“we must beg you to excuse us. We need to retire.”
The grandfather threw back his head and laughed, nodding vigorously to assure he understood intuitively.
“You honor us with your trust,” Pierre said, “in sharing your need, as all true friends must ever do with each other. Of course you must eat before you sleep, and your plates will soon be with you.” Immediately he began to address his father and his daughter in happy Arabic.
When I held my hand out to Adam, he rose from his knees, and I led him down the hall.
When I closed the door of Adam’s room behind us, I kissed Adam on the lips. He held me close against his body. For a moment we stood together, swaying. Then he tugged at the neckline of my sweater and said, “May I?”
I nodded consent and smiled. Carefully, he began to remove my clothing, and we both entered the realm of serene ritual. As he had whenever we entered our hotel rooms, since our flight from the jungle, Adam unbuttoned, unzipped, and took the clothing from my body. I stood perfectly still and smiled at him. When he had finished disrobing me, he took a pad of exquisite drawing paper and a wooden case of pencils from the valise decorated with pheasant feathers. Now he made a slight movement, sliding back the lid of the box to display a palisade of sharpened points.
“Where shall I sit?” I asked. Always he wanted to draw me, to practice his art, before we made love.
“Sit on the bed.”
I pulled back the covers and sat on the sheet, my bare feet resting on the floor.
“Hold the valise,” he said. “The feathers are like you.”
I stood the valise on end so that its edge rested on my thighs. It was tall enough to hide my nipples.
“Like this,” he said gently. He laid the valise flat across my thighs. “Like a dinner napkin.” Humor tweaked his glance.
I smiled at him, and he began to draw. I watched his eyes move back and forth from my body to the page and listened to the slight erotic rub, almost a scratch, of the graphite against the receptive page. My thoughts wandered to the two flowers on our plates, the open full-faced pansy for me, the black-crimson rose in flowing profile for him, as though it were a smoldering comet about to let its color slip off into space.
When he finished the drawing, Adam laid the pencil back into the wooden box. He turned the pad of drawing paper to face me.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “All your drawings are beautiful. I can never decide which one I love the most.” A rather narcissistic statement, I knew, since they were all of me.
Obligingly, he turned over the pages so we could review together the drawings he’d made. The early drawings had the loose lines of a sketch. The first one showed me sitting nude in a chair near a window; I was looking out at the Acropolis in the distance. The rectangular shape and pillared sides of the Parthenon were faintly suggested, and its geometry contrasted with my curves. “The Greeks had no more fear of the naked body,” I had said, “than we felt in Eden.”
In another sketch, I lay flat on a small sailboat, my face turned toward the artist, as though he stood in the water, though he had not. We were alone on the little boat in the Aegean, relaxing. I had spent Gabriel’s money freely.
A later drawing showed me in a roomette on a train. As he turned the pages over, the sketches became more detailed and erotic. With the fifth or sixth one, I had asked him if he were making a calendar. “Yes,” he had said, “a calendar for all times and places, of one person whose heart I love and whose body my hand loves to draw.”
When he actually touched me, each time we made love, he obliterated everything of my memory of Thom. In the drawings he never included the fact that I wore the flash drive on its black cord around my neck.
“Rembrandt loved to paint his Sasha,” I said, thinking of her wide waist and aging thighs. I recalled The Lagoon of Matisse, in which an apple green form spread over a bluish one, their curves undulating in the rhythms of loving bodies. Not people at all, but abstract forms, yet the concept was thoroughly erotic. Surely art has its deepest root in sensuality. “How many sketches do we have now?”
“This was number eleven.”
When I looked again at this newest drawing—Lucy with Feathered Valise, I thought—I noticed that my body seemed older, more sagged. “Do you think of them as particular months of the year?”
“No.” He pulled the cotton sweater over his head. “Do you want me, Lucy?” he asked.
“Of course.” Then I teased him a bit—“Who wouldn’t?”
Afterward, I listened to Adam’s breathing change and knew he was asleep. I sat up to admire his amazing beauty, memorizing, storing up for the future. Sighing softly, I remembered that we had not eaten. Pierre had said we should eat, and of course he was right. I padded to the door and opened it a crack. Yes, there were two trays, with decorously covered plates. Down the hall, very faintly, a trio of Arabic voices chattered in quick exchanges, and I heard the faint bubbling of a hookah; I inhaled the odor of Turkish tobacco and thought of the richly flowing—concealing, revealing—dress Arielle had worn.
After bringing in both trays, I slipped on a nightgown from our suitcase, for warmth. Then I ate all of my dinner, even the fattening baklava. While I enjoyed the honey sweetness, I continued to admire Adam, lying on his side, facing me, his cheek pillowed on his hands pressed flatly together. He had been lying in this posture, I remembered, a long time ago, when I first saw him under the apple tree. When I finished the food, I used my finger to swipe up the last of the honey and flaky pastry. Then I rose and passed through the door that joined our rooms.
I wanted to sleep long and undisturbed. When Adam got hungry, he would wake up and enjoy his food. He would feel strong and whole. He would have a clarity about him—perhaps for days—till something jolted him backward into a morass of guilt and confusion. If he perceived or imagined danger, his focus would become steely and his body and mind would contract into purposeful action. But he was not naturally a person of action; he was a dreamer.
In my own bed, alone, I wondered yet again, as had become my habit since Gabriel’s betrayal in the jungle, whether Thom had been faithful to me. I had relived seeing again and again my own more youthful face coming unselfconsciously toward the camera. Was a camera hidden in the corner of Thom’s glasses? Was he possibly even a spy? Had he seated the camera close to his natural eye to record classified scientific documents? For whom would he have been a spy? For his own records? His own library? I saw my face and body replaced (preferred?) by a series of other Lucys. But wouldn’t that have been a simple matter, with Gabriel’s vast computer expertise, for him to engineer? Perhaps Gabriel had filmed them from the corner of his own tortoiseshell glasses.
Again, Thom’s valentine emerged from the dark cosmos, declaring itself to be for all the Lucys in the universe. When that message had been engraved on my heart, there had been no sense of any sinister connotations.
I pictured the Lucy whom I had actually known, the young assistant I had assumed was Gabriel’s girlfriend. “We shared her,” Gabriel had claimed.
A film such as the one Gabriel had tricked me into watching could so easily have been faked. It was pornographic, not artful. Gabriel could have hidden the images on the drive of his computer, coiled in the chip, waiting till he gave it some signal I never noticed so that it would seem to be part of Thom’s memory stick. He could have caused the film to embed itself in Thom’s flash drive, too.
The answer was either yes or no. Thom was the person I had always believed in, or he was not. I thought of the probability problem referred to in physics as “Schr?dinger’s cat.” Tonight it seemed more likely that I had been mistaken about Thom. Was letting Adam draw me the way he did, and come to me as he did, the acting out of some feeling of degradation or of revenge on my part? Or was it liberation, joy, therapy, friendship, love, transition? I sighed and closed my eyes.
I remembered the abundance of Thom’s graying, springy hair. My own hair had its graying threads now. No curls. I thought of how Leonardo had loved to draw curls of hair, in angels, in men, in women. Sometimes he had drawn streams of water that swirled and curled like hair. Drowsy relaxation claimed me, and I thought of Schubert’s trout, a fish that smiled. When I slept, I dreamed of Fred Riley standing patiently beside a stream, hoping to catch a trout in a hand terminating in pale claws. Seated at a concert grand, the bedouin fingered ivory keys, interspersed with black ones grouped in twos and threes. Near the piano in a wooden chair, Arielle sat on Adam’s knee. Once again I tucked the viola under my chin.