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.
ADAM’S DREAM
DEEP IN THE night, curled in the cave of sleep, Adam dreamed of himself walking in the garden. Alone, he knelt beside the crisscrossed bark of a palm tree and prayed God to give him Eve. The side of the tree creaked open like a door, and graceful, nameless animals passed before him. A young woman appeared, richly dressed in the desert manner. “I’m here.” With a little gasp, she apologized, and her wide eyes looked afraid. “There will be blood on the sheets.”
Sleepily, he said, “They’re already red, aren’t they?”
He held out his arms to her. Many women had walked willingly into his arms, whether he was sane or not. Rosalie? Always he was a tender lover. He hoped so. This time he would live tenderly with her, too. No betrayal.
This he devoutly intended.
In the morning, Adam heard a light rapping at the door. When he opened it, a slender arm thrust through, holding a lightweight but beautiful dressing gown, purple with gold threads and small mirrors.
“There’s one for everybody,” the voice said—certainly it was Arielle’s voice. “Grandfather brought them on the donkey.”
Adam expected his robe to be too small, but his arms entered the sleeves as though they were entering air. He liked the thin, crisp fabric.
“Come to the library for coffee, please,” she said from behind the closed door to the hall.
Adam crossed into the adjoining bedroom, but Lucy’s room was empty.
When he entered the library, the four of them were already tucked into soft chairs. Their bodies bent this way or that—relaxed, chatting, eating, licking their fingers. It appeared to Adam that they had been talking for hours, sitting in their comfortable chairs grouped together on a lovely woolen carpet. Perhaps the carpet would rise and transport them to perfuméd Arabia.
Their robes and the food—glazed and braided breads encrusted with slivered almonds, goblets shaped like funnels filled with small round golden plums, the sprinkling of pink rose petals over the table—everything spoke of luxury. The word Venice formed in Adam’s mind, though he had never been there, and he felt the glide of a gondola.
“Such uniformity—all of us in robes,” Lucy exclaimed, but because the colors of the robes varied from person to person, Adam thought her choice of word to be not quite right. Unified, not uniformity, he thought. How composed and unified we are, like diverse people in a single painting might be. A Renoir married to a Matisse. He thought of the valise stuffed with art books Lucy had insisted on buying for him as they traveled. “They drew,” she had said, “yes, but, remember, they also painted.”
Lucy’s robe was scarlet shot with gold; Pierre was in verdant green, Arielle in azure, and Adam in royal purple like the prince the grandfather had said he was. Why did the grandfather resemble a turtle? It was the way his head thrust forward almost horizontally from his shoulders. The grandfather’s robe was the colors of sand and birds’ nests.
Quickly, Arielle said, “Beautiful. The robes our dear grandfather has brought on his donkey make us beautiful, one and all,” and Adam loved Arielle for the kindness in her courtesy.
While they ate breakfast together for the first time, their hosts asked how Lucy and he had met and what had happened to delay their arrival in France. Lucy’s sentences seemed curved, Adam thought, then straightened like a drawing that wanted to be a portal more than a picture, and he wondered if what she said was true. She told her tale briefly, and then Arielle wanted to know