love my daughter,” Pierre went on. His head was bent, and he appeared to be studying their feet. “But you doubt my love of you and Lucy.”
Adam was silent. I, too, studied our feet moving beside the pathside tufts of grass, beside a fallen pine, past a knuckle of rock emerging from the soil, beside a small gnarled bush with dried orange berries on it. Fellow travelers, we four, at least for the nonce.
“It is a little embarrassing for me to say to you that I love you,” Pierre continued. “And yet it is true of both you and Lucy, though I have known you such a short time. I love you because you have helped me, because you have brought me my heart’s desire, the ancient texts. I know it is a miracle that you have managed to do so.” Pierre was trying hard to read his heart for the truth of the moment. “You have brought a priceless treasure to my house. Who does not love those who give them even the ordinary things they need?”
“The ungrateful,” Adam said, then he tossed his head like a stallion and seemed surprised that he had said the words aloud.
“It is easy for me to feel gratitude,” Pierre said, “and gratitude is the bedfellow of love.”
“Does love have other bedfellows?” Adam asked, but his tone had changed. He sounded like a friend talking to a friend.
“Of course. One of them is desire.”
Adam simply let the idea sink like a stone in water.
“And there is longing,” Pierre added.
Adam touched the back of his neck, feeling the warmth of the sun there. Perhaps he was thinking it was a French warmth, not the white, high-altitude burning that touched the Idaho mountains, not the sizzling heat of sunlight on our skin in the unfiltered Middle East. He said, “Your name, Pierre, Peter, in English means ‘rock.’ Jesus told Peter, his disciple, that he would build his church upon a rock, through Peter’s faith.”
“Your greatest longing,” Pierre said, “is for God.”
“‘In God, we trust,’” Adam answered. He grinned. “In America, it’s written on our money.”
He used a friend’s prerogative to lighten the tone of a serious conversation.
Our curiosity about them satisfied, Arielle and I began our own dialogue, but we let a space open between our voices and their ears. We were glad to walk in the sunshine and to draw the aroma of grass and scattered trees into our nostrils, but we wanted to know each other, too. Walking beside Arielle, I remembered my girlhood friend Janet, and how often we had strolled in some park or boulevard while confiding our thoughts.
“Tell me about Thom, your husband who died,” Arielle said. “You loved him?”
Her question struck me as an insult. Beside my elbow, she was a streak of warmth, tall, young, exotic, a presence unlike myself. Because the only bridge to link us seemed to be an arc of language, I began to send words like so many goats across it. Was this how Adam often felt? Cut off from the world with only breath and words, peculiar words, to send to the Other Side? Perhaps what seemed an insult was really an invitation to commune. “I did love my husband—very much—and I do.”
What should I say to this younger woman, who was doubtlessly filled with real questions about love? Pierre had tried to read his heart to Adam; as the more experienced person, I must try, too. “I don’t know if the Thom I loved really existed, or if it was my idea of him.” My skepticism blurted out like a protrusion in the path. How blandly abstract my words! Yet I felt I was pulling barbed hooks from the red fish of my heart.
“If he was what I needed—I met him when I was eighteen.” My sentence bridge was breaking up into incoherent phrases. I gathered control and said, “I believed in him because I could imagine him to be what I needed.” When Thom came into my life, my ties with women friends had weakened. Regret flamed through me.
“And have you loved Adam?”
Did the young woman actually mean to ask me if I had had sex with Adam?
“Yes,” I said, but because I feared the falseness of a truth so baldly literal, I added, “And no.”
“These answers cancel out each other.”
“Exactly,” I said, but I felt only silly confusion.
Spontaneously, we both trilled with laughter and liked each other a bit better.