stopped my hand in midair and withdrew it. “Lucy,” I said. “My name is Lucy Bergmann.”
“Friend,” he answered, keeping his eyes on the roasting fish. “I know you as my friend today. But God willing, someday I will know you as my wife—”
I said nothing. When he had called me “friend,” my heart had wilted in disappointment—I had to admit it. But the word wife made me feel as though a cup of scalding water had been tossed onto my flesh.
“—and without sin, we shall dwell in the House of the Lord forever and ever.”
After a long pause, I asked him, in a new key, if he thought the fish was almost done and how he had caught it, and how he had kindled the fire, but I did not listen to his replies. I was monitoring my naughty hand, lest it stray to his shoulder.
When Gabriel Plum had asked me to marry him, I had laughed. Now I felt I was attending a wake. I wanted to cry, to mourn the passing of Adam’s hope. But still, Adam and I were alive, sitting in the dark in a grassland, beside a campfire, an isolated twosome. Reflected flames played orange and rosy on our flesh. He knelt before the fire; I sat on my buttocks, my knees drawn up, my arms hugging my knees. Who knew what might happen next? How much time had really passed? I could feel the thin new layer of flesh stretching between my shoulder blades. Perhaps healing was sped up in Eden. The patch on the back of my head was healing faster than my back.
“How does my back look these days?”
“Better.”
“How are you feeling, Adam?”
“Happy.”
I hesitated and then asked, “How happy?”
“More content than joyful,” he answered promptly. “When God created the animals, he made them in pairs—male and female. When Noah took them into the ark, they marched two by two.”
“What do you think of couples of the same sex?” I asked boldly. I wanted to knock him off his biblical pins; I wanted to make him acknowledge the con-temporary world. In the pause before his reply, I listened to locusts and tree frogs. They could have been in Memphis, Tennessee.
“That’s all right with me,” he answered. “I can understand that.”
He spoke in a steady—no, studied—voice, and I wondered about his past, the past of his hauntingly beautiful body. Surely both men and women would have been drawn to him, would have wanted him, or wanted to be him.
“Adam, I can picture the animals going into a wooden boat, but I need to tell you, I don’t believe that story. Not in any literal way.”
He said nothing.
A streak appeared in the dark sky, and I exclaimed, “Look! A shooting star.”
“No,” he said. “That’s a fighter jet going down.”
I felt foolish, felt the blush of embarrassment at my sentimental error, but knew that even though he glanced at me sharply, the fire glow would mask my blush. If he was the child capable of naive belief, I was the child who had to be right.
To console myself, I imagined the two halves of his brain like two gray elephants side by side—one a creature of ancient mythology, the other a practical, sure-footed beast wise in the ways of the world he inhabited.
“I’ve set the table,” he added. “Did you notice?”
I looked at one large, flat stone, almost covered by a single strongly ribbed leaf and two small stones draped with plate-sized leaves.
“This one is the cook table,” he said. “I’ll crack off the clay, then you can pass me your leaf, and I’ll serve you.”
He proceeded to carry out the acts he had previewed.
“Tomorrow I’ll look for some wild vegetables,” he said cheerfully.
“When I was walking in, I didn’t see any vegetables.”
“‘Seek and ye shall find,’” he quoted.
“If I were you, I’d look in that area where there’s a cultivated rose garden. Probably some farmer, before he deserted this place, planted a vegetable garden. In straight rows, with stakes for the tomatoes.”
“This is a strange place,” Adam said.
“It’s a place on earth like any other place,” I asserted. I picked up a shred of the white meat of the fish. Never had I tasted anything so fine. Better than ambrosia, I thought.
“Like any other,” he repeated. “Is it?” When I did not reply—I was as busy as a monkey using both hands to pick up morsels of food, sliding delicate meat from needlelike bones—he added, “It’s good to be able to take care of somebody.”