If he was insane, he was only mildly so. He could cooperate. He could follow instructions. He could anticipate instructions. His affect seemed appropriate. He seemed relaxed. Not at all anxious. He seemed as though he wanted nothing, as though he was perfectly content.
These conclusions about my companion awakened a certain sense of frustration. Where was ambition?
Thom had been a person who worked very hard. So had I. We had loved our work, had always kept each other on a loose leash concerning the freedom to work. And Thom knew how to take his pleasures; he made room for attending the concerts we both had loved since our first meeting. After he spent the day at the physics department, Thom enjoyed a good meal and good conversation, even if he came home quite late. Here there was no work, and we might as well be grunting at each other, so monosyllabic were our exchanges. Sometimes I did grunt. Thom had focus and insight about everything—art, politics, literature, above all his work in spectroscopy, his knowledge of the starry sky in all its aspects, visible and invisible. He could listen to the heartbeat of space, through the radio telescopes.
For the first time since I had fallen into Eden, I touched my talisman, the titanium case that held and protected Thom’s last thoughts. While my fingertips caressed the smooth case, I savored our last morning in the hotel when he had projected his valentine on the ceiling: To all the Lucys in the Universe.
Could there be more than one? The thought jolted me. Talk among the astrophysicists about parallel universes never seemed very serious. But was it possible that I had not been Thom’s one and only object of affection? What bizarre language! I was not an object of anything! Suddenly I realized my mind had become irritable. It was like a wound that itches as it heals. The patch on the back of my head itched. So did my back. It was irritating.
And yes, we ourselves had known more than one Lucy. One of them was a cousin of Thom, a woman about the age of Adam. Thom had sent her to work with our friend Gabriel Plum in England. She had come to Thom’s funeral and bawled her eyes out. I remembered how Gabriel had taken her into his arms, comfortingly, and even then, at Thom’s funeral, the idea had flickered through my mind that Gabriel and she might be an Item. Maybe I had glimpsed a sliver of their intimacy.
Then I’d forgotten the impression. Apparently if there had been any warmth between Gabriel and young Lucy it had not lasted, because Gabriel proposed to me. That moment in the big jet, flying over the spine of northern Italy, the gray Dolomite peaks arranged below like dragon vertebrae, belonged more to a dream than to reality. That scene of Gabriel and me inside the airplane seemed to float like an untethered balloon in insubstantial space.
My train of thought had branched and branched, and now I couldn’t remember what it was I had set myself to consider during Adam’s absence.
Moving across the hot meadow was a lilac bush in full bloom. Its aroma preceded it. I closed my eyes and rapturously drew in a long breath. When I opened them, I began to laugh, for of course the lilac tree had two long and manly legs. It was the ridiculous abundance of the bouquet that had made me laugh. It was like something a lover might offer in a Chagall painting. The bouquet would crowd the lovers to the frame and become the bloated centerpiece itself.
When Adam arrived, I joked, “I’m afraid I don’t have an appropriate vase.”
An anxious expression crossed over his face, then he suddenly knelt and began to place the lilacs around my bed, branch by branch, in a border.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll just arrange them here.”
Their color was perfect, purple and deep as Concord grapes, but with edges of lavender that helped to define their texture. There was a robust springiness about the panicles, a lollipop-like delectableness. Only a few of them had begun to droop from the heat. He held one of the floppy ones up to my nose.
“These have the heaviest fragrance,” he said.
The panicle lacked the turgor to raise its head, but it drooped gracefully over his hand. If I were to paint it, if Chagall had painted it, it might have been titled The Offering, with no