Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

Again she was slow to answer. “Paul, there are reasons why I might be reluctant to give you that kind of help.” She let me mull the implications. “All right,” she added, “bring him on. I’ll put aside my work and tell Adam to get lost for an hour or so.”

She hung up before I could thank her.

Throughout this conversation, Nollinger had been at my elbow. “I don’t know anything about the restaurant business,” he told me. “As far as that goes, I don’t know very much about art, either.”

“Do you know what you like?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Never mind,” I said. “Let’s get out there.”

Despite his musical talent and his advanced degrees in anthropology and primate behavior, Nollinger had not been lying about his ignorance of art. I learned the dismaying extent of his ignorance on our journey to Paradise Farm. Anxious that he not tip his hand too early, I alternately quizzed and coached him as we drove. Although not unfamiliar with Renaissance biggies like da Vinci and Michelangelo, he seemed to have abandoned his art-appreciation classes just as they were forging into the terra incognita of the seventeenth century. He knew next to nothing about impressionism, postimpressionism, and the most influential twentieth-century movements. He confused Vincent van Gogh with a popular author of science-fiction extravaganzas, believed that Pablo Picasso was still alive in France, and contended that N. C. Wyeth was a better painter than his son, Andrew, who painted only barns and motionless people. He had never even heard of the contemporary artists whom RuthClaire most esteemed.

“You’re a phony,” I said in disgust. “She’ll sniff you out in three minutes—if it takes her that long.”

“Look, Mr. Loyd, you’re the one who concocted this stupid scheme.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

“Why don’t we just tell her the truth?”

“The truth wouldn’t have got you out here.” I eased my car into the gravel-strewn drive before the house. “You’d still be in Beulah Fork playing your panpipe and waiting for your next tactfully mooched meal.”

Nollinger’s jaw went rigid. With visible effort, he swallowed whatever reply he had thought to make. The air of fierce inner resolve radiating from him, much like a fever, began to worry me.

RuthClaire met us on the front porch, shook Nollinger’s hand, and ushered us inside. We stood about in the sculpture-studded foyer like visitors awaiting their guide at a museum. I had not set foot over the threshold since September, and the faint but disturbing monkey-house odor that Adam had left in the West Bank was as hard to ignore here as mold on a brick of cheese. Nollinger noticed it, too, the incongruous scent of macaques in a barn-like Southern manse. RuthClaire was probably inured to the smell by this time, but she caught our sensitivity to it and explained it as the wretched mustiness of a shut-up house after a truly severe winter.

“I’m not an admirer of yours,” Nollinger blurted. His sallow face turned the color of a ripe plum. “I mean, I probably would be if I knew anything about your work, but I don’t. I’m here under false pretenses.”

“Criminy,” I murmured.

RuthClaire looked to me for amplification or aid. I rubbed the cold nappy head of a granite satyr next to the oaken china cabinet dominating the hall. (It was a baby satyr, with a syrinx very much like Nollinger’s.)

“I’m here to see Adam,” he said.

My ex did not take her eyes off me. “He’s outside foraging,” she replied curtly. “How do you happen to know about him?”

“Livia George may have let it slip,” I essayed. “From Livia George to Edna Twiggs to the media of all seven continents.”

“Here,” said Nollinger. He handed RuthClaire the packet of photos I’d taken from the magnolia tree outside the downstairs bathroom. Prudently, though, he saved back three or four of the pictures. Without facing away from me, RuthClaire thumbed through the batch in her hands.

“You’re a Judas, Paul—the most treacherously back-stabbing Benedict Arnold I’ve ever had the misfortune to know. And I actually married you! How could that have happened?”

To Nollinger I said, “I’m toting up your bill at the West Bank, Herr Professor. It’s going to be a shocker. Just you wait.”

“You told him about Adam,” RuthClaire said. “You volunteered the information.”

“I was worried about you. Grant me that much compassionate concern for your welfare. I’m not an unfeeling toad, for Christ’s sake.”

“When?” RuthClaire asked Nollinger. “When did he get in touch with you?”

“Last month, Ms. Loyd.”

She counted on her fingers as if computing a conception date. “It took at least four months for this ‘compassionate concern’ to develop? Four whole months, Paul?”

“His instincts were right in coming to me,” Nollinger said. “You’ve no business keeping a rare hominid specimen like Adam in your own home. He’s an invaluable evolutionary Rosetta stone. He belongs to the world scientific community.”

“Of which, I suppose, you’re the self-appointed representative?”

“Yes, ma’am, if you’ll just take it upon yourself to see me in that light.”

“First, I’m not keeping Adam in my house; he’s living here of his own free will. Second, he’s a human being and not an anonymous evolutionary whatchamacallit belonging to you or anyone else. And finally, I’m ready for you and Benedict Iscariot here to haul your presumptuous heinies back to Beulah Fork.”

Nollinger looked at me knowingly. “Your ex seems to be an uncompromising spiritual heir of Louis Rutherford, doesn’t she?”

“What does that mean?” RuthClaire demanded.

“I think what he’s trying to say is that you’ve got yourself the world’s only habiline houseboy and you don’t want to give him up.”

“It’s a form of involuntary servitude,” Nollinger said, “no matter how many with-it rationales you use to justify the relationship.”

“He comes and goes as he likes,” RuthClaire spat. “Paradise Farm is his only haven in this materialistic world of ours. Maybe you’d like him to live in a shopping mall or a trade-school garage or a tumbledown outhouse on Cleve Snyder’s place?”

“Or a fenced-in run at the field station?” I said, turning to the anthropologist. “So you can dope him up with amphetamines for fun and profit.”

“Wait a minute, Mr. Loyd,” Nollinger said. “I’m on your side.”

RuthClaire tore up the prints in her hands and sprinkled them on the floor like Kodachrome confetti. “These are cheap paparazzo snapshots,” she said, teeth clenched. She next went to work shredding the envelope.

“I still have these,” Nollinger told her, holding up the prints he had palmed. “And Mr. Loyd still has an entire set of his own.”

“She feels better, though,” I said, looking askance at RuthClaire.

“Of course she does. Once we’ve gone, she’ll have her habiline houseboy in here to clean up the mess. It’s not many folks in this day and age who command the obedience of a loyal unpaid retainer. She likes the feeling of power she gets from—”

Surprising even myself, I plunged my fist deep into Nollinger’s diaphragm. I would have preferred to clip him on the temple or jaw, but his wire-rimmed glasses dissuaded me—or, rather, my subconscious. Nollinger finished his sentence with an inarticulate “ Umpf !” and collapsed atop the photo scraps.

RuthClaire said, “Maybe you feel a little better, too. Not too much, though, I hope. His insults pale beside your treachery, Paul.”

“That’s probably so,” I said, hangdog.

“Get him out of here. I’ll start soliciting bed partners on Peachtree Street before your unmannerly ‘nephew’ ever lays eyes on the living Adam.”