Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

“That’s one word for it,” I said. “But is that how everybody who walks in here will finally interpret her work?”

“Oh, no. Some will take one look, turn around, and walk out. Others won’t see anything but naked flesh. For them, it’s pornographic, and they’ll either enjoy it or scorn it as such.”

I waved at the walls. “Is this stuff for sale?”

“Well, prints are. That’s how Ms. Kander makes her living. By today’s standards, they’re dirt cheap—but Kander’s popular and sells in volume.”

“Who’s she popular with? Voyeurs? The artsy-fartsy crowd?”

“Both, I guess. There’s no form to fill out to buy one. So far as I know, you don’t even have to be twenty-one.”

“Where would you hang these things? The bathroom?”

“That’s up to you. Are you thinking of ordering one?”

“Hell, no!” I virtually shouted.

Adam arrived in the company of a staff member named Bonnie Carlin, but I was still hot about the rub-your-nose-in-your-own-smug-prejudices strategy of Kander’s “art.” Everything Blau had said about it made a kind of backasswards sense, but I kept thinking that, for all her cleverness and technical skill, she was really accomplishing the Unnecessary, often for the Uncomprehending, and almost always with a (pardon me) Drollery that bespoke a superior smugness all her own.

Phooey, as Lester Maddox used to like to say.

Bonnie Carlin delivered a message—it was time to let the clamoring crowd in—and departed. We, too, abandoned the M.-K. Kander Room, crossing the corridor into the third and final gallery room, where Adam’s paintings hung. This room was like the first, but not so large. A single darkened studio loft brooded above us. Below it, all four walls seemed to resonate with the vitality and prehistoric wildness that Adam—who had even begun to wear deodorant—would no longer permit himself to reveal in his day-to-day relationships with others.

I saw the huge barbed baobab that he had painted at Paradise Farm. I saw rolling silver-brown mounds that could have been either the Lolitabu foothills or a herd of headless mammoths on a dusty African plain. I saw grass fires, volcanic eruptions, jags of icy lightning, and a crowd of silhouetted human (or semihuman) forms either fighting or feasting or copulating. I also saw a series of ambiguous mother-and-child portraits that could have been of RuthClaire and Tiny Paul, or of a baboon female and her capering infant, or even of a genderless adult attacking a smaller figure of the same unidentifiable, but monkeylike, species. There was also a painting of a hominid creature with the head of a dog or a jackal or a hyena, and around its head there glowed a brilliant orange-red light. The exhibit as a whole communicated energy and excitement.

By my standards, very good stuff.

Demurely, Adam hung back, his hands behind him. His eyes shifted from side to side, as if he was fearful that I would ridicule this painting or take umbrage at something and walk out. At Paradise Farm, he’d had no such qualms. Here, though, as the only artist on the premises, he appeared to be suffering a terrific bout of the butterflies.

“They’re good,” I told him. “I like ’em all.”

Adam smiled. His lips drew back to reveal teeth and gums. Then, flustered, he pursed them shut again.

By the terms of his contract with Abraxas, Adam had to stick around long enough to meet some of the general public at the opening. Members of the board of directors who had not been able to attend the reception would want to greet him, as would some of the wealthier patrons who always arrived late. Moreover, Blau encouraged his artists to talk to students, impulse visitors, reporters from the Atlanta papers, and other media people. Temperamental aloofness could hurt fund-raising efforts.

The reception officially ended, and the crowd swarmed in. Adam and RuthClaire withdrew to Gallery Three to receive congratulations and autograph Abraxas flyers. I retreated to Blau’s office and poured myself the last half-glass of Asti Spumante from the only decanter not already empty. Then I drank it up and wandered into Gallery One.

Haitian art was scoring heavily tonight. I had to reposition my shoulders every few steps to slide through the pockets of people discussing it. Gallery Two, featuring Kander’s work, was also packed. Flushed with admiration or chagrin, two women squeezed out of that gallery into the hall.

“It’s a wonder the place hasn’t been raided,” one of them said.

“Goodness, Doreen, the woman’s making a statement .”

I followed Doreen and her scandalized friend into Gallery Three. The Montarazes, huddled together for mutual protection, stood at the front of a ladder-like contraption giving access to the loft overhead. The sight of one particular hanger-on surrounding them brought me up short.

There before me—in checked shirt, green knit tie, dun pants, and fake suede jacket—slouched Brian Nollinger, the anthropologist from Emory, the Judas who had tried to turn Adam over to an agent of the INS. He had shaved his Fu Manchu, but his granny glasses and his air of unflappable belonging—“Why would anyone be unhappy to see me here?”—identified him more surely to me than a fingerprint check. And it was no comfort remembering that, but for my own jealous meddling, Nollinger might not have come into any of our lives. In a sense, I had created him… as an ongoing annoyance, if not as a human being.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Nollinger turned. “Hello, Mr. Loyd. I came to see the show.”

“How long does it take you to see it?”

“Well—”

“You don’t know a damn thing about art. You’re the kind of gallerista who thinks Winslow Homer was a blind Greek poet.”

“Look, if it’s okay with you, I came to apologize.”

“For calling me an enemy of science?” RuthClaire asked. “For accusing me of keeping my own private slave?”

For a moment, Nollinger looked profoundly embarrassed. “Yes, ma’am, I regret that. I was feuding with Alistair Patrick Blair.”

I shooed off the other hangers-on. “A scholarly feud excuses you of slinging mud at an innocent woman?”

“I had no idea she’d marry Adam, Mr. Loyd. At least I believed the creature—the person—under her roof was a living representative of Homo habilis . That was more than Blair was willing to concede. Give me that much credit.”

“Are you still shooting monkeys up with No-Dōz?”

That was a rabbit punch. The whites of Nollinger’s weary eyes swung toward me. “I concluded those researches long ago. I’ve been trying to obtain a grant for some field work outside the States. But this isn’t an easy time to find funding.”

“So you showed up here to put the pinch on RuthClaire and Adam, I take it.”

He shook his head, less in denial than in pity for the depth of my pettiness and suspicion. But one amazing consequence of this exchange was that RuthClaire had begun to turn a sympathetic eye on the man. She lacked the constitution for a sustained grudge, a character trait from which I, too, had benefited.

Nollinger gestured at the painting nearest us. “Another of my reasons for coming was professional. I’ve always taken an interest in documented cases of the creative impulse in collateral species.”

The poor fool was digging his own pitfall. I decided to lend him a hand. “What kind of cases, Dr. Nollinger?”

“Well, some years back, a chimpanzee in the London Zoo learned to draw and paint. He became proficient at putting circles and crosslike designs on canvas.”

“A chimpanzee?” RuthClaire said.

“That’s right. I believe his name was Congo. They gave him his own show. He even sold some paintings. The literature calls it the first documented exhibit of subhuman art in history.”