Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  “Beautiful,” I said, and I kissed her lightly on the forehead. “Bring this Adam fella to the restaurant, Ruthie Cee. Frogs’ legs, steak, wild-rice pilaf, coq au vin, anything he wants—on the house. And for you, of course, the gourmet vegetable plate. I’m serious now. Take me up on this.”

  She returned my chaste kiss along with the kitten. “This is the way you behaved when we were courting. Good night, Paul.”

  On my drive back to Beulah Fork, the kitten prowled all over my shoulders and thighs, miaowing obnoxiously. It even got tangled in the steering wheel. I put it out about a mile from Ruben Decker’s place and kept on driving.

  In January, as I have alluded, the pieces began coming together. To my surprise, RuthClaire called to make reservations for Adam and herself at the West Bank; they were actually going to avail themselves of my offer. However, even though only the two of them were coming, RuthClaire wanted the entire restaurant, every table. If I would grant them this extraordinary boon, she would pay me the equivalent of a night’s receipts on a typical weekday evening in winter. I told her that she was crazy, but that if she and her inamorato came on a Tuesday, always my slowest night, I would donate the premises as well as the dinner to their Great Romance. After all, it was high time she indulged a passion that was erotic rather than merely platonic and painterly.

  “That’s a cheap dig,” my ex accused.

  “How many kinds of generosity do you want from me?” I snapped back. “You think I like playing Pandare to you and your new boyfriend?”

  She softened. “It’s not what you think, Paul.” No, indeed. It wasn’t at all what I thought.

  On the appointed evening, Main Street was deserted but for Davie Hutton’s police cruiser, which he had parked perpendicular to the state highway as a caution to potential speeders. Precisely at eight, as I peered through the gloom, RuthClaire’s Honda Civic eased gingerly around the cruiser and slotted into a space in front of the West Bank. Then she and her mysterious beau exited the car and climbed the steps to the restaurant.

  Sweet Jesus, I thought, it’s a nigger kid in designer jeans and an army fatigue jacket. She’s not in love. She’s on another I’m-going-to-adopt-a-disadvantaged-child kick.

  Disagreements about starting a family had been another front in our protracted connubial war. I had never wanted any offspring, while RuthClaire had always craved two or three Campbell’s Kids clones or, failing that, a host of starving dependents on other continents. She believed wholeheartedly that she could paint, market her work, and parent—this was her ghastly neologism—without spreading herself too thin. I surrendered to her arguments, to the ferocity of her desire for issue, and for two years we went about trying to make a baby in the same dementedly single-minded way that some people assemble mail-order lawn mowers or barbecue grills. Our lack of success prompted RuthClaire to begin touting adoption as a worthy alternative to childbirth; the support of various international relief agencies, she avowed, would compensate the cosmic élan vital for our puzzling failure to be fruitful and multiply. We ended up with foster children in Somalia, Colombia, and Vietnam, and a bedroom relationship that made nonagenarian abstinence seem shamefully libertine. Because I had wanted no part of adopting a biracial child to bring into our home, RuthClaire had unilaterally decided that sex with me was irrelevant and thus dispensable. She would rather paint cherubs on teacups. Now here she was at the West Bank with a gimpy black teenager from Who-Could-Say-Where? Guess who’s coming to dinner. . . .

  “Paul, Adam. Adam, Paul.”

  I did a double take, a restrained and sophisticated double take. For one thing, Adam was no adolescent. More astonishing, he was the same compact creature who had come traipsing naked into the Paradise Farm pecan grove in September. His slender, twisted feet were bare. At a nod from RuthClaire he extended his right hand and grinned a grin that was all discolored teeth and darting, mistrustful eyes. I ignored his proffered hand.

  “What the hell are you trying to pull, RuthClaire?”

  “I’m trying to have dinner with Adam. This is an integrated place of business, isn’t it? Interstate commerce and all that. Besides, our money’s as green as anyone else’s.”

  “His color’s a non-issue. So is your money. He’s—” I gulped my indigestible objection.

  “Go ahead, Paul, say it.”

  “He’s an animal, RuthClaire, an animal in human clothing.”

  “I often thought the same thing of you.”

  I backtracked: “Listen, Ruthie, the county health department doesn’t permit barefooted people in its licensed eating establishments. He needs some shoes. Sandals, at least.”

  “Shoes are one of the things I haven’t been able to get him to wear.” RuthClaire reached over and lowered the habiline’s outstretched hand, which was still waiting to be shaken. “In comparison to you, Paul, Adam’s all courtliness, chivalry, and consideration. Look at him. He’s terrified to be here, but he’s holding his ground, he’s trying to figure out why you’re so jumpy and hostile. I’d like to know myself. Why are you being such a jackass?”

  “He belongs in a zoo. —Okay, not a zoo, a research center or something. You’re turning a scientific wonder, a throwback to another geological epoch, into a goddamn houseboy. That’s selfish, RuthClaire. Pathetic, even. There’s probably a law against it.”

  “We’ll sit over here,” my ex said. “Bring us two glasses of water and a menu.”

  “Only one menu?”

  RuthClaire gave me a look that was blank of all expression; it was also withering. Then she led Adam to a corner table beneath a burlap sculpture-painting (abstract) that she had completed during the first few months of our marriage. Once the habiline was seated, I could no longer see his bare feet; the maroon tablecloth concealed them. RuthClaire deftly removed the beige linen napkins (folded into fans) that I had earlier inserted into the waiting water glasses, for she had made up her mind that my humiliation must continue. This was my reward for making the West Bank available for their preposterous parody of a rendezvous.

  I turned toward the kitchen. Livia George Stephens, my chief assistant cook, was leaning against the flocked metal divider separating the cashier’s station from the dining area. I had given Molly Kingsbury, Hazel Upchurch, and my two regular waitresses the night off. Livia George constituted my entire staff. One hand rubbing the back of the other, she was sizing up our customers with a mock shrewdness that was genuinely shrewd.

  “Good to see you, Miss RuthClaire,” she said aloud. “Looks like you brought in a friend with some spirit in his bones. Give me a chanzt, I’ll put some meat on ’em.”

  “This is Adam,” my ex replied. “He’d say hello, but he’s mute. I’m sure he’s as pleased to meet you as I am to see you again. I hope Paul’s behaving himself for you.”

  Livia George tiptoed around this pleasantry. “Where’s he stay?” She nodded at Adam. “I ain’ never seen him ’roun’ here befoah, and I know mos’ evverbody in this part of ’Poya County.”

  “Livia George,” I said, “they’re here to eat, not to chitchat. Why don’t you go see about getting ready for them.”

  “Nothin’ I can do till I know what they like, Mr. Paul. You wan’ me to start cookin’ befoah they put in a order?”

  “I want you to get into the goddamn kitchen!”

  Sullenly, her hips moving like corroded pistons, she went. When she had gone, I strode over to the table to pour out the water and to recite our menu items rather than to present them in a printed folder. For RuthClaire, I recommended sautéed mushrooms, an eggplant dish, steamed pearl potatoes, a spinach salad, and a Cheddar soufflé with diced bell peppers and chives. For her tag-along escort, I suggested broiled liver and onions. Side orders of unsalted peanuts and warm egg whites would set off this entrée nicely, and he could wash it all down with a snifter of branch water and branch water.

  “I’ll have just what you recommend,” RuthClaire said. “Bring Adam the same and no bully-boy surprises. Water’s all we want
to drink, pure Beulah Fork spring water.”

  Although I followed RuthClaire’s instructions, the dinner was a disaster. Adam ate everything with his spoon. He bolted every bite, and when he didn’t like something—the eggplant au gratin, for instance—he tried to pile it up in the middle of the table like a deliquescent cairn. For this bit of creative gaucherie, he at first used his hands rather than his spoon, and he burned himself. Later, when the food had cooled, he finished the eggplant monument. Nothing RuthClaire said or did to discourage this project had any effect, and you could not keep from looking at this new centerpiece unless you let your eye stray to Adam himself. A flake of spinach gleamed in his mustache, ten or twelve pearl potatoes bulged out his cheeks, and he nonchalantly poured his ice cubes into the cheese soufflé.

  “This is his first time in a public restaurant,” RuthClaire acknowledged.

  “And his last, too, if I have anything to say about it.”

  My ex only laughed. “He’s doing pretty well. You should’ve seen the food fights we had out at Paradise Farm only a month or two ago.”

  “Yeah. Sorry I missed them.”

  She thinks she’s Pygmalion, I marveled. She thinks she can carve a dapper southern gentleman out of inchoate Early Pleistocene clay. Well, I loved the lady for the delusions she had formed.

  Unhappily, it got worse. For dessert RuthClaire ordered them each a Nesselrode pudding, one of the West Bank’s specialities and major attractions. Adam lifted the dish to his mouth and began eating of this delicacy like a dog devouring Alpo. After a few such bites, however, his head came up, his cheeks began to puff in and out like those of a blowfish, and he vomited all over the table. Guttural gasps of dismay or amazement escaped him between geysers, and in four or five minutes he had divested himself of his entire dinner and whatever else he may have eaten earlier that day. RuthClaire tried to comfort him. She wiped his mouth with a wetted napkin and stroked his furry nape with her fingers. Never before had a patron of the West Bank upchucked the extraordinary cuisine prepared in my kitchen, though, and I may have been more in need of comforting than was RuthClaire’s ill-bred habiline.

  “Get him to the rest room!” I cried, much too late to save either the tablecloth or my equanimity. “If nothing else, get him to the goddamn street!”

  “He isn’t used to such fare. I’ll clean it up, Paul. Just leave it to me, okay?”

  “He isn’t worthy of it, you mean! It’s like feeding caviar to a crocodile, filet mignon to a high school fullback!”

  “Hush, Paul, I said I’d take care of the mess, and I will.”

  Livia George helped her, however, and when RuthClaire left later that night, she placed three one-hundred-dollar bills next to the cash register. For the remainder of that week, the West Bank reeked of commercial disinfectant and a faint monkey-house odor that no one but me (thank God) appeared to detect.

  “She’s living with it,” I told the young man sitting at the cluttered desk, his hands behind his head and his naked elbows protruding like chicken wings. “She’s been living with it since October.”

  “Times have changed, Mr. Loyd. Live and let live.”

  “It’s not another man, Dr. Nollinger. It’s male, I mean, but it’s not, uh, human. It’s a variety of upright ape.”

  “A hominid?”

  “That’s RuthClaire’s word for it. Hominid, habiline. A prehistoric primate, for God’s sake. So I drove all the way up here to talk to somebody who might be interested.”

  “You could have telephoned, Mr. Loyd. Telephoning might have saved us both a good deal of time.”

  “Beulah Fork’s a small town, Dr. Nollinger. A very small town. You can’t direct-dial without Edna Twiggs horning in to say she’ll patch you through. Then she hangs on to eavesdrop and sniffle. Times may have changed, but bestial cohabitation’s still a mite too strong for Hothlepoya Countians. You understand me, don’t you?”

  “A habiline?”

  “I want you to get it out of there. It may be dangerous. It’s certainly uncouth. It doesn’t belong on Paradise Farm.”

  Brian Nollinger dropped his hands into his lap and squeaked his swivel chair around toward his office’s only window. A thin man in his early thirties, he wore scuffed cowboy boots, beige corduroy trousers, a short-sleeved Madras shirt with a button-down collar, wire-rimmed glasses, and a wispy Fu Manchu mustache with an incongruous GI haircut. Outside his window, a family of stub-tailed macaques huddled in the feeble winter sun in a fenced-in exercise area belonging to this secluded rural field station of the Yerkes Primate Center, ten or twelve miles north of Atlanta. Nollinger was an associate professor of anthropology at Emory University, but a government grant to study the effects of forced addiction to certain amphetamines on a representative primate species had given him an office at the field station and experimental access to the twenty-odd motley monkeys presently taking the February sun beside their heated trailer. They looked wide-awake and fidgety, these monkeys—“hypervigilant,” to use Nollinger’s own word. Given the nature of his study, I wasn’t greatly surprised.

  “Why don’t you write Richard Leakey or Alistair Patrick Blair or one of the other African paleoanthropologists specializing in ‘prehistoric hominids’?” Nollinger asked. “They’d jump at the chance to take a living fossil off Ms. Loyd’s hands. A find like that would secure a young scientist’s fortune and reputation forever. Leakey and Blair would just become bigger.”

  “Aren’t you interested in fame and fortune?”

  “In modest doses, sure.” He refused to look at me. He was staring at a lithograph of an Ishasha River baboon in twelve different baboonish postures, from a grooming stance to a cautious stroll through tall East African grass.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “Put yourself in my place, Mr. Loyd. It’s a bit like hearing a dinosaur’s been seen wading in the Chattahoochee.”

  “I’m not a crackpot, Dr. Nollinger. I’m a respected businessman with no history of mental illness or unprofitable undertakings. My wife—my ex-wife, I mean—is a painter of national repute. Should anything happen to her because you’ve refused to look into the matter, well, the world of art will have suffered a loss as great as that about to befall the world of science. It’s your conscience, Dr. Nollinger. Can you live with the consequences of such a reprehensible dereliction of duty?” I rose to leave.

  Stroking his Fu Manchu, Dr. Nollinger said, “Mr. Loyd, after two or three years as a researcher, every competent scientist develops a nose for crackpots.”

  “Go on.”

  “You came in like a crackpot, with the identifying minatory zeal and traditional combative cast in your eye.” He paused. “But you don’t talk like a crackpot. You talk like a man who’s bewildered by something he doesn’t know how to deal with.”

  “Bingo,” I said.

  “I don’t think you’re making this up, sir. That would require some imagination.” He smiled. “So I’ll help you out.” He stopped smiling. “On one condition.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Send me a photo or two—all you can—of this dispossessed specimen of Homo habilis. Use an Instamatic or a Polaroid and get me some proof. I don’t like wild-goose chases, particularly to backwaters like Beulah Fork.”

  “You got it,” I said.

  I walked back to the parking lot past a dozen communities of gorillas, orangutans, pygmy chimps, rhesus monkeys, and bespectacled primatologists, all equally inscrutable in their obsessive mind-sets and desires. We are fam-i-lee, go the lyrics of a recent popular song, but in my entire life I recall feeling close—spiritually close—to only one other living creature, and that is my lovely lost RuthClaire. Why had she taken up with a man-ape when my poor human soul still longed for union with hers?

  To get a photograph of Adam, I had to sneak out to Paradise Farm in violation of a legal promise to RuthClaire. I had to prowl around the house in the numbing winter dark. Fortunately, no dog patrols the property (otherwise, even Adam would
not have been able to sneak into its pecan grove), and I climbed into a magnolia tree near the downstairs bathroom without betraying my presence. I had neither an Instamatic nor a Polaroid, but an expensive Minolta with both a telephoto lens and a pack of high-speed film for shooting in dim or almost nonexistent light.

  Voyeurism is not ordinarily one of my vices, but when RuthClaire came into the lavatory that evening to bathe, I trembled. The waxy brown leaves of the magnolia tree clicked like castanets, mimicking the effects of a brutal winter wind. I looked, let me confess, but I did not take RuthClaire’s picture. (The only extant print of her bewitching unclad body is the one still burning in my mind.) When she lifted herself clear of the sunken bath, patted her body dry with a lavender towel, and disappeared from my sight like a nymph, I nearly swooned. Each of these three near-swoons was a metaphysical orgasm of the highest order. It had been a long, long time.

  The bathroom light went out, and a real easterly wind began to blow, surging through the pecan grove from Alabama. I clung to my perch. Adam and I, it seemed, had traded places. The strangeness of this reversal did not amuse me. The luminous digits on my watch registered 9:48. What if my habiline rival habitually relieved himself in the woods? What if, even in winter, he bathed in White Cow Creek? If so, he would never enter this bathroom, and I’d never get his photo. Dr. Nollinger would dismiss me as a screwball of the most annoying sort. I had made a mistake.

  At 11:04 P.M., though, Adam entered the big tiled bathroom. He wore the bottoms of a suit of long thermal underwear and carried what looked like the carcass of a squirrel. He climbed down into the sunken bath, where, after turning on a heavy flow of water, he proceeded to rend and devour the dead rodent. He did this with skill and gusto. I used up all my film taking pictures of the process—whereupon I heaved my own dinner into the shrubbery beneath the magnolia tree.