Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  RuthClaire was so quiet I feared she’d rung off. Then: “I don’t understand why your potential buyer wants to meet me.”

  “The part about him admiring your work is true,” I lied. “You know the three-dimensional paintings you did for the Contemporary Room in Atlanta’s High Museum? He’s seen ’em four or five times since their debut. Come on, Ruthie. He’d like to see you in person. I told him you would. It might help me cinch the sale.”

  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.”

  I helped Nollinger up and led him outside to my automobile. Still bent over and breathless, he mumbled that my assault was a classic primate ploy—especially typical of baboons or chimpanzees—to establish dominance through intimidation. I told him to shut up. He did. Thereafter he kept his eyes averted; and as we left Paradise Farm, rolling from crunchy gravel onto pothole-riven asphalt, I saw Adam staring out at us from the leafy picket of holly trees between RuthClaire’s property and the road. The half-hidden habiline, I glumly took note, was wearing one of my old golfing sweaters.

  It did not flatter him.

  At six o’clock that evening, the sullen anthropologist boarded a Greyhound bus for Atlanta, and I supposed that our dealings with each other had formally concluded. I did not want to see him again, and did not expect to. As for RuthClaire, she had every reason to feel the same way about me. I tried, therefore, to resign myself to her bizarre liaison with the mysterious refugee from Montaraz. After all, how was she hurting Adam or he her? I must get on with my own life.

  About a week later this headline appeared in the Atlanta Constitution, which I had delivered every morning to the West Bank:

  RENOWNED BEULAH FORK ARTIST

  HARBORING PREHISTORIC HUMAN

  SAYS EMORY ANTHROPOLOGIST

  “Oh, no,” I said aloud over my coffee. “Oh, no.”

  The story featured a photograph—a color photograph—of Adam dismembering a squirrel in the downstairs bathroom at Paradise Farm. Not having reproduced very well, this photo had the dubious authenticity of pictures of the Loch Ness monster—but it grabbed my eye like a layout in a gore-and-gossip tabloid, afflicting me with anger and guilt. About the only consolation I could find in the story’s appearance was the fact that it occupied a small corner of the city/state section rather than the right-hand columns of the front page. The photograph itself was attributed to Brian Nollinger.

  “I’ll kill him.”

  The Constitution’s reporter had created a tapestry of quotations—from Nollinger, from two of his colleagues at Emory, and from RuthClaire herself—that made the anthropologist’s claims, or charges, seem the pathetic fancies of a man whose career had never quite taken off as everyone had anticipated. The press conference he had called to announce his unlikely discovery included a bitter indictment of a “woman of talent and privilege” obstructing the progress of science for selfish reasons of her own. RuthClaire, in turn, had submitted to a brief telephone interview in which she countercharged that Nollinger’s tale of a Homo habilis survivor living in her house and grounds was a tawdry pitch for notoriety and more government research money. She refrained quite cagily, I noticed, from an outright declaration that Nollinger was lying. Informed of the existence of photos, for instance, she dismissed them as someone else’s work—without actually claiming they had been fabricated from scratch or cunningly doctored. Moreover, she kept me altogether out of the discussion. And because Nollinger had done likewise (from a wholly different set of motives), no one at the Constitution had tried to interview me. Ah, I thought, there’s more consolation here than I first supposed. My ex can take care of herself. . . . She would blame me for this unwanted publicity, though. She would harden herself to all my future efforts at rapprochement.

  Despite the early hour, I telephoned Paradise Farm to apologize for what had happened and to offer my shoulder either to cry on or to cudgel. A recorded message informed me that RuthClaire’s previous number was no longer functioning. I understood immediately that she had applied for and received an unlisted number. This unforeseen development hit me harder than the newspaper article. Paradise Farm now seemed as far away as Hispaniola or the court of Sayyid Sa’īd.

  Before the hour was out, my own telephone began ringing. The first caller was Livia George, who, in high dudgeon, asked me if I’d seen the piece in the Constitution and wondered aloud how my devious Atlanta relative had managed to take a photograph of RuthClaire’s mute friend Adam in her very own bathroom. “You got a spill-the-beans Peepin’ Tom for a nephew,” she said. “’F he ever comes back to visit you, Mr. Paul, I ain’ gonna do his cookin’, let me tell you now.” I agreed Nollinger was a contemptible sneak and promised she’d never have to wait on the man again.

  Then, in rapid succession, I received calls from a reporter on the Tocqueville Telegraph, a representative of The Today Show on NBC, an art dealer in Atlanta with a small stake in RuthClaire’s professional reputation, and two of my fellow merchants in Beulah Fork, Ben Sadler and grocer Clarence Tidings, both of whom expressed the hope that my ex-wife would not suffer disruptive public attention because of my nephew’s outrageous blather to the Atlanta media. An artist, they said, required her privacy. I put their commiseration on hold by agreeing and pleading other business. The reporter, the TV flack, and the art dealer I had sidestepped with terse pleasantries and an unshakable refusal to comment.

  Then I took my phone off the hook, dressed, and went shopping. My neighbors greeted me cheerily the first time our carts crossed paths, but studied me sidelong as I picked out meats, cheeses, and produce. Every housewife in the A&P seemed to look at me as she might a cuckolded male who pretends a debonair indifference to his ignominy. It gave me the heebie-jeebies, this surreptitious surveillance.

  Back at the West Bank my uncradled receiver was emitting a strident buzz, a warning to hang up or to forfeit continuous service. I replaced the receiver. A moment later, the telephone rang, and Edna Twiggs said that RuthClaire was trying to reach me.

  “Give me her new number,” I said. “I’ll call her.”

  But Edna replied, “Hang up again, Mr. Loyd. I’ll let her know you’re home. I’m not permitted to divulge an unlisted number.”

  Although angry, I obeyed Beulah Fork’s inescapable sedentary gadfly, and when next the telephone rang, RuthClaire’s voice sounded soft and weary in my ear: “We’re under siege. There’s an Eleven Alive news van from Atlanta on the lawn, and several other vehicles—one a staff car from the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer—are parked in the drive or along the roadway behind the hollies. It looks like a gathering for a Fourth of July picnic, Paul.”

  “Have you talked to any of those people?”

  “The knocking started a little over an hour ago. I wouldn’t answer it. Now there’s a man on the lawn taking pictures of the house with a video camera and a stylish young woman in front of him with a microphone talking about the ‘deliberate inaccessibility of artist RuthClaire Loyd.’ She’s said that four or five times, as if practicing. Anyway, I can hear her all the way up here in the loft. They’re not subtle, these people, they’re loud and persistent.”

  “Call the police, RuthClaire. Call the Hothlepoya County Sheriff’s Patrol.”

  “I hate to do that.”

  “They’re trespassing and making nuisances of themselves. Call Davie Hutton here in town and Sheriff Crutchfield in Tocqueville.”

  “What if I just poke my .22 out of the window and tell everyone to beat it?”

  “It’d make great viewing on the evening news.”

  “Yeah, wouldn’t it?” RuthClaire chuckled wryly. “May the seraphim forgive me, but maybe such a display would boost subscription sales for my Celestial Hierarchy series. AmeriCred has been a little disappointed in the way they’re going.”

  “We live in a secular age, RuthClaire.” Then: “How’s Adam taking all this?”

  “It’s made him restless and reclusive. He’s pacing the downstairs bathroom with the exhaust fan running—to drown out the clamor from the lawn.”

  “Well, I hope you closed the curtains on the upper half of the window in there. Reporters can climb trees, too, you know.”

  “Adam and I installed some blinds. No worry there. The worry’s how long this stupid encirclement will last. I can’t work. Adam’s going to develop a ne
rvous disorder.”

  “Let the law run them off. That’s what the law’s for.”

  “All right.”

  “You could have figured that out for yourself. Why call me for advice?”

  “To let you know how much trouble you’ve caused us, you dinkhead.” (But her tone was bantering rather than bitter.) “And another thing besides, Paul.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite.”

  “Adam’s one failing as a companion is that he can’t talk. Maybe I wanted to hear the silver-throated con man of Beulah Fork do his stuff again.” She let me ruminate on this left-handed compliment for a second or two, then gave me her new telephone number and bade me a peremptory goodbye.

  I sat awhile holding the receiver, but finally hung up before Edna Twiggs could break in to tell me I was on the verge of forfeiting continuous service.

  International media attention converged on Paradise Farm. Neither the Beulah Fork police department nor the sheriff’s patrol from Tocqueville could handle the journalists, TV people, curiosity seekers, and scientists who descended on Hothlepoya County for a peek at RuthClaire’s habiline paramour. For a time, the Georgia Highway Patrol intervened, rerouting the gate-crashers back toward the interstate and issuing tickets to those who ignored the detour signs; but Ruben Decker and a few of the other residents along the road linking Paradise Farm with town protested that they’d been singled out for citations as often as had the journalists and pesky outsiders plaguing the area, many of whom, when stopped, gave false ID’s to prove their claims of being locals. At last, even the highway patrol threatened to retreat from the scene; this wasn’t their fight.

  In desperation RuthClaire contracted with an Atlanta firm to erect a beige brick wall around the exposed sections of her property’s perimeter; and this barricade, upon its completion in May, proved an effective psychological as well as physical deterrent to most of those stopping by for a casual, rather than a mercenary or a malevolent, look-see. Pale arc lights on tall poles illuminated every corner of the vast front and back yards and portions of the shadowy pecan grove behind the house. Twice, RuthClaire broadcast stentorian warnings over a P.A. system installed for that purpose and once fired her rifle above the heads of the trespassers creeping like animated stick figures across the lawn. Word got around that it was dangerous to try to breach the elaborate fortifications of Paradise Farm. I liked that.