“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:
“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.”