“Did you?”
“What else could an art-school liberal from Charlotte do?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“He had a copy of Nollinger’s article in Atlanta Fortnightly. He wanted to know if I had enslaved Adam, if I had Adam doing menial tasks against his inclination or will. It sounded as if he had the questions written down on a notepad and was ticking them off each time he asked one and got an answer. I kept saying ‘No.’ They were that sort of question. The last one asked if I would allow an on-sight inspection to verify my denials and to ascertain the mental and emotional health of my guest. I said ‘No’ to that one, too. ‘In that case,’ the RAJA man said, ‘get set for more phone calls and a racial solidarity march right in front of your sacred Paradise Farm.’ And then he hung up. When the phone rang just now, Paul, I was a little afraid it was him again.”
“Nope,” I said glumly, “just me.”
“I’m catching it from all sides.” The receiver clunked as RuthClaire apparently shifted hands. “You see, Paul, I’ve offended the scientific establishment by refusing to let their high priests examine Adam, and I’ve offended organized religion by trying to make a comfortable home for him. Now, I’ve got Klansmen coming at me from another direction and civil rights advocates from yet another. I’m at the center of a collapsing compass rose waiting for the direction points to impale me. That’s pretty funny, isn’t it? There’s no way for me to escape. I’m everybody’s enemy.”
“The public still loves you. Just ask AmeriCred.”
“That’s a consolation—but kind of a cold one, tonight.”
“Hey, you’re selling more platters than a Rolling Stone. Pretty soon you’ll go platinum. Cheer up, Ruthie Cee.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t sound all that cheery yourself.”
She was right. I didn’t. The scare inflicted upon me by Teavers and Puddicombe had worn off a little, but in its place was nervousness, an empty energy, an icy spiritual dynamo that spun paralyzing chills down my spine to the very tip of my vestigial tailbone. Even in the oven of the storage room, I was cold. RuthClaire and I were linked in a strange way by our private chills. Each of us seemed to wait for the other to speak.
At last I said, “Does Adam sleep with you?” It was the first time I’d asked her this question. Somehow the time felt right. For me if not for her.
“In this kind of weather, Paul, he won’t stay in a bed. He’s sleeping on the linoleum in the kitchen where it’s cool.”
“You know what I mean.”
“One morning I found him lying down there with the refrigerator door open. He doesn’t do that anymore.”
“RuthClaire!”
“What do you want me to say, Paul? I’ve grown fonder and fonder of him the longer he’s been around. As for Adam, well, he’s comporting himself more and more like a person with a real sense of his own innate worth. It makes a difference.”
“You’ve finally got your own intramural United Nations relief agency, don’t you? With a single live-in aid recipient.”
“I can unplug this phone as easily as listen to you, Paul.”
I apologized—quickly and effusively—for my sarcasm. It was, I admitted, rude and inexcusable. It would devastate me if she cut me off. My tone was mock-pathetic rather than sappily beseeching, and she let me get away with it. How many times had we bantered in this way in the past? So long as I did not overstep a certain hazily drawn line, she welcomed familiar repartee. It was, I knew, my one clear leg up on the uninitiated, inarticulate Adam.
“How’s he doing?” I asked, mostly because I knew it would please her.
“Famously. His manners have improved, he’s adjusted to indoor conveniences, he’s stopped killing squirrels (I think), and I’ve taught him how to sing. He probably already had a knack for singing—plaintive melodies that run up and down the scale like a wolf’s howl or the undersea aria of a humpback whale. He does a moving ‘Amazing Grace,’ Paul, he really does.”
“Bring him to the West Bank again,” I said impulsively.
RuthClaire hesitated. Then she said:
“Before this uproar, Paul, I’d’ve jumped at the chance. Now it worries me, the idea of removing Adam from Paradise Farm. He’s happy here, and safe.”
“But he’s something of a prisoner, isn’t he? Just like that jerk from Emory and your caller from RAJA have accused.”
“Everybody’s a prisoner of something, Paul. Paradise Farm isn’t exactly an island in the Gulag Archipelago, though.”
“Then let me treat the two of you to dinner again.”
“Why don’t you come out here? I’ll do the cooking.”
“That’s one of the reasons.” Hastily I added, “Listen, now. I just don’t belong out there anymore, RuthClaire. It isn’t mine, and it hurts to walk around the place. It’s yours, yours and Adam’s. Besides, didn’t you hope that eventually the rest of us would come to regard Adam as a neighbor and a peer? Isn’t that why you brought him to the West Bank in the first place?”
“He’s still not ready for that. It would have to be after dark, Paul, and you’d have to make the restaurant off limits to everybody but us. Just like last time.”
“Deal.”
“When?”
“This coming Tuesday. Nine-thirty. It’ll be dark by then, and I’ll still be able to serve dinner between six and eight.”
RuthClaire laughed. “The consummate businessman.”
“We’re two of a kind.” Then: “I’ve missed you, Ruthie Cee. God Almighty, how I’ve missed you.”
“Good night, Paul. We’ll see you Tuesday.”
RuthClaire hung up. Maybe ten seconds passed before the steady buzz of the dial tone began issuing from my receiver. I sat in the ovenish heat listening to it. A cricket chirruped from behind a wall of cardboard boxes—they’d once held cans of tomato paste, bottles of catsup, jars of fancy mustard—opposite my cot. What an idiot I was. Months upon months ago, I could have built myself a house much nicer than the one on Paradise Farm….
A chaste conviviality suffused our get-together on Tuesday evening. There were only the three of us. Livia George and my other help had left at eight-thirty, and although the odor of my customers’ cigarette smoke often lingered for hours, tonight the old-fashioned two-speed fan whirling among the umbrellas overhead had long since imparted a sea-breeze freshness to the air. It was much cooler than on Saturday, and I had a sense of sated well-being that probably should have alarmed me.
As a treat, as a concession, RuthClaire let Adam order steak, medium rare, and he sat in his place at our corner table using his cutlery with the clumsy fastidiousness of a child at an adult banquet. The improvement over his previous appearance in the West Bank was marked. He divided the meat into two dozen or more little pieces and ate them one at a time, his eyes sometimes nearly closing in quiet enjoyment. Further, he took mannerly bites of potato, broccoli, or seasoned squash casserole between his portions of steak, and chewed with his lips pressed together. Not even the ghost of Emily Post could have faulted his scrupulously upright posture.
As RuthClaire and I talked, I found it hard not to glance occasionally at Adam. He wore a pair of pleated, beltless trousers of a rich cream color and a short-sleeved white shirt with a yachting wheel over one of its breast pockets. He had come shoeless again, an omission for which RuthClaire again apologized, but the neatness of his apparel and the slick-whistle closeness of his haircut (had my ex used a pair of electric sheep shears on him?) more than offset the effect of slovenly or rebellious informality implicit in his bare feet. Now, in fact, I sneakily watched his hands, which reminded me of his feet. They were narrow and arthritic-looking, as if his fingers had been taped together for a long period and only recently given their freedom. The stiffness and incomplete opposability of his thumbs made his dogged use of knife and fork all the more praiseworthy.