Instead, my companion was Adam Montaraz, now naked. I shuffled along beside him in sandals, loose ebony swim trunks, and a short-sleeved terrycloth jacket. Shells crunched beneath our feet, and stars began to glimmer overhead.
“You told Blair you’re the last of your kind, but RuthClaire’s letter said there were habiline artists here. That’s why I came—to look at their work, maybe even to represent it in Atlanta. What the hell’s going on, Adam?”
“I lied to Dr. Blair.”
“Why?”
“To protect the remnant that survives: five persons, Mister Paul—only five.”
“But if I go back to Atlanta touting their work as the glory of an innate habiline aesthetic impulse, this place’ll be overrun again. You’ll have blown their cover for good. The art will prove they’re here, and bingo! another influx of bounty hunters.”
Adam halted. “Not if you represent their paintings as the work of dead Haitian artists, each item you put up for bid as a discovery from their estates. You needn’t even identify the artists as habilines. Haitian art has many aficionados in los Estados Unidos. Sell it as Haitian art—nothing more, nothing less.”
“It would sell for a lot more if I could reveal the identity of the artists—if, in fact, I could document their identities.”
“But I am not interested in ‘mopping up.’”
“What are you interested in?”
“Secure futures for these last five people. After them, no more. After me, no more. RuthClaire and I want enough money to look after them here on Montaraz, enough to see to their remaining needs.”
“Your own work sells. Let me represent that, Adam. We’d all make money, and you wouldn’t even have to mention your last five habiline relations.”
Adam explained that although their recent travels had stimulated a lot of creative activity, it had also denied them enough time to finish many of these new works. Further, RuthClaire’s latest paintings—the series entitled Souls that she’d completed in Atlanta—had not yet found an audience. Gallery directors declined to show them. If RuthClaire rented space in malls or department stores to counteract the gallery boycott, the public ignored them. Newspaper critics lambasted them as dull, flat, colorless, repetitive, picayune in concept, and uninspired, particularly in light of their grandiose overall title. Even more dismaying, one critic who hated what he called “decadent decal work for the AmeriCred porcelain-plate scam” had cited the acrylic paintings Souls as evidence of the “steep falling off” of RuthClaire’s talent since Footsteps on the Path to Man. Indeed, you could argue that these unpopular and much-belittled paintings had ruined RuthClaire’s marketability. Adam’s work continued to sell, but his artist wife had run headlong into an immovable brick wall. That was one of the reasons they’d summoned Caroline and me to Montaraz.
“They’re good,” I said. “It’s just that nobody sees.”
“For a time, you didn’t see. And maybe they aren’t good, Mister Paul. Maybe it’s only an accident of light that redeems them from mediocrity.”
“To be truthful, my appreciation of them came and went—just like the light. It’s easy to understand why she’s having trouble selling them.”
“Okay. But that’s why we require money.” He began walking again, his hands clasped in the small of his furry back.
I took two long strides to catch up with him. “When do I meet these habiline artists, Adam? When do I see their work?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Where?”
In the early starlight, he grinned at me. “On the middle finger, Mister Paul. On the bird we shoot at Miami.” He turned, trotted toward the water, and threw himself out into the surf with a splash whose falling canopy of droplets iridesced like the bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war.
After shedding my jacket and kicking off my sandals, I followed Adam into the water. As I had hoped, it was warm without being strength-sapping. My habiline host was dog-paddling about the inlet, sometimes rolling to his back like a sea otter, sometimes treading water with the lackadaisical finning motion of a manatee. I sidled up using an easy breaststroke. He dog-paddled again, but stayed near so we could talk.
“From what you told Blair in that interview, you’ve abandoned Christianity for a new-fangled theory of the interrelatedness of biological systems.” I blew salt water away from my mouth.
“Nonbiological, too.”
“Where did it all come from, Adam?”
“It’s Batesonian, for a man named Gregory Bateson.” He circled me.
“Familiar, I guess, but I don’t really know him.”
“You can’t know him. He died the year my ego was beginning to crystallize out of the Edenic anonymity of my youth.”
“I don’t know his work. Have you uncritically adopted Bateson’s metaphysics? Jettisoned your time-tested religion for some kind of trendy Californian nonsense with pseudo-scientific underpinnings?”
“I adopt nothing uncritically, Mister Paul, and if you don’t know Bateson’s work, you understand nothing about its underpinnings, which are beautifully evolutionary.”
“I was worried about RuthClaire.”
“Why? I love her.”
“I’m sure you do, but it’s hard for me to believe she’s going to be crazy about a ‘religion’ based on the evolutionary interrelatedness of biological—and nonbiological—systems. She’s a traditionalist, but you’ve name-called traditional faiths like hers as egotistical and neurotic.”
He treaded water in front of me. “But I’m egotistical and neurotic. So was the young man who killed our son. I am trying to discover meaning, Mister Paul, also to cure myself of neurosis. Everyone should wish to cure themselves.”
“T. P.’s murder sent you down this path?”
“Yes. You heard the eulogies I spoke. I hurt. RuthClaire hurt. Maybe the family of Craig Puddicombe hurt. My choice was to seek consolation in the orthodox hereafter or find my place in the great systemic neurosis that devoured our son and so begin to heal myself from the inside: my gift to him.”
“Is it really an either-or situation?”
“Maybe not. But first things first.”
“How does what you believe now differ from Bateson’s world view?”
“He sees Mind and Megapattern. I see those things, but also continue to postulate God. It’s a matter of hopeful, nonneurotic faith.”
“Sez you.”
This tickled him. “Yes, sez me.” Both his palms struck the water, launching fusillades of spray right into my eyes. I yelled, clutched my face, and then blindly grabbed for him. He’d already dived out of reach, though, and was sea-ottering through the inlet toward the web of its sandy fingers. Once there, he scrambled onto the beach. Gasping, I waded ashore a minute or two later to join him on the ever-darkening strand.
“Do you mean you’ve jettisoned your favorite theologians for Charlie Darwin and Gregory Bateson? Adam, I don’t know what to say. It’s beginning to look as if we’re brothers under the skin, after alclass="underline" rational pagans, both.”
“But I am not a pagan.”
“No?”
“I don’t deny the divinity of RuthClaire’s Savior. I don’t deny the possibility of historical revelation. Not at all, not at all. It’s only that the New Testament revelation came at a time and a place inaccessible to my earliest people. I know of another revelation more topical and timely. For me, anyway. For me.”
“What?” He’d completely lost me.
“Tomorrow, Mister Paul. Let’s go back to the cottage.”
So we did, stopping once for me to retrieve my sandals and jacket, and when we entered the house, I heard Adam’s recorded voice saying, “… no great hope that the human species will ever adopt a holistic faith….” The rest I blotted out. Caroline was still hard at work, and I was still resentfully horny.