“What’s the matter, Paul?”
“How much is this going to cost?”
“Lots.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“For something this crucial, we’ve got it to spend.” She eyed me shrewdly. “You don’t approve?”
“It sounds great. Adam and I will be able to commiserate about the weather.”
What was wrong with me? I’d accepted so much else about Adam—his marriage to RuthClaire, his biological compatibility with my former wife, his developing literacy, and even the half-pathetic sincerity of his spiritual yearnings. Why couldn’t I accept his desire to talk? To put my selfish reluctance in the best possible light, maybe I had a faint intimation of all the trouble looming ahead for us.
RuthClaire paid the bill, but I insisted on leaving the tip.
We returned in my car to the sprawling Montaraz bordello-cum-boarding house on Hurt Street. It was too late to play with Tiny Paul, but when we looked in on him sleeping in his bassinet, I was startled to see his dreaming features betray a hint of the feral self-sufficiency that only a moment ago, leaving Patrick’s, I had seen in his father’s face. All babies have something endearingly pongid about them, but there in the sheen of his night light my godson’s resemblance to a “collateral primate”—a baby gorilla!—brought the forests of Uganda’s Virunga Mountains right into a bedroom near Inman Park.
Life is strange, I thought, and I kissed the kid so that we could withdraw and leave him to his sleep.
RuthClaire pointed me to a second-story guestroom wallpapered with a repeating pattern of pale green bamboo shoots, and Adam nodded a friendly goodnight on his way downstairs to drive Pam Sorrells home. Alone, sitting on my bed, a paperback novel in my hands, I thought of Adam’s naive invitation to share a bed with his wife while he was in the hospital—if, of course, we both agreed to the “niceness” of the sharing. How could I tell RuthClaire’s new husband that tonight I wanted her beside me not to ravish but to cherish, not to penetrate but to pet? These days, away from the West Bank, it was loneliness rather than sexual desire that ate at me, and that, of course, was why I kept myself so busy. At last I put my book down, heel-and-toed my shoes off, turned out the light, and stretched out to await the onset of sleep. It delayed and delayed, but eventually, two or maybe even three hours later, came.
I spent Wednesday with the Montarazes, most of which we devoted to a tour of the High Museum on Peachtree Street. On Thursday, I returned to Beulah Fork.
Business continued to boom. People came in and went out, and so did money. I yelled at Livia George, she glared at me in insulted contempt, the dristles of winter gave way to the hurricanes of spring, soldiers of twenty or more nations died in almost all the senseless ways it is possible to die, dining-room help arrived and departed, and the president of the United States asked Congress to okay funds for a defense force of mutant giant pandas with which to protect the Aleutian Islands from Soviet invasion. Something like that. I was too busy to pay more than passing heed to the news.
At last the summons came. I got to Atlanta on the day after Adam had undergone the six-hour surgical procedure designed to give him the ability to speak. I would have been there for the operation itself but RuthClaire delayed asking me to come until the next morning, when it was already clear that her husband was out of danger. Whether all the tinkering would have the desired effect remained a question of prime concern, but not whether he would live or die. All this, defying the possibility of a tap, RuthClaire had told me in a phone call—but when I reached Emory Hospital, I was still angry about not having had the chance to sit with her during the surgery.
RuthClaire met me in a corridor below the pagoda-like parking tower where I had left my car. She wore a white blouse with scrollish cutouts in the collar, a seersucker skirt, and a pair of Italian sandals. She had a baby-carrier on her back, but it was empty because Tiny Paul, not yet nine months old, stood at her knee gripping one of her fingers with a tentative hand.
I could not believe it. T. P., whom I’d last seen zonked in a bassinet, was walking. He wore navy-blue shorts, a powder-blue shirt, and a pair of minuscule tennis shoes with racing chevrons. There was nothing even remotely gorillaish about his appearance today. No baby fat, no leathery sheen on his forehead. As I neared him and his mother along the corridor, he eyed me with the solemnity of a pint-sized state legislator.
“Don’t start in.” RuthClaire raised her free hand in warning.
“Everything’s fine.” I knelt in front of the kid to give him a gentle poke in the breadbasket. His gums pulled away from his teeth in a… well, a smarl, which is to say a smile and a snarl so perfectly meshed that they are identical. “He’s really grown. How long’s he been walking?”
“Since April, Paul. He’s a dynamo. All the activity has slimmed him down.”
“Walking at five months? Does he talk, too?”
That one earned me a rebuke. “His dad’s just had surgery to allow him to speak, and you’re asking me if our son’s talking yet? Do you want to make me cry?”
“RuthClaire—”
“Some children don’t talk until they’re two or more. It’s nothing to fret about.”
“Listen, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Come on,” she said angrily. “Let’s go see Adam.”
We averted an argument by walking to the elevators at the far end of the echoing corridor. T. P. kept up with us with an effortless trot, like an Ethiopian conscript of the 1940s jogging to the front. Upstairs, the nurses at the nurses’ station got our names and let us proceed down the hall to Adam’s room. It was a long walk. I used it to start to berate my ex for not calling me sooner, but she cut me off with a recitation of all the people who’d already come by to see her and lend moral support.
“You don’t need me anymore, do you?”
“Give that man a cigar. He finally digs the full implications of our divorce.”
“Why call me at all, then?”
“Adam thought you should be here. He’s trying to be the alpha-male of our household, appointing a lieutenant until he’s well enough to return.” Like an invisible tide of warm honey, a mellifluous laugh came rolling out of Adam’s room.
“What the hell was that? Surely, not Adam?”
“We’ve got a visitor. He stopped by yesterday, too. I’d’ve run him off if Adam hadn’t asked me before the operation to let the clown come calling.” RuthClaire set Tiny Paul down, and the kid trotted into his father’s room. “Come see.”
We entered the room after the precocious toddler, who was already in the male visitor’s arms. Adam lay on the bed beside them, his mummy-wrapped face tilted toward the door. A pole-mounted IV bottle dripped glucose into his bloodstream.
“Paul Loyd,” RuthClaire said, “meet the Right Reverend Dwight McElroy.”
Most television evangelists, I had long ago decided, looked like affluent mobile-home salesmen. An eye tic or an unruly forelock of pomaded hair was the sole outward manifestation of the emotional kink that kept their motors going. But McElroy, whom I’d watched for only a few fascinated weeks on his syndicated Great Gospel Giveaway, did not fit this mold. Prematurely gray (or post-pubescently silver), he had the aristocratic mien of a European count. At the same time, though, I had no trouble dressing him out in basketball togs and putting him at the power-forward position for a team like the Celtics. He was too old for that, of course, but appeared in great shape—lean, muscular, alert, and, in spite of his lank (not blown-dry) silver hair, facially collegiate. Carrying T. P., the leader of the rigorously Protestant but otherwise scrupulously nondenominational Greater Christian Constituency of America, Inc., strode toward me with his hand out. When he smiled, the count gave way to the suggestion of a farm kid come to the big city in a borrowed suit.