“I know spoiled pork when I smell it. I don’t have to eat it to know it’s bad.”
“A gourmet chef is a gourmet chef is a glorified short-order cook. An artist is an artist is an artist.”
“That’s smug, RuthClaire, disgustingly smug.”
She kissed my cheek. “You’ve noticed how small they are?”
“A point in their favor.”
“Another way to free them from pretense,” she said. “Rothko liked big paintings because the viewer has to climb into them and participate physically in their energy and movement. Well, I want the viewer to climb into these canvases intellectually—not in the clinical way a Mondrian demands, but in the spiritual way a decision for faith requires.”
“You want the viewer to take the merit of these paintings on faith?”
“I call the series Souls, Paul.”
“And that, of course, explains everything.”
At this juncture, RuthClaire good-humoredly decided to end the argument. Never had we been so badly at odds on the subject of her art, and never had our disagreement on the subject had less effect on our good opinion of the other: weird.
“Let’s go see Adam,” she said.
That afternoon I left the hospital with T. P.—to give Adam and RuthClaire time together alone. Our destination was a recently remodeled restaurant called Everybody’s. It served beer, sandwiches, pizza, salads, and pasta in an airy, relaxed atmosphere perfectly suited to its mostly college-connected clientele.
I ordered beer and a bacon-cheeseburger, but a Coke and a cheeseburger for my temporary ward. T. P. sat in a kiddie chair with a booster seat, and we whiled away forty-five minutes eating and watching people. Traffic plied the hill on North Decatur Road, squirrels scampered across the dappled campus, and emerald-necked pigeons strutted the sidewalks. I felt loose and at ease, almost ready to drowse. Staring into my beer, I may have actually done so.
And then someone stood beside T. P. under Everybody’s angled skylights. I almost spilled my beer reacting to her presence.
Before I could stand up, though, she sat down on the chair opposite mine. “Hello, Mr. Loyd. I recognized you from newspaper photos. The baby’s being here didn’t hurt, though. That made me look twice. Otherwise, I’d have walked on by.”
“Another tribute to my personal magnetism.”
The woman gave me a look of amiable amusement. I figured her to be in her early thirties—almost out of the range of my interest. Thin-boned and tall, she escaped looking angular. Springy amber ringlets framed her face. She wore a gold-plated necklace that seemed to be made up of dozens of minuscule glittering hinges. She folded her arms on the table, and the amber down prickling them caught the evanescent dazzle of the tiny hinges at her throat.
“My name,” she said, “is Caroline Hanna.”
I tried to get a grip on the familiarity of her name.
“You’ve heard of me before. Once, at Brian Nollinger’s urging, you took some photographs of Adam. Brian showed these to me. And it was from me that he got the clue to research the island of Montaraz as Adam’s possible point of origin.”
“Nollinger,” I said numbly.
“You don’t like him, do you?”
“In my book, he’s a world-class jerk.”
“That’s not entirely fair,” Caroline Hanna said evenly.
“I’m sure it isn’t. But his kindness to you, or to his aged mother, doesn’t absolve him of the dirt he kicked on my ex-wife. It doesn’t clear him of abusing my hospitality in Beulah Fork. To three quarters of his acquaintances, the man may be nobility incarnate—but if he shows me only his pimply backside, Miss Hanna, that’s what I’m going to judge him by.” She regarded me as if I were a sick bear in Atlanta’s zoo. “I called you Miss Hanna, didn’t I? You’re probably Doctor Hanna.”
“Call me Caroline.”
“Paul.” I tapped my thumb against my chest. “Anyway, I’m sorry to say your pal Nollinger, back in February, even had the brass to ask RuthClaire and Adam for money. He needed funds for field work he wanted to do somewhere.”
“He’d come to apologize.”
“Well, he blew that. He started talking about some painterly ape in England.”
Caroline Hanna smiled wistfully. “That’s Brian, all right.”
“What can I do for you? Would you like a beer?”
She declined, saying she’d only wanted a closer look at T. P.—the sweetie—and to introduce herself to the man who’d tied Brian into the biggest event in evolutionary science since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species. She was glad to have contributed in a small way to the unraveling of the mystery of the origins of the Montaraz habilines. And she felt an odd kinship with me, each with our peripheral importance to the affair. Of course (she hastened to add), she was further on the periphery than I, but she sympathized with the muddle of feelings that a person in my position must sometimes experience. Wasn’t she running a gauntlet of small but painful changes herself?
Ever the diplomat, I said, “Like what?”
She said, “I wasn’t fishing for a chance to list them, honest.”
“You don’t have to list anything. Just tell me the most painful of your changes. It might do you good.”
Caroline considered this. Then she said, “Brian left Emory in June. He resigned his post in the anthropology department and left—without telling me anything. No foul play. He told the folks in his department. He just didn’t divulge his plans to me.”
“Another teaching or research position somewhere?”
“Not according to his department head. Brian said he was going to take off for a year and go overseas.”
“Maybe to visit Alistair Patrick Blair in Zarakal.” Caroline smiled wanly. I added, “Self-possessed women frighten him. The lack of a goodbye is the damning proof. He’s what my mother would have called a cad.”
“She would’ve had every right, but I’m not your mother.”
I lifted my beer mug to Caroline. “Amen to that.” I set the mug down. “But what else? Surely, getting shut of the biggest No-Dōz pusher at that primate field station can’t top the list of your woes.”
“You know you’re out of line, don’t you?”
“Sorry. I can’t help my feelings about, uh, Brian. Tell me something that’ll stir my sympathy for him.”
She started to rise. “Forgive me. I’ve got work to do.”
I caught her wrist. “One more chance. One more item from your list of worries. And I won’t be such a sarcastic bastard again, believe me.”
“No, you won’t,” Caroline said, subsiding. “How about this? The situation among the Cuban detainees in the Atlanta Penitentiary has me down. Some of those people belong in prison. Others deserve their freedom, and all my efforts to bring about releases have gone for naught. There. Do you like that one?”
“I’m in sympathy with it.”
“Stupid idealist.” She smiled gently. “I’m going.”
“Don’t you want to know what I’m doing here… with T. P.?”
“T. P.’s the baby? No. No, I don’t. It’s none of my business, and my business isn’t really any of yours, either.” Again she made as if to stand.
“Give me your address so we can redefine the limits of each other’s business.”
Hastily, she scribbled on the edge of a napkin. “Here’s a telephone number. Now I’ve got to go, really.”
T. P. reacted to her move—throughout our talk, he’d stared at her with moony adoration—by reaching out and upsetting his drink. I gathered napkins with which to blot the mess. In order to get at it, I lifted T. P.’s chair out of the way.
“Do you need some help?” Caroline asked.