Middle Age (17 page)

“Oh, Adam. What a beautiful dog. ‘Apollo’?”

“His full name is Apollodoros. You remember—Socrates’ youthful loyal friend.”

Camille, who had no idea what Adam was talking about, nodded in smiling agreement. Oh, yes!

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There followed then this haphazard scene, which Camille would recall in flashes and fragments for the remainder of her life.
In this lighted space,
waiting for me like a stage
.

Adam banished the dogs to another part of the studio, and returned to Camille, whose eyes gleamed with tears of yearning, and of love. How many months, in secret she’d adored this man! Now she seized Adam’s hands, and would have lifted them to her lips to kiss except Adam, surprised and embarrassed, drew away. “Adam, I l-love you,” Camille said pleadingly. “You must know it.” “Camille, my hands are dirty. They smell of mortality.” Camille said, “I don’t expect you to reciprocate my feeling, Adam. I know this is terribly intrusive. It’s in terrible taste. I can’t believe that I’m here—like this. But please accept my love, Adam. Will you?”

Across the room, the husky-shepherd Apollo whined as if in a parody of sexual yearning, shimmying his lean rear quarters and lowering his muzzle to the floor, barely restraining himself from leaping forward. Adam, rarely at a loss for words, seemed confused now, and chagrined; a deep mottled flush rose into his face. “Camille, dear! You know you love your husband.

You love your family, not
me
.” Camille protested, “Yes, I love them, but—

not as I love you.” “But what is it you ‘love’ in me, Camille? Seeing that you hardly know me.” “I—love everything about you, Adam. I think I did from the first—when we first met. Your face—” “My face?” Adam smiled incredulously. “Yes. I do love your face.” “Not my blind eye, surely?”

Adam’s right eye did make Camille uneasy, as it made others, even Lionel, uneasy; for it seemed neither a truly blind eye, nor was it a normal eye.

The eyeball appeared larger than the other, protruding beneath a grizzled, scarred eyebrow; it had the resiliency of glass, the iris unmoving. Sometimes there was a tawny-golden light reflected in it, uncanny. Adam’s other eye, the left, was alert, alive, human; often bloodshot as if with strain. This eye winked, this eye communicated. It was gazing at Camille now with a look of bemused patience. “I don’t think about your eye, Adam!” Camille said. “I love
you
.” It was a time when, in this compulsively rehearsed romantic scene, Adam would have come to Camille, to touch her; to hold her, perhaps to kiss her, to comfort her at least. To make her feel less ridiculous, exposed. Instead, he crossed his burly arms and said, in the manner of a stonemason, or a carpenter, hired to work for the Hoffmanns, and wanting to be certain he knew what their expectations were, if only to respectfully challenge them, “But what exactly do you think you love? In me? A man you scarcely know? That’s what we’re trying to determine.” Camille drew breath to speak, but stood confused, blushing. Adam

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had slipped into his Socratic mode of speech; almost, there was a sexual swagger in his manner at such times. “My face you ‘love’—? But not its components, surely? My psoriatic skin? My bumpy forehead, my Cro-Magnon skull? My crooked teeth?” Camille said, hurt, “Adam, when I say I love you I mean I love
you
. Why are you being so cruel?” “I’m not being cruel, Camille. I’m only just trying to understand you.” “When a woman loves a man, she loves—all that a man
is
. The physical part is—just a part.”

“But a part of—what?” “All that you are.” “ ‘All that I am’—how is that possible?” Adam’s forehead was creased with genuine perplexity. “You hardly know me, Camille. You don’t know my background, my history, my private self; you’ve seen me with others, as you might see a performer on a lighted stage. That isn’t knowing
me
.” Camille said stubbornly, “I know—

someone. Who tells the truth. As so few people seem to.” “But Camille, how
would
you know? You’d have to know the full truth about me, and about yourself, which surely you don’t?” Camille said, “But I—I know you’re the person you
are
. Your presence in the world, Adam, makes me feel less—” she paused, searching for the word, “—futile.”

Futile! Yes, that was it. Adam Berendt’s presence in the world made others feel less
futile
.

Camille’s uncharacteristic eloquence seemed to take her by surprise.

But square-built Adam stood his ground, shaking his head, frowning. If only the man would let her touch him! wrap him in her arms! hide her heated face against his neck. “Camille, you’re a lovely woman, and I feel very tenderly toward you. But I don’t think you understand what the consequences could be, of your coming to me like this; coming to any man, like this. Your marriage which has been your life might be destroyed, and your life devastated. It isn’t worth it, dear. Not with me, not with anyone.”

Camille said, her voice rising, “I don’t want ‘anyone,’ Adam, for God’s sake! I want you. I love
you
.”

“But what exactly does this ‘love’ attach to, Camille?
What do you love?
”

Camille stared incredulously as Adam began tugging at his clothing, baring parts of his anatomy as both dogs barked in excitement, leaping about. “My chest?”—Adam opened his shirt to reveal a broad, muscular torso, fatty at the waist; beneath an untidy pelt of graying hair, his skin was mottled, flaking and peeling, and looked scarred as if with burn tissue; his breast-nipples were tough little pink-rubbery knobs. “My belly?”—it was a flaccid, sagging belly, both unnaturally pale and red-mottled, blemished like his chest, and scarred with old burn tissue. “My cock?”—a thick,
Middle Age: A Romance

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stubby growth, like a thalidomide arm, purplish-red, moist at the tip, partly erect. Adam’s pubic hair was copious, bristling, sprouting even on the insides of his thighs. Camille, blushing fiercely, turned away, hiding her eyes. Adam laughed. “I don’t blame you, dear, it
is
ugly, isn’t it? I’ve never been one of those men who imagines his cock is impressive.”

Both dogs were nuzzling at Camille’s ankles with their damp inquisitive noses. Camille didn’t know whether to cry, or to laugh; didn’t know whether she’d been deeply insulted, or treated with an original sort of consideration. The intense romantic scene she’d been fantasizing for many months had swerved out of her control like a careening car, and had become comedy. Adam was matter-of-factly shoving his penis back into his pants, zipping himself back up, adjusting his clothing as if nothing extraordinary had occurred, even as Camille retreated stiff-backed, with what dignity she yet retained. Adam called after her, “Camille? You aren’t offended, I hope? But possibly enlightened?” He sounded like a mildly repentant, mostly amused host. Both Adam’s dogs, the aging yellow Labrador Butterscotch and the lean young husky-shepherd Apollo, trotted protectively beside Camille as if charged by their master with escorting her through the drafty, cluttered house, and back to her car in the driveway.

Had she left the keys in the ignition? And the headlights on, in a thickening wintry dusk.

The river’s surface was opaque, the hue of stainless steel.

Still, I love him
.

Camille drove home, cautiously, like an impaired person. She was deeply mortified, stricken to the heart, and yet: the absurdity of the scene swept over her, and she began unexpectedly to laugh. She was still laughing, tears streaking her face, when she returned to the house on Old Mill Way, and entered the warmly lit country kitchen where the Jamaican woman who came twice a week to clean house was sitting in the breakfast nook drinking coffee. When she saw Camille, she said with a gap-toothed grin, “Mrs. Hoffmann! That sure must be some joke you been told, the way you laughin.” Camille agreed, wiping at her eyes. “Felicia, it
is
.”

Immediately she was elsewhere. The kitchen vanished, Camille was staggering into a monstrous vibrating machine like an upright lawn mower. Or was it a helicopter. Near to waking—to be rudely awakened, by Lionel’s snoring—but clutching at the protection of the dream. Where was Adam? She knew now that something terrible and irrevocable had

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happened to him; but that he would not leave her, he was with her still.
I
must tell Lionel! I must confess
.
Bare my soul
.
My love for you
,
Adam
.
It isn’t
too late
.

Camille
.
Of course it’s too late
.

No
.
I love you!

But now I’m gone
.
Even my ugly battered body, gone
.

My love isn’t gone
.

You can’t love a dead man, Camille
.
Love the living
.

But, Adam
—

Love the living
.

With a shudder Camille awoke. The green luminous numerals of her bedside clock read : .. Beside her, turned from her, Lionel was not only snoring fitfully but grinding his back teeth as if arguing. Heat lifted from his long lanky back and his mussed hair. Camille, shaken from her dreams, slipped from bed and into her bathroom, to wash her feverish face and to drink a glass of water. (She deliberated, but decided against, taking another of her coarse white pills.) Oh, what had she been dreaming?

What visions had Adam brought her, from the Land of the Dead? She contemplated in a mirror above her sink a puffy girl’s face, and dilated eyes. She was thrilled, trembling. A decision had been made for her in her sleep: she would not tell Lionel of her love for Adam, as she’d intended.

Her hopeless (yet somehow still radiant) love for Adam Berendt.

Love the living, Camille,
he’d instructed her. And so she would.

A  L   his own secret agitated sleep. Tangled in sleep as in the bedclothes of the handsome four-poster bed, and in the enormous goose-feather pillows which (no matter how he shoved the damned things aside) were always pressing against his face, tickling his nose. Before coming to bed he’d had a small glass, or two, of bourbon.

Rinsed his mouth, gargled. Hadn’t kissed Camille good night. (By the time he came to bed, Camille was peacefully sleeping.) In bed, in his usual posture, he turned from her, gazing out into the dark. What a nightmare of a day! What sorrow.
My best friend
.
Dead of a heart attack
.
Cremated
.

And how perverse it was that, drifting into sleep, Lionel was becoming sexually aroused: moaning softly to himself, grinding his back teeth. He seemed to be crouched at the mouth of a cave. Or maybe it was a cellar: one of those old, earthen cellars built into a hillside he’d seen on farms in
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upstate New York, in the Adirondacks when he’d been a boy. He was crouched awkwardly on his haunches, his groin throbbing with blood. Inside the mysterious hole in the earth, which was approximately the width of an ordinary doorway, but not so high, what appeared to be a naked female figure lay curled. Her hair was long, matted, and greasy. Her body was naked, and smeared with dirt. Lionel squinted, seeing that the soles of her feet were filthy. She repelled him yet was sexually arousing, inviting. A sexual creature, purely female, still in the womb.
He
must give birth to her, if he dared.
The earth is the womb
.
Daylight is birth
. Adam Berendt was explaining. Lionel inched squatting closer to the mouth of the hole. God, how his penis bobbed taut with blood, painfully erect as a fist! He dared to lean inside the hole inhaling in a swoon the rich, rank smell of the female.

Her flesh-smell, the smell of her hair, the smell between her legs, the musky blood-smell that so powerfully repelled, and invited. The girl was awake, pretending to sleep? Moving her body provocatively in the dirt.

Her belly and thighs were a lurid milky-white, but smeared with dirt.

Girl’s breasts, tight and hard, with eye-like nipples; tufts of armpit hair (what a shock to a man of Lionel’s sensitivity, when first he’d glimpsed such tufts of wiry hair in female armpits, for Camille, of course, fastidiously shaved all unsightly hairs from her body, Camille would have been ashamed to acknowledge that such hairs grew on her body); toes that curled lasciviously in the dirt, like a monkey’s.
Bring her into the light, you
must bring her into the light. You must give birth to her
. Lionel understood that the purpose of the dream was to instruct him. He was a hypocrite, he’d been a hypocrite for a long time. Adam Berendt, who was his true brother, had brought him to the mouth of the cave, now it was Lionel’s task alone to fulfill the command. He must crawl inside the cave, into that place of fetid darkness, and he must rouse the sleeping female, and bring her into the light.
No shame
.
Never again
.
The broken halves of your life
.

Lionel woke with a shudder, on the precarious brink of orgasm. For a long time, his heart pounding, skin oozing sweat, he dared not move.

By slow degrees the blood drained out of his groin.

He felt his brain quicken, his thoughts rushing clear. Beside him in blissful ignorance, turned on her side, breathing wetly and sleeping that sleep that seemed to Lionel placid, bovine, dreamless, Camille lay inert as one of the goose-feather pillows. Now and then she sighed. Poor Camille!

Lionel did love her. Always he would love her. Though knowing she’d been in love with their friend Adam, and Adam hadn’t loved her in return.

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My wife’s sad, meager secret
.
I must grant her that secret
. Lionel felt his heart swell with magnanimity for the first time in memory.