First Man Page 2

  Something about this woman intrigued me. Love at first sight was a convention made up to sell movie tickets to teenaged girls, but something about her made me want to know more.

  I’d left a trail of pretty faces across the world, women who had shown me that the delights I could find in the world weren’t just inside museums. I had cherished my time with them, but there had never been a doubt that our time had an expiration date.

  She laughed, a bright open sound. “Cute.” She had a purple bag from a tea shop hanging off her wrist, and a few strands of pale hair had escaped the teeth of the plastic clip restraining her wavy hair. My eyes took in every detail like she was yet another artifact I was cataloging. “You weren’t really at Park Hall for the lecture, were you?”

  I chuckled. “Not in the slightest, though if I had known about it, I would have been. Manolis is a great speaker,” I added. “I’m new in the city, and I wanted to see the school. The lecture was a welcome diversion from unpacking.”

  She placed the book back on the shelf, and began rummaging through the small denim bag hanging from her shoulder. After a brief search, she pulled out a pen. She fished the receipt from the tea shop bag and wrote her number underneath the words “Casablanca Spice” in a tiny, precise hand. “I don’t know how interesting of a diversion I’ll be, but I’ll give it a try,” she said, handing the note to me. Almost as an afterthought, she added, “I’m Lily.”

  “Adam,” I answered.

  I didn’t realize until I was unlocking the door to my apartment an hour later that I had forgotten all about the pots.

  Two days passed before I called her. I was never a man who concerned myself with appearing over-eager and, despite my inexplicable fascination with Lily and her Southern charms, I was in no hurry.

  Unpacking had become a familiar ritual, comforting in the repetition. I couldn’t recall the amount of times I’d packed and unpacked my life entire life in the past 27 years, but even when I lived in a tent at a dig site, my father was obsessive about making the wind-battered canvas that sheltered us feel like a home.

  The scant photographs I had of my parents were hung with care on the stark white walls of my apartment. One was a grainy, out of focus shot of my father and his team unearthing one artifact or another.

  Another was a black and white photo of both of my parents. My mother was perched on my father’s lap, laughing as he whispered something in her ear. By the time I’d thought to wonder what he’d been saying to her, my father was long buried and my mother was long gone.

  The last photo had always been my favorite. Taken inside one of the endless canvas tents we lived in on site, I sat on my father’s lap. Chubby-cheeked with a gap-toothed grin, I couldn’t have been more than five years old. My father was reading to me from a book in his hand while I stared at him with rapt attention.

  I still remembered that day, even all these years later. My father had been reading a worn book of Greek and Roman myths, describing how baby Hercules strangled two snakes with his bare hands, utterly blowing my five-year-old mind. My mother had picked up the camera and snapped the photo without either of us noticing.

  In those early days before she had grown sick of the endless travel across the dusty countryside, the three of us had been happy. Somehow, I felt her presence more keenly in a photograph that showed no trace of her.

  Shaking off my nostalgia before it had the chance to mature into a melancholy funk that would linger for days, I turned back the task of unpacking, lining the slim shelf with the books difficult enough to find or with enough sentimental value to make them worth the trans-continental shipping costs. I ran my fingers along each book’s spine as I lined them up like multi-colored soldiers waited to be called to duty.

  I could have easily lost myself in those pages. I’d fallen into that trap too many times. A title would catch my eye, beckoning me to flip through its pages and enticing me with scraps of memory. I’d open it up, intending to skim a passage or two, nothing more. Then I’d look up and two hours had passed. Evening had fallen around me, and I was left surrounded by a litter of half-unpacked boxes and a few pages of hastily scrawled notes on my next paper.

  Instead, for once in my life, I put down the books and picked up the phone.

  BEGINNING

  She thought I was worldly.

  I fascinated her.

  I know it sounds like the absolute peak of pretension to say so, but I was sick of people finding me fascinating because I’ve traveled. I’ve been more than a little tempted to invent some perfectly dull fiction about my life. For once I could be a normal person. I could be a history professor at a small private school in England, that this was my first time traveling more than a hundred miles from home. I almost wanted her to think I was boring.

  We were at a corner table at Antica Posta, eating bread drizzled with olive oil and drinking Italian wine, and she was trying to get to know me. In half an hour I had learned that Lily had majored in Classics, decided to skip grad school because four more years of schooling offered nothing but the potential for academic burnout. She lived uptown in an apartment with plenty of windows. Her parents were well-off and driven, her father a dentist, her mother a defense attorney. They weren’t close, but Lily had the freedom to study whatever she wished without their interference and a trust fund large enough to guarantee that she wouldn’t end up a waitress after graduation, but not large enough for the summers in Europe she longed for.

  In half an hour, Lily had learned that I was an unapologetic nomad.

  Her openness shocked me. It might have been a cliché, but the staid British sensibility was still ingrained in every part of me. The wide-eyed friendliness and willingness to share was so different than anything I’d ever experienced, but somehow I felt my guard dropping.

  “So what kept you from settling down?”

  I didn’t answer for a long time. The question was jarring. It had come up a few times over the years, but I had become a master of deflection. The women in my past who were enjoyable company for an hour or a week or, rarely, more had never asked. Satisfied with the exotic stranger, they hadn’t pried. Lily made me want to answer.

  “My father always used to tell me stories. He was a historian and an archeologist, specialized in classical civilization.” Her eyes widened at archeologist and could already see her mind conjuring up images of pyramids and Harrison Ford. “It’s not all Indiana Jones, believe me. It’s a lot of hours digging the hot sun, squinting at the ground while you try to figure out what’s an artifact and what’s actually just dirt.

  “He used to read to me from Suetonius’ The Lives of the Twelve Caesars. I loved Nero and Caligula because he never shied away from telling a six year old the interesting parts.” A faint smile crossed my lips. “He called me his ‘little Centurion,’ and I grew up almost believing he was Augustus.”

  “We traveled. My mother and I trailed along behind him, following him wherever his whims took us. I can’t begin to tell you the amount of times I’d wake up to him shoving books into boxes and trunks, telling the both of use to get packed because we were off to some obscure corner of Sicily or Greece. I loved it though. The whirlwind of travel. I never had a chance to grow bored of anyplace. It got to be too much for my mother though.” I saw the question in Lily’s eyes. “My parents divorced when I was thirteen. I stayed with my father. My mother and I have never been close.”

  “I’m sorry.” I actually believed that she was.

  “Don’t be. You can’t miss what you never had.”

  Lily paused, searching for the right thing to say. “If you say so.”

  I continued without further comment. “A year after my mother left, my father died.” My voice took on the clipped tone it always did when anyone got close enough to warrant this story. “It was sudden and completely expected at the same time, but no one seemed to know what to do with me at first. At the sites and museums my father worked, no one minded me, but when my father was gone it was like they all suddenly
woke up and realized that they had a teenager in their midst.” I rubbed my temples, trying to keep the headache brewing behind my eyes at bay.

  “Luckily my father was a man who believed in planning. All his affairs were set in order, and he’d left explicit instructions behind. He was barely cold, and I was shipped back to England for boarding school.”

  “Wait-“ Lily interrupted, slowing the tide of words that had been pouring from me. “Where was your mother during all this?”

  “No idea.”

  Lily gaped at me. “Are you serious?” I nodded. “She never contacted you. . . not even a letter?” She seemed more desperate for a reunion between my mother and I than I had ever been.

  I shook my head. “I haven’t heard a word from her since she left when I was 13.” I shrugged, but Lily continued to stare at me with disbelief at my lack of reaction. “I made peace with it long ago, Lily. Some people just aren’t meant to be parents,” I added as an afterthought.

  Quickly switching to a more comfortable topic, I continued. “I did my tour of duty – boarding school, Oxford, graduate study. I was all set to start teaching at Corpus Christi with my old flatmate Edwin when I realized that I wasn’t cut out to be “Professor” for the rest of my life, so I went to Greece. After Greece it was Italy, Syria, Cyprus, Turkey, and Nigeria before I went to Egypt. I spent the longest time there, close to a year around Cairo before I came back to Europe. Paris was quite the culture shock after a year in Egypt. I’ve lived in half a dozen other cities, and I’ve visited quite a few more. I was in Spain before I came here.”

  “You don’t miss having roots?”

  “Not particularly. The last time I really had roots was when before my father died. Everything else is just materialistic trappings. There’s far too much world out there for me to want to tether myself to one spot.”

  I wondered idly if she would be one of the ones who would try to change me, to give me a reason to set roots. I almost wanted her to try, and a small part of me wanted her to succeed.

  It might have ended there, with a friendly dinner and casual flirtation. I could have driven her home, walked her to the door of her tidy, suburban apartment and left. I could have turned up the charm and gained in invite upstairs for a nightcap or more. I could have left before the sun came up.

  I didn’t though. Yes, I walked her to the door of that perfect apartment building with its manicured lawns and well-lit driveways. I paused at her doorway, and I could see her mentally warring with her desires and her self-proclaimed status as a good girl. Taking the choice out of her hands, I curled my arm around her slim hips and pulled her against my body.

  Fireworks did not explode when her lips met mine. Bells did not ring and the choirs of heavenly angels didn’t start up a song. The world did not notice.

  But I did. I’d built a wall around myself, hidden by an easy smile and a sardonic comment. I was the first to admit that I’d always been guarded, but somehow this tiny slip of a girl had found a chink in my armor and wedged her fingers into it. I knew that she’d tear that wall down, bit by bit, if I let her.

  I kissed her breathless, and my brain never stopped asking ‘Why?’ She was beautiful, but the world was filled with beautiful women. She shared my interests, but she was far from the first budding classicist I’d bedded.

  She pulled back, dizzy from the kiss, and smiled that open, unguarded smile. And I realized.

  It was happiness. Lily exuded happiness from every pore, like the delicate floral perfume that wafted around her. Untainted by loss and lacking the bitter cynicism that came from being let down, she made me feel lighter than I had since I was a laughing child listening to my father’s stories.

  “Can I see you again?” I asked, my brain still racing.

  She nodded, staring at me with those wide, grey eyes.

  I walked back to my car, aware and aching with something I couldn’t describe. A poet might say that I was lost, but I’d spent more years than I could count feeling that way. I wasn’t lost.

  I was found.

  THE GARDEN

  “So what’s this one, Adam? Artist, scholar, groupee?”

  “There’s no need to be vulgar, Edwin,” I snapped. We had been friends since we were teenagers, and nearly a dozen years had killed any trace of formality between us. “Scholar,” I replied grudgingly.

  “Touchy. This one must be special.” Edwin’s tone was light, but I could hear the hope in his voice. When his wife Elene had the twins a year ago, it had become Edwin’s less than private obsession to see me settled down.

  “She is.”

  Edwin whistled. “I’ve never heard you like this before. Could it be that the world traveler is finally finding a place for himself?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said, quickly realizing that if I let Edwin’s imagination run away with itself, he’d have me married with a litter of children on the way within a month.

  We said our goodbyes and ended the call. I knew before he put the phone down, Edwin would be yelling to his wife, “Adam’s in love!”

  I was too much of a pragmatist to think myself in love after just a few dates, but I was. . . comfortable. I could easily see how comfort could slip into something more.

  She spent at least an hour every Sunday walking in the Atlanta Botanical Garden breathing in the heady perfume of the acres of flowers. On our third date, she invited me to come.

  “It’s just something I do every week,” she said shyly. “It helps remind me that there’s a life outside of translations and historical documents.”

  I followed her through the flowers, feeling slightly like an intruder. Foolish mortals paid for disturbing a goddess in her garden. Where were the hounds to tear me apart for trespassing?

  I might have grown up far from America and the strange mix of puritanism and pornography that makes up American sexual mores, but I was far from unaware of what a third date meant.

  Lily watched me as I trailed her through the gardens. She would disappear around a bend, and I’d follow, expecting to find her just a few feet ahead. Instead, I’d find her picking her way through an overgrown path, her face buried in a mound of lilacs. She took a step toward me, close enough that I could smell the honeyed scent of the pollen clinging to her hair.

  When she was near enough to touch, she’d kiss me, nothing more than a quick peck on the lips, before racing back into the thicket of wildflowers, ducking my grasping hands as easily as a deer evades a hunter’s arrow.

  The flirtation was innocent and silly, and I found myself laughing along with her. When I finally managed to capture her, snaking my arm around her waist, we were both flushed and breathless.

  “You’re always so serious,” she said, as I brushed a few golden grains of pollen off her cheek. “I just want to see you smile.”

  And I did. The smile that curled my lips wasn’t sarcastic. My arms tightened around her, and, for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to let something slip through my fingers.

  I pressed my mouth against hers, and I tasted warmth and the thick perfume of the flowers surrounding us. I felt the heat of her body pressing against mine, alive and aching, and I wanted her with a desperation that set my blood on fire.

  No words were exchanged as we followed that winding path out of the gardens to her car. The tension and want simmered between us in the short drive. I felt like a teenager, staring at her tanned thighs as she shifted in her seat, wondering how it would feel when she wrapped them around my hips.

  Sex had never meant anything to me beyond momentary pleasure and the occasional temporary companionship. Women entranced me with the mysteries they held behind their eyes, and I had studied my lovers with the same fastidious attention to detail I gave my books.

  I learned that Lily sighed when I kissed her neck, fumbling with her housekeys. Teasingly, she pushed me away from her but once the door was unlocked, she pulled me inside, slamming the door as an afterthought.

  Southern gentility aside,
Lily was far from shy. Once the world was locked outside, everything was forgotten but touch and lips and breath. I knew in the coming days, I’d examine her apartment, trying to sort out the whys and whats of her life from the objects she surrounded herself with, but right now the décor was nothing but a blur of color in my peripheral vision as I slid the strap of her dress down her shoulder, kissing the bare skin that it revealed.

  “Adam,” she breathed, her voice sounding like a prayer.

  And, suddenly, I wasn’t the one doing the seducing.

  My shirt went first, her delicate fingers making quick work of the buttons on the soft grey linen before letting it fall, unnoticed to the floor. Her hands traced the contours of my muscles. A small smiled crossed her lips.

  “Not what you were expecting?”

  Her fingers skated over my ribs, and I tensed as she hit a ticklish spot. “Nerds are generally a bit less cut than this.”

  I threw my head back and laughed, the sound loud in the silent room. “I’m a nerd then?”

  Lily nodded solemnly. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Adam, but you are very much a nerd.”

  “I think I can live with that.” Her hands found my belt, and I knew that I could live with anything as long as she didn’t send me away.

  With agonizing slowness, she unbuckled my belt, keeping her grey eyes focused on my own and leaving no doubt to her intent.

  Snapping myself out of the trance she had pulled me into, my hands got busy. I fumbled at the zipper of her dress like a clumsy teenager. When I finally had it open, she took a step back and pushed the dress down, leaving a swirl of blue fabric on the floor at her feet.

  I surged forward, picking her up and carrying her into the bedroom like a Hollywood cliché. Maybe clichés weren’t so bad after all.