11

A few years ago I considered becoming a member of the Museum of Fine Arts. It was where Aubrey and I liked to spend days holding hands, standing with our arms around each other in front of the exhibits, murmuring into each other’s ears. I had planned to take her here for our anniversary last year. Instead, here I was on yet another stop of my Location Reclamation Project.

A piece of calligraphy in the long Islamic gallery caught my eye. The Arabic was written in the shape of a boat. The placard translated: “I seek God’s protection from the cursed devil.” I wondered at the symbolism of the boat—but wondered more what had prompted the writer’s need for protection.

I wandered into the Asian gallery, past busts from Angkor with curling hair and wide, broad lips, past Indian cave paintings faded into soft palettes of color, past the statue of an Indonesian demon with bulging eyes and a broad-lipped smile full of fanged teeth. The placard read: “The demon Manisha.”

Demons everywhere. Why had I never noticed this commonality between cultures before? Why had I assumed demons to be property of the Christian church? I suddenly felt, as a modern and educated man, that I might be living proof of retrograde enlightenment.

Beyond the marble statue of infant Moses and his mother lay the Nubian gallery, the room typically rushed through en route to the morbid Egyptian collection. Even the museum guide had printed, beneath “Egyptian Funerary Arts,” the parenthetical “(Mummies)” for those who had come here solely to see dead people. Aubrey had always found the idea gauche, so we never invested much time there; the impressionists, existential and vibrant, were much more romantic.

I was considering the pieced-together shards of a bowl that had been buried with the wife of a king when a woman in her fifties came to stand next to me. “Nothing lasts, does it? It all turns to dust.”

“I suppose you’d know.”

In my peripheral vision I saw her turn and stare at me as I realized my mistake too late.

“I beg your pardon!” The skin between her chin and neck shook as she said it. I imagine it did, too, when she walked deliberately out the direction I had just come in from.

Across the small exhibition hall, I heard soft laughter. The crimson stain was still on my face when the source of the sound, a caramel-skinned woman, strolled toward me, mirth and the devil dancing in her eyes.

“Not one of your smoother moments,” she said, still chuckling. Her hair fell in a wave past her shoulders, and I inwardly groaned at the sight of it, even as I found myself wanting to touch it. She was tall, svelte, her peacoat not reaching the hem of the short skirt that bared her knees. They were coltish, those legs, skin showing through the open weave of her tights like sun through a thousand tiny windows. She had turned her heart-shaped face to the broken bits of bowl, but I was staring at the profile of her mouth, at the pouty curve of her upper lip. She was the kind of beauty other women seemed to hate on principle.

“This is quite old, in terms of your history. Though it seems like yesterday to me. I’m dating myself, aren’t I?”

“I hate it when you do that.” I turned away.

“Do what?”

“Make your smug demon jokes.”

“What else can I do in this divine comedy that sums up your human existence? It is a joke! It’s all a joke.”

Together we wandered past gold necklaces, amulets designed to protect the wearer from evil—Lucian seemed unfazed by any of these—past scarabs and Eyes of Horus to a collection of ninth-century BC jewelry.

She studied a weathered gold ring. “This is much closer.”

“Closer to what?”

“The time when God came to Eden.”

“Came to Eden?”

She looped her arm through mine. “We had no idea what he was doing,” she said in a low, seductive tone. “Everything so far had appeared by word, had come into existence by the sheer will of God. But now El came down to this new Eden. We felt him moving over the land, rushing upon meadow and valley, the animals excited in his wake, their chorus raised to the sky. In the garden I felt him, circling as one paces upon the ground in consideration. He came to the edge of the river and lingered there, roaming through the reeds.” She looked at me, her eyes luminous and wild.

“Why? What was he doing?”

“The unthinkable!” she said in a whisper. She seemed unusually convivial today. “There now, by the river, the earth was gathering upon itself, forming up from the ground as though El himself had bent down and scooped up mounds of the foul stuff in his hands.” She covered her mouth, a strange half laugh seeming to escape her of its own volition, inadvertent as a hiccup, the sound of it peculiar and cracked.

“We on the periphery lingered in the humid air. What was he doing? There was God, doing something in the muck. We looked at each other. Even Lucifer stared, dumbfounded. You should have seen the look on his face!”

She broke out in sudden, trilling laughter. There again was that slight hint of mania. And as before, the abruptness with which she regained her composure startled me nearly as much as how quickly she had lost it. It occurred to me that anyone overhearing her—the way her voice shot up in register and lowered to a whisper and then broke out in laughter—might have thought she was unbalanced.

She steered me toward an exhibit of gold bracelets and rings, preserved all these years in a Nubian tomb. I was conflicted by her casual contact and thought about pulling away from her whispered words, stirring the tiny hairs in my ear.

“El was sculpting the earth into some thing, some likeness, creating this time not by word . . . but in person.” When I said nothing, she gestured imperatively, vainly, as one groping for words. “In person, Clay. As though by hand!”

I looked at her, baffled.

“We were all staring, gape-mouthed as you, by then. And then he surrounded this thing. He was everywhere around it, as if he had gathered the dirty thing in his arms and cupped it by the head. And then I heard it.”

She was clutching my arm, her fingers biting into my flesh so that I was glad I had worn a sweater, sure that she would have left half-moon punctures with her nails in my forearm.

“The sound, it was the same expectant sound at the dawn of all the world. A breath exhaled into the mud! Given to the mud thing as surely as if he had set his mouth against those dirty lips and breathed.

“Oh, divine exhale! It was himself. Much more than life, it was everything—the awareness, all the emotion, the propensity to love, to nurture, to create. And he endowed it all upon this new creature made of mud.” The plush mouth contorted. Behind her irises, the unnatural light I had noted before blazed like a black nova. “And the clay chest filled, and expanded, and warmed. The man coughed and fell down, alive.”

I stared. “But you’re saying—”

“Yes, Clay”—her mouth smoothed into a chilly smile—“Image of El, breath of God. In such an unworthy vessel. Something far more precious than diamonds, denied even to us but entrusted to a container of mud.”

“I take it Lucifer was as thrilled as you seem.”

Again the brittle laugh. “His jealousy exploded in a fiery blast, the fallout infecting us with his cancer.”

She shrugged out of her coat, and I instinctively moved to help her. She wore a sleeveless turtleneck beneath, and the skin of her arms was smooth, luminous. I wanted to touch it.

“Eden, once the seat of his government, had been made anew, raised up and recreated lush and living—and prepared for another.” She took the coat from me and draped it over her arm, a delicate silver watch on her wrist catching the light. “No more stones like mirrors—this was a handcrafted cradle for no creature of our kind.”

“So he—El—made it for Adam. I assume that’s the man you’re talking about.”

“Yes. This new garden, planted by Elohim, became his home. The former throne of Lucifer now belonged to a cherished new creature made of mud.”

“You said yourself that Lucifer didn’t want it anymore.”

“Not as it was. Not ruined. But El had done something special and made it anew—and given it away. Worse yet, El himself deigned to go there. He went down from the heavens daily. He left the mount and moved among the creatures, speaking with the man, walking with him in the shade and telling him things beneath the trees. Oh, intimate whispers! How my soul suddenly longed to be a clay creature!”

All this time we had been alone, the museum unusually quiet for a Saturday afternoon.

“By now Lucifer was no longer content to sit by. The earth was his, had been since its inception. He meant to inspect these new creatures and all this strange life now roving about and sprouting from this planet of his jurisdiction.” She stopped to peer at an assortment of jewelry: shell bracelets and necklaces, their tiny conches perfectly intact. “From the Red Sea,” according to the numbered notation.

“There had never been any question, in Lucifer’s mind at least, as to who would rule this place, this new life, the creatures. The earth—all of Eden—belonged to him. He might disdain this refurbished Eden and its new tenants, but it was his. But El wasn’t finished.”

She moved farther to my left to gaze intently into the exhibit case, and I saw the object of her interest: an ivory comb. For several moments, she stood unmoving, her expression thoughtful, her lips pursed. And then she tilted her head and said with what I thought was sadness, “I knew the woman this belonged to. She used to sing to the moon at night, and I used to stop to listen to her, this human who seemed to see in that pale light the very thing I did.”

I could not help but wonder if some accident had befallen that woman—the 2200 BC equivalent of being run down by a car. Just then it hit me: I stood shoulder to shoulder with a being older than any item in this room. Or the next. Older, even, than the very soil it was built upon.

She touched the Plexiglas. “How odd that I should share sentiments with a human. It was, I think, the most kinship I have ever felt with one of your kind.” Her fingers fell away. “Of course, I realized sometime later that it had not been the actual woman I was drawn to, but those qualities within her that were the earmark of El. In the poignant yearning of her psyche, in the loveliness of her voice, I had heard El.”

She fell quiet after that, her lips moving slightly, emitting no sound. And I realized that she mouthed the words to a song.

“You said El wasn’t finished,” I prompted.

She sighed. “No, he wasn’t. In a sudden, great blow to my prince, he gave the animals to the man and told him to rule over them. Do you understand what I’m saying, Clay?” She leaned against the case, her face turned up toward mine. “Gave them to the clay man! He brought them to the man and gave him the power to name them. And the man, oblivious to what he did in usurping Lucifer’s rightful place, did it. But it got worse.” She shifted her coat, lifting a finger for emphasis. “For every animal there was a counterpart.” She added a second finger and turned her fingers this way and that. “But for the man—nothing. Naming the animals took a long time. Caring for the garden was no small task. The man needed help. And he was lonely. Communing with nature is only novel for so long.”

“He had El,” I offered, wondering that such pious-sounding words should come out of my mouth.

“True, and that ought to have been enough. But El is extravagant. And what was good enough for us positively paled beside what he was willing to do for the mud race.” There was a strange, ironic tinge to her voice.

“And so, like your bakers, who pinch off dough from one loaf and set it aside to leaven another, El took out a part of this man—no flesh, but fine, sleek bone—and crafted a new thing.” She moved on toward the next room but glanced over her shoulder as though to see if I followed. I noticed that the smooth skin bore a small tattoo: a falling star. “And she rose up, a counterpart to the man, the female to his male.”

She smoothed her hair back with her hand, her fingertips brushing absently against the side of her neck, pausing to trace the line of it, to feel, perhaps, the faint pulse there. “They were as regal a pair as could ever hope to spring from the mud. Both unique from all creation, both uniquely created in person by God and after his own image. I actually forgot, as El gave them the green things to live on and told them to fill the earth, that they had been born of the dirt.”

She stopped to check her watch. I was accustomed, by now, to this ritual—and to the fact that it might signal her imminent departure. She tapped it as I had seen the demon do in the taxi with the dashboard clock. When it seemed to work to her satisfaction, she looked up at me.

“And?” I hated the way she made me wait on her. But I did it. I did it because I wanted as much to take back to my desk, to my expanding stack of pages, as possible. I did it in the hope of having more from which to glean her purpose, her unspoken reason in sharing her story in the first place.

She shrugged. “He sat back, called it good, and rested.”

I waited.

She waited.

I raised my brows. “And?”

Her mouth curved into a smile. “You think I’m pretty, don’t you.”

THE “MUMMY” ROOM WAS dimly lit, miniature track lights shedding halogen pools onto giant sarcophagi and burial masks that were never meant to emerge from darkness. It was cooler, too, the change in light and temperature making for an appropriately tomblike atmosphere. Along the far wall, a small pantheon of gods stood sentry over the dead: Isis, Anubis, Maat, Thoth. Sections of an actual burial chamber adorned the adjacent wall, etched with symbols to protect the dead.

Thinking of the Arabic calligraphy and the amulets to ward against evil in the Nubian room, I wondered what the deceased had used to protect themselves while they lived.

Lucian sauntered through the display of sarcophagi, caressing the Plexiglas cases in a way I found thoroughly unsettling.

“I know this seems like a myth to you. Ancient history at best. But can you imagine, Clay, that all of this”—she gestured around the chamber—“stemmed from them, the original two?”

I assumed what she meant by “this” were the vestiges of an elaborate culture. Otherwise, for all practical purposes, this room was a cult tribute to death.

“After that,” she said, “we waited. Even as the man began his life with the woman, feeding her and lying down with her, we waited to see what they would do, sure there would be more. But El was finished. And there was nothing for us.”

She leaned over the sarcophagus of a princess, turning her ear to it as though to listen for tapping on the inside. “I wonder, sometimes, what it must be like to die.”

I turned away.

“Oh, don’t.” She was at my side again, her arm twining through mine.

“I want to know what this has to do with me.”

“If you don’t understand the beginning, the rest will mean nothing to you, and we’ll have wasted our time. And neither of us can afford that.” She picked a piece of lint off my sweater.

A few other patrons drifted through the mummy room as I remarked again to myself at the lack of traffic. I wouldn’t have minded more; a shallow part of me felt gratified to be seen like this with such an obviously beautiful woman on my arm. And another part of me remembered that this was no woman, no human, at all.

Wheels, skidding on pavement . . . blonde hair and blood . . .

“You picked the perfect place for me to tell you all of this. Here, among your artifacts that have managed to outlast millennia of humans like you. Can you grasp what I’ve told you? That I watched the first rising of the sun, strolled the best beaches on earth before human feet soiled the sand?”

Her head tilted toward my shoulder. “I know,” she said with a sigh. “I’m giving away my age.”

HER VOICE DROPPED TO a conspiratorial whisper. “Lucifer claimed it was spite.” She might have been any woman gossiping to a friend. Across the room, a man in his twenties tried not to openly stare at her. He mostly failed.

“It was spite, he said, that El communed with these new creatures as though they were more than walking mud, as though they could ever be worthy of anything. He knew then what we hardly dared believe: that El had created a new favorite. I have a present for you, Clay.”

I was startled by the sudden sound of my own name. “You do?” I frowned. “What is it?”

“You’ll see.” Her lips curled up, catlike.

I didn’t like that smile.

She tightened her arms around mine, hugging it to her. “Now Lucifer addressed the Legion: ‘What is to stop us from becoming their kings? Their gods? What else could we possibly be to these new creatures? Let us walk in the garden as he does. Let us be as gods to them and exercise our influence over them and turn them away from this fellowship with Elohim, as we have turned away.’”

We paused before a statue of the falcon-headed Horus. I hesitated and then marveled at her implication. Did I imagine it, or had she winked at it? I shuddered. She nuzzled my shoulder, her eyes on the statue. My head was spinning.

“Lucifer became obsessed with the humans. I didn’t know what to make of his fixation. I had never seen him like this. Even in the throes of his failed ascent, he had never been so intent, driven by such singularity of purpose. He studied them. He lost interest in the new world. He forgot us and even ceased to taunt El. The whole world had shrunk to this one thing: the humans.” She leaned away, her arm never leaving mine, to inspect a burial mask with vacant eyes and dark, curling hair, to trace its shape on the Plexiglas.

“He prowled the garden, inspecting for himself the handiwork of El like the jealous critic who judges the craftsmanship of the master, turning the work slowly between his hands, searching for the slightest weakness.” Her finger squeaked down the front of the display case. “And who, after long days and years of searching, finds it at last.”

For the last ten minutes or so there had been a new flow of visitors circulating through the room, coming in and out of the entrances on adjacent sides of the gallery. And so I paid no particular attention to the couple that entered the room just then until I felt, rather than saw, one of them falter. I glanced up just as Lucian twined both arms around mine once more.

Aubrey.

I HAD DREADED AND anticipated this day. Would it be at Old Beijing on a weekend? On the pedestrian mall outside Macy’s, or coming out of Peet’s? Would I look up in the T station to see her waiting across the track . . . or would it happen at all?

In the weeks since Lucian’s intrusion into my life, I had found new fears to rival my dread of running into Aubrey. Since then there had even been a growing number of days when I thought about Aubrey only once or twice. I panicked upon realizing this at first, feeling that the last traces of her were slipping away from me completely, too quickly. Later I tenuously congratulated myself, thinking that in the midst of this new madness I had begun to move on.

Even so, I was invariably conscious of her specter almost every time I left home—following me down Tremont or into the Harvest store in Cambridge, seeking me in places we had never been together before—whispering in my mind, Is today that day? And though I had exhaustively premeditated it, I knew when that day happened, I would not be prepared.

But I was less—so much less—prepared for it today. Especially upon seeing her with a man, the arm of whom she had instinctively clasped upon seeing me.

Richard.

Now at last I would confront him. But what I saw confounded me more than the faceless man he had been to me all these months: Other than his height, he did not resemble at all the chiseled-featured lothario of my imagination. Granted, he was tanned as if he had just come in from Saint Martin, and he had a full head of sporty brown hair. But his features seemed somehow soft, his eyebrows ill-formed over the pale color of his eyes. I thought his chin receded a little bit as well. In fact, other than the obvious understated quality of his clothing, he was disappointingly average, which evoked in me first relief and then incredulity. And I wondered, as I had a thousand times before, what the draw had been, that thing that caused Aubrey to gravitate toward him when she compared the two of us side by side as she must have done.

As I did now.

I noticed the black cashmere scarf draped around his neck: Aubrey’s trademark gift. She had given one to me and her boyfriend before me. I wondered if he knew that.

Aubrey was tanned, too. They must have just come from some no-doubt exotic location. And it irritated me to think that as I wondered almost daily if and when I would run into her, for part of that time she had not even been in the city.

The introductions went smoothly—thanks, surprisingly, to Richard. The Richard. Smooth as Richard. To his credit, he stuck out his hand, congenially and formally, as though it were a peace offering. I saw my hand clasp it, heard myself say something not nearly as clever as I had said in my rehearsals for this moment.

It was then that I caught the scent of her perfume, the bottle of which, shaped like a blue star, had sat every day on the bathroom counter. I was suddenly besieged by memories: her shoulders in the dress she wore to her office party our last Christmas together, the indentation of her pillow in the morning, the hair across her face as she slept, her clothes, pooled by the side of our bed.

“Clay,” Richard said. I detected, in the single syllable of my name, a slight accent. British. Wouldn’t you know it.

“You look good,” Aubrey lied. She seemed flushed, as though too warm in her cable-knit sweater and corduroys, a mixture of slight confusion and what I would recognize later as benign detachment in her eyes. Her lips, glossy and pink, were parted, as if on the cusp of a remark. I remembered the shape of that mouth, found myself first gazing and then staring at it. She had a front tooth that had always been at a slight angle so that it nudged her upper lip. She had been self-conscious of it, but I had thought it endearing. It kept her otherwise aristocratic look somehow approachable, more human. But now I was certain there was no discrepancy between those white edges. She had gotten it fixed! The lips closed, parted again as her blue gaze flitted from me, to Richard, and back like a moth, settling at last on the woman coiled at my side.

“Yvonne.” The demon smiled in that magnanimous way women do when they know they’re the prettier of the two. Her head tilted just perceptibly then, and I recognized with alarm a faint buzzing in the air. Her smile broadened. “Clay was just telling me how you used to come here together.”

I was mortified. I wrapped my arm around her. Aubrey gave a slight smile.

“I’m surprised to see you in the mummy room.” I wanted to accuse her—of getting her tooth fixed, of coming to the mummy room though she didn’t like it.

“I insisted, having never seen it before. Quite spectacular, really,” Richard said, coming to her rescue.

I hated him.

“So nice to meet you, Yvonne.” Aubrey’s expression was benign, betraying no insecurity or envy, only a bare hint of surprise. “Are you from the city?”

“Yes. I’m an attorney,” the demon said.

“Ah.” Aubrey was obviously impressed, her gaze bouncing from “Yvonne” to me, and back. And with ex-husband perception I heard her thinking that she would never have thought an attorney to be my type. “What kind of law?”

“I litigate product liability lawsuits,” Lucian said with a smile. I had no idea what that meant but felt an instant alignment like gratitude toward her that both surprised and unsettled me.

Richard checked his watch. “Well, I’m a bit peckish. Do you mind much, Bree, if we head up to the restaurant for some lunch?”

Richard to the rescue again. Aubrey excused them both with a smile and nod. “It’s good to see you, Clay.”

When their footsteps had receded out into the American galleries, I turned on Lucian. “You had no right,” I hissed, feeling the heat of the initial meeting still in my face.

“I think that went quite well.” She let go of me. I stared past the funerary mask of the dead princess, quite unable to believe that it had finally happened and happened so uneventfully that they were even now walking into Bravo, the upstairs restaurant, as I stood blinking in the middle of the mummy room.

But now that it was over, I was angry. Angry at Aubrey’s detachment, at being caught off-guard, at Richard’s heroics. I hated Richard for stepping in the way he had, first into our marriage and now today, for saving her from the need to answer for herself, as though to protect her from me.

“Is that why we were here?” I asked Lucian finally.

“You chose to come here, Clay.” She was smoothing her hair back in a way that reminded me of a Siamese cat. She peered up at me, then, her expression indulgent, the smile I hated was back again.