First Man (3 page)

“Are you looking for the
Predecessors of the Parthenon
lecture?”

I turned quickly to see a slender blonde in a pale green slip dress looking at me inquisitively.

“Yes,” I said quickly, my interest piqued. “Yes, I am, but I’m a bit lost.”

She smiled warmly. I had heard rumors of Southern gentility, but it was surprising to see how unexaggerated they were. “Follow me,” she said. “I’m a bit early, but I wanted a good seat. These guest lectures always fill up fast.” She lead me into a large room with stadium seating, already half-filled with students, professors, and anyone with enough interest in classical architecture to give up a Thursday night.

She walked up to a cluster of professors and, in a matter of seconds, was engaged in an animated conversation with several of them. Sensing that she had all but forgotten about my presence, I took a seat near the front.

She hadn’t been joking about the popularity of the lecture. The hall filled quickly. The speaker was Manolis Korres, an expert of Greek architecture. I’d seen him speak several times before, and I found my attention wandering to the woman in the green dress. The house lights lowered as large images of the Parthenon appeared on the overhead screen. The dim light obscured her features, and I wondered if her eyes were blue or green like her dress. She watched the lecture with rapt interest, barely blinking.

To be young. . . I doubted if she was even 23. She had the look of an enthusiastic grad student, the knowledge hungry students that lingered after the lectures, hoping a five minute chat with the professor would unravel the reasons why they were spending their lives in the dust of parchment and marble.

Once upon a time, I was her. Ten years ago, I wanted nothing more than to understand the secrets of the past, to bury myself in the sand and ashes of the ruins. I didn’t want to hide back then. I wanted to
know
. It had taken far too many years before I realized that however magnificent the Valley of the Kings was, it was still a city of the dead.

I squinted as the house lights suddenly blinded me, and I applauded along with the crowd. She was smiling.

To be young.

It was over a week later when I saw her again. I had rented a studio apartment downtown, and while unpacking the meager amount of boxes I had had shipped from Barcelona, I realized that my pots and pans were still hanging about the stove in my old apartment off Carrer Del Taulat. Despite my nomadic lifestyle, I was not a man who subsisted on takeout curry and leftover Chinese.

Nothing quite illuminated any society as accurately as a trip to its version of the mall. Rome and Cairo had open air markets and bazaars and Atlanta had Perimeter Mall, and I needed cookware.

Tuesday afternoon, and the mall was relatively empty. I skirted a pack of truant teenage girls and slipped into the kitchen goods store. As I passed a shelf of baguette pans in search of a few simple skillets, I saw her. She stood next to a display of electric mixers, her face buried in a French dessert cookbook and entirely oblivious to her surroundings. Clad in a pair of faded jeans and a red tank top, she looked even younger than she had at the lecture. I turned away, feeling strangely like an intruder.

“Can I help you?” she asked raising her eyes from the full page illustration of a chocolate mousse cake.

They were grey.

I smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, but I didn’t think I should waste this opportunity again. You disappeared after the lecture before I had a chance to take you to dinner.”

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

S
he 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.