In time he learned almost to take it for granted, that moment in a conversation with Sia when the ground under his feet was gently gone, like a missed stair or curbstone, and he invariably lurched off-balance, as violently as when he twitched out of a falling dream. But just then he felt himself blushing, saying with hot flatness, “I do what I do. It suits me.”
“Yes? How sad.” She got up to put the dishes in the sink. She was still laughing to herself. “I think you allow yourself only the crusts of your experiences,” she said, “only the shadows. You always leave the good part.”
The lute breathed like a creature waking slowly as he picked it up. “This is the good part,” he said. He began to play a Narvaez pavane that he was vastly proud of having transcribed for the lute. The translucent chords fell slowly, shivering and sliding away through his fingers. Ben came in while he was playing, and they nodded at each other, but Farrell went on with the pavane until it ended abruptly in a gentle broken arpeggio. Then he put the lute down, and he got up and hugged Ben.
“Spanish baroque,” he said. “I’ve been playing a lot of it, the last year or so.” Ben put his hands on Farrell’s shoulders and shook him slowly but hard. Farrell said, “You look different.”
“You don’t look any different at all,” Ben said. “Except the eyes.” Sia sat watching them, one hand closed in Briseis’ fur.
“That’s funny,” Farrell said softly. “Your eyes haven’t changed.” He stared, wary and fascinated and truly alarmed. The Ben Kassoy with whom he had waited for buses in the New York morning snow had looked very much like a dolphin and moved as sweetly and frivolously as any dolphin through the acrid waters of the high-school pool. On land he had tripped over things, tall and slouching, nearsighted, stranded in this stingy, unkind element. But he carried himself with Sia’s fierce containment now, and the glassy skin had weathered to the hard opacity of sailcloth, the round, blinking face—dolphin-browed, dolphin-beaky, dolphin-naked of shadows—grown as rough and solitary and rich with darknesses as a Crusader castle. Farrell had been casually prepared, after seven years, for a cleared-up complexion and the first gray hairs; but he would have passed this face in the street, turning a block later to look after it in wonder and disbelief. Then Ben knuckled his mouth with his left forefinger in the old study-hall habit, and Farrell said automatically, “Don’t do that. Your mother hates that.”
“As long as you crack your toes in class, I can chew my finger,” Ben said. Sia came silently to stand beside him, and Ben put an arm around her shoulders. He said to her, “This is my friend Joe. He takes his shoes off under the desk and does terrible things with his feet.” Then he looked at Farrell and kissed her, and she moved against him.
Later she went to get dressed, and Farrell began to tell Ben about Pierce/Harlow and the green convertible; but it kept getting scrambled, because Farrell had not really slept for thirty-six hours, and they had all suddenly caught up with him at once. Halfway up the stairs to the spare bedroom he remembered that he had wanted Ben to hear the two Luys Milan pieces he had just learned, but Ben said it could wait. “I’ve got a nine o’clock class and office hours. Sleep till I get back, then you can play all night for us.”
“Which one is the nine o’clock?” Farrell had curled up in his clothes and a quilt, listening to Ben’s voice with his eyes closed.
“My all-purpose monster. It’s an introduction to the Eddas, but I get in a little Old Norse etymology, a little Scandinavian folklore, a little history, related literature, and a key to the Scriptures. The Classic Comics version of Snorri Sturlesson.” His voice was unchanged—slow for New York, and light, but broken as erratically as an adolescent’s by a deep, random jag of harshness, strangely like interference on a long-distance call. When you hear somebody talking to Wyoming or Minnesota, just for a moment.
Farrell fell asleep then—and woke promptly with Briseis washing his face. Ben turned quickly to call the dog away, and his words came out in a soft sidelong rush. “So what do you think of her?”
“Overdemonstrative,” Farrell grunted, “but very nice. I think she’s got worms.” He opened his eyes and grinned at Ben. “What can I tell you? Living with her has given you cheekbones. You never used to have cheekbones before, I never could figure out what was holding your face on. Will that do?”
“No,” Ben said. The kind, brown, dolphin gaze regarded Farrell almost without recognition, admitting to no shared subways, no Lewisohn Stadium all-Gershwin concerts, no silent old jokes and passwords. “Try again, Joe. That won’t do at all.”
Farrell said, “I was doing my old charming bit, and she pulled me up so short I think I ruptured my debonair. Remarkable woman. We may take a while.” His arm had begun to throb, and he blamed Sia for not leaving it alone. He said, “Also, I’m sorry, I can’t imagine you together. I just can’t, Ben.”
Ben’s expression did not change. Farrell noticed the scar under his left eye for the first time—dim and thin, but as ragged as if it had been made with the lid of a tin can. He said flatly, “Don’t worry about it. Nobody can.”
Downstairs the doorbell rang. Three-quarters asleep, Farrell felt Sia move to answer it, the heavy steps trudging in the bed. He mumbled, “Piss on you, Kassoy. Stand around like a junior high school girl full of secrets. I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Ben laughed shortly, which startled Farrell as much as anything that had happened so far that morning. When they were children, Ben had seemed most often to be straining on the edge of laughter, digging in his heels against the terror of finding everything funny. Farrell had seen the ghosts of murdered giggles burning along the perimeter of Ben’s body, like St. Elmo’s fire. “I don’t really know either. Get some sleep, we’ll talk later.” He patted Farrell’s foot through the quilt and started out of the room.
“Can you put me up for a bit?”
Ben turned back, leaning in the doorway. What is he listening for, what is it that has all his attention? “Since when do you ask?”
“Since it’s been seven years, and unemployed company with no plans is not a good thing. I’ll start looking for a job tomorrow, see about a place to live. Take me a few days.”
“It’ll take longer than that. You better bring all your stuff inside.”
“Jobs and parking spaces, remember?” Farrell said. “I always find something. Canneries, fry cook, hospital work, tend bar. Check out the zoo up in Barton Park. Fix motorcycles. Lay linoleum. Did I write you about that, how I got into the union? Ben, the people you let in your house to lay down your linoleum!”
Ben said, “I could probably get you a guitar class at the university in the fall. Not a master class or anything, but not Skip to My Lou either. It couldn’t be any worse than teaching out of the Happy Chicken Bodega on Avenue A.”
Farrell held out a hand to Briseis, who came and plopped her head in it and went to sleep herself. “I don’t even have a guitar anymore.”
“The Fernandez?” The Ben he remembered stared at him for just a moment, unprotected, always a little startled, and endlessly, maddeningly honest.
He said, “I traded it to the guy who made the lute for me. I had to be sure I was serious.”
“So you actually did something irrevocable.” Ben spoke softly, the fortress face expressionless again. Farrell heard Sia’s voice on the stairs, and under it a younger voice, muddy and sexless with pain.