“Mr. Farrell,” she said. “Could you tell our listeners, please, just what it has cost you to play like that? What you have chosen to give up?”
“Caramel baked beans,” he said, and went on up the stairs, turning at the top, though he had planned not to do that. They were not looking after him, but at each other, and Sia was raising her brown fortuneteller’s face to Ben’s scarred one, as her quicksilver hair came down. From where Farrell stood, her belly’s camber appeared as elegant and powerful as the arc of his lute. What can it be like for them? He caught himself trying for the first time to imagine the shifting weight of breasts as softly wrinkled as sand dunes, wondering what sort of teasing obscenities that contrary voice could possibly permit itself. These deeds must not be thought after these ways—so, it will make us mad. He grinned, shivered, and went to bed.
That night he felt them making love. Their bedroom was at the other end of the house; the only suggestive sound he ever heard from there was Briseis whining vainly to be let in. This was an understanding intensely beyond cries or creaking springs, an awareness so strong that he sat up, sweating in the dark, smelling her pleasure, feeling Ben’s laughter on his skin as if he were caught up in bed with the two of them. He tried to sleep again, but the wicked sharing invaded him from all quarters, tumbling him in his own bed like a pebble in a flash flood. Shamed and terrified, he bit his mouth and clenched around himself, but the cry clawed free of him at the last, as his body shook loose from his will, resonating helplessly to the alien joy that used him in order to savor itself that much more and had already forgotten him as it let him go. He fell back to sleep instantly and dreamed that he was being murderously assaulted by the Thumper’s bunny. Neon eyes weeping flames, it kept shaking him and screaming, “You’re a spy! You’re a spy!” And in the dream, he was.
At breakfast Ben corrected exams while Sia sat in the kitchen’s small bay window with a newspaper, eating her favorite morning glop of yogurt, honey, mangos, and dry cereal and giggling softly over the comic strips. The one time she caught Farrell staring at her, she asked him to make her a cup of herb tea. She was dozing when he left for work, a dusty gray Persian cat sprawled twitching in the sunlight, and Ben was snapping pencil points and cursing middle-class illiteracy.
So, it will make us mad.
He literally ran into Suzy McManus, coming through the front door as he was going out. It was dangerously easy not to see Suzy; she took up so little space so quietly. She was a thin woman, almost gaunt, pale of eye and skin and hair, and her voice, addressing anyone but Sia, was equally anorexic, starved of all inflection. Only when she spoke with Sia did she even begin to take on color; and on the occasions when Farrell came on them laughing together, he was astonished each time to realize how young she was. He had promptly determined that he would make Suzy laugh himself, but it was all he could do to get her to talk to him, let alone understanding her mumbled responses to his jokes and questions. Now, righting her before she fell, he flirted with her, saying, “Suzy, this makes the third time I’ve knocked you down and stepped on you. Don’t I get to keep you now?”
Suzy answered him in—as far as he could ever tell—absolute seriousness, in her usual downcast whisper. “Oh, no, it takes much more trampling than that.” She ducked her head abruptly, in a way she had, turning so that she almost looked directly at him, yet Farrell never saw her eyes. Then she vanished, which was another way of hers, slipping past him toward the kitchen, but trailing away into air before she reached the door. Farrell had a very bad day at Thumper’s.
Farrell had spent a good deal of his adult life hunting up a new place to stay. In any other city he would have set out with the fewest possible expectations. But his image of Avicenna was ten years old and full of big, sunny rooms and flowery, winy, rickety houses where all his friends lived. It took him a week to discover that almost every one of the dear places where he had been drunk and in love and floating were now either parking lots or university offices. The few that remained were happily unchanged, except that their rents had quadrupled. Farrell stood for a while in the fuchsia-blurred courtyard under the window of Ellen’s little room. He knew she was long gone from there, or he would never have made the visit, but it was a matter of continuity.
“There were so many good ones,” he said to Ben. “Sometimes you couldn’t remember whose house you were in, they were all so good.”
“They were dumps,” Ben said. “We were just too horny to notice at the time.”
Farrell sighed. “Was that it? So much for golden lads and lasses.” They were alone in the faculty locker room at the gymnasium, stripping to swim. Ben liked to go there at least twice a week, after his night class. Farrell said, “I miss them anyway, those times. Not me, you understand, just the times.”
Ben glanced briefly at him. “Hell, you were homesick for everything while it was all going on. You just wandered along backward, fastest nostalgia in the West.” He stuffed his socks into his shoes and put the shoes in his locker, and the compressed, delicate violence of the movement made Farrell think of a leopard floating with his ripped prey up to the fork of a tree. Ben had always been deceptively strong, the result of dutiful exercise, but his strength had seemed acquired, rented for the occasion, not a casual fire. He said, “Come on, drag you for beers.”
Farrell was a good swimmer, for Ben had taught him, in the old days, all that a dolphin can actually tell anyone about moving in the water. He kept decently even with Ben for five laps, began to wallow a bit on the sixth, and hauled out to sit with his legs dangling and watch his friend working up and down the pool, arms reaping the water in short, flat slashes, head turning only slightly to breathe. Yet it struck Farrell strangely that once or twice Ben lost the water altogether, flailing and gasping in a moment of distorting terror. Farrell decided that it was one of the mysterious games Ben liked to play alone, for each time he caught his stroke immediately and swam on as powerfully as ever. After the second time, he climbed out at the far end of the pool and came around to Farrell, shaking himself dry.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was meant to be a compliment, actually. You were always so aware of loss—you were missing things before it was fashionable, before whales and old people were in. I remember, you used to know whenever anything anywhere got paved over, or torn down, or became extinct. It wasn’t nostalgia, it was mourning. You still doing that?”
Farrell shrugged. “Sort of. Sort of not. I’m getting a little old to go around keeping track of my defeats.”
“It’s an honorable calling.” They sat by the pool, talking quietly, while jets of water from the inlets thumped against their hanging legs and lights fluttered in the Avicenna hills beyond the small wired windows. Ben asked if Farrell had been meeting old acquaintances, and Farrell said, “It’s a little scary. Half the people I know are still striding around Parnell, taking anthropology classes and making the parties. They hang in different coffeehouses now, but it’s the same faces. I can’t go into that new place, the South Forty, without running into somebody who wants me to come over to the house and play Fishing Blues.”