The Folk Of The Air

Chapter 2

The old woman said, “You had better be Joe Farrell.”

Afterward, at odd times and places, he liked to think about the first time that Sia and he ever looked at each other. By then he remembered no single detail of the moment, except that both of them had instinctively clutched something close—Farrell his lute, and Sia the belt of the worn blue robe, which she drew tight under her heavy breasts. Sometimes he did recall being instantly certain that he had just met either an old friend or a very patient, important enemy; more often he knew that he was making that up. But he felt strange trying to imagine not knowing who Sia was.

“Because if you are not,” she said, “I have no business being out here at six in the morning listening to a strange lute player on my front porch. So if you are Joe Farrell, you can come in and have breakfast. Otherwise I am going back to bed.”

She was not tall, actually, nor was she very old. Ben had described her hardly at all in his letters, and Farrell’s first vision had been of a great, drowsy monolith standing above him, a menhir in a frayed flannel bathrobe. As he stood up, he saw that the broad, blunt-featured face was no older than sixty, the dark-honey skin almost without lines, and the gray eyes quick and clear and imperiously sad. But her body was as lumpy as a charwoman’s—waistless, short-legged, wide-hipped, bellied like the moon—although she carried it with all the vivid rigor of a circus wire walker, even in bedroom slippers like heaps of fluffy slush. The bathrobe was too long for her, and Farrell shivered slightly to realize that it must be Ben’s robe.

“You’re Sia,” he said. “Athanasia Sioris.”

“Oh, I know that,” she answered, “even this early. What about you? Have you decided if you’re Joe Farrell yet?”

“I’m Farrell,” he said, “but you can go back to bed anyway. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Her hair was very thick and a little coarse, gray and black together, like a winter dawn. It fell down between her shoulder blades, caught, not in a ribbon, but with a gnarled silver ring. Her eyes had almost no white to them. Farrell could see the pupils breathing slowly in the morning light, and he fancied that he felt their full weight testing his strength, as boxers will lean thoughtfully on each other in the early rounds. She said, “Am I afraid of you?”

Farrell said, “When Ben first wrote me about you, I thought you had the prettiest name in the world. I still do, except maybe for a woman named Electa Arenal de Rodriguez. It’s a close thing either way.”

“Am I afraid of you?” she asked again. “Or am I glad to see you?” Her voice was low and hoarse, the Greek accent less of a sound than an aftertaste; not unpleasant, but not an easy voice, either. He could not imagine it teasing, consoling, caressing—Christ, she’s older than his mother—or telling lies. It was a voice suited only for asking nettly questions with no safe answers.

He said, “No one’s ever been afraid of me. It would be grand if you were, but I don’t really expect it.”

She had been looking at him, so it was not that the dark regard suddenly shifted or focused on him more intensely, but rather as if he had managed to attract the attention of a forest, or of a large body of water. “What do you expect?” Farrell stared back at her, too tired and uncertain even to shrug, almost peacefully at a standstill. Sia said, “Well, come in, good morning.”

She turned her back; as she did so, Farrell felt a curious desolation pass over him—a fox-fierce little autumn wind of abandonment and loss that might have blown out of his childhood, when sorrows were all the same size and came and went without ever explaining themselves. It was gone instantly, and he walked into the house, following a middleaged woman in a blue bathrobe who moved cumbrously on legs that he knew must have varicose veins.

“Sia’s house is a cave,” Ben had written to him three years ago, having lived with her then for more than a year. “Bones underfoot, little clawed things scampering in the shadows, and the fire leaves greasy stains on the walls. Everything smells of chicken blood and skins drying.” But that morning Farrell thought the house was like a green tree, and the rooms were branches, high and light and murmurous with the sounds that wood makes in the sun. He stood in the living room, studying the manner in which the toast-colored boards of the ceiling went together like the back of his lute. There were books and big windows; mirrors and masks, small, thick rugs, and furniture like drowsing animals. A chess set stood on a low cast-iron table in front of the fireplace. The pieces were of wood, worn almost as round and featureless as the spindles of the staircase. Farrell saw a tall old windup phonograph in a corner, next to a wicker basket full of pampas grass and rusty spears.

She led him to a small kitchen where she scrambled a lot of eggs and made coffee, working swiftly with brown, rather stubby hands, saying very little and never looking at him. But when she was done, she brought their plates to the table and sat down across from him, settling her chin between her fists. For a moment the gray eyes—clear and savage as snow water—regarded him with an earnest, personal hostility that seemed to lick along his bones, scouring them hollow. And then Sia smiled, and Farrell took a very quick breath before the mischief of the women and smiled at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “May I take the last fifteen minutes back?”

Farrell nodded seriously. “If you leave the eggs.”

Sia said, “Frightened lovers are hideous. I have been dreadful to Ben for a week, just because of you.”

“Why? You sound like the Pope receiving Attila the Hun. What have I done to deserve all this terror?”

She smiled again, but the deep, secret amusement was gone. She said, “My dear, I can’t tell how used to this sort of situation you are, but you should certainly know that no one really welcomes the old best friend. Don’t you know that?” Farrell felt the kitchen sunlight stir against him as she leaned forward.

“Oldest friend, maybe,” he answered. “Best, I don’t know. I haven’t seen Ben for seven years, Sia.”

“In California, oldest is best,” she answered. “Ben has good friends here, people at the university, people who care for him, but there is no one who knows him except me. And now here you are. It’s very silly.”

“Yes, it is.” Farrell reached for the butter. “You’re Ben’s best friend now, Sia.” An enormous Alsatian bitch came and barked once at him; then, with that over, put her head on his knee and drooled. Farrell gave her some of his scrambled eggs.

Sia said, “You knew him when he was thirteen years old. I can’t ever catch up with that. What was he like?”

“He had a high, shiny forehead,” Farrell said, “and I used to call him Rubberlips.” Sia began to laugh very quietly. Her laughter was almost too low for him to hear; it played at the edges of all his senses, like whale song. Farrell went on. “He was a hell of a swimmer, a really rotten actor, and in high school he got me through trigonometry one year and chemistry another. I used to make faces at him in math class, trying to get him to laugh. His father died, I think when we were juniors. He hated my plaid winter hat with the earflaps, and he loved Judy Garland and Joe Williams and little nightclubs where they’d put on a show with five people. That’s the kind of stuff I remember, Sia. I didn’t know him. I think he knew me, but I was too busy worrying about my pimples.”

She continued to smile, but the expression, like her laughter, seemed a part of some other, slower language, where everything he understood meant something else. She said, “But you had a room together, later, when you lived in New York. You would play music together, and nothing is closer than that. You see, I am jealous of anyone who was before me, like God. I can be jealous of his mother and his father sometimes.”

Farrell shook his head. “No, you aren’t. I’m reasonably stupid, but you’re playing with me. Jealousy is not your problem.”

“Get down, Briseis,” Sia said sharply. The Alsatian left Farrell and trotted clicking to her. Sia fondled the dog’s muzzle, never taking her glance from Farrell.

“No,” she said. “I am not jealous of anything you know about him, or anything you may have of him. I am only afraid of what comes with you.” Farrell found himself turning solemnly, so truly did she seem to see the sullen companion at his shoulder. Sia said, “Being young. He forgets how young he is—there’s nothing like a university to make you do that. I never try to make him old, never, but I let him forget.”

“Ben was always a little old,” Farrell said. “Even shooting paper clips in home room. I think you must be younger than Ben.”

The playfulness came back—again somehow shocking to see turning lithely in her eyes. “From time to time,” she said. The big dog reared up suddenly, putting its paws in her lap and pressing its cheek against hers, so that the two faces confronted Farrell with the same look of impenetrable laughter, except that Sia kept her mouth closed. He turned away for a moment, looking out of the window at the squat gathering of oaks behind the house. The glass reflected, not his face at all, but the single figure seated in the chair across from him. It had the vast stone body of a woman, and a dog’s grinning head.

The vision endured for less time than it took his eyes to translate, or his mind to sidestep, promising to write. When he turned again, Briseis had started after the butter, and Sia pushed her to the floor. “You are hurt.” There was neither alarm nor what Farrell would have called concern in her voice; if anything, she sounded slightly offended. He looked down at himself and noticed for the first time that his right shirtsleeve was ragged from wrist to elbow, the edges of the cut dappled rust-brown.

“Ah, it’s just a scratch,” he said. “I always wanted a chance to say that.” But Sia was beside him, rolling up his sleeve, although he protested earnestly, “Farrell’s Fifth Law: If you don’t look at it, it doesn’t hurt as much.” The wound was a long, shallow gouge, clean and uncomplicated, looking like nothing but what it was. He told her about Pierce/Harlow, carefully spinning the whole unlikely event into a harmless, idiotic tall tale, while she washed his arm and then drew the cut closed with butterfly bandages. The more he tried to make her laugh, the more tense and abrupt her hands became on him; whether with sympathy, apprehension or only contempt for his foolishness, he could not tell. He chattered on, helplessly compulsive, until she finished and stood up, muttering to herself like any ruinous ragbag lost in a doorway. Farrell thought at first that she was speaking in Greek.

“What?” he asked. “Should have known what?” When she turned to face him he realized in bewilderment that she was furious at herself, this odd, sly, squat woman, as intensely and unforgivingly as though Pierce/Harlow were her personal responsibility, the holdup all her own absentminded doing. The gray eyes had darkened to the color of asphalt, and the airy morning kitchen smelled like a distant storm. She said, “It is my house. I should have known.”

“Known what?” he demanded again. “That I’d shove my arm onto some preppy bandit’s knife? I didn’t know it myself, how could you?” But she stood shaking her head, looking down at Briseis, who crouched and whined. “Not outside,” she said to the dog. “No more, that is gone. But this is my house.” The first words had fallen as softly as leaves; the last hissed like sleet. “This is my house,” she said.

Farrell said, “We were talking about Ben. About his really being older than you. We were just talking about that.” It seemed to him that he could feel her anger crowding the silence, see it piling up around them both in great drifts and ranges of static electricity. She stared at him, squinting as though he were drawing steadily away from her, and finally showed small white teeth in a cold sigh of laughter.

“He likes me to be old and wicked and clever,” she said. “He likes that. But I feel sometimes like a—what?—like a witch, like a troll queen, one who has enchanted a young knight to be her lover, but he must never hear a certain word spoken. It is nothing magic, just a word out of the kitchen or the stables—but if he hears it, it is all up, he will leave her. Think how she would guard him, not from magicians, but from horseboys, not from beautiful princesses, but from cooks. And what could she do? And whatever she did, how long could it be? Someone would come along and say straw or dishrag to him sooner or later. And what could she do?”

Farrell flexed his arm cautiously and reached a second time to touch his lute. “Not much. I suppose she’d just have to go on being a queen. There’s a shortage of queens these days, trolls or any other kind. People are complaining about it.”

She laughed so that he could hear it then, the slow, disheveled laugh of a human woman in the morning; and suddenly they were only themselves at the table, and nothing in the kitchen but sunlight and a dog and the smell of cinnamon coffee. “Play for me,” she said, and he played a little, sitting there: some Dowland, some Rosseter. Then she wanted to know about his wanderings, and they talked quietly of freighters and fishing boats, markets and carnivals, languages and police. He had lived in more places than Sia, but never as long; he had been to Syros, the island of her birth, that she had not seen since girlhood. She said, “You were Ben’s legend for a long time, you know. You acted things out for him.”

“Oh, everybody has one of those,” he answered. “People’s dreams dovetail like that. My own legend was running around Malaysia on a bicycle, the last I heard of her.”

The mischief flared again in Sia’s eyes. “But what a strange sort of Odysseus you are,” she said. “You keep having the same adventure over and over.” Farrell blinked at her uneasily. Sia said, “I have read your letters to Ben. Wherever you wake up and find yourself, you take some stupid job, you make a few very colorful acquaintances, you play your music, and sometimes, for one letter, there is a woman. And then you wake up somewhere else, and it all begins again. Do you like such a life?”

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.

“Suzy,” Ben said. “One of Sia’s clients, pays her by doing housework. Married to a surfing thug who thinks cancer’s contagious.”

“Is she really a psychiatrist, Sia?”

“Counselor. She has to call herself a counselor in this country.” The voices went into another room, and a door closed. Farrell asked, “Is that how you met? You never exactly said.”

Ben shrugged in the old lopsided way, ducking his head crookedly, like a fishing bird. He began to say something; but Sia was talking to the woman, and the slow, near-wordless pulse of her voice in the other room was beginning to wash Farrell gently back and forth, here and gone and here. With each lulling swing across the darkness, something he almost knew about her left him, the stone woman with the dog’s head last of all. Ben was saying, “So I thought you might as well be working at something you enjoyed.”

Farrell sat up and said with urgent clarity, “No, teeth. A purple in the back seat with teeth.” Then he blinked at Ben and asked abruptly, “What makes you think I enjoy teaching?” Ben did not answer. Farrell said, “I mean, I don’t not enjoy it. I dig anything I do well enough. All that stuff, those stupid little jobs, I just don’t want to start liking any of them more than enough. I like them stupid.”

Then Ben smiled suddenly and lingeringly, the comforting phosphorescence of suppressed delight flaring around him once more. Farrell said, “Now you’re thinking about my goddamn hat with the earflaps.”

“No, I’m thinking about your goddamn briefcase, and your goddamn incredible looseleaf notebook. And I’m thinking about how you could play, even then. I never did understand how that notebook could go with that music.”

“Didn’t you?” Farrell asked. “Funny.” He turned on his side, to Briseis’ considerable distress, and burrowed down in the quilt, resting his head on his arm. “Ah, lord, Ben, the music was the only thing that ever came naturally. Everything else I had to learn.”