The Folk Of The Air

by Peter S. Beagle

  Somewhere in the house, she stood still. Farrell knew it with his eyes on his flowing, melting left hand, as he knew it when Ben put down his book. Outside in the dark, Briseis whimpered at the kitchen window. The bass line was retarding perfectly, treading almost painfully along his tendons, balancing, walking his nerves like a high wire, while the treble danced in his scalp and skirled just under the skin of his cheeks. He thought about Ellen, and the thought was kindly. I’m nice when I’m playing. I am really a nice fellow when I’m playing.

  When he finished and looked up, she was standing with her hand on Ben’s shoulder, the other hand slowly unweaving her long braid. Farrell discovered that his hands and lips were cold. He said, “Sometimes I can do that.”

  She did not answer, but Ben grinned at him and said, “Hey, you play good.” He held an invisible microphone close to Farrell’s mouth. “Mr. Farrell, would you talk to us just a bit about the technique required for a proper interpretation of Dowland’s music?”

  It was an old game, one they had not played since his arrival. Farrell let his face go loose and silly. “Was that Dowland I was doing? Oh, man, I always think it’s that other one, you know, what’s that other limey? William Byrd, yeah. You sure that wasn’t William Byrd?”

  “All that kind of fairy music sounds the same to me,” Ben said blandly. “Mr. Farrell, what about your legato? I’m sure every young lutenist in the country would be agog to learn the secret of developing such a silky, liquid, voluptuous legato.”

  “Yeah, I bet they would,” Farrell said, chuckling. “Tell them I said they could all suck Clorox.” He stood up to go to bed and had almost reached the stairs when Sia called softly, “Mr. Farrell.” She had not moved, but was standing with one arm out toward him, gravely offering him her own microphone. Queen Victoria with a trident, Farrell thought. Beside her, Ben’s face was briefly the old subway face again, gentle and boneless, seeming close now to snickering with embarrassment at a fat, grizzled woman in a long dress. The flesh of her outstretched arm sagged like a raincloud.

  “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 s
econd 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.”

  Ben nodded. “People hang on in Avicenna. This town is a La Brea tar pit for academic types.”

  “I’m hip. They come out to do graduate work and wind up shoplifting. Dealing. All the cabdrivers came out on the G.I. Bill in 1961 and flunked their orals.”

  “Of course,” Ben said softly, “there’s a point in your life when everyone starts to look familiar.” Farrell looked sideways and saw him scratching and rubbing at the base of his throat—another habit of the bored, kindly, sardonic boy strayed from nowhere to slump next to him in assembly. Ben said, “I wish I’d flunked my orals.”

  “You can’t fail tests,” Farrell said. “You don’t know how.”

  “Didn’t know why, more like it.” Ben was leaning forward, writing what looked like Sia over and over in the water with his toes.

  Farrell said, “You like it here?”

  Ben did not turn. “I’m a hotshot here, Joe. They work my ass off, but they know who I am. They’ll give me tenure next year, and associate, and let me do about what I want to do. Because I mean business. Because I’m a goddamn firstclass scholar of Icelandic literature, and there are maybe three others this side of the Rockies. I am aces around here.”

  “Then why are we both talking funny?”

  Ben gripped the side of the pool, staring down between his legs into the water. He said without expression, “I like two of my undergraduate students and one graduate. No, all right, two graduates. I’m starting to cheat on my office hours, and I’ve been getting into fights with people at committee meetings, when I show up. There’s this book I’m supposed to be writing, about style and diction in the later skaldic poetry. There is one hell of a big feud going on in the department, and most of the time I can’t remember whose side I’m supposed to be on. Sometimes I can, and that’s worse. It’s really not too much fun.”

  “Well, it’ll probably be a lot better for you next year.” Farrell tried conscientiously to say something useful. “As you said, once you’ve got tenure, they’ll let you alone. Let you write your own ticket, pretty much.”

  “A ticket to where?” The familiar sweet, shrewd gaze returned to Farrell, and he saw that the thin scar under Ben’s eye was standing up, seeming to stir like a muscle. Ben said, “I don’t think it is going to get any better. The boredom I could handle, but I hate feeling so contemptuous. I hate feeling myself getting mean. Joe, it’s just not what I had in mind.”

  “I didn’t know,” Farrell said. “We never talked much about that part of your life, you never wrote how things were. I thought it was what you wanted, committees and all.”

  “Oh, wanting’s different.” Ben gripped Farrell’s forearm, not hard, but the urgency in the touch set the bones cringing together. “I did get what I wanted, and I probably even still want it, for all I know these days. But it isn’t what I had in mind.” He peered at Farrell, squinting with the need to make him see, as though he were tutoring him in chemistry once again. “It isn’t what I had in mind.”

  A door yawped and sighed, and they both turned to see a tall, naked, white-haired man enter and stand peering at them down the pool. He had a massive, grainy face that reminded Farrell of the bowls of stone grapes and bananas in the gardens of Scotia Street. Ben said abruptly, “Go do a couple of laps, I want to watch you.”

  The white-haired man cried out in the thickest Scots accent that Farrell had ever heard, “Now by the rood, ‘tis in sooth the guid laird Egil Eyvindsson of Narroway!” Farrell walked to the near end and went in. He dived too deep and came up off-balance, and it took him nearly a length to find his stroke. Each time he turned his head, he saw the whitehaired man striding toward Ben, one arm out in greeting, skidding alarmingly on the tiles, but never deigning to grab for balance, so that he progressed at an increasingly rapid lurch. For all that, a kind of overripe stateliness steamed about him, and he bawled nobly in a voice like wooden wheels on a wet wooden bridge, “Egil, hail! Och, I was but seeking ye the noo! News o’ Duke Claudio!”

  Farrell swam back slowly, gurgling his delight into the water. When he rose beside them, the white-haired man was beaming down at Ben, rumbling and buzzing through a strangle of glottal stops. “I had it frae the laird Morton of Shaws—aye, I ken weel ye’ll say he hath ever been but indifferently o‘ oor party—” Ben was digging at this throat again.

  Farrell said, “How’d I do?” The white-haired man neither started nor turned. Ben said heavily, “You’re kicking wrong.” Then he turned to the white-haired man. “Crof, I’d like you to meet my oldest friend, Joe Farrell. Joe, Crawford Grant, Crof.”

  Farrell stuck up a hand from the water, feeling a good bit like the Lady of the Lake. Crof Grant said, “Pleased to meet you, Ben’s told me a lot,” in a clear New Hampshire voice, and his handshake was firm enough; but he never saw Farrell. There was no least stir of consent to Farrell in his face, no belief in the slaty hand that it closed on anything of substance. Before that placid, smiling denial, there was a moment when Farrell trembled for his own presence.

  Crof Grant turned calmly back to Ben. “Yet for that reason itself do I believe his rede that the Duke Claudio inclineth ever mair toward the Laird Seneschal’s favor—and if Claudio gaes ower, he’ll take the best of King Bohemond’s am folk wi‘ him. Aye, ye’ll scoff, Egil, but gin Claudio’s for Garth, then the war’s ower as we stand here, and ye’ll mind I said so.” There was more, but Farrell lost a lot of it after that.

  Elbows hooked over the edge of the pool, Farrell hung in the water, fascinated and amused now that the blandly annihilating stare was turned from him. But Ben spoke severely across the serene babble, demanding, “Where’d you pick up that thing of kicking from the shins on down? Took me two years to make you get your whole leg into it, and now you just lie there and flap your ankles. Try it again, Joe, that’s ridiculous.”

  Grant had never stopped talking. Farrell began to swim slowly along the side of the pool, trying to concentrate on nothing but moving his legs from the hip and on feeling the thrust in his shoulders. Crof Grant’s paperback medievalese bumbled on in the tiny waves under his cheek and in the wet tiles.

  “Aye, Bohemond’s no longer for the crown than the Whalemas Tourney, but what of that?” And again, chuckling thickly, “Egil, lad, ye’re a bonny hand wi‘ maul or longaxe, but the craft o’ the court still scapes ye.” And twice Farrell heard the white-haired man say clearly, “‘Tis the wee lassie they all fear. I’ll tell ye straight, I fear the girl masel’, each day the mair.” He could not catch what Ben said in reply.

  Grant finally thumped into the pool and began to swim—heaving himself along in a chugging, high-prowed breast stroke—and Ben beckoned sharply to Farrell. They dressed almost without speaking, though once Farrell asked, “What’s Grant teach?”

  Ben said, “Art history,” never looking at him. In the yellow-green light of the
caged bulbs, the fragile scar boiled up maroon.

  During the steep, silent ride home, Farrell tilted the bucket seat back, stretched his legs out, closed his eyes and hummed I Belong to Glasgow. Ben finally sighed angrily and said, “It’s like a running gag with Grant. We met at a costume party a couple of years ago. I went as a Viking skald, and Grant was a sort of Jacobite exile, all sporrans and haggis and the Skye Boat Song, the complete homemade Highlander. He’s been doing it forever, since long before I got here. Rack of old swords in the office, and he walks around campus reciting laments for Falkirk and Flodden Field to himself. They say he’s really impressive at committee meetings.”

  “All those other people he was talking about,” Farrell said. “Sounded like mail call in Sherwood Forest.”

  Ben glanced sideways as the car took one of the Avicenna hills’ Russian-roulette corners. There were few street lights here, and the car was crowded with the prickly, fragrant shadows of jasmine, clematis, and acacia. “I told you, he’s like that most of the time. It used to turn off for his classes, but I hear it’s even getting into the lectures now. He’s got his own names for everybody, and when he’s talking faculty politics, you’re just supposed to know who he means. That’s what all that stuff was about, the king and the war and whatever.” He grinned then. “I will say, it does lend a certain grandeur to fights over who has to teach the freshmen this semester. Makes it all seem like the Crusades, instead of mud-wrestling.”

  “He called you Egil something,” Farrell said. Ben nodded, rubbing his mouth. “Egil Eyvindsson. It’s the name I used at the party. Egil was the greatest of the Icelandic skalds, and there was another man around the same time called Eyvind the Plagiarist. Professors at play.”

  They had parked in the driveway before either of them spoke again. Ben cut the engine and they sat still, looking up at the wishbone-sharp gables and the pagoda flare of the porch roof. Farrell asked idly, “How many windows on this side of the house?”