The Folk Of The Air

by Peter S. Beagle

  “She just took up all the room,” he said. “All of it, everywhere.”

  Julie said slowly, “So after that, you went and washed up, you put on a clean shirt, and you met me here for dinner. And you talked about us. You talked about Barney Miller, for God’s sake, about running into my sister’s ex-husband—”

  “I didn’t think you’d believe me,” Farrell said. “Do you? Tell me you really believe one word of all that UFO craziness I just dumped on you. Come on, one word.”

  He had let go of her fingers, the better to wave his own hands. Julie reclaimed them now, dipped his fingertips in the couscous gravy, and then licked them daintily, one by one, looking at him. She said, “I don’t believe words. I believe you. There’s a difference.”

  “Meaning I hallucinate, but I don’t lie. Right. Bless you, Jewel.”

  “Meaning you’re scared,” she said. “I’ve never seen you scared before, not even in Lima. Not that you’re so wildly heroic—it’s more that you’re too curious about whatever’s going on really to notice the fear. But this one has all your attention. You saw what you saw.”

  Farrell sighed and shrugged. “Maybe, but I’m losing it. There’s something I know, but it keeps slipping and scrabbling further away from my mind, trying to get back to her. Now I can’t remember the way it was—just what happened, and that’s different, too. I don’t know what I saw.”

  “What about Suzy?” Julie asked.

  Farrell rolled his eyes in exasperation. “She was stunned, she was terrified, she was hysterical, and besides she was looking somewhere else at all the interesting moments. That’s what she says, anyway, and by now I’m sure it’s perfectly true. People are watching you doing that, Jewel.”

  Julie nodded complacently, smiling against his fingers. A turbaned waiter swept their dishes off the table like frisbees and swept back a moment later with little cups of coffee as hot and slow as lava. Farrell said, “The gun turned in his hand. He didn’t drop it, and he wasn’t holding it carelessly, God knows. Suzy called, ‘Mother,’ and the gun wriggled and pointed at him and shot him. I keep waiting to forget that part.”

  “What happened to the gun?” Farrell shrugged again. Impatiently she demaned, “Well, what happened afterward? I mean, it’s been five days, do they talk about it at all, at breakfast? Did the neighbors hear anything, did anybody call the police? I can’t believe it’s all just going along.”

  “That’s what it’s doing, all right,” Farrell said. “No cops, no neighbors, nothing’s changed. Ben just says he wasn’t there, and Suzy pretends she wasn’t there, and old Sia, she don’t say nuttin‘. Believe me, the matter does not come up at mealtimes.” Julie let go of his hands. Farrell went on, “The one I’d really like to talk to is Briseis. She saw it all and she believes her eyes. She won’t go near Sia.”

  Julie said, “Tell me about her. Not the dog. Sia.”

  Farrell was silent, matching stares with the waiter, who had already greeted two newcomers at the door and was pointing to their table. He said finally, “There’s a grizzly bear up in the zoo. It’s amazing how small and slumpy that animal can look, until it moves.”

  “Does she attract you?” Farrell’s mouth sagged open. “Leaving me out of it—and Ben, and anything else. Would you go to bed with her?”

  “Jesus, Jewel,” he said. Julie kicked his foot lightly under the table. She said, “When you start talking about bears.”

  Farrell said very slowly, “The thing about the grizzly, there’s no limit to it. You look at it for a while, you think about it, and you can’t possibly imagine where its strength begins or ends. And it’s fat and swagbellied and sort of pigfaced and it’s attractive too.” He had not tried to tell her about the night when Sia’s pleasure in another room had forced his body to connive in its own solitary ransacking. “It’s attractive,” he said again. “That kind of power always is, especially when it’s got a beautiful silvery-brown coat, and it moves just a little like a human being. But it’s a bear.”

  Julie wanted to walk, so they strolled up two blocks to pay their respects to the Waverly Hotel. The Waverly was eighty-seven years old, and had looked just as strange in its own time as it did now. It was supposed to have been modeled after a Burgundian castle, and it did at least look more like a castle than like anything else in the world. There were round towers and square towers, dunce-cap turrets and Moorish arches and galleries, a functioning portcullis and a sally-port, a driveway approach in the form of a drawbridge, and a stone-flagged courtyard with parking stripes. It changed owners every few years, but was still quite popular with certain conventions.

  On a clear night, the Waverly could be seen from Parnell Street—a great drowsy bubble, pink and purple and green, floating softly up out of the hills. Farrell and Julie walked with their arms around each other’s waists, leaning together, playing a favorite game of singing improbable combinations of songs in counterpoint. Farrell was chanting “Il était une bergere,” while Julie gleefully ravaged “Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl.”

  In front of the Waverly, they fell silent, standing under the portcullis and looking straight up into the marzipan radiance. Farrell saw only a scattering of cars in the parking lot and a few people clustered at a side door; but even so, the hotel seemed to resound and tremble with light, like an acacia in bee time. Julie said against his shoulder, “It would be lovely if you could give a concert here someday. You’d never have a better setting for the music.”

  When he did not answer, she raised her head and looked at him curiously, saying, “Now that made you sad. I could feel it happen in you. What is it, Joe?”

  “Nothing,” Farrell said. “I don’t really give concerts much these days, especially in the good settings. They just make the music feel more dead than it is, and I don’t need that. I already know.”

  “Old buddy,” she said. “Childhood sweetheart, moon of my delight, I hate to hurt your feelings, but you aren’t exactly the only Renaissance musician in town. Since I moved back here, I’ve never seen so many classical guitarists, so many countertenors, so many little groups tootling away on their recorders every Tuesday night. You can’t throw a rock and not hit someone playing Dowland on a street corner. How can it all be dead, with everyone going at it like that?”

  “Because that world’s gone,” Farrell said, “the world where people walked around whistling that music. All the madrigal singers in the world can’t make that other one real again. It’s like dinosaurs. We can put them back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we don’t know what they smelled like, what kind of sounds they made, or how big they really looked standing in the grass under all those fossil fern trees. Even the sunlight must have been different, and the wind. What can bones tell you about a kind of wind that doesn’t blow anymore?”

  A cab turned in from the street, and they stepped aside to let it go by, bumping along the silly drawbridge. The driver looked dour and embarrassed. Julie said, “Worlds are perishable. Do you want people not to play Mozart because they can’t ever hear the music with the ears he meant it for?”

  “I don’t mean it just like that,” Farrell began; and then, “No, by God, I think I do mean it like that. Music should be daily. They ought to stop playing a composer’s music as soon as the last one who knows what it means is gone. The last one who knew the noises. The stuff I play has hawkbells in it and mill wheels and pikes all grounding at once. Chamber pots being emptied out of the window, banks of oars rattling into the water. People screaming because the hangman’s just held up somebody’s heart for them to see. I can’t hear the noises, I just play the notes. Shouldn’t be allowed.”

  Julie studied him sideways, frowning a little. She said, “People miss the whole thing about you, don’t they? You’re not really a compromising, adaptable type at all. You’re a bloody fanatic, Joe. You’re a purist.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s like the trouble I have when I travel. Wherever I go, I always want to spend a lifetime there. Anywhere—Tashkent, Calabr
ia, East Cicero. I always want to be born there and grow up and know everything about the place and be horribly ignorant and die. I don’t approve of flying visits. It’s the same thing with the music, I guess. Smells, noises. I know it’s dumb. Let’s go back to your place.”

  Julie put her arm through his. Farrell could feel her sudden silent chuckle tugging at him like a kite. The almost-black eyes had turned golden and transparent in the flare of the Waverly. She said, “All right. Come on, I’ll take you where the noises are.”

  At her house, she darted in and out of closets while he stood scratching his head; she foraged briskly through drawers and sea chests, tossing bright, soft garments behind her onto the bed. Farrell fingered in astonishment over a rising drift of tights and tunics, horned headdresses, and heavy painted hoods; long furred and scalloped gowns, split from high waist to hem, with bell-shaped sleeves, square shoes and shoes with curling tips, and stiff short cloaks like muletas. He tried on a tall, round-crowned hat, a sort of fur derby, and took it off again.

  “I like costume parties,” he ventured at last, “but that isn’t really what I was talking about.”

  Julie paused briefly, regarding him across the rainbow heaps with a familiar flash of affectionate irritation. “This isn’t costume,” she said. “This is clothing.” She tossed him a pair of hose with one leg striped vertically in black and white and the other plain white. “Try these on for a start.”

  “Did you make all this stuff?” He sat down on the bed to take his shoes off, slightly damaging a hat like a Shriner mosque. “You have some expensive hobbies, love.”

  Julie said, “It isn’t as extravagant as it looks. Most of the material is synthetic—I use terrycloth a lot and I’ve made things out of ordinary blanketing, outing flannel. There’s velvet, some silk and taffeta, some upholstery brocade. I use what I’ve got, unless people want to pay extra for something special. Rats, I don’t think I like those tights on you. Try the brown houppelande.”

  “The brown what?” Julie indicated a high-necked gown, the full sleeves lined in black and the skirts held together in front by an enameled girdle. Dutifully struggling into the gown, he asked, “What people? Whom do you make these things for?”

  “All will be revealed,” she told him in a hoarse gypsy whisper. She considered him abstractly as a design of folds and flows, shaking her head slowly. “It would do, but I don’t know. I hate to waste your legs. No.”

  Eventually she decided on plain hose and a dark blue doublet embroidered with green and gold diamonds and fleurs-de-lis. The waist was tapered sharply, and the sleeves were split all the way up the inside of the arm. She gave him a pair of low, pointed shoes and a soft velvet cap and said happily, “You’re fun to dress. I could play with you all evening. Go look at yourself.”

  Farrell stood before the mirror for a long time, not at all out of vanity, but only to make the acquaintance of the slender, burning stranger in the glass. Under the high cap, his face was younger than Farrell’s and differently made; the nose was longer, the eyesockets notably more arched, the forehead rounder, the wide mouth grown curiously shadowed and secretive, and the whole off-center cast of the face at once as unnervingly tranquil and as deeply, casually ready for violence as that of a knight on a tomb rubbing or an angel on a stained-glass window. Is that me? No, it’s the light in here, it’s the mirror, the mirror’s warped or something. Behind him he could see Julie undressing, her head back as she fumbled with a zipper. The man in the glass watched her, looking quickly back at Farrell now and then. Is that me? Do I want it to be me?

  For herself, Julie chose a long, simple gown, deep green and close-fitting; and over it, she wore a garment like a full-length apron, almost the same clear, pale amber as her skin. The apron had no sides, being joined only at the hips and shoulders. Julie smoothed her hands down the dark ellipses and told Farrell, “They used to call these the Gates of Hell.”

  “When did they stop?” he asked, and she giggled.

  “This is prim, this is inhibited. High medieval clothing is the most sensual stuff anybody ever wore. I made a kirtle for the Lady Criseyde once—” She stopped, and then asked him, “Do you wonder where I’m taking you? What are you thinking?”

  “I still think it’s a costume party. With any luck, maybe a costume orgy.”

  Julie did not laugh. She said very quietly, “That happened once. You wouldn’t have liked it.”

  A short green cloak for him, a longer gray mantle over her shoulders, the hood shrouding her loose hair, and she was saying in the milky night, “You’ll have to drive the bike. I’ll tell you how to go.”

  Farrell blinked at the BSA lowering at the curb like a cumulonimbus. Julie put her key ring into his hand. “I can’t drive in this outfit, and I feel like taking the bike. You always like to drive my machines.”

  “Not in the Macy’s Parade,” he grumbled. “It’s bad luck to humiliate a BSA.” But he was already unlocking the front fork, greedily but with a certain proper deference. He thought of Julie’s motorcycles as her familiar demons, a cross between hippogriffs and pit bulls.

  Julie lived three blocks off Parnell, almost on the invisible line dividing student Avicenna from the rest of the town. She rode sidesaddle, one arm lightly holding Farrell’s waist as he guided the BSA gingerly up to Parnell. “Like London,” she said, “when we used to sneak out at night so you could practice. Because you didn’t have a permit.”

  “And you didn’t have title to the bike. I was so impressed with you, stealing bikes and all like that. My outlaw.”

  “Actually, I was just late getting the papers. But the other was more fun for you.” She directed him north, toward the university.

  Every record store was open late, and all car radios and portable tape decks were at full volume, speakers bellowing back and forth like rutting alligators. Farrell eased along Parnell, passing like a diver through the shifting currents, temperatures, and textures of sound. The street simmered and banged in its own lemon-butter light—on this Saturday night at least a little like the old times, when every corner had been an Arab marketplace and all doorways were inhabited by lovers, thieves, and businessmen, by troubadours and children with cellophane eyes and faces made of hard candy. Julie leaned against Farrell’s back and chanted softly in his ear:

  “The hag is astride,

  This night for to ride—

  The devil and she together…“

  An improbably tall, impossibly thin black man was standing in the middle of the street, flouncing gently as he considered the drivers who passed him by, waving them along with an outsized, flowing blissfulness. The BSA was moving almost at a walk as it reached him, and he had leisure to study Farrell and Julie’s faces and clothing, to pat their heads solemnly, and to bend down to them. His face was concave and burnished, smooth as an old wooden spoon. They felt the light, lost, mocking touch of his voice: “Remember me to the girl. Oh, tell Aiffe of Scotland to remember Prester John.”

  Behind Farrell, Julie said sharply, “Turn right here.” Farrell nodded to the black man and cut past a movie theater whose marquee advertised a Rhonda Fleming retrospective, gunning the motorcycle uphill into darkness again.

  “That’s more like it,” he said happily over his shoulder. “Prester John of Africa and India, the one whose cook was a king and whose chamberlain was an archbishop. That’s where the Fountain of Youth was, in Prester John’s country.” Julie said nothing, and he went on thoughtfully. “Aiffe of Scotland. I almost know her, too—sounds like someone in an old ballad.” What the name actually brought back to him was the warm, prickly sourness of the swimming pool and Crof Grant nattering on about a girl he was afraid of. He said, “This town always did have the most erudite loonies.”

  “He’s not a loony. Don’t you call him that.” Julie’s voice was hard and low.

  “I’m sorry,” Farrell said. “I didn’t know you were friends. I’m sorry, Jewel.”

  “We’re friends. His name is Rodney Micah Willows.”<
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  Farrell opened the BSA up a bit, heading into the hills toward Barton Park. Julie’s hood blew back, and her hair snapped along his cheek. She tucked herself closer against him, murmuring the witch-poem once more:

  “The storm will arise

  And trouble the skies,

  This night; and, more the wonder,

  The ghost from the tomb

  Affrighted shall come,

  Called out by the clap of the thunder.“

  They entered the park at the south end, on the opposite side from the zoo. The main road spiraled upward around a shaggy, bulging foothill, widening occasionally into shaved areas where redwood tables, benches, washrooms, and see-saws flourished under the redwoods. Beneath a tarnished silver sky, the picnic structures all stood up like great slabs of granite, appointed to guide an extinct mathematics and uphold a faith, with thin, shallow rills to lead the blood away. California Stonehenge. They’ll think we used the whole park for predicting earthquakes.

  Smaller paths ran away from the camping areas down to baseball fields and cinder tracks or up and in through groves silted ankle-deep with redwood mold, smelling like cool, powdered armpits. Julie directed Farrell onto one of the steep grades, and he followed it slowly down a black arcade of trees with a mandarin moon brooding in their top branches, until he came out suddenly into a meadow and saw lights jigging far ahead.

  “We’ll walk from here,” Julie said as the cars and motorcycles began to drift into shape on both sides of the path. Farrell cut the engine and heard owls. He also heard Gervaise‘ basse-dance La Volunté being played by crumhorns and a rebec. The tune twinkled across the meadow, cold as coins, tiny and shining and sharp as new nails.