Chapter 7
Julie and Farrell’s record for mutual toleration was slightly less than five consecutive days, set almost eight years before on Nantucket. They celebrated their sixth day together by going again to the Moroccan restaurant, where they had couscous and warm, bitter champagne. Farrell spent the first half of the dinner in playing happily with Julie’s fingers and grinning at her; and the second half in telling her, headlong and in no order at all, everything he could put into words about Sia and Ben and Suzy’s visitor. Julie listened silently, attentive but expressionless, until he ran out of champagne, fingers, and phrases to describe Sia barefoot on the stair in her flowery dress.
“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?”