“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, Calabria, 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:

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.”