When Farrell continued to stare at her without speaking, she sighed a little and put his hand away from her. “You can go now, Joe. I just needed a little company for a while. I will be fine here, thank you.” But she looked all at once like a very young girl trembling with her first real lie. Farrell wanted to hold her, but she turned away again, and he found himself approaching the door, trying to look back. Someone in the room was making tiny, disconsolate sounds; he assumed it was Briseis, and then realized that the sounds were his own.
He had begun to open the door, already feeling the jaws of air beyond closing slowly on him, when she said, “Stay, Joe. I am not fine. Stay with me until Ben comes home.”
So Farrell stood at the window with her, and they held hands while the house whined and sang and moaned all around the imaginary bubble of her room. He did not want to look out of her window ever again, but she said, “It’s all right, there is only Avicenna out there now, I promise you. Sometimes that is all I see.” And she kept her word; the high windows looked down on remembered roofs and streets, parked cars, the bright haze of the Bay, and people Farrell knew working in their gardens, appearing motionless as waves seen from far away.
“I will miss it so,” she said beside him. “This hell of a place, I will miss it so much. This fat body, walking mud puddle, deceived by everything, this impossible, ruinous accident of a world, these people who would truly rather hurt one another than eat—oh, there is nothing, nothing, nothing I would not do to stay here ten minutes longer. Oh, I will leave clawmarks, I will drag mountains and forests away under my fingernails when I am dragged off. Such a stupid way to feel. I will be all dirty from clutching at this stupid planet, and the gods will laugh at me.”
Farrell said, “When we made love, it wasn’t really me, was it?” She did not answer, but held his hand against her breast. “Clutching at the whole stupid planet?” Sia nodded, and Farrell said, “I’m honored,” and they waited silently after that until Ben came home.
Chapter 18
Julie did not call; instead, she came to find him late one afternoon at the restoration shop. Farrell smelled her before he saw her and scrambled out of a rumble seat he was reupholstering, trying hard to look distantly pleased. She stood the car’s length away from him, announcing, “I’m still pissed at you, but I miss you. We have things to talk about, and I think you should come home with me and cook us some scallops Marsala. With new potatoes and those nice green beans in peanut sauce, please. But I’m still pissed.”
Farrell said, “Well, I think you’re overreacting and unreasonable; and I think that’s a dumb way to wear you hair. Give me ten minutes.”
To do her justice, she told him about Micah Willows before he started cooking; to be fair to him, he went ahead with the dinner and threw in a fruit salad with a lemon and yogurt dressing. But it was beyond him to set her plate down in front of her without the scallops bouncing like popcorn, or to forbear from saying, “Just don’t start him calling me up for recipes, that’s all.”
“It’ll only be for a couple of weeks,” she said. “Two weeks at the most. You ought to know I can’t have anyone around all the time for more than two weeks.” Farrell dropped potatoes onto her plate like depth charges. “Joe, the doctor said he needs to be around people he knows, somebody he trusts, until he can trust himself to be whole again. Right now, I am about all he’s got. His family’s back in Columbus, I’ve been on the phone with them almost every day. They’ll pay all his hospital bills, send any money he needs, anything, just so he doesn’t come home. He has nowhere else to go.”
“A genuine remittance man,” Farrell said. “Nicholas Bonner’s got the same problem. Right. I’ll clear my stuff out of the bathroom first thing.”
She caught hold of his arm as he started to turn away and made him face her. “Joe, God damn it, Micah and I have things to settle. We never broke up, he just got possessed.” In spite of himself, Farrell laughed outright at the cozy madness of the statement, and she laughed too, shaking her head and covering her mouth for a moment, as her grandmother had taught her. She said “I don’t know what it was I felt for him and I need to find out, because I can’t stand loose ends. And you and I have a whole lot of business to do yet, because our special relationship happens to be all loose ends, and because we have seen things together that nobody but the other one will ever believe. So we have to be really careful never to lose each other, whatever else happens. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Joe?”
“Everybody asks me that,” he said. “Jewel, since the day we met, you have never once waited around for me to understand anything. Don’t start now, or I’ll know you’re getting old. Just be careful and call me if you need me, recipes included. Eat your damn scallops, you made such a thing about them.”
Julie said quietly, “I am getting old.” When he left her house, she held him at the door, looking at him with a strange, angry appeal in her face. “Joe, I’m not going to tell you not to go to the Whalemas Tourney. Just be careful of yourself. Crof’s dead and Micah’s been damaged, and I don’t want to lose any more people I care about. It really does feel like getting old, going bad, feeling my senses shrinking up one by one. You’re as weird as Aiffe, in your own little way, but I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, ever.” She put her head down on his shoulder for a moment and then she stepped back inside her house and shut the door.
In the last ten days before the Tourney, the League for Archaic Pleasures itself seemed to disappear. There were no more classes, no feasts or dances, no more comradely evenings of old music and old stories. Farrell saw only the women of the League on the street, and them almost entirely at two or three specialized fabric shops. Their lords were at home, furbishing up their arms and armor, whacking grimly away at painted four-by-fours in the backyard or arranging hurried private sessions with John Erne. In practice with Basilisk, Farrell found the musicians giving twenty to one against King Bohemond’s retaining the crown, with Benedictis de Griffin and Raoul of Carcassonne equal favorites at three to one, and Garth de Montfaucon attracting the long-shot money at ten to one. It was understood that all bets were off if Egil Eyvindsson entered the lists.
“You can’t help being interested in it, just from that angle,” Farrell said to Hamid and Lovita. They had been to a silent movie, then stopped for ice cream on the way home. He said, “When it’s people you know. I can get six-and-a-half to one on Simon Widefarer.”
“Those odds don’t mean doodly,” Hamid said. “Not in this tourney.” Farrell raised his eyebrows. “There’s the whole wild-card thing, they didn’t tell you? At the Whalemas Tourney the combats don’t have to be set up in advance—no eliminations, nothing. Anybody can challenge anybody, and you about have to accept the match.”
“Marvelous,” Farrell said. “Some back-country baron gets hot for a day, and the book goes out the window. I gather that’s how Bohemond won it last year.”
Lovita shook her head, making a tiny, subversive ballet out of the simple act of licking ice cream off her upper lip. “That girl got mad at her daddy, ‘cause he grounded her or some such, and so she put some kind of protection on Bohemond. I was there. People started getting sick, having accidents, just before they went to fight him. Frederik, old Garth, they couldn’t touch him, their swords just came sliding off the air. I was there, I saw it.”
Hamid nodded confirmation. “After that was when she really started being Aiffe all the time.”