“Didn’t you?” Farrell asked. “Funny.” He turned on his side, to Briseis’ considerable distress, and burrowed down in the quilt, resting his head on his arm. “Ah, lord, Ben, the music was the only thing that ever came naturally. Everything else I had to learn.”
Chapter 3
Nothing in Farrell’s considerable experience of frying eggs and hashbrowns had quite prepared him for Thumper’s. His work here was the opposite, the denial, the absolute negation of cooking: it consisted almost entirely of reheating dormant fruit pies, periodically adding water to the stewing vats of coffee, chili, and something orange, and filling red plastic baskets with sandy gobbets of fried rabbit, prepared in Fullerton in accordance with a secret recipe and delivered by truck twice a week. He also had the responsibility of steeping the chunks, either in Thumper’s Meadow Magic Sauce, which smelled like hot blacktop, or in Thumper’s Forest Flavoring, which Farrell had renamed “Twilight in the Everglades.” For the rest, he mopped the floors, scoured the ovens and the deep fryer, and, before he left in the evening, pulled the switch that lit up the grinning, eyerolling, foot-flapping bunny on the roof. The bunny was supposed to be holding a Big Bear Bucket of Cottontail Crispies, or it might have been Jackrabbit Joints or Hare Pieces. Farrell was entitled to one Big Bear Bucket a day, but he took his meals at a Japanese restaurant around the corner.
So did Mr. McIntire, the manager of Thumper’s. A hulking, silent man with a red face and hair as gray and sticky as old soap, he winced visibly to serve Wabbit Wieners and pushed the bright baskets of Bunny Buns across the counter with his fingertips. Farrell felt sorry for Mr. McIntire and made an omelette for him his fifth day on the job. It was a Basque piperade, with onions, two kinds of peppers, tomatoes, and ham. Farrell added a special blend of herbs and spices, acquired from a Bolivian lawyer in exchange for the lyrics of Ode to Billie Joe, and served the omelette to Mr. McIntire on a paper plate with pink and blue rabbit tracks printed all over it.
Mr. McIntire ate half of the omelette and abruptly put the plate aside, saying nothing, twitching his shoulders. But he tagged after Farrell all that afternoon, talking to him in a dry, mournful susurrus about mushroom and chicken-liver souffles. “I never meant to wind up running a place like this,” he confided. “I used to know how to cook burgundy beef, caramel baked beans. Bubble-and-squeak. Remind me, I’ll show you how to make bubble-and-squeak. It’s English. I used to go with this English girl, in Portsmouth, in the war. I was gonna open a restaurant in Portsmouth, but we broke up.”
“My famous mistake,” Farrell said to Ben and Sia that evening. “Stirring up the natives. He’s already talking about messing with the menu, trying to sneak some real cooking in among the Thumper Thighs before Disney sues the whole wretched outfit right into Bankruptcyland. No more omelettes for Mr. McIntire.”
He had been tuning the lute to play for them, and now he began on a Holborne galliard; but Sia’s silence made him fumble the first measures and stop. When he turned to look at her, she said, “But you might like that. To work for a man who is still discontent, who cannot quite resign himself to garbage. What’s better, if you have to work for someone?”
“Nope,” Farrell said. “Not me. When I’m a fry cook, I’m a fry cook, and when I’m a chef, that’s another thing altogether. I don’t mind giving, but I like to know exactly what I’m expected to give. Otherwise it gets confusing, and I have to think about it, and it troubles the music.”
Sia stood up with a movement so decisive that it wiped out all memory of her ever having been sitting. Her voice remained low and amused, but Farrell knew after a week that Sia only moved quickly when she was angry. “Cockteaser,” she said. She took herself out of the room then, and Farrell more than half expected to see the lamps, the rugs, and the stereo go bobbing after her, the piano spinning slowly in the backwash. The strings of his lute were all out of tune again.
Farrell sat with the lute in his lap, wondering if there could conceivably be a Greek word that sounded like the one he had heard. He was going to ask Ben; but then he looked across the room at shaking shoulders inadequately concealed behind an oversized art book and, instead, he retuned the lute once more and launched into Lachrimae Antiquae. His attack was a bit harsh in the opening bars, but after that it was all right. Sia’s living room was very good for pavanes.
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.