At breakfast Ben corrected exams while Sia sat in the kitchen’s small bay window with a newspaper, eating her favorite morning glop of yogurt, honey, mangos, and dry cereal and giggling softly over the comic strips. The one time she caught Farrell staring at her, she asked him to make her a cup of herb tea. She was dozing when he left for work, a dusty gray Persian cat sprawled twitching in the sunlight, and Ben was snapping pencil points and cursing middle-class illiteracy.
So, it will make us mad.
He literally ran into Suzy McManus, coming through the front door as he was going out. It was dangerously easy not to see Suzy; she took up so little space so quietly. She was a thin woman, almost gaunt, pale of eye and skin and hair, and her voice, addressing anyone but Sia, was equally anorexic, starved of all inflection. Only when she spoke with Sia did she even begin to take on color; and on the occasions when Farrell came on them laughing together, he was astonished each time to realize how young she was. He had promptly determined that he would make Suzy laugh himself, but it was all he could do to get her to talk to him, let alone understanding her mumbled responses to his jokes and questions. Now, righting her before she fell, he flirted with her, saying, “Suzy, this makes the third time I’ve knocked you down and stepped on you. Don’t I get to keep you now?”
Suzy answered him in—as far as he could ever tell—absolute seriousness, in her usual downcast whisper. “Oh, no, it takes much more trampling than that.” She ducked her head abruptly, in a way she had, turning so that she almost looked directly at him, yet Farrell never saw her eyes. Then she vanished, which was another way of hers, slipping past him toward the kitchen, but trailing away into air before she reached the door. Farrell had a very bad day at Thumper’s.
Farrell had spent a good deal of his adult life hunting up a new place to stay. In any other city he would have set out with the fewest possible expectations. But his image of Avicenna was ten years old and full of big, sunny rooms and flowery, winy, rickety houses where all his friends lived. It took him a week to discover that almost every one of the dear places where he had been drunk and in love and floating were now either parking lots or university offices. The few that remained were happily unchanged, except that their rents had quadrupled. Farrell stood for a while in the fuchsia-blurred courtyard under the window of Ellen’s little room. He knew she was long gone from there, or he would never have made the visit, but it was a matter of continuity.
“There were so many good ones,” he said to Ben. “Sometimes you couldn’t remember whose house you were in, they were all so good.”
“They were dumps,” Ben said. “We were just too horny to notice at the time.”
Farrell sighed. “Was that it? So much for golden lads and lasses.” They were alone in the faculty locker room at the gymnasium, stripping to swim. Ben liked to go there at least twice a week, after his night class. Farrell said, “I miss them anyway, those times. Not me, you understand, just the times.”
Ben glanced briefly at him. “Hell, you were homesick for everything while it was all going on. You just wandered along backward, fastest nostalgia in the West.” He stuffed his socks into his shoes and put the shoes in his locker, and the compressed, delicate violence of the movement made Farrell think of a leopard floating with his ripped prey up to the fork of a tree. Ben had always been deceptively strong, the result of dutiful exercise, but his strength had seemed acquired, rented for the occasion, not a casual fire. He said, “Come on, drag you for beers.”
Farrell was a good swimmer, for Ben had taught him, in the old days, all that a dolphin can actually tell anyone about moving in the water. He kept decently even with Ben for five laps, began to wallow a bit on the sixth, and hauled out to sit with his legs dangling and watch his friend working up and down the pool, arms reaping the water in short, flat slashes, head turning only slightly to breathe. Yet it struck Farrell strangely that once or twice Ben lost the water altogether, flailing and gasping in a moment of distorting terror. Farrell decided that it was one of the mysterious games Ben liked to play alone, for each time he caught his stroke immediately and swam on as powerfully as ever. After the second time, he climbed out at the far end of the pool and came around to Farrell, shaking himself dry.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was meant to be a compliment, actually. You were always so aware of loss—you were missing things before it was fashionable, before whales and old people were in. I remember, you used to know whenever anything anywhere got paved over, or torn down, or became extinct. It wasn’t nostalgia, it was mourning. You still doing that?”
Farrell shrugged. “Sort of. Sort of not. I’m getting a little old to go around keeping track of my defeats.”
“It’s an honorable calling.” They sat by the pool, talking quietly, while jets of water from the inlets thumped against their hanging legs and lights fluttered in the Avicenna hills beyond the small wired windows. Ben asked if Farrell had been meeting old acquaintances, and Farrell said, “It’s a little scary. Half the people I know are still striding around Parnell, taking anthropology classes and making the parties. They hang in different coffeehouses now, but it’s the same faces. I can’t go into that new place, the South Forty, without running into somebody who wants me to come over to the house and play Fishing Blues.”
Ben nodded. “People hang on in Avicenna. This town is a La Brea tar pit for academic types.”
“I’m hip. They come out to do graduate work and wind up shoplifting. Dealing. All the cabdrivers came out on the G.I. Bill in 1961 and flunked their orals.”
“Of course,” Ben said softly, “there’s a point in your life when everyone starts to look familiar.” Farrell looked sideways and saw him scratching and rubbing at the base of his throat—another habit of the bored, kindly, sardonic boy strayed from nowhere to slump next to him in assembly. Ben said, “I wish I’d flunked my orals.”
“You can’t fail tests,” Farrell said. “You don’t know how.”
“Didn’t know why, more like it.” Ben was leaning forward, writing what looked like Sia over and over in the water with his toes.
Farrell said, “You like it here?”
Ben did not turn. “I’m a hotshot here, Joe. They work my ass off, but they know who I am. They’ll give me tenure next year, and associate, and let me do about what I want to do. Because I mean business. Because I’m a goddamn firstclass scholar of Icelandic literature, and there are maybe three others this side of the Rockies. I am aces around here.”
“Then why are we both talking funny?”
Ben gripped the side of the pool, staring down between his legs into the water. He said without expression, “I like two of my undergraduate students and one graduate. No, all right, two graduates. I’m starting to cheat on my office hours, and I’ve been getting into fights with people at committee meetings, when I show up. There’s this book I’m supposed to be writing, about style and diction in the later skaldic poetry. There is one hell of a big feud going on in the department, and most of the time I can’t remember whose side I’m supposed to be on. Sometimes I can, and that’s worse. It’s really not too much fun.”
“Well, it’ll probably be a lot better for you next year.” Farrell tried conscientiously to say something useful. “As you said, once you’ve got tenure, they’ll let you alone. Let you write your own ticket, pretty much.”
“A ticket to where?” The familiar sweet, shrewd gaze returned to Farrell, and he saw that the thin scar under Ben’s eye was standing up, seeming to stir like a muscle. Ben said, “I don’t think it is going to get any better. The boredom I could handle, but I hate feeling so contemptuous. I hate feeling myself getting mean. Joe, it’s just not what I had in mind.”