Peter Beagle - The Folk Of The Air

“I thought about you,” he said quietly. “Mostly wondering where you were, how you were doing.” He caught her hands this time. “I didn’t want to have fantasies, Jewel. You try strangers on like that, friends not so much.”

“But we were always both,” she said. “Or neither. Run into each other every couple of years, pal around for a few days until we fight. That’s not friendship, that’s just nothing. Scratch my back.”

Farrell scratched. “Well, it keeps me hopeful, whatever it is. Even if I’m stranded in Bonn, or Albany, there’s always that chance—turn one more corner and here comes Julie. New job, new language, new clothes, new man, new bike.” He drew his fingernails up and down her hips, shivering with her. “Hell, you’re my role model, I’ve been imitating you for years.”

“And you say you didn’t fantasize.” She slid off him and pulled the coverlet over them, lying on her side with her legs drawn up, and looking suddenly homely and frail. Farrell tried to draw her close again, but her knees held him away.

“Yeah, all my men,” she said. “And you were great buddies with all of them, and you weren’t ever jealous, not once. Never watched me going home with Alain or Larry or Tetsu and thought about me being like this with them, lying and talking—”

“Larry who? Which one was Larry?”

“The lieutenant in Evreux. At the airbase. You used to play chess with him all the time. Joe, I think you’re the biggest hypocrite I’ve ever known. I mean that.”

Farrell lay back, looking around at the room. He had no sense yet of being in Julie’s home with her; it still felt very much as if they had fumbled drunkenly at the first door they came to, found it open, and fallen upon each other in a little free space granted them by an anonymous donor. But now, in the oval of light that the big bed-lamp threw, he began to recognize objects that he had seen with Julie in Evreux and Paris, in Minorca and Pittsburgh and Zagreb. The three rows of copper-bottomed pots, the painting her sister did of her in high school, the stones and seashells she always has around everywhere; the brown, blood-cracked cape that wheezy old fraud of a bullfighter gave her in Oaxaca. Same red chenille bedspread, same stuffed giraffe, same ankle-munching coffee table she bought at a Seattle garage sale. Julie’s a collector. I used to think she traveled light, but it’s that men carry things for her and ship them for nothing . All the same, a sudden spill of half-sorrowful tenderness and comradeship for Julie’s friendly belongings made him shiver and take hold of her hair.

“Why did you call me back?” he asked. “I was walking off just sure I’d messed everything up forever.”

“Maybe you have, I don’t know yet. I wanted to find out what there was to mess up.” She shrugged herself deeper under the covers. “Besides, it was time, you were right about that. One way or the other, we couldn’t go back to being whatever we were. Kittens.”

“Are you glad?” Julie closed her eyes. Farrell licked a sweaty place just below the nape of her neck. He said, “You taste like red clover. Little tiny explosions of honey.”

Julie put her hand on his stomach, just below the ribs. “Thin,” she murmured; and then, “Joe? Do you remember the time we met in Paris when I was in my car?”

“Mmm. I was dragging along Monsieur-he-Prince. You were just sitting there at the curb.”

“I was supposed to take twenty airmen on a tour the next day and I’d forgotten all about it and I hadn’t made any arrangements at all. So I was sitting and thinking about that. Then I saw you. You looked like hell.”

“Felt like hell. That was my bad winter. I’ve never been that down again or in that much trouble. Not at the same time, anyway. Sitting in your car with you, that was the warmest I’d been since I got to France.”

She patted him, still keeping her eyes closed. “Poor Joe, in your New York topcoat.” A large, fluffy, white cat jumped up on the bed and wedged himself inflexibly between them, jacking up his rear and purring like a sewing machine. “This is Mushy,” Julie said. “Old slobby Musheroo. He started out to be Mouche, but it didn’t take. Did it, you fat fiend?” The cat kneaded her arm, but he eyed Farrell.

“You’ve never had a cat,” Farrell said. “I don’t remember you ever having pets at all.”

“Mushy isn’t really mine. He came with the house, sort of.” Her eyes opened a few inches from his own—neither brown nor quite black, but a questioning, elusive darkness that he associated with no one else. “Do you remember that I was counting?”

“What?” he said. “What counting?”

“In the car, writing on the window. One, two, three, four, like that. Remember?”

“No. I mean, I do now, because you tell me, but not really. Move that cat and come see me.”

Julie reached up suddenly and switched off the bed-lamp. Farrell’s retinas, long accustomed to hurry calls, did the best they could, filing away the high contrast of black hair slashing across a shoulder the color of weak tea, the small breast drawn almost flat by her movement, and the shadow of tendons in her armpit. He reached for her.

“Wait,” she said. “Listen, I have to tell you this in the dark. I was counting me. Counting my cycle. I was trying to figure if it would be safe for me to take you back to my room with me. You looked so bad.”

The white cat had fallen asleep, but he was still purring with each breath. There was no other sound in the room. Julie said, “It was a matter of a day, one way or the other. I remember that very clearly. You don’t remember anything?”

The lights of a car slid over the far wall and part of the ceiling of Farrell’s hotel room, making the bidet glow like a pearl and turning the half-empty suitcase at the foot of the bed into a raw grave. Beside him, across the snowdrift of the cat— Paris winters are dirty, the air gets sticky and old —Julie’s round, tumbly-soft Eskimo face came and went again, as Julie herself came and went up and down in the world; as he would learn to come and go lightly too, if he didn’t die, if he made it through this long, dirty winter. He said, “I was twenty-one years old, what did I know?”

For a moment he could not feel Julie’s breath on his face. Then she said, “I just told you that to show you that I did think about you, even that long ago.”

“That’s nice,” he said, “but I wish you hadn’t told me. I don’t remember a damn thing about the counting, or whatever, but I remember that winter. I think you could probably have changed the course of world history by taking me home with you. All that dumb misery would have had to go somewhere.”

“Aw,” she said. “Aw, poor topcoat.” She picked up the cat and poured him gently off the bed. “Well, come here right away,” she said. “This is for then. Officially. Old friend. Old something. This is for then.”

In the morning he woke in bed with a suit of armor. Actually it was chain mail, slumped empty next to him like the gleaming husk of some steel spider’s victim; but the great helm that shared his pillow dominated his waking completely. The helm looked like a large black wastebasket with the bottom reinforced by metal struts and with most of one side cut away and covered by a slotted steel plate, riveted in place. Farrell had his arm over it, and his nose pressed into the face plate—it was the cold, rough, painty smell that had awakened him. He blinked at the helm several times, rubbed his nose, then rolled onto one elbow, looking around for Julie.

She was standing in the doorway, dressed and laughing silently, fingers at her lips in one of the few echoes of classical Japanese manners that he had ever noticed in her. “I wanted to see what you’d do,” she gasped. “You were so sweet to it. Were you scared?”