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“It’s time, Jewel. It’s exactly time, this minute.”
She nodded, still not quite looking at him. “But sometimes you let things go by, even when it’s time. Because you don’t know what you’ll be afterward.”
“Hungry,” Farrell said. “I’ll cook di
Farrell sighed and lowered his arms, taking a step backward. “Well,” he said. “Maybe it’s not time.” She looked straight at him then, but he could not tell whether she felt regret, a
“I will,” Julie said, so softly that Farrell had to read her lips to make out the words. He kept backing away, knowing—even without the whistles and guffaws of the fraternity boys—that he looked ludicrously as if he were withdrawing from the presence of royalty. But he knew also that she would not call, and it seemed to him that he had once again stumbled across something irreplaceable just at the moment of its extinction. He said, “Check the clutch on that monster, Jewel. It might be slipping a little.”
He was striding briskly toward Parnell, shoulders only a little hunched, when she said, “Farrell, come back here,” loudly enough that a baying chorus immediately took it up: “Farrell, you get back there this minute!… You heard her, Farrell!” When he turned, he saw her beckoning forcefully, ignoring the second-floor gallery. He approached her with some hesitation, wary of old of the half smile playing like a kitten with one corner of her mouth. The last time he had seen that particular smile, they had both been in a Malaga jail fairly shortly thereafter.
“Get on,” she said. She pushed the BSA off the kickstand and straddled it, waiting for him. When he only stared, oblivious to highly detailed instructions from their audience, she repeated the command sharply without looking back as she tugged her helmet on.
“Shopping,” Farrell said. “What happened to shopping?” Julie started the engine, and the air around the BSA danced to life, this time enclosing them within a roaring privacy—a momentary country, trembling at the curb. Outside, beyond their borders, the honey-slow twilight was thi
“Where are we going?” he asked. The street was begi
Chapter 5
My,” he said, “what kind of motorcycle is a Tanikawa?”
“A dirt bike. Don’t move, stay with me.” She was propped on his chest, looking at him, her smile lifting as delicately as the corners of her eyes. The pupils were narrowing to normal size again. Farrell said, “You smell so good. I can’t believe your smell.”
Julie kissed his nose. She said, “Joe, you’re thin. I never imagined you’d be so thin.”
“Coyotes are thin. That’s my totem, the coyote.” He put a hand up to touch her cheek, and she let her head rest on it. “I never imagined you imagining me like that. Hussy.”
“Oh, you try people on,” Julie said. “Didn’t you ever wonder about me at all? As much as you wonder?” Now she lowered herself against him, her face cool on his throat, her body surrounding him like water. But when he said nothing, she dug her chin into him and pulled his hair. “Come on, Joe, it’s been ten years, eleven years now. I want to know.”
“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 Bo
“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.”