The Folk Of The Air

Walking up the stump-flagged path to Ben’s house, he unwrapped the lute, his chest aching with gratitude to find it whole. He sat down on the porch steps, marveling as always at the sight of his own hand on the long golden curve of the instrument, as he had once caught his breath to deny the miracle of his hand touching a woman’s bare hip. He hugged the lute gently into his belly and held it there, and the coupled strings sighed into the air, though he had not yet touched them.

“Come on, love,” he said again. He began to play Mounsiers Almaine, too fast, as he often took it, but not trying to slow it down. After that he played a Dowland pavane, and then Mounsiers Almaine again, properly this time. The lute grew warm in the sun and smelled like lemons.

Chapter 2

The old woman said, “You had better be Joe Farrell.”

Afterward, at odd times and places, he liked to think about the first time that Sia and he ever looked at each other. By then he remembered no single detail of the moment, except that both of them had instinctively clutched something close—Farrell his lute, and Sia the belt of the worn blue robe, which she drew tight under her heavy breasts. Sometimes he did recall being instantly certain that he had just met either an old friend or a very patient, important enemy; more often he knew that he was making that up. But he felt strange trying to imagine not knowing who Sia was.

“Because if you are not,” she said, “I have no business being out here at six in the morning listening to a strange lute player on my front porch. So if you are Joe Farrell, you can come in and have breakfast. Otherwise I am going back to bed.”

She was not tall, actually, nor was she very old. Ben had described her hardly at all in his letters, and Farrell’s first vision had been of a great, drowsy monolith standing above him, a menhir in a frayed fla

“You’re Sia,” he said. “Athanasia Sioris.”

“Oh, I know that,” she answered, “even this early. What about you? Have you decided if you’re Joe Farrell yet?”

“I’m Farrell,” he said, “but you can go back to bed anyway. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Her hair was very thick and a little coarse, gray and black together, like a winter dawn. It fell down between her shoulder blades, caught, not in a ribbon, but with a gnarled silver ring. Her eyes had almost no white to them. Farrell could see the pupils breathing slowly in the morning light, and he fancied that he felt their full weight testing his strength, as boxers will lean thoughtfully on each other in the early rounds. She said, “Am I afraid of you?”

Farrell said, “When Ben first wrote me about you, I thought you had the prettiest name in the world. I still do, except maybe for a woman named Electa Arenal de Rodriguez. It’s a close thing either way.”

“Am I afraid of you?” she asked again. “Or am I glad to see you?” Her voice was low and hoarse, the Greek accent less of a sound than an aftertaste; not unpleasant, but not an easy voice, either. He could not imagine it teasing, consoling, caressing—Christ, she’s older than his mother—or telling lies. It was a voice suited only for asking nettly questions with no safe answers.

He said, “No one’s ever been afraid of me. It would be grand if you were, but I don’t really expect it.”

She had been looking at him, so it was not that the dark regard suddenly shifted or focused on him more intensely, but rather as if he had managed to attract the attention of a forest, or of a large body of water. “What do you expect?” Farrell stared back at her, too tired and uncertain even to shrug, almost peacefully at a standstill. Sia said, “Well, come in, good morning.”

She turned her back; as she did so, Farrell felt a curious desolation pass over him—a fox-fierce little autumn wind of abandonment and loss that might have blown out of his childhood, when sorrows were all the same size and came and went without ever explaining themselves. It was gone instantly, and he walked into the house, following a middleaged woman in a blue bathrobe who moved cumbrously on legs that he knew must have varicose veins.

“Sia’s house is a cave,” Ben had written to him three years ago, having lived with her then for more than a year. “Bones underfoot, little clawed things scampering in the shadows, and the fire leaves greasy stains on the walls. Everything smells of chicken blood and skins drying.” But that morning Farrell thought the house was like a green tree, and the rooms were branches, high and light and murmurous with the sounds that wood makes in the sun. He stood in the living room, studying the ma

She led him to a small kitchen where she scrambled a lot of eggs and made coffee, working swiftly with brown, rather stubby hands, saying very little and never looking at him. But when she was done, she brought their plates to the table and sat down across from him, settling her chin between her fists. For a moment the gray eyes—clear and savage as snow water—regarded him with an earnest, personal hostility that seemed to lick along his bones, scouring them hollow. And then Sia smiled, and Farrell took a very quick breath before the mischief of the women and smiled at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “May I take the last fifteen minutes back?”

Farrell nodded seriously. “If you leave the eggs.”

Sia said, “Frightened lovers are hideous. I have been dreadful to Ben for a week, just because of you.”

“Why? You sound like the Pope receiving Attila the Hun. What have I done to deserve all this terror?”

She smiled again, but the deep, secret amusement was gone. She said, “My dear, I can’t tell how used to this sort of situation you are, but you should certainly know that no one really welcomes the old best friend. Don’t you know that?” Farrell felt the kitchen sunlight stir against him as she leaned forward.

“Oldest friend, maybe,” he answered. “Best, I don’t know. I haven’t seen Ben for seven years, Sia.”

“In California, oldest is best,” she answered. “Ben has good friends here, people at the university, people who care for him, but there is no one who knows him except me. And now here you are. It’s very silly.”

“Yes, it is.” Farrell reached for the butter. “You’re Ben’s best friend now, Sia.” An enormous Alsatian bitch came and barked once at him; then, with that over, put her head on his knee and drooled. Farrell gave her some of his scrambled eggs.

Sia said, “You knew him when he was thirteen years old. I can’t ever catch up with that. What was he like?”

“He had a high, shiny forehead,” Farrell said, “and I used to call him Rubberlips.” Sia began to laugh very quietly. Her laughter was almost too low for him to hear; it played at the edges of all his senses, like whale song. Farrell went on. “He was a hell of a swimmer, a really rotten actor, and in high school he got me through trigonometry one year and chemistry another. I used to make faces at him in math class, trying to get him to laugh. His father died, I think when we were juniors. He hated my plaid winter hat with the earflaps, and he loved Judy Garland and Joe Williams and little nightclubs where they’d put on a show with five people. That’s the kind of stuff I remember, Sia. I didn’t know him. I think he knew me, but I was too busy worrying about my pimples.”