“He’s a very nice man,” she answered him. “No, damn it, that sounds terrible, insulting. But he is.”
Farrell nodded. “I believe it. You always did have this deadly weakness for nice men. I was an aberration.”
“No, you’re my friend,” Julie said. “You’re my friend, and I’m sorry, I should have told you I was getting married.” A waiter’s loaded tray caught her between the shoulderblades just as a busboy stepped on her foot, and she was properly furious this time. “I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d do exactly what you’re doing now, which is look at me like that and imply that you know me better than anyone else ever possibly could, which is not true, Farrell. There are all kinds of people you don’t even know who know things about me you’ll never know, so just knock it off.” She ran out of breath and anger more or less simultaneously. She said, “But somehow you’ve gotten to be my oldest friend, just by goddamn attrition. I missed you, Joe.”
Farrell put his arms around her again. “I missed you. I worried about you. A whole lot. The rest can wait.” There came a crash and a mad bellow from the steamy depths of the kitchen, and Farrell said, “Your dork’s probably missing you too. That was the Table Fourteen dessert, sure as hell. Where can I call you? Are you actually back in Avicenna?”
“For now. It’s always for now in this town.” She wrote the address and telephone number on the back of the Tonight’s Specials menu, kissed him hurriedly and left the kitchen. Behind her she heard another bellow, and then Farrell’s grimly placid voice saying, “Stay cool, stay cool, big Luis, it’s not the end of the world. Change your apron, we’ll just add some more brandy. All is well.”
It took more time than they were used to, even after more than twenty years of picking up, letting go and picking up again. The period of edginess and uncertainty about what questions to ask, what to leave alone, what might or might not be safe to assume, lasted until the autumn afternoon they went to the museum. It was Farrell’s day off, and he drove Madame Schumann-Heink, his prehistoric Volkswagen van, over the hill from the bald suburb where he was condo-sitting for a friend and parked under a sycamore across from Julie’s studio apartment. The building was a converted Victorian, miraculously spared from becoming a nest of suites for accountants and attorneys and allowed to decay in a decently tropical fashion, held together by jasmine and wisteria. He said to Julie, “You find trees, every time, shady places with big old trees. I’ve never figured how you manage it.”
“Old houses,” she said. “I always need work space and a lot of light, and only the old houses have it. It’s a trade-off—plumbing for elbow room. Wait till I feed NMC.” NMC was an undistinguished black and white cat who slept with six new kittens in a box underneath the tiny sink set into a curtained alcove. (“She likes to keep an eye on the refrigerator,” Julie explained. “Just in case it tries to make a break for freedom.”) She had shown up pregnant, climbing the stairs to scratch only at Julie’s
door, and sauntering in with an air of being specifically expected. The initials of her name stood for Not My Cat. Julie opened a can, set it down beside the box, checked to make sure that each kitten was securely attached to a nipple, briefly fondled a softly thrumming throat and told her, “The litter tray is two feet to your left. As if you care.”
At the curb, gazing for a long time at Madame Schumann-Heink, she said, “This thing has become absolutely transparent, Joe, you know that. I can see the Bay right through it.”
“Wait till you see her by moonlight,” Farrell said. “Gossamer and cobwebs.
The Taj Mahal of rust. Tell me again where the Bigby Museum is.”
“North. East. In the hills. It’s hard to explain. Take the freeway, I’ll tell you where to turn off.”
The Bigby City Museum had been, until fairly recently, Avicenna’s nearest approach to a Roman villa. Together with its long, narrow reflecting pool and its ornamental gardens, it occupied an entire truncated hilltop from which, morning and evening, its masters—copper-mining kinglets—had seen the Golden Gate Bridge rising through the Bay mist like a Chinese dragon’s writhing back. With the death of the last primordial Bigby, the lone heir had quietly sold the mansion to the city, set up its contents (primarily lesser works of the lesser Impressionists, a scattering of the Spanish masters, and the entire oeuvre of a Bigby who painted train stations) as a joint trust, and sailed away to a tax haven in the Lesser Antilles. Julie said there were a few early Brueghel oils and drawings worth the visit. “He was doing Bosch then—maybe forgeries, maybe not—and mostly you can’t tell them apart. But with these you start seeing the real Brueghel, sort of in spite of himself. There’s a good little Raphael too, but you’ll hate it. An Annunciation, with putti.”
“I’ll hate it,” Farrell said. He eased Madame Schumann-Heink over into the right-hand lane, greatly irritating a BMW, who honked at him all the way to the freeway. “Practically as much as I hate old whoever, the guy you married.”
“Brian.” Julie punched his shoulder hard. “His name is Brian, and he’s a lovely, wonderful man, and I really do love him. We just shouldn’t have gotten married. We both agreed on that.”
“A damn Brian,” Farrell said. He put his head out of the window and yelled back at the BMW, “She went and married a Brian, I ask you!” The BMW driver gave him the finger. Farrell said, “The worst thing is, I’d probably like him, I’ve got a bad feeling about that. Let’s talk about something else. Why’d you marry him?”
Julie sighed. “Maybe because he was as far away from you as I could get. He’s sane, he’s stable, he’s—okay, he’s ambitious, nothing wrong with that—”
Farrell’s immediate indignation surprised him as much as it did Julie. “Hey, I’m sane. All things considered. Weird is not wacko, there’s a fine but definite line. And I’m stable as a damn lighthouse, or we’d never have stayed friends this long. Ambitious—okay, no, never, not really. Still cooking here and there, still playing a bit of obsolete music on obsolete instruments after hours. Same way you’re still drawing cross sections of lungs and livers for medical students. What does old ambitious Brian do?”
“He’s a lawyer.” Julie heard herself mumbling, saw the corner of Farrell’s mouth twitch, and promptly flared up again. “And I don’t want to hear one bloody word out of you, Farrell! He’s not a hired gun for corporations, he doesn’t defend celebrity gangsters. He works for non-profits, environmental groups, refugees, gay rights—he takes on so many pro bono cases, half the time he can’t pay his office rent. He’s a better person than you’ll ever be, Farrell. Or me either. That’s the damn, damn trouble.” Her eyes were aching heavily, and she looked away from him.
Farrell put his hand gently on the back of her neck. He said, “I’m sorry, Jewel.” Neither of them spoke after that until they were grinding slowly up a narrow street lined with old sycamore and walnut trees and high, furry old houses drowsing in the late-summer sun. Julie said, “I do a little word-processing, temp stuff,” and then, in the same flat voice, “You never married anybody.”
“Too old,” Farrell said. “I used to be too young, or somebody was, I remember that. Now it’s plain too late—I’m me, finally, all the way down, and easy enough with it, but I damn sure wouldn’t marry me.” He braked to keep from running over two cackling adolescents on skateboards, then resumed the lumbering climb, dropping Madame Schumann-Heink into second gear, which was one of her good ones. Looking sideways, he said, “One thing anyway, you’re still the prettiest Eskimo anybody ever saw.”
“Get out of here,” she answered him scornfully. “You never saw an Eskimo that wasn’t in some National Geographic special.” Now she looked back at him, fighting a smile, and he touched her neck again, very lightly. “Well, I’m getting like that myself,” she said. “Too old and too cranky to suit anybody but me. Turn right at the light, Joe.”
The Bigby City Museum came upon them suddenly, filling the windshield just after the last sharp curve, as they rolled slightly downward into a graveled parking lot which had once been an herb garden. Farrell parked facing the Bay, and the two of them got out and stood silently on either side of Madame Schumann-Heink, staring away at the water glittering in the western sun. Then they turned, each with an odd, unspoken near-reluctance, to face the Museum. It would have been a beautiful building, Julie thought, in another town. It was three stories high, cream white, with a flat tile roof the color of red wine. Shadowed on three sides by cypress trees, camellia bushes softening the rectitude of the corners, a dancing-dolphin fountain chuckling in the sunny courtyard, and the white and peach rose gardens sloping away from the reflecting pool, it was a beautiful house, but one that belonged in Santa Barbara, Santa Monica or Malibu, worlds and wars, generations and elections removed from silly, vain, vainly perverse Avicenna. Farrell finally sighed and said, “Power to the people, hey,” and Julie said, “A bas les aristos,” and they went inside. The ticketseller and the guest book were on the first floor, the Brueghels on the second. Julie and Farrell walked up a flowing mahogany stairway hung with watercolors from the Southwestern period of the train-station Bigby. On the landing Farrell looked around judiciously and announced, “Fine command of plastic values, I’ll say that,” to which Julie responded, “Oh, no question, but those spatio-temporal vortices, I don’t know.” They laughed together, joined hands and climbed the rest of the way.
There were ten or twelve other people upstairs in the huge main gallery. Most were younger than Farrell and Julie, with the distinct air of art students on assignment, their eyes flicking nervously from the Brueghels to their fellows to see whether anyone else had caught the trick, fathomed the koan, winkled out the grade points that must surely be hiding somewhere within those depictions of demon priests and creatures out of anchorite nightmares. When Julie took a small pad out of her purse, sat down on a couch and began copying certain corners and aspects of the paintings, the students were eddying silently toward her within minutes, just in case she knew. Farrell winked at her and wandered off toward a wall of train stations. Julie never looked up.
More quickly than she expected, he was back, leaning over her shoulder, his low voice in her hair. “Jewel. Something you ought to see. Right around the corner.”
The corner was actually a temporary wall, just wide and high enough to hold three tapestries whose placard described them as “…mid-fifteenth century, artist unknown, probably from Bruges.” The highest tapestry, done in the terrifyingly detailed millefleurs style, showed several women in a rich garden being serenaded by a lute-player, and Julie at first thought that Farrell—a lutanist himself—must have meant her to look at this one. Then she saw the one below.
It was in worse shape than the upper tapestry, badly frayed all around the edges and darkly stained in a kind of rosette close to the center, which showed a knight presenting a unicorn to his simpering lady. The unicorn was small and bluish-white, with the cloven hooves, long neck and slender quarters of a deer The knight was leading
it on a silvery cord, and his squire behind him was prodding the unicorn forward with a short stabbing lance. There was a soapbubble castle in the background, floating up out of a stylized broccoli forest. Julie heard herself say in a child’s voice, “I don’t like this.”
“I’ve seen better,” Farrell agreed. “Wouldn’t have picked it as Bruges work myself.” The lance was pricking the unicorn hard enough that the flesh dimpled around the point, and the unicorn’s one visible eye, purple-black, was rolled back toward the squire in fear or anger. The knight’s lady held a wreath of scarlet flowers in her extended right hand. Whether it was meant for the knight or the unicorn Julie could not tell.
“I wish you hadn’t shown me this,” she said. She turned and returned to the Brueghels, trying to recapture her focus on the sliver of canvas, the precise brushstroke, where the young painter could be seen to step away from his master. But time after time she was drawn back, moving blindly through the growing crowd to stare one more time at the shabby old imagining of beauty and theft before she took up her sketchpad again. At last she gave up any notion of work, and simply stood still before the tapestry, waiting patiently to grow numb to the unicorn’s endless woven pain. The lady looked directly out at her, the faded smirk saying clearly, “Five hundred years. Five hundred years, and it is still going on, this very minute, all to the greater glory of God and courtly love.”