"You…"
Mr Newboy started to question, grew uncomfortable with that, so returned his eyes to the line.
"…just read it and knew I'd wanted one there?"
Newboy began to say several things, but stopped (after a little nod) before voice, as if curious what silence would affect.
Two emotions clawed the inside of Kid's skull. The fear, as it rose, he questioned: Is this some trick of autonomic nerves that causes the small of my back to dampen, my heart to quicken, my knees to shake like motors; it was only a comma, the smallest bit of silence that I have misplaced — only a pause. I am quaking like Teddy's candles. The joy, mounting over, obliterating, and outdistancing it, was at some sensed communion. (Newboy had known!) To restrain it, Kid told himself: Between two phrases like that, why shouldn't Newboy be able to tell? He lowered his head to read on: his eyes filled with water and the emotion tore through such logic. And the darkness under. He anticipated their collision to make some wave. But like two swirls of opposite spin, they met — and canceled. He blinked. Water splashed from his lashes across the back of his hand.
There had been a recurrent pain on the back of his right shoulder that, three or four years ago, had intrigued him because it would be a pulsing annoyance for hours or even days and then would, in a second, vanish: no proddings or contortions could recall it. He hadn't for years, till now.
Tensing his shoulders, he read the next poem, and images set to at the backs of his eyes, their substance and structure familiar, their texture alien, alien and grave. He kept blinking, to finish the line in his mind; eyes opened to finish it on the page, where it demanded new bulbs. Boxes of glass ticked their clear covers on stunned marvels. Things were safe, and that was so horrifying his heart was pulsing in the little pit at the base of his throat as though he were swallowing rock after rock. "Mr Newboy?"
"Mmm?" Papers shuffled.
Kid looked over.
Newboy was going through the illustrations.
"I don't think I'm gonna write any more poems."
Newboy turned another black page. "You don't like them, reading them over?"
Kid peeled off the next paper ribbon. The first two words of the first line of the first poem were transposed—
"Here!" Mr Newboy offered his pencil. "You found a mistake?" He laughed. "Now see, you don't have to write quite so hard as that! Wait! You'll tear the paper!"
Kidd unhunched his shoulder, unbent his spine, and let his fingers relax about the yellow shaft. He breathed again. "They're going to fix that, aren't they?"
"Oh, yes. That's why you're looking it over now."
Kid read, and remembered: "The parts I like, well…" He shook his head, with pursed lips. "They just don't have anything to do with me: somebody else wrote them, it seems, about things I may have thought about once. That's pretty strange. The parts I don't like — well, I can remember writing those, oh yeah, word by word by word."
"Then why aren't you going to write any—?"
But Kid had found another mistake.
"Here," Newboy said. "Why don't you lay the galleys on your notebook so you can write more easily."
While Kid passed the halfpoint of the next galley, Newboy mused: "Perhaps it's good you're not going to write any more: you'd have to start considering all those dull things like your relation to your audience, the relation between your personality and your poetry, the relation between your poetry and all the poetry before it. Since you told me you weren't responsible for those notes, I've been trying to figure out whether it just happened or whether you were making a conscious reference: You managed to reproduce, practically verbatim, one of my favorite lines from Golding's translation of the Metamorphosis."
"Mmm?"
"Are you familiar with it?"
"It's a big green and white paperback? That's the one Shakespeare used for some of his plays. I only read about the first half. But I didn't take any lines from it, at least not on purpose. Maybe it just happened?"
Mr Newboy nodded. "You amaze me. And when you do, I suspect I'm rather a smaller person for having such petty notions in the first place. Well, the line I was referring to was from the last book anyway. So you hadn't gotten to that one yet. Tell me, who do you think should read your poems once they're published?"
"I guess people who… well, whoever likes to read poetry."
"Do you?"
"Yeah. I read it more than I read anything else, I guess."
"No, that doesn't surprise me."
"You know, in bookstores for the schools I used to go to, or down in the Village in New York, or in San Francisco, they got whole sections for poetry. You can read a lot of it there."
"Why poetry?"
Kid shrugged. "Most poems are shorter than stories."
Newboy, Kid saw, was suppressing a laugh. Kid felt embarrassed.
"And you're not going to write any more?"
"It's too hard." Kid looked down. "I mean if I kept it up, I think it would kill me, you know? I never did it before, so I just didn't understand."
"That's sad — no, I can be more honest than that. It's frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art."
"Yeah." Kid's eyes came up. "I know. I really know that. And I wish — I wish I didn't frighten you as much as I do. What is it? What's the matter with you, now?"
"Nothing." Newboy shook his head.
"I wish I didn't," Kid repeated. "The last poem…" Kid began to turn through the galleys. "What did you think of that one, I mean compared to all the rest of them?"
"The one in meter? Well, it isn't finished. We printed it up to where you broke off. That's another thing I wanted to query about—"
"How do you like what there is?"
"Frankly, I didn't think it was as strong as many of the others. When I went back over it the fourth or fifth time, I began to see that the substance of it was probably on its way to a great deal of richness. But the language wasn't as inventive. Or as clean."
Kid nodded. "The rhythm of natural speech," Kid mused. "I had to write it. And it was pretty bad, wasn't it? No, I don't think I'll write any more. Besides, I'm probably never going to have another book published…?" He raised an eyebrow at Newboy.
Newboy, lips pursed, considered. "I could say that I sincerely don't believe that should be a consideration. Or that, as I remember it, it was something like eleven years between my first and second book of poems. Or that I think you're asking for confirmation of something that really doesn't have anything to do with poetry."
"What else could you say?"
Newboy's lips unpursed. "I could say, 'Yes, possibly you won't.' "
Kid grinned quickly and went back to correcting.
"It's very silly to commit yourself to something like that, if you're going to write or not. If you wrote those, you will write more. And if you promise yourself you won't, you'll just be very unhappy when you break the promise. Yes, a good part of me doesn't like the idea of an artist giving up art. But this is another part of me talking. Believe me."
Kid's mind was on Lanya.
He pulled it away, to reflect on: Golding's Metamorphosis. He'd seen the book on a dozen shelves in a dozen bookstores, picked it up as many times, read the back cover, the first page of the introduction, flipped through three or four pages, unable to read more than three or four lines on each. (The same thing, he realized, had happened with Pilgrimage.) The first half? He'd been unable to read a whole page! Poetry, he thought. If it makes me start lying to a guy like this, I should stop writing it.
Kid corrected the last half-dozen sheets in silence drenched with vision. He flipped them, rattling like dry feathers, together.