"Back at the bar," she said, "while you were in the john." Actually, she sounded sleepy. "I thought he was joking. Then you said you'd been there in the morning."
"Mmmm." He nodded. "What did he say?"
"That you were cooperative. But basically a cold fish."
"Oh." He was surprised and felt his eyebrows, and his lower lip, raise. "What do you think?"
She snuggled, a movement that went from her cheek in his armpit (he moved his arm around her), down through her chest (he could feel one breast slide on his chest; one was pressed between them so tightly he wondered if it wasn't uncomfortable for her), to her hips (his cock rose from between his thighs and fell against his belly), to her knees (he clamped his together around hers) to her feet (he pushed his big toe between two of hers: and she held it). "Intense…" she said, pensively. "But I like that."
He put his other arm around her. "I like you better," and decided that he did. Suddenly he raised his head from the blanket, looked down at her again: "Hey… Do you have any birth-control stuff?"
She began to laugh, softly at first, her face turned into his shoulder, then out full, rolling away from him to her back, laughing in the dark.
"What's so funny?" He felt the length where she'd been as cold now as it had been warm.
"Yes. I have taken care of the birth-control… 'stuff,' as you. put it." Her laughter went on, as light as leaf tipping leaf. "It's just your asking," she told him at last, "sounds so gallant. Like manners from another age and epoch. I'm not used to it."
"Oh," he said, still not quite sure he understood. And, anyway, he felt himself drifting again.
He wasn't sure if he actually slept, but came awake later with her arm moving sleepily against his; aroused, he turned to her, and at his movement, she pulled herself half on top of him: she had been lying there, already excited.
They made love again; and fell into sleep like stone — till one or the other of them moved; and once more they woke, clinging.
So they made love once more; then talked — about love, about moons ("You can't see them at all now," she whispered. "Isn't that strange?"), about madness — and then made love again.
And slept again.
And woke.
And made love.
And slept.
III: House of the Ax
Beginning in this tone, for us, is a little odd, but such news stands out, to your editor's mind, as the impressive occurrence in our eccentric history. Ernest Newboy, the most notable English-language poet to emerge from Oceana, was born in Auckland in 1916. Sent to school in England, at twenty-one (he tells us) he came back to New Zealand and Australia to teach for six years, then returned to Europe to work and travel.
Mr Newboy has been three times short-listed for the Nobel Prize, which, if he receives it, will make him one in a line of outstanding figures in the twin fields of diplomacy and letters which includes Asturias, St-John Perse, and Seferis. As a citizen of a comparatively neutral country, he has been visiting the United States at an invitation to sit on the United Nations Cultural Committee which has just adjourned.
Ernest Newboy is also the author of a handful of short stories and novellas, collected and published under the title Stones (Vintage Paperback, 387 pp., $2.95), including the often anthologized long story, The Monument, a disturbing and symbolic tale of the psychological and spiritual dissolution of a disaffected Australian intellectual who comes to live in a war-ravaged German town. Mr Newboy has told us that, though his popular reputation rests on that slim volume of incisive fiction (your editor's evaluation), he considers them essentially experiments of the three years following the close of the War when he passed through a period of disillusionment with his first literary commitment, poetry. If nothing else, the popularity of Stones and The Monument turned attention to the three volumes of poems published in the thirties and forties, brought together in Collected Poetry 1950 (available in Great Britain from Faber and Faber). To repeat something of a catch-phrase that has been echoed by various critics: While writers about him caught the despair of the period surrounding the War, Newboy, more than any other, fixed it in such light that one can lucidly see in it the genesis of so much of the current crisis. From his early twenties, through today, Newboy has produced occasional, literary, and philosophical essays to fill several volumes. They are characterized by a precise and courageous vision. In 1969 he published the book-length poem Pilgrimage, abstruse, surreal, often surprisingly humorous, and, for all its apparent irreverence, a profoundly religious work. After several more volumes of essays, in 1977 the comparatively brief collection of shorter poems written in the thirty-odd years since the War, Rictus, appeared.
A quiet, retiring, scholarly man, Newboy has traveled for most of his life through Europe, North Africa, and the East. His work is studded with images from the Maori and the many cultures he has been exposed to and explored, with his particular personal insight
Newboy arrived in Bellona yesterday morning and is indefinite about the length of his stay. His comment to us when asked about his visit was, after a reticent smile: "Well, a week ago I wasn't intending to come here at all. But I suppose I'm happy I did."
We are honored that a man with such achievement in English letters and a figure of such world admiration should.
"What are you doing?" she mumbled, turning from his side.
"Reading the paper." Grass creased his elbows. He had wiggled free of the blanket as far as his hips.
"Did it come out yet?" She raised her head in a haze of slept-in hair. "It isn't that late?"
"Yesterday's."
She dropped her head back. '"That's the trouble with sleeping out. You can't do it past five o'clock in the morning."
"I bet it's eight." He spread the wrinkled page bottom.
"What—" opened her eyes and squinted—"you reading about?"
"Newboy. That poet."
"Oh, yeah."
"I met him."
"You did?" She raised her head again, then twisted, tearing blankets from his leg. "When?"
"Up at Calkins'."
She pulled up beside him, hot shoulder on his. Under the headline, NEWBOY IN TOWN, was a picture of a thin white-haired man in a dark suit with a narrow tie, sitting in a chair, legs crossed, looking as though there were too much light in his face. "You saw him?"
"When I got beat up. He came out and helped me. From New Zealand; it sounded like he had some sort of accent."
"Told you Bellona was a small town." She looked at the picture. "Hey, how come you didn't get inside then?"
"Somebody else was with him who raised a stink. A spade. Fenster. He's the civil rights guy or something?"
She blinked at him. "You really are out meeting everybody."
"I wish I hadn't met Fenster." He snorted.
"I told you about Calkins' country weekends. Only he has them seven days a week."
"How does he get time to write for the paper?"
She shrugged. "But he does. Or gets somebody to do it for him." She sat up to paw the blankets. "Where did my shirt go?"
He liked her quivering breasts.
"It's under there." He looked back at the paper, but did not read. "I wonder if he's ever had George up there?"
"Maybe. He did that interview thing."
"Mmmm."
Lanya dropped back to the grass. "Hell. It isn't past five o'clock in the morning. You know damn well it isn't."