“Can you see anything?” the other asked, then giggled—the girl in maroon jeans who had come with them from the nest: She pushed out between the brush.
Somebody behind her was looking all around: that was Spitt.
The other girl Kid first recognized as one of Roger’s guests. Even in the three-quarter dark she looked rumpled. The second recognition was that it was Milly: Her red hair fell over a dark, velvet jumper. She wore something metallic beneath it, unbuttoned now. Copperhead, a hand on each of her shoulders, guided her out.
Lanya said, “Lord!” and laughed.
“Oh!” Milly said. “It’s you all!” in dissimilar accent, but identical inflection, as Glass. She pulled from Copperhead.
She and Lanya clutched one another in a fit of giggles.
Copperhead frowned at Kid and shook his head.
Kid shrugged.
“I can’t find my comb!” Milly finally got out. “Isn’t it amazing! I can’t find my comb.”
Lanya looked back at Kid: “Here, I’ll see you in a little while.”
Then, her arm around Milly’s shoulder, they fled the garden.
“Man,” Glass said. “This is a pretty good party.”
Copperhead, deprived of Milly, settled beside the first girl. He bent to whisper to her. She whispered back.
“God damn, nigger!” Spitt said. “You don’t do nothin’ but fuck, do you?”
“Shit,” Glass said. “I watched your pink ass poppin’ up and down there a pretty good long while.”
“Yeah, sure.” Spitt said. “But, man, you were in this one, then that one, then this one again—God damn!”
Glass just chuckled.
Then both of them saw that Copperhead and the girl were moving off.
“Hey!” Spitt called and started after them.
Glass loped to their other side.
Phalanxed by black and white, the girl and Copperhead left.
“Come on.” Denny pulled away from Kid, who followed, wondering what in all that interchange had interested Denny most. But as soon as Denny got between the hedges—one shoulder feathered with shadow, the other bright under the lights of June—he stopped to adjust the control box. “There.”
Nowhere, Kid was sure, had he seen John. But then he hadn’t recognized Mildred before.
Guests surging Novemberwards cut them off from Copperhead and the others.
After he’d left Denny, Kid thought: But the whole point was to spend some time with him. Kid sucked his teeth, annoyed with himself, and stepped onto another bridge.
The lights on Kid’s end worked.
Frank came toward him, grinning hugely, squinting slightly, face full of floodlight.
I must be in silhouette, Kid thought.
“Hey!” Frank said. “It is a really good party they’re having for you. Congratulations on everything. I’m having a great time.”
“Yeah,” Kid said. “Me too.”
Beyond Frank, beyond the bridge, Kid saw a flash of metallic kelly. Lanya was still with Milly, whose complicated hair was now in place. They were still laughing. They were still going away.
“You see my book?”
“Sure.”
“What’d you think of my poems? I was sort of interested in what you’d think of them. I mean because you’re a real poet.”
Frank raised his eyebrows. “That’s really—Well…” He lowered them. “Would you like me to be honest? I make the offer, because I guess you’ve been getting a lot of compliments, especially here at your party. And real honesty is going to be a little rare—maybe this evening isn’t the place for it and we should save it for some night at Teddy’s.”
“No, go on,” Kid said. “I guess you didn’t think they were all that great?”
“You know…” Frank grasped the rail with one stiffened arm and leaned. “I was wondering what I was going to say to you about them if you ever really asked. I’ve been thinking about you a lot. A lot more, I guess, than you’ve been thinking about me. But I keep hearing about you all the time, people always talking about you. And it occurs to me that I don’t know you at all. But you’ve always seemed like a good person. And I thought it would be good if somebody was just straightforward with you, you know?” He laughed. “And there I was, starting to say, ‘They’re great,’ like everyone else. That’s really not my character. I think it’s better to be honest.”
“What did you think?” Kid heard the coldness in his own voice, and was astonished; listening to himself, he felt suddenly trapped.
“I didn’t like them.”
It’s his smile, Kid thought and thought after that: No, you’re just trying to tell yourself it’s the smile you don’t like. He said, He didn’t like them, that’s all. “What’s wrong with them?”
Frank snorted a laugh and looked down at the rocks. “You really want to know?”
“Yeah,” Kid said. “I want to know what you think.”
“Well.” Frank looked up. “The language is extremely artificial. There’s no relation, or even tension, between it and any sort of real speech. Most of the poems are pompous and over-emotional—I’m sure you were sincere about every one of them. But sincerity by itself, without skill, usually just results in mawkishness. The lack of emotional focus makes subjects that could have been interesting into Grand Guignol melodrama. They end up coming off pretty banal. The method’s cliche, and often, so is the diction. And they’re dull.” After a silence in which Kid tried to figure the varieties of unpleasantness he was experiencing, Frank continued: “Look, you once told me you’d only been writing poetry a couple of weeks. Didn’t it ever strike you as a little improbable that you could just jump into it and the first batch you produced would be worth reading? I guess the thing that’s really got me upset over the whole thing is all this business.” He gestured at guests both sides of the bridge. “Tak once told me you were as old as he is—two years older than me! Kid, most of the people here think you’re seventeen or eighteen! That, along with the poor man’s Hell’s Angel bit, and all the gossip about the various kinky things you get into—people are just here for the show. As far as most of them are concerned, Brass Orchids is like a performance by a talking dog. They find it so cunning that he speaks at all, they couldn’t care less what he actually said.”
“Un…” Kid had intended that to be an Oh. “And you—” which wasn’t what he’d wanted to say either, but he went on because he had to make sure—“you think the poems aren’t very good?”
Frank said: “I think they’re very bad.”
“Wow,” Kid said, gravely. “And you think that’s all the poems mean to any of the people here?”
“To most people—” Frank put his hand, stiff-armed, on the rail again—“poetry doesn’t mean anything at all. From a couple of things you said to me at the bar, though—about what you read and what you felt—I suspect it does mean something to you. Which is why I keep bothering to put my foot in my mouth the way I’ve been.”
“No,” Kid said, “go on,” thinking: But he hasn’t stopped, has he?
Kid’s shadow cut Frank’s face and purple shirt down the middle.
“With all the variety that’s part of current poetry—” Frank blinked his visible, squinting eye—“perhaps it’s silly for me to be passing judgments like this. There are lots of kinds of poetry. And sure, some kinds I personally prefer to others. I’ll be honest: the kind that yours is trying to be isn’t a kind I find very interesting at its best. Which is maybe the reason I should have kept my mouth shut in the first place. Well, look, I’m not passing judgments. I’m just talking about my own reactions. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that, as far as I can tell—and I admit I’m biased—it seems pretty clear what you wanted to do in the poems. And pretty clear that you didn’t come close. I mean, that last one, in the clunky blank verse—now that may or may not be a good poem; I can’t tell. It’s unreadable.” Frank’s smile was wan. “But you have to admit, that’s a stumbling block.”
Kid grunted what he had intended as polite assent. It sounded more like he’d been elbowed in the liver. And that’s not, he thought, what I want to sound like. “Maybe some time at Teddy’s or someplace you could go over one or two of them with me and tell me what you think is—”