A waterfall rushed beside them, stilled beneath them.
“This is April,” Mr. Newboy informed them from the plaque in the bridge’s center.
They crossed it.
The corner bit Kidd’s heel.
“You must know these quite well,” Newboy said to Lanya.
“Not really. But I like them.” She nodded.
“I’ve always meant to ask Roger why he has September and July in each other’s place.”
“Are they?” Lanya asked. “I must have walked around here fifty times and never noticed!”
They left the bridge to stroll under huge-leafed catalpas, past bird baths, past a large bronze sundial, tarnished brown and blank of shadow.
Stone benches were set out before the hedges in August.
Beyond the trees he could see the lawns of September. They passed through high stone newels where a wrought iron gate was loose from the bottom hinge, and, finally, once more, they were on the gravel driveway curving through great, squat evergreens.
Mr. Newboy walked them to the front gate. By the green guard-shack, they exchanged Good-byes, So longs, I really enjoyed myselfs, You must come agains, and more good-byes, during which, Kidd felt, as the gate-latch clanked behind them, each person had spoken one time too many.
He turned on the sidewalk to take Lanya’s hand, sure she would bring up the shattered Observatory wing the moment silence settled.
They walked.
She didn’t.
After a dozen steps she said, “You want to write, don’t you?” which, he realized, was what this compulsion to articulation was.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I’ll stop off at the bar, maybe do something there.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m going back to the park, first. But I’ll come by Teddy’s later.”
“Okay.”
She ambled beside him, shoulder brushing his, sometimes looking at the houses beside them, sometimes at the pavement before them, sometimes glancing up at a willow-lapped wall.
He said: “You want to go off and play your harmonica, don’t you?” knowing it by the same pattern of silent cues she had known his desire. He put his arm around her shoulder; their walks fell into sync.
“Yes.”
He thought his own thoughts, occasionally glancing to wonder what hers were.
Silent in the circuit of the year, speech is in excess of what I want to say, or believe. On the dismal air I sketch my own restraint, waking reflexively, instant to instant. The sensed center, the moment of definition, the point under such pressure it extrudes a future and a past I apprehend only as a chill, extends the overlay of injury with some retentive, tenuous disease, the refuse of brick-and-mortar-grinding violence. How much easier all machination were such polarized perception to produce so gross an ideal.
Speech, the notebook’s owner had written across from the page where Kidd wrote now, is always in excess of poetry as print…
“Hello.”
He looked up from the counter (in the cage the silver dancer bowed to thin applause and flicked through the black curtain), then down as the dog gave a short bark.
“Muriel—!”
“Hello, Madame Brown. I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Odd: I haven’t seen you either.” She laughed, high to low. “God, this place is dead tonight. May I sit down? You can pretend to buy an old woman a drink.”
“Sure—”
“But I’m interrupting your work.”
He shrugged. “I’m sort of at a stopping point.”
As Madame Brown sat, the bartender brought her usual and replaced Kidd’s beer. “What are you writing. Another poem?”
“A long one. It’s in the natural rhythm of English speech.”
She raised her eyebrow, and reflexively he closed the book; then wished he hadn’t. “How are Mr. and Mrs. Richards, and June?”
“Oh.” She flattened her knuckles to the wood. “Like always.”
“They like their new place?”
She nodded. “I was over there for dinner night before last. But this evening they’re having other guests, apparently. It was quite amusing to watch Mary try and make sure I didn’t just accidentally drop around tonight.” She didn’t laugh. “Oh, yes, they’re quite settled in now.” She sat back. “I wish there were some more people. The city soaks them up; or maybe people are just…leaving?”
Kidd put the orchid on the cover of his book where it balanced on the three longest prongs.
“I guess you have to carry that around, don’t you.” Madame Brown laughed. “Perhaps I ought to get one. Perhaps I’ve just been very lucky in this dangerous city…?”
From opposite sides he moved his hands together till his blunt fingertips bumped in the cage, and the blade points tugged back the skin between, burning now, about to cut. “I’ve got to go back to see them.” He separated his fingers a little. “About my money.”
“You haven’t been paid?”
“Five dollars, the first day.” He looked at her. “That morning I met you in the park, you said they’d told you they’d pay five an hour.”
She nodded and said something softly. He thought he heard “…poor kid,” but could not tell if “poor” were preceded by “you” or followed by comma and capital.
“How did they tell you?”
She looked at him questioningly.
“What did they say to you, exactly?”
She turned her frown to her glass. “They told me that if I found a young man who might help them with their moving, I should tell him they would pay him five dollars an hour.”
“Mr. Richards?”
“That’s right.”
“It’s one of the reasons I took the job. Though, Lord knows, you don’t need it here. But I guess they knew what they were doing, then?”
“You should have spoken to him. He’d have given you some…thing.”
“I want him to give me what he said he was going to—shit, I couldn’t ask him that last day.”
“Yes, it would have been a little odd.”
“I’m going to have to go back and talk to him, I guess.” He opened his notebook. “I think I’m going to write some more now, ma’am.”
“I wish there were more people here.” She pushed back from the bar.
“Well, it’s early.”
But she wasn’t listening.
He went through the pages till he found:…as print is in excess of words. I want to write but can fix with words only the desire itself. I suppose I should take some small comfort in the fact that, for the few writers I have actually known, publication, in direct proportion to the talent of each, seems to have been an occurrence always connected with catastrophe. Then again, perhaps they were simply a strange group of…
“Ba-da,” he whispered and turned over the notebook to the blank page, “ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da.”
The letter was still in the mailbox.
Among the bent and broken doors, red, white, and blue edging crossed this one, intact grille. He thought he could see the inking of a return address. I can pretend, he thought, it says Edward Richards, from a hotel in Seattle, Washington, off Fremont Avenue, on 43rd. He could make some things appear like that, when it was this dim…He turned and went to the elevator.
Someone, at least, had mopped the lobby.
He pressed the button.
Wind hissed from the empty shaft. He stepped into the other.
He’d come out in the pitch-dark hall before—as the door went k-chunk—he realized habit had made him push seventeen, not nineteen. He scowled in the dark and walked forward. His shoulder brushed a wall. He put out his hand and felt a door. He walked forward till he felt another.
Then he stopped—because of the smell. He scowled harder.
By the time he reached the next door (three, four doors on that side of the hall?) the odor was nauseous and sharp. “Jesus…” he whispered; his breath echoed.
He made himself go on.
The next door, which had to be the Richards’ old apartment, swung in under his hand. The stench made him reel and lose kinesthetic focus. He hurried back, twice banging walls, one with his left shoulder, one with his right.
He was wondering how long it would take him to feel for the elevator bell…