Kid turned over the next galley. “You’re talking to yourself.” Eyes down, he wondered what expression was on Newboy’s face.
“Most certainly,” Newboy said after a longish pause.
“You’re really that scared your own stuff isn’t any good.”
Newboy paused.
In the pause, Kid considered looking up but didn’t.
“When I’m not actually working, I have no choice: I must consider it worthless. But when I’m engaged in it, writing, revising, shaping and polishing, by the same process, I have to consider it the most important thing in the world. And I’m very suspect of any other attitude.”
Kid looked up now: the expression leaving Newboy’s face was serious. But laughter marks were replacing it. “Ah, when I was a young man, as young as I once thought you were, I recall I labored with incredible diligence over a translation of ‘Le Bateau ivre.’ Here I am at the respectable, if a bit garrulous, threshold of old age, and last night, in the front library at Roger’s, after everyone else had gone up, I sat there working—by hurricane lantern: the electricity is off in that wing now—on ‘Le Cimetière marin.’ The impulse was thoroughly the same.” He shook his head, still laughing. “Have you found any mistakes?”
“Um,” Kid said. “Not in the first three sheets.”
“I spent yesterday and most of today checking it against your fair copy. I’ve put a couple of queries here and there. You’ll get to them as you go through.”
“Where?”
“The first one’s near the front.” Newboy set down his cup and leaned over Kid’s shoulder. “Next sheet. There. It’s a poem you had a loose copy of on blue paper, just stuck in the notebook. It looked like somebody else had written it out for you. Did you perhaps intend a comma in the third line? I checked it back with the version in your notebook, and neither one has it. Except for the phrasing, I wouldn’t have—”
“The copy in the notebook has a comma, doesn’t it?” Kid frowned and flipped handwritten pages. His eyes stumbled among words, trying not to be caught between any two, till he found the notebook page. “It’s not there.” He looked up. “I thought I put one in.”
“Then you did intend it. Here, use my pencil. Just cross out the question mark I put by the line. I had a feeling you might—what’s the matter?”
“I thought I had a comma there. But I didn’t.”
“Oh, I’m always discovering I’ve left out words I was sure I wrote down in the first draft—”
“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 effect.
Two emotions clawed the inside of Kid’s skull. The fear, as it rose, he questioned: Is this some trick of the 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 had 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…
Tensing his shoulder, 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 anymore 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!”
Kid 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 half-point of the next galley, Newboy mused: “Perhaps it’s good you’re not going to write anymore: 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?”