Newboy fixed his eyes on Kidd’s. Kidd smiled and felt uncomfortable. Then he felt belligerent, which maybe tainted the smile. He was going to say, Do you always rap like this when somebody…
The notebook suddenly slipped from Newboy’s knees. The poet bent, but Kidd snatched it up first.
Its back cover had fallen open. Kidd frowned at the final block of handwriting that ran off the page bottom:
…The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to
“Do you…” Kidd’s hand fell on the page. He looked up slowly.
The chain snaked around his wrist up his arm. It crossed his belly, his chest, between the vest flaps. “Do you think that’s what they mean?”
“Pardon me?”
Kidd hooked his thumb beneath the chain and pulled it. “These. Do you think that’s what they’re supposed to mean?”
Mr. Newboy laughed. “I haven’t the faintest idea! You have them. I don’t. I’ve seen people with them, here, but no. No. I was just using them. Oh, no! I would never presume to say what they meant.”
Kidd looked down again. “Do you always go on like that to people who bring you poems?” he asked, with nowhere near the belligerence he had intended: He grinned.
Newboy was still laughing. “All right.” He waved his hand. “Read some of them to me, now.” He sat forward, took another sip, then put his cup down. “No, really, I want to hear some of them out loud.”
“Okay,” Kidd said, expecting to feel resentment, but experiencing a different anxiety altogether. He noted with concern, once more, the number of pages left with free sides.
“Read the one about the dog-thing. I liked that one.”
“Murielle?”
Newboy nodded, hands together in his lap.
Kidd turned toward the front of the book.
He began to read.
Breathlessness left about the third line. Somewhere, something like enjoyment bloomed under his tongue and, rather than tripping it, somehow made it more sensitive, so that, without pause he realized how the vowels in both loom and flow took off from the same point but went different places. He found his face hollowing for the more resonant tones. He let them move the muscles about his mouth till staccato t’s and k’s riddled the final line and made him smile.
“Lovely,” Newboy said. “In a rather horrifying way. Read the one in front of it.”
He read, and lost himself in the movements of his mouth, till a momentary convocation in the ear stunned him into a shriller voice. Then the long sounds quieted the answer.
“There are two voices in dialogue in that one, aren’t there,” Newboy commented at the finish. “I didn’t pick it up just glancing at it.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Maybe I should set them apart on the page—”
“No, no!” Mr. Newboy sat up and motioned. “No, believe me, it isn’t necessary. It would be perfectly clear in a page of print. It was my attention reading, believe me. Just go on.”
He read.
What had come to him as images (among which he had pecked with tongue tip and pen point) returned, shocked, luminous—sometimes more, sometimes less vivid than memory, but so rich he thrust them out with his tongue to keep from trying to eat them.
“It’s so much fun,” Newboy said, “that you enjoy your own poems so much. Have you ever noticed how free verse tends to turn into iambic pentameter all by itself? Especially by people who haven’t written much poetry.”
“Sir?”
“Well, it’s only natural. It’s the natural rhythm of English speech. You know, when the line goes ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da, ba-da? Oh, now don’t sit there and look confused. Read some more. I’m not going to get pedantic again. I’m enjoying this. Really.”
Kidd was happily embarrassed. His eyes dropped—to the page. Kidd read; turned; read…Several times he thought he must be going on awfully long. But Newboy motioned for another, and once asked to hear both versions (“I saw that you had two when I was looking through…” and, after the earlier version: “Well, most of your revisions are in the right direction.”) and had him reread several more. More confident, Kidd chose others now, went back to one he had left out, then skipped ahead, gathering some enjoyment that was not pride, was greatest when he was least aware of the man eating cookies before him, was a supportive pattern in the caverns under the tongue.
He stopped to glance at Newboy—
The poet was frowning at something not him.
Lanya said (in a voice that made Kidd turn, frowning) ten feet down the terrace: “I…I didn’t mean to interrupt.” It was blue, it was shredded, it was silk.
“What’s that?”
“My…dress.” She came forward carrying it over her arm. “I looked upstairs in the Observatory Wing…for my dress, while you were reading. Christ, it’s a mess up there!”
Mr. Newboy frowned. “I didn’t even know anybody was staying there.”
“It doesn’t look like anybody is,” she said, “now.”
“Is that on the third floor?”
Lanya nodded.
“Roger said something about not using that section—the doors were closed, weren’t they? I thought it was something about plumbing repairs.”
“They were closed but they weren’t locked.” Lanya said. “I just went right in. They were using it when I was here—I was just looking for the room Phil and I stayed in. But…the carpets have been pulled up off the floor; and torn. It looks like somebody yanked the light fixtures out of the ceiling, with about a foot of plaster each. In the bathroom off our bedroom, the sink’s just sitting in the middle of the floor, and all that lovely blue Victorian tilework has been smashed. There’re two holes in the wall that look like they’ve been put there with a battering ram—and somebody’s slashed all the mattresses!” She looked down at the shredded material. “And my dress. It was balled up in a corner of the closet…the clothes bars were all pulled down and the clothes hook had been hammered back and bent or something.” She held the dress up. “Somebody had to do this—it looks like somebody’s been at it with a razor! But what in the world for?”
“Oh, dear!” Mr. Newboy said. “Why, that’s perfectly—”
“I mean it doesn’t matter,” Lanya said. “About the dress. When I left it, I didn’t think I was coming back for it. But why in the world—?” She looked at Kidd, at Newboy. Suddenly she said, “Oh, hey—I didn’t mean to interrupt!” She pulled the dress together into a ball, leaned back against the balustrade. “Please, go on. Don’t stop reading, Kidd—”
Kidd said, “Let’s go up and take a look at—”
“No,” Lanya said, surprisingly loud.
Newboy blinked.
“No, I really don’t want to go back up there.”
“But…?” Kidd frowned.
“Roger did ask us all not to go in that wing,” Newboy said, uncomfortably. “But I had no idea it was—”
“I closed the doors.” Lanya looked at the blue silk in her fist. “I should have left this up there.”
“Maybe some wild party got out of hand?” Kidd asked.