Lanya said: “It didn’t look like any party to me.”
Newboy, Kidd suddenly saw (and realized at the same time that Lanya saw it too) was upset. Lanya’s response was: “Is the coffee hot? I think I’d like a cup.”
“Certainly.” Newboy stood, went to the urn.
“Go on, Kidd,” Lanya said. “Read another poem,” as Newboy brought her the cup.
“Yes.” The elderly poet, collecting himself, returned to his chair. “Let’s hear another one.”
“All right.” Kidd paged through: they were all in some conspiracy to obliterate, if not Lanya’s news itself, at least its unsettling effect. And he’s got to live here, Kidd thought. There were only three more poems.
After the second, Lanya said: “That one’s one of my favorites.” Her hand moved over torn blue, folded over the wall.
And he read the third. “So now,” Kidd said, primarily to keep something going, “you’ve got to give me some idea of what you think of them, whether they’re good or bad,” a thought which hadn’t occurred to him once since he’d come; only previous mental rehearsal brought it out now.
“I thoroughly enjoyed hearing you read them,” Newboy said. “But for anything else, you simply have to say to yourself, with Mann: I cannot know, and you cannot tell me.”
Kidd smiled, reached for three more cookies on the teawagon, tried to think of something else.
Newboy said: “Why don’t we take a stroll around the grounds? If it were a bright sunny day, it would be quite spectacular I’m sure. But it’s still nice, in an autumnal sort of way.”
Lanya, who was looking into her cup, suddenly raised her eyes. “Yes, that’s an idea. I’d like that.”
And that, Kidd realized, was Newboy’s kindness to Lanya. Somehow after her initial confidence, a moodiness had surfaced, but she had jumped to dispel it with movement and converse.
She put down her saucer, got down from the balustrade.
Kidd started to ask her: “Are you gonna take your…?”
But obviously she wasn’t.
What, he wondered as they walked along the terrace and turned down the low steps, would be the emotional detritus from the violence upstairs in himself? But, as he wondered, Lanya, at the bottom step, took hold of his little finger in a hot, moist grip.
They walked across grass till rock rose from under it.
They climbed stone steps. They crossed a bridge with wrought railings.
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.