Dhalgren (98 page)

"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 of 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 youVe 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 of 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—"

"No." Frank shook his hand, fingers straight, and his head, face a-scowl. "No, no. It isn't that kind of… Look, I can't tell you how to be a poet. I can just tell you what I think. That's all."

Kid grunted again.

"Don't take it as anything more than that."

Do you say thanks, now? Kid wondered. You say thanks for compliments. "Thanks." It sounded the most tentative question.

Frank nodded, looked over the rail again.

Kid stepped around him and walked toward the end of the bridge. Halfway, like a tic, he thought Frank was about to tap his shoulder. He turned, and realized, turning, it was some untransformed kernel, perfectly hostile, trying to emerge. Facing into the lights of May, Kid could not tell if Frank looked at him or away.

Squinting, Kid swallowed the thought unworded and went on into the high paths of January; from which he could look down on the crowded terrace.

They're all here, Kid thought, for me! He was desperately uncomfortable. Frank's smile—it had made his criticism seem as though he thought he was getting away with something. Well, that still didn't change
what
he'd said. Somebody else, Kid remembered but couldn't remember who, had said they'd liked them… and decided that wasn't what he wanted to think about now. But with the resolve erupted memories of seven other reactions: Puzzled, indifferent, interests fleeting or otherwise. He recalled Newboy's complex noncommittal and sensed in it betrayal—not so much Newboy's but his own—of something the poet had tried to tell and he had not been able to understand.

"This is like…" he started out loud, heard himself, and laughed. This was like the night in the park when his fantasized reception had pressed so heavily he'd been unable to write.

He laughed again.

A couple smiled and nodded.

His look became surprised as he noticed them. But they passed.

I want a drink, he thought, and saw he was already heading for the bar. I really want a drink very much.

This isn't, Kid found himself repeating, what it should be about. Repeating it for the sixteenth or seventeenth time, he sat on the stone rail, looking across at the table and the bottles, still without a glass.

"Hi!" Then her expression (and handfuls of scarlet fell down among green fires) changed. "What happened to you?"

His hands went out against her hips: Around one, blue puddled, around the other, green.

"Am I bleeding?"

He slid them back to her buttocks, thinking, how warm she is; lay his face against her warm belly. She took hold of his hair. Before his blinking, black scales flittered to silver, to scarlet, to green.

"No. But you look like you just walked into a wall and now you're waiting for it to go away."

Kid made a sound supposed to launch the next sentence; it came out another grunt. So he backed off it and started again a little higher. "I was just… talking with Frank. About my… poems."

She pulled loose and hoisted herself up on the wall beside him, shoulder against his shoulder, leg against his leg, to become a deviling glitter at the corner of his eye while he stared at his ruined thumbs, now pressed together on his meshed fists' calloused drum. She asked: "What did he say?"

"He didn't like them, very much." She waited.

"He said everybody here thought I was a talking dog. They all think I'm some sort of dumb nut, that I'm ten years younger than I am, and they'd all be just as astonished that I even spelled my name right—if I had a name…"

"Kid…" which came out much softer than his voice. She put her hand over his. He raised one thumb. She caught it in her fist. "That's fucking nasty."

"Maybe it's fucking true."

"It isn't!" Her voice told him she was frowning: "That's Frank? The one who's supposed to have had a book of poems published out in California?"

Asking who else it could have been, he said: "Yeah?"

She answered: "He's jealous, Kid!"

"Huh? of what," which was a statement, not a question.

"You're both poets. You both have a book published. Look at all the attention you're getting. I doubt if this happened when
his
book came out."

"That's awfully easy. Besides, I don't care
why
he said it, I just wish I knew if it
were
true—Oh, shit! Calkins didn't even read the poems when he decided to publish them. Maybe he did when they finally came out and was so embarrassed he decided not to show up this evening."

"No! That's silly—"

"And you remember how Newboy kept beating around the bush whenever I asked him if they were—"

"He
enjoyed
them—"

"Shit! He enjoyed
me!
If he was trying to say anything, he was trying to say he couldn't make the distinction."

"And
what
makes you to think Frank is any more capable of making it? He resents you, he resents the way everybody has fixated on you: And then he tries to read the poems. At least Mr Newboy was honest enough to admit he couldn't make the separation. Hell, I like them!"

"You're biased."

"You think Frank isn't? Look, they don't—" She let go his thumb.

He looked over.

Her fists were knotted above her tidewise, swirling lap. "We're going about this wrong." Her bottom lip moved over her teeth, to fix her mouth for some new tone of voice. "He is right. About a lot of it, anyway."

The simple hurt started in his throat. One swallow dragged it down to his stomach's floor.

"He doesn't like your poems and he's probably sincere. About not liking them. Thelma likes them, and she's probably just as sincere."

"I was trying to remember her name. It was sort of hard."

"It should be just as hard to remember his. Being sincere doesn't mean they're right. It just means they believe they are."

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah. Sure. That's what Frank said, about the poems."

"Sorry."

"He's right about the people, about what everybody here thinks."

"Not everybody," she said. "I suspect not even half. Do you care what people think?"

"I care…" He paused. "…
about
people. The people here. So if they think that, I've got to care about that too. And I wish they didn't think what he said."

She made a sound of assent.

"Maybe we shouldn't have come to this party," he said.

"You want to go?"

"No. I want to stay and see what happens." Kid opened a hand on each knee. "It's something not to do again, maybe. But I don't think I want to leave in the middle. I'm learning too much." He pushed from the rail and turned to the bar.

Denny said, "What's the—?"

Kid put his arms around him: Denny's hands came up first to push, then all of a sudden went tight across Kid's back. Kid pushed his face against the dry, hot neck and thought: My face must feel cold. He held the hot shoulders and thought: My hands…

Denny moved once, was still, moved again; let his arms half down, waiting to pull away.

Kid raised his head.

Two people passing looked away.

Kid stepped back.

Denny asked, "Are you all right?" then glanced at Lanya.

Her eyebrows moved to answer him.

"I'm okay," Kid said and wondered if he'd contradicted her.

She asked "You're sure?"

Kid put his hand on her bright knee. "I'm okay. Somebody said some nasty things about my poems. Whether they're true or not, it made me mad as hell."