Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

“Sir, maybe if—?”

Newboy moved his hand, looked back down. “It starts out mirrored on both sides: initially reassuring, but ultimately distracting. It rather gets in the way. But as you go on, the silvering starts to wear. Now you can see more, and more, directly through. Really—” Newboy glanced up quickly, then returned his eyes to the page—“it’s a lens. The transition period is almost always embarrassing, however. While you are still being dazzled with bits of your own reflection, you begin to see that it might, after all, be one-way glass—with a better view afforded from out there! Still, once used to it, you find the view more interesting. With only a little practice, you get so you can read both legends at once, without having to stop what you’re doing to turn the thing around. Oh, and how many, many times you came close to clashing into someone you thought buck-naked only to find his Shield had grown transparent as your own. You become chary of judging too quickly who still has, and who has discarded, his. And when some youngster, glitteringly protected, through malice or, worse, some incomprehensible vision of kindness, shouts up at the dreadfully stark crag on which you happen to be panting, or down into the fetid ravine from which you are manfully trying to clamber with only one arm free, ‘You’re naked, don’t you understand?’ you may, momentarily, squint to make sure the double legend is still etched before you, but you are not liable to waste much energy setting him straight unless your own vision of kindness is as incomprehensible as his. There are more important things to do. As best you can, you go about doing them. But things still interrupt: now your eyes are deviled by a recurrent, polychrome flash. You try to ignore it. But its frequency increases. From habit, you check the cut runes to make sure. But, frankly, during the moments of illumination, it is practically impossible for you to read them, much less decide whether they still contain sense. The thing you have been baring, not to mention staring through all this time, has become an immense prism.” Newboy leaned back now, his eyes somewhere on the underside of the balcony. “Did I say the first transition was embarrassing? This one is monstrous. And it is the same fear: one-way glass! If only you didn’t remember all those other, endless, elderly ladies with their water color sets, the old men with their privately printed poems, whom one had, out of politeness, brought flowers for or invited out to dinner, as well, even though their heads were wrapped in tin foil and they babbled ceaselessly about Poetry and Truth. After all, they were nice in a useless sort of way, which is, after all, the only way to be truly nice. You even could discern two or three of the proper letters among the foil folds, admittedly cut from cardboard and taped there with sticking plaster. Are all these humbling fireworks some sort of cruel second childhood, a defect in the eye: You begin to suspect, as you gaze through this you-shaped hole of insight and fire, that though it is the most important thing you own—never deny that for an instant—it has not shielded you from anything terribly important. The only consolation is that though one could have thrown it away at any time, morning or night, one didn’t. One chose to endure. Without any assurance of immortality, or even competence, one only knows one has not been cheated out of the consolation of carpenters, accountants, doctors, ditch-diggers, the ordinary people who must do useful things to be happy. Meander along, then, half blind and a little mad, wondering when you actually learned—was it before you began?—the terrifying fact that had you thrown it away, your wound would have been no more likely to heal: indeed, in an affluent society such as this, you might even have gone on making songs, poems, pictures, and getting paid. The only difference would have been—and you learned it listening to all those brutally unhappy people who did throw away theirs—and they do, after all, comprise the vast and terrifying majority—that without it, there plainly and starkly would have been nothing there; no, nothing at all.”

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.

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.

“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…

K-chunk…k-chunk…k-chunk. One of the doors had caught on something. Between k-chunks, reminiscent of his own breath, came wind.

He paused, disoriented in the putrid dark. The left elevator door? The right? Then fear, like the lightest forefinger, tickled his shoulder. He nearly bent double, and staggered against the wall; which was not a wall, because it gave.

Inside the exit door, he caught the banister, and stumbled down.

Faint light greyed the glass a flight below. Gulping fresh breath, he came out in the hall of sixteen. One bulb burned at the far end.

His next gulp checked explosive giggles. Kidd shook his head. Well, what the fuck were they supposed to do with it? He started down the hall, grinning and disgusted. Still, then why did I go to all that to drag it up?

When he knocked on the door, rattlings suggested it was open. When he pushed it in, a girl caught her breath. “Hey, who’s home?” he asked.

“Who…who is it?” She sounded afraid and exhausted. The window let in dark blue over the iron bunks, piles of clothing, an overturned stool.

“It’s the Kid.” He was still grinning.

“They’re all gone,” she said, from the muddle of blankets. “There’s just me. Please…they’re all gone.”

“I’m not going to do anything.” He stepped in.

She pushed herself up on her elbow, brushed hair back from her face and blinked bruised eyes.

“You’re…the one who was sick?”

“I’m better,” she whined. “Really, I’m better. Just leave me alone.”

“Thirteen, and the others? How long have they been gone?”

She let herself fall, sighing.

“Are they coming back?”

“No. Look, just—”

“Do you have food and things?”

“Please…yes, I’m all right. They split a couple of days ago. What do you want?”

Because he had once feared her, he stepped closer. “Don’t you have any light?”

“Lights, huh?” Plurality and inflection baffled him. “Look, I’ll be all right, just go away. Lights? Over there…” She gestured toward the mannequin.

He went to see what she pointed at. “Has Faust been coming to check you out? He was all worried about you last time I was here.” Bald plaster breasts were snaked with chain.

“Yeah, he comes. Look around the neck.” That was further instruction. “Some guy left them. He ain’t gonna come back.” She coughed. “They don’t got no battery.”

He lifted the heavy links from the joined neck. The smile was paint streaked and chipped under one eye. “Lights? Light shield?” The thing linked to the bottom clicked on the plaster chin, nose, forehead.

“All right. Now just go, will you?”

“It doesn’t have a battery?”

She only sighed, rustled her covers.

“All right, if you say you’re okay, I’ll go.” Something in him…thrilled? That’s what he’d heard people say. The fear was low, the physical reaction runneled and grave. He dared the mirror:

Her bunk was filled with shadow and crumpled blankets.

“All right,” he repeated. “Good-bye. Tell Thirteen or Denny if they come back—”

She sighed; she rustled. “They’re not coming back.”

So he shut the door behind him. Ominous: but what would he have had her tell? He put the chain around his neck. A blade snagged the links. He pulled his bladed hand away.

Light shield?

The thing linked to the bottom was spherical, the diameter of a silver dollar, black, and set with lenses. The heavy links crossed the brass chain and glass bits. He ran his thumb around the back of his vest, shrugged the lapels closed, and walked up the hall.

The elevator opened.

Rising in the dark, “19” suspended orange at eye level, he thought about batteries and rubbed his naked stomach.

At the Richards’ new apartment door he heard voices. A woman, neither Mrs. Richards nor June, laughed.

He rang.

Carpet-muffled heels approached.

“Yes?” Mrs. Richards asked. “Who is it?” The peekhole clicked. “It’s Kidd!”

The chain rattled, the door swung back.

“Why, come in! Bill, Ronnie, Lynn; this is the young man we were telling you about!” Air from the opened balcony doors beat the candle flames: light flapped through the foyer. “Come in, come in. Kidd, some friends of Arthur’s…from work. Arthur? They came over for dinner. Would you like some coffee with us? And dessert?”

“Look, if you’re busy, just let me talk to Mr. Richards a minute?”

“Kidd?” Mr. Richards called from the dining room. “Come on in, will you?”

Kidd sought for an expression but, finding nothing adequate for his impatience, came, patiently, inside; he settled on a frown.

Mrs. Richards’ smile was perfect.

Kidd went into the dining room.

The woman sitting next to Mr. Richards was doing something with her earring. “You write poems, Mary told us. Are you going to read us some?”

“Huh? Oh. No, I didn’t bring any.”

The man across from her took his leather-patched elbows from the tablecloth. “That’s a rather dangerous looking thing you did bring.”

“Oh.” Kidd looked at the orchid. “Well, it’s almost dark out.” He snapped the band open, shucked the finger harness, while the people up and down the table chuckled.

From where he stood, the flame at the white wax taper tip covered June’s left eye. She smiled.

“Here,” Mrs. Richards said behind him. “Here’s a chair. Move down a little bit, Sam. Pour him a cup of coffee, Arthur.”

“What do you think I’m doing, honey,” Mr. Richards said with total affability.

A large woman in blue corduroy began to talk again with the man on her left. The cup passed from hand to hand.

The woman in the green dress smiled, but couldn’t keep her eyes (pale grey) from flicking at the steel cage he had set on the corner of the tablecloth. She put the cup beside it. Mrs. Richards held the back of her chair, about to sit. “Really, just like I was telling you, Kidd absolutely saved our lives. He was such a help. We were beginning to think of him as part of the family.”

At the other end of the table, a large man rubbed one finger against his nose and said, “Mary, you’ve been about to bring in that dessert for fifteen minutes now, and I’m on my second cup of coffee.”

Mrs. Richards laughed. “I have been talking on. Here, I’ll bring it in right now.”

June, her small fists whispering in white taffeta, rounded the table for the kitchen.

The man beside the woman in green leaned around her and said, “Mary’s just been going on all about you and your poems. You just live downtown, near the park?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Where do you live?”

“Ah-ha.” Still leaning forward he fingered the collar of his sports shirt. “Now, that’s a very good question.” His nails were not clean and the side of the collar was frayed. “That’s a very good question indeed.” He sat back, still laughing.

Still plucking at her earring, the woman at Mr. Richards’ right said, “You don’t look like a poet. You look more like one of those people they’re always writing about in the Times.”

“Scorpions?” said the very blond man (tweed and leather elbow patches) over his clasped hands. “His hair isn’t long enough.”

“His hair is long,” insisted the earring plucker.

“Long enough,” explained the blond man and turned to look for a napkin fallen by June’s vacated chair.

Kidd grinned at the woman. “Where do you live?”

She stopped plucking, looked surprised. “Ralph and I used to be out on Temple. But now we’ve been staying—” and stopped because somebody said something on her other side, or may have even elbowed her.

“You like it better there?” Kidd asked, vaguely curious as to where Temple was.

“If you can like anything in Bellona, right now!”

Mrs. Richards entered with a large glass bowl.

“What is that?” the man on Mr. Richards’ left asked. “Jello?”

“No, it isn’t jello!” Mrs. Richards set the bowl before Mr. Richards. “It’s wine jelly.” She frowned at the purple sea. “Port. The recipe didn’t mention any sugar. But I think that was probably a mistake, so I put some in, anyway.”

Beside Mrs. Richards, June held a bowl heaped with whipped cream, glossy as the taffeta. Wrapped around one wrist, glittering in the candlelight…No, Kidd thought, she wouldn’t have taken them off the…But the idea made him grin.

“Do you want to serve that, Arthur?”

At his corner Kidd contemplated being belligerently nice to the woman with the earring. But she was too far away. He turned to the woman beside him in green. “You work with Mr. Richards?”

“My husband used to,” she said and passed him a white-capped dessert dish.

He ate a spoonful: maple.

“I,” he said and swallowed, “have to talk to Mr. Richards about some money. You like it here?”

“Oh, it’s a very nice apartment. You moved all the furniture for them, they told us.”

He smiled, nodded, and decided he just couldn’t take grape jello with maple flavored whipped cream.

The man beside the woman leaned around again: “I didn’t really work with Arthur. I used to work for Bill over there who used to do statting for MSE—where Arthur works. So Lynn and me, we just came along.”

“Oh,” Lynn said deprecatingly while Kidd drank coffee, “we just have to extend ourselves, you know, while all this is going on.”

“That’s what I’m doing; that’s what I’m doing. A bunch of us have gotten together, you see. We’re living together in…well, we’re living together. I mean we were just about to get chased out of our house. By some guys with those things, you know?” The man pointed to the orchid. “But today, I’d wear one if I had it.”