Teddy looked up. “Hello,” he said. He partly closed his notebook, partly let it close by itself.
“Mind if I sit down a minute?” the young man asked, with what seemed to be unlimited cordiality. “This anybody’s chair?”
“Well, these four chairs belong to my family,” Teddy said. “But my parents aren’t up yet.”
“Not up? On a day like this,” the young man said. He had already lowered himself into the chair at Teddy’s right. The chairs were placed so close together that the arms touched. “That’s sacrilege,” he said. “Absolute sacrilege.” He stretched out his legs, which were unusually heavy at the thighs, almost like human bodies in themselves. He was dressed, for the most part, in Eastern seaboard regimentals: a turf haircut on top, run-down brogues on the bottom, with a somewhat mixed uniform in between—buff-colored woolen socks, charcoal-gray trousers, a button-down-collar shirt, no necktie, and a herringbone jacket that looked as though it had been properly aged in some of the more popular postgraduate seminars at Yale, or Harvard, or Princeton. “Oh, God, what a divine day,” he said appreciatively, squinting up at the sun. “I’m an absolute pawn when it comes to the weather.” He crossed his heavy legs, at the ankles. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been known to take a perfectly normal rainy day as a personal insult. So this is absolute manna to me.” Though his speaking voice was, in the usual connotation, well bred, it carried considerably more than adequately, as though he had some sort of understanding with himself that
anything he had to say would sound pretty much all right—intelligent, literate, even amusing or stimulating—either from Teddy’s vantage point or from that of the people in the row behind, if they were listening. He looked obliquely down at Teddy, and smiled. “How are you and the weather?” he asked. His smile was not unpersonable, but it was social, or conversational, and related back, however indirectly, to his own ego. “The weather ever bother you out of all sensible proportion?” he asked, smiling.
“I don’t take it too personal, if that’s what you mean,” Teddy said.
The young man laughed, letting his head go back. “Wonderful,” he said. “My name, incidentally, is Bob Nicholson. I don’t know if we quite got around to that in the gym. I know your name, of course.”
Teddy shifted his weight over to one hip and stashed his notebook in the side pocket of his shorts.
“I was watching you write—from way up there,” Nicholson said, narratively, pointing. “Good Lord. You were working away like a little Trojan.”
Teddy looked at him. “I was writing something in my notebook.”
Nicholson nodded, smiling. “How was Europe?” he asked conversationally. “Did you enjoy it?”
“Yes, very much, thank you.”
“Where all did you go?”
Teddy suddenly reached forward and scratched the calf of his leg. “Well, it would take me too much time to name all the places, because we took our car and drove fairly great distances.” He sat back. “My mother and I were mostly in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Oxford, England, though. I think I told you in the gym I had to be interviewed at both those places. Mostly the University of Edinburgh.”
“No, I don’t believe you did,” Nicholson said. “I was wondering if you’d done anything like that. How’d it go? They grill you?”
“I beg your pardon?” Teddy said.
“How’d it go? Was it interesting?”
“At times, yes. At times, no,” Teddy said. “We stayed a little bit too long. My father wanted to get back to New York a little sooner than this ship. But some people were coming over from Stockholm, Sweden, and Innsbruck, Austria, to meet me, and we had to wait around.”
“It’s always that way.”
Teddy looked at him directly for the first time. “Are you a poet?” he asked.
“A poet?” Nicholson said. “Lord, no. Alas, no. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.”
Nicholson, smiling, reached into his jacket pocket and took out cigarettes and matches. “I rather thought that was their stock in trade,” he said. “Aren’t emotions what poets are primarily concerned with?”
Teddy apparently didn’t hear him, or wasn’t listening. He was looking abstractedly toward, or over, the twin smokestacks up on the Sports Deck.
Nicholson got his cigarette lit, with some difficulty, for there was a light breeze blowing from the north. He sat back, and said, “I understand you left a pretty disturbed bunch—”
“ ‘Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die,’ ” Teddy said suddenly. “ ‘Along this road goes no one, this autumn eve.’ ”
“What was that?” Nicholson asked, smiling. “Say that again.”
“Those are two Japanese poems. They’re not full of a lot of emotional stuff,” Teddy said. He sat forward abruptly, tilted his head to the right, and gave his right ear a light clap with his hand. “I still have some water in my ear from my swimming lesson yesterday,” he said. He gave his ear another couple of claps, then sat back, putting his arms up on both armrests. It was, of course, a normal, adult-size deck chair, and he looked distinctly small in it, but at the same time, he looked perfectly relaxed, even serene.
“I understand you left a pretty disturbed bunch of pedants up at Boston,” Nicholson said, watching him. “After that last little set-to. The whole Leidekker examining group, more or less, the way I understand it. I believe I told you I had rather a long chat with Al Babcock last June. Same night, as, a matter of fact, I heard your tape played off.”
“Yes, you did. You told me.”