“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.