A heaving bulk of air, fresh and hot, was hauling up and over the ridge tops then speeding down through the narrow weedy slots and rocky channels toward the west, grinning wide in a fiery flood all the way to the shore and beyond, sweeping the usual coppery haze far out over the Pacific in a wide arc, leaving a blistering blue roar in the basin.
Dale could sense the shimmering heat outside and he finally dragged his eyes open, his mouth stuck to a foul tongue; as he shifted on the narrow divan in Elaine’s sleeping porch, his shirt fabric crackled with static; his hand flopped out, a finger not even touching the metal leg of the side table cracked with a spark and he sat bolt up with a sharp shit! as if bitten.
He flopped back down onto the divan “…a dark, cold day.” he muttered a couple of words from something he’d read.
“Auden,” a voice said; it wasn’t a guess.
Dale cracked another spark of static, ssht! But was more pricked to see he was not cursing to himself: where was he? At Elaine’s? How did he get there from Echo Park? “I thought…” he rasped out his throat, trying to arrange his thoughts “…Yeats.”
“Auden about Yeats,” said Seamus. He was a shoulder away behind a bookshelf at the wobbly wooden kitchen table with his coffee, a open book and a cigarette. He was in a white undershirt and grey pants, shoes on the floor beside him “On his death.”
Dale’s knuckle grazed the metal of the divan leg; it sparked and he goddammed it hard under his breath. “How in the name of holy hell would you know what Auden said?”
“Read it in the newspaper.”
“Not the Los Angeles Times its obvious.”
“After Yeats died, before the war. Some journal I found in a bookstore. Hollywood Boulevard; I probably still have it if you want to read it.” Seamus offered “I was interested in him for awhile after…” he wasn’t going to finish the sentence, but Dale was giving him a serious sneer “I ran in to him.”
“William Butler Yeats,” Dale’s belief was as thin as it gets “You met him.”
Seamus looked away, not needing to be heard, particularly. It was just something interesting that had happened. “A long while ago.” he said in a kindly way that made Dale feel like an infant “In the twenties when I was in Dublin for a time. Weren’t actually introduced.” he said “…Auden was writing a sort of epitaph that was carried in the…”
“No wait, you met Yeats---“
“Didn’t know ‘til bleedin’ after he’d left the room!” Seamus’ eyes twinkled for just a moment and Dale caught his breath “Might have known with his eye glasses pinching his nose, from all the pictures over the years. Maureen whispered that it was him and she knew him from the theatre.”
“Miss Delainey.”
“She was in one of his plays at the Abbey. Maybe more than one.”
Seamus shrugged, tilting his head from side to side: look at those ears, Dale thought: they stand out like plates. “What did you say to Yeats? How did it happen?”
Seamus looked away a bit, tilting his head again. “I went to the theatre and saw the play.”
“Which play?”
“Oh---don’t remember now,” he said. It was an older play from the earlier days of the theatre. It seemed strange and dated considering the recent bloodshed in Dublin, just outside the door “It was full of the wild talk of the sidhe, y’know it. Midsummer Eve and the coming of the fairy girl to steal away the boy child… and there was a priest in it.”
“We should do this at the theatre.”
“And after, the man came through the back stage and wondered aloud to nobody about the music in it. Nobody answered him---who knows why? They all heard him. And I said I thought it didn’t need real music, it was all in the words.”
“That’s true isn’t it,” said Dale.
“But he had some woman come to do all the dances. Looks daft, its not needed.”
“I can see that.”
“He listened, he nodded and he moved on.”
There was more to this conversation---Seamus didn’t want to seem like an ass for describing to Dale a whole hour talking with the man.
The truth was that Seamus had brought something to show Yeats if he should meet him, and his friend Maureen said she’d take him backstage; he had the scrawly manuscript inside his jacket and couldn’t let his hand go near it to pulling it out, for there was Yeats himself:
Oval lenses pinched elegantly on the bony arch of his nose, tethered by a thin black cord swirling behind the lush bow of his soft silk tie; a beautifully pressed suit of expensive wool allowed him to wear it, immaculately cut and finished with crisp cuffs and a starched collar. He radiated fame, his serious little mouth speaking a kind of precious language.
Maybe he’d tell that story to Dale one day. Maybe he wouldn’t. It would not be today: he had to get to work.
“An enormous genius,” said Seamus “He went to Mussolini toward the end there, goddamn him. And Ezra Pound.”
“There’s another genius.”
“I could go on about Pound some time---an undoubted genius, mad as a coot as the best ones are.”
“Was he mad, really?” Dale wondered “Or was he just…”
“Inconvenient,” said Seamus thoughtfully as he slipped on his shoes “There’s something to be discussed sometime.” He swallowed the last bit of his coffee and left for work, talk now over.
Dale admired his exit “But Yeats…”