Muse: A Novel (11 page)

Paul noticed that Bree had stopped knitting and was looking out over the pond, at what he couldn’t tell.

“How old was she then?”

“Let’s see. A.O. was seventy-four, so she would have been in her early fifties. But she looked much younger. She
always has. Her flawless skin, her carriage, her piercing green eyes—she’s always been twenty years younger than her actuarial age. And acted it, too! No, there’s no one like Ida. Never was, never will be.”

Paul hadn’t heard Sterling talk this way before. He was being sentimental! Paul had read enough of the man’s poetry to know the many varieties of amorousness he could affect, most of them patent hot air, and probably meant to be taken as such. But there was a kind of straight-up idealization in his reminiscing today that was unlike him, in Paul’s admittedly limited experience.

“What did she talk about?”

“Everything and nothing, like any normal person. She made wonderful conversation, kept things going as if there were nothing unusual or untoward about Arnold’s behavior. She covered for him. You would never have known that, of the two of them, she was arguably the greater writer. By a country mile.”

Bree was rising now, stuffing her knitting into her bag. “It’s time to be going, Sterling,” she said, though it was only five, unusually early for them to be leaving the dock.

“Read her, my boy,” Sterling advised Paul, as he struggled to his feet. “Read her.”

“Oh, I’ve read her, Sterling,” he answered. “I think I know her almost by heart.”

“Just checking,” Sterling snorted. “She’s the one, you know, boy. She’s the one.” Then he followed Bree up the steps, and in a minute Paul heard the station wagon turning over and slowly trundling up the woods road.

He spent the evening immersed in Ida yet again—there were multiple copies of all her books in the barn. As always, he tried to feel his way into her life through her poems, but there was something elusive, indistinct, about the objects or catalysts of her own precisely evoked feelings, though Paul knew her amorous itinerary inside out. But he was beginning to hear Ida differently in her poems than he had before. True, her love objects were all gorgeous antagonists, virtually interchangeable conquered conquerors shorn of their manhood along with their locks, as in the infamous “Verga” of 1943, written when she was just eighteen:

Yet as Ida aged, as life flowed through her veins, Paul began to detect a subtle change in her explorations of eros. It was as if gradually she became able to entertain feelings of vulnerability and insufficiency. And her portrayals of self then could be heartrending:

Ida’s work developed, and changed, too, as she aged. And at times her heroic self-sufficiency began to feel like simple sadness.

* * *

The next morning, it was back to work in the barn. After a long slog, he felt he was beginning to make headway. Slowly, by a grim, steadfast process of elimination, he’d begun to break into Arnold’s code.

He’d started with some long lines, predominately in the later notebooks, which were repetitions in every possible permutation and in numberless styles of penmanship, upper- and lowercase, of just three symbols: A, 3, and #.

or sometimes

or

Paul decided to adopt the hypothesis that these frequently repeated figures represented the letters of Ida’s name, which often appeared uncoded, too—row after row of
I
’s and
D
’s and
A
’s—in the last notebooks. After that, a statistical matchup of the most common letter frequencies—he remembered good old
etaoin shrdlu
on the Linotype—started to produce results. Words began to form out of the blind symbology of A.O.’s lines, like figures emerging from the mist. The frequency tables needed some adjustment, though, because many of the words—again, unsurprisingly—were Italian, in which the most commonly used letters are
eaoin lrtsc
.

A.O.’s method turned out to be fairly straightforward, and Paul realized to his dismay that if he’d bothered to consult an expert he could have deciphered the notebooks long ago. Arnold’s encoding wasn’t quite as primitive as a Caesar’s cipher, where one letter substitutes for another a set number of places down the alphabet. Instead, he had replaced the letters and numbers with an arbitrary list of symbols: # for
a,
© for
b,
¥ for
c,
x
for a letter space,
d
for a colon. Certain letters and numbers stood in for others:
a
for
i,
and 3 for
d,
k
for
o,
g
for 6, for instance, which it took Paul several long sessions to figure out. Paul’s hypothesis had been correct: when Arnold meant IDA, he’d written A3#.

Once he’d deciphered them, though, the notebooks hadn’t, unfortunately, proven to be all that edifying. The “poems” turned out to be accountings of everything A.O. had done, day in and day out, hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute, in Venice:

The entries went on inexorably this way, covering roughly the last five years of A.O.’s life—before dementia seemed to leave him entirely incoherent, that is, though his daily jottings had continued even then. In the last notebook the scribbling became wilder, less concise and organized. The diary entries ceased and all that was left were chains of words, which could go on for pages:

No poems, no revelations or confessions. Just lists of appointments interspersed with strings of seemingly random words. And Ida’s name, in various permutations, in and out of code, repeated over and over.

Arnold’s notebooks remained opaque. Whatever meaning they held was locked inside them, maybe forever. Paul had succeeded in unscrambling their code, perhaps—or were these supposed diary entries a cipher of their own, with yet another layer of secrets beneath them? Their writer’s deeper imperative, the one that had determined the words on the pages, remained unfathomed.

Paul had been working his way through the old accordion file he’d found with the notebooks, too. It wasn’t just clippings, it turned out, but carbons of correspondence to and from Impetus and others concerning both A.O. and Ida—bills, letters from Sterling to both of them, along with some answers from Arnold—though, of course, nothing from her. Reading them was like watching Ida’s fame balloon.

It was the publication of
Bringing Up the Rear
in 1954 that had signaled her emergence from the chrysalis of cultdom
into public fame. Even the aging Wallace Stevens had written Sterling to say, “She gives me hope for our future.” Her kinsman Robert Lowell, only eight years Ida’s senior, who’d also had a stellar career early on, winning the Pulitzer Prize when he was barely thirty, had watched her speed by him like a literary Road Runner. Still, he couldn’t help but praise the “brilliance, finish, and freedom” of Ida’s work in his
Sewanee Review
review of
Bringing Up the Rear.
Ida was a Brahmin, too, every bit as much as Cal; but she had none of the self-protective entitlement he’d had to work so assiduously to shed; it just slid off her back like rainwater. Lowell could only look on in stunned confusion.

Then there was a July 23, 1960, letter to Sterling from the manager of the Chelsea Hotel, enclosing a bill for almost $12,000:

Or this one, from Sterling to A.O., dated February 28, 1970:

There were ecstatic reviews and the inevitable pans, particularly of
Barricade
and
The Brownouts,
published in Ida’s so-called Anti phase. There were endless award citations: four National Book Awards (and a photograph of Ida arm in arm with fellow winners Joyce Carol Oates and William Steig at the awards dinner in 1992); two Pulitzer Prizes; the Feltrinelli, Lenin, Nonino, Prince of Asturias, Jerusalem, and T. S. Eliot prizes; the gold medal for poetry of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; a letter from 41 offering Ida the Presidential Medal of Freedom (with a carbon of a reply from Sterling politely declining on her behalf); a list of thirty-nine honorary degrees, from 1960 to 2005; copies of full-page advertisements for various titles; articles in
Flair
and
Vogue
about her idiosyncratic fashion sense; bills from Bergdorf Goodman for thousands of
dollars, primarily for shoes; travel agents’ invoices from the triumphal 1967 West Coast tour, during which Ida had cavorted naked in the big pool at Esalen with Pepita Erskine, after spending the weekend in Watts with Eldridge Cleaver. A photo of sunburned, shirtless Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell flanking a pale, straw-hatted Ida, taken by Elizabeth Hardwick on Mount Desert Island in August 1968, two days after the
New York Post
printed the iconic shot of Ida in a Chanel suit with matching spectator pumps and alligator bag outside La Côte Basque with Babe Paley and Truman Capote (“Whose Hair Higher?” the caption queried). Invitations to twelve state dinners at the White House, from the Johnson to Obama administrations. A royalty statement for
Aria di Giudecca
(7,238 copies sold in the first six months of 2000).

And there was this, from 1964: