Muse: A Novel (17 page)

His head was spinning. He asked to be excused and was directed down a narrow hallway. He paused to look at the genre and carnival scenes on the walls—the wittiest and most evocative he’d ever seen.

As he dried his hands he looked at his misshapen reflection in the smoky old mirror. What did any of this have to do with him?When he came back to the salon, though, so inviting in its calm and comfort, it was clear Ida was eager to continue.

“Where were we? Yes, Trey. Soon enough it became evident that we were cut out to be friends and nothing more. He had a lot of other … interests. And I was spending lots of time in New York then, with Allen and Frank and Jimmy—and Abe Burack. And Bill de Kooning, one July in Springs, too. Trey detested the U.S.—he’d been living in self-imposed exile for more than a decade, as lots of black artists did in those days.

“And I couldn’t stand Nixon. Couldn’t bear his surly scowl. Not to mention the fact that what we were doing in Vietnam made me literally ill. I ran into Arnold again, here,
at Celine Mannheim’s—and, well, I never went back. Oh, I’d go for readings, and to see Sterling and Maxine every couple of years. But my life became Arnold. Here in Venice. For twenty years.”

“And you truly didn’t talk about your work?”

“Never—while we were writing. There were all the usual obligations and annoyances, as with anyone—and, as I said before, so many doctors. Italian medicine, Paul—you have no idea. Though some of them are truly wonderful. But they’re philosophers, you know, not scientists.

“But then when the books arrived from Impetus, we’d sit down and read them together, as if they were by somebody else. And we’d talk for hours—about what spoke to us in what we’d read, what bothered and disappointed us, what we’d stolen from each other. What we’d been after in our work, what we’d intended, even what we’d failed at. What we were jealous of, too, and not just on the page. Arnold always knew
precisely
what I was up to. He’d zero in on the grief I wanted to paper over. And my infidelities, even when they were only of the head and heart, as they tended to be—until the last years, at least. And he’d rant and rave and rave and rant, and then it would be over. It had gone back into the poetry, where it belonged.

“Which is why I don’t know about the notebooks, Paul. I wouldn’t have. I find it extremely odd that he wrote them in code. Communicating was what Arnold cared about
more than anything. But, as I said, Arnold in his last years was … much less available, to me as much as anyone. We grew apart, I guess I need to say, though it hurts to admit it. I think the weight of his loneliness, which is the same thing as his lack of an audience, was heartbreaking for him. He felt abandoned, because he had been. He was depressed—no, angry. He walked on the Zattere, took the vaporetto to San Michele, and wandered around among the graves, I’m told by friends who saw him there. And he wrote. Wrote for hours. But what he was writing I never knew.”

Ida held Paul’s look for a moment. “I guess it was these, these notebooks.” She shifted in her seat. “And you say they’re diaries?”

“Here. They’re like this.”

Paul opened his briefcase and took out a few pages of his transcription, along with a Xerox copy of the original page in code:

And farther down:

Ida looked them over for several minutes. Then suddenly she dropped her head and bit her lip, seemingly on the verge of tears.

“I know. It’s very sad. I’m—”

“No! You don’t understand.” Ida was incensed. “He was
spying
on me. These aren’t Arnold’s appointments. He never went anywhere. They’re
mine.
” Ida squared her shoulders and stared at Paul. “Mine.”

“I see.” What else could he say?

Ida laughed, bitterly now. “I don’t think you do. By the end of his life, Arnold had become pathologically jealous of me. Mainly, I think, because I was still working—though I spent so much of my time taking care of him. Maybe that
was part of it, too. I became unbearable to him. I don’t think he could stand the sight of me.”

This was another Ida altogether, very far from Paul’s fantasies.

“Eventually, yes, Leonello and I started seeing each other. But that was long after Arnold and I had stopped communicating, stopped sharing our lives. He was lost to me. And what was I supposed to do, I ask you? Stay locked up in that wretched apartment with someone who despised me?

“I hadn’t known he’d known, though. That’s what hurts. I wanted to protect him. But people see more than you think they do—even when they don’t seem to see anything at all.”

Ida wept. The room seemed to have closed in on them as dusk came on, till there was just the pool of light cast by the lamp next to her. Eventually, she started coughing and wouldn’t stop. Tears ran down her cheeks. She was gasping for breath.

Paul started to rise to go find Adriana, but Ida motioned to him to stay put.

At last, she was still. Out of desperation he tentatively asked, “What about these lists of words? What do you think they are?”

Ida picked up the pages again and lifted them to her face, scanning them intently and then riffling through them,
stopping now and then to examine a few lines more carefully before tossing them onto the table.

“Who knows?” she said, with a tinge of resentment. “It was a long time ago, you know. Maybe they’re ideas for poems, things he wanted to look up, things he wanted to remember, or couldn’t forget. What was left of his unquenchable need to write. Like poor old Bill de Kooning, still painting those loopy dead canvases, as if the gesture itself, the mechanical act, was what mattered. Maybe Arnold, too, was a poet to the end, even if he couldn’t write poetry anymore.”

Ida was quiet for a long time, sipping her cold tea, seemingly looking at the wall. The fire in the small fireplace near the door was embers now.

Suddenly, she roused herself and turned to Paul, putting on a face like a stage actress. The room seemed to brighten artificially.

“How is Sterling? I haven’t seen him for years now. How is his life with Bree?”

“They seem very happy together,” Paul answered, as if he knew.

“Bree has been in Sterling’s life since he was a young man. She worked for him at Impetus for years. She’s remarkably astute, and beautiful, and there’s no doubt Sterling is the love of her life. But after Jeannette, Aunt Lobelia produced
Maxine, and that was that. Maxine. One of the world’s perfect creatures.

“That halo of dark curls, that reluctant smile. She and Sterling were never simpatico. She wasn’t enough of a … siren for him, I guess. She was too giving, too selfless. Always there, always faithful and available. Not a good strategy with a man like that, I can assure you.”

“I’ve never heard a bad thing about her,” Paul allowed.

“That’s because she was one of God’s children. An old soul. Beautiful in a way Sterling is constitutionally incapable of appreciating. I’m afraid my dear cousin took terrible advantage of her—without intending to, of course. And then she died. Dear, dear Maxine! I miss her terribly. Getting old is not for the faint of heart, Paul. It’s not just the physical indignities, though they’re terrible. It’s that the ones who truly understand you
desert
you. The ingrates!” Ida laughed incredulously. “After all the time and need and adoration you’ve poured into them!
That’s
what’s unbearable.”

Ida was looking into Paul’s eyes again, her chin quivering slightly, as if searching in him for something he was certain he didn’t have. Though she was frail, her posture remained impressively strong. He held her gaze as openly as he could, knowing that he was looking, probably for the only time in his life, into a face out of history.

“Well, I’ve certainly talked your ear off, haven’t I?” Ida
laughed again, mirthlessly this time. “I guess it comes from not having anyone to share any of it with, anyone who could possibly understand. It makes one positively garrulous, loneliness.”

“It has been unforgettable,” Paul answered simply.

“Nonsense.”

Ida looked across the room through the gallery and out toward a group of winking lights moving slowly on the canal. Just as Paul was about to rise, she put her hand on his arm.

“There’s something else,” she said, addressing him with utter seriousness. “Something I’ve decided I want you to see. I think you can help me with it.” Ida paused. “It’s a very large problem for me, but you’ve shown such good judgment I’m convinced you’ll know what to do. No one has seen it. It will require all your wisdom, but I’m convinced you’ll be equal to it. Don’t ask questions; let’s just agree I’m going to trust you.”

Judgment? He’d hardly said anything all afternoon. But he answered, “Anything. I hope you know how much you and your work have meant to me—to all of us.”

“Never mind.” She patted his hand. “It will be delivered to your hotel tomorrow.”

“It?” he asked.

“Pazienza,”
she answered. “No more questions today.”

It was totally dark now. As if on cue, the lady in gray, Adriana, appeared in the doorway. He rose.

“I don’t know how to thank you for this afternoon, Ms. Perkins … Ida.”

“Thank you
very
much for coming, Paul Dukach,” she answered, leading him to the vestibule. “And remember what I said.”

Remember? Every word she’d uttered was engraved in his consciousness—though he had no idea what in particular she was referring to.

She led him to the elevator, then took both his hands and kissed him lightly on the forehead—was she flirting, performing, or offering him a kind of benediction? Then she smiled again, unreadably, turning away as the narrow door closed.

The package was delivered to Paul’s hotel at eleven the next morning. It contained a sheaf of eighty-eight numbered pages of rough, ridged European-style onionskin held together by a blue metal clamp, on which a group of poems had been typed. The keys of the old typewriter were so dirty that the
e
’s,
a
’s, and
o
’s were entirely black, but there were no corrections or erasures. In their own way, they were pristine.

Clipped to the cover was a memorandum neatly typed on heavy stationery engraved with the Moro di Schiuma crest:

It was signed in a shaky but readily identifiable hand:

The letter bore the seal of a Venetian notary.

Paul sat at the small, uncomfortable desk in his room, with the only letter of Ida Perkins’s he had ever seen. The clicking of the radiator and the intermittent groan of the Giudecca foghorn were the only sounds.

He began to read.