Muse: A Novel (24 page)

One evening in Rufus’s loft, after he’d served them unforgettable linguine with sea urchin, George suddenly said, over a glass of super-smooth Nonino grappa:

“How about coming to work here at Medusa, Paul? You can spearhead our publishing program for us. We’ve got everything you need—including Rufus. Hell, I’ll even buy P & S. We’ll make it the flagship of Medusa Publishing.”

Paul felt the room tilt. How was he going to tell Morgan
this
? But he recovered enough to answer equably, “I’ll have to think this over, George. Thank you for your expression of confidence in me.”

Rufus was uncharacteristically quiet while they did the dishes after the Boutises left. Paul didn’t quite know how to take this; was Rufus offended that Paul hadn’t jumped at the chance to be in San Francisco with him? Had he known all along that George’s proposal was in the offing?

“Well. That was quite a shock,” Paul finally said.

“George is serious,” Rufus replied, with more than a trace of exasperation, as he emptied the dishwasher of glassware and put in the pots and pans. “He doesn’t make offers lightly, especially ones as meaningful as this.”

“I have no doubt of that,” Paul answered evenly. “But it’s a lot to take in, you have to admit. The idea is exciting in so many ways—especially being here with you. But wouldn’t it mean leaving behind everything I’ve spent my life working to accomplish?”

“Medusa is the future, Paul,” Rufus said carefully. “It’s here to stay. P & S can be part of it. And I’m here. We could have a wonderful life together.”

“It’s incredibly tempting, Rufus. I just need to think it over in tranquillity.”

“Fine. But don’t keep us waiting too long. George isn’t known for his patience.”

Us?
And you; how patient are you?
Paul wanted to ask.
Somehow his boyfriend was sounding like a member of the opposing team.

Later, as he lay in Rufus’s sculpted arms listening to the dryer revolve in the pantry, Paul couldn’t sleep. He felt he was on the edge of a precipice and in danger of falling so far he couldn’t see the ground beneath him. And he wasn’t at all sure that the slapping of the place mats and napkins as they tossed in the dryer’s drum in the silent San Francisco night wasn’t the sound of Homer, Sterling, Ida, Arnold, Elspeth, Pepita, Dmitry—all of them—whirling like dervishes in their horrified graves.

Medusa did acquire P & S a few years down the road, along with Owl House and Harper Schuster Norton, pawns in its life-or-death struggle with Gigabyte to monopolize the retail (and e-tail) reading market. For the time being, at least, New Directions, Impetus, Boatwright, and the rest of the smaller publishing fry managed to avoid their larger competitors’ fate and remain independent.

Paul, though, was no longer with P & S. Rufus and he had broken up not long after he turned George Boutis down. So, finding himself unattached yet again in his mid-forties, and having scaled the summit of editorial achievement, by his lights anyway, with the publication of Ida’s
Complete Poems,
not to mention Rick Nielsen’s blockbuster,
The End of Everything
—coupled with the devastating news that the Soft-shell Crab would soon be shutting its doors—he decided after much soul-searching to take a break and try his luck as, you guessed it: a writer.

“It’s the most retrograde, counterintuitive thing I can imagine doing,” he told Morgan. “It’s got to be right.”

“Don’t forget bookselling!” she remonstrated. “Remem
ber, you can always come home and take over Pages. I’m getting way too old for this fandango.”

Paul had a heart-to-heart with Plato and Aristotle and recommended that they hire his friend Lucy Morello, who had been doing wonders as Larry Friedman’s number two at Howland, Wolff. As usual, they were exceptionally gracious, and he’d left with enough of a nest egg to get him through a frugal year or two or three of writing. So he rented a little gray-shingled house in Eastport, Rhode Island, from Morgan’s sister in Providence, and all that long, brutal winter, the coldest in two decades, he sat at his kitchen table staring at the islands that littered the water off Pawcatuck Point, trying to work on a book about Ida, a personal reading that would try to make sense of his enduring passion for her and her work.

Occasionally, Morgan and her now husband, Ned, would drive down from Hattersville for a weekend of bundled-up walks in the punishing wind followed by bibulous dinners; more often, Paul would drive into Providence to meet Joel Hallowell, the associate professor of design at RISD he’d recently found himself attracted to, for a meal and a movie and whatever else might transpire. Joel was different from any man Paul had ever been close to—calm and self-accepting without being self-advertising, in a way that made Paul feel safe and centered. “Let’s sleep on it,” Joel would say whenever Paul wound himself up about his work
or future, or the generally perilous state of the world. Paul had promised himself he’d take it slow with Joel, but, as he watched the unchanging gray ocean day after day and tried to concentrate on his work, he couldn’t ignore how frequently his new friend cropped up in his thinking, his conversation, his dreams.

He was determined to make sense of Ida once and for all, why she’d mattered so much—to him, but not just him. He had the
Complete Poems
beside him: twelve hundred pages of immortality, with her sunlit face on the back of the jacket, lifted from Ida B’s snapshot of her namesake holding hands with Maxine and Sterling on the dock at Hiram’s Corners. That impassive smile, like an archaic kouré’s, hid far more than it revealed. He was working to find his way behind it, to get at her essential nature.

He’d recently learned something sad about Ida’s last years in Venice. Aristotle Stern had called him to report that he’d seen his now-aged relation Celine Mannheim in New York, and she’d had surprising things to say about Leonello Moro. According to Celine, the count hadn’t coped well with Ida’s growing infirmity and had made himself increasingly scarce, spending more and more time in Barcelona. Ida had lived out her final months a solitary prisoner in Palazzo Moro.

Paul was distressed to imagine Ida, who had been with
someone her whole life, unhappy and weak and alone. He wondered if her decision to give him
Mnemosyne
might have been motivated less by concern for protecting—or wounding—Sterling, than by her pressing need, as Paul had somehow intuited, to save her last book from a neglectful husband’s indifference or even envy.

Slowly, he was beginning to comprehend how one-sided, and how two-dimensional, his love for Ida and all his writers had been. It was intrinsic to the relationship; they’d needed him to magnify them in order to be fully, uninhibitedly themselves. And he’d needed to do it, to be of use, to bask in their reflected aura. It was a way of keeping his distance, of staying out of the line of fire. With Joel, he was beginning to learn the risks of mutuality. Did that mean his love for Ida was something he had to put behind him, like his fruitless enthrallment with Jasper, which had left him safely unexposed?

Ida had surely been no saint. His afternoon with her had shown him he would have to appraise her from countless contradictory angles. Yet the more faceted and surprising she’d become for him, the more she meant. Ida had been guileless
and
willful, passionate and snobbish, generous, great-hearted, self-seeking, myopic, petty. Like so many artists, she’d pursued her own desires, ignoring the consequences for others—and herself. She’d also suffered the worst loss a human being could know and found the inner
discipline to absorb and master it. And in her words, at least, she had always been cognizant of her actions:

Ida, when she was most herself, had lived the way she wrote: at white heat, without backtracking or revision. That’s what her lines kept saying: this was how it was meant to be, how it could be, if only you let it. Because life was what it was.
There is nothing else.
And it was enough. It had to be, by definition.

Had he, too, left her in the lurch? Had he deserted his mentors Homer and Sterling when he’d left P & S? The company seemed to be thriving under Lucy, according to everything he heard from Tony and Momo and Seth. Daisy and her crew were finding and acquiring wonderful books, as always, and often—not every time, but it had been ever thus—finding engaged readers for them. Maybe he’d go back, if he ever finished his own book, and join forces with
Jas, or kick-start his own latter-day Impetus or P & S with contributions from the grateful authors he’d worked with over the years.

Or maybe not.

Meanwhile, Ida was everywhere. Her work was read on the radio, quoted in songs and movies, imitated, discussed, debated. It felt as if she’d never had more readers. Both Impetus and P & S were selling p- and e-book editions of her steadily; more often than not, she was the best seller in Rufus’s Perennial Poets category, one of the most happening spots on the Medusa site. (Go figure!) Prizes, university chairs, even a highway in her native Massachusetts were being named for her. Her life was the subject of the new opera by John Adams, and her profile was set to appear on a postage stamp—if anyone still used stamps. The flat in Venice that she’d shared with Arnold had become a writers’ residence; Paul would be spending three months there in the spring. Thanks to Ida’s influence, the memorizing and recitation of poetry had miraculously become a part of the English curriculum again in certain schools. Children were learning her by heart, the way he had all those years ago.

Ida was alive, as alive as anything. She didn’t need Paul any more than she’d needed Sterling or Homer, or Arnold—or any man, or woman—to be triumphantly herself in her afterlife, even if her earthly end had been hard. Her mes
sage, her genius, had been handed on, not via biology, but through the DNA locked inside her syllables. For all its greed and heedlessness, its ignorance about its past and insouciance about its future, America had produced a universal artist in Ida Perkins—in much the same way it had made a place as serene as Eastport, with its long stonewalled fields sloping down to the water, its aged, sea-stunted trees and silver houses huddled in front of the rocks that lined the shore of the Point. Some things in life can’t be improved on. He couldn’t imagine how Eastport could be more beautiful, more reassuringly humane. And the same was true of Ida.

Though it seemed eternal, Paul knew Eastport had changed greatly over the years. The stateliness of its vistas, its opennesses and secrets, whispered gently but insistently of creative destruction. Like every place, Eastport was always on the way to being something else, moving so slowly it seemed to be standing still to whoever reveled momentarily in its timelessness. We’re all just along for the ride. You could find it terrifying if you wanted to. But to Paul it felt healing, consoling.

Paul had changed, too—he’d lost his innocence, several times over; he’d fallen and been wounded; he’d erred and failed. He’d been guilty of cupidity, of calculation, of dissembling. He hoped he’d been forgiven by Sterling’s ghost, wherever he was. If Sterling had turned out to be less than impeccably heroic, it was only because of the outsize shadow
Paul had compelled him to cast in Paul’s fevered imagination. Sterling was as important to him now as he’d ever been—and Homer, too, in all his testosterone-fueled glory. Time was slowly settling them into the honored niches they would occupy in his helter-skelter imagination.

Paul stared at the line of the ocean and sensed a force gathering unlike anything he’d ever known: a wave still invisible on the horizon, coming at them. It was as if they were about to relive the legendary hurricane of 1938, when the ocean had risen up and smashed Pawcatuck Point and the entire Eastern Seaboard. The shanties at Pawcatuck had been pulverized and washed away; islands had been submerged; peninsulas had turned into islands. In many places the water had flowed in and never flowed back out.