Muse: A Novel (5 page)

He’d also fallen under the spell of the rail-thin poet/critic Evan Halpern, whose view of Ida was more tempered than Paul’s, and who enjoyed winding him up about his obsession.

“I’m afraid Ida Perkins doesn’t come within striking distance of Elspeth Adams, Paul,” Evan would attack, pitting Paul’s most beloved NYU teacher against his deepest admiration, and preparing for the barrage he knew would be forthcoming from his young disciple. “She has none of her finesse, none of her historical ballast.”

“You’re just trying to get me riled,” Paul would volley back. “You know how I feel about Miss Adams. She’s the best teacher I’ll ever have”—he’d grin defiantly at Evan as he said this—“and an unforgettable poet. But she just doesn’t have Ida’s daring and reach and joie de vivre. She’s so careful and depressive … and … and closeted. She never has any fun—at least not on paper. She’s always the unloved lover, the loser, the waif. Ida is so up front and open about everything. And she knows how to enjoy herself, too.”

“Precisely. No implication, no tragic subtext. She’s a flat, declarative open book, always engaged and engorged. She’s a monotone ecstatic bore.”

Paul secretly enjoyed the way his teacher teased him about his attachment, but he was nowhere near ready to admit to anyone, least of all to Evan, that Ida was less than perfection. He was far too invested in his investment to submit it to any kind of test. He did, however, take Evan’s advice and write his undergraduate thesis on someone else: he’d chosen Arnold Outerbridge, concentrating on the influence of his postwar work on Ida.

At NYU Paul had also slowly, painfully, begun to accept that he liked boys better than girls, and had lived through a series of infatuations that brought him moments of intense joy but more often a misery he experienced as a low-grade fever he couldn’t kick. Ted Curtis, a fellow student in Evan’s symbolist poetry class, had been Paul’s first serious crush. A
taciturn blond from Reading, Pennsylvania, Ted was certifiably heterosexual yet desperately in need of positive reinforcement. Paul’s not truly returned yet never fully rejected attraction consumed them both through college, until Ted went off to law school at Berkeley and they lost touch.

Love in the flesh remained elusive. It drew yet frightened him. This was the late eighties, after all, the most terrifying days of the plague. Surrounded everywhere by insolent youth and beauty, Paul looked and lusted but didn’t dare touch.

As graduation neared, he became more and more worried about what he was going to do with his life. Terror gripped him that he’d have to go back to his family in Hattersville, a living death. After a series of panicked consultations with Morgan, he decided he’d give publishing a try, since it had to do with books and writers, the only things he’d ever cared about. Morgan, who, Paul had come to understand, was one of the most respected booksellers in the country, arranged an interview with her friend Homer Stern, the premier literary publisher of his generation, as she described him to Paul. “He’s an outrageous cad,” she told him, with a knowing glint in her eye. “But he’ll teach you more about publishing in one day than you’ll ever learn anywhere else.”

Homer had been all bluster and grand gesture when Paul paid him a visit, but, alas, he had no openings. It happened,
though, that he knew about a position in the rights department at Howland, Wolff, and before long Paul found himself a member of the workforce, pulling down $300 a week and as many free books as he could haul home to his rabbit hutch of a studio in Chelsea.

His generally sunny demeanor, largely adopted in imitation of Morgan, which he managed to project even when he didn’t feel sunny, along with his judgment, which turned out to be usually sound thanks to Evan’s training and his voluminous reading, earned him Dan Wolff’s and Larry Friedman’s confidence, and after a couple of years he’d been elevated to junior editor at HW. But P & S remained his ideal.

True, they had legendarily disgusting quarters on Union Square, the city’s major needle park, and rock-bottom wages; but the quasi-religious fealty Homer inspired in his crew was a siren call to Paul. That and the authors! Not just scary Pepita Erskine, perfectionist Iain Spofford, and hypercool Thor Foxx, but the haunting young E. C. Benton, who’d sprung like Athena from the mountains of Carolina; or Grenada Brooks, the hope of Caribbean literature; or Dmitry Chavchavadze, the larger-than-life Georgian poet; and Australian Padraic Snell; and St. John Vezey, South Africa’s national bard, and … and … and … The list was practically endless. There was something about its homemade, familial—or was it paternalistic?—feeling for
writers that made the shabby-chic firm fatally appealing to Paul. Each of their books was a sacred object. Paul was in love with Caroline Koblenz’s elegant jackets and typography that paid subtle homage to the work of W. A. Dwiggins, the genius behind Knopf’s magisterial bindings and settings, which had long ago set a never-to-be-equaled standard in book design. He loved the heft of the books in his hand. He loved the colors of their bindings. He loved how they smelled.

A few years later, after he had worked with a number of presentable if far from immortal novelists and journalists at HW, there had at last been an opening in Homer’s editorial department and, with yet another assist from Morgan, Paul had been able to make the leap. Homer took him out for a ceremonial lunch at his daily watering hole, the Soft-shell Crab, where they each downed a shot of vodka followed by the Crab’s popular wasabi tuna burgers. Paul reported for work two weeks later.

Paul had felt at home the moment he’d walked into the boxed-in, ill-lit P & S lobby. The place looked more like his idea of the offices of a porn magazine (there seemed to be one upstairs, down the hall from the rehab center on the eighth floor) than a temple of contemporary literature. A broken couch and frosted glass dividers fought for attention with certificates for the National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, and National Book Critics Circle Awards won by house authors appended helter-skelter over the receptionist’s rickety desk alongside less prepossessing announcements, like the American Book Designers Federation 1969 honorable mention for typography. P & S specialized in Nobel Prizes, in fact, but there were no plaques for them, just the gold medals that Paul had noticed on Homer’s desk during their interviews. Later that morning, he was given a cubicle on the south side of the hallway (Homer had called it “a nice office with a window” at lunch), equipped with a boxy Korean computer console and a telephone, both of which appeared to be in working order.

Manuscripts from literary agents would show up in neat
gray or powder-blue boxes on his pockmarked old school desk, or in battered manila envelopes if they were coming from writers without representation, and he’d read through them with the requisite show-me detachment. In 90 percent of cases, you could tell within a page or two whether the writer could write. Ninety percent of the time, box or no box, he or she could not. Every so often, though, the words would cohere, the sentences would follow one on another with lockstep plausibility, and Paul would begin to feel an unsettling combination of elation and fear—elation at the linguistic and psychological aptness of what he was reading, and fear, as he went on, that this undeniably gifted writer would veer off and spoil her creation before he could finish the stack of pages.

When, miraculously, the work was actually fine, Paul would run into Homer’s office half crazed with excitement, shouting, “We have to do this!” Which, remarkably enough in Paul’s experience, was music to Homer’s ears. “Go, go, go, baby!” he’d shout back, as if cheering on a two-year-old at the track. Paul would hondle, as Homer put it, with the writer’s agent over the advance—usually no more than $25,000 or $30,000 in those days—and often enough, mirabile dictu, the manuscript, and its author, would be theirs to coax and hover over and massage into a living, breathing printed and bound novel or book of stories or poems or essays or work of reportage that could be trumpeted
to booksellers and reviewers and that increasingly endangered species, the retail book buyer, as something not to be missed.

Many P & S books turned out to be a bit more “specialized”—or should we say Impetus-like?—than was generally appreciated. Paul subscribed to the saw of Larry Friedman at Howland, Wolff that a publisher could either lead public taste or run after it. He wanted to lead, to introduce new voices, to make the common reader a little less common, which was the firm’s stated mission, after all; but sometimes he got tired of hearing how difficult their books were to sell from the travelers, a group of hard-boiled, hard-drinking commission salesmen and -women, old-timers who at heart were as devoted to good books as anyone in the office, if not more so, but who had to make a buck, as did Homer and Co.—though the editors often seemed unaware that this was a fundamental aspect of their work. So the sales and marketing departments, under cool, supercompetent Maureen Rinaldi and market-wise Seth Berle, who seemed like different species but functioned beautifully together in spite or because of it, would tart up the new Brooks or Burns or Burack with a stunning jacket and an only mildly misleading tagline and pass it off as far more easy to digest than it actually was. Paul would sometimes mutter, not too loudly, that it was P & S’s job to put over a
few good books on the unsuspecting public—not that they were fooled all that often.

Still, in his years at the firm he and his fellow editors had managed to discover a number of writers who had developed into an identifiable group, indeed almost a generation of their own, who had made a notable cultural contribution
and
were sought after by readers. George Howe Nough’s
Nightshade;
Julian Entrekin’s
Subtle Specimens;
Nita Desser’s breakout second novel,
Mud Rambling;
and Eric Nielsen’s
Show Me the Mountain
were books that went a long way toward defining the aesthetic and the preoccupations of their moment. Nielsen and Entrekin in particular had become enormous best sellers and major prizewinners (Paul sometimes referred to them around the office as “Hemingway and Fitzgerald”) and Nielsen, with his fourth novel,
The Insolent Hours
—Paul was particularly chuffed that he’d come up with the title—had emerged as the novelist of the moment.

What Paul loved best was working with the authors on their texts. Some manuscripts—the ultimate rarities—showed up on his desk virtually letter-perfect and simply needed to be printed, but most called for pruning, or even sometimes having an extra limb or two lopped off. Some writers wanted their hand held as their book developed year after
year—though over and over he had watched them learn to write their books by … writing them; by the time they’d got to the end, they recognized that what had to be done was to go back to the beginning and recast the first half in the light of what had come together in the second. And some simply wanted to bask in the sunlight of his approval. What the great Pepita Erskine really loved was sitting at the long table in Paul’s office and going over her manuscript with him, word by word. She radiated joy at his undivided but critical attention, and Paul himself never felt more wanted or appreciated than during their chaste lovefests. The fact that she could walk past him in the square the next day without recognizing him hardly mattered.

Over the decade, book by book, season by season, Paul and Daisy Kenneally and Maureen and Seth et al. had managed to extend the company’s literary franchise for a new generation. Paul would call Morgan every now and then and tell her about the incredible manuscripts he’d read and sometimes even acquired, or the bullets he’d dodged, or the masterpieces that had heartbreakingly gotten away—and about his boss’s day-in-day-out outrageousness.

“You won’t believe what Homer did last night!” he’d dish. “He called Tim Tudow”—a top-notch if not exactly top-flight Hollywood-style literary agent with an unwavering Cheshire cat smile—“a ‘toothpaste salesman.’ To his face!”

Morgan would listen with the requisite beguilement or outrage when he recounted the internecine squabbles, the gossip, the good old low-down fun that made P & S—and publishing—so enjoyable. She’d snort at the amorous entanglements of Paul’s fellow workers, or the underhanded tactics of their competitors and the outrageous advances they had been willing to pay—as high as $100,000 for a first novel!—or the outlandish fights Homer would pick with other publishers, whom he was only too happy to sound off about publicly to anyone who would listen, especially if he or she happened to work for a major newspaper.