Muse: A Novel Page 11

  He couldn’t wait to breathe the fetid air of his beloved Venice, where he often escaped after the mind-numbing hothouse of the fair. He washed down the rest of his veal chop with too much syrupy Rotwein, ushered his last guests out of the funereal restaurant, and caught the midnight train with minutes to spare. He arrived in Venice early the next morning, sleepless but jangly with excitement.

  He splurged on a water taxi down the Grand Canal, stunned as always to be confronted with how truly strange Venice was. The shut-up palaces fell straight into the oily loden-colored water (what held them up?). The sky alternated between pearlescent and Bellini blue. He felt gusts of enchantment and resistance, elation and revulsion. Venice was a hallucinatory incubus, the most artificial environment in the world: Disneyland for grown-ups. It reeked of sex and its putrescent partner, death. Thomas Mann had caught its rouged, feverish aura perfectly.

  What was Ida Perkins, the avatar of red-cheeked American expansiveness and optimism, doing here? This was a place to hide, to fade away—not to grab life by the lapels, as she always had. Had Ida become infected by A.O.’s old man’s despondency? Or had she found a new lease on life with Leonello Moro? Was Ida still Ida?

  Paul spent the morning wandering, struck yet again by the seemingly chance beauty of Italian public spaces, shaken down over time into nonchalant irregularity and aptness. He had always felt lighter in Italy, unburdened by expectations, his own or anyone else’s; he could move at will here, unimpeded and unobserved, as he sometimes could in New York, too, actually, walking anonymous in the noontime crowd. He had lunch in the autumn sun at a trattoria in the Campo Santo Stefano, and made stabs at resuscitating his dormant Italian. He reread Ida’s Venice book, Aria di Giudecca, which was as alive to the decay and incandescence of the city as anything he knew (“city of Jewish saints / of cul-de-sacs and feints / of stains and taints”). Then he started leafing through his transcriptions of A.O.’s notebooks while he sipped his espresso:

  14 JUNE 1987

  8:45 caffè latte, pane al cioccolato

  10:15 Dr. Giannotti

  14:30 computer

  15:40 phone call—U.S.

  16:20 Debenedetti

  17:00 seamstress

  20:00 Celine

  hair heaven glimmer thread error reflect pillow binding

  Seamstress? Why would Arnold see a seamstress? Paul shivered a little as the gathering shadows overtook the afternoon sun. Then he returned to his reading. On Monday he was going to meet Ida Perkins. He had lots of questions and he wanted to be prepared.

  IX

  Dorsoduro 434

  The gloomy “false Byzantium” of the Hotel Danieli bar at three o’clock on an October afternoon was only partly offset by the blaze in the fireplace reflected in the room’s high-hung, aged mirrors. The upholstery of the couches, gray peau de soie moiré, suited Paul’s mood. Outside was burnished Venice autumn weather—pure cloudless blue, sixty-eight degrees in the sun on the Riva degli Schiavoni; but he was trapped inside, overcoat beside him on the couch, waiting for Ida Perkins.

  He was taut and indrawn, the way he tended to be when meeting someone new, but especially so today. He was about to come face-to-face with the Person, the Goddess, the One and Only … he was winding himself up, he knew; he had to stop.

  Why was he here? He had a sudden urge to hightail it back to New York and forget the whole thing. Instead, he played with his BlackBerry, scanning but not reading his messages.

  Suddenly, a slender figure turned the corner from the foyer and peered into the mote-filled semi-gloom before making her way toward him, negotiating among the islands of furniture that filled the room.

  Ida was here.

  But no, it was an elderly Italian woman in a heavy pea jacket, not Ida at all.

  “Signor Dukach, La Contessa Moro is not well today, mi dispiace davvero,” the woman offered. “She asked me to see if instead you might come see her tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Yes, of course, ma’am. I can do that.” Paul felt a thrill. He was going to visit Ida at home! Over the years on his trips to Venice, he’d scoped out her address, hoping for a glimpse of her in a window or, better yet, on the street. Now he was going to see for himself.

  “A che ora, signora?” he asked, as nonchalantly as he could.

  “Alle quattro del pomeriggio, per piacere. Dorsoduro 434, presso San Gabriele. Grazie, grazie tante.”

  The woman looked around anxiously, rubbing her hands together as if from the cold, though the room was pleasantly warm. Nodding apologetically, she backed away, turned, and disappeared.

  Paul was reprieved! He was going to see Ida, but not yet. Carefree, he strolled in the thinning light past the Arsenale, all the way to San Pietro di Castello; then he meandered back through a warren of backwater rios to San Marco and over the Accademia Bridge. After a stint in the museum with his favorite Carpaccios, he found his way to Montin, a simple trattoria on a de Chiricoesque canal where the maître d’ was only too happy to show him the table where Ezra Pound had sat with his back to the crowd every evening with Olga Rudge—and occasionally, in his last years, with Arnold and Ida.

  He had a couple of limoncellos after his fegato alla veneziana and polenta and then wandered back to his hotel on a small canal that gave onto the Giudecca, passing the monument to Dmitry Chavchavadze on the way. Dmitry, who had died of a heart attack in Atlanta a few years before, had, like other émigrés, chosen to spend his immortality in Venice, the ultimate way station of the exile.

  Paul fell asleep immediately. In the morning, he lit out for the Ghetto and the farther reaches of Cannaregio with his dog-eared Red Guide, paying an obligatory visit on the way to barrel-vaulted Santa Maria dei Miracoli, nestled like a marble boat in the harbor of small canals surrounding her.

  * * *

  The nondescript entrance to Palazzo Moro di Schiuma fronted on a narrow alley that ended unceremoniously at the Grand Canal. Paul rang the bell at precisely 4:00 and a small door clicked open. After walking down a short brick passageway between high stucco walls with shards of broken bottles at the top, he found himself in a disused garden. Climbing vines just losing their reddened leaves covered the back of the house. Paul entered the portico to the right as directed and took the small elevator to the fourth floor.

  It opened onto a squarish marble entryway in which a tall, frail woman with pure white hair coiled on top of her head was leaning on a cane with a carved, yellowed ivory handle. She wore a stylishly cut brown wool shift, with no jewelry except a round brooch of rough gold, and brown velvet slippers.

  Yes, Ida was still Ida, Paul surmised, taking her measure once he’d recovered from the shock of her presence. Her high cheekbones retained their almost Mongol glamour, though the skin was drawn thin across them.

  “Come in, Mr. Dukach.”

  “Ms. Perkins, it is such an honor to meet you.”

  She half bowed and indicated a pair of couches in the middle of the room, then led him slowly to them, sitting facing him, with a tea table between them.

  As he moved through the low-ceilinged room furnished with commodiously grouped, low-slung Venetian fauteuils and lit here and there in the failing daylight by Murano glass lamps glowing red and green like signal lights, Paul noticed a closed-in gallery at the far end, overlooking what had to be the Grand Canal. It was here he had read somewhere that Wagner had written the third act of Tristan und Isolde. The walls of the room were covered in beige dam ask, overhung not with the expected Venetian scenes but with paintings by Severini and Morandi and, to his delight, a surreal seascape, the largest and most captivating Paul had ever seen, by the Italian Post-Impressionist De Pisis. Where, he wondered, was Leonello Moro’s notorious contemporary collection?

  A few logs smoldered in a small fireplace near the door, and a lamp was lit on the desk near the east end of the room overlooking the gallery, where Ida had been working, or so it appeared.

  “Would you like some tea, Mr. Dukach?” Ida’s unreconstructed Brahmin accent,
with its broad extended vowels, was out of another era.

  He nodded distractedly. Being here was making him forget what he’d so carefully planned to say.

  Ida rang a small bell on the table beside her. The woman from yesterday appeared.

  “Tè, per cortesia, Adriana,” Ida instructed her servant.

  “So. Now how can I help you?” she asked, turning to Paul. She was firm, maybe a little brusque as she patted the pillows behind her back, making herself comfortable. Paul was surprised to find that instead of the expansiveness he’d endowed her with in his fantasies, the Ida in front of him was old-fashioned, restrained, no-nonsense. And guarded.

  “Rosalind Horowitz, as I believe you know, suggested I come see you,” he began. “I’m working with Sterling Wainwright on Arnold Outerbridge’s red notebooks. We’re trying … well, I’m trying to figure them out.”

  “Oh yes.” Ida nodded. “Roz wrote me all about you.” She seemed to relax a bit. “And Sterling tells me you know more about me—about my work, anyway—than anyone, apart from him, of course. Which is more than a little frightening, I have to admit.” Ida laughed an uncomfortable little laugh. “I’ve certainly never heard him talk that way about another publisher—and one who works for Homer Stern to boot!”

  Ida turned her face toward him at a quizzical angle, as if expecting Paul to reveal himself. Could this really be Ida, the interlocutor of so many of his wishful dreams?

  “Sterling has been incredibly kind. I’ve learned an unbelievable amount from him. And Homer asked to be remembered to you, of course. He’s always talking about you.”

  “I can imagine,” Ida answered with a bit of a chuckle. “How is dear old Homer? Still chasing the girls?”

  “Well, probably not quite the way he used to. He’s over eighty, you know.”

  “How impertinent of you to mention it, young man! As you’re well aware, I’m even older!” To his relief, Paul saw that Ida was laughing openly now. He hadn’t turned her off. Not yet.

  “That’s quite hard to believe.” He managed to raise his eyes and meet hers, which were tautly focused on him, their legendary green undimmed.

  “Anyway, as I was saying,” Paul forged ahead, “I’ve been trying to help … Sterling decipher Outerbridge’s notebooks in my spare time. I’ve made progress on the code he wrote them in. I know what they say. But what they mean is still a mystery. Roz thought you might be able to help—that you could tell me more about them.”

  The woman in gray appeared with a tea tray and set it on the table between them. Ida was silent as she poured out their tea: Lapsang souchong; he was almost drugged by its rich, smoky scent. She offered him milk, which he accepted, and sugar, which he refused. Then she looked up.

  “So. You’ve read the notebooks …”

  “Yes. They appear to be timekeeping notes of some sort. A diary of his daily activities. Very minute and …”

  “And obsessional.”

  “Well, yes, in a word. As if he needed to keep track of his every movement.”

  “I see,” Ida responded grimly, looking down into her lap. Then she raised her eyes, the lines in her tanned face deeply etched, and said carefully, “I’m afraid that in his last years, Arnold wasn’t capable of working anymore. Which was terribly cruel, given how prolific, how totally absorbed in his writing, he’d always been.”

  “I’m very sorry,” Paul said, lowering his eyes. There was silence before he added, “There’s nothing worse than seeing a brilliant person deprived of his gifts.”

  Ida nodded.

  “You were together a long time,” Paul continued, trying to gently prime the pump.

  “Nearly twenty years, this last go-around.”

  “I have to confess I always imagined you side by side, sharing your work, discussing ideas, inspiring each other.”

  “Well, I can see you haven’t learned very much in your young years,” Ida shot back derisively.

  “Forgive me, Ms. Perkins, but I hope you can appreciate how large you and Mr. Outerbridge loom in the imaginations of some of us,” he answered.

  “You’re not one of those despicable literary sleuths who thinks he can deduce every last little sordid biographical detail from a writer’s work, are you?” Ida asked, with ill-concealed suspicion.

  Paul sat back, flummoxed. Was that what he was?

  Ida’s jaw was set. Her eyes flared with indignation. “When, I want to know, do writers get to simply live their boring lives? Don’t you know living is not about writing, Mr. Dukach? There was always so much else going on. Svetlana. The shopping. The laundry—and the doctors! Writing is something one does—we both did, I should say—to escape, to get away. And also maybe to make sense of one’s mistakes, wrong turns you know you’ve made but can’t come to terms with any other way. Poor man’s psychoanalysis, Arnold used to call it.

  “Arnold engaged with the world day in and day out. But he couldn’t have cared less what was for dinner, or who was sleeping with whom. He always had his eye on the bigger picture.”

  “And you?” Paul ventured.

  “My story was entirely different. I grew up in a sheltered environment, and felt the need to break away early on. Unlike Arnold, who endured deprivation from childhood. Sterling and I had to get away and see things for ourselves. It’s what brought us together that summer in Michigan. All those sailors and croquet players swirling around us in the dining hall at Otter Creek, planning their tournaments and regattas, while we were plotting our escape—to New York, London, Paris.”

  Paul relaxed a little. Ida, he sensed, was performing one of her solos.

  “We got there, too, each in our own way. We helped each other—at least he helped me, though my options as a woman were, needless to say, far more limited. When I published my first book it was a veritable scandal at Bryn Mawr! The shadow of Marianne Moore hung over the place like a cloying little modernist cloud. The atmosphere was far too claustrophobic for yours truly. And those intensely … innocent crushes on each other. I was not innocent, or at least I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be scandalous!”

  Ida was enjoying herself.

  “You certainly turned poetry on its head, from the very first,” Paul said.

  “I was a college sophomore, just having a little fun. But they—the literary folk—took me seriously. That was the last thing I was expecting—or wanting. Another regimen, with another set of rules and expectations.”

  “How did it feel to be the toast of the town when you were still a teenager?”

  “Those silly young/old men with their unreadable magazines and their precious self-importance. Little prigs! I’ve always despised the Establishment, Paul, and that includes the Bohemian Establishment, which is really no different from the bankers. Poetry, for me, and for everyone serious, I think, is about otherness: being ‘maladjusted,’ standing apart. They didn’t understand the first thing about what I was writing—or what was happening to me.”

  Ida leaned back and coughed a little. Her superfine hair was spun sugar in the lamplight.

  “Then I met Barry Saltzman. He seemed like the way out—he was dashing, open, mature, supportive, generous. He was quite a bit older, and it didn’t bother him one bit that I was a writer—an outré one, even. He was proud of my ‘independence.’ He thought he was encouraging it. We had a lovely apartment in the East Seventies and I had maids and a secretary and all the time in the world to work. I just didn’t have anything to write about—do you understand? I needed experience. I needed to derange my senses.”

  Ida looked up, as if to gauge whether he was following her. Paul nodded encouragement.

  “And there was ravishing Sterling again, hanging around the Village with people Barry wouldn’t have known how to talk to. Sterling took me everywhere, including to his apartment more than once, I’m not ashamed to say, and … but”—Ida looked toward the windows—“I’m boring you.”

  “You have to be joking! Nothing could be further from the truth.”

  H
er skin was nearly translucent. Ida trembled faintly at times as she continued.

  “Then Stephen came along, Stephen Roentgen, at one of those insufferable Fifty-seventh Street art gallery readings. My quondam suitor Delmore Schwartz was there, still more or less compos mentis, and John Berryman, and old Wallace Stevens, too, down from Hartford, the one time I met him, still complaining about Eliot, if you can believe it. That’s when that pig Ora Troy started acting up, accusing me of poaching. Always out for attention. But Stephen, who was fresh off the boat from Liverpool, was pure genius—wild-eyed, extravagant, and a wonderful poet. Yes, he’d known Ora; but it was love at first sight—for both of us. No doubt you’ve seen the pictures of him with his shirt front unbuttoned and that dreamy wave in his hair. Stephen had such verve—and intensity, commitment, talent, belief in himself. He just didn’t have staying power.”

  Ida was looking across the tea table straight at him. Paul didn’t know how to respond. He worried he was tiring her, but she forged ahead.

  “We got married. Barry and I had divorced after he found out about Sterling. He couldn’t take it, and I didn’t blame him. In the end, he wanted an uptown life, and he deserved someone to share it fully. I needed to be down on Varick Street. So he went off with Alice Pennoyer and they were happy as could be, at least I think so. And I did adore Stephen.

  “But he ran dry. He ran out of gas. He blamed me, you know, said I sucked it all out of him, that there was nothing left after I was through with him. Which was ridiculous. Everyone knows erotic energy is self-replenishing. Of course that was before Thomas.”

  “Thomas?”

  “Our son, Thomas Handyside Roentgen,” Ida said matter-of-factly. “Born January 13, 1951, after twenty-eight hours of labor. He died three days later.”

  Paul sat up ramrod straight. “I didn’t know you had a child,” he said, as calmly as he could.

  “It was our secret. We weren’t married; Stephen was supposedly with Esther Podgorny. And then our little boy died. He died. I still dream about him. Holding him for those few precious hours. He’d be fifty-nine years old today.”