Muse: A Novel Read online

  Ida was silent, enveloped in memory; but it was Paul whose eyes were wet. “I am so very sorry” was all he could think to say. How could this all-important fact of Ida’s life have eluded him? What else had he missed or misunderstood about this woman he thought he knew inside out? Suddenly, certain lines and images he realized he’d never really absorbed—vacant rooms, and yes, graveyards, cypresses, shrouds—clicked into place:

  the snow-blown morning when I held

  your tiny purple hand

  How could he not have seen it?

  But Ida was continuing.

  “We got married afterward, and moved to London. We wanted to have another baby. But I couldn’t, the doctors said. I think each of us secretly blamed the other. But I’ll always love Stephen. Always.”

  A phone rang somewhere in the apartment. Adriana came to the doorway, but Ida shook her head and the woman disappeared.

  “And then suddenly Arnold appeared. I met him the first time in the late fifties, at Louis MacNeice’s. You know the rest, I’m sure. He was still breathing fire and brimstone in those days, putting everyone on the defensive politically and morally, insufferable, really, though no one was paying much attention by then. A dyed-in-the-wool doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist, which was a damn daring thing to be at the height of the Cold War. And I was attracted to that—to his sense of injury, his conviction that the world needed putting to rights, and that it was up to us, to us, not somebody else, to do it. ‘Make it new’ was about something more than aesthetics for Arnold. Not that he wasn’t the most wonderful poet.”

  “No one in the older generation had been more urgent, more persuasive, more prescient. And I knew he understood me, and my work, through and through. Because I’m a woman, everyone always assumes that love is my subject. And it is my subject. But there’s a lot more going on, always. And Arnold didn’t consign me to the second-class compartment. He didn’t need to condescend. And I fell. Fell deeply.

  “He was living with Anya Borodina, the dancer. At least I think he was. Arnold was never good with details. When we were together later on, I had to take care of everything, from seeing that his socks got darned to the electric bill to what we ate—and drank. He was unreconstructed in that sense. But in his mind we were equals, in a way I’ve never felt with anyone else. Arnold understood me as I am. And in some ways that was the most radical thing about him. No other man I’ve known has been capable of it. We saw each other constantly, till he suddenly up and left.”

  “Left London? For where? What happened?”

  “I never knew. He was just—gone. I was devastated, naturally, but we’d never made each other promises—and we didn’t later on, either.” Ida paused. “That’s how it ought to be between two people, don’t you think? What is certain in this life? And if it were—would we want it?”

  “What about Trey Turnbull?” Paul asked.

  “What about him. He was an old friend of Stephen’s. You should have seen them all at the White Horse in the West Village, carousing night after night. Trey was an utterly selfish, unreliable, overgrown adolescent—and one of the most gorgeous, most intoxicating characters I’ve ever known. I ran into him again at a club in Paris one night—he’d been living there for more than a decade then. I thought, ‘Why not?’ Yes, he was ten years younger—big deal. Such a beautiful man! And what a musician. We were all swept up in the possibilities then, Paul. You can hear it in Trey’s music, I think, in the silences between his solos. Such exquisite … emptiness.”

  Ida smiled faintly, quoting the title of what was one of her lesser-known but, to Paul, most-achieved works. He nodded, and was pleased to see she was aware he’d caught her reference—though he understood it now in an entirely new and tragic way.

  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:

  12 JULY 1985

  8:29 caffè, cornetto

  10:40 mercato

  1:30 colazione a casa

  15:30 Giannotti

  20:30 Olga

  13 JULY 1985

  8:18 caffè latte, cornetto

  9:30 RAI 4

  1:15 colazione

  16:30 Moro

  20:15 Celine

  And farther down:

  breeze grass towel drain disappear cold old

  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.

  X

  Mnemosyne

  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:

  Dorsoduro 434

  Venezia

  Tel: (041)5253975

  12 ottobre 2010

  To Whom It May Concern:

  I am entrusting the manuscript of my final book, Mnemosyne, to Mr. Paul Dukach of New York City, to whom I hereby convey its copyright. This letter will direct him to arrange for its publication as he sees fit upon my death.

  I further direct that all earnings from the sale of Mnemosyne be divided equally, like the rest of my literary and personal property, between the Children’s Aid Society and the library of Bryn Mawr College.

  It was signed in a shaky but readily identifiable hand:

  Ida Perkins

  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.

  MNEMOSYNE

  Ida Perkins

  Venice, 2010

  M in memoriam

  Ille mi par esse deo videtur.

  Paul recognized the Latin epigraph as the first verse of Catullus’s imitation of Sappho’s most celebrated lyric, in which he (she, in the Greek original) likens the man sitting beside his (her) beloved to a god.

  The manuscript was divided into two sections. He turned the page and read the first poem of the first part.

  MNEMOSYNE REMEMBERS

  Mnemosyne remembers. It’s her job.

  The stationary heat,

  the glare, the trance,

  the listless

  lob; then eveni
ng coming on:

  coolth, cardigan

  on ramrod shoulders,

  sharp myopic stare

  across the meadow

  where the great man’s sheep

  browse as in an underwater dream.

  No stars: the tipsy

  stumble down the hill

  in utter darkness

  then the age-old dance

  hand held and no stitch dropped

  but one word said.

  Mnemosyne was there;

  the only thing she does

  is this: recall.

  It’s what she does.

  It’s who she is.

  That’s all.

  Paul read on. The poems, recognizably Ida’s in style, were piercing in their simplicity. This was Ida at her most purely lyrical, he thought, yet sharper and clearer than ever before—and sadder, more elegiac. The poems were stripped down to essential statements in a way that harked back to her early classically inspired work, though these—knowing, rueful, ironic, resigned—were patently not a young person’s poems. And Paul quickly saw that they comprised a narrative.

  The Titaness Mnemosyne, goddess of memory and mother of the Muses, was speaking the poems, remembering. And it soon became clear that what she was remembering was a love affair. But this time, instead of being the longed-for object, the pursued, the responder or rejecter, as was inevitably the case with Ida, her persona here, Mnemosyne, was the initiator, the pursuer, the supplicant—struggling, often without hope, it seemed, for recognition and acceptance, desperate to be taken in by an elusive, reluctant, fugitive, disappointing other.

  I WAITED

  in the sunlight

  by the water

  waited in the breeze

  to hear the rustle