Muse: A Novel Read online

in the parted

  grass to see the towel

  fall on the chair

  the body sink

  beside me and unfold

  the silver voice

  remind me I was there

  I might have dozed

  but I don’t think I did

  I was so dazed

  with waiting

  I got lost

  in time without you

  time I have no way

  of clawing back

  stale time

  that swivels counterclockwise

  down the drain

  time that crystallizes pain

  time that isn’t

  life or air

  foul time that doesn’t

  move but disappears

  I waited

  in the sun all afternoon

  I waited

  on the dock

  till it was cold

  And when I raised my head up

  I was old

  There were none of Ida’s familiar erotic counterparts here, no “burly assassins,” no importunate, gorgeous swains-in-waiting begging to be sidelined or shown who held the cards. In these new poems, it is Mnemosyne who pines, who struggles to be seen and answered, and often fails. At times, she seems to be fighting for her life:

  I never understood

  that insufferable

  balderdash about

  hopelessness

  till now but oh now

  I do now I know now

  how cruel your cool

  and simple

  kindness is

  Then, to his shock, Paul saw something else.

  THE RAGE

  your local raccoon

  didn’t know what to

  make of us vamping

  disturbing the peace

  disturbing his habitat

  new in the dawn

  flashing his tail

  by the dam he was

  hoping to scare us

  but nothing

  could scare us

  nothing giardia

  thunder or hapless

  invaders could

  trample our idyll

  we were alive

  that June morning

  only we two

  the raccoon

  coyote and catamount

  mockingbirds dragonflies

  bees didn’t

  know what to do

  weren’t we the naiads

  then darling

  weren’t we the rage

  Mnemosyne’s loved one, the secret sharer of these moments of joy, and also the cause of her uncertainty and pain, was a woman.

  Next it dawned on him that he recognized the setting of this exalting and tormented relationship:

  wade the old

  roadway

  through

  loosestrife

  and goldenrod

  where the

  primordial

  icebox

  keeps humming

  all night

  in the primordial

  woods with the

  owl as our witness

  while the

  inexorable

  hand keeps on

  winding

  its stopwatch

  killing our time

  invading our dark

  with its flashlight

  The sheep in the meadow, the woods road, the unused cabin by the wind-raked pond: Paul could see every detail in his mind’s eye. He had walked there, basked in the breeze by the water, lain on the dock and watched the clouds pass overhead. Time and again he had strolled past the abandoned cabin by the turn where the woods road rose as it reached the pond. Reading the poems, he was back in Hiram’s Corners on Sterling’s farm.

  Mnemosyne’s secret affair had taken place there.

  Paul also thought he recognized certain words in the poems from A.O.’s lists in the red notebooks. He would have to compare them with the manuscripts later.

  A third character emerged in this tortured romance: “The Great Man,” a solar deity of sorts, evoked at times with more than a tinge of resentment.

  LET HIM

  be occupied

  offhand Olympian

  let him be god

  while we dither

  and waver

  stay with me here

  in the pool

  of the evening

  in our penumbra

  his sun can’t uncover

  Or this:

  THE SUN

  surveys

  what’s his

  with purple pride

  his piercing rays

  decide

  what gives

  and lives

  but I know ways

  to hide

  inside the shade

  and while he sleeps

  we’ll shut his eyes

  and find

  our peace in this

  green glade

  Paul recognized Mnemosyne’s Great Man. He had something of Sterling’s high-minded, airy self-absorption. But who was the skittish, reticent object of this no-holds-barred adoration who had to be shared with this powerful, aloof man?

  Ida/Mnemosyne had written this about her:

  BERENICE’S

  hair hangs in heaven

  only for you

  I dressed it

  I watched it shimmer

  on water

  saw it reflect

  and correct

  and obliterate

  all of our

  error

  see it now

  falling

  miraculous

  onto our pillow

  glinting thread

  binding

  unbinding

  your moonsilver

  nightgown

  all of it mine

  There were poems about a rendezvous in a fishing shack in the Florida Keys and at the Connaught Hotel in London, poems about hidden mazes and keyholes and what men will never understand about women. There were tirades denouncing the loved one’s farouche facelessness; her maddening, irresistible shyness; her enraging self-sacrifice:

  Go ahead stack his books

  type for him ski

  even tennis and golf

  if you want to

  ply him

  with orange juice

  bacon and sunny-

  side eggs if you must

  cook but don’t

  clean dear

  remember it’s

  dust unto dust

  * * *

  The first part of the book came to an abrupt end without any sort of summary or conclusion, almost as if unfinished. There was a drastic shift in the second section:

  LITTLE REQUIEM

  the pews are

  all filled with

  your children

  your husband

  pallbearers

  friends and

  relations

  exemplary

  citizen

  and I sit with

  them silent and

  no one knows why

  no one knows why

  as I toss my one

  scarlet carnation

  into your grave

  Mnemosyne’s beloved has suddenly disappeared without warning, and can only be evoked now in memory.

  In this second part of the book the poems became intentionally repetitive, desperate and at times rageful testaments to a desire that has been left unfulfilled:

  How to go on

  with this

  heaviness all

  this despair

  being kind

  being reasonable

  practical

  organized fair

  when all that I

  want is to shut

  the door open

  your locket and

  finger your hair

  There were antiphonal poems in italics, too, in the second part, an answering voice that Paul inferred was that of Mnemosyne’s lover, filtered through memory:

>   not like that

  no I can’t no

  we can never

  find time

  no lean back

  and untether

  how can we ever

  be quiet and

  breathe

  how

  can we ever

  no lie

  here together

  The later poems of Mnemosyne were raw, harsh, sometimes cruel in their cold assessment of grief. This was something entirely new in Ida—the poet forced to accept loss, fallibility, mortality, brought low in ways Paul would not have predicted from her previous work:

  Go your

  way out into

  nothingness

  leave me

  abandon

  me widowed

  go your way

  leave me

  defenseless

  just go

  your

  own way

  The book closed with this:

  MNEMOSYNE ALONE

  Mnemosyne remembers as she sits

  and teases at the shoreline through the haze

  what she sees

  she’s seen for hours

  for days

  for months and years

  she feels the sun’s late rays

  fall on the dock

  she sees the wary deer

  approach the water

  gingerly at dusk

  she smells the ozone

  after love the fear

  She sees the holy eyes

  that burn the dark

  and in the summer flush

  she hears the rain

  battering the laurel

  leaves again

  Paul set the manuscript down. For a long time he sat and looked out the window, focusing on nothing.

  He could see it all, though. He knew who Mnemosyne’s ungraspable muse had been. Someone Sterling was constitutionally incapable of appreciating.

  Maxine Wainwright had died long ago; and with Bree in the picture, Sterling had seldom done more than occasionally mention her. But Morgan had known her. Paul wandered aimlessly along the Giudecca until it was late enough to call her. He reached her at Pages, as she was opening up for the day.

  “Morgan, I’m in Venice, in the midst of an earth-shattering discovery. You’ll hear the whole story as soon as I’m back. What I need now is for you to tell me everything you can about Maxine.”

  “Maxine Wainwright? Why? Was Sterling unfaithful to her?”

  “No doubt. But this is about her, not him. What was she like?”

  “Well … she came from an old Main Line family on her mother’s side. Mama apparently caused a little bit of a stir by marrying Maximilian Schwalbe, a penniless Austrian émigré; but he made everything all right by founding Mac Labs, which went on to become one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Maxine went to Bryn Mawr, like her mother, though she was a decade or so younger than your Ida Perkins, I think. I’m rather surprised you don’t know all this, Paul. I’m sure we talked about it long ago.”

  For once Paul didn’t rise to Morgan’s bait. She continued:

  “She was dark, petite, quite shy, but with tremendous warmth. Utterly without airs. She had an uncanny ability to make immediate connections with people; she certainly did with me, when we met at the booksellers’ convention in Chicago when I was just starting Pages. God knows why she was there—though she was a tireless cheerleader for all of Sterling’s enterprises. We started chatting at the Impetus booth and by the time I left I felt I’d made a friend. Athletic, too, a terrific golfer. I know she and Sterling enjoyed cross-country skiing together up in Hiram’s Corners. And Maxine was the ultimate good citizen. School board, League of Women Voters, what have you. A card-carrying Democrat. They had one son, Sterling the Third, who works for Mac Labs out West now, I believe. I remember her saying she hadn’t wanted to live in Aunt Lobelia’s house after she died because she didn’t want her boy growing up in the biggest place in town. Then she passed away herself more than twenty years ago, of pancreatic cancer.

  “But what’s this about? Why do you need me to rehearse all this?”

  “I think Maxine and Ida were lovers.”

  There was silence on the line. Finally, Morgan said:

  “I find that very hard to believe, Paul. Are you sure?”

  “As sure as one can ever be about these things. I’ll explain when I’m back. I learned something else, too—something tragic about Ida.”

  “Well, hurry home, child. You’ve got a whole lot of explaining to do.”

  Paul hung up. Mnemosyne was a work of genius, one of the signal works he had held in his hands as an editor. His sense of privilege in possessing this manuscript, pristine and untampered with, in being the first person in the world to read it, was exalting. He had never felt the joy inherent in his work so keenly.

  But this was also an onionskin atom bomb that would blow up poor Sterling Wainwright’s life. Why had Ida handed him this impossible responsibility? She’d instructed him to see to its publication on her death, but had said nothing about how. And not one word about Sterling, her lifelong editor, or nearly. Was Ida expecting Paul to deliver Mnemosyne to him once she was gone?

  No, Ida clearly understood that Mnemosyne was something Sterling would never be able to accept or deal with. Was the book, the reality it represented, a dilemma she simply couldn’t face, and so she’d opted to leave it to him to sort out?

  When had she written these poems? The title page said 2010, but were they brand-new—or had they been composed during and after her love affair with Maxine, a kind of intermittent diary? Or had they come gushing out of her in the wake of Maxine’s death but she’d been unable to come to terms with them until now, as she was contemplating her own passing? Was Ida afraid that if Mnemosyne was left among her papers it might fail to see the light of day, or even end up destroyed? Paul knew stranger things had happened.

  How could he intuit her intentions? How well did Paul really know Ida? Not at all, clearly, despite his unending digging and delving. He’d spent all of one afternoon with her. Yes, he’d read her work inside out, or thought he had, until a few hours ago. But how could he understand what had driven her to this abrupt decision? He needed to know much more before he could do anything.

  He phoned the office.

  “Homer, you won’t believe what’s happened.”

  “Don’t tell me you had to sleep with her,” he guffawed. “She was delicious when I tasted her, but that was ages ago.”

  “Homer, she was wonderful. We talked for hours. And she spoke very lovingly of you. But listen. She gave me something.”

  “Something of Outerbridge’s?”

  “Something of hers. Her last book. It’s tremendous. Spectacular. It’s out of the ballpark, an absolute game changer.”

  “The truffle hound strikes again! I’m smacking my lips. Get yourself home today, baby. I want to see what you’ve got.”

  Homer hung up and Paul sat in the empty bar next to his hotel watching the light break up the surface of the oily canal outside the café doorway.

  He gathered his wits, reread Ida’s letter, and phoned Palazzo Moro. After many rings, a low voice answered. Paul recognized Adriana, the lady in gray.

  He asked to speak to Ida. After a long silence, Adriana picked up the receiver again and said, “La Contessa Moro is not able to come to the telephone, I’m afraid. She asked me to thank you for your visit and requested that you follow the instructions in her letter.”

  “But I need to know more. I need further instructions from the countess.”

  “I’m very sorry. Donna Ida is not well. If you like, perhaps you could call again in a few days. Or write.”

  Paul hung up, defeated. He packed his bag, paid his bill, and took a water taxi to the airport. As he sped across the lagoon, he looked back at the campaniles sticking up over the curve of Venice’s large island, and, on this unusually clear day, the Dolomites rising white in the distance like a wall of ivo
ry. Venice, as you left it, looked like a snail shell curled in on itself. Paul invariably felt the need to escape after a week or so. Yet miraculous things happened in Venice; lives got lived, and art got made, in this seemingly moribund warren of infested calles and canals. It wasn’t dead at all. Venice was a Platonic beehive buzzing with covert vitality. Its fabulous gilt-encrusted past wasn’t the point; it was how the past kept gnawing away at the present, digesting and fermenting and reforming it, and extruding it into the future.

  And what about Sterling? Paul pondered as he sat at the gate waiting for his flight to be called. How would he read Mnemosyne? How could he read it? He was the oblivious god in the book, who got to sit next to Ida’s priceless object, arrogant and ignorant—an encumbrance, an irrelevance, the enemy even, blind, as Mnemosyne decidedly was not, to the treasure by his side. To be portrayed this way, at this stage of his life, and by a woman he himself had loved and encouraged professionally for decades, struck Paul as hard, maybe even cruel. Did Ida recognize that her elegy for Maxine was also an act of revenge against her beloved publisher, to say nothing of her long-standing consort?

  No, Sterling’s self-esteem could never tolerate this double-edged attack on his manhood—and from his most vaunted author, cousin, and old flame. Paul understood why Ida needed his help in publishing Mnemosyne elsewhere, which had to mean at P & S. It was the only course of action that made sense. But did she expect him to wait until Sterling was gone to do it? The publicist in Paul rose up in revolt against the idea that he should postpone trumpeting the literary find of the new century to the world, even as he recognized that this was surely what delicacy required. Sterling could live another ten or fifteen, or even twenty, years; Paul would be nearly an old man himself by then. Would anyone care about Ida and Sterling and Maxine and Mnemosyne in 2030? Besides, who was he to override Ida’s instructions?

  These larger-than-life people with their precious feelings that demanded to be memorialized: Ida, Outerbridge, Pepita, Thor, Dmitry, Eric: so endlessly navel-gazing, so convinced of their significance and depth and originality. And Sterling and Homer, too. Writers! Publishers! They were all intolerable. They expected him to be as wrapped up in their stories as they themselves were. And he had been; that was the awful truth. He’d fed off their work and their vicissitudes; he’d made them the star players in a drama he’d been staging for himself since his teenage years in Hattersville. He’d lived through them and they’d floated past in their own precious bubbles, down the river past him.