Muse: A Novel Page 15

There, he’d said it.

  “That’s the most outrageous thing I’ve ever heard in my life! You can’t be serious. I’ve done all her work, every single book, she and Arnold and Denise and Robert—every blasted one of them. They depend on me. I’ve always been here for them. I don’t believe you. It’s … Oh! Now I get it! Now I see. You’re out to cheat me, you and that fraudulent boss of yours!”

  “I could never do that, Sterling. I think you know how I feel about you. But it was something Ms. Perkins expressly asked me to do. She must have had her reasons, though she didn’t tell me what they were. She wrote me a letter …”

  “I’ll bet she did. I bet you dictated it and made her sign it. You and Homer Stern. You’re a traitor. A traitor! And after all I’ve done for you. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer. I never want to see your miserable, snot-nosed little fairy face again! I—”

  There was clattering on the other end of the line, the sound of footsteps, a shout. Then the line went dead.

  XIII

  Mr. President

  Sterling Wainwright’s memorial service was likewise held in the auditorium of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a few weeks after his cousin Ida’s, with more or less the same crowd in attendance. Il Catullo americano had, much to his pride and joy, been elected a member of the august body the previous year, in recognition of his services to literature.

  Sterling’s daughter, Ida Bernstein, had asked Paul, as one of her father’s most faithful apostles, to be among the speakers, along with Elliott Blossom; Svetlana Chandos; Sterling’s last poetic flame, Charysse Hodell; and several others. Paul, still traumatized by Sterling’s death, hadn’t known what to say to Ida B about his involvement in his hero’s demise. He kept his remarks brief, reverent, and, he hoped, witty. Afterward, Bree, Ida, and Sterling III, the spitting image of his father as a dashing young man, whom Paul was meeting for the first time, all thanked him warmly for his words.

  Homer, luckily, was not in attendance.

  Before long, rumors about the existence of Ida Perkins’s mysterious last book started to circulate in the blogosphere, having been anonymously planted by Homer’s publicity guru, Seth Berle. The crescendo of speculation became such that Seth suggested they might want to issue some sort of statement explaining that they and not Impetus were going to be publishing Ida’s last book.

  Paul, though, was leery of offending the Wainwrights. Ida had been the Impetus author par excellence, after A.O., and Paul had still not found a way to explain to Ida and Charlie Bernstein, who, after Sterling’s death, were now running his company, that P & S was going to be doing her last book. Luckily, Ida’s will specified that her fourth and final husband, Leonello Moro, had no claim on her literary or personal property, as she had none on his. In fact, apart from her literary estate and her clothes and jewelry and a few pictures, Ida turned out to have owned almost nothing.

  Beyond this, Paul was naturally concerned that the Wainwrights, and Ida B in particular, would be disturbed by the book’s contents, which were bound to be an unwelcome surprise to say the least, and by the role he himself was playing in its publication. (He wasn’t so worried by Bree; he thought she might take secret pleasure in the news that Maxine had not been an utter saint—and that Sterling had suffered an erotic comeuppance of his own.)

  Ida B was not Maxine’s daughter, and though they had always been cordial and eventually much more, a certain natural distance had existed between them. But Ida, inde pendent and clear-eyed and even caustic about Sterling as she was capable of being, was nevertheless fiercely loyal to her father’s memory. There was no way around it; Mnemosyne was going to be hugely problematic for her.

  It was Morgan, of course, who came up with the solution.

  “Tell Ida B that Sterling told you he named her after Ida—Perkins, that is, not Wainwright. I think it’s true, by the way. Sure, he had the cover of his grandmother’s name to make it all look hunky-dory, but he was always entranced with Ida P, there’s no doubt about it. If Ida B can understand that, if she can be made to feel an affinity with her namesake, I think she’ll come around.”

  Paul decided to risk it. What did he have to lose, after all? There was nothing else in his arsenal.

  To his amazement and relief, it worked like a charm. Paul met Ida and Charlie Bernstein for dinner at a hole-in-the-wall in the Village one evening and told them the whole story of his visit to Ida P in Venice, handing them a copy of the manuscript of Mnemosyne as they said good night. He spent a few anxious days waiting for their response, but, as Morgan predicted, their worldly good natures and common sense saved the day. Ida B was moved by the book, and flattered, too, Paul could tell—the affiliation with his father’s old flame made her feel more connected to Sterling, who hadn’t paid his children all that much attention, not even his unswervingly faithful if occasionally gimlet-eyed daughter. Morgan was right: once Ida B had gotten used to the idea, this new bombshell of a book allowed her to identify with Ida P—and, who knows, perhaps also with Maxine, who had been neglected by Sterling in a different way.

  Paul meanwhile had reread his transcription of A.O.’s notebooks in the light of Mnemosyne and confirmed the suspicion he’d had when he’d first read the manuscript that the strings of words distributed here and there among the diary entries had been drawn, many of them at least, from poems in the book. The diaries went from 1983 to 1988. The way the word lists were interspersed among them suggested that the poems of Ida’s they’d been drawn from belonged to the same period, and had likely been written as Ida’s love for Maxine was lived. This had been no brief affair, but an ongoing romance that had ended only with her death.

  Which meant that Arnold had been spying on Ida in more ways and for more reasons than one. He’d been jealous of far more than the fact that Ida was still writing; it was what she was writing, too: these passionate, importunate, despairing poems to another woman. Had Ida understood this when she’d examined Paul’s transcriptions that all-important afternoon? What was it she’d said? People see more than you think they do—even when they don’t seem to see anything at all. Had she perceived then that Arnold had known all along about her love for Maxine? Had she had to come to terms then with what she hadn’t acknowledged, or hadn’t wanted to, before: her own role in Arnold’s despair?

  It had all been more than Ida had been able to face, Paul decided. And so, perhaps impulsively, she’d off-loaded the responsibility onto him.

  He determined to keep these insights to himself. It would all come out in the wash, if Alan Glanville did his homework.

  Paul was feeling like an ace detective, as well as a psychiatrist, as he so often did at work (at times it seemed as if Earl Burns couldn’t tie his shoes without calling him for advice). And, for once, he felt he’d solved his patients’ problems. He’d had a series of Herculean tasks: to fulfill his obligation to Ida and her work; to give Homer what he’d always wanted, his chance to be her publisher; and to make the Bernsteins comfortable with this untoward turn of events, all at once. And, with an assist from Morgan, he’d done it. Talk about a royal flush! If he could pull this off, he told himself, he could do anything.

  He phoned Jasper and asked him to meet at the Crab the next night. They had another of their long, torturous talks, at the end of which Paul managed, definitively, to say good-bye.

  * * *

  On a hot August afternoon a few months later, Paul found himself on the Wainwright dock in Hiram’s Corners with Ida and Charlie Bernstein, watching the O’Sullivans act up next door and reminiscing about Sterling (Bree was on Block Island, visiting her sister). Paul had brought along a proof copy of Mnemosyne, Caroline Koblenz’s sober gray cover with its cadmium white lettering so strikingly at odds with its fiery contents. It was not lost on any of them that many of the poems in the book described the very place where they were sitting.

  “Shall we stroll down to the cabin and see if we can find any evidence?” Charlie asked. A pencil-thin Nobel laureate in particle physics who h
eld a chair at Rockefeller University and sported a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard, he had always struck Paul as complaisantly indulgent of the eccentric fauna in his wife’s family. Charlie seemed to find the saga of his in-laws’ amorous entanglements more amusing than anything else.

  “Dad always thought a lot of you, Paul,” said Ida, with just the faintest sardonic undertone. “It must be hard to have to do something he would have disapproved of.”

  “So hard. I feel guilty of sins I hadn’t even known I’d committed,” Paul answered, wondering, not for the first time, what Ida suspected about his final talk with Sterling.

  “Well, he brought it on himself, in a way. He was never fair to Maxine, though he was totally dependent on her. I find it hard to believe she would have stepped out on him, though. Do you think Ida could have made it all up?”

  “Not a chance,” Charlie interjected. “The poems are too real,” he added. “There’s no fantasy in those memories.” Paul was impressed that Charlie had read the book so closely.

  The breeze picked up and little ridges appeared on the surface of the water. “Someone told me Ida used to say she could get anyone she wanted into bed,” Paul remarked, shifting in his chaise. “I hadn’t understood that applied to women as well as men.”

  “Well, luckily, there’s no one left who can be hurt,” Ida said. She raised her eyebrows in silent commentary as Charlie, who’d been leafing through the book, exclaimed, “Listen to this!”

  ACROSS THE POND

  Something falling

  at the boathouse

  someone diving

  in the glimmer

  I can see him

  I can see her

  as the sun sets

  in the water

  then I lose her

  as I lose him

  incandescent

  summer shimmer.

  As Charlie read, a figure appeared on the Binnses’ dock on the opposite side of the little lake. The blue afternoon had moved unnoticed to rose, mottled by alternating stripes of black and gold. Then, in a perfect moment of life imitating art, whoever it was on the raft, man or woman it was impossible to tell, dove and disappeared into the silver-red water.

  * * *

  Mnemosyne was published on November 4, 2011, Ida’s eighty-sixth birthday and the first anniversary of her death. It seems needless to rehearse here one of the most fabled moments in modern literary history. Suffice it to say that the book was reviewed on the front page of every newspaper in the country—not in the book pages; this was news! Mnemosyne won both the National Book Award, given posthumously for the first time, and the Pulitzer Prize (Ida’s fifth and third awards, respectively). By the end of 2012, P & S had sold more than 750,000 copies, a record for a work of poetry. Just before Christmas, President Obama invited the Bernsteins and Wainwrights, the Sterns, Paul, and various members of the arts establishment to a reading of the book in the East Room of the White House, performed by America’s favorite poetry lover, Oprah Winfrey.

  One person who declined the invitation was Roz Horowitz. Before Seth put out the announcement that P & S was going to publish Mnemosyne, Paul had written her a letter recounting his visit to Ida and its aftermath, and enclosing a copy of the manuscript with Ida’s memorandum attached. When he’d placed a follow-up call, Roz had refused to come to the phone. As Paul had known she would, Roz blamed him for Ida’s directive, and took to vilifying him as an ingrate and a thief at every opportunity, in spite of the fact that he made sure P & S paid her commission on every copy, as if it had been specified in Ida’s letter. The lawsuit Roz threatened failed to materialize, and she regularly cashed her substantial checks; nevertheless, she cut him dead whenever they ran into each other, which was uncomfortably often, though Paul stopped eating at Bruno’s, where they’d had their fateful lunch.

  Mnemosyne gradually became part of the curriculum in many high school and college English classes, and Americans learned how to pronounce its beguiling title (it sounds particularly luscious when spoken with a southern drawl, Ne-MAW´-sin-nee, as if it were the name of a broad, ferrous river meandering through the Carolina Low Country).

  The book’s success had consequences for everyone it touched. It was the high-water mark of Homer Stern’s career as a publisher, involving as it did the landing of the great literary trophy (so far, anyway) of the twenty-first century. Homer’s victory lap through Frankfurt, where he sold rights in thirty-eight countries, and at every book award dinner worth attending, was a wonder to behold. He looked the glass of fashion in his custom-made dove-gray dinner suit and helmet of white hair, the last of the independent publishing grandees, whose celebrity sometimes outshone his authors’.

  But Paul’s reeling in of Homer’s long-desired quarry wrought unexpected changes in their relationship. Paul found that the balance of power between them had shifted almost invisibly, and he began to chafe under Homer’s paternalistic, not to say patronizing, ways, which had begun to feel as outdated as some of his old mentor’s business practices. Paul became more vocal about his own convictions and stood his ground when he felt Homer was in the wrong, which was increasingly often. The publishing landscape was changing, faster and more fiercely now than ever in the digital age. If things were going to stay the same around P & S, they would have to change.

  Homer put up a good fight, but, being the pragmatist he was, and with a little pressure from his twin sons, Plato and Aristotle, with whom Paul had developed a rapport over the years, he ended up agreeing to make Paul president and become the firm’s chairman. Homer hated letting go, and there were some difficult days when Paul felt his mettle was being tested to the utmost. Then suddenly the storm was over, and Homer seemed to settle into a quieter routine, while Paul took over the day-to-day running of P & S.

  It wasn’t second nature to him. Where Homer had been able to charm the pants—literally—off the switchboard operator and the sub rights assistant, occasionally at the same time, Paul found that his more inward temperament made it hard for him to project the hail-fellow-well-met cheer that, along with his absolute power, had allowed Homer to reign unchallenged. Paul knew his hegemony would need to be shared with his long-standing colleagues, Maureen and Seth and Daisy, whom he had recently made editor in chief, and Tony De Grand, his wisecracking CFO. After all, he didn’t own P & S; the Sterns and their stockholders did. Besides, he adored Homer, adored his bluster and exuberance and lust for life, and could overlook the volcanic temper that went along with them, as long as he wasn’t its object too often.

  Homer’s days in the office were different now. Sally still took his dictation, he still told his old stories to anyone who’d listen, but he managed by walking around less, and took longer lunches, often just with Sally, at the Crab. In October, Paul traveled with them to Frankfurt and enjoyed watching Homer come alive where he was still the king who helped set the fair’s brash, mendacious tone. He still pressed the flesh at their booth and at some at least of the endless round of receptions. But Frankfurt was a special kind of mirror. In it, you watched everyone around you age, fair after fair after fair; and they saw you do the same. Homer and Sally had reached the “You look marvelous!” years, which meant that, unbelievably, they were old.

  In the spring of 2014, Homer was diagnosed with lung cancer, which turned out to be inoperable. He left the office early one April afternoon, never to return. Paul would call now and then to ask his advice about a negotiation or a personnel issue. Homer would sound off mildly, advising him to let the issue “supturate” until it resolved itself and hang up without saying good-bye as he always had, but Paul could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Sally visited Homer in the hospital and at home, when Iphigene let her, and reported on his condition to Paul and the team at the office, but before long, Homer cut himself off from everyone else, including Paul, as if his work, which had been his life, was already behind him.

  And then one morning he was literally gone. Exit Homer. Paul got a call from a reporter at The Daily Blade, asking fo
r a comment. He phoned Sally at home. She hadn’t heard, and she was devastated. “They didn’t call me,” she kept saying, to whoever would listen. Paul empathized with her disorientation and bereavement because they were his, too.

  He had lost both his professional fathers now, and in each case he felt obscurely responsible. Was it what he’d secretly wanted? It wasn’t too long after Paul had nudged Homer aside that he’d gotten sick, just as Sterling had keeled over when Paul had given him the news about Ida. And Ida was gone, too. The polestars of his world no longer shone in the sky. Even Pepita Erskine, their signature writer for so long, had been run over by a bus a few short months before Homer’s passing.

  Homer was interred in the Egyptian-style Stern family mausoleum in Queens, after a cold and correct funeral at Temple Emanu-El, the Gothic-style cathedral of New York’s old German Jewish elite. At the burial, Paul watched Sally and Iphigene circle like tigers, avoiding each other. The two women had always been icily civil; Paul remembered nearly freezing to death in the crosscurrents when he’d been seated between them at a dinner after St. John Vezey’s historic reading at the 92nd Street Y. Iphigene had been married to Homer for well over sixty years. She had understood the essence of Homer’s business, the care and feeding of literary talent. She had been an unacknowledged, unappreciated partner in the firm, frequently recommending new writers; indeed, it had been she who’d advised Homer to take on Pepita after reading one of her early filletings of white male novelists in The Protagonist, and she’d entertained Homer’s authors and their hangers-on in high old bluestocking style on East Eighty-third Street. But it was Sally, Paul felt, who’d understood Homer; the care and feeding of him had been Job One for her.

  Paul had always especially liked Aristotle, the younger of the six-foot-four-inch Stern twins, whom he called “the Philosophers.” His brother, Plato, who was thin-skinned and combative, unfortunately lacked his father’s style or charisma, and after a frustrating few years running up against Homer’s egotism at P & S, had gone on to a successful career as an agent for classical musicians. Ari, by contrast, was wry and, well, philosophical, and his pickerel smile and laid-back personality had protected him from taking the family mythology too seriously. He’d ignored his father’s crocodile invitations to join the company and gone into the real family business, lumber, where he had made a literal fortune, so much so that the family wasn’t going to have to sell P & S to pay the estate taxes after Iphigene’s death. Neither son, in fact, showed signs of wanting to make big changes at the company. Both seemed to be counting on Paul to run it for them, at least for the time being.