Muse: A Novel Page 6

  Sterling’s infatuation with Ida, then, was not only genteelly quasi-incestuous, but had the sanctified aura of first love about it. But it wasn’t simply carnal, though her flowing red locks, creamy skin, and callipygian figure were as remarkable as her aquiline profile, which today graces our 52-cent stamp. To see the cousins together was to feel you were on a movie set—except that they were so natural and unaffected, there wasn’t the faintest whiff of commerce about them.

  And young Ida had turned out to be a poet as well—and a supremely gifted one. No wonder Sterling, who already had the literary bug himself, fell book, line, and sinker for his beauteous lyre-strumming playmate, who at eighteen had just published her notorious first collection. Even crusty Arnold, himself more than a little dazzled by the poetic Wundermädchen, had dubbed her, on reading Virgin Again that same fateful summer, “the Sappho of Our Times.”

  The Sappho of Our Times was not a Sapphist, however—far from it. Her fling with her young cousin hadn’t lasted long, Sterling admitted, but Paul knew it was only the first in a string of passionate liaisons destined to become the stuff of literary myth. Ida’s liaisons became as legendary as Edna St. Vincent Millay’s, but where Vincent had been blowzily self-advertising in her controversy-courting life and work, the young Ida was aristocratically private—ice to the outer world, a furnace within. Only H.D. and Marianne Moore approached Ida in ethereal remoteness, so dazzlingly raffinée next to the louche effusions of her own contemporary, the sloppy Muriel Rukeyser. No, Ida’s style—cool, fragmentary, and mysterious—was entirely her own, and lent her more than a whiff of erotic glamour. “No wonder they thought she was one of the girls,” Sterling joshed, downing his third single malt of the evening.

  Sterling ran into the now-infamous and if anything more striking Ida in New York in the fall of 1948, and before long he was head over heels again, the way he’d been at sixteen—enough to allow him to recover at least temporarily from A.O.’s dismissal of his work and start writing again. “Il Catullo americano” an Italian critic had named him in his later years, the American Catullus, a moniker he wore with pride, though he could never quite muster the engorged animus that had made the Roman immortal. Sterling’s love poems were generically idealizing, maybe even a little saccharine. Basically, Paul thought, he was too nice.

  Ida sweeter

  than upstate

  Falernian

  I’m waiting

  here down

  in the garden

  under the window:

  Now jump!

  Not the stuff of greatness, alas. But Ida had responded. Tall, dreamy Cousin Sterling, his adolescent peachiness seasoned by a few years of romantic training, his remaining baby fat absorbed into leanness, caught her fancy again, and over that Christmas holiday they had their second torrid entanglement.

  Sterling made it sound as if he’d spent a lifetime mourning those few weeks—though he’d gone on to have a rich and varied sex life of his own. He’d acquired another wife, and a son and namesake, after a series of relationships, including a long-standing, emotionally wrenching one with Bree Davis, who worked as an editor for many years at Impetus. Bree was a live wire, sensible and huskily beautiful, a kind of literary Ava Gardner, but Sterling’s mother had put her foot down. He’d had one free shot; his next consort was not going to be a nobody, too. So Bree got the boot, though the on dit was that they’d never totally called it quits, and Sterling married Maxine Schwalbe, the self-effacing, no-nonsense, seriously wealthy daughter of the founder of Mac Labs. Sterling, who was more than a foot taller than his wife, was, Paul was aware, the less wealthy partner of the two, though Wainwright’s own investments, as his protégée Bettina Braun had told Paul, brought him $10,000 a day back in the early eighties, when money was still money.

  You would never have known that slight, brunette Maxine was rich, except that her effortless manners and careful democratic consideration for everyone gave her away. She didn’t need to throw her not-so-considerable weight around; she needed not to. And she was loved for her selfless self, her warmth and generosity, by all who knew her, according to Bettina. Everyone but Sterling, that is. Their alliance was highly satisfactory for him, for in Maxine he finally had a good-natured mate who could create and manage a domestic establishment that catered to his every need and wish—if not desire. Desire belonged elsewhere, outside the suffocating family circle. And no doubt Maxine understood this, though she never made reference to it; that would have meant disturbing the almost courtly decorum that regulated their lives. So Maxine held firm but gentle sway in Hiram’s Corners with young Sterling III, while Sterling toggled back and forth between the farm and the Impetus office he’d opened in New York in the sixties, where it was easier for him to sweet-talk wayward authors, and indulge his penchant for beautiful young things.

  That was decades ago now, and a lot of water had flowed under all their bridges. Maxine had died far too young, in her late fifties, and Sterling had up and married Bree soon after. Ida was walled up in Venice with the ghost of A.O. and her showboat Italian husband. In the old days, she’d made a cross-country tour every year or two, organized by the Impetus staff, who were understandably desperate to maintain her franchise. She’d appear like royalty, magnificent in frayed velvet, silvering hair flying wild in her face, before ecstatic audiences of all ages, and then, as long as Maxine was alive at least, would drop down for a week or two of R&R at the Wainwrights’ farm in Hiram’s Corners, north of the city. She and Sterling had been kissing cousins, after all, and she was his best-selling author. Though their lives had long since diverged, their literary and personal ties endured. They were like family—no, they were family. It had been ages, though, since Ida, claiming the excuse of age, had been to America.

  “The Goddess,” Sterling called her more than once in the course of his evenings with Paul, with more than a hint of envy. “She barely deigns to notice us mere mortals anymore,” he complained, drawing contemplatively on his amber-colored meerschaum, its bowl sculpted into a grinning satyr’s head.

  To which Paul had gently retorted, “Isn’t she just the same as always—only older?”

  “Maybe so,” Sterling muttered, chewing on the stem of his pipe, then withdrawing inward, his mind already on something else, or lingering on how his and his cousin’s lives had developed and diverged, tendrils from the same plant that had wound around different branches, different banisters—undeniably separate, yet still connected, still somehow one.

  Paul had come upon a framed picture of them all together in Hiram’s Corners on a bookshelf in Sterling’s apartment, a color snapshot from the late eighties, its greens and blues leached out now. Ida, uncharacteristically wearing jeans and a straw hat, is seated between Sterling and Maxine, looking up at the photographer—most likely Sterling’s daughter, Ida, her namesake. Ida P is wearing a determinedly happy smile, possibly a little careworn around the eyes. Putting a brave face on things? It was hard to tell from one photograph, one small yet precious bit of evidence, one mere tessera in the great mosaic that might fit in so many places. Who could say what those looks, those hands, those clothes, that weather truly signified? But there it was, a piece of the gone world that existed where we tread today. One sunny moment, moving inexorably toward sepia. Incredible, really, so far and yet so near: the divine Ida Perkins in Hiram’s Corners, New York, holding hands with Sterling and Maxine Wainwright, smiling into the sun.

  V

  The Outerbridge Notebooks

  One night, in Sterling’s Barrow Street apartment, a floor-through in a West Village brick row house softened by elegant old Turkmen carpets, with drawings by Kandinsky and Max Ernst on the walls and a waist-high soaring Brancusi marble nude that stood voluptuously next to Sterling’s chair, Paul asked about Outerbridge’s last years.

  “What happened to A.O. in Venice, Sterling? He seems to have gone radio silent. And what about the notebooks I understand he left behind? When are you going to publish them? When I studied his work i
n college, nobody even knew they existed.”

  Sterling was silent for a moment. “I’ve looked at them, but they’re gobbledygook as far as I can tell,” he allowed at last, in his aw-shucks staccato, meditatively sipping his sixteen-year-old Lagavulin and gazing into the embers of the fire he’d lit at the start of the evening. “They’re written in code, page after page—book after book of unreadable symbols. I’ve never gotten around to dealing with them. Lazy, I guess. Frankly, Arnold became more or less a recluse in his later years. I’m not sure he was still all there. We pretty much fell out of touch, except through Ida.”

  “Could I take a look at them sometime?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Sterling answered with a shrug. “They’re in the vault at the office. Come by some afternoon.”

  The Impetus offices, in a venerable Meatpacking District building not far from Sterling’s apartment, were at least as scruffy as P & S’s, with upholstery that looked lice-infested and filthy walls that had not been washed, let alone painted, in forty years. Still, they commanded a panoramic view of the harbor, including the Statue of Liberty, Staten Island, and the Verrazano Bridge, from the terrace that girded them. The old bank vault was in the business office at the end of the hall, which was lined with familiar photos of some of Sterling’s principal authors, including a beetling, rather intimidating one of A.O. and, farther on, a wispy, out-of-focus Ida in a style reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron.

  Sterling spun the dial, swung open the safe’s heavy army-green door, and rifled through a rat’s nest of manuscripts and ledgers, finally producing an old grocery box from the bottom shelf. The notebooks were piled inside, Venetian laid paper edged with gold bound in grained red leather. There were thirteen of them, each ninety-six pages, about nine by eleven inches. Every surface was covered with writing—numbers, letters, and symbols in ordered rows, page after page of them, all in uniform red ink. At the bottom of the box was a large accordion file stuffed with crumbling newspaper clippings, articles, and other ephemera.

  Clearly, Outerbridge had had something to say in his last years in Venice, but he hadn’t wanted anyone to know what it was, at least not anytime soon. Paul was intrigued. He asked Sterling if he could look the notebooks over more thoroughly.

  “Be my guest,” Sterling conceded amiably. “Maybe we’ll both learn something.”

  Paul made several visits to Impetus to pore over the notebooks after work. He got to know the staff—those he hadn’t already met in his years in the business, that is. They struck him as a clannish bunch, suspicious of the corrupted world outside the Impetus walls. He felt a solidarity with them he wasn’t sure was fully shared, given that he worked for one of Sterling’s longtime nemeses in Commercial Publishing. Still, they too were lifers, not all that different from the inmates on Union Square, and he hoped he’d eventually be accepted as part of the family—a loud, clueless distant relation, maybe, visiting interminably from Elsewhere.

  The notebooks themselves, though, made no sense at all. In form they resembled poems, but they were written in what looked like an abstruse computer language:

  &/x#xewhh

  hd/zxk66cc

  wde9x+#}#>3$a#

  ezd/zx3$.+a#>>k++a

  eed%hx2$#.x+k$c>)c++a

  e%df9x6;k$a

  e9d/zxvk4c—+;k>=x+;>wv

  Sometimes, the “poems” were interrupted by series of longer lines:

  ;!vc#}#+xvc#}^x4c3ac}#+x@c}^x$c|$ac}#+

  $k#31#^x+k+3c>$k3xaw#@kyx6k$cvc#3x6kk|2|c!2

  At first Paul was totally stymied by the impenetrability of A.O.’s gobbledygook, but as he hunkered down, he could see patterns emerge. He asked if he could borrow the notebooks, but Sterling demurred: “They don’t belong to me; they’re Svetlana’s”—Arnold’s daughter, who lived in London. “I’d be responsible if anything happened to them.”

  So whenever he could steal time from his regular duties, Paul worked alone late into the evening, bent over the old metal desk in the fluorescent-lit back office, laboriously mapping the notebooks, trying to identify recurrences in Arnold’s symbols. At times the work was so stultifying that he felt like giving up. But he wanted to impress Sterling with his industry and ingenuity, so he kept at it, searching doggedly for some way into their mystery.

  Then one evening, out of the blue, after one of their whiskey-lubricated confabs had stretched long into the wee hours, the old man made Paul an unexpected offer.

  “Why don’t you come spend your vacation up in Hiram’s Corners? You can keep chipping away at these cussed things, and we can keep talking about Arnold and Ida and everything else.”

  It was more than a dream come true; it was the fulfillment of a dream Paul hadn’t known he’d had. He didn’t fully understand why he was so drawn to Sterling, as he was in a different way to Homer, these figures from another era, these competing fathers. As someone who’d always felt faintly fatherless himself and who was always quietly searching for mentors, he found that each loomed in his psyche in his own unsettling way. Homer, outlandish, imposing, larger than life, was the immutable sun around which everything in his universe revolved. Sterling was cooler; he had the nonchalance, the charm and modesty and arrogance, of the privileged man nothing had ever stood in the way of. He was tall, though at his age his knees gave slightly when he walked, so he had no doubt been even more imposing as a beautiful young man. Now he ambled along like a daddy longlegs with or without cane, still slim and elegant, still sure he was the handsomest man in the room, yet innocent of the self-love that emanated from Homer like a musk.

  Paul understood that Homer and Sterling represented worldly effectiveness, a congruity of aspiration and achievement that Paul wanted for himself. The trouble was, they hated each other. Paul felt tarred by Homer’s brush when he was with Sterling, and vice versa: too venal for Impetus-like sainthood, too airy-fairy literary for a he-man’s world of fucking and cigars. When he was with one or the other, Paul made light of their antipathy, as they themselves did, to their credit, yet he had an uneasy intuition—or was it simply a projection?—that each man wanted him all to himself. Each commanded his loyalty. Homer was Paul’s chief enabler, the senior partner in the rough-and-tumble game they both enjoyed so much, often precisely because of its (relatively civilized, to be sure) rugby scrum–like mixing it up. But Paul esteemed and aspired to emulate Sterling’s taste and finesse, too. Now here he was, employed by Homer but moonlighting on a project for Sterling. It was an uncomfortable place to be, like so many others he’d found himself in.

  Much the same was true, in a different way, of his relationship with Jasper Bewick, the fetching young music critic he’d been pining over for the past couple of years, ever since his on-again, off-again thing with Tony Heller had come to an end. Tony was an actor who filled in as a waiter at the Crab, and he’d played the part of a boyfriend beautifully, until their run was suddenly over. There’d been a long period of misunderstandings and hurt feelings and what felt like betrayals, until they both had the sense to end it. After Tony’s aimlessness, Jasper’s rash enthusiasms and 24/7 seductiveness, not to mention his wavy dark hair and compact, muscular body, had been catnip for Paul—as had Jasper’s push-me-pull-you, fort/da ambivalence. Jasper clearly needed Paul around. The trouble was he didn’t seem to want Paul, least of all as a lover. They would have long, intense dinners during which they’d talk about music, literature, their families, Jasper’s dreams of fame—everything under the sun—but when Paul walked him to his doorway, Jasper would give him a brotherly hug and disappear upstairs.

  When Paul pulled away, though, Jasper was there in a flash—with unobtainable concert tickets, premium-grade gossip, and pouty protestations of need and affection. This had been going on long enough for Paul to recognize, in his moments of lucidity, that he and Jasper had no future. But he was a sucker for Jasper’s beauty and brilliance and charm—which meant he was stuck with their stuckness, treading water, as he always did when it came to roma
nce. It depressed him to think about it, so he tried to concentrate on his work, and on the notebooks, though they seemed as impossible to find his way into as Jasper’s arms.

  When August first rolled around, Paul invited Jasper to drive up for a visit, using the local music festival as bait, though he had little expectation he would bite. Paul bid Homer and his office mates a fond farewell and headed for Hiram’s Corners in his rented red Hyundai with his heart in his mouth. He felt a little bit like a character in a Grimm’s fairy tale, disappearing into the fragrant forest with no trail of crumbs to help him to find his way home.

  VI

  Lost in Hiram’s Corners

  High in the foothills of the Middlesex Mountains, Hiram’s Corners was far enough from New York City to be a world unto itself, not the weekenders’ outpost that towns across the Connecticut border like Kent or Salisbury had become—enclaves of rich urbanites who owned most of the notable property in town and kept the locals employed maintaining it. Hiram’s Corners differed from other wealthy suburban watering holes in that its grandees were homegrown. It sometimes seemed that all the large landholders in the town were related. The Wainwrights’ presence went back to Sterling’s great-aunt Aurelia, a big-bosomed Cincinnati matron with a lorgnette and sensible shoes who had married her way east when she was younger and lither. Adelbert Binns, whom she’d wed in 1905, had made good as John D. Rockefeller’s chief fixer at Standard Oil and had been handsomely rewarded in the process. Binns belonged to another notable Cincinnati tribe; he’d put down roots here on the advice of old Senator Hiram Handspring, who had likewise married into the family. Over the years his son Bobby Binns, and Bobby’s son Beebe, a noted conservationist, nationally recognized orchid grower, and devotee of the Middlesex woods, had acquired more than eight thousand acres on the slopes of Bald Mountain, reputedly one of the largest private holdings in the state outside the Adirondacks. The Wainwrights’ mere several hundred acres hugged the edge of this spread and were effectively part of it.