Muse: A Novel Page 8
sleep while you can while
the sun is still roaming
white body tarred
by its cyclamen stain
night-haired Endymion
splayed in the gloaming
stay in my arms
till its coming again
Yet as Ida aged, as life flowed through her veins, Paul began to detect a subtle change in her explorations of eros. It was as if gradually she became able to entertain feelings of vulnerability and insufficiency. And her portrayals of self then could be heartrending:
Look for me under my pinafore
under your skin
reckless and shivering
ravenous wild-
eyed and thin
Ida’s work developed, and changed, too, as she aged. And at times her heroic self-sufficiency began to feel like simple sadness.
* * *
The next morning, it was back to work in the barn. After a long slog, he felt he was beginning to make headway. Slowly, by a grim, steadfast process of elimination, he’d begun to break into Arnold’s code.
He’d started with some long lines, predominately in the later notebooks, which were repetitions in every possible permutation and in numberless styles of penmanship, upper- and lowercase, of just three symbols: A, 3, and #.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333
################################################
or sometimes
################################################
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333
or
333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333
################################################
AAAaaaAAaaAaAaAaAaAaAaaaaaAAAAAAaAaaAAaaAAaA
Paul decided to adopt the hypothesis that these frequently repeated figures represented the letters of Ida’s name, which often appeared uncoded, too—row after row of I’s and D’s and A’s—in the last notebooks. After that, a statistical matchup of the most common letter frequencies—he remembered good old etaoin shrdlu on the Linotype—started to produce results. Words began to form out of the blind symbology of A.O.’s lines, like figures emerging from the mist. The frequency tables needed some adjustment, though, because many of the words—again, unsurprisingly—were Italian, in which the most commonly used letters are eaoin lrtsc.
A.O.’s method turned out to be fairly straightforward, and Paul realized to his dismay that if he’d bothered to consult an expert he could have deciphered the notebooks long ago. Arnold’s encoding wasn’t quite as primitive as a Caesar’s cipher, where one letter substitutes for another a set number of places down the alphabet. Instead, he had replaced the letters and numbers with an arbitrary list of symbols: # for a, © for b, ¥ for c, x for a letter space, d for a colon. Certain letters and numbers stood in for others: a for i, and 3 for d, k for o, g for 6, for instance, which it took Paul several long sessions to figure out. Paul’s hypothesis had been correct: when Arnold meant IDA, he’d written A3#.
Once he’d deciphered them, though, the notebooks hadn’t, unfortunately, proven to be all that edifying. The “poems” turned out to be accountings of everything A.O. had done, day in and day out, hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute, in Venice:
23 APRIL 1986
8:30 coffee
9:15 lavanderia
10:36 Dr. Giannotti
11:28 Sra. Lorenzetti
12:45 fuori
15:30 home—long lunch
16:29 Sterling call
18:40 bath
19:30 Moro cocktails
21:00 dinner
22:59 bed—red room
24 APRIL 1986
8:29 caffè, cornetto
9:09 shoemaker
11:19 plumber
14:30 Giannotti …
The entries went on inexorably this way, covering roughly the last five years of A.O.’s life—before dementia seemed to leave him entirely incoherent, that is, though his daily jottings had continued even then. In the last notebook the scribbling became wilder, less concise and organized. The diary entries ceased and all that was left were chains of words, which could go on for pages:
upheaval heavy medieval bevy retrieval seawall scorch
levee steady level conundrum grief set piece
alstroemeria astronomy aphid Arthurian unstable unspeakable
table unable
roadway goldenrod icebox forehead footsteps possess embrace
No poems, no revelations or confessions. Just lists of appointments interspersed with strings of seemingly random words. And Ida’s name, in various permutations, in and out of code, repeated over and over.
Arnold’s notebooks remained opaque. Whatever meaning they held was locked inside them, maybe forever. Paul had succeeded in unscrambling their code, perhaps—or were these supposed diary entries a cipher of their own, with yet another layer of secrets beneath them? Their writer’s deeper imperative, the one that had determined the words on the pages, remained unfathomed.
Paul had been working his way through the old accordion file he’d found with the notebooks, too. It wasn’t just clippings, it turned out, but carbons of correspondence to and from Impetus and others concerning both A.O. and Ida—bills, letters from Sterling to both of them, along with some answers from Arnold—though, of course, nothing from her. Reading them was like watching Ida’s fame balloon.
It was the publication of Bringing Up the Rear in 1954 that had signaled her emergence from the chrysalis of cultdom into public fame. Even the aging Wallace Stevens had written Sterling to say, “She gives me hope for our future.” Her kinsman Robert Lowell, only eight years Ida’s senior, who’d also had a stellar career early on, winning the Pulitzer Prize when he was barely thirty, had watched her speed by him like a literary Road Runner. Still, he couldn’t help but praise the “brilliance, finish, and freedom” of Ida’s work in his Sewanee Review review of Bringing Up the Rear. Ida was a Brahmin, too, every bit as much as Cal; but she had none of the self-protective entitlement he’d had to work so assiduously to shed; it just slid off her back like rainwater. Lowell could only look on in stunned confusion.
Then there was a July 23, 1960, letter to Sterling from the manager of the Chelsea Hotel, enclosing a bill for almost $12,000:
Miss Ida Perkins and her coterie left hurriedly this morning after more than a month here at the Chelsea without settling their account. As she provided your name in case of emergencies, I am sending it on to you for satisfaction.
Or this one, from Sterling to A.O., dated February 28, 1970:
Dearest Arnold:
My spies tell me the powder at the Summit is peerless this season, but I haven’t been able to get away, largely due to the run on Ida’s work. We’ve reprinted Half a Heart thirteen times since the National Book Award, and my salesmen tell me the stores can’t keep it on the shelves. And all of her work is going gangbusters. E. S. Wilentz collared me in front of his shop on Eighth Street this morning and wouldn’t stop chanting, “SEND. ME. MORE. BOOKS.” It was embarrassing—and sublime. Of course we don’t have books to send him at the moment, but the printer promised another twenty thousand next week. Twenty thousand! Our cynical old sales manager Sidney Huntoon says it’ll be “Gone today, here tomorrow,” once the excitement dies down, but in Ida’s case, I don’t think so for once. The old girl is the absolute toast of the town. You should have seen her on Dick Cavett, making eyes and getting him to laugh uproariously. And her show with Audrey Dienstfrey and Her Kind was a sellout at Boston Garden. Audrey screamed and wept and made an enormous scene—envious, no doubt—but now they’re joined at the hip and Audrey won’t let her new soul sister out of her sight.
You’d be proud of your consort. I certainly am. We’re minting money, for once. Ida seems to be enjoying it all—at least most of it; I don’t think she’s wild about bei
ng mobbed in the street. Luckily, she’s coming up to the farm for the weekend to hide out, bringing that ingrate Hummock and maybe young John Ashbery along. Yawn. Maxine has orga nized a little golf tourney for everyone that ought to be a riot, since most of the guests aren’t exactly star athletes.
In other news, I’m sorry to report that we’re going to have to let Elegy for Evgenia go out of stock for the time being, as demand has fallen below the acceptable threshold for a reprint. Here’s hoping the situation turns around shortly.
I trust all is otherwise serene in La Serenissima. Keep the faith; we’re holding on as usual here.
Ever thine,
There were ecstatic reviews and the inevitable pans, particularly of Barricade and The Brownouts, published in Ida’s so-called Anti phase. There were endless award citations: four National Book Awards (and a photograph of Ida arm in arm with fellow winners Joyce Carol Oates and William Steig at the awards dinner in 1992); two Pulitzer Prizes; the Feltrinelli, Lenin, Nonino, Prince of Asturias, Jerusalem, and T. S. Eliot prizes; the gold medal for poetry of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; a letter from 41 offering Ida the Presidential Medal of Freedom (with a carbon of a reply from Sterling politely declining on her behalf); a list of thirty-nine honorary degrees, from 1960 to 2005; copies of full-page advertisements for various titles; articles in Flair and Vogue about her idiosyncratic fashion sense; bills from Bergdorf Goodman for thousands of dollars, primarily for shoes; travel agents’ invoices from the triumphal 1967 West Coast tour, during which Ida had cavorted naked in the big pool at Esalen with Pepita Erskine, after spending the weekend in Watts with Eldridge Cleaver. A photo of sunburned, shirtless Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell flanking a pale, straw-hatted Ida, taken by Elizabeth Hardwick on Mount Desert Island in August 1968, two days after the New York Post printed the iconic shot of Ida in a Chanel suit with matching spectator pumps and alligator bag outside La Côte Basque with Babe Paley and Truman Capote (“Whose Hair Higher?” the caption queried). Invitations to twelve state dinners at the White House, from the Johnson to Obama administrations. A royalty statement for Aria di Giudecca (7,238 copies sold in the first six months of 2000).
And there was this, from 1964:
Dear Mr. Wainwright:
I want to thank you for sending Ida Perkins’s new book, The Face-lift Wars, which I have been nibbling at with great fascination since its arrival. Miss Perkins is that unlikely miracle, a Real Thing. Gertrude Stein, who as you know encouraged Ida when she was still a girl, would have been gratified to see how she has panned out.
With appreciation,
Alice Toklas
* * *
That night Paul had troubled dreams, of Ida and Sterling and A.O. and Gertrude Stein and Mao and Gloria Steinem (and Jasper, too) caught in bizarre conflicting situations, battles, triangles, thrashing sex, and misery—and him on the sidelines, not knowing how to enter in, to engage or calm them. He woke headachy and exhausted, and spent another rainy day in the barn finishing up his transcription, which that day seemed boring and pointless. He was sick of them all, and most of all sick of himself and his voyeuristic need to live through them. Luckily, it would soon be time to pack up and head back to the city.
First, though, Homer was coming for a visit. He’d called to announce that he and Iphigene were driving up to Hiram’s Corners to check in on Paul—“consorting with the enemy,” he’d put it good-humoredly enough, though he’d been disparaging about Outerbridge when Paul had admitted he was working with Sterling on the notebooks. Maybe Homer was curious about how his old competitor lived; his own country place was a turn-of-the-century Tyrolean chalet in Westchester originally built by his great-uncle that now, unfortunately, backed onto the Saw Mill River Parkway. Or maybe it was simple boredom that sent him out of the house. In any case, Paul decided to invite Sterling and Bree to lunch at the Cow Cottage on the Sterns’ visiting day. He fixed a shrimp salad, iced tea, and icebox cookies, and waited for the fireworks.
It had gone well, much to his relief. Sterling presented Homer with a rare copy of a Hiram’s Corners Chapbook of Elspeth Adams’s First Poems, and Homer had been visibly touched. They’d all chatted cordially about the weather, their children, and various authors, steering clear, for the most part, of the ones they’d “shared” (i.e., fought over) and moving on to the general decline of the business and the perfidy of agents—subjects the two old lions were in utter agreement about. And then, after a couple of hours of making nice, Homer and Iphigene had been on their way. Ida had gone unmentioned, needless to say—after all, there were other ladies at the table—but in Paul’s mind, and who knows, perhaps in the other men’s, too, she had been vividly present.
He’d imagined her suddenly appearing: lunch on Olympus, le déjeuner sur l’herbe, all of them immortally young, feasting nude on nectar and ambrosia. Instead, it had been a congenial little meal, a moment of truce between aged warriors—with nothing to arouse their old rivalry.
“He’s mellowed,” Homer said about Sterling when Paul was back at work—which was precisely what Sterling had told Paul down at the dock that afternoon. The good feeling lasted a few weeks, and then they were back to what they enjoyed most: doing each other down to Paul. He was caught in the middle, as usual. Yet he felt abler now to move back and forth between his heroes. He’d been with both of them at the same time and place and no one had even raised his voice.
VII
Sunny Days at P & S
“How was your weekend, dearie? Read anything interesting?”
Paul, who’d been back at work for a few weeks, was sitting in Homer’s corner office with him and Sally, as they did most mornings after she’d taken Homer’s dictation. The company’s ratty style extended to the boss’s inner sanctum, which, though larger than the other offices and furnished with a conference table and a dirt-encrusted Danish modern desk and two sweat-stained aquamarine leather armchairs, was every bit as shabby as the rest of the premises. The cracked linoleum floor was waxed fairly often, filth and all, so it was shiny as well as grubby. Thirty-year-old curtains of a beige indistinguishable from dinge framed windows overlooking Union Square, which was currently experiencing a renaissance that had made it the teenage hangout capital of Manhattan. Now, instead of users scoring at the foot of the Civil War monument in the center of the park, recovering users competed with after-schoolers, dog walkers, and the occasional hardy passerby for seats on the too-few benches. Still, the greenmarket that happened four days a week right outside the office was a boon. Paul occasionally saw Homer and Sally shopping for fruit or flowers on their daily postprandial stroll.
“Not much. A few no-count novels.”
“When is that momser Burns going to finish his book? He owes us a small fortune. If he’d lay off shtupping that girl of his with the ring in her nose and get down to work, we’d all be a lot better off.”
“That’s a bindi Anjali wears on her forehead, Homer. Earl phoned last week to say he’s about to deliver.”
Homer’s banter with Paul kept things lively and safely impersonal between them. His constant stream of gossip, especially the sexual variety, invariably contained juicy tidbits about whoever was current on his ever-active shit list. “Davidoff is a faggot,” he’d assert, more or less out of thin air, or “I hear that cocksucker Stevens is boffing both his secretaries. When the Nympho finds out, she’ll have a vaginal collapse.” Homer was an equal opportunity offender when it came to others’ proclivities—though “cocksucker” was a term reserved exclusively for heterosexuals. Ethnicity wasn’t one of his primary categories of derision, but he did enjoy poking fun at the “piece of fluff” that Gerald Bourne had brought over from Paris on his most recent annual visit (Gerald always showed up with a foulard for Homer, an extravagant scarf for Sally, and a tie for Paul, picked up, no doubt, at the Hermès airport gift shop). “What was It wearing?” the boss would ask, about someone whose sexuality was a little too fluid according to his antediluvian standards.
“I don’t believe people do all the things you say they do, Homer; they couldn’t possibly,” Paul would object when Homer cataloged the shenanigans of his foes, and friends, to which Homer would counter, “No, but they do something.” Which was hard to deny. Sexual activity for Homer was an index of moral fallibility and vitality at one and the same time. It didn’t matter what people did; he was sure they did something illicit. It meant they were alive, like him. Maybe he was simply looking for companionship in transgression.
Homer had been a varsity sexual athlete in his prime, according to Georges Savoy, who told Paul that Stern would often return from lunch with wet hair. For years he had a special “wire” in his office, originally installed, it was rumored, for secret government contacts. Now, though, the old black rotary phone rang only when a woman friend from out of Homer’s colorful past checked in; then Sally would stand in the hall and intone, “Your phone is ringing.” (She refused to answer it herself.) Homer was reputed to have maintained a pied-à-terre near the office where he would repair for nooners, sometimes allegedly three-ways recruited (but how?) from among the staff. Sex was P & S’s best—indeed its only—sport (the softball team was famously terrible), and it was Homer who set the tone. “Put this in with your smalls,” he’d tell his rights director, Cherry Withington, on her way to Frankfurt, tossing her the galleys of a new book. Sex was recreation for him, a healthy, immensely satisfying pastime, and he was an avid tennis player too, well into his eighties. For all his profanity and bedroom antics, though, Homer was a relative prude when it came to misbehaving on the page. He was no Barney Rosset, the swashbuckling, boundary-testing founder of Grove Press, who’d braved the censorship laws bringing out Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Story of O, and other lubricious classics. Sex scenes in the novels Homer published made him uncomfortable, though he was convinced (erroneously, for the most part) that they sold books.