Muse: A Novel (10 page)

On Paul’s first evening, he walked down the grassy old woods road that ran past the cottage like something out of a poem by Robert Frost. It wound over a rickety bridge, up a steep hill, and across a pine forest plateau, then descended beside a swamp that was home to Venus flytrap and other carnivorous plants, passing a small, unoccupied screen-porched cottage on the right. After another slight incline it arrived at Handspring Pond and Aunt Lobelia’s stone “camp,” a Beaux Arts gem in its own right, with Sterling’s shingled one a few hundred feet to the east. Sprinkled around the edge of the little lake were a dozen similar structures, most of them owned by the several branches of the Binns family. The only noise that intruded on the pond, where motorboats were forbidden, was an occasional shout from the beach at the west end, which Beebe leased to the town for a dollar a year. The woods roads and trails in the Bald Mountain Forest passed many wonders—secret lakes,
cellars of settlements abandoned centuries ago, even occasional patches of primeval first-growth forest, the ultimate rarity.

The photos of Hiram’s Corners in the mid-nineteenth century that Paul saw at the Historical Society on the town green were shocking: these densely green hills had, like most of the Eastern Seaboard, been virtually shorn of forest by charcoalers avid to feed the kilns of the small iron factories that lined the Huckleberry River, which was little more than a big brook, before the invention of steel. The very innovations that had been the sources of the Wainwrights’ and Binnses’ wealth—oil, coal, and steel—had killed off these little enterprises and tens of thousands like them and allowed those brash nineteenth-century Midwestern arrivistes to become the lords of Hiram’s Corners. And now oil and steel had been shoved aside by what—high tech? Everyone was waiting for the first dot-commers to show up in Middlesex. So far, though, it seemed to have been passed over by the new Masters of the Universe in favor of showier spots. Being up in the hills, Hiram’s Corners didn’t even have high-speed Internet access, a bone of contention, Paul soon learned, for the few transplanted New Yorkers who wanted to live and work here. It was a place out of time, nearly feudal in its hierarchies and peaceableness. Paul lay back in his chaise longue and breathed in its self-satisfied woodsy air like perfume.

The Cow Cottage had originally been built as the farmer’s house on Aunt Lobelia’s property. Like her own aunt Aurelia, she’d arrived from Cincinnati, one of those reverse pioneers who made their way back to the original Colonies to acquire the patina of gentility that was missing in the Western Reserve. Aunt Lobelia was stolid and a little self-righteous, but devoted to her brother’s wayward yet alert only son, and indulgent, up to a point, of his odd interest in the arts. When Sterling had decided to become a publisher, she’d created a sylvan refuge in which he could pursue his literary aspirations away from the intermittently prying eyes of his intermittently disapproving parents and under her conventional but benevolent nose.

A succession of writers had lived in the Cottage, helping Sterling conduct Impetus business and holding down the fort when he took off for the Summit, where he still spent much of every winter, skiing, snowshoeing, and transforming the place into a Spartan but first-world-class ski resort, and visiting Jeannette and their daughter, Ida, named, he said, for his Wainwright grandmother.

In his absence, first Harold Cowden, then Konrad Preuss, and lastly Eli Mandel, all of them among Sterling’s second string of indigent young writers, had tried to make a go of working for subsistence wages in the upper Hudson Valley with no one to see or talk to except the naturally curious—i.e., suspicious—locals, who didn’t know a villanelle from a
bottle of bourbon. Cowden had got a book out of it—his
Hiram’s Corners Cantata,
usually viewed as an aberration in his work—before being briefly institutionalized. Preuss and Mandel, perhaps better balanced, had lasted less long. Then Sterling established the Impetus New York office and bought the Barrow Street apartment (useful for authorial conferences that sometimes turned into trysts and/or vice versa), and the work and play of Impetus Editions had largely moved south. But to the initiated, the Cow Cottage retained its aura of literary sanctity, and the attached barn, with its mullioned Swiss windows, was stocked with Sterling’s overflow library of IE books, a veritable temple to the literary cult he’d established. It was here that Paul had set up shop to work on A.O.’s notebooks.

Paul shared Sterling’s view that A.O. was the only Red poet who had not been bested by ideology. As with his model Shelley, Arnold’s superabundant lyric gift surpassed and, some would say, annihilated the ideas he expressed, till all there was, in effect, was the poetry—its thrust and lilt steamrolling the poet’s purported convictions. Paul could practically taste the romance of A.O.’s life in Venice with Ida, she consoling him about the eternal vagaries of politics and reminding him of the enduring power of his voice, Arnold urging her on to ever-new delvings, new castles in Spain, new amazements to be pulled out of the humid Venetian
breeze, composing his mysterious encrypted poems all the while.

But this wasn’t Venice. Paul was here in this idyllic yet unfamiliar place, with a daunting task in front of him. He’d taken up the study of ciphers, having ordered every guide he could find on the Medusa website that didn’t sound too technical. He felt guilty about patronizing the rapacious online bookseller, but the truth was that Styx and Stonze never had what he needed, even in their Madison Square flagship store, where board games and wrapping paper and the book chain’s own proprietary product were beginning to squeeze out books. What would Morgan think? he wondered—a bit disingenuously, since he already knew.

Paul had convinced himself that it was just a matter of time before he’d find the method in A.O.’s madness. Working in the airless barn wasn’t always conducive to code-cracking, though. Some days, he’d spend more time than he’d have liked to admit
not
working on the notebooks, fretting about the non-life he was leading or poring over Sterling’s secondary—or was it tertiary?—library of Impetus titles, alphabetically arranged on unpainted shelves with old juice bottles for bookends. Everyone from Tagore to Blaisdell, early Luteri to late Broch, Robert Duncan to Dermott Weems to César Vallejo to Pélieu to Serenghetti—it was a checkerboard of world literature, mind-boggling in its
breadth and adventurousness and originality. Yes, Sterling liked to talk about the ones that got away but, my God, the ones he’d landed, the cavalcade of writers he’d discovered, nurtured, and kept in print over a long and no doubt often discouraging but ultimately triumphant career!

The truth was that many of these names, the makers of modern culture, had sold very little over the course of their long lives in print with Impetus. It was one of the realities of publishing: what was truly new often languished in the warehouse nearly unasked-for. One of the tricks of publishing was catching the wave of public taste at the right moment. If you were too prescient, too far ahead of the swell, literally nothing would happen—until lightning struck, if it did, years, sometimes decades, later. In the meantime, you had to have other ways of keeping body and soul together to be a serious writer—or a publisher. The remarkable thing about Sterling was how he’d used his means, and used them brilliantly, to build his house. With Aunt Lobelia’s help, he’d husbanded his modest stake and kept his shoestring operation going long enough, consistently enough, devotedly enough, that fifty years on he had a catalog that was the envy of the more discerning of his commercial confreres. And Impetus had eventually become profitable as well, when a goodly number of its key authors had ended up being adopted in classrooms across America. The long tail had paid off for Sterling. Not that this was why he’d done it;
but commercial success in the end was heroic confirmation of the essential soundness of his undertaking. He’d made a wager with fate that out of desire, stick-to-itiveness, and judgment, he could create a worthwhile publishing venture. And he’d succeeded; by trusting his own taste, he’d shown them all—his uncomprehending family, his derisive competitors, even crusty, superior Arnold Outerbridge, who’d taken a left-handed chance on a brash young layabout.

Paul hadn’t come into publishing at a time when with a little money and a lot of taste and elbow grease you could build something like an Impetus or a P & S. Besides, he didn’t have the cash or the chutzpah to start something on his own. By the time he’d shown up, most of the smaller houses had been gobbled up by so-called general-interest publishers, most of them now owned in turn by much bigger conglomerates who’d publish anything they could get their hands on that had a chance of making money, and whose lists consequently more or less resembled one another. Impetus and P & S were anomalies now, among the last of the independents, whose lists reflected the tastes and commitments of the publishers themselves. It was unclear how long they’d hold out in the rush for consolidation and “scale” that was whipping through the book business and countless others like a tornado through a hay field.

Still, Paul hoped that in his work with Homer he could
emulate the single-mindedness and finesse that Sterling had brought to realizing his dream. Paul believed in believers—not the credulous religious, but those who aspired to move the needle, to add something to the world. What he valued most was their all-or-nothing faith in themselves—something he wished he had more of—accompanied by the self-forgetting that true love requires. Aspiration to him didn’t feel like self-seeking.

So he daydreamed a lot in that often stifling back room, with dead flies in the cobwebs and the dust of slowly disintegrating books in the air—and not always about the shambles of his love life. He was taken with the hodgepodge of images tacked on the beams: an early Impetus logo by Alfonso Ossorio (which he later convinced Sterling to frame and hang in the house); an ink sketch of A.O. in his most prophetic mode; a dog-eared eighteenth-century print of the Forum; that eye-opening photo of Sterling moguling on the Swiss slopes; a peeling, blunt-cornered postcard of Celine Mannheim’s half-finished Venetian palazzo; a snapshot of Ida dancing the frug with Robert Duncan in a San Francisco gay bar.

He could hear bees out in the garden, under the gigantic, unthreatening clouds. He could see the hollyhocks and roses distorted by the bottle-green glass of the barn windows. He didn’t know which was more attractive: the sun-drenched world outside the barn; the barn itself with its
beckoning treasures; or the pages on the desk in front of him, the paper trail, the leavings of the man who had written more than a few of the classic books arrayed around him. Part of him wanted to be outside in the cool air, so clean it hurt his citified lungs, weeding the lily beds or editing the woods, as Sterling had joked when he’d come upon him one day, piling up brush in the thin stand of birches behind the house for exercise. But he wanted to be here inside, too, with the ephemera of his heroes’ lives. He didn’t know how to choose, so he sat doing nothing, till he felt the chill of a sudden storm through the door he’d left open.

Reluctantly, he rose and went to make sure the windows were shut in the cottage. The rain raged, and the power went out for an hour. After a while, his laptop’s battery died, so he flipped through the papers in the accordion file, inhaling the smoky residue of Arnold’s and Ida’s lives. The charred smell came, he assumed, from the pages themselves, burning away invisibly as they had for years in the Impetus vault in New York. Eventually they would crumble and be lost to the world, if they weren’t thrown away first. For today, though, they were his to inhale and get lost in. Utter joy, joy he knew no one else could understand or share in, joy like a secret perversion possessed him, and in those moments in the barn Paul was guiltily, radiantly happy, wallowing in his heroes’ lives as if they were his own.

* * *

Late in the day he usually strolled down to the dock to join Sterling and Bree for a swim. It was like clockwork: at four o’clock the old station wagon would trundle past the Cow Cottage and Paul would know Sterling would be spending the next hour or two down at the pond, occasionally dipping in the water but mainly sunning and gabbing with Bree and Ida and his son-in-law Charlie Bernstein and their kids and whoever else happened to be around.

Next door to Sterling’s was the camp of Seamus O’Sullivan, a jerry-built wooden affair with a proliferation of porches, balconies, and docks from which many-colored bath towels were perpetually waving like banners in the breeze. Seamus, a longtime staff writer at
The Gothamite,
where he had been both the jazz and the racing critic for decades, considered himself a bon vivant and a wit. He also fancied himself a bosom buddy of Sterling’s, and he was constantly seeking to engage him in barbed banter studded with classical taglines from their school days. But Paul thought he could detect a certain detachment in Sterling’s repartee, and a corresponding neediness underneath Seamus’s affectionate raillery. Paul had begun to understand that Sterling was always just a little bit absent with everyone. He let things happen, he played along, but there was a plane of his attention that seemed unreachable.

Today, as it happened, it was just Bree on the dock with Sterling. She was knitting, chuckling as Sterling commented on the news and made derisive noises about the Higher Social Orders over at Serenity Lake, the other body of water in Hiram’s Corners, whom the Handspring Pond denizens enjoyed condescending to. There wasn’t much of a breeze this afternoon, and the one Sunfish out on the pond, manned by Rick Binns with a new blond passenger, wasn’t making much headway.

Paul, his head full of his work in the barn, asked Sterling about Outerbridge’s visit to Hiram’s Corners with Ida. “When were they here?”

“Must have been in seventy-nine, when A.O. got his honorary degree from Harvard—an honorary A.B., in fact; as you know, he never graduated.

“It was quite an afternoon,” Sterling continued. “A.O. wasn’t talking. It was in his period of Silent Protest against the way he’d been treated in the McCarthy years. But Ida was wonderful. She made the whole thing as natural as an ice-cream social with her nonstop chatter, while attending to Arnold’s every need.”