Muse: A Novel (12 page)

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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.

“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.

Paul could tell who Homer’s old flames had been by how courtly he was with them, loyal in a way he was with no one else—not authors, relations, or even his best foreign confederates. Sex with Homer seemed to lead to friendship, perhaps the most unambivalent relationships he had. He was a ladies’ man, and not just in the accepted sense of the term. Women seemed to offer him a solace that was missing from his noisy yet inarticulate sparring with men.

It was impossible for Homer to be really close to another male; his Neanderthal instinct was too strong. He boasted about his affection for his authors, the Three Aces in particular, but when Paul joined them for lunch, as he was always
invited to because Homer, he sensed, was uncomfortable one-on-one, the conversation often ended up being superficial, if not inane—a terrible waste when three of the leading writers in the world were sitting at the table. Homer, for all his impact, was a man of a few words, many of them unprintable, which got repeated over and over in ingenious combinations. “And so forth and so on” was how his stories tended to trail off, with a dismissive wave. “Let’s go make a book” was how he brought lunch to a close.

What Homer thrived on most was having enemies. Nothing gave him more pleasure than cutting dead a former employee—a “deserter,” hence a nonperson—or providing a denigrating comment about a competitor to
The Daily Blade.
In his days doing army PR he’d learned that it didn’t matter what you said as long as you were quoted. He had a series of rubber stamps for unwelcome correspondence, which he’d return with
GREAT MOMENTS IN LITERATURE
,
HORSESHIT PIE,
or best of all
FUCK YOU VERY MUCH
smudged in big black letters across the pages. He delighted in accusing Sandy Isenberg, the pint-sized president of Owl House, of boorishness, making bellicose public sallies that left Sandy, a short man unaccustomed to opposition of any kind, sputtering with rage.

Best of all, though, was fighting with agents, those parasites who interfered with his private relations with his property—i.e., his authors. Paul, who felt it was advisable
to get along with people if possible because you might want or need to do business with them in the future, now and again suggested it might be politic to reestablish relations with Agent X, who had incurred Homer’s ire years ago by selling a book he’d wanted to Farrar, Straus or Knopf.

“Don’t give me that Christian forgiveness bullshit, Dukach. I’m a vindictive Jew!” he’d bellow. “End of joke!”—another classic Homer Stern way of closing a conversation.

One agent who loomed in his imagination was Angus McTaggart, with whom Homer enjoyed a long-standing sadomasochistic bromance. McTaggart, who professed to adore Homer, adored working his way through Homer’s catalog even more, signing up his unrepresented or badly represented writers and then demanding oversize improvements in their compensation for their next books, which Homer delighted in being outraged about. Most of the writers ended up staying, on terms that made publishing them unprofitable for Homer, but some of the bigger ones did occasionally leave for greener pastures, like Abe Burack, after he finally hit it big with his big Brooklyn novel,
A Patch on Bernie.
Homer would thunder and swear and refuse to take Angus’s calls for a few weeks or months. Then Angus would take him out to lunch, grovel apologetically, and pick up the check, an unheard-of deviation from the publisher-agent quadrille, and the cycle would start up again. But unlike the Nympho, another powerful agent who couldn’t
help taking Homer’s acting-out personally (to be fair, there was a misogynist cast to many of his jabs), Angus reveled in the ritualized combat that was a way of averting boredom for both of them.

Homer loved winning, and loved seeing others lose even more. But he also enjoyed the game for its own sake. And he was extraordinarily good at it. He had created a highly articulated organism and employed the diversionary color of his personality effectively in its service—unless he got carried away, as he quite often did, by his emotions. His employees felt to him like his “illegitimate children”; they were the best in the business because they were his. He was no intellectual and didn’t pretend to be, though he read, or “sniffed,” as he put it, all the books he published. He was an amateur, in the original sense of the word: he loved writing and writers. And he was unmatched at the one thing that mattered to them more than anything—even money: he could get them talked about.

Now, having more or less recovered from his agon with the notebooks, Paul mentioned to Homer and Sally that he was rereading Pepita’s demolishing essay on Outerbridge in
Retrospective Transgressions,
her scathing study of postwar Communist intellectuals. Pepita had become the darling of
The Protagonist,
the anti-Stalinist left-wing review, early in her career, when they’d published “Jiving with Joe,” her exposé of the totalitarian principles that underlay Movement
aesthetics, which had put her on the map as the nerviest cultural critic of her generation.