Muse: A Novel (15 page)

“It’s possible,” he told Paul. “There are other currents afoot, but it’s possible.”

Paul didn’t know what to make of these gnomic tea leaves. All he could do was what everyone else was doing: wait.

He was at the booth at one o’clock, but the silence was deafening. After an excruciating wait, word went around that Hendrijk David of the Netherlands had squeaked out enough votes to take the prize. It was said he’d been expecting it for years, sitting complacently by the phone on the appointed morning each October.

The rumor, though, turned out to be erroneous. Dries
van Meegeren, another, far more obscure Dutch essayist, had won, setting off an unseemly free-for-all for the acquisition of his largely still-available rights. Publishers from nearly everywhere, who before today had never heard of van Meegeren, swarmed the normally empty Dutch hall, anxious to buy themselves a Nobel Prize winner. The booth of De Bezige Bij, The Busy Bee, van Meegeren’s lucky publisher, resembled a rebooking desk in an airline terminal after a canceled flight. (David, meanwhile, never recovered, dying in bitter disappointment a couple of years later.)

In any case, the prize hadn’t gone to Ida. Paul consoled himself with the fact that her not having won meant she still could.

He phoned Homer once the office was open in New York.

“Can you believe Dries won?” he cackled, giddy with disbelief. Van Meegeren had been campaigning for the Nobel for ages, going on reading tours across Scandinavia, writing articles about the work of Swedish Academy members, even taking up with a Swedish woman reputed to be on a first-name basis with the academy’s secretary.

“That gonif has been kissing Swedish ass for years,” Homer answered. “I was hoping for Les or Adam. I need my Four of a Kind, you know.”

“It will happen, Homer. All in good time. Everyone
here sends love.” Paul relayed greetings from a passel of Homer’s long-standing confreres.

“Keep your nose clean and have fun. I’ll see you Monday.”

“Not Monday. Remember, I’m going to visit Ida Perkins in Venice after the fair.”

“Right.” Paul could hear Homer clearing his throat across the ocean. “Well, give her a slap on the ass for me, and tell her our arms are always open. Keep me posted!”

“Will do—at least the second and third parts,” Paul answered, and rang off. The fair had another two days to run, but he could hardly wait for it to be over. He sleepwalked through his appointments and forced himself to put in an appearance at a few receptions, trying to muster the enthusiasm to host the firm’s Friday night dinner in Homer’s stead. He couldn’t help feeling that, like him, Homer’s pals would be on autopilot without their Fearless Leader to mirror back their well-rehearsed performances as cultural grandees—marshals of France, someone called them. Self-importance was ubiquitous, Paul knew, but there was a particular smarmy pungency to the horse-trading in Frankfurt that he found revolting, especially when he was engaging in it. It was a far cry from the poetry of Ida Perkins or the novels of Ted Jonas, sweated out in anguish and solitude. The idea of Ida or Eric Nielsen or Pepita
here among these overdressed, overfed word merchants who acted as if they owned their writers’ hides made him faintly ill.

On Friday evening he stood in his off-the-rack suit at a long table in an otherwise deserted hotel restaurant as Homer’s crowd—Brigitta, Norberto, Matthias, Beatriz, Jorge and Lalli, Héloise, Gianni, Teresa—sat expectantly, waiting, he was sure, for him to commit an unforced error. He made a stab at imitating Homer’s offhand delivery of one of his risqué toasts, but Paul’s own attempts at public humor usually came off a little forced. All seemed to be going along all right, though, until he made the mistake of mentioning e-books:

“Why, before you know it, you’ll be enjoying Padraic and Thor and Pepita and Dmitry on your own devices, just like us!” he exclaimed with ersatz jollity, given that he’d never opened an e-reader himself.

It was as if he’d farted at the table or mentioned the Holocaust. Brigitta and Matthias stared at each other bug-eyed and sucked in their cheeks, like specters out of Goya’s
Disasters of War,
imagining the digital horde advancing from the West like the latest strain of American influenza. Thank God they would be too old to care when it reached their shores.

Paul shrank down in his seat. What would Homer and Sally say when word reached them, as it assuredly would,
that he’d demonstrated once and for all how unsuited he was for this well-padded, backward-looking world?

He couldn’t wait to breathe the fetid air of his beloved Venice, where he often escaped after the mind-numbing hothouse of the fair. He washed down the rest of his veal chop with too much syrupy
Rotwein,
ushered his last guests out of the funereal restaurant, and caught the midnight train with minutes to spare. He arrived in Venice early the next morning, sleepless but jangly with excitement.

He splurged on a water taxi down the Grand Canal, stunned as always to be confronted with how truly strange Venice was. The shut-up palaces fell straight into the oily loden-colored water (what held them up?). The sky alternated between pearlescent and Bellini blue. He felt gusts of enchantment and resistance, elation and revulsion. Venice was a hallucinatory incubus, the most artificial environment in the world: Disneyland for grown-ups. It reeked of sex and its putrescent partner, death. Thomas Mann had caught its rouged, feverish aura perfectly.

What was Ida Perkins, the avatar of red-cheeked American expansiveness and optimism, doing here? This was a place to hide, to fade away—not to grab life by the lapels, as she always had. Had Ida become infected by A.O.’s old man’s despondency? Or had she found a new lease on life with Leonello Moro? Was Ida still Ida?

Paul spent the morning wandering, struck yet again
by the seemingly chance beauty of Italian public spaces, shaken down over time into nonchalant irregularity and aptness. He had always felt lighter in Italy, unburdened by expectations, his own or anyone else’s; he could move at will here, unimpeded and unobserved, as he sometimes could in New York, too, actually, walking anonymous in the noontime crowd. He had lunch in the autumn sun at a trattoria in the Campo Santo Stefano, and made stabs at resuscitating his dormant Italian. He reread Ida’s Venice book,
Aria di Giudecca,
which was as alive to the decay and incandescence of the city as anything he knew (“city of Jewish saints / of cul-de-sacs and feints / of stains and taints”). Then he started leafing through his transcriptions of A.O.’s notebooks while he sipped his espresso:

Seamstress?
Why would Arnold see a seamstress? Paul shivered a little as the gathering shadows overtook the afternoon sun. Then he returned to his reading. On Monday he was going to meet Ida Perkins. He had lots of questions and he wanted to be prepared.

The gloomy “false Byzantium” of the Hotel Danieli bar at three o’clock on an October afternoon was only partly offset by the blaze in the fireplace reflected in the room’s high-hung, aged mirrors. The upholstery of the couches, gray
peau de soie
moiré, suited Paul’s mood. Outside was burnished Venice autumn weather—pure cloudless blue, sixty-eight degrees in the sun on the Riva degli Schiavoni; but he was trapped inside, overcoat beside him on the couch, waiting for Ida Perkins.

He was taut and indrawn, the way he tended to be when meeting someone new, but especially so today. He was about to come face-to-face with the Person, the Goddess, the One and Only … he was winding himself up, he knew; he had to stop.

Why was he here? He had a sudden urge to hightail it back to New York and forget the whole thing. Instead, he played with his BlackBerry, scanning but not reading his messages.

Suddenly, a slender figure turned the corner from the foyer and peered into the mote-filled semi-gloom before
making her way toward him, negotiating among the islands of furniture that filled the room.

Ida was here.

But no, it was an elderly Italian woman in a heavy pea jacket, not Ida at all.

“Signor Dukach, La Contessa Moro is not well today,
mi dispiace davvero,
” the woman offered. “She asked me to see if instead you might come see her tomorrow afternoon.”

“Yes, of course, ma’am. I can do that.” Paul felt a thrill. He was going to visit Ida at home! Over the years on his trips to Venice, he’d scoped out her address, hoping for a glimpse of her in a window or, better yet, on the street. Now he was going to see for himself.

“A che ora, signora?”
he asked, as nonchalantly as he could.

“Alle quattro del pomeriggio, per piacere. Dorsoduro
434, presso San Gabriele. Grazie, grazie tante
.
”

The woman looked around anxiously, rubbing her hands together as if from the cold, though the room was pleasantly warm. Nodding apologetically, she backed away, turned, and disappeared.

Paul was reprieved! He was going to see Ida, but not yet. Carefree, he strolled in the thinning light past the Arsenale, all the way to San Pietro di Castello; then he meandered back through a warren of backwater rios to San Marco and over the Accademia Bridge. After a stint in the museum with his favorite Carpaccios, he found his way to Montin, a
simple trattoria on a de Chiricoesque canal where the maître d’ was only too happy to show him the table where Ezra Pound had sat with his back to the crowd every evening with Olga Rudge—and occasionally, in his last years, with Arnold and Ida.

He had a couple of limoncellos after his
fegato alla veneziana
and polenta and then wandered back to his hotel on a small canal that gave onto the Giudecca, passing the monument to Dmitry Chavchavadze on the way. Dmitry, who had died of a heart attack in Atlanta a few years before, had, like other émigrés, chosen to spend his immortality in Venice, the ultimate way station of the exile.

Paul fell asleep immediately. In the morning, he lit out for the Ghetto and the farther reaches of Cannaregio with his dog-eared Red Guide, paying an obligatory visit on the way to barrel-vaulted Santa Maria dei Miracoli, nestled like a marble boat in the harbor of small canals surrounding her.

* * *

The nondescript entrance to Palazzo Moro di Schiuma fronted on a narrow alley that ended unceremoniously at the Grand Canal. Paul rang the bell at precisely 4:00 and a small door clicked open. After walking down a short brick passageway between high stucco walls with shards of broken bottles at the top, he found himself in a disused garden.
Climbing vines just losing their reddened leaves covered the back of the house. Paul entered the portico to the right as directed and took the small elevator to the fourth floor.

It opened onto a squarish marble entryway in which a tall, frail woman with pure white hair coiled on top of her head was leaning on a cane with a carved, yellowed ivory handle. She wore a stylishly cut brown wool shift, with no jewelry except a round brooch of rough gold, and brown velvet slippers.

Yes, Ida was still Ida, Paul surmised, taking her measure once he’d recovered from the shock of her presence. Her high cheekbones retained their almost Mongol glamour, though the skin was drawn thin across them.

“Come in, Mr. Dukach.”

“Ms. Perkins, it is such an honor to meet you.”

She half bowed and indicated a pair of couches in the middle of the room, then led him slowly to them, sitting facing him, with a tea table between them.

As he moved through the low-ceilinged room furnished with commodiously grouped, low-slung Venetian fauteuils and lit here and there in the failing daylight by Murano glass lamps glowing red and green like signal lights, Paul noticed a closed-in gallery at the far end, overlooking what had to be the Grand Canal. It was here he had read somewhere that Wagner had written the third act of
Tristan und Isolde.
The walls of the room were covered in beige dam
ask, overhung not with the expected Venetian scenes but with paintings by Severini and Morandi and, to his delight, a surreal seascape, the largest and most captivating Paul had ever seen, by the Italian Post-Impressionist De Pisis. Where, he wondered, was Leonello Moro’s notorious contemporary collection?