Muse: A Novel (19 page)

Mnemosyne’s beloved has suddenly disappeared without warning, and can only be evoked now in memory.

In this second part of the book the poems became intentionally repetitive, desperate and at times rageful testaments to a desire that has been left unfulfilled:

There were antiphonal poems in italics, too, in the second part, an answering voice that Paul inferred was that of Mnemosyne’s lover, filtered through memory:

The later poems of
Mnemosyne
were raw, harsh, sometimes cruel in their cold assessment of grief. This was something entirely new in Ida—the poet forced to accept loss, fallibility, mortality, brought low in ways Paul would not have predicted from her previous work:

The book closed with this:

Paul set the manuscript down. For a long time he sat and looked out the window, focusing on nothing.

He could see it all, though. He knew who Mnemosyne’s ungraspable muse had been.
Someone
Sterling was constitutionally incapable of appreciating.

Maxine Wainwright had died long ago; and with Bree in the picture, Sterling had seldom done more than occasionally mention her. But Morgan had known her. Paul wandered aimlessly along the Giudecca until it was late enough to call her. He reached her at Pages, as she was opening up for the day.

“Morgan, I’m in Venice, in the midst of an earth-shattering discovery. You’ll hear the whole story as soon as I’m back. What I need now is for you to tell me everything you can about Maxine.”

“Maxine Wainwright? Why? Was Sterling unfaithful to her?”

“No doubt. But this is about her, not him. What was she like?”

“Well … she came from an old Main Line family on her mother’s side. Mama apparently caused a little bit of a stir by marrying Maximilian Schwalbe, a penniless Austrian émigré; but he made everything all right by founding Mac Labs, which went on to become one of the biggest
pharmaceutical companies in the world. Maxine went to Bryn Mawr, like her mother, though she was a decade or so younger than your Ida Perkins, I think. I’m rather surprised you don’t know all this, Paul. I’m sure we talked about it long ago.”

For once Paul didn’t rise to Morgan’s bait. She continued:

“She was dark, petite, quite shy, but with tremendous warmth. Utterly without airs. She had an uncanny ability to make immediate connections with people; she certainly did with me, when we met at the booksellers’ convention in Chicago when I was just starting Pages. God knows why she was there—though she was a tireless cheerleader for all of Sterling’s enterprises. We started chatting at the Impetus booth and by the time I left I felt I’d made a friend. Athletic, too, a terrific golfer. I know she and Sterling enjoyed cross-country skiing together up in Hiram’s Corners. And Maxine was the ultimate good citizen. School board, League of Women Voters, what have you. A card-carrying Democrat. They had one son, Sterling the Third, who works for Mac Labs out West now, I believe. I remember her saying she hadn’t wanted to live in Aunt Lobelia’s house after she died because she didn’t want her boy growing up in the biggest place in town. Then she passed away herself more than twenty years ago, of pancreatic cancer.

“But what’s this about? Why do you need me to rehearse all this?”

“I think Maxine and Ida were lovers.”

There was silence on the line. Finally, Morgan said:

“I find that
very
hard to believe, Paul. Are you
sure
?”

“As sure as one can ever be about these things. I’ll explain when I’m back. I learned something else, too—something tragic about Ida.”

“Well, hurry home, child. You’ve got a whole lot of explaining to do.”

Paul hung up.
Mnemosyne
was a work of genius, one of the signal works he had held in his hands as an editor. His sense of privilege in possessing this manuscript, pristine and untampered with, in being the first person in the world to read it, was exalting. He had never felt the joy inherent in his work so keenly.

But this was also an onionskin atom bomb that would blow up poor Sterling Wainwright’s life. Why had Ida handed him this impossible responsibility? She’d instructed him to see to its publication on her death, but had said nothing about how. And not one word about Sterling, her lifelong editor, or nearly. Was Ida expecting Paul to deliver
Mnemosyne
to him once she was gone?

No, Ida clearly understood that
Mnemosyne
was something Sterling would never be able to accept or deal with. Was the book, the reality it represented, a dilemma she simply
couldn’t face, and so she’d opted to leave it to him to sort out?

When had she written these poems? The title page said 2010, but were they brand-new—or had they been composed during and after her love affair with Maxine, a kind of intermittent diary? Or had they come gushing out of her in the wake of Maxine’s death but she’d been unable to come to terms with them until now, as she was contemplating her own passing? Was Ida afraid that if
Mnemosyne
was left among her papers it might fail to see the light of day, or even end up destroyed? Paul knew stranger things had happened.

How could he intuit her intentions? How well did Paul really know Ida? Not at all, clearly, despite his unending digging and delving. He’d spent all of one afternoon with her. Yes, he’d read her work inside out, or thought he had, until a few hours ago. But how could he understand what had driven her to this abrupt decision? He needed to know much more before he could do anything.

He phoned the office.

“Homer, you won’t believe what’s happened.”

“Don’t tell me you had to sleep with her,” he guffawed. “She was delicious when I tasted her, but that was ages ago.”

“Homer, she was wonderful. We talked for hours. And she spoke very lovingly of you. But listen. She gave me something.”

“Something of Outerbridge’s?”

“Something of hers. Her last book. It’s tremendous. Spectacular. It’s out of the ballpark, an absolute game changer.”

“The truffle hound strikes again! I’m smacking my lips. Get yourself home today, baby. I want to see what you’ve got.”

Homer hung up and Paul sat in the empty bar next to his hotel watching the light break up the surface of the oily canal outside the café doorway.

He gathered his wits, reread Ida’s letter, and phoned Palazzo Moro. After many rings, a low voice answered. Paul recognized Adriana, the lady in gray.

He asked to speak to Ida. After a long silence, Adriana picked up the receiver again and said, “La Contessa Moro is not able to come to the telephone, I’m afraid. She asked me to thank you for your visit and requested that you follow the instructions in her letter.”

“But I need to know more. I need further instructions from the countess.”

“I’m very sorry. Donna Ida is not well. If you like, perhaps you could call again in a few days. Or write.”

Paul hung up, defeated. He packed his bag, paid his bill, and took a water taxi to the airport. As he sped across the lagoon, he looked back at the campaniles sticking up over the curve of Venice’s large island, and, on this unusually clear day, the Dolomites rising white in the distance like a
wall of ivory. Venice, as you left it, looked like a snail shell curled in on itself. Paul invariably felt the need to escape after a week or so. Yet miraculous things happened in Venice; lives got lived, and art got made, in this seemingly moribund warren of infested calles and canals. It wasn’t dead at all. Venice was a Platonic beehive buzzing with covert vitality. Its fabulous gilt-encrusted past wasn’t the point; it was how the past kept gnawing away at the present, digesting and fermenting and reforming it, and extruding it into the future.

And what about Sterling? Paul pondered as he sat at the gate waiting for his flight to be called. How would he read
Mnemosyne
? How
could
he read it? He was the oblivious god in the book, who got to sit next to Ida’s priceless object, arrogant and ignorant—an encumbrance, an irrelevance, the enemy even, blind, as Mnemosyne decidedly was not, to the treasure by his side. To be portrayed this way, at this stage of his life, and by a woman he himself had loved and encouraged professionally for decades, struck Paul as hard, maybe even cruel. Did Ida recognize that her elegy for Maxine was also an act of revenge against her beloved publisher, to say nothing of her long-standing consort?

No, Sterling’s self-esteem could never tolerate this double-edged attack on his manhood—and from his most vaunted author, cousin, and old flame. Paul understood why
Ida needed his help in publishing
Mnemosyne
elsewhere, which had to mean at P & S. It was the only course of action that made sense. But did she expect him to wait until Sterling was gone to do it? The publicist in Paul rose up in revolt against the idea that he should postpone trumpeting the literary find of the new century to the world, even as he recognized that this was surely what delicacy required. Sterling could live another ten or fifteen, or even twenty, years; Paul would be nearly an old man himself by then. Would anyone care about Ida and Sterling and Maxine and
Mnemosyne
in 2030? Besides, who was he to override Ida’s instructions?

These larger-than-life people with their precious feelings that demanded to be memorialized: Ida, Outerbridge, Pepita, Thor, Dmitry, Eric: so endlessly navel-gazing, so convinced of their significance and depth and originality. And Sterling and Homer, too. Writers! Publishers! They were all intolerable. They expected him to be as wrapped up in their stories as they themselves were. And he had been; that was the awful truth. He’d fed off their work and their vicissitudes; he’d made them the star players in a drama he’d been staging for himself since his teenage years in Hattersville. He’d lived through them and they’d floated past in their own precious bubbles, down the river past him.

In the end, though, it was Maxine, the tolerant solid citizen, the brave, good-natured, generous, “normal” one,
who wouldn’t have dreamed of putting pen to paper, who had been the muse of his muse’s last and, he was convinced, greatest book—Ida’s secret sharer, someone in and of the real world, without any of the pretension or self-concern that made this crew of narcissists so unbearable to Paul at this moment.