Muse: A Novel (9 page)

One night, in Sterling’s Barrow Street apartment, a floor-through in a West Village brick row house softened by elegant old Turkmen carpets, with drawings by Kandinsky and Max Ernst on the walls and a waist-high soaring Brancusi marble nude that stood voluptuously next to Sterling’s chair, Paul asked about Outerbridge’s last years.

“What happened to A.O. in Venice, Sterling? He seems to have gone radio silent. And what about the notebooks I understand he left behind? When are you going to publish them? When I studied his work in college, nobody even knew they existed.”

Sterling was silent for a moment. “I’ve looked at them, but they’re gobbledygook as far as I can tell,” he allowed at last, in his aw-shucks staccato, meditatively sipping his sixteen-year-old Lagavulin and gazing into the embers of the fire he’d lit at the start of the evening. “They’re written in code, page after page—book after book of unreadable symbols. I’ve never gotten around to dealing with them. Lazy, I guess. Frankly, Arnold became more or less a recluse in his later years. I’m not sure he was still all
there. We pretty much fell out of touch, except through Ida.”

“Could I take a look at them sometime?”

“I don’t see why not,” Sterling answered with a shrug. “They’re in the vault at the office. Come by some afternoon.”

The Impetus offices, in a venerable Meatpacking District building not far from Sterling’s apartment, were at least as scruffy as P & S’s, with upholstery that looked lice-infested and filthy walls that had not been washed, let alone painted, in forty years. Still, they commanded a panoramic view of the harbor, including the Statue of Liberty, Staten Island, and the Verrazano Bridge, from the terrace that girded them. The old bank vault was in the business office at the end of the hall, which was lined with familiar photos of some of Sterling’s principal authors, including a beetling, rather intimidating one of A.O. and, farther on, a wispy, out-of-focus Ida in a style reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron.

Sterling spun the dial, swung open the safe’s heavy army-green door, and rifled through a rat’s nest of manuscripts and ledgers, finally producing an old grocery box from the bottom shelf. The notebooks were piled inside, Venetian laid paper edged with gold bound in grained red leather. There were thirteen of them, each ninety-six pages, about nine by eleven inches. Every surface was covered with
writing—numbers, letters, and symbols in ordered rows, page after page of them, all in uniform red ink. At the bottom of the box was a large accordion file stuffed with crumbling newspaper clippings, articles, and other ephemera.

Clearly, Outerbridge had had something to say in his last years in Venice, but he hadn’t wanted anyone to know what it was, at least not anytime soon. Paul was intrigued. He asked Sterling if he could look the notebooks over more thoroughly.

“Be my guest,” Sterling conceded amiably. “Maybe we’ll both learn something.”

Paul made several visits to Impetus to pore over the notebooks after work. He got to know the staff—those he hadn’t already met in his years in the business, that is. They struck him as a clannish bunch, suspicious of the corrupted world outside the Impetus walls. He felt a solidarity with them he wasn’t sure was fully shared, given that he worked for one of Sterling’s longtime nemeses in Commercial Publishing. Still, they too were lifers, not all that different from the inmates on Union Square, and he hoped he’d eventually be accepted as part of the family—a loud, clueless distant relation, maybe, visiting interminably from Elsewhere.

The notebooks themselves, though, made no sense at all. In form they resembled poems, but they were written in what looked like an abstruse computer language:

Sometimes, the “poems” were interrupted by series of longer lines:

At first Paul was totally stymied by the impenetrability of A.O.’s gobbledygook, but as he hunkered down, he could see patterns emerge. He asked if he could borrow the notebooks, but Sterling demurred: “They don’t belong to me; they’re Svetlana’s”—Arnold’s daughter, who lived in London. “I’d be responsible if anything happened to them.”

So whenever he could steal time from his regular duties, Paul worked alone late into the evening, bent over the old metal desk in the fluorescent-lit back office, laboriously mapping the notebooks, trying to identify recurrences in Arnold’s symbols. At times the work was so stultifying that
he felt like giving up. But he wanted to impress Sterling with his industry and ingenuity, so he kept at it, searching doggedly for some way into their mystery.

Then one evening, out of the blue, after one of their whiskey-lubricated confabs had stretched long into the wee hours, the old man made Paul an unexpected offer.

“Why don’t you come spend your vacation up in Hiram’s Corners? You can keep chipping away at these cussed things, and we can keep talking about Arnold and Ida and everything else.”

It was more than a dream come true; it was the fulfillment of a dream Paul hadn’t known he’d had. He didn’t fully understand why he was so drawn to Sterling, as he was in a different way to Homer, these figures from another era, these competing fathers. As someone who’d always felt faintly fatherless himself and who was always quietly searching for mentors, he found that each loomed in his psyche in his own unsettling way. Homer, outlandish, imposing, larger than life, was the immutable sun around which everything in his universe revolved. Sterling was cooler; he had the nonchalance, the charm and modesty and arrogance, of the privileged man nothing had ever stood in the way of. He was tall, though at his age his knees gave slightly when he walked, so he had no doubt been even more imposing as a beautiful young man. Now he ambled along like a daddy longlegs with or without cane, still slim and elegant, still
sure he was the handsomest man in the room, yet innocent of the self-love that emanated from Homer like a musk.

Paul understood that Homer and Sterling represented worldly effectiveness, a congruity of aspiration and achievement that Paul wanted for himself. The trouble was, they hated each other. Paul felt tarred by Homer’s brush when he was with Sterling, and vice versa: too venal for Impetus-like sainthood, too airy-fairy literary for a he-man’s world of fucking and cigars. When he was with one or the other, Paul made light of their antipathy, as they themselves did, to their credit, yet he had an uneasy intuition—or was it simply a projection?—that each man wanted him all to himself. Each commanded his loyalty. Homer was Paul’s chief enabler, the senior partner in the rough-and-tumble game they both enjoyed so much, often precisely because of its (relatively civilized, to be sure) rugby scrum–like mixing it up. But Paul esteemed and aspired to emulate Sterling’s taste and finesse, too. Now here he was, employed by Homer but moonlighting on a project for Sterling. It was an uncomfortable place to be, like so many others he’d found himself in.

Much the same was true, in a different way, of his relationship with Jasper Bewick, the fetching young music critic he’d been pining over for the past couple of years, ever since his on-again, off-again thing with Tony Heller had come to an end. Tony was an actor who filled in as a
waiter at the Crab, and he’d played the part of a boyfriend beautifully, until their run was suddenly over. There’d been a long period of misunderstandings and hurt feelings and what felt like betrayals, until they both had the sense to end it. After Tony’s aimlessness, Jasper’s rash enthusiasms and 24/7 seductiveness, not to mention his wavy dark hair and compact, muscular body, had been catnip for Paul—as had Jasper’s push-me-pull-you,
fort/da
ambivalence. Jasper clearly needed Paul around. The trouble was he didn’t seem to
want
Paul, least of all as a lover. They would have long, intense dinners during which they’d talk about music, literature, their families, Jasper’s dreams of fame—everything under the sun—but when Paul walked him to his doorway, Jasper would give him a brotherly hug and disappear upstairs.

When Paul pulled away, though, Jasper was there in a flash—with unobtainable concert tickets, premium-grade gossip, and pouty protestations of need and affection. This had been going on long enough for Paul to recognize, in his moments of lucidity, that he and Jasper had no future. But he was a sucker for Jasper’s beauty and brilliance and charm—which meant he was stuck with their stuckness, treading water, as he always did when it came to romance. It depressed him to think about it, so he tried to concentrate on his work, and on the notebooks, though they seemed as impossible to find his way into as Jasper’s arms.

When August first rolled around, Paul invited Jasper to drive up for a visit, using the local music festival as bait, though he had little expectation he would bite. Paul bid Homer and his office mates a fond farewell and headed for Hiram’s Corners in his rented red Hyundai with his heart in his mouth. He felt a little bit like a character in a Grimm’s fairy tale, disappearing into the fragrant forest with no trail of crumbs to help him to find his way home.

High in the foothills of the Middlesex Mountains, Hiram’s Corners was far enough from New York City to be a world unto itself, not the weekenders’ outpost that towns across the Connecticut border like Kent or Salisbury had become—enclaves of rich urbanites who owned most of the notable property in town and kept the locals employed maintaining it. Hiram’s Corners differed from other wealthy suburban watering holes in that its grandees were homegrown. It sometimes seemed that all the large landholders in the town were related. The Wainwrights’ presence went back to Sterling’s great-aunt Aurelia, a big-bosomed Cincinnati matron with a lorgnette and sensible shoes who had married her way east when she was younger and lither. Adelbert Binns, whom she’d wed in 1905, had made good as John D. Rockefeller’s chief fixer at Standard Oil and had been handsomely rewarded in the process. Binns belonged to another notable Cincinnati tribe; he’d put down roots here on the advice of old Senator Hiram Handspring, who had likewise married into the family. Over the years his son Bobby Binns, and Bobby’s son Beebe, a noted conservationist, nationally
recognized orchid grower, and devotee of the Middlesex woods, had acquired more than eight thousand acres on the slopes of Bald Mountain, reputedly one of the largest private holdings in the state outside the Adirondacks. The Wainwrights’ mere several hundred acres hugged the edge of this spread and were effectively part of it.

The Binnses over time had created a Currier and Ives world of rambling old houses, orchards, and rolling fields amid the pond-studded woodland of Hiram’s Corners. Other relations of Aurelia’s had followed her here—including her niece Lobelia Wainwright Delano, Sterling’s aunt, until the whole east side of Hiram’s Corners facing the Middlesex Mountains, which rose gently a few miles beyond, was one large swath of Binns/Delano/Wainwright lands. Ida and Sterling, though they had fallen for each other in Michigan, had spent winter holidays here, too, at extended-family house parties, engaging, or not engaging, in the activities—snowshoeing and cross-country skiing by day; skating by the light of the bonfires built on the ice of Handspring Pond, playing bridge, and drinking by night—that made up life in the Magic Kingdom.

There was something about the changeless tranquillity of the place—the large, unfarmed farms with their well-tended meadows and woods; the lack of change in their ownership; the deep, deep cold of the long, long winters. When Sterling’s Aunt Lobelia had settled here in the
twenties, she’d built herself a Palladian mansion on a rock ledge on River Road. After Sterling had come to his senses and returned from London, she’d constructed a tall, boxy wooden house for him across the street, and let him set up Impetus Editions in the farmer’s house beyond the meadow. In between the Cow Cottage, as it was known, and his aunt were nothing but birch and maple fern woods scattered with towering rhododendrons and flame azaleas that blazed bright orange in June.