Muse: A Novel (16 page)

A few logs smoldered in a small fireplace near the door, and a lamp was lit on the desk near the east end of the room overlooking the gallery, where Ida had been working, or so it appeared.

“Would you like some tea, Mr. Dukach?” Ida’s unreconstructed Brahmin accent, with its broad extended vowels, was out of another era.

He nodded distractedly. Being here was making him forget what he’d so carefully planned to say.

Ida rang a small bell on the table beside her. The woman from yesterday appeared.

“
Tè, per cortesia,
Adriana,” Ida instructed her servant.

“So. Now how can I help you?” she asked, turning to Paul. She was firm, maybe a little brusque as she patted the pillows behind her back, making herself comfortable. Paul was surprised to find that instead of the expansiveness he’d endowed her with in his fantasies, the Ida in front of him was old-fashioned, restrained, no-nonsense. And guarded.

“Rosalind Horowitz, as I believe you know, suggested I
come see you,” he began. “I’m working with Sterling Wainwright on Arnold Outerbridge’s red notebooks. We’re trying … well,
I’m
trying to figure them out.”

“Oh yes.” Ida nodded. “Roz wrote me all about you.” She seemed to relax a bit. “And Sterling tells me you know more about me—about my work, anyway—than anyone, apart from him, of course. Which is more than a little frightening, I have to admit.” Ida laughed an uncomfortable little laugh. “I’ve certainly never heard him talk that way about another publisher—and one who works for Homer Stern to boot!”

Ida turned her face toward him at a quizzical angle, as if expecting Paul to reveal himself. Could this really be Ida, the interlocutor of so many of his wishful dreams?

“Sterling has been incredibly kind. I’ve learned an unbelievable amount from him. And Homer asked to be remembered to you, of course.
He’s
always talking about
you
.”

“I can imagine,” Ida answered with a bit of a chuckle. “How is dear old Homer? Still chasing the girls?”

“Well, probably not quite the way he used to. He’s over eighty, you know.”

“How impertinent of you to mention it, young man! As you’re well aware, I’m even older!” To his relief, Paul saw that Ida was laughing openly now. He hadn’t turned her off. Not yet.

“That’s quite hard to believe.” He managed to raise his eyes and meet hers, which were tautly focused on him, their legendary green undimmed.

“Anyway, as I was saying,” Paul forged ahead, “I’ve been trying to help … Sterling decipher Outerbridge’s notebooks in my spare time. I’ve made progress on the code he wrote them in. I know what they say. But what they mean is still a mystery. Roz thought you might be able to help—that you could tell me more about them.”

The woman in gray appeared with a tea tray and set it on the table between them. Ida was silent as she poured out their tea: Lapsang souchong; he was almost drugged by its rich, smoky scent. She offered him milk, which he accepted, and sugar, which he refused. Then she looked up.

“So. You’ve read the notebooks …”

“Yes. They appear to be timekeeping notes of some sort. A diary of his daily activities. Very minute and …”

“And obsessional.”

“Well, yes, in a word. As if he needed to keep track of his every movement.”

“I see,” Ida responded grimly, looking down into her lap. Then she raised her eyes, the lines in her tanned face deeply etched, and said carefully, “I’m afraid that in his last years, Arnold wasn’t capable of working anymore. Which was terribly cruel, given how prolific, how totally absorbed in his writing, he’d always been.”

“I’m very sorry,” Paul said, lowering his eyes. There was silence before he added, “There’s nothing worse than seeing a brilliant person deprived of his gifts.”

Ida nodded.

“You were together a long time,” Paul continued, trying to gently prime the pump.

“Nearly twenty years, this last go-around.”

“I have to confess I always imagined you side by side, sharing your work, discussing ideas, inspiring each other.”

“Well, I can see you haven’t learned very much in your young years,” Ida shot back derisively.

“Forgive me, Ms. Perkins, but I hope you can appreciate how large you and Mr. Outerbridge loom in the imaginations of some of us,” he answered.

“You’re not one of those despicable literary sleuths who thinks he can deduce every last little sordid biographical detail from a writer’s work, are you?” Ida asked, with ill-concealed suspicion.

Paul sat back, flummoxed. Was that what he was?

Ida’s jaw was set. Her eyes flared with indignation. “When, I want to know, do writers get to simply live their boring lives? Don’t you know living is not about writing, Mr. Dukach? There was always so much else going on. Svetlana. The shopping. The laundry—and the doctors! Writing is something one does—we both
did,
I should say—to escape, to get away. And also maybe to make sense
of one’s mistakes, wrong turns you know you’ve made but can’t come to terms with any other way. Poor man’s psychoanalysis, Arnold used to call it.

“Arnold engaged with the world day in and day out. But he couldn’t have cared less what was for dinner, or who was sleeping with whom. He always had his eye on the bigger picture.”

“And you?” Paul ventured.

“My story was entirely different. I grew up in a sheltered environment, and felt the need to break away early on. Unlike Arnold, who endured deprivation from childhood. Sterling and I had to get away and see things for ourselves. It’s what brought us together that summer in Michigan. All those sailors and croquet players swirling around us in the dining hall at Otter Creek, planning their tournaments and regattas, while we were plotting our escape—to New York, London, Paris.”

Paul relaxed a little. Ida, he sensed, was performing one of her solos.

“We got there, too, each in our own way. We helped each other—at least he helped me, though my options as a woman were, needless to say, far more limited. When I published my first book it was a veritable scandal at Bryn Mawr! The shadow of Marianne Moore hung over the place like a cloying little modernist cloud. The atmosphere was far too claustrophobic for yours truly. And those intensely … 
innocent
crushes on each other. I was
not
innocent, or at least I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be scandalous!”

Ida was enjoying herself.

“You certainly turned poetry on its head, from the very first,” Paul said.

“I was a college sophomore, just having a little fun. But
they
—the literary folk—took me seriously. That was the last thing I was expecting—or wanting. Another regimen, with another set of rules and expectations.”

“How did it feel to be the toast of the town when you were still a teenager?”

“Those silly young/old men with their unreadable magazines and their precious self-importance. Little prigs! I’ve always despised the Establishment, Paul, and that includes the Bohemian Establishment, which is really no different from the bankers. Poetry, for me, and for everyone serious, I think, is about otherness: being ‘maladjusted,’ standing apart. They didn’t understand the first thing about what I was writing—or what was happening to me.”

Ida leaned back and coughed a little. Her superfine hair was spun sugar in the lamplight.

“Then I met Barry Saltzman. He seemed like the way out—he was dashing, open, mature, supportive, generous. He was quite a bit older, and it didn’t bother him one bit that I was a writer—an outré one, even. He was proud of my ‘independence.’ He thought he was encouraging it. We had
a lovely apartment in the East Seventies and I had maids and a secretary and all the time in the world to work. I just didn’t have anything to write
about
—do you understand? I needed experience. I needed to
derange my senses
.”

Ida looked up, as if to gauge whether he was following her. Paul nodded encouragement.

“And there was ravishing Sterling again, hanging around the Village with people Barry wouldn’t have known how to talk to. Sterling took me everywhere, including to his apartment more than once, I’m not ashamed to say, and … but”—Ida looked toward the windows—“I’m boring you.”

“You have to be joking! Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Her skin was nearly translucent. Ida trembled faintly at times as she continued.

“Then Stephen came along, Stephen Roentgen, at one of those insufferable Fifty-seventh Street art gallery readings. My quondam suitor Delmore Schwartz was there, still more or less compos mentis, and John Berryman, and old Wallace Stevens, too, down from Hartford, the one time I met him, still complaining about Eliot, if you can believe it. That’s when that pig Ora Troy started acting up, accusing me of poaching. Always out for attention. But Stephen, who was fresh off the boat from Liverpool, was pure genius—wild-eyed, extravagant, and a wonderful poet. Yes, he’d known Ora; but it was love at first sight—for both of
us. No doubt you’ve seen the pictures of him with his shirt front unbuttoned and that dreamy wave in his hair. Stephen had such verve—and intensity, commitment, talent, belief in himself. He just didn’t have staying power.”

Ida was looking across the tea table straight at him. Paul didn’t know how to respond. He worried he was tiring her, but she forged ahead.

“We got married. Barry and I had divorced after he found out about Sterling. He couldn’t take it, and I didn’t blame him. In the end, he wanted an uptown life, and he deserved someone to share it fully. I needed to be down on Varick Street. So he went off with Alice Pennoyer and they were happy as could be, at least I think so. And I did adore Stephen.

“But he ran dry. He ran out of gas. He blamed me, you know, said I sucked it all out of him, that there was nothing left after I was through with him. Which was ridiculous. Everyone knows erotic energy is self-replenishing. Of course that was before Thomas.”

“Thomas?”

“Our son, Thomas Handyside Roentgen,” Ida said matter-of-factly. “Born January 13, 1951, after twenty-eight hours of labor. He died three days later.”

Paul sat up ramrod straight. “I didn’t know you had a child,” he said, as calmly as he could.

“It was our secret. We weren’t married; Stephen was
supposedly with Esther Podgorny. And then our little boy died. He died. I still dream about him. Holding him for those few precious hours. He’d be fifty-nine years old today.”

Ida was silent, enveloped in memory; but it was Paul whose eyes were wet. “I am so very sorry” was all he could think to say. How could this all-important fact of Ida’s life have eluded him? What else had he missed or misunderstood about this woman he thought he knew inside out? Suddenly, certain lines and images he realized he’d never really absorbed—
vacant rooms,
and yes,
graveyards, cypresses, shrouds—
clicked into place:

How could he not have seen it?

But Ida was continuing.

“We got married afterward, and moved to London. We wanted to have another baby. But I couldn’t, the doctors said. I think each of us secretly blamed the other. But I’ll always love Stephen. Always.”

A phone rang somewhere in the apartment. Adriana came to the doorway, but Ida shook her head and the woman disappeared.

“And then suddenly Arnold appeared. I met him the first time in the late fifties, at Louis MacNeice’s. You know the rest, I’m sure. He was still breathing fire and brimstone in those days, putting everyone on the defensive politically and morally, insufferable, really, though no one was paying much attention by then. A dyed-in-the-wool doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist, which was a damn daring thing to be at the height of the Cold War. And I was attracted to that—to his sense of injury, his conviction that the world needed putting to rights, and that it was up to us, to
us,
not somebody else, to do it. ‘Make it new’ was about something more than aesthetics for Arnold. Not that he wasn’t the most wonderful poet.”

“No one in the older generation had been more urgent, more persuasive, more prescient. And I knew he understood me, and my work, through and through. Because I’m a woman, everyone always assumes that love is my subject. And it
is
my subject. But there’s a lot more going on, always. And Arnold didn’t consign me to the second-class compartment. He didn’t need to condescend. And I fell. Fell deeply.

“He was living with Anya Borodina, the dancer. At least I think he was. Arnold was never good with details. When we were together later on, I had to take care of
everything,
from seeing that his socks got darned to the electric bill to what
we ate—and drank. He was unreconstructed in that sense. But in his mind we were equals, in a way I’ve never felt with anyone else. Arnold understood me as I am. And in some ways that was the most radical thing about him. No other man I’ve known has been capable of it. We saw each other constantly, till he suddenly up and left.”

“Left London? For where? What happened?”

“I never knew. He was just—gone. I was devastated, naturally, but we’d never made each other promises—and we didn’t later on, either.” Ida paused. “That’s how it ought to be between two people, don’t you think? What is certain in this life? And if it were—would we want it?”

“What about Trey Turnbull?” Paul asked.

“What about him. He was an old friend of Stephen’s. You should have seen them all at the White Horse in the West Village, carousing night after night. Trey was an utterly selfish, unreliable, overgrown adolescent—and one of the most gorgeous, most intoxicating characters I’ve ever known. I ran into him again at a club in Paris one night—he’d been living there for more than a decade then. I thought, ‘Why not?’ Yes, he was ten years younger—big deal. Such a beautiful man! And what a musician. We were all swept up in the possibilities then, Paul. You can hear it in Trey’s music, I think, in the silences between his solos. Such exquisite … emptiness.”

Ida smiled faintly, quoting the title of what was one of her lesser-known but, to Paul, most-achieved works. He nodded, and was pleased to see she was aware he’d caught her reference—though he understood it now in an entirely new and tragic way.