Muse: A Novel (18 page)

Paul recognized the Latin epigraph as the first verse of Catullus’s imitation of Sappho’s most celebrated lyric, in which he (she, in the Greek original) likens the man sitting beside his (her) beloved to a god.

The manuscript was divided into two sections. He turned the page and read the first poem of the first part.

Paul read on. The poems, recognizably Ida’s in style, were piercing in their simplicity. This was Ida at her most purely lyrical, he thought, yet sharper and clearer than ever before—and sadder, more elegiac. The poems were stripped down to essential statements in a way that harked back to her early classically inspired work, though these—knowing, rueful, ironic, resigned—were patently not a young person’s poems. And Paul quickly saw that they comprised a narrative.

The Titaness Mnemosyne, goddess of memory and mother of the Muses, was speaking the poems, remembering. And it soon became clear that what she was remembering was a love affair. But this time, instead of being the longed-for object, the pursued, the responder or rejecter, as was inevitably the case with Ida, her persona here, Mnemosyne, was the initiator, the pursuer, the supplicant—struggling, often without hope, it seemed, for recognition and acceptance, desperate to be taken in by an elusive, reluctant, fugitive, disappointing other.

There were none of Ida’s familiar erotic counterparts here, no “burly assassins,” no importunate, gorgeous swains-in-waiting begging to be sidelined or shown who held the cards. In these new poems, it is Mnemosyne who pines, who struggles to be seen and answered, and often fails. At times, she seems to be fighting for her life:

Then, to his shock, Paul saw something else.

Mnemosyne’s loved one, the secret sharer of these moments of joy, and also the cause of her uncertainty and pain, was a woman.

Next it dawned on him that he recognized the setting of this exalting and tormented relationship:

The sheep in the meadow, the woods road, the unused cabin by the wind-raked pond: Paul could see every detail in his mind’s eye. He had walked there, basked in the breeze by the water, lain on the dock and watched the clouds pass overhead. Time and again he had strolled past the abandoned cabin by the turn where the woods road rose as it reached the pond. Reading the poems, he was back in Hiram’s Corners on Sterling’s farm.

Mnemosyne’s secret affair had taken place there.

Paul also thought he recognized certain words in the poems from A.O.’s lists in the red notebooks. He would have to compare them with the manuscripts later.

A third character emerged in this tortured romance: “The Great Man,” a solar deity of sorts, evoked at times with more than a tinge of resentment.

Or this:

Paul recognized Mnemosyne’s Great Man. He had something of Sterling’s high-minded, airy self-absorption. But who was the skittish, reticent object of this no-holds-barred adoration who had to be shared with this powerful, aloof man?

Ida/Mnemosyne had written this about her:

There were poems about a rendezvous in a fishing shack in the Florida Keys and at the Connaught Hotel in London, poems about hidden mazes and keyholes and what men will never understand about women. There were tirades denouncing the loved one’s farouche facelessness; her maddening, irresistible shyness; her enraging self-sacrifice:

* * *

The first part of the book came to an abrupt end without any sort of summary or conclusion, almost as if unfinished. There was a drastic shift in the second section: