Muse: A Novel (23 page)

Paul leaned back with his feet up on Homer’s desk, which was now his own, twirling a Boatwright toothpick in his mouth, and feeling somewhat less of an impostor than usual. He had convinced Ida B and Charlie to co-publish the
Complete
Ida P with P & S next year—yes, Impetus had most of her work, but
they
had
Mnemosyne
!—which was sure to be a bonanza for both houses. Not only that, but Nita Desser and Rick Nielsen would likely be delivering big new books in the next few months. Something always seemed to come along to save their asses; who would have thought it would be poetry? Poets on the best-seller list! That was the magic of Ida—and P & S. But what about next year, and the year after?

Paul lounged in his Aeron chair and gazed at the pictures
of his heroes on the console behind his desk. There was his old boss, hands on hips, in foulard and canary-yellow trousers, sporting a smile as wide as the Hudson; Ida, with her aquiline nose and unkempt hair, peering flirtatiously up at the camera; Arnold, all mustache and beetling eyebrows, scowling at the world. And Sterling was there too, now that Homer was no more, a wistful, pale young man with thin arms, his chin on his elbow, staring dejectedly into space at his desk in the Cow Cottage, the future still in front of him.

And there was Thor Foxx, in his salmon-pink suit and goatee; Pepita with her gray Afro and leather-button cardigan, corduroy skirt and knee socks, frowning; Homer’s Three Aces, arms around each other, black ties askew, singing at full throttle like the Three Tenors; round-faced Elspeth Adams, outwardly serene and self-possessed, sporting elegant cabochon earrings; Ezekiel Schaffner, his Adam’s apple protruding assertively from his long neck; Rick Nielsen, intensely nerdy-handsome, shouldering the weight of the world; Nita Desser; Sarita Burden; Julian Entrekin; Ted Jonas.

Paul knew what mattered to him: they did, they and their headlong urge for self-expression. Their faces centered and encouraged him; they defined his world.

He looked beyond them, down onto Union Square. You couldn’t erase its history: the rallies, the riots, Gorky’s studio to the east, the long, cool shadow of Warhol’s factory
on the north (so what if the building now housed a Petco?). The hordes of gorgeous youth that streamed by him, cell phones in their palms, when he strolled on St. Mark’s Place probably weren’t aware they were passing the shabby apartment where Auden had written “The Shield of Achilles” either, but it was the artists who finally gave their times and places significance. Paul felt the presence of their ghosts out in the world, just as he felt them here in his office and in his head. The air was full of them. They were everywhere and always would be.

And he knew that in this at least he was just like Sterling and Homer, no matter the differences in their backgrounds and temperaments. Their authors and their work had been the ultimate raison d’être for whatever they themselves had done. Beyond their petty self-aggrandizing, Homer and Sterling and their kind had been true to their writers’ gifts. Ida wasn’t the only one they’d been devoted to. Their authors were their gods, despite their high-handed behavior, egomania, and competitiveness. In the end, it had been all about them.

“Where are you off to now, Paul?” asked his sales director, Maureen Rinaldi, seeing his overnight bag parked by his desk on a Friday morning. Momo, as he called her, had cheerfully put up with Paul’s lack of organizational talent list after list, year after year. Paul would have been helpless without her, and everybody knew it—especially Momo.

“Going to see the Man, where else?” Paul answered with a grin. In the last few months, his bimonthly trips to San Francisco had become common knowledge around the office. He was in love, for what felt like almost the first time and everyone at P & S knew it.

The Man was Rufus Olney, a content editor at Medusa. The San Francisco–based e-tailer was wreaking havoc in the publishing business, underselling publishers’ wares to steal business away from bookstores and achieve a virtual online monopoly in both print and e-books in the process. Lately, they’d been making feints at being publishers, too, as if to show the traditional book trade how far up their asses their heads were. Paul had come across Rufus on one of the more activist websites that had transformed his per
sonal life post-Jasper. When he’d discovered as they chatted that Rufus (screen name Rockstar Apollo) worked for big, bad Medusa, he’d suggested they get together during the upcoming booksellers’ convention in New York. They’d hit it off, though Rufus didn’t have the slightest idea who Ida or Arnold or Homer or Sterling or the rest of Paul’s pantheon were. Content was king at Medusa, they claimed, but Rufus’s expertise ran more to genre novelists and management gurus than literary writers. Which was fine with Paul, who was looking for someone who was interested in his personal as opposed to professional attributes. Rufus, who in spite of his name had rich brown hair and a broad, still unlined forehead, seemed taken with Paul’s East Coast nerdiness. Paul was susceptible to his new friend’s hazel eyes and winning ways and found himself yielding, often, to his insistent salesman’s charms.

At first he’d called him just that, talking to Morgan or his friends at work: the Salesman. Then, as things heated up between them, the Salesman had become the Man from Medusa, as if an ironic moniker could inoculate him from his deepening attachment. Soon enough, though, Paul’s irony had died away and the Man from Medusa had morphed into the Man, pure and simple. Rufus was the Man in more ways than one, and Paul was crazy about him.

On their weekends in San Francisco, they’d spend hours in the perpetually unmade bed in Rufus’s steel-and-maple
loft downtown, with its stunning view of the Bay; then Paul would relax with a glass of sauvignon blanc and pretend to fiddle with a manuscript (retro, yes, but that was Paul; he’d confessed to Rufus on their third date that he hated e-readers), while Rufus, the original foodie, rustled them up a fantastic meal. Then they’d lounge around with Rufus’s laptops and smartphones and tablets and other devices and Rufus would try to indoctrinate Paul in the intricacies of tech.

Paul was enchanted by the lingo of Rufus’s world: big data, scalability, pivoting, crowdsourcing, virtual convergence, geo-location, but before too long he came to understand that everything his guy was talking about—platforms and delivery systems and mini-books and nanotech and page rates and and and—had very little to do with what mattered to Paul, which was the words themselves and the men and women who’d written them. Rufus could make them bigger or smaller on his pads and notebooks, he could add visual elements and music, he could reformat them six ways to Sunday and break them into bits or bites or bytes and send them into the world on all sorts of pathways, but
Moby-Dick
was still
Moby-Dick,
whatever device you screened it on, and
Mnemosyne
was
Mnemosyne,
no matter how you sliced it.

What bothered Paul was that Rufus and his pals at Medusa wanted to sell Ida’s—and Thor’s and Ted’s and Rick’s and everyone else’s—work so cheaply they were
practically giving it away. They couldn’t have cared less that a writer had sweated blood for years to create immortal poetry, or that an editor had hovered lovingly over the manuscript of a novel to bring it into the world in the form and condition it deserved. Rufus and his cohorts were all for Open Access. It sounded wonderful, and it was—for the end user (Paul had grown up calling her “the reader”). But the creator, who in spite of everything remained a virtual divinity to Paul, mattered far less to Rufus. If he couldn’t get one kind of content he’d find something else, unencumbered by restrictions, somewhere else. No, content wasn’t king at all at Medusa; it was more or less fungible. This drove Paul to paroxysms of rage and despair, and he found he often had to set his feelings aside when he and Rufus were together.

When he talked to Morgan these days, the news about the business was more often than not depressing. She was an extremely canny bookseller who’d outsmarted the chains by making Pages the heart and soul of the community in and around Hattersville. She had local and visiting authors give readings weekly; she had children’s hours on Saturdays; she was the den mother to a hundred book groups; she supplied books for events at Hattersville State and Embryon, the local private college. Besides, she was Morgan Dickerman, and people naturally gravitated to her the way Paul had (he wasn’t self-deluding enough to believe he was her only protégé, though he liked to flatter himself that he was
still Number One). So Pages was still doing all right. But some of Morgan’s perhaps less talented or less energetic colleagues were not faring nearly as well. The chain store across the square had gone out of business, too, which, paradoxically, hadn’t helped matters at Pages.

And Morgan herself was changing. The yellow streaks in her lustrous silver hair seemed more and more prominent when he saw her, which was every six months or so. Paul didn’t like to admit it, but ageless Morgan was aging. He wondered how long she could keep it up.

“I’d like to ask your Mr. Rufus if he understands what they’re up to at Medusa,” she’d say to him, in a tone only partially intended to mask her indignation. “I mean, I’m sure he’s a good lay and hallelujah for that. But does he know what he and his posse are doing to the Fabric of Our Culture?” Paul could almost see those capital letters in neon gold, dripping blood as they burned up the airwaves between them.

But phrases like “the Fabric of Our Culture” meant very little to Rufus. He was an intelligent, educated, well-adjusted guy with a toned body, wonderful manners, and a marvelous braising technique. But at thirty-three, he was way too young to have experienced or cared about the Paperback Revolution, the travails of returns, the rise and demise of the Borders chain, or the roller-coaster vagaries of Oprah’s Book Club. Trying to get him to appreciate the
arcana of the Life of the Book was like suggesting he follow
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
in the kitchen. He’d just nod, roll his eyes, and quote his über-boss, the nefarious George Boutis, who was fond of saying about those old-fashioned objects known as physical books (p-books to the initiated), “I like camels, too, but I don’t ride one to work.”

Over time Paul found that his disputes with Rufus about the book business had grown erotically charged. They never seemed to be able to agree on anything professionally, but they had a fantastic time fighting about it, and making up. To argue better, Paul felt he needed to be as well-versed as possible in what his antagonist was saying and thinking, so he haunted the office of the P & S Internet marketing team, and as he listened to them discussing freemiums, like-gating, webisodes, and tag clouds, Paul wondered what they’d say if they knew that the quality of his love life depended on their know-how.

Eventually, Paul met Rufus’s boss, Spike Edelman, who ran Medusa’s book operations. A few weeks later, he found himself having dinner with Spike, Rufus, and George Boutis himself. George, who was short, pugnacious, and curious about everything, had founded Medusa soon after graduating from Williams, where he’d shared an off-campus apartment with Rick Nielsen. George, who had more than a dollop of Master of the Universe arrogance, was formidably well-read, and Paul couldn’t deny that in spite of their
differences he found himself fascinated, if not charmed, by his conversational adversary.

It took him months to admit this to Morgan. When he did fess up, she screamed, “Well, I’ll be a rat’s ass! You two-timing bastard! Now I’ve seen everything.” After which she laughed uproariously, all instantly forgiven.

George and Paul ended up seeing each other every so often on Paul’s trips west to wrestle with Rufus. Sometimes Spike came along, but more often it was just the four of them: Paul, Rufus, George, and his sharp-tongued, hilarious wife, Martha, whose first novel, about the frustrated wife of a Silicon Valley magnate who wants to be a painter, was soon to be published by Impetus Editions, of all things. Their no-holds-barred dinner conversation was sometimes heated but always stimulating, and Paul had come to feel as time passed that, unlike Rufus, George understood his old-fashioned author-centered vision of publishing, much as it differed from George’s own.