Muse: A Novel (3 page)

“Who do I have to blow to get Burack’s new book reviewed, baby?” he’d jaw to his sidekick Florian Brundage, affectionately known as Chowderhead,
The
Daily Blade
’s chief book critic and, perhaps not entirely incidentally, a P & S novelist, picking his teeth all the while. “Your piece on that cow I’m too refined to mention, Hortense Houlihan”—to tell the truth, Homer made use of a coarser, unprintable epithet—“was shit and you know it.”

Miraculously, books emerged from P & S’s Augean stables. Usually they won kudos, often they won prizes, and now and again they sold reasonably well. Sometimes working for Homer was peaches and cream, occasionally it was infuriating, but mostly it was kind of fun. All you had to do was accept that it was Homer’s shop, 100 percent. There were no office politics at P & S, because he decided everything. So people—those who lasted—relaxed and homed in on their work, endlessly complaining about the peremptory, ungrateful, self-involved authors whose writing they idolized. They were utterly mad, of course, but they did their level best to ignore one another’s foibles since they were the same as their own. And to many of them the cramped, filthy offices on Union Square were a mind-bending, topsy-turvy little heaven on earth.

No one, it seemed, was more in sync with Homer in his later years—with the clear exception of his longtime assistant and partner in crime, the regal Sally Savarin, uncrowned queen of the company—than Paul Dukach, the latest in the long line of editors in chief, who in the eyes of many had emerged as Homer’s heir apparent.

Being number two at P & S had historically been a dangerous proposition. You couldn’t win. If you were too deferential, Homer walked all over you and sooner or later lost respect for you and fired you. But if you felt the need to demonstrate your cojones—if you implied, for instance, that Eric Nielsen was “your” author—you were dead meat in a different way. Homer at the office was more than a little like Henry VIII, or maybe it was Joseph Stalin. “It’s time for a change” was one of his most familiar and most dreaded nostrums, and publishing was littered with talented individuals who’d gotten the ax simply because they’d clashed with the boss. In the long run most men couldn’t tolerate Homer’s alpha male need to dominate; consequently, the
majority of his employees were on the distaff side (the rock-bottom wages he paid could have had something to do with it, too). Homer might have thought of them as his complaisant harem, when he thought of them at all.

He was older now, though, and no longer had the same energy to stomp on the competition both inside the company and out as he once had. Paul Dukach had lucked into a sweet spot at P & S. He was unthreatening enough—“ductile” was the term one of his shrewder authors had used—that Homer could let his guard down and allow the younger man to explore his own independent editorial interests without feeling mortally threatened. To everyone’s surprise, maybe Homer’s most of all, they got along.

“We need to shake things up around here, Dukach,” Homer would say on a Monday morning, when his vital signs were particularly healthy after a restorative weekend in the country. “It’s time for a change. I think you should let Kenneally go.”

Paul had recently promoted Daisy Kenneally to editor after three grueling years as his assistant, and the first book she’d acquired on her own, about the Cleveland Browns—admittedly an unusual offering for P & S; and where else in publishing would the in-house sports aficionado be a girl?—had been a surprise best seller. Out of envy, perhaps (or was it pure perversity?), Homer had unaccountably taken against her.

“I don’t think we can do that, Homer,” Paul would respond, as flatly as he could. “She’s the most productive young editor we have.”

“I think her books are thin soup. How did that novel by what’s her name, Fran Drescher, do?” Homer was incorrigibly terrible with names.

“If you’re referring to Nita Desser’s
Plankton,
it did all right,” Paul allowed, resorting to the euphemism that everyone knew meant a book had been a small, or large, disappointment.

“Well, I thought it was a dog, and the critics did, too. Woof.”

Most of the time Homer grumbled and moved on. If he got you permanently fixed in his sights, though, watch out. There always seemed to be someone he was thinking of eliminating, and he’d torture him or her, the way a cat plays with a mouse. Paul knew that one big part of his job was keeping the boss distracted.

Sandy-haired, with a square-cut but receding chin, Paul wore horn-rim glasses and still looked younger than his age, which was now well into his latening thirties, though he had the incipient paunch of a sedentary man who drinks a bit too much. He’d grown up in the wilds of upstate New York—not high-end Westchester or Putnam Counties, as the city slickers thought of it, but way, way, way upstate, west of Syracuse, several hundred miles from the
city. Hattersville was the Midwest, really, a rust-belt town that seemed to survive on pure inertia.

Paul had three older brothers, all obsessed if only moderately talented athletes vying for the largely withheld approval of their college football star father, now the local district court judge. To Arnold Dukach, Paul was an afterthought, the runt of the litter, and he left his youngest son’s care and feeding to his harried wife, Grace—at least that was how it felt to Paul, who was close to his mother but wondered if she too might have preferred another tight end to the bookworm she’d been dealt.

As an introverted teenager desperate to escape from the rah-rah bell jar of Team Dukach, Paul had had one saving grace: Pages, the rambling, heavily stocked bookstore housed in an old brick office building on Hattersville’s run-down town square where he worked afternoons and Saturdays all through high school. Morgan Dickerman, Pages’ owner, was a woman of kindness and discernment, statuesque if not conventionally pretty, with prematurely graying hair; a long, elegant neck; and an assured stylishness that stood out in Hattersville, which still felt stuck in the Eisenhower era. Paul had developed a moony crush on Morgan the way adolescent boys sometimes do on their mothers’ friends. He couldn’t understand what someone as glamorous and sophisticated as Morgan was doing in a dump like his hometown.

She’d hailed from the actual Midwest, Des Moines, and had married Hattersville’s leading (indeed, only) cardiologist, who enjoyed the godlike authority of medical men in small towns. Fifteen years into their marriage, though, Rudy Dickerman had fallen for the nurse who ran his office, and they’d divorced. Morgan, with two daughters in school, had stayed put and opened Pages. After a while, she’d formed an alliance with Ned Harman, a widower who owned the local Jeep franchise, and over time she’d made Pages into the living, breathing heart of Hattersville. People met at Pages for coffee as a matter of course, all day long. And they bought lots of books—and CDs and greeting cards and chocolate—there, too.

Morgan had taken a shine to Paul, perhaps because her own children, the younger of them a full decade older than he was, were now living in San Francisco and Hong Kong. Slowly, she’d become a kind of surrogate parent, encouraging his literary curiosity, guiding his reading, and offering a much-needed window onto the great world beyond. Paul’s reliance on her was close to total, and Morgan seemed to return his affection, God knew why. He could hardly wait for Saturday to roll around so he could spend the day with her.

It was Morgan who’d first put Ida Perkins’s
Striptease
into Paul’s hands one November afternoon, while the rest of the Dukach tribe was watching the local Embryon
College Earwigs get trashed by Hobart and William Smith.

“Try this on for size,” she said with a wink, as she turned to straighten up the children’s section.

How had she known? It was love at first reading. Paul had never encountered anything so daring, so insolent, so electrically
present,
running on all cylinders at once. He’d devoured all of Ida’s work, starting at the beginning with
Virgin Again
and moving all the way to her latest collection,
Arte Povera,
which had provoked yet another sensation when it had come out a few years before. Her rapturous flights in the face of convention, behavioral and literary, made Perkins’s poetry thrilling; but it was the mastery, the purity of tone and timbre with which she did it, that induced Paul’s amazement. On the surface, she was a flawless modern stylist; yet her unblemished instrument was employed in the service of the most unconventional thinking—as if Louis MacNeice were channeling Allen Ginsberg, or Edward Thomas the great Walt. Not since Rimbaud, Paul was sure, had a poet been so seductively subversive:

What could have been more illicitly charged for a boy who felt like an alien born into the wrong family? Poetry, particularly poetry like Ida’s, has always been the lonely teenager’s salvation, and Paul was entirely unoriginal in his choice of an idol when he taped her photo to his bedroom wall, like thousands of other pimply yearners before and since.

More exceptionally, over time he’d become a fanatical expert who uncovered literally everything there was to know about Ida Perkins. How her ancestors had founded Gloucester, Massachusetts, a few years after the Pilgrims made landfall at Plymouth; how her aunt Florence Perkins had served original China Trade tea to her guests in Manchester-by-the-Sea well into the 1960s; how she had been raised by her mother’s sister in Springfield because of her own mother’s incapacitating illness; how she’d become a dazzling heroine and subject of scandal at a very young age in an America desperate for distraction from the exigencies of war; and how over the decades she’d emerged as a national treasure, one of the icons of the age.

He also learned all about Ida’s many loves, starting with her second cousin Sterling Wainwright, two and a half
years her junior, when she was only eighteen and had just published her scandalous first book. And there were her marriages: to the financier Barrett Saltzman, a partner at J. P. Morgan and a family friend twenty years her senior (1945–50), then the charismatic, erratic British “Movement” poet Stephen Roentgen (1952–60), followed by Trey Turnbull, the American tenor saxophonist exiled in Paris (1961–68). From 1970 on, she’d lived in Venice with the die-hard Stalinist expat poet and literary supernova Arnold Outerbridge; and after Outerbridge’s death in 1989 she’d married, in 1990, Venetian count Leonello Moro di Schiuma, the notorious collector of paintings and women, who was thirty years younger than she was, sharing his family’s sixteenth-century palace on the Grand Canal.

Paul had read pretty much all there was to read about these men and their lives: not just A.O., as he was universally known, and the much-lamented Roentgen, but Turnbull and Moro, too—and how Trey’s gnomic music, considered by many the most radical contribution to jazz in a generation, clashed incongruously with Moro’s late-twentieth-century consumerist taste for the fashionably hideous, from Koons to Kuniyoshi, collected with an ostentation in keeping with the uncertain sources of his wealth. Paul had even delved into Ida’s first marriage, to Saltzman, going as far as to examine the divorce records in the New York City archives—“irreconcilable differences,” the order blandly
stated. (Paul had learned somewhere that though Ida had refused a share of Saltzman’s considerable wealth, he had nevertheless settled a generous annuity on her, which meant that Ida had never had to work at anything but being Ida.)

Most of all, though, he read her work, and that of her contemporary allies and competitors—even the enemies Ida had earned thanks to her unquenchable forthrightness. The English literary vamp Ora Troy, for one, had accused Ida of stealing both her bedmate Roentgen
and
the essence of her poetry, though even a casual perusal of
Ramparts of the Heart
demonstrates how time-bound and banal Ora’s work is next to Ida’s insuperable pyrotechnics in evoking what might superficially look like similar thematics—infidelity, religious doubt, and existential loneliness.