Muse: A Novel (6 page)

“Music to my ears,” she’d croon in her blue-sky Iowa accent, taking another late-night sip of Chardonnay during their phoned-in drinks date. “The human comedy! It’s keeping me young.”

For Paul, like many of his fellows, the company had turned out to be a haven in a heartless world. His work was his life, apart from an occasional fling that went nowhere. Many of the writers he’d idolized as a student were house authors, and some of them had now become “his,” their previous editors having retired or moved on to higher-paying jobs elsewhere. Everyone understood that any author with any kind of profile was automatically the personal property of Homer. Nevertheless, Pepita Erskine and Orin Roden and all the women’s heartthrob, the divine Padraic Snell, took Paul’s calls and had errands for him to run, and he’d
been thrilled to run them. Until, in the eyes of many in the tight-knit community of agents and writers and journalists and other editors, Paul and P & S had become more or less synonymous. Recognizing which, as he lay awake on his sagging daybed wedged in between the stacks of books and galleys and manuscripts in his West Nineteenth Street walk-up, he would sometimes shake his head in grateful wonder.

Still, the writer Paul cared most about, the ever-incandescent Ida Perkins—“the bitch that got away,” Homer would mutter when he was feeling competitive and resentful, which he did whenever he wasn’t feeling triumphant—was nowhere near Union Square. Paul looked on in envy while she racked up prizes all over the world, appeared on
Charlie Rose
and Bill Moyers’s shows and even, one unforgettable January afternoon, for a full hour on
Oprah,
gave sell-out readings at the biggest venues, appeared in the gossip columns with her fancy acquaintances, and sold an outlandish number of books for a poet. And as he watched it all, book after book, year after year, he felt the unassuageable ache of unrequited passion transmute into bittersweet longing. He and Ida were like an old couple by now; they’d been through a lot together, and they would always be each other’s—if only in his head.

He’d experienced a more immediate kind of pain around Elspeth Adams when he’d been a student in her poetry
workshop at NYU, so overwhelmed with love and insufficiency he’d been virtually speechless. Being in her presence, when he’d gotten to know her, had been so much what he wanted that he couldn’t enjoy it; he was literally sick with reverence. He’d get a stomach ache when he was invited to Miss Adams’s apartment for dinner. She was a grandmotherly figure, richly if soberly dressed, without pretension but with the quiet dignity of someone who knew her worth. She insisted on calling her students by their last names; to her, he was “Mr. Dukach” and she was “Miss Adams”—no ersatz “Ms.” for her. Paul loved this, like everything else about her. He was enchanted by the purr of her smoke-enriched voice, her lowball rapier irony, her politely expressed disdain for everything noisy and showy about her contemporaries. Poets like Audrey Dienstfrey, who performed for rapt audiences with a rock band for backup, moaning incantations about the vicissitudes of her genitalia, were anathema to Miss Adams, though it was a nearly open secret that she’d had a series of rocky affairs with younger women. She had one of the steeliest intelligences he had ever encountered. Her sense of herself, of her womanhood, was multilayered, not easy to parse.

He’d last seen her when he was still at HW, at the Modern Language Association convention in New York. John Adams (no relation) had premiered his “Starlight” song cycle based on a group of wonderful poems from her
Pulitzer Prize–winning collection,
Intergalactica,
sung by the ethereal Viridiana Bruck. A few months later, aged sixty-six, she’d had a heart attack and died alone in her apartment overlooking the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

Her suddenly expanded circle of intimates referred to Elspeth by her given name now that she was gone, but Paul hesitated before saying it when, to his amazement, he’d become the editor responsible for her work, once Georges Savoy had finally retired. He felt an intense loyalty and responsibility to Miss Adams and her work, though he had always considered Ida a more ambitious and more adventurous writer. He cherished Miss Adams’s letters to him, which he kept in his copy of her
Collected Poems,
the binding of which was in danger of giving out, and he’d hung her photograph next to Ida’s above the desk in his apartment.

As he grew into his life at work, though, Paul found he had gradually lost a degree of the awe for the writers he worked with. They no longer left him tongue-tied, though their talent often still amazed him. Eventually, Miss Adams had had to become Elspeth to Paul, too. You couldn’t work with someone for too long, even if she was gone, without somehow ending up on a first-name basis. He’d come to appreciate that writers were just like everyone else, except when they were more so. It sometimes seemed that they’d been able to develop their gifts thanks to a lack of inhibition, an inner permission to feel and react, that made them
seem self-absorbed and insensitive to the existence of anyone else.

Pepita Erskine was a prime example. She’d grown up black and dirt-poor in Detroit, but by dint of her brilliance and courage and strength of personality, she’d made herself into an intellectual and moral force to be reckoned with, even as a very young woman. She’d driven cross-country to New York after a noisy career at Berkeley, where she’d been a thorn in the side of radical student leader Ronnie Morrone, whom she’d accurately called out as both racist and sexist, and had gone on to make her mark nationally as a counterculture columnist at
The Daily Blade.

In excoriating the self-congratulatory liberal clerisy, Pepita had refused with remarkable success to be labeled a black or a woman writer, or a left-winger, or a sexual renegade. She was also an indefatigable culture vulture, hoovering up every civilizing tidbit she could get her hands on—poetry, literary theory, dance, music, theater, film. She was an insatiable maw of desire and need to know, to experience, to opine. And her insatiability extended to the creators themselves, for Pepita had boundary issues. Approbation, in someone as constitutionally critical as she, often got confused with passion, and her affairs with the writers, dancers, and artists she looked up to were widely known. Paul referred to them as her “seminars”—private sessions with the masters in their fields, held at their feet and sometimes
in their beds. Men or women, it made no difference to Pepita, as long as her chosen objects could give her a run for her formidable mental money and momentarily assuage her need for recognition and response. She was literally enamored with art—arguably less so with the individuals who created it, who often turned out to have inconvenient needs and egos of their own, which on occasion dwarfed even hers.

Homer always referred to Pepita as Pootie. He had nicknames for many of his current favorite—or unfavorite—allies or antagonists. (Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.) The Nympho, the Dauphin, the Dwarf, and the Slightly Used Canadian, whatever that meant, were only some of the characters in the eternal soap opera that was publishing for him.

One day Paul got up the courage to ask him, “Why do you call Pepita Pootie, Homer?” To which he answered matter-of-factly, “Because she’s such a sweet little pootie-tat.”

Right. Of the attributes that could be assigned to Pepita—brilliance, originality, courage, stridency, arrogance, neediness, narcissism—sweetness was not first among them. Indeed, her nickname around the office, “the Purring P,” told you everything you needed to know about her relations with the staff. Homer’s moniker showed that he had been on the receiving end of Pepita’s cat’s—or bear’s—paw often
enough; indeed, it was clear to one and all that she had him in her thrall.

After all, it was Pepita’ s voice—insolent, belabored with Germanic Seriousness, lightened and enlivened by a dash of jive, and insistent on its own unimpeachability—that had become the hallmark of P & S style. At a critical point in its history, Pepita’s intellectual reach and tropism for controversy had lent the house an aura of urgent cultural significance that it had never lost. Pepita Erskine, the scourge of white liberalism, had become white liberalism’s dangerous darling—and the quintessential P & S author. She certainly thought so, and Homer concurred, and they had a correspondingly intense relationship—part father-daughter, part professional, part flirtatious (Paul had heard they’d been lovers; he couldn’t be sure, but he knew that for Homer no complicated relationship with a woman could fail to be sexual in some sense)—and 100 percent transactional.

Paul remembered how, long before he’d worked for Homer, he’d run into him lunching with Pepita in the old restaurant at One Fifth Avenue. They were sitting side by side, wearing matching leather jackets and exuding a bonhomie that felt faintly postcoital to Paul. Glamorous Meredith Gethers, the agent who was Paul’s date that day, brought him over to their banquette to say hello. Homer was civil, just barely, but when Meredith started to
commiserate about the
Daily Blade
’s scathing review of her client Earl Burns’s new novel, he cut her off. “It’s a fart in the wind,” he sneered with a dismissive wave, before turning back to the real object of his interest.

One of Pepita’s most notable seminars had been with Dmitry Chavchavadze, the émigré Georgian poet. The fact that he lived in Atlanta, where he held an endowed chair at Emory University, confused matters, for people were often unsure which kind of Georgian he was. On his arrival in New York in 1982 after being expelled from Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, Dmitry had been lionized by Manhattan’s glitterati, until they bumped up against his hard-line rightist politics, by which time it was too late. Before you could say
Bozhe moi,
Pepita and Dmitry had become inseparable.

Pepita, who had a gorgeous ebony complexion set off with cherry-red lipstick and a high-teased Afro, dressed like a Seven Sisters coed of yesteryear in flared corduroy skirts and penny loafers, while Dmitry, with his soul patch and filled-out figure, looked like what he was, an aging émigré intellectual on the dole in America’s groves of academe. Their seminar lasted only a few months, for in Dmitry, Pepita’s ego had more than met its steely match. Paul used to say that you didn’t get to be Dmitry Chavchavadze or Pepita Erskine by being nice (her war with Susan Sontag over the black characters in Jean Genet’s dramas had gone practically nuclear). But Dmitry, with his unmovable detestation
of Communism, his intransigent commitment to poetic formalism, and his bludgeoning disdain for his intellectual inferiors, took the cake.

Dmitry’s hatred of his Soviet tormentors meant that he approved of all anti-Communists, first among them Ronald Reagan, and considered left-leaners “dangerous fools”—and it was during their short-lived liaison that Pepita’s notorious rightward shift had begun. From the hammer-and-tongs opponent of midcult conformism of her early essays, she reemerged in her later years as a defender of the much-maligned and soon-to-disappear literary canon, the ultimate Great Books girl she’d once been in Black Bottom, where, as a bucktoothed teenager, she’d inhaled volume after volume of the Modern Library.

Dmitry was considered the most important Georgian poet of the century, and the Swedish Academy had concurred, enNobeling him unprecedentedly early, at the age of thirty-eight. His poems in Russian were said to be at once hypnotically lyrical and cynically disaffected, but some saw the English-language versions, which he insisted on creating himself, as an unintentional pastiche that relied on an insufficient understanding of his target language. Still, his status as a freedom fighter combined with his brilliance and take-no-prisoners implacability conferred impregnable authority on Dmitry. “Is sheet!” he’d shout, about the work of a writer he didn’t rate, which was most of
them. “Sheet! Sheet! Sheet!!” This turned out to be a surefire argumentative technique, since few had the temerity to disagree—except, on occasion, the fearless Pepita. And their relationship came a cropper over … who else but Ida Perkins?

Dmitry had met Ida and A.O. in Venice soon after he’d been expelled from the Soviet Union. Needless to say, he had nothing but contempt for Outerbridge, whom he derided as an apologist for the worst criminal in modern history. So their encounter, as one might have expected, had not gone well. Homer’s cousin Celine Mannheim, the modernist collector, who was Arnold’s landlady in Venice—he and Ida lived in a flat that looked over Celine’s luxuriant garden on Dorsoduro—had given a reception in honor of Dmitry’s arrival and had been shocked to come upon her glamorous new social trophy making a scene, insulting her tenant in her own salon. Ida, needless to say, had been outraged, and she’d gone on the record about it. “Georgian Honor,” her scathing takedown of Dmitry’s Stalinist anti-Stalinism, had occasioned the longest-running exchange of letters in the history of
The Protagonist,
the savage old-left review. Pepita, to the surprise of many, had taken Arnold’s (and Ida’s) part, and this had proven intolerable for Dmitry.

“Mr. Chavchavadze, for all his political shrewdness, has failed to take on board Arnold Outerbridge’s vital role in denouncing the defensive Babbittry of prewar American
society, and the promise of an alternative, however eventually disillusioning, that the Soviet Union once held out,” Pepita wrote in the fifth
réplique
of her fourteen-letter exchange with Dmitry, which was to prove fatal to their relationship.

“They’re all alike,” he’d been heard to mutter after breaking off their increasingly bitter dialogue—though he left it unspecified who precisely “they” were: Americans, writers, fellow-traveling socialist roaders, women, blacks? It could have been any or all.

Still, Pepita and Dmitry, together or apart, were always and only themselves. Pepita knew what she knew, and brooked no disagreement. But Dmitry was her match, a monument to the egoism of the transcendentally gifted. They were insufferable, both of them, to each other as much as to anyone else—maybe even to themselves, once in a blue moon. Yet, like Pepita, Dmitry, despite his dagger goatee and rotund belly, had undeniable charisma. Even his put-downs of other poets—except for Snell and Vezey, Homer’s other Aces, who were automatically exempted—were delicious. Dmitry knew he was bad, and there was a twinkle in his eye when he was at his most obstreperous, as if he was sharing a joke with you: the joke of his own outrageousness.