in the parted
grass to see the towel
fall on the chair
the body sink
beside me and unfold
the silver voice
remind me I was there
I might have dozed
but I don’t think I did
I was so dazed
with waiting
I got lost
in time without you
time I have no way
of clawing back
stale time
that swivels counterclockwise
down the drain
time that crystallizes pain
time that isn’t
life or air
foul time that doesn’t
move but disappears
I waited
in the sun all afternoon
I waited
on the dock
till it was cold
And when I raised my head up
I was old
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:
I never understood
that insufferable
balderdash about
hopelessness
till now but oh now
I do now I know now
how cruel your cool
and simple
kindness is
Then, to his shock, Paul saw something else.
THE RAGE
your local raccoon
didn’t know what to
make of us vamping
disturbing the peace
disturbing his habitat
new in the dawn
flashing his tail
by the dam he was
hoping to scare us
but nothing
could scare us
nothing giardia
thunder or hapless
invaders could
trample our idyll
we were alive
that June morning
only we two
the raccoon
coyote and catamount
mockingbirds dragonflies
bees didn’t
know what to do
weren’t we the naiads
then darling
weren’t we the rage
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:
wade the old
roadway
through
loosestrife
and goldenrod
where the
primordial
icebox
keeps humming
all night
in the primordial
woods with the
owl as our witness
while the
inexorable
hand keeps on
winding
its stopwatch
killing our time
invading our dark
with its flashlight
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.
LET HIM
be occupied
offhand Olympian
let him be god
while we dither
and waver
stay with me here
in the pool
of the evening
in our penumbra
his sun can’t uncover
Or this:
THE SUN
surveys
what’s his
with purple pride
his piercing rays
decide
what gives
and lives
but I know ways
to hide
inside the shade
and while he sleeps
we’ll shut his eyes
and find
our peace in this
green glade
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:
BERENICE’S
hair hangs in heaven
only for you
I dressed it
I watched it shimmer
on water
saw it reflect
and correct
and obliterate
all of our
error
see it now
falling
miraculous
onto our pillow
glinting thread
binding
unbinding
your moonsilver
nightgown
all of it mine
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:
Go ahead stack his books
type for him ski
even tennis and golf
if you want to
ply him
with orange juice
bacon and sunny-
side eggs if you must
cook but don’t
clean dear
remember it’s
dust unto dust
* * *
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:
LITTLE REQUIEM
the pews are
all filled with
your children
your husband
pallbearers
friends and
relations
exemplary
citizen
and I sit with
them silent and
no one knows why
no one knows why
as I toss my one
scarlet carnation
into your grave
Mnemosyne’s beloved has suddenly disappeared without warning, and can only be evoked now in memory.
In this second part of the book the poems became intentionally repetitive, desperate and at times rageful testaments to a desire that has been left unfulfilled:
How to go on
with this
heaviness all
this despair
being kind
being reasonable
practical
organized fair
when all that I
want is to shut
the door open
your locket and
finger your hair
There were antiphonal poems in italics, too, in the second part, an answering voice that Paul inferred was that of Mnemosyne’s lover, filtered through memory:
not like that
no I can’t no
we can never
find time
no lean back
and untether
how can we ever
be quiet and
breathe
how
can we ever
no lie
here together
The later poems of Mnemosyne were raw, harsh, sometimes cruel in their cold assessment of grief. This was something entirely new in Ida—the poet forced to accept loss, fallibility, mortality, brought low in ways Paul would not have predicted from her previous work:
Go your
way out into
leave me
abandon
me widowed
go your way
leave me
defenseless
just go
your
own way
The book closed with this:
MNEMOSYNE ALONE
Mnemosyne remembers as she sits
and teases at the shoreline through the haze
what she sees
she’s seen for hours
for days
for months and years
she feels the sun’s late rays
fall on the dock
she sees the wary deer
approach the water
gingerly at dusk
she smells the ozone
after love the fear
She sees the holy eyes
that burn the dark
and in the summer flush
she hears the rain
battering the laurel
leaves again
Paul set the manuscript down. For a long time he sat and looked out the window, focusing on nothing.
He could see it all, though. He knew who Mnemosyne’s ungraspable muse had been. Someone Sterling was constitutionally incapable of appreciating.
Maxine Wainwright had died long ago; and with Bree in the picture, Sterling had seldom done more than occasionally mention her. But Morgan had known her. Paul wandered aimlessly along the Giudecca until it was late enough to call her. He reached her at Pages, as she was opening up for the day.
“Morgan, I’m in Venice, in the midst of an earth-shattering discovery. You’ll hear the whole story as soon as I’m back. What I need now is for you to tell me everything you can about Maxine.”
“Maxine Wainwright? Why? Was Sterling unfaithful to her?”
“No doubt. But this is about her, not him. What was she like?”
“Well … she came from an old Main Line family on her mother’s side. Mama apparently caused a little bit of a stir by marrying Maximilian Schwalbe, a penniless Austrian émigré; but he made everything all right by founding Mac Labs, which went on to become one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Maxine went to Bryn Mawr, like her mother, though she was a decade or so younger than your Ida Perkins, I think. I’m rather surprised you don’t know all this, Paul. I’m sure we talked about it long ago.”
For once Paul didn’t rise to Morgan’s bait. She continued:
“She was dark, petite, quite shy, but with tremendous warmth. Utterly without airs. She had an uncanny ability to make immediate connections with people; she certainly did with me, when we met at the booksellers’ convention in Chicago when I was just starting Pages. God knows why she was there—though she was a tireless cheerleader for all of Sterling’s enterprises. We started chatting at the Impetus booth and by the time I left I felt I’d made a friend. Athletic, too, a terrific golfer. I know she and Sterling enjoyed cross-country skiing together up in Hiram’s Corners. And Maxine was the ultimate good citizen. School board, League of Women Voters, what have you. A card-carrying Democrat. They had one son, Sterling the Third, who works for Mac Labs out West now, I believe. I remember her saying she hadn’t wanted to live in Aunt Lobelia’s house after she died because she didn’t want her boy growing up in the biggest place in town. Then she passed away herself more than twenty years ago, of pancreatic cancer.
“But what’s this about? Why do you need me to rehearse all this?”
“I think Maxine and Ida were lovers.”
There was silence on the line. Finally, Morgan said:
“I find that very hard to believe, Paul. Are you sure?”
“As sure as one can ever be about these things. I’ll explain when I’m back. I learned something else, too—something tragic about Ida.”
“Well, hurry home, child. You’ve got a whole lot of explaining to do.”
Paul hung up. Mnemosyne was a work of genius, one of the signal works he had held in his hands as an editor. His sense of privilege in possessing this manuscript, pristine and untampered with, in being the first person in the world to read it, was exalting. He had never felt the joy inherent in his work so keenly.
But this was also an onionskin atom bomb that would blow up poor Sterling Wainwright’s life. Why had Ida handed him this impossible responsibility? She’d instructed him to see to its publication on her death, but had said nothing about how. And not one word about Sterling, her lifelong editor, or nearly. Was Ida expecting Paul to deliver Mnemosyne to him once she was gone?
No, Ida clearly understood that Mnemosyne was something Sterling would never be able to accept or deal with. Was the book, the reality it represented, a dilemma she simply couldn’t face, and so she’d opted to leave it to him to sort out?
When had she written these poems? The title page said 2010, but were they brand-new—or had they been composed during and after her love affair with Maxine, a kind of intermittent diary? Or had they come gushing out of her in the wake of Maxine’s death but she’d been unable to come to terms with them until now, as she was contemplating her own passing? Was Ida afraid that if Mnemosyne was left among her papers it might fail to see the light of day, or even end up destroyed? Paul knew stranger things had happened.
How could he intuit her intentions? How well did Paul really know Ida? Not at all, clearly, despite his unending digging and delving. He’d spent all of one afternoon with her. Yes, he’d read her work inside out, or thought he had, until a few hours ago. But how could he understand what had driven her to this abrupt decision? He needed to know much more before he could do anything.
He phoned the office.
“Homer, you won’t believe what’s happened.”
“Don’t tell me you had to sleep with her,” he guffawed. “She was delicious when I tasted her, but that was ages ago.”
“Homer, she was wonderful. We talked for hours. And she spoke very lovingly of you. But listen. She gave me something.”
“Something of Outerbridge’s?”
“Something of hers. Her last book. It’s tremendous. Spectacular. It’s out of the ballpark, an absolute game changer.”
“The truffle hound strikes again! I’m smacking my lips. Get yourself home today, baby. I want to see what you’ve got.”
Homer hung up and Paul sat in the empty bar next to his hotel watching the light break up the surface of the oily canal outside the café doorway.
He gathered his wits, reread Ida’s letter, and phoned Palazzo Moro. After many rings, a low voice answered. Paul recognized Adriana, the lady in gray.
He asked to speak to Ida. After a long silence, Adriana picked up the receiver again and said, “La Contessa Moro is not able to come to the telephone, I’m afraid. She asked me to thank you for your visit and requested that you follow the instructions in her letter.”
“But I need to know more. I need further instructions from the countess.”
“I’m very sorry. Donna Ida is not well. If you like, perhaps you could call again in a few days. Or write.”
Paul hung up, defeated. He packed his bag, paid his bill, and took a water taxi to the airport. As he sped across the lagoon, he looked back at the campaniles sticking up over the curve of Venice’s large island, and, on this unusually clear day, the Dolomites rising white in the distance like a wall of ivo
ry. Venice, as you left it, looked like a snail shell curled in on itself. Paul invariably felt the need to escape after a week or so. Yet miraculous things happened in Venice; lives got lived, and art got made, in this seemingly moribund warren of infested calles and canals. It wasn’t dead at all. Venice was a Platonic beehive buzzing with covert vitality. Its fabulous gilt-encrusted past wasn’t the point; it was how the past kept gnawing away at the present, digesting and fermenting and reforming it, and extruding it into the future.
And what about Sterling? Paul pondered as he sat at the gate waiting for his flight to be called. How would he read Mnemosyne? How could he read it? He was the oblivious god in the book, who got to sit next to Ida’s priceless object, arrogant and ignorant—an encumbrance, an irrelevance, the enemy even, blind, as Mnemosyne decidedly was not, to the treasure by his side. To be portrayed this way, at this stage of his life, and by a woman he himself had loved and encouraged professionally for decades, struck Paul as hard, maybe even cruel. Did Ida recognize that her elegy for Maxine was also an act of revenge against her beloved publisher, to say nothing of her long-standing consort?
No, Sterling’s self-esteem could never tolerate this double-edged attack on his manhood—and from his most vaunted author, cousin, and old flame. Paul understood why Ida needed his help in publishing Mnemosyne elsewhere, which had to mean at P & S. It was the only course of action that made sense. But did she expect him to wait until Sterling was gone to do it? The publicist in Paul rose up in revolt against the idea that he should postpone trumpeting the literary find of the new century to the world, even as he recognized that this was surely what delicacy required. Sterling could live another ten or fifteen, or even twenty, years; Paul would be nearly an old man himself by then. Would anyone care about Ida and Sterling and Maxine and Mnemosyne in 2030? Besides, who was he to override Ida’s instructions?
These larger-than-life people with their precious feelings that demanded to be memorialized: Ida, Outerbridge, Pepita, Thor, Dmitry, Eric: so endlessly navel-gazing, so convinced of their significance and depth and originality. And Sterling and Homer, too. Writers! Publishers! They were all intolerable. They expected him to be as wrapped up in their stories as they themselves were. And he had been; that was the awful truth. He’d fed off their work and their vicissitudes; he’d made them the star players in a drama he’d been staging for himself since his teenage years in Hattersville. He’d lived through them and they’d floated past in their own precious bubbles, down the river past him.