“You didn’t? I thought you said you knew poets. They have their cliques and their claques, their jealousies and their sworn enmities, like all artists. If you go for Stravinsky you’re not going to be too popular with Schoenberg. Take that bastard Hummock. He’s always talking down his so-called friend Roden over there. It’s human nature.”
“I suppose you’re right. Sometimes I think it’s visceral, biological even. As if they can’t stand each other’s smell.”
“Watch it, kiddo. Ida Perkins doesn’t smell. She’s as pure as a rose.”
“I know she’s perfect, Roz. And not only because she’s your client. I yield to no one in my admiration of Ida Perkins. But a rose does have a wonderful, rich odor — and thorns, too, the last time I checked. I bet even the perfect Ida Perkins has had her … dissatisfactions over the years. How happy is she with her publisher?”
Roz gave Paul an even stare. “You know very well she’s been with your new best buddy Sterling Wainwright more or less her whole life.”
“Yes, of course. I wouldn’t dream of interfering with a blissful relationship. I was just curious about how it’s gone. From her perspective.”
“The usual ups and downs. But I’m not sure I can imagine Ida anywhere else.”
“Of course not.” Paul retreated to his previous line of questioning. “Have you ever discussed Ms. Perkins’s work with your sister?”
“Aren’t we curious today. Hebe and I don’t talk business. We’ve got enough to contend with dealing with our aged parents — and each other. I know she thinks the world of Ida, though; everyone with any taste does. I wouldn’t be surprised if she wrote a book about her someday. I don’t think she’s so sure about Elizabeth Adams.”
“Elspeth.”
“If you say so. How pretentious can you get,” Roz muttered under her breath before ordering herself another glass.
“Blame her parents if you must. I think it’s a beautiful name myself. But getting back to Ms. Perkins — she hasn’t published for quite a few years now. How is her health?”
“Fine, as far as I know. To tell you the truth, we’re not in daily contact. You’re aware she lives in Venice. And she’s not on e-mail.”
“Yes. I’ve been talking to Sterling about her and Arnold Outerbridge, working on these strange notebooks he left behind. They’re written in a kind of code. I’d be interested in finding out what Ms. Perkins knows about them.”
“Arnold Outerbridge! Did I ever tell you about my night with Arnold Outerbridge? What a shit! But that’s a story for another time. What were you saying about these notebooks? Are you going to publish them?”
“That would be up to Sterling,” Paul answered in his most self-effacing vein. “Right now we’re simply trying to figure out what they add up to — if anything.” Sterling and Paul had pored over Paul’s transcription before he’d left Hiram’s Corners, but Sterling hadn’t had any better idea than Paul what was going on in them.
Roz sipped her wine and assessed Paul silently. At last she said, “Listen — I have an idea. Why don’t you go pay Ida a visit after Frankfurt? I’ll arrange it.”
“Do you think she’d see me? That would be fantastic, Roz! I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Just remember you can’t talk poetry with her. She detests literary types. And suck-ups.”
“Roz! I promise I won’t forget.”
“Don’t. Because if you start going la-di-da on her, you’re toast.”
“I give you my word.”
They finished their double decaf espressos and Paul paid for their lunch (two salades niçoises and Roz’s three glasses of Falanghina to his one), planted a noisy kiss on each cheek, and put her into a taxi. He rode the bus down Fifth Avenue to give himself time to daydream a little. He couldn’t keep from fantasizing about what it would be like to be in Ida’s presence, to actually hear her speak. He was half afraid that when she did open her mouth, he’d be so overwhelmed that what she said would go in one ear and out the other and he’d come away with nothing but the memory of his own fascination.
Yes, he had an ulterior motive in making his visit, he admitted to himself as the bus crawled through the afternoon traffic past the Empire State Building, into the seedier stretches of the Garment District and Koreatown, and on past the Flatiron Building. And Roz was well aware of it; she was setting it up, wasn’t she? What he really wanted, though, was simply to be in Ida’s presence, to see how she moved, to hear the sound of her voice. Whatever happened beyond that, if anything, would be gravy.
The bus lurched to a halt at Fourteenth Street, and he made his escape. He was going to see Ida Perkins in Venice. Unaccountably, he was convinced this visit would change his life. First though, he had to get through Frankfurt.
VIII. The Fair
The modern-day Frankfurt Book Fair was a postwar phenomenon, a vehicle for easing the readmission of Germany into the company of civilized Western societies. Originally, it had been a phenomenon of the Renaissance, Frankfurt being the largest trading center near Mainz, where Johannes Gutenberg and his fellows had invented movable type in the late 1430s. The fair had been established again in 1949 and had grown into the most important annual gathering in international publishing. Every October, tens of thousands of publishers from all over the world scurried like so many ants among the warehouse-like halls of the fair’s bleak campus on the edge of the city center, rushing to appointments with their counterparts.
But books weren’t sold at the modern-day Frankfurt. Authors were — by the pound and sometimes by the gross. What the publishers did at Frankfurt was hump the right to sell their writers’ work in other territories and languages, often pocketing a substantial portion of the earnings for themselves (the ever-paternalistic French were among the most egregious, raking off 50 percent of the take). The days before agents woke up to the potential of international deals were a wild and woolly era, though the seigneurial rituals of fair commerce were punctiliously observed by the players. Rights directors were the most visible players under the Frankfurt bell jar, and the acknowledged queen of them all was Cora Blamesly, FSG’s mace-wielding Iron Maiden, who hailed from the arbor-draped hills of Carinthia and was a past master at brandishing her picked-up Sloane Ranger accent, with its ineradicable Germanic undertone, and her S/M selling techniques to extract outrageous contracts from her desperate European “friends.”
Cora and her ilk would hold back important manuscripts for sale at the fair and then “slip” them with elaborate fanfare to favored editors in various territories, demanding that they be read overnight and soliciting preemptive offers, often inflated by the expectations and tensions of Frankfurt’s carnival atmosphere.
The Europeans were desperate because the postwar cultural economy had dictated that Italian and German, Japanese and Brazilian, and sometimes even French readers needed and wanted to read American books. Not just the big commercial authors, either, the Stephen Kings and Danielle Steels, but the Serious Literary Writers, too. First there’d been the anxiety-ridden, attitude-infused Jewish American novelists; followed by the less interesting, more self-regarding WASPs, the Updikes and Styrons and Foxxes; and the nondescript newbies, the young Turks full of sass and plausibility that Cora and her counterparts whipped up into supernovas for the four days of the fair, sometimes for book after book, year after year. European publishing nabobs like Jorge Vilas (Spain), Norberto Beltraffio (Italy), Matthias Schoenborn (Germany), and the biggest overspender of them all, Danny van Gennep from Utrecht, had been playing this way for years, and were on the hook to Cora for literal millions. When Roger Straus or Lucy Morello brought a new author to Frankfurt, they all jumped, as they did for Rob Routman, the head-turning editor in chief of Owl House — sometimes, it was rumored, without reading all that much (or, let’s be honest, any) of the manuscript — because often, or often enough anyway, the books “worked,” i.e., sold copies back home. Many publishers played “Ready, Fire, Aim” buying foreign books, acquiring titles that sounded hot but often, when the commissioned translations materialized months later, would have them shaking their heads, wondering how such a dog could have appeared so leonine in the half-light of the smoke-infested Hessischer Hof bar, still packed at two a.m. with drunken, libidinous editors and rights people splayed across each other on the sagging couches.