“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 ivory. 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.
In the end, though, it was Maxine, the tolerant solid citizen, the brave, good-natured, generous, “normal” one, who wouldn’t have dreamed of putting pen to paper, who had been the muse of his muse’s last and, he was convinced, greatest book — Ida’s secret sharer, someone in and of the real world, without any of the pretension or self-concern that made this crew of narcissists so unbearable to Paul at this moment.