Paul lounged in his Aeron chair and gazed at the pictures of his heroes on the console behind his desk. There was his old boss, hands on hips, in foulard and canary-yellow trousers, sporting a smile as wide as the Hudson; Ida, with her aquiline nose and unkempt hair, peering flirtatiously up at the camera; Arnold, all mustache and beetling eyebrows, scowling at the world. And Sterling was there too, now that Homer was no more, a wistful, pale young man with thin arms, his chin on his elbow, staring dejectedly into space at his desk in the Cow Cottage, the future still in front of him.
And there was Thor Foxx, in his salmon-pink suit and goatee; Pepita with her gray Afro and leather-button cardigan, corduroy skirt and knee socks, frowning; Homer’s Three Aces, arms around each other, black ties askew, singing at full throttle like the Three Tenors; round-faced Elspeth Adams, outwardly serene and self-possessed, sporting elegant cabochon earrings; Ezekiel Schaffner, his Adam’s apple protruding assertively from his long neck; Rick Nielsen, intensely nerdy-handsome, shouldering the weight of the world; Nita Desser; Sarita Burden; Julian Entrekin; Ted Jonas.
Paul knew what mattered to him: they did, they and their headlong urge for self-expression. Their faces centered and encouraged him; they defined his world.
He looked beyond them, down onto Union Square. You couldn’t erase its history: the rallies, the riots, Gorky’s studio to the east, the long, cool shadow of Warhol’s factory on the north (so what if the building now housed a Petco?). The hordes of gorgeous youth that streamed by him, cell phones in their palms, when he strolled on St. Mark’s Place probably weren’t aware they were passing the shabby apartment where Auden had written “The Shield of Achilles” either, but it was the artists who finally gave their times and places significance. Paul felt the presence of their ghosts out in the world, just as he felt them here in his office and in his head. The air was full of them. They were everywhere and always would be.
And he knew that in this at least he was just like Sterling and Homer, no matter the differences in their backgrounds and temperaments. Their authors and their work had been the ultimate raison d’être for whatever they themselves had done. Beyond their petty self-aggrandizing, Homer and Sterling and their kind had been true to their writers’ gifts. Ida wasn’t the only one they’d been devoted to. Their authors were their gods, despite their high-handed behavior, egomania, and competitiveness. In the end, it had been all about them.
XIV. The Man from Medusa
“Where are you off to now, Paul?” asked his sales director, Maureen Rinaldi, seeing his overnight bag parked by his desk on a Friday morning. Momo, as he called her, had cheerfully put up with Paul’s lack of organizational talent list after list, year after year. Paul would have been helpless without her, and everybody knew it — especially Momo.
“Going to see the Man, where else?” Paul answered with a grin. In the last few months, his bimonthly trips to San Francisco had become common knowledge around the office. He was in love, for what felt like almost the first time and everyone at P & S knew it.
The Man was Rufus Olney, a content editor at Medusa. The San Francisco — based e-tailer was wreaking havoc in the publishing business, underselling publishers’ wares to steal business away from bookstores and achieve a virtual online monopoly in both print and e-books in the process. Lately, they’d been making feints at being publishers, too, as if to show the traditional book trade how far up their asses their heads were. Paul had come across Rufus on one of the more activist websites that had transformed his per sonal life post-Jasper. When he’d discovered as they chatted that Rufus (screen name Rockstar Apollo) worked for big, bad Medusa, he’d suggested they get together during the upcoming booksellers’ convention in New York. They’d hit it off, though Rufus didn’t have the slightest idea who Ida or Arnold or Homer or Sterling or the rest of Paul’s pantheon were. Content was king at Medusa, they claimed, but Rufus’s expertise ran more to genre novelists and management gurus than literary writers. Which was fine with Paul, who was looking for someone who was interested in his personal as opposed to professional attributes. Rufus, who in spite of his name had rich brown hair and a broad, still unlined forehead, seemed taken with Paul’s East Coast nerdiness. Paul was susceptible to his new friend’s hazel eyes and winning ways and found himself yielding, often, to his insistent salesman’s charms.
At first he’d called him just that, talking to Morgan or his friends at work: the Salesman. Then, as things heated up between them, the Salesman had become the Man from Medusa, as if an ironic moniker could inoculate him from his deepening attachment. Soon enough, though, Paul’s irony had died away and the Man from Medusa had morphed into the Man, pure and simple. Rufus was the Man in more ways than one, and Paul was crazy about him.
On their weekends in San Francisco, they’d spend hours in the perpetually unmade bed in Rufus’s steel-and-maple loft downtown, with its stunning view of the Bay; then Paul would relax with a glass of sauvignon blanc and pretend to fiddle with a manuscript (retro, yes, but that was Paul; he’d confessed to Rufus on their third date that he hated e-readers), while Rufus, the original foodie, rustled them up a fantastic meal. Then they’d lounge around with Rufus’s laptops and smartphones and tablets and other devices and Rufus would try to indoctrinate Paul in the intricacies of tech.
Paul was enchanted by the lingo of Rufus’s world: big data, scalability, pivoting, crowdsourcing, virtual convergence, geo-location, but before too long he came to understand that everything his guy was talking about — platforms and delivery systems and mini-books and nanotech and page rates and and and — had very little to do with what mattered to Paul, which was the words themselves and the men and women who’d written them. Rufus could make them bigger or smaller on his pads and notebooks, he could add visual elements and music, he could reformat them six ways to Sunday and break them into bits or bites or bytes and send them into the world on all sorts of pathways, but Moby-Dick was still Moby-Dick, whatever device you screened it on, and Mnemosyne was Mnemosyne, no matter how you sliced it.
What bothered Paul was that Rufus and his pals at Medusa wanted to sell Ida’s — and Thor’s and Ted’s and Rick’s and everyone else’s — work so cheaply they were practically giving it away. They couldn’t have cared less that a writer had sweated blood for years to create immortal poetry, or that an editor had hovered lovingly over the manuscript of a novel to bring it into the world in the form and condition it deserved. Rufus and his cohorts were all for Open Access. It sounded wonderful, and it was — for the end user (Paul had grown up calling her “the reader”). But the creator, who in spite of everything remained a virtual divinity to Paul, mattered far less to Rufus. If he couldn’t get one kind of content he’d find something else, unencumbered by restrictions, somewhere else. No, content wasn’t king at all at Medusa; it was more or less fungible. This drove Paul to paroxysms of rage and despair, and he found he often had to set his feelings aside when he and Rufus were together.
When he talked to Morgan these days, the news about the business was more often than not depressing. She was an extremely canny bookseller who’d outsmarted the chains by making Pages the heart and soul of the community in and around Hattersville. She had local and visiting authors give readings weekly; she had children’s hours on Saturdays; she was the den mother to a hundred book groups; she supplied books for events at Hattersville State and Embryon, the local private college. Besides, she was Morgan Dickerman, and people naturally gravitated to her the way Paul had (he wasn’t self-deluding enough to believe he was her only protégé, though he liked to flatter himself that he was still Number One). So Pages was still doing all right. But some of Morgan’s perhaps less talented or less energetic colleagues were not faring nearly as well. The chain store across the square had gone out of business, too, which, paradoxically, hadn’t helped matters at Pages.