Ida sweeter
than upstate
Falernian
I’m waiting
here down
in the garden
under the window:
Now jump!
Not the stuff of greatness, alas. But Ida had responded. Tall, dreamy Cousin Sterling, his adolescent peachiness seasoned by a few years of romantic training, his remaining baby fat absorbed into leanness, caught her fancy again, and over that Christmas holiday they had their second torrid entanglement.
Sterling made it sound as if he’d spent a lifetime mourning those few weeks — though he’d gone on to have a rich and varied sex life of his own. He’d acquired another wife, and a son and namesake, after a series of relationships, including a long-standing, emotionally wrenching one with Bree Davis, who worked as an editor for many years at Impetus. Bree was a live wire, sensible and huskily beautiful, a kind of literary Ava Gardner, but Sterling’s mother had put her foot down. He’d had one free shot; his next consort was not going to be a nobody, too. So Bree got the boot, though the on dit was that they’d never totally called it quits, and Sterling married Maxine Schwalbe, the self-effacing, no-nonsense, seriously wealthy daughter of the founder of Mac Labs. Sterling, who was more than a foot taller than his wife, was, Paul was aware, the less wealthy partner of the two, though Wainwright’s own investments, as his protégée Bettina Braun had told Paul, brought him $10,000 a day back in the early eighties, when money was still money.
You would never have known that slight, brunette Maxine was rich, except that her effortless manners and careful democratic consideration for everyone gave her away. She didn’t need to throw her not-so-considerable weight around; she needed not to. And she was loved for her selfless self, her warmth and generosity, by all who knew her, according to Bettina. Everyone but Sterling, that is. Their alliance was highly satisfactory for him, for in Maxine he finally had a good-natured mate who could create and manage a domestic establishment that catered to his every need and wish — if not desire. Desire belonged elsewhere, outside the suffocating family circle. And no doubt Maxine understood this, though she never made reference to it; that would have meant disturbing the almost courtly decorum that regulated their lives. So Maxine held firm but gentle sway in Hiram’s Corners with young Sterling III, while Sterling toggled back and forth between the farm and the Impetus office he’d opened in New York in the sixties, where it was easier for him to sweet-talk wayward authors, and indulge his penchant for beautiful young things.
That was decades ago now, and a lot of water had flowed under all their bridges. Maxine had died far too young, in her late fifties, and Sterling had up and married Bree soon after. Ida was walled up in Venice with the ghost of A.O. and her showboat Italian husband. In the old days, she’d made a cross-country tour every year or two, organized by the Impetus staff, who were understandably desperate to maintain her franchise. She’d appear like royalty, magnificent in frayed velvet, silvering hair flying wild in her face, before ecstatic audiences of all ages, and then, as long as Maxine was alive at least, would drop down for a week or two of R&R at the Wainwrights’ farm in Hiram’s Corners, north of the city. She and Sterling had been kissing cousins, after all, and she was his best-selling author. Though their lives had long since diverged, their literary and personal ties endured. They were like family — no, they were family. It had been ages, though, since Ida, claiming the excuse of age, had been to America.
“The Goddess,” Sterling called her more than once in the course of his evenings with Paul, with more than a hint of envy. “She barely deigns to notice us mere mortals anymore,” he complained, drawing contemplatively on his amber-colored meerschaum, its bowl sculpted into a grinning satyr’s head.
To which Paul had gently retorted, “Isn’t she just the same as always — only older?”
“Maybe so,” Sterling muttered, chewing on the stem of his pipe, then withdrawing inward, his mind already on something else, or lingering on how his and his cousin’s lives had developed and diverged, tendrils from the same plant that had wound around different branches, different banisters — undeniably separate, yet still connected, still somehow one.
Paul had come upon a framed picture of them all together in Hiram’s Corners on a bookshelf in Sterling’s apartment, a color snapshot from the late eighties, its greens and blues leached out now. Ida, uncharacteristically wearing jeans and a straw hat, is seated between Sterling and Maxine, looking up at the photographer — most likely Sterling’s daughter, Ida, her namesake. Ida P is wearing a determinedly happy smile, possibly a little careworn around the eyes. Putting a brave face on things? It was hard to tell from one photograph, one small yet precious bit of evidence, one mere tessera in the great mosaic that might fit in so many places. Who could say what those looks, those hands, those clothes, that weather truly signified? But there it was, a piece of the gone world that existed where we tread today. One sunny moment, moving inexorably toward sepia. Incredible, really, so far and yet so near: the divine Ida Perkins in Hiram’s Corners, New York, holding hands with Sterling and Maxine Wainwright, smiling into the sun.
V. The Outerbridge Notebooks
One night, in Sterling’s Barrow Street apartment, a floor-through in a West Village brick row house softened by elegant old Turkmen carpets, with drawings by Kandinsky and Max Ernst on the walls and a waist-high soaring Brancusi marble nude that stood voluptuously next to Sterling’s chair, Paul asked about Outerbridge’s last years.
“What happened to A.O. in Venice, Sterling? He seems to have gone radio silent. And what about the notebooks I understand he left behind? When are you going to publish them? When I studied his work in college, nobody even knew they existed.”
Sterling was silent for a moment. “I’ve looked at them, but they’re gobbledygook as far as I can tell,” he allowed at last, in his aw-shucks staccato, meditatively sipping his sixteen-year-old Lagavulin and gazing into the embers of the fire he’d lit at the start of the evening. “They’re written in code, page after page — book after book of unreadable symbols. I’ve never gotten around to dealing with them. Lazy, I guess. Frankly, Arnold became more or less a recluse in his later years. I’m not sure he was still all there. We pretty much fell out of touch, except through Ida.”
“Could I take a look at them sometime?”
“I don’t see why not,” Sterling answered with a shrug. “They’re in the vault at the office. Come by some afternoon.”
The Impetus offices, in a venerable Meatpacking District building not far from Sterling’s apartment, were at least as scruffy as P & S’s, with upholstery that looked lice-infested and filthy walls that had not been washed, let alone painted, in forty years. Still, they commanded a panoramic view of the harbor, including the Statue of Liberty, Staten Island, and the Verrazano Bridge, from the terrace that girded them. The old bank vault was in the business office at the end of the hall, which was lined with familiar photos of some of Sterling’s principal authors, including a beetling, rather intimidating one of A.O. and, farther on, a wispy, out-of-focus Ida in a style reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron.
Sterling spun the dial, swung open the safe’s heavy army-green door, and rifled through a rat’s nest of manuscripts and ledgers, finally producing an old grocery box from the bottom shelf. The notebooks were piled inside, Venetian laid paper edged with gold bound in grained red leather. There were thirteen of them, each ninety-six pages, about nine by eleven inches. Every surface was covered with writing — numbers, letters, and symbols in ordered rows, page after page of them, all in uniform red ink. At the bottom of the box was a large accordion file stuffed with crumbling newspaper clippings, articles, and other ephemera.