But this wasn’t Venice. Paul was here in this idyllic yet unfamiliar place, with a daunting task in front of him. He’d taken up the study of ciphers, having ordered every guide he could find on the Medusa website that didn’t sound too technical. He felt guilty about patronizing the rapacious online bookseller, but the truth was that Styx and Stonze never had what he needed, even in their Madison Square flagship store, where board games and wrapping paper and the book chain’s own proprietary product were beginning to squeeze out books. What would Morgan think? he wondered — a bit disingenuously, since he already knew.
Paul had convinced himself that it was just a matter of time before he’d find the method in A.O.’s madness. Working in the airless barn wasn’t always conducive to code-cracking, though. Some days, he’d spend more time than he’d have liked to admit not working on the notebooks, fretting about the non-life he was leading or poring over Sterling’s secondary — or was it tertiary? — library of Impetus titles, alphabetically arranged on unpainted shelves with old juice bottles for bookends. Everyone from Tagore to Blaisdell, early Luteri to late Broch, Robert Duncan to Dermott Weems to César Vallejo to Pélieu to Serenghetti — it was a checkerboard of world literature, mind-boggling in its breadth and adventurousness and originality. Yes, Sterling liked to talk about the ones that got away but, my God, the ones he’d landed, the cavalcade of writers he’d discovered, nurtured, and kept in print over a long and no doubt often discouraging but ultimately triumphant career!
The truth was that many of these names, the makers of modern culture, had sold very little over the course of their long lives in print with Impetus. It was one of the realities of publishing: what was truly new often languished in the warehouse nearly unasked-for. One of the tricks of publishing was catching the wave of public taste at the right moment. If you were too prescient, too far ahead of the swell, literally nothing would happen — until lightning struck, if it did, years, sometimes decades, later. In the meantime, you had to have other ways of keeping body and soul together to be a serious writer — or a publisher. The remarkable thing about Sterling was how he’d used his means, and used them brilliantly, to build his house. With Aunt Lobelia’s help, he’d husbanded his modest stake and kept his shoestring operation going long enough, consistently enough, devotedly enough, that fifty years on he had a catalog that was the envy of the more discerning of his commercial confreres. And Impetus had eventually become profitable as well, when a goodly number of its key authors had ended up being adopted in classrooms across America. The long tail had paid off for Sterling. Not that this was why he’d done it; but commercial success in the end was heroic confirmation of the essential soundness of his undertaking. He’d made a wager with fate that out of desire, stick-to-itiveness, and judgment, he could create a worthwhile publishing venture. And he’d succeeded; by trusting his own taste, he’d shown them all — his uncomprehending family, his derisive competitors, even crusty, superior Arnold Outerbridge, who’d taken a left-handed chance on a brash young layabout.
Paul hadn’t come into publishing at a time when with a little money and a lot of taste and elbow grease you could build something like an Impetus or a P & S. Besides, he didn’t have the cash or the chutzpah to start something on his own. By the time he’d shown up, most of the smaller houses had been gobbled up by so-called general-interest publishers, most of them now owned in turn by much bigger conglomerates who’d publish anything they could get their hands on that had a chance of making money, and whose lists consequently more or less resembled one another. Impetus and P & S were anomalies now, among the last of the independents, whose lists reflected the tastes and commitments of the publishers themselves. It was unclear how long they’d hold out in the rush for consolidation and “scale” that was whipping through the book business and countless others like a tornado through a hay field.
Still, Paul hoped that in his work with Homer he could emulate the single-mindedness and finesse that Sterling had brought to realizing his dream. Paul believed in believers — not the credulous religious, but those who aspired to move the needle, to add something to the world. What he valued most was their all-or-nothing faith in themselves — something he wished he had more of — accompanied by the self-forgetting that true love requires. Aspiration to him didn’t feel like self-seeking.
So he daydreamed a lot in that often stifling back room, with dead flies in the cobwebs and the dust of slowly disintegrating books in the air — and not always about the shambles of his love life. He was taken with the hodgepodge of images tacked on the beams: an early Impetus logo by Alfonso Ossorio (which he later convinced Sterling to frame and hang in the house); an ink sketch of A.O. in his most prophetic mode; a dog-eared eighteenth-century print of the Forum; that eye-opening photo of Sterling moguling on the Swiss slopes; a peeling, blunt-cornered postcard of Celine Mannheim’s half-finished Venetian palazzo; a snapshot of Ida dancing the frug with Robert Duncan in a San Francisco gay bar.
He could hear bees out in the garden, under the gigantic, unthreatening clouds. He could see the hollyhocks and roses distorted by the bottle-green glass of the barn windows. He didn’t know which was more attractive: the sun-drenched world outside the barn; the barn itself with its beckoning treasures; or the pages on the desk in front of him, the paper trail, the leavings of the man who had written more than a few of the classic books arrayed around him. Part of him wanted to be outside in the cool air, so clean it hurt his citified lungs, weeding the lily beds or editing the woods, as Sterling had joked when he’d come upon him one day, piling up brush in the thin stand of birches behind the house for exercise. But he wanted to be here inside, too, with the ephemera of his heroes’ lives. He didn’t know how to choose, so he sat doing nothing, till he felt the chill of a sudden storm through the door he’d left open.
Reluctantly, he rose and went to make sure the windows were shut in the cottage. The rain raged, and the power went out for an hour. After a while, his laptop’s battery died, so he flipped through the papers in the accordion file, inhaling the smoky residue of Arnold’s and Ida’s lives. The charred smell came, he assumed, from the pages themselves, burning away invisibly as they had for years in the Impetus vault in New York. Eventually they would crumble and be lost to the world, if they weren’t thrown away first. For today, though, they were his to inhale and get lost in. Utter joy, joy he knew no one else could understand or share in, joy like a secret perversion possessed him, and in those moments in the barn Paul was guiltily, radiantly happy, wallowing in his heroes’ lives as if they were his own.
* * *
Late in the day he usually strolled down to the dock to join Sterling and Bree for a swim. It was like clockwork: at four o’clock the old station wagon would trundle past the Cow Cottage and Paul would know Sterling would be spending the next hour or two down at the pond, occasionally dipping in the water but mainly sunning and gabbing with Bree and Ida and his son-in-law Charlie Bernstein and their kids and whoever else happened to be around.
Next door to Sterling’s was the camp of Seamus O’Sullivan, a jerry-built wooden affair with a proliferation of porches, balconies, and docks from which many-colored bath towels were perpetually waving like banners in the breeze. Seamus, a longtime staff writer at The Gothamite, where he had been both the jazz and the racing critic for decades, considered himself a bon vivant and a wit. He also fancied himself a bosom buddy of Sterling’s, and he was constantly seeking to engage him in barbed banter studded with classical taglines from their school days. But Paul thought he could detect a certain detachment in Sterling’s repartee, and a corresponding neediness underneath Seamus’s affectionate raillery. Paul had begun to understand that Sterling was always just a little bit absent with everyone. He let things happen, he played along, but there was a plane of his attention that seemed unreachable.