Still, over the years, Matthias and Homer and now Paul had shared certain core writers who had had an international impact, among them Homer’s Three Aces. And Matthias, a respected avant-garde writer himself (Homer had published several of his dark, abstruse short novels before giving up the ghost), was Ida’s German publisher, too, and he was well aware of Paul’s passion for her and her work. Being the canny insider he was, Matthias often seemed to have privileged information about deliberations in Stockholm, and this year was no exception.
“It’s possible,” he told Paul. “There are other currents afoot, but it’s possible.”
Paul didn’t know what to make of these gnomic tea leaves. All he could do was what everyone else was doing: wait.
He was at the booth at one o’clock, but the silence was deafening. After an excruciating wait, word went around that Hendrijk David of the Netherlands had squeaked out enough votes to take the prize. It was said he’d been expecting it for years, sitting complacently by the phone on the appointed morning each October.
The rumor, though, turned out to be erroneous. Dries van Meegeren, another, far more obscure Dutch essayist, had won, setting off an unseemly free-for-all for the acquisition of his largely still-available rights. Publishers from nearly everywhere, who before today had never heard of van Meegeren, swarmed the normally empty Dutch hall, anxious to buy themselves a Nobel Prize winner. The booth of De Bezige Bij, The Busy Bee, van Meegeren’s lucky publisher, resembled a rebooking desk in an airline terminal after a canceled flight. (David, meanwhile, never recovered, dying in bitter disappointment a couple of years later.)
In any case, the prize hadn’t gone to Ida. Paul consoled himself with the fact that her not having won meant she still could.
He phoned Homer once the office was open in New York.
“Can you believe Dries won?” he cackled, giddy with disbelief. Van Meegeren had been campaigning for the Nobel for ages, going on reading tours across Scandinavia, writing articles about the work of Swedish Academy members, even taking up with a Swedish woman reputed to be on a first-name basis with the academy’s secretary.
“That gonif has been kissing Swedish ass for years,” Homer answered. “I was hoping for Les or Adam. I need my Four of a Kind, you know.”
“It will happen, Homer. All in good time. Everyone here sends love.” Paul relayed greetings from a passel of Homer’s long-standing confreres.
“Keep your nose clean and have fun. I’ll see you Monday.”
“Not Monday. Remember, I’m going to visit Ida Perkins in Venice after the fair.”
“Right.” Paul could hear Homer clearing his throat across the ocean. “Well, give her a slap on the ass for me, and tell her our arms are always open. Keep me posted!”
“Will do — at least the second and third parts,” Paul answered, and rang off. The fair had another two days to run, but he could hardly wait for it to be over. He sleepwalked through his appointments and forced himself to put in an appearance at a few receptions, trying to muster the enthusiasm to host the firm’s Friday night dinner in Homer’s stead. He couldn’t help feeling that, like him, Homer’s pals would be on autopilot without their Fearless Leader to mirror back their well-rehearsed performances as cultural grandees — marshals of France, someone called them. Self-importance was ubiquitous, Paul knew, but there was a particular smarmy pungency to the horse-trading in Frankfurt that he found revolting, especially when he was engaging in it. It was a far cry from the poetry of Ida Perkins or the novels of Ted Jonas, sweated out in anguish and solitude. The idea of Ida or Eric Nielsen or Pepita here among these overdressed, overfed word merchants who acted as if they owned their writers’ hides made him faintly ill.
On Friday evening he stood in his off-the-rack suit at a long table in an otherwise deserted hotel restaurant as Homer’s crowd — Brigitta, Norberto, Matthias, Beatriz, Jorge and Lalli, Héloise, Gianni, Teresa — sat expectantly, waiting, he was sure, for him to commit an unforced error. He made a stab at imitating Homer’s offhand delivery of one of his risqué toasts, but Paul’s own attempts at public humor usually came off a little forced. All seemed to be going along all right, though, until he made the mistake of mentioning e-books:
“Why, before you know it, you’ll be enjoying Padraic and Thor and Pepita and Dmitry on your own devices, just like us!” he exclaimed with ersatz jollity, given that he’d never opened an e-reader himself.
It was as if he’d farted at the table or mentioned the Holocaust. Brigitta and Matthias stared at each other bug-eyed and sucked in their cheeks, like specters out of Goya’s Disasters of War, imagining the digital horde advancing from the West like the latest strain of American influenza. Thank God they would be too old to care when it reached their shores.
Paul shrank down in his seat. What would Homer and Sally say when word reached them, as it assuredly would, that he’d demonstrated once and for all how unsuited he was for this well-padded, backward-looking world?
He couldn’t wait to breathe the fetid air of his beloved Venice, where he often escaped after the mind-numbing hothouse of the fair. He washed down the rest of his veal chop with too much syrupy Rotwein, ushered his last guests out of the funereal restaurant, and caught the midnight train with minutes to spare. He arrived in Venice early the next morning, sleepless but jangly with excitement.
He splurged on a water taxi down the Grand Canal, stunned as always to be confronted with how truly strange Venice was. The shut-up palaces fell straight into the oily loden-colored water (what held them up?). The sky alternated between pearlescent and Bellini blue. He felt gusts of enchantment and resistance, elation and revulsion. Venice was a hallucinatory incubus, the most artificial environment in the world: Disneyland for grown-ups. It reeked of sex and its putrescent partner, death. Thomas Mann had caught its rouged, feverish aura perfectly.
What was Ida Perkins, the avatar of red-cheeked American expansiveness and optimism, doing here? This was a place to hide, to fade away — not to grab life by the lapels, as she always had. Had Ida become infected by A.O.’s old man’s despondency? Or had she found a new lease on life with Leonello Moro? Was Ida still Ida?
Paul spent the morning wandering, struck yet again by the seemingly chance beauty of Italian public spaces, shaken down over time into nonchalant irregularity and aptness. He had always felt lighter in Italy, unburdened by expectations, his own or anyone else’s; he could move at will here, unimpeded and unobserved, as he sometimes could in New York, too, actually, walking anonymous in the noontime crowd. He had lunch in the autumn sun at a trattoria in the Campo Santo Stefano, and made stabs at resuscitating his dormant Italian. He reread Ida’s Venice book, Aria di Giudecca, which was as alive to the decay and incandescence of the city as anything he knew (“city of Jewish saints / of cul-de-sacs and feints / of stains and taints”). Then he started leafing through his transcriptions of A.O.’s notebooks while he sipped his espresso: