Ida was looking across the tea table straight at him. Paul didn’t know how to respond. He worried he was tiring her, but she forged ahead.
“We got married. Barry and I had divorced after he found out about Sterling. He couldn’t take it, and I didn’t blame him. In the end, he wanted an uptown life, and he deserved someone to share it fully. I needed to be down on Varick Street. So he went off with Alice Pennoyer and they were happy as could be, at least I think so. And I did adore Stephen.
“But he ran dry. He ran out of gas. He blamed me, you know, said I sucked it all out of him, that there was nothing left after I was through with him. Which was ridiculous. Everyone knows erotic energy is self-replenishing. Of course that was before Thomas.”
“Thomas?”
“Our son, Thomas Handyside Roentgen,” Ida said matter-of-factly. “Born January 13, 1951, after twenty-eight hours of labor. He died three days later.”
Paul sat up ramrod straight. “I didn’t know you had a child,” he said, as calmly as he could.
“It was our secret. We weren’t married; Stephen was supposedly with Esther Podgorny. And then our little boy died. He died. I still dream about him. Holding him for those few precious hours. He’d be fifty-nine years old today.”
Ida was silent, enveloped in memory; but it was Paul whose eyes were wet. “I am so very sorry” was all he could think to say. How could this all-important fact of Ida’s life have eluded him? What else had he missed or misunderstood about this woman he thought he knew inside out? Suddenly, certain lines and images he realized he’d never really absorbed—vacant rooms, and yes, graveyards, cypresses, shrouds—clicked into place:
the snow-blown morning when I held
your tiny purple hand
How could he not have seen it?
But Ida was continuing.
“We got married afterward, and moved to London. We wanted to have another baby. But I couldn’t, the doctors said. I think each of us secretly blamed the other. But I’ll always love Stephen. Always.”
A phone rang somewhere in the apartment. Adriana came to the doorway, but Ida shook her head and the woman disappeared.
“And then suddenly Arnold appeared. I met him the first time in the late fifties, at Louis MacNeice’s. You know the rest, I’m sure. He was still breathing fire and brimstone in those days, putting everyone on the defensive politically and morally, insufferable, really, though no one was paying much attention by then. A dyed-in-the-wool doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist, which was a damn daring thing to be at the height of the Cold War. And I was attracted to that — to his sense of injury, his conviction that the world needed putting to rights, and that it was up to us, to us, not somebody else, to do it. ‘Make it new’ was about something more than aesthetics for Arnold. Not that he wasn’t the most wonderful poet.”
“No one in the older generation had been more urgent, more persuasive, more prescient. And I knew he understood me, and my work, through and through. Because I’m a woman, everyone always assumes that love is my subject. And it is my subject. But there’s a lot more going on, always. And Arnold didn’t consign me to the second-class compartment. He didn’t need to condescend. And I fell. Fell deeply.
“He was living with Anya Borodina, the dancer. At least I think he was. Arnold was never good with details. When we were together later on, I had to take care of everything, from seeing that his socks got darned to the electric bill to what we ate — and drank. He was unreconstructed in that sense. But in his mind we were equals, in a way I’ve never felt with anyone else. Arnold understood me as I am. And in some ways that was the most radical thing about him. No other man I’ve known has been capable of it. We saw each other constantly, till he suddenly up and left.”
“Left London? For where? What happened?”
“I never knew. He was just — gone. I was devastated, naturally, but we’d never made each other promises — and we didn’t later on, either.” Ida paused. “That’s how it ought to be between two people, don’t you think? What is certain in this life? And if it were — would we want it?”
“What about Trey Turnbull?” Paul asked.
“What about him. He was an old friend of Stephen’s. You should have seen them all at the White Horse in the West Village, carousing night after night. Trey was an utterly selfish, unreliable, overgrown adolescent — and one of the most gorgeous, most intoxicating characters I’ve ever known. I ran into him again at a club in Paris one night — he’d been living there for more than a decade then. I thought, ‘Why not?’ Yes, he was ten years younger — big deal. Such a beautiful man! And what a musician. We were all swept up in the possibilities then, Paul. You can hear it in Trey’s music, I think, in the silences between his solos. Such exquisite … emptiness.”
Ida smiled faintly, quoting the title of what was one of her lesser-known but, to Paul, most-achieved works. He nodded, and was pleased to see she was aware he’d caught her reference — though he understood it now in an entirely new and tragic way.
His head was spinning. He asked to be excused and was directed down a narrow hallway. He paused to look at the genre and carnival scenes on the walls — the wittiest and most evocative he’d ever seen.
As he dried his hands he looked at his misshapen reflection in the smoky old mirror. What did any of this have to do with him?When he came back to the salon, though, so inviting in its calm and comfort, it was clear Ida was eager to continue.
“Where were we? Yes, Trey. Soon enough it became evident that we were cut out to be friends and nothing more. He had a lot of other … interests. And I was spending lots of time in New York then, with Allen and Frank and Jimmy — and Abe Burack. And Bill de Kooning, one July in Springs, too. Trey detested the U.S. — he’d been living in self-imposed exile for more than a decade, as lots of black artists did in those days.
“And I couldn’t stand Nixon. Couldn’t bear his surly scowl. Not to mention the fact that what we were doing in Vietnam made me literally ill. I ran into Arnold again, here, at Celine Mannheim’s — and, well, I never went back. Oh, I’d go for readings, and to see Sterling and Maxine every couple of years. But my life became Arnold. Here in Venice. For twenty years.”
“And you truly didn’t talk about your work?”
“Never — while we were writing. There were all the usual obligations and annoyances, as with anyone — and, as I said before, so many doctors. Italian medicine, Paul — you have no idea. Though some of them are truly wonderful. But they’re philosophers, you know, not scientists.
“But then when the books arrived from Impetus, we’d sit down and read them together, as if they were by somebody else. And we’d talk for hours — about what spoke to us in what we’d read, what bothered and disappointed us, what we’d stolen from each other. What we’d been after in our work, what we’d intended, even what we’d failed at. What we were jealous of, too, and not just on the page. Arnold always knew precisely what I was up to. He’d zero in on the grief I wanted to paper over. And my infidelities, even when they were only of the head and heart, as they tended to be — until the last years, at least. And he’d rant and rave and rave and rant, and then it would be over. It had gone back into the poetry, where it belonged.
“Which is why I don’t know about the notebooks, Paul. I wouldn’t have. I find it extremely odd that he wrote them in code. Communicating was what Arnold cared about more than anything. But, as I said, Arnold in his last years was … much less available, to me as much as anyone. We grew apart, I guess I need to say, though it hurts to admit it. I think the weight of his loneliness, which is the same thing as his lack of an audience, was heartbreaking for him. He felt abandoned, because he had been. He was depressed — no, angry. He walked on the Zattere, took the vaporetto to San Michele, and wandered around among the graves, I’m told by friends who saw him there. And he wrote. Wrote for hours. But what he was writing I never knew.”