Muse: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

surprise of many, and a kind of fairy godmother to Chelsea, who stayed with her twice in Venice, complete with Secret Service detail, during her father’s second term, when she needed a break from Monicagate.
    In the sixties, Ida progressed from literary superstar to celebrity, pure and simple. The transition had something to do, no doubt, with the simplifying and opening up of her work, which gradually lost its hard edge and became readable for everyone, while losing none of its depth and originality. (Could it have been due to the influence of Trey Turnbull? Paul wondered; or had her renown encouraged Ida to relax and clarify, though she was constitutionally incapable of dumbing down?) Her popularity also had todo, he could see, with her natural beauty, her penchant for risk-taking, and, above all, her well-known talent for love.
    There was grumbling among her jealous “peers,” of course—what else do poets do but complain about each other’s success, both critical and erotic? Who was it who said the reason there’s so much backbiting among poets is because there’s so little at stake? Ida had been the exception that proved the rule. By then, she’d moved into a region of fame that left virtually every other writer of any stripe in the dust. Forget
The Hudson Review
and
Poetry.
Now
Time,
Fortune, Ladies’ Home Journal, US News & World Report, Saturday Review, The New Yorker
—even
Reader’s Digest
—were desperate to write about and interview and publish her. Her “What Becomes a Legend Most” Blackglama ad—lustrous sable over a brown tweed Chanel suit and oxfords—was a sensation. A vampish, guileless Meryl Streep with flaming red hair—that was Ida in her late thirties.
    Her occasional stealth appearances in New York and San Francisco in those years were widely reported on—and, as Paul discovered, occasionally invented. When Janis Joplin sang “Marginal Discharge” at Woodstock, Ida was reputedly sighted in the audience, though this may have been a desperate fan’s acid-stoked fantasy. Carly Simon and Carole King recorded a duet version of “Broken Man,” Ida’s sexiest, most unforgettable song, which went platinum in 1970 (that’s Ida shaking the tambourine in the background):
                   Broken man,
                   you’re just skin and bone,
                   broken-down man,
                   like I’m skin and bone.
                   Broken man,
                   why can’t I leave you alone?
                   Take my heart
                   and you torture me.
                   Break my heart,
                   I’m in misery.
                   Broken man,
                   will we ever be free?
    Paul, though, preferred the version on Turnbull’s Grammy-winning album
The Ida Sessions,
on which she recites a dozen of her best-loved lyrics, filigreed with Trey’s smoking riffs on tenor saxophone.
    In the seventies, during her short-lived flirtation with Maoism, when her work turned strident in the eyes of many, Ida was the only person ever to appear simultaneously on the covers of
Rolling Stone, Tel Quel,
and
Interview.
By then, though, she’d reunited with the leonine Outerbridge, now a virtual outcast as an unrepentant Stalinist, whom she’d met in London a decade earlier. Soon she more or less disappeared into the nimbus of A.O.’s Venetian silence (he’dlong since stopped publishing). Ida kept writing, but her work, too, turned inward, though her crossover popularity with baby boomers had undeniable staying power over the next three decades. A new book would emerge every two or three years as if dropped from the heavens, and Sterling would gather it up and publish it at Impetus to general stupefaction and acclaim. Ida slowly became an off-site legend, a great hovering absent presence. Which only whetted the appetite