Muse: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

about Miss Adams. She’s the best teacher I’ll ever have”—he’d grin defiantly at Evan as he said this—“and an unforgettable poet. But she just doesn’t have Ida’s daring and reach and joie de vivre. She’s so careful and depressive … and … and closeted. She never has any fun—at least not on paper. She’s always the unloved lover, the loser, the waif. Ida is so up front and open about everything. And she knows how to enjoy herself, too.”
    “Precisely. No implication, no tragic subtext. She’s a flat, declarative open book, always engaged and engorged. She’s a monotone ecstatic bore.”
    Paul secretly enjoyed the way his teacher teased him about his attachment, but he was nowhere near ready to admit to anyone, least of all to Evan, that Ida was less than perfection. He was far too invested in his investment to submit it to any kind of test. He did, however, take Evan’s advice and write his undergraduate thesis on someone else: he’d chosen Arnold Outerbridge, concentrating on the influence of his postwar work on Ida.
    At NYU Paul had also slowly, painfully, begun to accept that he liked boys better than girls, and had lived through a series of infatuations that brought him moments of intense joy but more often a misery he experienced as a low-grade fever he couldn’t kick. Ted Curtis, a fellow student in Evan’s symbolist poetry class, had been Paul’s first serious crush. Ataciturn blond from Reading, Pennsylvania, Ted was certifiably heterosexual yet desperately in need of positive reinforcement. Paul’s not truly returned yet never fully rejected attraction consumed them both through college, until Ted went off to law school at Berkeley and they lost touch.
    Love in the flesh remained elusive. It drew yet frightened him. This was the late eighties, after all, the most terrifying days of the plague. Surrounded everywhere by insolent youth and beauty, Paul looked and lusted but didn’t dare touch.
    As graduation neared, he became more and more worried about what he was going to do with his life. Terror gripped him that he’d have to go back to his family in Hattersville, a living death. After a series of panicked consultations with Morgan, he decided he’d give publishing a try, since it had to do with books and writers, the only things he’d ever cared about. Morgan, who, Paul had come to understand, was one of the most respected booksellers in the country, arranged an interview with her friend Homer Stern, the premier literary publisher of his generation, as she described him to Paul. “He’s an outrageous cad,” she told him, with a knowing glint in her eye. “But he’ll teach you more about publishing in one day than you’ll ever learn anywhere else.”
    Homer had been all bluster and grand gesture when Paul paid him a visit, but, alas, he had no openings. It happened,though, that he knew about a position in the rights department at Howland, Wolff, and before long Paul found himself a member of the workforce, pulling down $300 a week and as many free books as he could haul home to his rabbit hutch of a studio in Chelsea.
    His generally sunny demeanor, largely adopted in imitation of Morgan, which he managed to project even when he didn’t feel sunny, along with his judgment, which turned out to be usually sound thanks to Evan’s training and his voluminous reading, earned him Dan Wolff’s and Larry Friedman’s confidence, and after a couple of years he’d been elevated to junior editor at HW. But P & S remained his ideal.
    True, they had legendarily disgusting quarters on Union Square, the city’s major needle park, and rock-bottom wages; but the quasi-religious fealty Homer inspired in his crew was a siren call to Paul. That and the authors! Not just scary Pepita Erskine, perfectionist Iain Spofford, and hypercool Thor Foxx, but the haunting young E. C. Benton, who’d sprung like Athena from the mountains of Carolina; or Grenada Brooks, the hope of Caribbean