Read Online Muse: A Novel by Jonathan Galassi - Free Book Online Page B

a Sapphist, however—far from it. Her fling with her young cousin hadn’t lastedlong, Sterling admitted, but Paul knew it was only the first in a string of passionate liaisons destined to become the stuff of literary myth. Ida’s liaisons became as legendary as Edna St. Vincent Millay’s, but where Vincent had been blowzily self-advertising in her controversy-courting life and work, the young Ida was aristocratically private—ice to the outer world, a furnace within. Only H.D. and Marianne Moore approached Ida in ethereal remoteness, so dazzlingly
raffinée
next to the louche effusions of her own contemporary, the sloppy Muriel Rukeyser. No, Ida’s style—cool, fragmentary, and mysterious—was entirely her own, and lent her more than a whiff of erotic glamour. “No wonder they thought she was one of the girls,” Sterling joshed, downing his third single malt of the evening.
    Sterling ran into the now-infamous and if anything more striking Ida in New York in the fall of 1948, and before long he was head over heels again, the way he’d been at sixteen—enough to allow him to recover at least temporarily from A.O.’s dismissal of his work and start writing again. “
Il Catullo americano
” an Italian critic had named him in his later years, the American Catullus, a moniker he wore with pride, though he could never quite muster the engorged animus that had made the Roman immortal. Sterling’s love poems were generically idealizing, maybe even a little saccharine. Basically, Paul thought, he was too nice.
                           Ida sweeter
                           than upstate
                           Falernian
                           I’m waiting
                           here down
                           in the garden
                           under the window:
                           Now jump!
    Not the stuff of greatness, alas. But Ida had responded. Tall, dreamy Cousin Sterling, his adolescent peachiness seasoned by a few years of romantic training, his remaining baby fat absorbed into leanness, caught her fancy again, and over that Christmas holiday they had their second torrid entanglement.
    Sterling made it sound as if he’d spent a lifetime mourning those few weeks—though he’d gone on to have a rich and varied sex life of his own. He’d acquired another wife, and a son and namesake, after a series of relationships, including a long-standing, emotionally wrenching one with Bree Davis, who worked as an editor for many years at Impetus. Bree was a live wire, sensible and huskily beautiful, a kind of literary Ava Gardner, but Sterling’s mother had put her foot down. He’d had one free shot; his next consort was not going to be a nobody, too. So Bree got theboot, though the
on dit
was that they’d never totally called it quits, and Sterling married Maxine Schwalbe, the self-effacing, no-nonsense, seriously wealthy daughter of the founder of Mac Labs. Sterling, who was more than a foot taller than his wife, was, Paul was aware, the less wealthy partner of the two, though Wainwright’s own investments, as his protégée Bettina Braun had told Paul, brought him $10,000 a day back in the early eighties, when money was still money.
    You would never have known that slight, brunette Maxine was rich, except that her effortless manners and careful democratic consideration for everyone gave her away. She didn’t need to throw her not-so-considerable weight around; she needed not to. And she was loved for her selfless self, her warmth and generosity, by all who knew her, according to Bettina. Everyone but Sterling, that is. Their alliance was highly satisfactory for him, for in Maxine he finally had a good-natured mate who could create and manage a domestic establishment that catered to his every need and wish—if not desire. Desire