Muse: A Novel by Jonathan Galassi

when Paul walked him to his doorway, Jasper would give him a brotherly hug and disappear upstairs.
    When Paul pulled away, though, Jasper was there in a flash—with unobtainable concert tickets, premium-grade gossip, and pouty protestations of need and affection. This had been going on long enough for Paul to recognize, in his moments of lucidity, that he and Jasper had no future. But he was a sucker for Jasper’s beauty and brilliance and charm—which meant he was stuck with their stuckness, treading water, as he always did when it came to romance. It depressed him to think about it, so he tried to concentrate on his work, and on the notebooks, though they seemed as impossible to find his way into as Jasper’s arms.
    When August first rolled around, Paul invited Jasper to drive up for a visit, using the local music festival as bait, though he had little expectation he would bite. Paul bid Homer and his office mates a fond farewell and headed for Hiram’s Corners in his rented red Hyundai with his heart in his mouth. He felt a little bit like a character in a Grimm’s fairy tale, disappearing into the fragrant forest with no trail of crumbs to help him to find his way home.

VI

Lost in Hiram’s Corners
    High in the foothills of the Middlesex Mountains, Hiram’s Corners was far enough from New York City to be a world unto itself, not the weekenders’ outpost that towns across the Connecticut border like Kent or Salisbury had become—enclaves of rich urbanites who owned most of the notable property in town and kept the locals employed maintaining it. Hiram’s Corners differed from other wealthy suburban watering holes in that its grandees were homegrown. It sometimes seemed that all the large landholders in the town were related. The Wainwrights’ presence went back to Sterling’s great-aunt Aurelia, a big-bosomed Cincinnati matron with a lorgnette and sensible shoes who had married her way east when she was younger and lither. Adelbert Binns, whom she’d wed in 1905, had made good as John D. Rockefeller’s chief fixer at Standard Oil and had been handsomely rewarded in the process. Binns belonged to another notable Cincinnati tribe; he’d put down roots here on the advice of old Senator Hiram Handspring, who had likewise married into the family. Over the years his son Bobby Binns, and Bobby’s son Beebe, a noted conservationist, nationallyrecognized orchid grower, and devotee of the Middlesex woods, had acquired more than eight thousand acres on the slopes of Bald Mountain, reputedly one of the largest private holdings in the state outside the Adirondacks. The Wainwrights’ mere several hundred acres hugged the edge of this spread and were effectively part of it.
    The Binnses over time had created a Currier and Ives world of rambling old houses, orchards, and rolling fields amid the pond-studded woodland of Hiram’s Corners. Other relations of Aurelia’s had followed her here—including her niece Lobelia Wainwright Delano, Sterling’s aunt, until the whole east side of Hiram’s Corners facing the Middlesex Mountains, which rose gently a few miles beyond, was one large swath of Binns/Delano/Wainwright lands. Ida and Sterling, though they had fallen for each other in Michigan, had spent winter holidays here, too, at extended-family house parties, engaging, or not engaging, in the activities—snowshoeing and cross-country skiing by day; skating by the light of the bonfires built on the ice of Handspring Pond, playing bridge, and drinking by night—that made up life in the Magic Kingdom.
    There was something about the changeless tranquillity of the place—the large, unfarmed farms with their well-tended meadows and woods; the lack of change in their ownership; the deep, deep cold of the long, long winters. When Sterling’s Aunt Lobelia had settled here in thetwenties, she’d built herself a Palladian mansion on a rock ledge on River Road. After Sterling had come to his senses and returned from London,