Rameau's Niece (3 page)

While working on her dissertation, which became her first book,
The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny,
Margaret had discovered an intriguing eighteenth-century manuscript. She could find no evidence that it had ever been published, and how it had arrived at Midtown Medical Library, she could not yet say.

It was in the form of a dialogue. Gradually, she came to realize that whole passages of works by Helyétius, Diderot, Kant, Condorcet—everyone who was anyone in the eighteenth century—as well as considerable portions of John Locke's
Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
had been lifted, unacknowledged, and scattered through the book. This was not in itself unusual. There were no copyrights, and pirated editions of philosophical works, anthologies of unattributed excerpts, often considerably altered, were common.

But was this a philosophical work? she wondered. For, in addition to the philosophical content, the story, like much of the literature of that libertine time, was one of seduction.

Was it then a libertine novel? And if not—if not a philosophical tract and not a libertine novel—what was it? What manner of beast? Margaret was translating it from the French. Her new book, on underground Enlightenment literature, was centered on this bawdy, didactic dialogue. She turned to it each day with increasing pleasure and curiosity. A hybrid creature, feathered, furred, and pink-complexioned, it lay before her, open, waiting, a mysterious coquette, waiting for her, for Margaret. It was called
Rameau's Niece.

RAMEAU'S NIECE
by Anonymous
Translated by Margaret Nathan

It is my custom to whistle while I work. I adopted this habit at a tender age and have found it to be a pleasant accompaniment to the exertions of my occupation, an occupation already so delightful that this further adornment sometimes lifts my spirit to such an unaccustomed height that I thoroughly forget what, in fact, my delightful occupation is.

On one such occasion, as I whistled merrily, the sounds flew from my pursed lips to join, somewhat humbly, the magnificent song of a lark perched in a tree beneath which I strolled. I turned my eyes toward that delicate creature of heaven and so, my attention averted momentarily from my earthly path, I stumbled.

My foot had rubbed against a thick, protruding root, causing me to lose my balance, and I thus was flung against a passerby, hitherto unnoticed by me, engaged as I was in my habitual whistling and the aforementioned glance at the feathered messenger of Venus; for the lark's song was indeed a song of love that day, an idea by which I was struck even as I was struck by the beauty of the passerby whom I inadvertently, but rather forcefully, struck.

SHE:
You have lost your footing.

MYSELF:
I have indeed lost my footing. But let us hope that I have not lost my head, for surely, just this moment, I have lost my heart! What a lovely apparition to appear before me, here where I expected only solitude.

She was indeed lovely. Lovely? She was exquisite, a girl whose many qualities, each one remarkable on its own, created together a sense of harmony, of consistency, of perfect unity—in short, of beauty! I felt all of this immediately, before even I realized I was experiencing anything at all, for her grace was of such subtle power that the effect seemed to be obtained without any effort. And so too, effortlessly, was it apprehended, and welcomed, by me.

MYSELF:
Will you forgive me?

SHE:
I cannot forgive you for an act instigated not by you but by chance; nor would I forgive you for an act that gives me the pleasure of meeting again, after all these years, the friend of my uncle and a philosopher of such brilliance. For let me confess, sir, I have often desired to see you again. Your
Treatise on Sense and Sociability
has been my most intimate companion this past year.

How extraordinary. A little girl (she was no more than sixteen) had chosen for company a work of mine, a rather difficult one, too. Why, it was in her small and delicate hand at that very moment! She pressed the book—my book—almost reverently to her breast.

SHE:
I have so many questions.

As did I, the first and most pressing of which was, Who was she?

This I knew not. But, yet, I felt I knew something of greater weight, for her desire to struggle toward the freedom to make use of her reason was clear to me. And so too was my obligation to accompany—no, to lead her on her journey. Without my knowledge, I had been chosen to be (indeed, judging by the book in her little white hand, I already was) her guide on a journey toward enlightenment. Here was an innocent child, unspoiled, seeking an education.

MYSELF:
But how is it that you know me? And who is your uncle?

I tell you now, dear reader, that I addressed these questions to the lovely girl in a state of agitation, for in my distress at disturbing an innocent young lady by clumsily bumping into her on a deserted and narrow garden path, and in my excitement at discovering a pupil so eager, I had quite forgotten to step aside to let her pass, and so was standing in such intimate proximity to her that I felt her breast heaving, in shock at the surprise of the initial encounter, no doubt, against my own chest, her little hand clutching still my modest treatise on sociability now pressed between our two hearts.

I longed to teach her then, to be her friend, to be employed incessantly in promoting her felicity and increasing it by every sort of pleasure.

And, longing thus, foreseeing the pleasure and happiness of such an arrangement, and standing thrust against her as I was, I became conscious of another feeling—a sudden and enormous surge of emotion on my part.

Recognizing my inability to control this swelling of sentiment in a situation of such delightful propinquity, and fearing that the girl might herself sense this sudden fullness of feeling and become alarmed, I moved back a pace.

SHE:
Don't be startled, sir. I am not a stranger to you, only a stranger in this figure, for you have not seen me since I was a child. I am Rameau's niece.

E
DWARD HAD NO DIFFICULTIES
at dinner parties. If he had been seated beside a rock, he would have quickly begun an animated discussion of its layers of granite or sandstone or lime, its life underground, its ocean journeys and aspirations for the future. Intoxicated by this encounter, he would regale Margaret with tales of the rock's history, which he would tell with such enthusiasm and such grace that she would laugh and hope that some day she too might sit beside a stone at dinner. And the stone? It would sigh and bask in its newly realized glory, its importance and beauty, necessity and dignity—I pave roads and build towers, I form mountains, I rest on the throats of gracious ladies!

Margaret, on the other hand—well, sometimes she thought about what it would be like to sit next to herself at a dinner party. She would have nothing to say. And neither would she.

Unable to ask the initial dinner-party question (the question to ask at a dinner party, at least at the kinds of dinner parties she attended, was either "What is your field?" or "What are you working on?" depending on the degree of familiarity between participants in the exchange), unable to ask the question because of a feeling that she ought already to know the answer but didn't, or that the answer was "Nothing" and would make the question seem aggressive and cruel, she would sit in an agonized silence that she, in the next chair, also paralyzed and mute, would interpret as disdain, boredom, or, worst of all, stupidity.

Edward told her that her appalling memory was cleansing, that she came to everything fresh, and so it was a virtue. But he was wrong. A poor memory robs a person of dignity, Margaret knew. She had some standing in the world, but none of it had been achieved at dinner parties.

But here we are, Margaret thought, as she and Edward entered a large West Side apartment, the walls around them enameled, glistening, slick as ice. The ceiling, she thought, looking up—you could skate on the ceiling, gravity aside.

Edward whispered in her ear, "'And most of the jokes you just can't catch, like dirty words rubbed off a slate, and the songs are loud but somehow dim and it gets so terribly late."' Edward had taken to quoting only American poets since moving to New York. "Elizabeth Bishop," he said gently, answering her helpless look.

The couple giving the party were named Till and Art Turner. Margaret had roomed with Till in college, an unforgettable experience that involved witnessing constant rehearsing of Till's roles in various avant-garde student productions, many of them musicals.

Till's husband, Art, a tall, handsome man with a short beard and lovely teeth, stood at the door. He was a highly regarded writer who never seemed to write anything, which somehow only added to his reputation. He was a man of integrity. He smiled, shook hands, smiled, smiled, and smiled. He whispered to some, loudly announced others, his attentiveness calling attention to itself.

It was Art who, in a flurry of self-importance, had insisted on taking Margaret's doctoral dissertation to an editor he knew, only to see it become the best-selling
Anatomy of Madame de Montigny.
Art and Margaret had never forgiven each other.

He is a monster, Margaret thought, watching him greet his guests. An unholy monster of manipulation guarding the castle gate, a man who has learned the meaning, the secret, of other people's vanity and uses it to feed his own. Come, he seemed to say, submit to excessive flattery,
my
excessive flattery, come along. And as you sheepishly (shucks, you really mean it?) accepted his invitation, the gate slammed: clank. And you were—still outside.

He rolled back his head and exposed his very good teeth. "Ah, here's my little discovery."

Margaret looked down at the thick forest green carpet, guilty. But it sickens him, too, she thought. It sickens him too that his help helped.

"You're marvelous, Margaret, marvelous," he said. "Open, simple, lacking all affectation."

What Margaret had said, the inspiration for his effusive welcome, was "Hello." She tried to smile in a friendly, grateful way, but felt immediately that she had failed.

"A conceptual breakthrough in the critical biography," he was saying. "The field can never be the same, never recover from this onslaught of..." He paused. "Well. How modestly you carry your genius, Margaret. I'm sure no one would ever suspect it was there at all." And he turned his shining smile to his next guest.

Not only didn't people observe genius in Margaret—they detected very little intelligence at all. It was Margaret's fate, or misfortune as she saw it, to have inherited from her mother a face that was pleasant and decorative enough, but that in no way expressed her temperament or personality. As she suffered from panic, shyness, and critical disdain for her fellow man, all her fellow man saw was a pretty young woman with undignified Shirley Temple curls, a spray of freckles across her nose, and a wide eager look in her brown eyes which might easily be interpreted as cheerful self-confidence.

Would that I were sallow and severe and haughty, she thought, my thin hair in a tight French knot. But Margaret looked jolly and content instead.

She sat down, turned, and noted that she was mercifully not sitting next to herself. She was beside a man known to her slightly, and only by meetings at parties such as this one. There he sits, she thought, patiently waiting to be unable to strike up an interesting conversation with me.

He was a writer, a fairly fashionable one from the East Side with a brownstone and a table at the sort of restaurant at which writers had tables, a best seller or two in his past, and a small, lingering portion of celebrity that she found particularly intimidating. He was just famous enough so that she ought to know some basic facts about him but not famous enough so that she did. She, on the other hand, had written a famous book, and enough had been written about her book so that she expected people to know what it was she had written about, but it was the kind of book that assured that no one had.

She glanced around, looking for Edward, listening for his voice, hearing only other voices gliding stylishly through the topics of the day. This is what people did at dinner parties: talk. But the talk existed on some level beyond communication. It was decorative.

Margaret saw Edward walking toward her. He put his hand on her cheek as he passed by but said nothing, and she felt almost forlorn. If Till had seated him next to Margaret, she wouldn't have to worry about making smooth flourishes of talk, or trying to follow it. She wouldn't have to be clever. She would listen instead, and she would hear Edward. His loud, exuberant talk would swoop her up, filling her deliriously with information and observation and line after line of American poetry.

But Edward was destined for other parts, and Margaret sighed and took stock of her situation. On her left side, a highly perfumed girl slid in. Across from her sat a man who looked familiar, but perhaps it was just his eyeglasses; next to him was a woman whom Margaret might or might not have known; and so on around the large table, until Margaret met the pale blue eyes of her husband and she smiled. Some woman or other was next to Edward, then Till's appalling husband smirking and nodding ("You've created an entirely new vocabulary, a new critical language..."). Really, Margaret thought, Art's habit of thrusting greatness about, as if he had just this instant, and
that
instant, too, as if every instant he had just discovered a continent and were planting the flag, was becoming increasingly trying. Margaret detested Art and she liked Till very much, in the way that one likes a friend and no longer knows why. That Art and Till came together as a package was unfortunate, but they did come together and always would. Couples were miraculous, odd, ill-formed things that grew without reason and without grace, like double ears of corn. Still, she thought, Till should discipline him.

Beside Art sat Lily, a friend of Till's from college whom Margaret hadn't seen in years but remembered liking. With her short, tousled black hair and red, pouty lips, she looked like a girl on the cover of a 1950s bohemian paperback.