Rameau's Niece (7 page)

And she imagined walking with Edward through a city she had never seen. Had she even seen a picture of Prague until the newspapers began running photographs of students huddled around candles at the foot of the statue of King Wenceslaus on his horse? She imagined walking beneath King Wenceslaus, gently stepping over flickering tapers and brave students wrapped in knitted scarves.

Next month. That was soon. She would have to start preparing something to say immediately. Next month. Well, if it was next month, she realized, she would have to meet truth and beauty and the transcendent pilsner on her own. For that was the beginning of the new term, and Edward, the Virgil to her wandering Dante (and to everyone else's), would have to stay home and teach, teach other people, teach students. That was a pity. Edward was always good to have around. In case she forgot something. Like her name. Well, she could always make one up. She hadn't traveled alone in years. And after her trips with Edward, orgies of food, sex, and culture, it didn't seem quite possible to travel alone. What would she talk about? And with whom? And Margaret hated to give lectures, suffering from stage fright, losing her place in her notes, forgetting the subject of the talk in mid-sentence. But still—Prague! Kafka's city! Havel's city! And Comenius's city, too, of course.

"Oh, you wrote that book," a young man said to her.

Margaret reddened but stood her ground. She nodded bravely.

"Oh." He smiled and walked away.

A woman began talking to Margaret about the difficulty of assessing the relationship between the forms of popular culture (by which she meant images, she considerately explained) and their consumers. Margaret wondered if she was referring to the Nielsen ratings system, but then the woman noted with some conviction that "pop had never really signified with one discourse," and Margaret knew that she was not. Oh, Prague! she thought. Where are you when I need you?

She thought how much she would miss Edward, even for a week, how much she liked him, how often she saw him, how little Kafka she had read. She found Edward chatting in Russian (It sounded like Russian, but then, who knew? Perhaps he'd learned Polish on the sly, or Czech) with a skinny, handsome man with bad teeth, and when there was a pause, Edward introduced her, she smiled, did not even take in the man's name long enough to forget it, waited till he'd drifted away, and then told Edward she'd been invited to Prague. "To talk about traditions in underground literature," she said.

"Dirty books? That's marvelous. Shall I join you? No, of course I can't if you're off so soon. The term will be just beginning." He offered her a glass of some sort of spiced wine. "What a grisly business Christmas is," he said. "I have been thinking of a plan for calendar reform which would improve matters immensely. It is obviously incompatible with the exciting educational advances of today for children to be expected to remember complex rhymes such as 'Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November,' don't you agree? So I propose that ten months be of thirty-one days each, leaving just two exceptions: February, with its twenty-eight, and December, which would have only twenty-seven days. Consequently, New Year's Eve would come forty-eight hours after Christmas Day and only twenty-four after Boxing Day. The gain for sanity, the boost to production, the sheer beauty of the scheme from all points of view, make me wonder why it has not been promulgated before." He put his arm around her. His hand squeezed her shoulder. "You haven't been away from me, Margaret, in such a very long time."

"Let's go home," Margaret said softly.

"Yes," Edward said, and he kissed her head.

"I'll be lost without you, Edward. Like Virgil without Dante. I mean, Dante without Virgil."

"No, darling. Like Joseph K. You're going to Prague, you see, not to hell."

Margaret frowned, embarrassed, and walked off.

"'Then my leader went on with great strides...'" Edward recited the lines from Dante at the top of his lungs, following her as he spoke. "'Her looks disturbed somewhat with anger; so I left these burdened souls, following the prints of the dear feet.'"

A
WEEK OR SO
LATER,
Till called to invite Margaret to a dinner party in honor of a young unproduced playwright she had taken up. Till discovered young unproduced playwrights. It was a hobby. She was much admired for her generosity, although Margaret had noticed that she then proceeded to give the young unproduced playwrights advice like, Why not take a couple of years off and go to medical school? or, Your work is much too important to be produced in such a small theater, which pretty much assured they would become old unproduced playwrights.

Margaret did not think she could face another evening at Till's large, busy table just yet, so she suggested they have lunch together instead.

"I'll bring Lily, too," Till said.

Yes, Margaret thought. Why not recreate an earlier era, when lonely girlfriends gathered together over coffee shop tables, covered wagons briefly turned away from the wilderness toward the warm fire? Sometimes Margaret wondered if she missed being lonely. There had been a certain down-and-out vigor to her plight which appeared lean, almost glamorous, compared to the round contentment she experienced now.

They met at a hamburger place in the neighborhood. Margaret got there first and watched Till clatter in on gold sequined high heels, rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, or very nearly. Till, like John F. Kennedy, did not wear a coat. It was a gift, she said, her inner warmth.

Together they watched Lily make her entrance. Her cheeks were, as always, just barely flushed, her short wavy hair in easy disarray. An open, beckoning, corruptible-peasant-faced sort of person, she maneuvered through the tables with her lips slightly parted and her eyes slightly glazed. Lily always looked as if she had just been fucked. This look appealed to Margaret. How did one achieve it?

"Oy, what a day," Lily said, sliding into the booth with a motion so fluid and so revealing of the many positive features of her figure that Margaret wondered if she practiced sliding into coffee shop booths, if she went to a health club specializing in coffee-shop-booth-sliding workouts. And one, two, three, sliiide!

"Notice how the menu says 'We,'" Lily said immediately, pointing to Till's open menu with one hand while unzipping her motorcycle jacket with the other. "'We have a meat loaf special today'! Do you think that 'we' includes us? Of course not. The 'we' refers to them. Hello, doll." And she kissed Till on the cheek, then leaned across the table and kissed Margaret.

Margaret now remembered why she hadn't seen Lily much in the years since college. Because she disliked Lily. At least, she disliked a good thirty percent of the words that tumbled happily from Lily's red, cherub lips.

"It's just a menu," Margaret said. And she ordered the meat loaf.

"We have no meat loaf today," said the waitress.

Lily giggled. "Never trust the transparency of meaning, Margaret."

"Now, girls," Till said in the fey, show-biz tone that had been popular among them in college, but that she alone had kept up.

"It's still just a menu," Margaret said irritably.

"I wrote my dissertation about menus," Lily said. Then she turned the sultry warmth of her gaze on Margaret, smiled, squeezed Margaret's arm, and seemed so genuinely pleased to see her that Margaret smiled and knew she must forgive anything Lily said because of the way she said it—the flirtatious, absurdly good-natured warmth; her voice, the whisper of a starlet; and the way she giggled deliciously. And then, perhaps most important, Lily had always seemed to like Margaret so much. That was greatly in her favor.

"They leave their telltale signs everywhere," Lily continued, looking at her own menu in its dark green plastic cover. "The text of their exclusion is so public. Oh, I like your do, Margaret," she added, patting Margaret's hair, which had just been cut. Then she leaned forward, and continued, "You know, I wake up in the morning and I feel like a sex object."

Because she thought this sounded glamorous, Margaret examined Lily more closely. The tight black leather skirt was de rigueur for a feminist art critic, she supposed. But the red lace bodice seemed a more personal statement. Well, if one had shapely shoulders and beautiful breasts, the left breast blessed further with a beauty mark, why shouldn't one display them? If this caused men to leer at one and treat one as a sex object, it was a reflection on them, the men, wasn't it? There was something wonderfully innocent and nearly tragic about Lily, Margaret thought, like a flower, bursting with gaudy color and health, swaying in the garden breeze, alluring by nature, but shy of every admiring glance, seeing there its own—pluck!—mortality.

***

We determined that we could do no better, in the pursuit of enlightened understanding, than to examine the nature of friendship using our own growing friendship as a model. My pupil, my "friend," had already set for herself a course of reading of such a noble and ambitious tone, a road leading to such heights and yet lined with such pitfalls, that I felt compelled, as a friend, to accompany her, to act as her guide, to take her hand and lead her.

MYSELF:
Education determines a man. Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education. But you, you have somehow escaped and remained as un-stained as a chad. Now your education can begin. First, your senses will awaken. You will see and hear and smell, you will taste and you will touch. And then, ah! As your senses awaken, all the inlets to the mind are set open; now, now, all the objects of nature will rush thither.

SHE:
Thither?

MYSELF:
Thither.

SHE:
To the inlets?

MYSELF:
They will rush into the deepest inlets. To all the inlets of the mind.

Rameau's niece, formerly a wretched, sniveling infant (as I vividly recalled when once she identified herself), an indefatigable nuisance, petulant, weeping, quarreling with other little nuisances, a graceless, unruly thing, who had yet been worshiped as a goddess by her parents, blinded as they were by nature, was now truly a goddess. Please, do not deceive yourselves that my judgment was likewise clouded by parental sentiment. I felt not at all like a parent to this exquisite little girl whom any man of discernment would have described, as I often did to myself, as a figure of such elevating charms that just to look at her, the way her shoulders curved in relation to the equally elegant curve of her white neck, and the manner in which her waist, with its own, quite unique little curve, yet was bound up so eloquently with the rest, was to experience that these curves achieved a most pleasing unity of effect, an effect of beauty so powerful that I confess that during one of our meetings (this time in the library, for it was raining), before I could even realize what I was doing, I had flung myself to my knees before her.

Alone in the room, the others having retired, we faced each other, she seated, still clutching the volume she had been reading, myself at her feet, wondering what I had done and fearing more than anything her displeasure at my intemperate behavior, when suddenly the silence was broken by her soft, pure voice. My pupil began to read aloud.

SHE
[reading]: When I observe the relation objects have to me [here she glanced at me, then lowered her dark, bright eyes to the page], I am in like manner attentive to the impressions I receive. [She paused, and I, heeding what I took to be the import of her words but even more her agitated expression, placed my hand on hers. She trembled, dropped the book upon her lap, then quickly recovered it and resumed reading.] These impressions are either agreeable [her breathing seemed to change to a rhythm of particular intensity] or disagreeable. Now, in either case, what is judgment? [She closed her book, put it aside, took my hand in both of her own.] To tell what I feel. [Reciting now from memory, my pupil drew my hand to her breast.] To judge [she was whispering now] is to feel. To judge is to feel.

S
O YOU HAD LUNCH
with your lady friends," Richard said. "Did you wear hats?"

"Yes, and we counted out the change and loudly discussed how we would divide it." It was her evening call to him, when she lay back in bed with pages piled beside her and reviewed the day that was nearly done. She smiled, accidentally pressing several of the phone's buttons with her cheek, triggering a long series of clicks and beeps through which she could hear Richard muttering.

"Richard," she said, when the phone was quiet. "Men are born ignorant, not stupid. But what if you remain ignorant?"

"I wouldn't know."

"It's very difficult being an ignorant intellectual."

"Well," Richard said thoughtfully, "I suppose it's better than being a stupid intellectual."

Margaret sighed. Then she read to Richard from
Rameau's Niece.

"'I must compliment you on the great care which you take of my education,' says the little girl, 'and on your unwearied perseverance, my dear teacher, and the pains which you bestow on me. You are no more wanting, I am persuaded, in skill than in industry.' That's Hume, Richard. My author stole that from Hume, from
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
Just listen to what he's done to poor Hume! 'By continual precept and instruction,' replies the philosopher, 'and I hope, too, by example, I shall imprint deeply on your tender mind, and your equally tender lips, an habitual reverence for these principles of kissing. Then at last, having thus tamed your mind to a proper submission, I will have no longer any scruple of opening to you the greatest mysteries of all.'"

"No one ever speaks to me like that," Richard said.

"I am," Margaret said. "I do." The pillow was cool against her cheek. Richard's voice was soft and alluring, and she felt suddenly very tenderly toward him, always there on the other end of the phone when she needed him, when she wanted him. She felt tenderly toward him and toward the World at large, she realized when she'd hung up, as she lay in wait for Edward, toward whom she felt most tenderly of all, most tenderly indeed.