Rameau's Niece (19 page)

T
HERE WAS AN UNEXPECTED MESSAGE
on the answering machine. "Margaret," said a female voice. "I know you haven't seen me in almost ten fucking years, but I'm having a book party. For the book I started when I knew you. So would you come? You better!"

It was Jessica. Margaret recognized the voice, and she had seen a review of the book, pretty favorable, in the
Times
last week. It was a mystery set at a local TV station called
Murder in Media Res.

The party was on Tuesday at an East Side grill. Margaret had a terrible toothache, a toothache that rattled her head, but she went, of course. Jessica also had been a reader at the same small publishing house where Margaret had worked one summer. Rhodes Press, now defunct, had published highbrow radical works and Edwardian pornography. There had been several young editors and readers who hung out together that summer.

Margaret spotted Jessica easily. Her face was ridiculously familiar. She was now a TV journalist who had achieved some notoriety by giving the soundman the finger while still on camera. "I have a kid now," she said. "Can you believe it? I'm married to a lawyer. Can you fucking believe it? Do you still smoke pot? Oh, you never did, did you? I don't anymore. I mean I would if anybody ever had any, which nobody ever does."

Edward had to leave the party early to give a lecture somewhere. Margaret, who found herself daily more angry at and less tolerant of Edward, had not even bothered to ask what about or to whom, and after he was gone, she stood surrounded by her old friends. The icy cold of her demure glass of mineral water, with its bright, slender wedge of lime, rolled across her bad tooth in shattering pain. She considered having some wine to numb things a bit, but then remembered her bibulous evening in Paris, and so, uncomfortable and sober, she observed with fascinated nostalgia the four men standing with her and Jessica. She realized that she had slept with all four. Teddy, who had become a tenured professor of comp. lit. specializing in narratology, now had long stylish hair and was wearing a sharkskin suit and delicate Italian loafers that looked like pumps or bedroom slippers, in spite of which he still had a lugubrious physical charm.

"I can't smoke pot now," he said. "Fucking cocaine fucked me. I said to my students, 'What do Sherlock Holmes and Freud have in common?' And this girl says, 'Drug addiction?' I said, 'Why do you put it that way? Not drug addiction, you idiot. Cocaine.' Margaret, it's fucking amazing, but you look just the same. We all look the fucking same to each other, because we're all ten years older. You know, you taught me to speak like this, Jessica. I grew up in a nice home, then I met you. I never say 'fuck' to my students."

"Girlfriend?" Jessica said.

"Two years. New apartment, thirtieth floor. Great view. So now I've got vertigo and go to a fucking shrink twice a week."

"I thought narratology was passé," Margaret said, annoyed somehow that he had a steady girlfriend. He had a hangdog Russian Jewish face that she had always found irresistible. "In France they're reading James Madison."

"The fucking French."

The rhythms and patterns of the past came back to them, crept back, stealthily. They had talked like this in the exhilarating late-night boredom of people whose jobs meant nothing to them, on and on into the morning, at restaurants, on street corners. Had they done anything else? Yes, there had been those vague sexual encounters, less the products of desire than of opportunity.

One of these former flames standing around Margaret was now a gay activist who was occasionally quoted in the
New York Times.
Another was a Marxist film professor at a community college. Margaret had argued with him into the wee hours of many a morning, but she couldn't remember his name. She'd see him on cable TV once in a while over the years. (Thin enough to be a drug addict, she thought, but certainly not one. Perhaps he jogged. No, Marxists didn't jog.) The last in this group of past follies was now a very hot editor of lurid minimalist novels. His picture appeared regularly in the tabloids with club celebrities. He nodded at Margaret, then left the party with a thuggish young man in a large suit.

Margaret sat down at a little table and closed her eyes and tried to remember. What had they looked like, these lovers, as lovers? Had she liked them? The spin of statues in Prague came back to her. The man on the plane, breathing, human and close, came back to her.

She opened her eyes. Desire is a state of uneasiness. She had read that in
Rameau's Niece.
She was uneasy and stood up to go home.

"Margaret!"

It was Till. Margaret had forgotten that Till might be here. Now she watched Till approach. Please don't yell at me in front of all these people, she thought. Please don't tell them I hate Art Turner, the man who discovered me. Please go away.

"Margaret! I'm so glad to see you! I was hoping you'd be here."

Why? Margaret wondered. She put her hand to her cheek, where the tooth throbbed. Had Margaret been forgiven? Had time healed Till's wound? Or had Till been storing her anger and resentment for lo, these many months, and now, with a really well stocked larder of the stuff, she was sliding through the crowd to share some of it with Margaret?

"Hi," Margaret said.

With a jangle of bracelets, Till threw her arms around Margaret's neck, kissed her on both cheeks, and said, "Margaret, I want you to know I've written the most wonderful play. It's about egotism. And selfishness and insensitivity, of course, and it's all based on you, and I'm really so grateful to you, you really are a wonderful friend, this is clearly my best work, commercial but serious—"

"You're not mad at me? You forgive me?"

"Forgive you? I want to thank you! This play is inspired, and inspired by you."

"What about Art?" Margaret said, looking around for him, for the smile, the teeth set perfectly, like traps.

"That's what I'm trying to say—this is art!"

"No, no, your husband."

"Art?" Till said. "Why, we split up last month. I'm living with my therapist. Didn't I tell you? I think I have you to thank for that, too, Margaret. You're loyal and honest in your way, aren't you? The truth shall set you free. Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last. Do you and Edward want to come for dinner? Willibald and I are having a little dinner party. Friday..."

***

In the week following Jessica's party, Margaret's tooth continued to hurt, not all the time, but on and off throughout the day. Each time it hurt, she thought first of Till and Art, a couple who had uncoupled, and she felt instead of the triumph that she expected to feel, a nervous uncertainty. Then the tooth would throb again, and, like a dog in an experiment, she would think of her friends at Jessica's party.

One morning she lay on her bed after a shower, closed her eyes, and for a moment she remembered lying back in her narrow bed in a high-ceilinged room in Florence. It was a summer session of her college in a villa surrounded by hills blooming with lavender and olive trees. When she finished her classes each evening, she would stand and look across the hills and think of taking a long, solitary walk. But she hated to be solitary, she was tired, it was beastly hot, and so she would go to flirt with one of the professors, a young, fresh-faced midwesterner. At night, when the heat was unbearable, the two of them would plunge into the small swimming pool. In the dark they could not see the thick green algae. In the dark they could not see each other. But they sensed each other as they floated on their backs. They never spoke in the pool.

After staring at the stars and soaking in the cool, green brine, Margaret would silently leave the pool and go to her room to lie there, wet, to feel the water evaporating in the heavy heat.

She lay back on her bed now, wet, and cursed her throbbing tooth and cursed Edward's students more.

They never slept together, not that summer, not in Florence. They never even acknowledged it as a possibility. He was married, and Margaret liked his wife. She liked his wife more than she liked him, actually. He was blustery, assertive, boyish. His wife was capable and witty in a surprisingly straightforward way. They never slept together that summer. But Margaret visited them in Chicago the following winter. Then they slept together. It had seemed inevitable. Awful, sneaky, dishonest, exciting, and inevitable. Margaret was sickened whenever she thought of it, pleasant as the actual encounter had been. It was the worst thing she had ever done.

Edward came into the room.

"Why do you look so miserable?" he said. "Your tooth again?"

"No. I'm thinking of the worst thing I ever did."

"And what's that? Raped all those students in Gainesville?"

"I can't tell you. I can't tell anyone."

Edward looked intrigued. "Margaret! What can it be?"

For a moment, the new strangeness between them forgot itself, forgot to assert itself, and Margaret kissed Edward's hand as he stroked her cheek. He lifted a lock of wet hair, dropped it, and made a face. "What can it be?" he said again, then stood up and walked away, his mind already on something else.

Margaret sat up and brushed her hair and tried to forget the worst thing she ever did.

She decided to call Richard. "Do you have a good dentist?" she asked.

"Yes. He takes dentistry awfully seriously. I receive regular correspondence from him keeping me up to date on late-breaking developments in the field of teeth. Extremely expensive. Handsome—"

"I'm almost done with the book," she told him. "And it's just as well. I'm turning into a libertine. I think I used to be a libertine, actually. I sometimes think I'd like to be a libertine again."

"How athletic of you even to be able to contemplate such a thing, Margaret."

I
N THE WAITING ROOM,
she wondered what Richard's dentist would look like. Perhaps he would look like her last dentist, who retired at the age of fifty, a trim, tennis-playing, Jewish, art-collecting man with a slightly receding hairline. She had been to several dentists in her life, and all of them had looked like that, so perhaps he would, too. She sat on the modular couch in the sunken well in the gray-carpeted waiting room (there was carpeting on the walls, as well as the floor) and put her hand to her cheek where the tooth throbbed.

She took some photocopied sheets of Rousseau's
Émile
from her briefcase. She had traced several sections of
Rameau's Niece
to
Émile.
The strategy of the anonymous hack author of
Rameau's Niece
had been to lift lines, paragraphs, a phrase, whatever he chose from whomever he chose, and use them in whatever ways he chose. The result may have been incoherent at times, but it always maintained an unmistakably libertine sensibility, a sense of a world order as tangled as bed sheets.

"I am aware of my soul," she read from
Émile.
"It is known to me in feeling and in thought; I know what it is without knowing its essence; I cannot reason about ideas which are unknown to me. What I do know is this, that my personal identity depends upon memory, and that to be indeed the same self I must remember that I have existed. Now after death I could not recall what I was when alive unless I also remembered what I felt and therefore what I did; and I have no doubt that this remembrance will one day form the happiness of the good and the torment of the bad."

That leaves me out, Margaret thought as she imagined herself floating in some confusion through the heavens. I forget, she would say to the celestial gatekeeper. I forget, and so I am not.

She closed her eyes, listened to the woman across the room turn the pages of a magazine, opened her eyes, looked briefly and enviously at the woman, who had white hair and a short mohair jacket and a sensible skirt and sensible shoes and probably sense as well. What a good idea, Margaret thought, to be sensible.

"Just put it on the right line. Don't screw me up," said another waiting patient, a woman in late middle age sitting beside a man filling out insurance forms. Margaret assumed he was her husband, but then he said, "You're treating me like my wife. You're getting to be like my wife." Maybe she was his mother.

"She's a pain, but she's beautiful. My wife is beautiful," he was saying. "Her skin—"

"Dream," said the woman sharply.

"What-ya mean, 'dream'?"

"Like a dream," she said. "Skin like a dream."

Margaret turned from the pages of
Émile
to some pages from
Rameau's Niece.
"
MYSELF:
What I do know is this, that my personal identity depends upon memory. For the body will be worn out and destroyed by the division of its parts. But does the promise of storms stop our enjoyment of today's beautiful sun?

"After death, I would not be able to recall what I was when alive unless I also remembered what I felt and therefore what I did. Let us, therefore, dear pupil, feel and do and so create memories worthy of eternity."

The receptionist opened the door that led to the little rooms and their low-slung medical-modernist chairs. She motioned Margaret to follow her, and Margaret obeyed, stung by the sudden scent of cloves.

She stretched herself out on the dentist's chair and closed her eyes. The room was cool and she was tired. Muzak burbled gently from a loudspeaker somewhere above her. She wondered what Edward was doing at that moment. Waving his arms at his students, reciting to them. Who were his students this term, anyway? Had he mentioned any?

No. He hasn't mentioned any, has he? she thought. She lay in the dentist's chair in the dim and frigid pearl gray room. Sprawled there, she suddenly felt the cold.

Why hasn't he? He always talks about his students, especially the one or two bright ones who frequent his office after class to talk, but mostly, Margaret suspected, to listen. And to flirt.

"Margaret?" An oddly textured hand touched her cheek. She opened her eyes and saw him. His black hair was slicked back like a TV drug dealer's. Beneath his starched white doctor's coat, a white polo shirt clung to a slender but startling, articulated, muscular torso. Around his neck, he wore a thin gold chain with two small gold charms. His watch, which touched her cheek, beeped in little shrill, computerized gasps. His face was covered by a large transparent blue plastic shield. The hand that had touched her was covered by a milky yellow rubber glove, the color and texture of a condom. Margaret was in love.