Rameau's Niece (15 page)

The thuggish boys looked at each other.

Margaret bit her lip and looked away.

The boys began clapping politely.

Led to the hotel by the little Belgian judge and his little Belgian wife, Margaret wearily walked up the steps to her room. On the landing, she stopped to look at a large painting, so dark that in the daytime it appeared to be all black. But now, in the evening, it was lit up to reveal itself as a scene of an Edwardian man at a table. Beyond the French doors was a pink sunset.

That's nice, Margaret thought as she passed it. A nice, conventional turn-of-the-century bourgeois scene. She smiled and then noticed something under the table in the painting, something large and bluish white, soft and voluptuous, female and naked—a big, curvaceous gal, stashed beneath the table as if an afterthought, no allusion to it anywhere else in the painting, the man above looking out the window, unperturbed, oblivious, beneath him a drift of snowy flesh.

Margaret drew herself a bath. The bathtub was long enough for her to stretch out in, and only her head and feet protruded from the water. In the steamy tub, Margaret closed her eyes. Edward, Edward, she thought. The tub was big enough for two. But her husband was home. Twenty-four young men bathe by the shore. Or was it twenty-eight? "Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore," he was reading, reading Whitman to the students who watched him with slightly parted lips and half-closed eyes. And Margaret bathes alone.

She opened her eyes. Her feet stuck up from the water like plaster feet, large, white plaster feet. Plaster feet hung from the ledges of doorways, doorways of pale lemon-colored buildings. Margaret closed her eyes to rid herself of these images. Feet begone. But what now? What were these? Thighs? Thighs, startlingly clear, white plaster thighs of large and impressive proportions.

Is corporeal sensibility the sole mover of man? The sole mover of Prague? The sole mover of Margaret?

Edward is not here. He is home with his girls. You never heard the Czech Philharmonic. They are in New York. With Edward. You are in Prague. You are alone. Your search for knowledge has led you here, to this bath, to this revelation: alone, you see a perfectly respectable city as a throbbing, eroticized house o' weenies.

God, she thought. I was right all along. The desire to know really
is
desire.

A
FTER A
TWO-HOUR WAIT
in Paris, Margaret boarded the connecting flight to New York. There were men on either side of, her, probably businessmen, one beside her by the window, the other across the aisle, and as they both appeared to be asleep, she felt she could study them without inviting conversation.

The American businessman across the aisle wore the blue pinstripe suit (the jacket off and folded carefully in the overhead compartment) and red foulard tie of one still dressing for success even as success had lost its cachet, the newsmagazines having recently announced the death of the Greed Decade that had made success so successful to begin with. The Frenchman (she had not heard him speak, but he was a Frenchman—they knew how to get that across somehow) was dressed in dove-colored trousers of so fine a material that she longed to touch them and in a pale green-and-white-striped shirt that stretched somehow elegantly over his large belly, as if bellies—good, classic, fashionable bellies—were meant to protrude
comme ça.

Margaret leaned with some difficulty over her seat belt and examined their shoes. The American wore loafers with tassels as small and useless as a whale's internal ankle bone. Smaller, actually, Margaret thought. Whales are quite large, leviathan, aren't they, and even their miniaturized evolutionary detritus must be gigantic. She suddenly, involuntarily, saw before her an image of several dolphins whipping gracefully round and round a deep concrete pool, a memory of Flipper's Sea World, an aquarium she had once visited. Round and round went the dolphins, faster and faster, exposing large, oddly pink extrusions on their pale gray undersides. "Look!" a child had cried. "Dolphin dicks!"

Our cousins from the deep, Margaret thought. She turned and surveyed the Frenchman's crepe-soled, soft leather oxfords. Our cousin from another land. For a moment she felt that she hated this man. From his thick crepe soles to his light brown hair. Why did she hate him? His elbow was not on her armrest. He neither snored nor carried with him the stale odor of cigar smoke. He had not insulted her. She liked his pants. Why did she hate him?

She decided she must hate him because he was French. She had never hated the French before, but these things can grow on you. After all, their food was so good, their books were so good, their paintings so good, they dressed so well. Those were reasons enough, surely, to hate them. And then they were smug, they had beautiful cities, they were intellectual Stalinists, they revered bad American movies but had a history of making good movies themselves. They cheated on their wives.

My, aren't we the cultural-stereotype wallah, Margaret thought. Since really you would die to be French and have those small French female feet that fit into those small shoes they wear. Well, we did have a better revolution.

She was staring at the Frenchman's face now, a comfortable face just gone the slightest bit fleshy, an extremely French face with thin but sensuously protruding lips that always looked moist, she was quite sure. He has daughters, nymphets, little blossoming girls that he watches with more than paternal interest, Margaret thought. That's what they do there. They're so civilized.

The man stirred, opened his eyes, put on his glasses, big thick-framed unexpectedly shaped glasses. He had gray eyes, and they looked into hers in such a direct way that Margaret thought she was being appraised, like a stone. Gem quality, but flawed, mister. Try down the block.

Soon he would speak to her. Then she would have to answer. Perhaps she didn't hate the French, she thought. Perhaps she didn't hate this man, either. Perhaps, what she hated was the inevitability of social relations with him.

He would speak to her. And she would be required to answer. Edward was not there to do it for her, or even to support her in her own efforts, to remind her of the name of the book of Czech essays she had just finished reading, of the opera she had just seen.

She'd been in the last row of the tiny gilded opera house. Row thirteen. The opera, by Dvořák or Janáček, it was a little muddled already, had been beautiful and moving, although she was not certain what had taken place. There was a young woman who ran off to meet a young man. An old woman in black (her mother? grandmother? stepmother? mother-in-law?) mistreated her and bossed around a man with some close connection to the young woman (father? husband?). The young woman sank to her knees regularly. The young man she was in love with went away. And in the end, after a thunderstorm, she threw herself in the river.

Margaret had had a coughing fit in the beginning of the first act and had to climb over a blind man to get out, but after buying some mints at the bar, she had returned to the grandly intimate little golden theater and felt great sympathy for the suffering soprano, whatever the problem might have been.

Edward would have remembered the name of the opera. He would have known what it was about. Maybe this Frenchman would know. Why do all people from France have those lips, she wondered. It must be from the way they speak. Over the years, their mouths take on that provocative little pout. Oh, how to quash the inevitable, unsolicited bid for an exchange of pleasantries? I don't want to talk. Leave me alone, to fester in unhealthful isolation.

She felt how close she was to him, the two of them pressed against each other in the narrow airplane seats. He shifted in his seat, and his beautiful shirt, smooth Egyptian cotton, brushed against her bare arm. She guessed he was in his late forties and looked slightly older, owing to French indulgences like insatiable mistresses and cream sauces.

Oh shut up, Margaret. Edward likes strangers. Be like Edward. He speaks to foreigners. Of course, he
is
a foreigner. The Frenchman smiled at her, then pushed his glasses up until they rested on top of his head.

She had always considered cynicism a particularly sour form of provincialism, and it was now clear to her that she had become a sour provincial. But that's what happened when you went off by yourself—you discovered your true self. And her true self, she now knew, was a sexually hysterical, xenophobic, middle-aged midwesterner from the 1930s.

The Frenchman had gone back to sleep, a thin camel-colored blanket pulled up to his chin. His reading light was on, shining down like a spotlight, illuminating him in his innocent, childlike slumber. One arm was tucked under the blanket, the other hugging the blanket to his chest, his Rolex sparkling in the white glare.

Without thinking, Margaret reached up and turned off his little light. As she was still leaning over him, the Frenchman opened his eyes. They looked at each other, he in soft, sleepy confusion, she in the awareness that she was looking down at a complete stranger with moist, pouty lips from a distance of six inches.

"Sorry," she muttered, pulling away from him, from the intimate image of his face and sleepy eyes. Oh, that's why I hate him, she thought. I want to sleep with him.

He moved his head back and forth slightly, as Europeans do when they mean any number of completely contradictory things, and, clutching his blanket closer, closed his eyes once again.

I want, I want, I want, Margaret thought. I want to sleep with him. I want to forget I am married and drown myself in an affair with a stranger. No. I want, I want, I want to forget this stranger and drown myself in marriage. No, no, that's not right either. No
drowning.
I want to observe, to experience, to know! I am in search of truth and beauty. I am a scholar! That's why I want to fuck the French fellow.

Margaret watched him as he slept. Here was beauty, anyway. A beauty of sorts. If debauched Frenchmen were to your taste. He breathed softly but audibly. Edward, she thought, Why aren't you here? You are my husband. You're meant to protect me, to shelter me, to surround me, to make me forget everything and everyone else.

Edward engulfed the world; he held out his arms in an irresistible embrace, a gesture of supreme self-love and supreme largess. Margaret admired this ability to co-opt existence, to make it his. She loved Edward for that embrace. She had married him in anticipation of it; then, soothed and warm, she had lived among Edward's enthusiasms, swept up in the wave, the nirvanic swoon of living someone else's life.

Hey! Drowning again, Margaret, she thought. Waves indeed. Wake up. Smell the flowers. Fuck the Frenchman.

Adultery, Margaret thought, is an epistemological necessity. Rameau's niece found that out. To know is to fool around. She wasn't married of course. But still. Fuck the Frenchman.

Margaret got up and made her way to the bathroom. The Frenchman had long eyelashes, she thought. And his eyes, opened so suddenly, had looked at her with such easy amusement. She had expected him to launch his offensive then, having been given an opening, to surge ahead into the unavoidable friendly chat. Why hadn't he?

As she returned, walking slowly down the long aisle, looking for her seat in the darkened plane, she saw and recognized the top of his head and, it being the only head she recognized, the only object in the entire plane that had any personal relationship to her at all, and because it signified that there beside it was her own place, the crown of light brown hair looked reassuring, familiar.

Margaret sat down and took out a few sheets of her manuscript of
Rameau's Niece
and read: "
MYSELF:
Simple ideas enter into the mind through the senses pure and unmixed."

She looked up from the page at the Frenchman. My idea regarding you is simple enough, she thought. She watched him sleep for a while. He was awfully good-looking, in a prosperous,
bon vivant
sort of way. The more she looked at him, with his pursed lips and his pretty pants, the more oddly alluring she found him.

"
MYSELF:
When the understanding is once stored with these simple ideas, it has the power to repeat, compare, and unite them, even to an almost infinite variety, and so can make, at its own pleasure, new complex ideas."

It had been so long since she had flirted with anybody, she thought. A century, a decade, anyway. She turned back to her reading: "The coldness and hardness which a man feels in a piece of ice are ideas as distinct in the mind as the smell and whiteness of a lily or as the taste of sugar and the smell of a rose."

The Frenchman stirred slightly.

His head fell onto her shoulder.

His temple was pressed against her lips. The coldness and hardness of his glasses was perceived by her chin, and she sensed the smell and whiteness of his skin, as pale and sweet as a lily.

Oh God, Margaret thought. She could almost taste him, the taste of sugar.

Go away, she thought, terrified. I was only joking. Daydreaming. It was a secret.

He would wake up eventually, and then he would be bound to notice that their relationship had assumed a rather intimate physical nature, which he would undoubtedly attribute to her, for how could she possibly say, Look, your face fell onto my lips? She stared into his hair. The pleasant scent of his shampoo, the smell of a rose, filled her nostrils.

Well, Margaret thought. At least he's not trying to talk to me.

The rhythm of his breathing made her aware of his whole body, pressing closely onto her own. She shifted, just a bit, and her lips moved across his skin, an experience Margaret found pleasant, too pleasant. In fact, the entire experience of this unfamiliar male body against hers was too pleasant.

This is not a statue, Margaret told herself. I am not sightseeing. Just move your head away and we'll forget the whole thing ever happened. Your handsome, noble head with its clear gray eyes and long, feminine lashes and thin, moist lips, your head like a lily, a rose, like sugar and ice.

Each time she tried to move away, he seemed to move with her, snuggling in closer, his head heavier and more intimate. Margaret closed her eyes. But he was still with her. I am very attracted to a strange man sleeping on my shoulder, she thought. What does this mean?