Rameau's Niece (2 page)

Rows of poplars lined the road. The sun had come out from the clouds, which now glowed and reddened. This is bliss, Margaret thought. No wonder Edward likes Juliette and Jean-Claude. No wonder people drink wine, so red and velvety, rolling on your tongue. Margaret let her head fall back. She closed her eyes.

"
Tu baves, ma chérie
" Edward said gently, patting her knee.

"I'm what?" Margaret said.

"Drooling, darling."

The restaurant was dark and quiet and seriously comfortable. Yum, yum, Margaret thought, gazing lazily at the menu. Yum, yum. Little lambs and little bunny rabbits and little fluttery quail—all manner of gentle, innocent beasts. I will have pork, the forbidden flesh scorned by centuries of my ancestors, but big and ugly. Yum, yum, yum. Medallions of pork with chestnuts.

"Too many pets on the menu," she said. "If I ran this joint, I would offer
boeuf sous rature.
Get it, Edward?" She heard herself laughing.

"Yes, Margaret, I get it," Edward said.

He was not laughing, but looking at her rather dryly. Still, she could not stop herself. What was the point of having read so much incomprehensible Derrida if one could not make philistine deconstruction puns? "
Sous rature
" she continued. "'Under erasure.' And then they'd serve you—nothing! They'd take the beef
off
the plate!"

"Is this what they teach you poor children in graduate school these days?"

"And then on the menu you could draw that line through the word
boeuf,
as the deconstructionists do in order to denote when a word is, well, when a word is whatever it is that makes them draw that line through it..."

As she rambled on, drunk and delighted with her erudition, Edward ignored her and ordered the wine, which was even better than what they'd drunk at lunch. She held the glass to her lips and drank slowly. If she was not mistaken, Edward was talking to the waiter about medieval husbandry. She could see the lights in the dim restaurant reflected in her wine glass, in the wine-dark wine. Wine-dark wine. She giggled. She could see the lights twinkling there, like stars, like stars on a dark night. Oh, how banal. Oh, how sublime.

She staggered to bed that night and lay staring at the ceiling as Edward untied her shoes and recited in Latin a Catullus poem about a stolen napkin, and she thought she would marry him, would have to marry him, that it was a necessity, a rule of nature, like gravity. If, of course, he would have her.

"'Give back my napkin!'" he shouted, straddling her, pinning her arms to the bed. "'Or await three hundred hendecasyllables!'"

The next day they drove to Les Baux, the cliff-top ruins of a castle where some medieval nobleman had grilled the heart of a poet and served it to his wife for dinner. When that lady had finished her meal and was told the ingredients, she said the dish had been so sweet that she never wanted anything else to pass her lips, and jumped off the cliff.

"Ah, the goyim," Edward said.

They drove to Vaucluse, where Petrarch had written his love poems to Laura, and to Avignon, where Margaret came down with a fever and stayed sweating and shivering in the little low-ceilinged hotel room within the city's high walls; and from her damp, febrile pillow she wondered if she would die right now, right here, dissipated with drink and lovemaking and museum-visiting.

When she recovered, they drove to the Italian Alps and spent the night in an almost empty ski resort where she read while Edward held a long, quiet, serious discussion that Margaret could not understand with the Austrian chef's eight-year-old son. Edward knew seven languages, and accepted only with the poorest grace that he could speak just one of them at a time. The others were always waiting, eager and impatient, shifting from foot to foot like children, until, at last, one of them would be allowed to thunder out, full speed ahead. Edward spoke with resonant, distinct enjoyment, loud and clear, savoring each word, as if the different languages tasted good. He was a show-off, talking, laughing, sometimes singing loudly, without fear, sharing his own wonder of himself. Margaret was so fully in love with him now that she never knew if the flushed confusion she was experiencing was from the wine or her boisterous companion.

"For our honeymoon," he said the next morning as Margaret drove the left-handed English car on the right-handed Italian road, "I propose—"

"But you never have proposed, you know."

"I propose Sri Lanka—Ceylon, as we old stick-in-the-mud imperialists prefer to call it. We shall discover the meaning of life on the scented isle. When bored with copulation, we can go up to Kandy and regard the Buddha's tooth."

When Margaret woke up in the Alps, the air was so clear she blinked. Driving on the winding road, toward Italy, toward a whole new land of new wines and new paintings and new beds to share with her new fiancé, she stared ahead at the narrow, climbing vine of a road, and her heart pounded with disbelieving pleasure. Edward, in the mountains, was required by nature to recite Romantic poetry. He recited poetry as habitually as other people cleared their throats. Verse was preverbal: a preparation for speech, an ordering of one's thoughts and feelings, an exquisite sketch, a graceful, generous, gratefully borrowed vision. Margaret understood this and listened to his voice, as clear as the air, as self-consciously grand as the surrounding peaks, as happy as a child's, and then she drove off the mountain. Not all the way off the mountain, she noticed. Just
aiming
off the mountain, really.

"Shortcut, darling?"

Margaret never forgot driving off the mountain, and she never forgot how Edward pretended she wasn't shaking, how he made quiet jokes that guided her back to the road and back to the world where cars were aimed at Turin rather than at a heavily wooded abyss.

She drove slowly, with determination, ecstatic that she had not rolled hideously to a foreign death, and for a moment she felt about the world the way she thought Edward always felt about it, for thirty honking cars trailed irritably behind her, and, glancing in the rearview mirror, all she noticed about them was how brightly they sparkled in the mountain sunlight.

B
EHIND THEIR LIVES
stood Edward's schedule, a firm yet supple structure that gave to each day a thousand opportunities. If there were only twenty-four hours, then let them begin! Edward rose not only with the sun, but as if he were the sun. I am here, he seemed to be saying. The day may, indeed must, begin. He ate the same breakfast each morning, but what a breakfast—kippered herring and pumpernickel bread, bacon and eggs, fried tomatoes and mushrooms, Cheerios and sliced bananas, toast and jam and muffins, too. It was a labor-intensive meal, which was perhaps how he could stay so thin and eat so much. He presided over this ecumenical array of bowls, dishes, pots, and pans with smooth efficiency, then, finished, turned to his coffee and his newspapers, sometimes reading aloud to Margaret, unless she objected, which, foul-tempered and puffy-eyed, she often did.

"I don't care, Edward. I don't care about the Czech Philharmonic just yet."

"Margaret, one of the things I love about you, and there are so many it fills my soul with joy, but one of the most endearing qualities you have is how sincere you become in petulance." He smiled.

Margaret, her senses blunted by fatigue and the rich potpourri of breakfast odors, would nevertheless experience his presence then, acutely and pleasantly—the look of him and his touch, without looking or touching—and she would feel rising within her the familiar tide of gratitude and astonishment that she had come to recognize as love.

Margaret put her hand out and touched his across the table. Far away in Prague, the Czech Philharmonic was actively participating in a democratic revolution. In New York, she was happy and married to Edward. Both of these occurrences seemed equally improbable to Margaret and nearly miraculous. Edward was right: the world was a marvelous place.

"You really don't mind me," she said. "You like me."

"Our marriage is a putrid sink of festering lies; a vile, infested prison house into which we have been flung by a careless and callous fate."

Edward had married Margaret and moved to New York, to Columbia's Comp. Lit. Department, adapting as enthusiastically as the English sparrow, shifting effortlessly from an ancient, orderly university town to the great noise of urban decay. An Americanophile, Edward was a scholar of (of all people and against all academic fashion) Walt Whitman, and he adored the home of his poet.

Mannahatta! '"A million people—manners free and superb'!" Edward was a man at peace with New York.

For the next six years, each morning at 7:00, Edward ventured forth into Mannahatta to run around the reservoir. He maintained that it cleared his head, but Margaret noted that running was practically the only exercise that would not affect pectoral muscles in a positive way, and so she was convinced that he underwent the ordeal merely to assure that his British chest would remain sufficiently concave. When he returned home, at exactly 8:40, sweating and loquacious after so much time deprived of both students and books, he would quickly shower and change, eat his extensive breakfast, then walk up to Columbia for his 11:00 class. Home for lunch and a twenty-minute nap. Back to school, for conferences or research or petty, backbiting department meetings, each of which he embraced warmly and without reservation, for they belonged to his life, and therefore to him, and so beamed with a pleasant and interesting reflected light. Home for dinner at 6:30 sharp, whether he had an 8:00 class or not. When he did, home at 10:15. If not, work at home until 11:00. Asleep at 11:30. Up at 6:30 for another round.

If there were exceptions to this routine—a dinner date, a lecture to give, a concert—the schedule rippled effortlessly and made room. Margaret had never met a more orderly, less rigid soul. Edward's mind, nearly promiscuous in its passionate interests, opened to every new possibility, with one exception: the possibility of failing to do what he had planned to do when he had planned to do it, and of failing to do anything else he wanted to or was required to, as well. And so, every day, like the spinning of the earth, like the silent journey of the stars from one curved horizon to another, Edward's day followed its course. If "willful" and "blessed" were synonyms, they would describe Edward and the gentle, unvarying rhythm of his days.

Vigorous and effortless, the weeks passed and his life was full. Margaret gazed admiringly, for she herself had no schedule to speak of. Her contributions to the family income, while considerable, came irregularly and from far away. Margaret was almost famous. She had written a biography—a plain, sturdy little biography, a biography as unfashionable, as modest and unassuming as an aproned housewife, which had nevertheless caught the public's fickle eye. The subject, Charlotte de Montigny, had been assigned to her when she was a graduate student in intellectual history looking for a dissertation topic. Wife of a dissolute and ill-tempered minor eighteenth-century aristocrat, Madame de Montigny had consoled herself by becoming an amateur astronomer, an occasional portrait artist, and an avid autodidact of anatomy. "Oh,
you
might as well take
her,
" Margaret's adviser had said. An aging, eminent professor who drank too much and married too many of his students, he ordered up dissertation topics as if they were dishes at an unsatisfactory restaurant, the only restaurant in town. But this time, the meat loaf had won a prize, several prizes. Margaret was the recipient of grants and royalties, of a postdoctoral sinecure, of a little office at Princeton that was too far away to use.

But grants and royalties and an unused office across the river did not require a schedule or regular habits. Margaret eavesdropped on Edward as he argued amiably on the telephone with a magazine editor for whom he was reviewing a book.

"Do you like James Schuyler?" Edward finally asked into the phone. "I do. So American. 'The night is filled with indecisions, to take a downer or an upper, to take a walk, to lie down and relax. I order you: RELAX.'" And then, with great satisfaction, as if that certainly settled the matter, he hung up. Sometimes, when Margaret saw a poem on the printed page, with all its punctuation, its short and long lines, its verses, she would be startled. Living with Edward, she had come to regard poetry as conversation.

At her desk in the study they shared, Margaret turned back to Voltaire. Voltaire and his mistress had worked together for years, she thought. But they shared a château, not a spare bedroom. They worked in separate, elaborately appointed quarters, a prudent arrangement that made it quite impossible for Madame du Châtelet to waste her working time by listening in on Voltaire's undoubtedly brilliant and entertaining telephone conversations—although she had regularly steamed open his mail. Still, she showed far greater independence than I do, sitting around gawking at my own husband as if he were my first beau, my secret lover, my only friend, and my lifelong mentor.

Sometimes the depth of her feelings for Edward annoyed her. Am I a domesticated household pet, to take such pleasure from the physical presence of a man reading the
Mississippi Review?
She got up and put her arms around his neck, burying her face in his silver unmowed lawn of hair. Who does he think he is, strutting around, being happy and punctual all the time?

"Let's go to Prague together," she said then. "Let's hear the Czech Philharmonic."

M
ARGARET SPENT THE DAY
at the library. Even the sunlight stepped carefully here on its slow, heavy journey down from the dusty windows high above, whispering to itself, Do not disturb, do not disturb.

Margaret did not disturb. No one disturbed, which also meant no one disturbed Margaret. Margaret lived in constant fear of casual conversation, in which invariably someone would ask her about something she had written, and she would not know what they were talking about. Margaret was an authority on many things, with this one qualification—she had forgotten those many things as thoroughly as if she swilled daily from the river Lethe, morning, noon, and night, gulping, gargling, brushing her teeth with the waters of oblivion. Margaret suffered short-lived but all-consuming intellectual passions to which she gave herself over completely, becoming expert enough to be thoughtful. After she wrote about whatever it was that preoccupied her for that moment, she forgot, forgot everything, forgot it altogether, retaining only a pleasant feeling of accomplishment and completion.