Rameau's Niece (21 page)

The days were getting longer, a little longer, and Margaret waded through swarms of elderly women at the fruit market out into a silvery dusk and an unaccustomed wash of clean, windy air which made her remember many other places and other times, albeit not very specifically. A mountain somewhere in northern Europe or maybe Colorado, a spring walk to school in Massachusetts, a beach, some beach.

This was it, she realized. In New York, this was spring. She had just experienced it, a moment that recalled other moments, that suggested other places where trees and flowers blossomed, rodents awoke, insects hatched, and birds showed off. And now it was over. Springtime in New York. It had come and gone on that one fresh breeze. A bus roared past. A man stood on the corner holding an empty picture frame to his face, hollering, "I been framed!"

At home, she threw herself down in the armchair in the living room and looked out at the sky as it grew darker. Was there milk in the grocery bag, or yogurt or chicken or fish? Something she ought to put away? She didn't care. She thought about Dr. Lipi, the way he stared with his sharp eyes. The man on the plane had such soft gray eyes. She'd seen a teenage boy in the lobby with fresh pink cheeks and the slack, greedy face of youth. Margaret leaned her head back. She liked this time of day, when everything faded so softly.

When the doorbell rang, she jumped and shuddered and realized she must have fallen asleep. The apartment was quite dark now. She stumbled to the door. Edward must have forgotten his keys. Good. Everyone should forget something sometimes. And she would somehow not have wanted him to find her asleep, for when she slept she dreamed. She no longer wanted Edward to know what it was she dreamed about.

"Hello," she said, blinking at the glare from the hall lights as she opened the door.

"'Allo," replied the figure in the door. "But look who it is! It is you, the pretty girl from the airplane.
Bonjour!
'Allo, 'allo!"

No, not Edward.

Margaret looked closer. Those thin lips, moist and pouting. The gray eyes. And the shirt. The green-and-white-striped shirt. It was the man from the plane, the man she dreamed about, the man who fell asleep on her face. But what was he doing here when he was awake, when she was awake? How had he found her? She hadn't told him her address, not even her name. And didn't he have any other shirts? She said nothing in her excitement. Nothing at all.

"You are astonished to see me."

Margaret nodded.

"And I am astonished to see you!"

But I live here, Margaret thought.

"I look for Marguerite Nathan."

"You find her," said Marguerite.

"Yes? So pleasant that she is you!"

"Yes. So pleasant." Margaret stared down at the bag of groceries she'd left on the floor by the door. The smell of scallions and overripe strawberries drifted up.

"You are acquainted with my father. I am Martin Court, son of Jules Court, of Brussels. You have met him in Prague, yes? He gives me your name and location and says I am to meet you. But we meet already!"

"Yes, we do."

"That is really something!"

Margaret looked at the shirt and the blue cashmere blazer and the unself-consciously protruding belly. I'm looking at him too long, she thought.

"Follow me!" she said.

In some confusion, she switched on lights, a lot of lights, every light she passed. The apartment glared. Margaret led Martin Court to the living room. She was not looking at him at all now, careful not to look at him. She turned to motion him to take a seat. Martin grasped her hand.

I will swoon, she thought. She felt ill, and the bright lights burned her sleepy eyes. He had come for her. She was meant to take a lover, and now her lover was here, here for her to take. His hand closed around hers, large and warm around her suddenly icy fingers, tighter and tighter, drawing her toward him. His long fingers, curled around hers, pressed harder and harder, drawing her hand up slightly, but urgently, then down again. Martin Court was shaking her hand.

"That is really something!" he said again. "Really, really something!"

Margaret coughed, nodded, and sat down.

Martin Court was an engineer of absurdly expensive hi-fi equipment whose company was hoping to break into the American market. He had been to New York twice since his father had rescued Margaret from the dangers of Prague's suggestively beautiful architecture, but only now had he found the time to look up the beneficiary of his father's excellent sense of direction.

Margaret did not want to offer him coffee because he was French and would judge her coffee harshly, until she remembered he was Belgian. "Would you like a cup of coffee?" she said. Her voice sounded sharp to her, the squawk of an unpleasant night bird as it pounced on its prey.

"Tea."

In the kitchen, Margaret stood over the kettle and watched it not boil. He was here, in her house. His name was Martin, a name impossible to pronounce properly in French without sounding as if one's sinuses were blocked. His hair fell over his eyes, onto his big, oddly shaped glasses. What did she say to him now? She had already given him her life's history on the plane, told him her secret philistine theories of epistemology. Perhaps she should tell him Edward's Theory of Monogamy and the End of Evolution, a.k.a. Adultery, the Ultimate Self-Sacrifice.

Margaret heard the front door open.

"Oh, hello," she heard Edward say.

"'Allo. I am Martin Court, a friend of Marguerite. You are a friend of Marguerite, too?"

The kettle whistled shrilly.

Margaret made a cup of tea for Martin Court and sat down and drank it. She hated tea.

I will never go out there, she thought. I will stay here, by the stove. I will sleep on the stove like a Russian house serf. It's nice and warm in here by the stove. Out there, it's too hot.

She heard them laughing, talking about Wagner and George Bernard Shaw, the advantages of tube amplifiers and the necessity for something called Monster Cable.

"Margaret," Edward said, coming into the kitchen. "How funny that you met your new chum on the plane. Have you asked him to dinner? He'll keep you company. I can't stay, I'm afraid."

Margaret looked up at him, torn between suspicion and relief.

"Department meeting," he said. "Multiculturalism in Literature—Too Little Too Late? I shouldn't think so, but then I have been wrong before. Ah well, the more the merrier. Bring on the cultures, let graduate students at 'em, a new supply of obscure works to grind into obscure theses, the new dry dust of new classics, sprinkled pitilessly upon innocent undergraduates. Perhaps my poets can survive. I can pass them off as homosexuals, or closet homosexuals, or protohomosexuals. Parahomosexuals!"

"Don't be bitter."

"No. You're right. It's ludicrous, what goes on, and I quite enjoy it. 'Me imperturbe ... aplomb in the midst of irrational things.' Did you offer the man a drink, darling?"

He pulled two beers from the refrigerator and walked out.

"Tea," Margaret said to his back. "I offered him coffee, and he wanted tea."

But Edward didn't hear. He was already back in the living room with his new pal. Margaret listened to them. Her husband talking to her lover. Well, her lover in theory. Her husband in fact. She would sleep on the stove. In perpetuity.

Margaret and Martin Court ended up going out to dinner. Margaret took him to the least romantic, noisiest restaurant she could think of, a sports bar with six large-screen television sets. Here I can think, she said to herself, and decide what I must do. Without any music or soft lights to cloud my judgment. Just flashing scoreboards and the din of an angry mob.

Martin drank a beer, and Margaret watched.

"I am happy to get to know you," he said.

He ran his hand through his hair, and Margaret remembered the smell of it and the feel of it against her face.

"My father and mother like you so much. My father say you are so knowledgeable about prison reform in the United States."

His hands rested on the polyurethane-coated table. His fingers were long and all nearly the same length, his nails rounded and regular. He wore no wedding ring.

"Your husband has a good taste in music," he said.

"Are you married?"

"Divorced."

Martin had a polished, elegant manner that occasionally burst into boyishness. Through the cheers, boos, grunts, and squeaks of large sneakers on the televised basketball courts that surrounded them, he remarked that the sports bar was "really something!" He mentioned ways the establishment could upgrade both the video equipment and the audio equipment. He told her he had thought about her many times since their meeting on the plane.

"Your laryngitis is better," she said:

Martin stared around him at the young lawyers and stockbrokers and smiled. "America!" he said.

Several times he refilled her glass of mineral water with as much courtly solicitude as if she had been drinking champagne. At her coronation.

When her hamburger came, Margaret looked at it with distaste. She was too nervous to eat. Martin watched her with concern.

"Marguerite, you are not well."

"I don't look well?"

"You look very well! Very, very well."

"Oh."

"But you look as though you don't feel well, you see?"

Margaret saw. She saw a beautifully dressed, beautifully mannered, beautiful-faced man with a sexy belly and a kind disposition. No wonder I look as though I feel sick, she thought.

"My daughter loves New York," Martin was saying. "We have been here together." His daughter was twenty-four.

"Why, she's almost my age!" Margaret said. The dirty old man. No, no, that didn't fit him at all. The lecherous
roué.
That didn't fit him either, but it suited Margaret's sense of romantic propriety much better.

"Yes," he said. "She's very much like you."

He kissed her good night on both cheeks. Margaret put her hand on his arm, on his cashmere-covered arm.

"You have the softest clothes," she said.

He looked at her quizzically. A lock of hair had fallen between his glasses and his left eye. Margaret thought to push it away, but he did it himself first.

"Good-bye, my friend, my old friend," Martin said. He raised his hand for a taxi.

Margaret panicked. Was he going? Just like that? Would she never see him again, never again see Martin Court, the man obviously fated to become her lover?

"I have something for your father," she said quickly. Good thinking, Margaret! "A gift. A book. I'm so grateful. Are you free tomorrow? I'll give it to you then. I'll take you sightseeing. If I don't get lost. I won't get lost. That was a joke."

"Yes, I know," he said.

Her hand was still on his sleeve. She pulled it away.

He reached in his pocket for a datebook. "Friday," he said. "That is good?"

"That is good."

"You're very kind, Marguerite," he said as he got into a cab. "Kind to foreigners."

Margaret walked home thinking that the cheers of sports fans would never be the same for her. The lock of hair that had fallen over Martin's left eye remained, tantalizing, in her mind, a veil she must push aside. Martin. Divorced. One twenty-four-year-old daughter. Forty-nine himself. Mathematics and music, he said, are the same; they are the laws of the universe. Would she care to listen to his electronics sometime? She would be astounded. They were really something!

Oh yes! she had wanted to say. I'll listen to your electronics. Just plug them in.

Across the table, bathed in the flickering light of the six TVs, he was irresistible, his face undeniably, obviously, foreign, his voice high-pitched and glamorously out of context.

Edward was already home. I've been hypnotized, she thought. Don't break my spell. Tall and familiar as a tree in the dark hallway, he put his arms around her, but Margaret thought again of Martin, the man on the plane, in the sports bar, on the sidewalk, a face in a cab.

"'Not to be in love with you,'" said Edward. "'I can't remember what it was like. It must've been lousy.'" He kissed the top of her head. "Schuyler," he said.

Guilty, and angry that she felt guilty—for absolutely nothing!—she said, "Why do you always quote other people? Don't you ever have anything to say for yourself?"

Edward jumped, he was so startled. He looked at her questioningly, then walked away, silent, into the study and closed the door behind him.

Margaret thought, He will never forgive me. He quotes things out of love and excitement, like a boy rattling a box of shiny pebbles, opening and closing it, then opening it again. I've insulted his pretty stones. I threw them in the river.

And Margaret had the feeling she had just crossed a line, a line of civility that was required for love. When in love, one felt free and safe to reveal the deepest, most secret truths about oneself. But there were truths about the other person that one never revealed, not because of fear or shame, but out of acceptance—out of love.

I have been capricious and thoughtless, she realized. Like a child who calls a fat man fat. But she couldn't apologize. Her mouth refused to form the words. She formed so few words for him these days.

Edward was too courteous to stop speaking to her altogether. But it seemed to her that after this he stopped taking any pleasure in his words. Margaret sometimes waited for him to try to speak to her about their not really speaking, but their silence only grew in authority, a strict and overbearing mother. It never quite let the two of them out of its sight. Edward, the booming Walt Whitman scholar, singing of "Life immense in passion, pulse, and power," lived his life with vigor and joy. It was the only way he knew how. But Margaret had withdrawn vigor and joy, leaving a vacuum, an absence, and he backed away from her uncertainly, like a cat from a puddle. They existed cautiously, new neighbors in their old life.

Lily sat on the grass in the park, where they now met quite regularly for lunch. She had taken off her shoes, black pointy pumps that lurked, stark and sinister, beside her bare feet on the bright spring grass. She had small, even toes (to match her teeth) dabbed with pearly nail polish.