Rameau's Niece (5 page)

He wasn't as well dressed as he was reputed to be, though, was he? Didn't they write magazine pieces about his wardrobe? Then, suddenly, Margaret blushed, thanking God for the inability to speak at dinner parties, which thereby covered up her inability to think at dinner parties, and admitted to herself that she had spent all this time under the impression that the sportswriter beside her, whom she had met so many times, was a novelist whom she had never set eyes on.

She could hear her husband. He was talking about Walt Whitman. I wish I could talk about Walt Whitman. I wish I was Walt Whitman, a drunken homosexual American genius. What cachet. Then I could say whatever I wanted. But I don't want to say anything.

"Excuse me," said the perfumed girl (Dominique, was it?), squeezing back into her place.

Remembering Till's injunction to be nice to Dominique, Margaret tried to smile, then, slowly, careful to enunciate clearly, she said, "Do-you-read-American-poet? Whitman?" She gave the name a slight French intonation: Whit-mahn. "Walt Whit-mahn?"

"No," said Dominique.

"So, Bonnie," said the sportswriter-who-was-not-a-novelist to Dominique, "What're you working on?"

"I'm in turnaround," said Dominique-who-was-really-Bonnie and had never been Dominique at all, or even French. She went on about her latest project, a screenplay called
The Private Life of Squeaky Fromme.

Well, now it is time for me to go home, Margaret thought. Go home and read a book. A book by Walt Whit-mahn.

"
Zut alors,
" she muttered to herself. Then abruptly, to the sportswriter, "Do you have a lot of friends?"

She had interrupted him. He was still talking to Bonnie. "Do I what?" he said.

"Do you have a lot of friends?"

"I suppose I do."

"Oh."

"Do you?"

"That's a rather personal question," she said severely.

E
DWARD HAD GONE OUT
to hear a friend of his at a reading, but Margaret disliked readings, embarrassed if the work was bad, too distracted by the author's physical idiosyncrasies and the audience's hairstyles to enjoy it if it was good. She stayed home and tucked herself into bed with her manuscript.

The girl was a guest of the Marquise de-, as was I, and our paths crossed many times during that month. At dinner, I often found myself glancing at her as I attempted to resolve some problem of philosophy, turning it over and over in my mind. And it soon became apparent to me, from her own glances, as well as a sudden and remarkably becoming flush that appeared on her cheeks during these exchanges of looks, that she too pondered these philosophical questions. At least so I hoped, and as the days passed I grew more and more curious to ascertain whether my perception was correct.

At these times, too, the question with which I was grappling began to take on a new urgency.

Is corporeal sensibility the sole mover of man?

Eagerness to establish the truth burned in my breast, fueled by the looks I exchanged with Rameau's niece.

One morning, I came across her walking in the gardens. She carried a book which, when she saw me, she held out to me as she approached with her habitual grace and delicacy. I took it from her, from her fingers agile and exquisite, and opened the volume, whereupon she turned the pages with such a lightness of touch that I marveled and felt almost weak with admiration.

She pointed to a line.

Understanding that I was to read it aloud, my voice trembling with involuntary emotion, I began.

MYSELF:
"When a man enters into himself, when he examines the bottom of his soul, he perceives nothing in all his sentiments but the development of bodily pain—"

SHE
[her eyes closed]: "—and pleasure!"

In the days that followed, we often found ourselves alone in the gardens, discussing philosophy. Was it really true, she asked, that interest and want were the principles of all sociability?

Her arm brushed quite accidentally against mine, stimulating my own interest and want to a degree I declare I had never yet experienced. I composed myself as best I could and answered.

MYSELF:
Men exaggerate the force of sentiment and friendship.

She looked away with a suddenness I found surprisingly gratifying. For did not this gesture suggest disappointment at my words? And did not her disappointment suggest the force of her own sentiment, of her own feelings?

Wanting to discover the validity of this proposition, that she was experiencing a forceful sentiment and desire for friendship, I continued.

MYSELF:
Men exaggerate the force of friendship. They represent sociability as an innate affection or principle. But there is but one principle of this kind.

We had stopped walking and I was speaking softly to her.

MYSELF:
That principle is corporeal sensibility.

Her eyes widened then. Her complexion, pure and white as a pearl, glowed with a sudden rosy hue. She tossed her head in anger.

SHE:
I admire your wisdom, sir. But heaven forbid that I should copy it. If all your friendships are nurtured in a sunlight as harsh as this, then your garden must be a dry, insipid place indeed. I myself must seek a little cooling shade. These walks of ours expose us too much to the glare of Apollo's gaze without the serenity of his gentle song.

She began to walk away, and when I attempted to accompany her, she turned and walked in a different direction.

Was this to be the course of my careful tutoring? That it should end before it had in truth begun? That my student should flee her teacher, untouched by understanding?

MYSELF:
Please! I meant only to suggest...

But Rameau's niece strode on, deaf to my entreaties. Nor, for days afterward, did she take herself again to those garden paths. "I feel the sun so acutely," she would say when asked by some member of the company why she had forsaken her earlier regimen of exercise and fresh air. She avoided my eyes as carefully as she shunned the garden. Never did I surprise her in a room alone; always was she attended by the marquise's retinue of old women.

For days, and then a week, and two weeks, this inhumane treatment persisted. My sleep was uneasy, my appetite uninspired, and it was only small comfort to notice the same symptoms in the gentle girl who steadfastly refused to respond to my sighs and glances. In the company of the other guests, I would address bitter speeches to my lost student, speeches she and only she could recognize as being meant for her, and only for her.

In these speeches I rendered accusations:

MYSELF:
Seeing that life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? If that is so, is it not true that the heart is nothing more than a spring?

I implored mercy:

MYSELF:
It is a law of nature, is it not, that a man ought to pardon the offenses past committed by them that, repenting, desire it? For pardon is nothing but the granting of peace; and not granting it to those who repent is a sign of aversion to peace, and refusing to forgive is therefore contrary to the law of nature.

Sometimes, when I was near her, all my senses were strangely ravished and my eyes did not dare to rest on hers; all my body felt languid and oppressed. But my pupil appeared to notice nothing regarding her teacher.

Only after two weeks of existence in this arid desert devoid of feeling, of charm, of beauty, did I see the first sign of budding life, a mere shoot, a tender sprig of attention, but enough to cause my heart to beat with renewed vigor. Rameau's niece on this day, truly a spring morning, allowed her glance to fall on me.

MYSELF:
The understanding is like the eye. While it makes us see and perceive all other things, it takes no notice of itself; and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own object.

Her own eyes, large and luminous, looked into mine as if seeking there understanding, the sight of the mind. For a moment, I was unable to continue and remained where I was, silent and trembling in the unaccustomed glory of her gaze. She lowered her lashes then, plunging the world back into the darkness of her indifference. But that one moment gave me hope, and I continued.

MYSELF:
But whatever be the difficulties that lie in the way of this inquiry, whatever it be that keeps us so much in the dark to ourselves—and to each other—I am nevertheless sure that all the light we can let in upon our minds, all the acquaintance we can make with our own understandings, will not only be very pleasant, very, very pleasant...

And here I sighed, and really I could not go on. As my voice trailed off, the other guests remarked with sympathy on the rigors of philosophy and suggested I take some wine, while Rameau's niece retreated silently from the room with a quick, shy glance at me that worked simultaneously as both cure for my sudden infirmity and the cause of a debilitating relapse, so that I felt it necessary to take myself weakly to my chamber for the restorative balm of sweet solitude and repose.

In the days following, Rameau's niece began to offer to me more of these slight glances, at first shyly, then with greater intensity and frequency, looks almost of tenderness, certainly of curiosity, until one evening after dinner, as she walked past me toward the card tables, I felt something pressed into my hand, and in my excitement at this undreamed-of felicity, I stuttered some words attesting to a headache and took to my room. There, I opened a note written hastily but in a beautiful hand. It said, "From the dim candlelight of these sad weeks, I long for daylight, for the sun to illuminate my way to greater understanding. It would be unpardonable to undervalue the advantages of knowledge, to neglect to improve understanding when given an opportunity to do so. You are my teacher, I see that now. And I? If you will have me, I am your student."

Margaret put down the manuscript and turned off the light. A teacher and his student, bound together, locked in the giddy embrace of pedagogy. Margaret sighed and remembered when she had first seen Edward teach, remembered sitting at a desk in the back of the room, listening; remembered a line from the Whitman poem ("Does not all matter, aching, attract all matter?"); remembered what he wore; remembered that one of his shoelaces had been untied, remembered a hazy space between his body and hers, a crowd of students and desks and chairs, none of which existed. Only Edward existed. Edward and Margaret and the words and the silence that ran between them.

She never went to hear Edward teach anymore. She was too busy, he told her everything he wanted to discuss ahead of time, at home, and it seemed undignified to follow one's husband around listening to him lecture when perhaps one ought to be lecturing oneself. But recalling the early days, when she sat before him, waiting and listening in the uncertain ecstasy of anticipation, she thought perhaps she ought to resume her studies with Edward.

Still, it was blissful to be alone sometimes, she thought. Like now, the whole bed to herself, the whole apartment to herself, no one blasting into the room with a new interpretation of an old dog of a poem. Edward was wonderful, it was true, but sometimes his wonder weighed heavily.

Where was he, anyway? It was past twelve. The reading was over at ten. Unlike him to be so late. They probably went out for a drink afterward. Still. She considered what she would do if Edward ever had an affair. Make him stop.

W
HEN
MARGARET
had been very young and single, people, also very young and single, had constantly dropped by. They would telephone from the street corner or just ring the bell and come and sit on the couch with her and discuss how much they hated being so young and so single and, more often than not, so unemployed. Margaret sighed. What golden days those were, sitting in the gloom. The dimming afternoon light. Slouched on the sofa until it was really quite dark. Too lazy to reach up and turn on a light. Drinking coffee, having lunch delivered from the coffee shop across the street, dinner delivered from the coffee shop across the street from the first coffee shop. (She was too ashamed to get both meals from the same place. She had once almost ordered a poached egg for breakfast and had it delivered, but decided at the last minute that it would be decadent.)

Since marrying Edward, Margaret's social life had taken a peculiar turn. She went out more than she ever had in the past but seemed to know fewer and fewer people. She met people—Edward's colleagues, Till's chattering circle. She met other historians, too, although she had managed to keep her academic activities to a minimum. She hated to teach, and after the success of
The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny
she had not needed to. She belonged to a group, a seminar of pseuds (as Edward, who also belonged, called it) which brought her into contact with people from other disciplines. She had lunches with magazine editors. And so her universe, once the narrow university, was now slightly broader, perhaps, but considerably more ephemeral. And the comfort of friendship—the kinds of casual, open-ended encounters she had once had with friends—now occurred almost exclusively between her and her husband.

Margaret didn't really mind the change; indeed, for a long time she didn't even notice. Edward made up for a great deal. He filled a lot of space. Listening to him, she was busy. She struggled to recall names, dates, everything she had firmly believed in two hours before. Edward remembered vigorously, joyously, as if the act of remembering was itself a magnificent physical pleasure.

Sometimes she wondered if he didn't fill up a little too much space, for she was aware of him even as she thought her own thoughts. And every once in a while the rhythm of those old, long days, when she and her thoughts were alone, would come back to her, like a song, and she would feel a sense of nostalgia for a time when all was expectation and nothing was expected from her.

Her old friends, or at least her old ways of friendship, seemed to have slipped away when she wasn't paying attention. Had she simply forgotten them, along with their names? Had her forgetfulness hardened to callousness? Margaret didn't like to think of herself as a callous person—it wounded her vanity—and she disliked the idea of losing anything, anything at all. Thinking this way, she felt a familiar urge, a compelling desire, not for something specific, just for more. Seek, and ye shall find. Then ye shall forget. So, ye'll just have to seek again.