Rameau's Niece (6 page)

Forgetfulness was the engine that moved her. And if it compelled her to frenzied gathering of facts and ideas into books, surely she could gather friends to her bosom, too.

Being a methodical as well as a suggestible person, and having spent the morning reading Francis Bacon, she decided to test the inductive method of reasoning by making lists of former friends and looking for a characteristic common to all of them by which she might arrive at a general law of friendship gone awry.

The names fell into two categories: those she had lost interest in, and those who had lost interest in her. She looked briefly at the column of names of people she had lost interest in, considered calling one or two, then lost interest. The other list, those who had lost interest in her, was baffling, and the only general law she could arrive at was that they were disloyal. This was of course a tautology and surely not what Francis Bacon had been driving at, but then he died of a cold caught while testing his theories of refrigeration by shoving snow into a chicken.

Margaret called Richard, her editor. In a way almost unheard of for the editor of an academic, he watched over her like a hen, clucking and fussing and proud. He admired her, protected her, manipulated her. He actually edited, too. Margaret recognized that she was smiled upon by fortune, even if this blessing came to her by way of Art Turner and was itself of a highly irritable, even petulant, nature.

Was he her friend? Yes, she supposed he was, if your benefactor could be your friend, if someone you saw a couple of times a year, in a small dusty office, in order to determine whether your prose was tripping over your ideas, or your ideas tripping over your prose, if someone who laughed out loud with pleasure when you improved a sentence and then peevishly wondered why you hadn't written it that way to begin with could be your friend, yes, he was her friend.

She thought fondly of him, the way his pink finger tapped at a word (his fingers were oddly flat on the pad, probably from all that tapping), a direct, visceral code of irritation and disapproval. She thought of his hands when she thought of him because that's what she knew best, sitting beside him and watching him tap. He would hop up periodically and bustle away in irritation to look after other books in other stages of production. He would purse his lips and snort in annoyance when the phone rang, reach for it with a severe swoop of his arm, and then, in his soft, insinuating, melodious voice, as if he welcomed the call, and knew who was calling, too, he would say, so gently, "Hello?" Margaret wondered which reaction, the preliminary show of fury, or the gracious, musical greeting, was sincere. She loved his voice and called him often, braving the flourish of anger she could always picture as the phone rang, rewarded by his hello. His finger pressing against a page, his seductive voice, the nape of his neck. Only when he saw something he liked did he lean back from the table and turn his face to hers, and she was always, even after so many years, startled to see his perfectly pleasant, ordinary face.

They spoke on the phone almost daily. He had discovered her, or so he liked to say. In fact, she had attained her odd crossover success while under his tutelage, to his surprise as much as hers. Art had given him the manuscript of a graduate student of intellectual history. He liked it and agreed to publish it; there was a meager advance, a token printing the next spring. She was thrilled, and then one day, or so it seemed, it happened so fast, she was suddenly reading about her "theories," first in little magazines, then in big ones. No one actually read the book, but it had somehow hit a nerve and people talked about it—and bought it. They discussed it at the cocktail parties and dinners that Margaret disliked; they argued about it on the phone. She was Margaret Nathan, author of the best-selling biography,
The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny,
did you ever read it, I have it at home, it's marvelous, I'll lend it to you, but give it back, I've never actually finished it.

Everyone had never actually read anything she'd written, and yet everyone knew who Margaret was, every member of the little circles that for her overlapped into one large, bulging, media-academic-literary-political-Washington-New York ring.

I know no one, she thought. I remember the jangle of a woman's bracelet rather than her face. I know nothing. I remember gossip but forget whom it is about.

She called Richard. The phone rang twice and she imagined him, pushing his chair back with an outraged clatter, thrusting his hand at the phone, pulling it violently off the receiver and to his ear.

"Hello?" he said, so gently, a caress.

"Hello. Busy?"

"No, I'm just stretched out here on my chaise longue doing my nails."

Oh, how very clever, such repartee, she said to herself. But his sarcasm, however tired and predictable, always delighted her and made her laugh, in much the same way puns did. "I'd like to have lunch with you."

"Why?"

"Richard, really, people do have lunch together. Frequently. Particularly people like you, editors, and people like me, writers. I'm sure I'm right about this."

S
OMETIMES
MARGARET
wondered at her good fortune. She, Margaret Nathan, who knew nothing, who experienced ideas the way other people experienced landscapes, who drove through them admiringly and wrote scholarly articles about the view, snapshots that became more real for her than the memory of the original—was she a fraud? Or was her success the reward for her hard work, for the loyal, desperate clicking of her camera?

Edward's reaction to her success was a mixture of pride in her and in his choice of her, pride in the outside world's confirmation of his pride, and the simple excitement he always showed when something good occurred, for he was proud of goodness itself, as if it originated with him. In fact, he took the whole thing so much in stride—my wife, Margaret? Well, naturally!—that Margaret herself began to feel comfortable with the situation. It was, she concluded, a freak of nature, a happy fluke, like being born a strawberry blonde. No one deserves to be a strawberry blonde, no one earns it, it is not the reward for virtue. But on the other hand, no one deserves not to be a strawberry blonde either.

The seminar Margaret belonged to met four times a year, a group composed primarily of academics, with some poets, novelists, and highbrow journalists thrown in. For Margaret, it was a rather intimidating group, especially after she'd been discovered by writers, like Jacques Maridou, whom she couldn't even bear to read. Would she now have to discuss Maridou's theories of narrative? Weren't they hopelessly passe yet? She had not escaped critical theory altogether but had ignored it as much as possible, even in France. Her many visits to France, spent mostly in libraries, had made that country seem only more foreign to her: the fashions oddly distant, like costumes in an old James Bond movie; the food fetishistic; the intellectuals enthusiastically cynical. But now,
she
was a fashion in France. It was the bicentennial of the Revolution, and Margaret's book had been reprinted under the title
Anatomie sans culotte,
with Maridou's essay as an introduction.

One of the seminar's quarterly meetings was a Christmas party held in the large university-subsidized, West Side apartment of the group's chairman. The chairman herself, a colorful woman who taught Italian literature and claimed to have been Rossellini's production assistant during the filming of
Open City
(as a
teenager—she
was as vain about her age as she was about her avant-garde credentials), stood at the door to greet Margaret and Edward. After a flurry of
ciaos
and kisses, Edward threw an arm over the shoulder of a dapper man and wandered off, speaking German.

Margaret watched Edward walk away and thought that he was like a drug, a dangerous, potent, exhilarating drug, that the more she had of him the more she seemed to need him and want him. Did that mean she had too little of him, or too much? She noted the apartment's ornate cherry moldings with envy and turned her attention to the roomful of her colleagues. Which name went with which face? And then, which idea went with which name? Margaret thought there ought to be nametags with a person's discipline, political bent, and latest publication printed neatly beneath the name. "Timothy Shiller, economist, neoliberal,
Why I Am Not a Socialist—And Never Was, Either.
" "Leonard Winks, medieval historian, far left,
The Importance of Cross-Dressing in the Symbolism of the Eleventh-Century Promissory Note.
" But of course there were no labels, and anonymous bodies drifted past her as she leaned forlornly against a bookcase, listening to an enormous, effeminate art historian discuss rap music with a middle-aged woman she didn't recognize. Was it an indigenous art form? Or a commodity? Margaret didn't really care, but she felt the warmth of academic familiarity comfort her in her distress.

A pleasant-looking girl smiled in delight when she saw Margaret.

"Hello!" Margaret said. I know you, she thought. And I like you. Who
are
you?

"Yes, I read it," said a tall, pink man with a slight English accent to the young woman. "You were
laboriously
fair."

"You gave my book a nice blurb," said a man with a beard whom Margaret recognized as a professor of American history.

"I did?" Margaret said.

"My dear young lady," said a graying old man with a heavy Eastern European accent, "I have just written you a letter."

He was a professor of philosophy, she thought. The New School? No, Brooklyn College. Very partial to the thought of someone no one had ever heard of. Seventeenth century? And he was a translator, too. Czech, was he? Or Polish? He was a neat and compact man, as if he'd been specially designed to fold easily for travel. Jan! His name was Jan something. Comenius? Jan Comenius.

"I have invited you to Prague. That is, the Comenius Society has invited you to Prague to speak."

Ah. Jan Comenius was his philosopher, not his name. She remembered. A Bohemian protestant.

"I read your article in
Quod,
my dear young lady. 'The Satin Underground.' Very amusing title, very droll. And timely, too, this article. Don't you think the dissemination of revolutionary ideas through popular, underground art such as pornography is an interesting antecedent to the
samizdat
publications of my country?
From the Satin Underground to the Velvet Revolution!
What do you think?"

"Well..."

"What fun you will have, my dear young lady. I have just come back. 'Havel in the Castle'! That is what all the posters say! There are people dancing in the streets."

"Yes, I'm sure. I mean I've heard—"

"The Comenius Society will pay your expenses, there is a small honorarium—"

"That's very generous, and I would love to go to Prague—" Prague! Where whole editions of John Ashbery sold out in a single day! Where playwrights led revolutions! Where ideas rose up as if on their own, pure and untainted by market research! Where even popular culture was culture! "Especially now, my God! But don't you think my work is, well, in light of what has happened, almost trivial? Why would anyone in the middle of a real-life democratic revolution want to hear old plagiarized smut and watered-down empiricism?"

Jan wagged his finger at her. "But that's how revolutions are made!" he said. "And that's what real-life revolutions are for!"

Margaret laughed, flattered. "Thank you," she said. "Thank you for thinking of me. Prague! Do you have any idea when? Is there a date yet?"

"It's rather short notice. Impromptu, you might say. This is a revolution, after all! Next month? To return there, after so many years in New York—for me it was a miracle, my dear young lady. A miracle."

Margaret listened to the old man, who now fell into a comfortable monologue, obviously his favorite monologue. Teachers are wonderful, Margaret thought. They take full conversational responsibility. She leaned against the bookcase, half closed her eyes, and basked in someone else's knowledge and confidence in sharing it.

"It is fashionable now to say that truth is just a convention," he said. He took out a cigarette, lit it, and continued, waving his hand as he spoke, leaving a soft, silver trail. "But in Prague, where people have had to live a lie for
so
long, truth is no convention. It is a moral reality."

Comenius believed in educational reform, he explained, and smoke wafted from his mouth and nostrils. Margaret watched it evaporate, politely nodded her head, and waited in a pleasant state of excited passivity for him to continue. Everyone knew that. Everyone in Czechoslovakia, anyway. He touched her arm every now and then, a gentle emphasis. She smiled and listened and watched as he spoke. But more important, he continued, reaching with both hands for both her arms now, his cigarette dangling from his lips, more important, there was a direct philosophical line from Comenius to Václav Havel, one that bypassed completely the Cartesian thinking that dominated Western thought. As Margaret listened, she thought, Only Eastern Europeans and teenagers can smoke without shame anymore.

"I love to speak," he said, interrupting himself apologetically.

"I love to listen," she said. Then she added, "To you." And his words and pale cigarette smoke surrounded her again: For Descartes, truth and beauty were not a part of objective reality but were subjective, lesser, opposed. But in central Europe, Comenius understood that reality was meaningful in itself, that truth and beauty were intrinsic values, the very structure of reality. For Havel, for Czechoslovakia, truth had a moral urgency; truth had the force of reality.

"But I am so sorry, Miss Nathan," he said suddenly. "I am warm on this subject and really have been lecturing you, shamelessly lecturing you. Let us talk about beer. In Prague, the beer has the force of reality, too, you might say. It is worth the trip, my dear, for the magnificent beer alone."

Margaret moved through the rooms of the shaggy old apartment, looking for Edward. She wanted to tell him that she had been invited to speak in Prague. They could drink beer there, together. They could encounter truth, beauty, and witness a revolution all at the same time. Why, they could go to the Czech Philharmonic after all.