Rameau's Niece (16 page)

I am a happily married woman.
That is a synthetic proposition, one based on observation, with no inherent, necessary logic. But does observation really support this proposition? Well, I am happy. Yes. Satisfied? Yes, that too. But then if I'm so happily married, why didn't Edward come to Prague to be happy with me? Because of his students? Fuck his students! Oh lord, what if he did fuck his students?

Margaret suddenly thought of the small university offices where she used to stalk her own professors. The invariable cramped rectangle with its bookshelves, battered desk, worn wooden chairs, and black linoleum floor came back to her, or she returned to it, and to that moment of fear bordering on joy when she would knock on the door.

Knock, knock.

Yes, I certainly got my money's worth of higher education, she thought.

Hello, Mr. So-and-So, I just came by to ask you about Kant's critique of Hume, I want to ask you about Hume and Kant, I have come by for you, I want you. I have waited for weeks but could wait no more. I see you in my dreams, the arrangement of your pens in your pocket in my dreams. The place in the back where your belt misses the belt loop in my dreams. Your scornful interpretation of your colleagues' interpretations of the works of long-dead Germans in my dreams. I dream of these things because they are part of you, professor. I have read your books. But now I want to stop dreaming, stop reading. I have come for you, and I will get you, too. Never mind that I have forgotten all the clever things I thought up last night in bed to impress you so that now I sit before you frowning in concentration on whatever it is you are saying, reduced to hoping you'll find me young enough and adoring enough and willing enough to make up for being stupid and tongue-tied, because that is exactly what will happen, and we both know it, knew it after the first class. There's one every semester, you're thinking. That's what I'm thinking, too.

Why not? she had always asked herself. There was something so alluring about them. No real evaluation of these men was necessary because these affairs could not lead anywhere. What difference did it make if they turned out to be as smoothly pompous as balloons, swollen with self-love and self-importance, floating with garish indirection above their fellow men? She wasn't stuck with them, was she? That was the wife's problem, wasn't it?

Oh lord, Margaret thought. I am the wife. I am the wife.

The Frenchman sighed and burrowed deeper, until his head was resting on her breast. Oh God, just go away, mister.
Monsieur.
I am a happily married woman. But if I'm a happily married woman, why am I sitting here with this man's head on my breast? Oh, Edward, I'm sorry. What am I doing? I'm not doing anything, actually, but I'm thinking. And why shouldn't I think, anyway, when you're home fucking twenty-eight girls in the bathtub?

I am a happily married woman. I lust after another man. Happily married women do not lust after other men. Therefore, even though I think I'm happily married, I am not happily married. Or am I?

The Frenchman opened his pale, seductive eyes and sat up. He ran his hand through his hair, the hair she had just felt against her face, and looked at her with some surprise.

"Well," she said, feeling herself redden. Well, indeed.

For a long time, Margaret pretended the Frenchman was not there. He seemed equally embarrassed, for he was silent. Margaret stared in front of her at the blue seat back. Out of the seat back's pocket stuck a laminated drawing of a plane, perfectly intact, which had supposedly just made a crash landing on the Atlantic Ocean. Happy survivors whisked down colorful inflated rubber slides.

The silence and embarrassment were becoming oppressive. She hadn't done anything wrong. Why should she sit there, tormented and ashamed? Anything would be better than this guilty, confused silence. Even conversation. In fact she longed to talk, to launch into one of those droning exchanges of banalities that would occupy her mind as thoroughly as an army occupies a town, as visiting relatives occupy a living room; it would prevent her from thinking, overwhelming and clouding all sensation in a fog of boredom and convention.

"So," she said. She looked over at the Frenchman. "Long trip," she said.

The Frenchman nodded.

"Longer on the way back. On my way back, that is. On your way back it will be shorter. It always seems shorter on the way back, doesn't it? But in your case it will actually be shorter. For me, it's just a subjective illusion."

She continued to talk, warming up now, for the Frenchman, to her surprise, was a wonderful listener, nodding, smiling, laughing once in a while, never interrupting to add his own self-involved anecdotes to compete with her self-involved anecdotes. I'm pretty good at this conversation business, Margaret thought. I just needed the proper partner. She began to talk about Prague, about the opera there, about her talk, about the manuscript she had translated.

"The way ideas are disseminated is interesting, yes. That's what I write about—the history of ideas. But what is really marvelous is the human being's appetite for ideas. We're gourmands, indiscriminate, lustful idea hogs," she said. "Even though sometimes ideas, sometimes philosophy itself, are, is, just stupid. Stupid. Do you know what I mean? For example, for centuries there has been an argument about subjectivity versus objectivity. I mean in one form or another that's what they're always going on about. But that is stupid. Finally, it's just stupid. Obviously what we think or say or notice has to be subjective. But we wouldn't be able to think it, say it, or notice it if there weren't an 'it' to think, say, or notice, would we? And we wouldn't have any subjective information to project onto it if we hadn't already received that information from objective impressions before. But then again, it's not the 'it' that does the thinking, it's me. This is all so obvious, isn't it? I mean, these people have no common sense. Of course common sense is out of fashion now, anyway—it's an ideological construction of the bourgeois social formation. And there's no subjectivity either anymore, is there, because there's no subject. Because any attempt to act or perceive as a subject suggests that you are trying to conquer the object, and that's bad because it's impossible. You see, meaning is impossible to obtain, so any search for it is false and oppressive. And anyway, the subject is now the object, because we are trapped by language, which determines what we say and what we do. So the object—the world—is now really the subject, because it holds all the cards. Of course, you already know all this, being French. But finally it seems to me that this just brings us back to what I was saying in the first place: subjectivity is rooted in objectivity and objectivity can't really exist without subjectivity. Big deal."

The Frenchman looked at her with furrowed brows, with his pale gray eyes, and then without showing his teeth, his lips pouting just a bit more, turning up slightly at the corners, he smiled.

I've made a friend, Margaret thought. Is this really the kind of friend I meant to make, though? she wondered. The kind I kind of want to sleep with?

"You're awfully quiet," she said after a while.

He reached into his briefcase, took out a slender leather case with a gold pen and a pad of paper inside.

"
Laryngite,
" he wrote. He pointed to his throat.

Margaret stared at her new friend.
Laryngite?
She took the pad from him, and the little pen.

"Sorry," she wrote irritably.

They sat silently for a while.

"Was there a dead baby?" the Frenchman suddenly wrote.

She started to write "Huh?" on the leather-bound pad. Why am I writing? she thought then, and shoved the pad rather ungraciously back to the Frenchman.

"Huh?" she said.

"A dead baby in the opera?" he wrote.

"No. Just a dead girl."

"
Katya Kabanova,
" he wrote.

"Oh yeah," Margaret said. "
Katya Kabanova.
"

In her dream, the Frenchman on the airplane stared at her as if she were a jewel he was appraising. His green-and-white-striped shirt rubbed suggestively against her bare arm. He examined her as if she were a jewel, with a jeweler's glass, while she lay naked on the hotel bed and his green-and-white-striped shirt stretched alluringly across his stomach.

"Enlightenment," said the Frenchman, "is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage."

I know, she thought.

"Nonage," he said, "is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance."

I know.

"Kant."

Kant.

"Kant said, 'Dare to know,'" said the Frenchman, handing her the jeweler's glass, but keeping hold of her hand once the jeweler's glass was in it. "Dare to know."

"Okay."

"
FOLLOW ME!
" he said, and pulled her into a little orange car with peeling paint.

Because of a short journey I was obliged to take, to Geneva to attend to some matters regarding the publication of an edition of my
Treatise on Sense and Sociability,
I was forced to abandon temporarily my instruction of Rameau's niece. Separated from my pupil for over a month, I found myself bound to her more and more in imagination. I could not concentrate. I tried to write but could not. I tried to find something to do and began one task and gave it up for another, and that for yet another; my hands stopped of their own accord. I had never experienced anything like it.

At last, my business was successfully completed, much to my advantage, I might add, and yet I had so regretted the necessity for a trip that interrupted the education of my remarkable pupil that I returned with the greatest alacrity at my command.

Immediately upon reaching the house of the marquise, I inquired as to the whereabouts of Rameau's niece and, hearing that my student was walking alone in the garden, without stopping even to change my clothing, I followed in order to search her out.

My trip had afforded me many new experiences and given me much time for contemplation of new ideas, as well as the ideas my pupil and I had explored so diligently together, and I longed to impart to my student the fruits of my discoveries and of the many evenings spent in lonely contemplation, as soon as was feasible.

Walking through the garden, I recalled with rising spirits our first meeting, for memory can produce the most delicious state in a sensitive soul. I recalled how the affection we had conceived for our studies had grown from day to day. I rapturously recounted the observations I had made during our mutual pursuit of enlightenment: her sweet breath; her forehead, white and smooth and beautifully shaped; her eyes, sparkling with curiosity and intelligence; her tiny, dimpled hands; her bosom, firm as a statue and admirably formed; her rounded arms; her neck, exquisitely unusual in its beauty.

I walked on, thinking of how, after a night of the give and take of rigorous philosophical discussion, of delving unrelentingly for knowledge and for truth, my pupil would wrap her figure, which was of perfect proportions, in a muslin nightgown and leave my room, turning back at the door, running back to me to thank me for my efforts on her behalf, throwing her arms around my neck and covering me with kisses of gratitude. Truly, there is nothing so rewarding as the instruction of the young.

When Margaret married Edward, she felt as if she'd walked in through a door and closed it gently behind her. Now that door had somehow opened. She'd looked through it, and it would no longer stay shut. It rattled with every breeze.

I have become an adulteress, she thought. An adulteress in the head. Many people are adulteresses. But until now I was not one of them and could not imagine becoming one of them. Now it is all I imagine.

She, Margaret Nathan, was one of those hateful people—the doctors who let their wives support them through medical school, then messed around with someone younger. She was the father of three who decided to find himself with his daughter's best friend. She was a restless housewife who became a campaign volunteer only to run off with a losing senatorial candidate. She was a philanderer, a liar, and a cheat, the villain of every pop song ever written.

In New York, away from statues and mute Frenchmen, Margaret waited for her intemperate, wanton mood to disperse. But it did not. I am obsessed, she realized. I think of nothing else. A visit to the fish market has become a bawdy escapade during which I look at young men in their running tights. I look at the man in Apartment 3E across the hall and I wonder if I will sleep with him. I look at Edward and wonder when I will betray him.

She had always told Edward everything, but she certainly could not tell him this. He would laugh at first, then, when he understood, he would be disgusted and hurt. Margaret ate with him and slept with him, but she did not really talk to him. The only thing she had to say she could not say to him.

It seemed impossible, to feel so distant from the man she loved. She had gone to Prague, seen some marble feet, and felt desire. So what? But her adventure played itself out in her imagination, over and over again. The man in the plane, asleep on her breast, burrowed deeper and deeper in her dreams.

"Look," Edward cried, pulling her to the window. "Look outside." He showed her proudly, as if the deep blue sky, its clarity, its quick white clouds, were his, or at least his doing. "Now out you go. A nice brisk walk. Do you good, darling."

"I walked in Prague. In New York I sit."

"Margaret, I'm worried about you. You're so glum and remote. You require cheering up. Shall we go out tonight? Do you want me to buy you a puppy?"

Margaret sighed.

"A mink coat? Just like Mummy's?"

Margaret thought of how they electrocute minks. One of Edward's students, the boy who had grown up on a mink farm, had described it to Margaret at dinner as one of Edward's other students, the adoring girl from the Boston suburb, had listened with a hurt, sad expression.

"Why are you being so nice to me?" Margaret asked Edward now.

"Yes, well, perhaps it was misguided. But I felt your absence deeply, Margaret. It's a relief to have you back with me."