Rameau's Niece

by Cathleen Schine

  It was Art who, in a flurry of self-importance, had insisted on taking Margaret's doctoral dissertation to an editor he knew, only to see it become the best-selling Anatomy of Madame de Montigny. Art and Margaret had never forgiven each other.

  He is a monster, Margaret thought, watching him greet his guests. An unholy monster of manipulation guarding the castle gate, a man who has learned the meaning, the secret, of other people's vanity and uses it to feed his own. Come, he seemed to say, submit to excessive flattery, my excessive flattery, come along. And as you sheepishly (shucks, you really mean it?) accepted his invitation, the gate slammed: clank. And you were—still outside.

  He rolled back his head and exposed his very good teeth. "Ah, here's my little discovery."

  Margaret looked down at the thick forest green carpet, guilty. But it sickens him, too, she thought. It sickens him too that his help helped.

  "You're marvelous, Margaret, marvelous," he said. "Open, simple, lacking all affectation."

  What Margaret had said, the inspiration for his effusive welcome, was "Hello." She tried to smile in a friendly, grateful way, but felt immediately that she had failed.

  "A conceptual breakthrough in the critical biography," he was saying. "The field can never be the same, never recover from this onslaught of..." He paused. "Well. How modestly you carry your genius, Margaret. I'm sure no one would ever suspect it was there at all." And he turned his shining smile to his next guest.

  Not only didn't people observe genius in Margaret—they detected very little intelligence at all. It was Margaret's fate, or misfortune as she saw it, to have inherited from her mother a face that was pleasant and decorative enough, but that in no way expressed her temperament or personality. As she suffered from panic, shyness, and critical disdain for her fellow man, all her fellow man saw was a pretty young woman with undignified Shirley Temple curls, a spray of freckles across her nose, and a wide eager look in her brown eyes which might easily be interpreted as cheerful self-confidence.

  Would that I were sallow and severe and haughty, she thought, my thin hair in a tight French knot. But Margaret looked jolly and content instead.

  She sat down, turned, and noted that she was mercifully not sitting next to herself. She was beside a man known to her slightly, and only by meetings at parties such as this one. There he sits, she thought, patiently waiting to be unable to strike up an interesting conversation with me.

  He was a writer, a fairly fashionable one from the East Side with a brownstone and a table at the sort of restaurant at which writers had tables, a best seller or two in his past, and a small, lingering portion of celebrity that she found particularly intimidating. He was just famous enough so that she ought to know some basic facts about him but not famous enough so that she did. She, on the other hand, had written a famous book, and enough had been written about her book so that she expected people to know what it was she had written about, but it was the kind of book that assured that no one had.

  She glanced around, looking for Edward, listening for his voice, hearing only other voices gliding stylishly through the topics of the day. This is what people did at dinner parties: talk. But the talk existed on some level beyond communication. It was decorative.

  Margaret saw Edward walking toward her. He put his hand on her cheek as he passed by but said nothing, and she felt almost forlorn. If Till had seated him next to Margaret, she wouldn't have to worry about making smooth flourishes of talk, or trying to follow it. She wouldn't have to be clever. She would listen instead, and she would hear Edward. His loud, exuberant talk would swoop her up, filling her deliriously with information and observation and line after line of American poetry.

  But Edward was destined for other parts, and Margaret sighed and took stock of her situation. On her left side, a highly perfumed girl slid in. Across from her sat a man who looked familiar, but perhaps it was just his eyeglasses; next to him was a woman whom Margaret might or might not have known; and so on around the large table, until Margaret met the pale blue eyes of her husband and she smiled. Some woman or other was next to Edward, then Till's appalling husband smirking and nodding ("You've created an entirely new vocabulary, a new critical language..."). Really, Margaret thought, Art's habit of thrusting greatness about, as if he had just this instant, and that instant, too, as if every instant he had just discovered a continent and were planting the flag, was becoming increasingly trying. Margaret detested Art and she liked Till very much, in the way that one likes a friend and no longer knows why. That Art and Till came together as a package was unfortunate, but they did come together and always would. Couples were miraculous, odd, ill-formed things that grew without reason and without grace, like double ears of corn. Still, she thought, Till should discipline him.

  Beside Art sat Lily, a friend of Till's from college whom Margaret hadn't seen in years but remembered liking. With her short, tousled black hair and red, pouty lips, she looked like a girl on the cover of a 1950s bohemian paperback.

  According to Till, Lily had traveled with one or two hangers-on, a motley collection of chic but unproductive artists, ever since college. The most loyal of them was with Lily tonight, a wiry middle-aged man named Pepe Pican who exhibited such contempt for his surroundings at all times that all he could bring himself to do was dine. He dined wherever and whenever he or anyone he knew was invited.

  "Hi," Margaret said to Lily. "Hello, Pepe."

  Pepe looked at her darkly and turned back to his plate.

  "Margaret! I haven't seen you in, I don't know, a century! I had a dream about you last week!" Lily said, then turned back to the man next to her.

  All around Margaret there were faces, more faces, smiling and laughing, their mouths opening and closing, easily, in the formation of words, the mystery of conversation. Margaret wanted to cry. She tried to recall which Eastern European government had fallen that day. Was it really Romania? She wished she was at a dinner party in Romania, beneath the family's single forty-watt light bulb, a spotty boiled potato on her plate. What a trivial person you are, Margaret, she thought. All the Romanians want to be here, where we're free. Free to be trivial.

  Margaret put her chin in her hand and watched Till. Till reached for her wine, and a joyous rattling chorus rose up, a choir of bangle bracelets. Her jacket was iridescent green, her long crimped hair jet black, her teeth white and large. At the head of the table, she jingled and sparkled as a goddess would, omniscient, powerful, confident.

  Till Turner was first and foremost a hostess, but she found, time to write, too. She was a playwright whose enormously popular body of work concentrated on small groups of women sitting in large moving vehicles—there was an airplane play, another on a bus, a train, a ferry—jouncing along, chewing the old bones of their lives until whole skeletons of marriage and divorce and aged parents and teenage children, an ossuary of relationships, lay gleaming white around them, clickety-clack.

  Till Turner was nicknamed Turner Off by one critic, but most of them welcomed her ability to churn out a new play every single year. Her apartment was old and the rooms large and square, not narrow and rectangular as in most New York apartments. Although Margaret was perfectly happy in her own apartment, when she went out she found herself inattentively, but invariably, appraising, and wanting, someone else's. She would stand, panting from the six flights of stairs, in a narrow garret in the East Village, trying to keep her balance on the slanted floor; or step out onto a balcony not much bigger than a shoe box from an apartment on Second Avenue and Sixty-eighth Street and listen to the traffic bray below; or search the dark, endless hall of a railroad flat near Columbia, looking for the dreary bathroom. It didn't matter where she was—every apartment had something, a leaking but romantic skylight, a view, a shower fixture. She vaguely wanted all of them, and of all of them the one she vaguely wanted most was this one, Till Turner's. Sunlight streamed through the treetops to the broad windows during the day. Beyond the trees was the park and then the river. At night, the light
s of New Jersey twinkled merrily through the leaves: you over there may ridicule us over here, the New Jersey lights seemed to say, but look, just look who you're staring at, and look who we get to watch!

  Now Till was leaning over the back of Lily's chair, speaking rapidly and softly to Lily, and Margaret watched them with envy, wishing someone, anyone, would at that moment speak rapidly and softly to her, or even loudly and excruciatingly slowly. Till looked up and saw that Margaret was watching. She pulled away from Lily with a little laugh.

  "I haven't seen Lily in a long time," she said. She laughed again and moved on to another guest.

  "Margaret!" said Lily from across the table, her head tilted to one side as if Margaret were a very rare bird indeed. "In the dream, we were reading Ovid together. Translating for a course. Wild? In straight-backed chairs. Just like Mr. Griswold's class, remember?"

  "I've never studied Latin," Margaret said. "I never read Ovid."

  "Of course you have," Lily said reassuringly. "And you're absolutely scandalous, with your best seller and all your prizes. I'm so envious I could spit." She reached out and put her hand on Margaret's and patted it and didn't seem the least bit envious, only amused.

  "Don't spit," Margaret said.

  Maybe I should hone my poor socialization skills with Lily, Margaret thought halfheartedly, noticing Lily's vintage white silk suit. She's exotic. She looks like a post-quickie-divorce Las Vegas bride.

  Till, in and out of the room, up and down in her seat, back and forth and round and round among the guests, now approached Margaret's vicinity. Thank God she won't wonder at my magnificent simplicity the way her unbearable husband did. Margaret thought she heard Art discussing his SAT scores. He was forty years old. "It was an onerous burden. I cheated to bring them down, of course."

  Till stood beside Margaret now. Her appearance had a biblical quality, flowing in various ways and directions—skirts, hair, scarves, and sleeves. In her deep voice, a hoarse, gravelly melody of slightly Southern intonation, she said "Telephone" to the girl beside Margaret with such resonance and respect that the telephone ceased all at once to be a convenience and returned instead to its early, almost mythic stature—it was again an invention. As the girl beside her silently rose and wafted away, Margaret wondered anew at Till.

  "Margaret," Till said, and she looked at Margaret with such evident interest and approval, such enthusiasm. This, Margaret thought, is a kind of power. To make other people feel they are important to you. "Margaret," Till repeated, as if her very name were a joy to the senses and the intellect both. "What are you working on?"

  "A sequel."

  "Ah. Margaret the scholar. I admire you, Margaret. I mean, your work actually has stature. You don't know that because you're so absurdly self-effacing, but you have an impact on people, on the way people think..."

  Margaret said, "Marchons, marchons."

  But her work did march victoriously, and she sometimes watched its odd popularity with alarm. The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny had been reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review as "an unusually accessible, one might even say readable, work of scholarship that addresses issues as relevant to twentieth-century women as to the women of the Age of Enlightenment," and had crept onto the best-seller list, where it settled in for nineteen weeks.

  "By the end of the eighteenth century," the review said, "the sturdy peasant had replaced the delicate aristocrat as the physical ideal. Breast-feeding, says Nathan, became a national obsession: 'The bosom metamorphosed from decorative bauble to natural wonder. Charlotte de Montigny, a student of anatomy and therefore conscious of these changes in sentiment, recognized them as revolutionary and sought to name them. She did this by renaming the human body in a little-known tract called Anatomie sans culotte.'"

  Who cares? Margaret had wondered, reading the review. Only I care. Only I, who have spent so much of my adult life with this woman and her body parts. No one else could possibly care.

  But they did. They cared that the feet were named lafayettes, the erector penis the crescam ut prosim (words, meaning "Let me grow, in order to benefit mankind," engraved on Lafayette's sword by Benjamin Franklin, while the testicles, the cur nons, or "why nots," were named after the other motto on the sword); it intrigued them that the sigmoid notch had become the vainqueur de la Bastille, that the mammary glands were dubbed the citoyens bienfaisant.

  The book was hailed by every publication from Savvy to Dyke: A Quarterly as a feminist breakthrough. A woman had written it about a woman who had turned the body upside down, literally, beginning her anatomy at the feet and working her way up past le quatorze juillet (the heart) to the voltaires (the eyes). The feminist theoretical journal Enclitic praised it as a seminal work in the study of the politics of the body in an article called "Feet First: Inverting the Anatomical Hierarchy." An HBO TV movie, called simply Anatomy and starring Mariel Hemingway, was in production. And in a special issue of Diacritics, devoted entirely to Margaret's book, Jacques Maridou had written a highly influential essay revealing Charlotte de Montigny's tract on the anatomy to be a precursor of postmodern bricolage. Margaret was a popular pedant.

  "Now, Margaret, listen," Till continued in a somber whisper that conveyed both urgency and special, exclusive trust. "Be especially nice to Dominique. She just got in from Paris and she doesn't know a soul." She kissed Margaret on both cheeks, in honor of Dominique, no doubt, and returned to her duties.

  So the girl who'd been sitting beside Margaret was named Dominique and came from France. No wonder her scent was so, so—scented. Well, certainly I know what it feels like to sit on the outside looking in. But will I be able to do my part for the foreigner with the overdeveloped taste for perfume? Margaret asked herself.

  She was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. The room was warm, the talk noisy. The gossip about craven producers and publishers, about billionaire real estate magnates (the popes and monarchs of this particular circle of urban courtiers), the revelations and snickers about other writers, all floated tantalizingly by. She couldn't keep the names straight. Ron Perelman and Richard Perle; she knew she disapproved of them both, but which one for which reason? She could not recall. Well, yes, now she could, now that the conversation had turned to something else. Harold Brodkey or Joseph Brodsky? Saul Steinberg or Saul Steinberg? Oh, where was that perfumed Parisian, who had none of these worries, who knew that every American was a gangster, a cowboy, or an arbitrageur?

  I have forgotten even more than I ever knew, Margaret thought. Names and dates, faces, theories—she sought them with a kind of desperation. She could never possess them, not really, and so they had become for her precious, moving, full of wonder. Margaret had become a connoisseur of these treasures, they were so rare, so delicate, so easily destroyed. Insatiable, she had studied history in college and then in graduate school, plunging into dusty libraries and dreary indices as if they were pools of clear, cool water.

  Margaret was considered an important new voice after the publication of her book. But by those who met her, at conferences or even at dinner, she was considered a mute, and so a fool. I don't want to be a mute fool, she thought. I want to be witty and wise. Like Edward. If only Edward were a ventriloquist. I could move my mouth and not worry about what came out. And I could sit on his knee!

  The man next to her was still next to her, wasn't he? Well, perhaps she could say she had loved his last book. She hadn't read it. But it's possible she would have loved it if she had. Her mother had read it over the summer, and she had loved it. She could say that.

  Across from her, beyond the baskets and bowls and platters of fashionable food, there was a skinny man who, with his red, shiny, bald head, reminded her of her Uncle Harry. Maybe, like Uncle Harry, he would let her puff on his cigar and then, when it was bedtime and she had to go to her room, slip her a new, crisp dollar bill. Next to him, Lily discussed life-size human figures, knitted and stuffed with cotton rags, which she referred to as sculptures. Margaret thought of the toy
monkeys made from gray and red socks. She wondered if Lily actually knitted sculptures, clicking her needles in a SoHo rocking chair, or if she merely admired them. And then she remembered—Lily was a critic of something. Art? Yes, sort of. She was the editor of a trendy feminist art journal. The Gaze. And she wrote a column about women's health issues, "Body Text," for some place like Harper's Bazaar.

  Margaret stared miserably at her plate. I am too self-centered, she thought. Too vain and too easily bored.

  "Well," the author said in response to something Margaret had, as usual, missed, "if men have no close friends, and that's what they say, that men have no close friends, then why are there so many buddy-buddy movies? I wonder if the reason is just that, that men have so few close friends. American men have created this myth..."

  Margaret mused on her own self-absorption. If people expect anything of me, I resent them and feel incompetent and ill at ease. And yet I expect so much, and if I don't get it, I feel only contempt. I'm sort of an asshole, she thought.

  "Politically, the myth of the American male had its strongest expression in Ronald Reagan."

  "Do you really think so?" she blurted out, determined suddenly to join in, her voice sounding loud to her. "Eisenhower is my idea of an American male."

  "And that is why she married me, isn't it, darling?" said her husband in his most affected imperial British (she rules the waves!) accent. I say, said the accent, what a funny little colony it is.

  No, Margaret thought. I married you because I'm greedy and you're generous, because when I'm with you I don't notice that I've forgotten everything because you have forgotten nothing.

  For years she had toiled in the library, willful and superior, tolerating this boyfriend, then that boyfriend, for a while, then abruptly dumping the current one to take up unenthusiastically with another, proud of her detachment—one false move and you're out, buster—all the while waiting. Waiting for Edward, of course, with whom the fog of her life took on a discernible shape, an elegant, exquisite shape, like Jove when he had abandoned his cloudy disguise after seducing Io.