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."
SOMETIMES 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!"
Margare
t 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.
And she imagined walking with Edward through a city she had never seen. Had she even seen a picture of Prague until the newspapers began running photographs of students huddled around candles at the foot of the statue of King Wenceslaus on his horse? She imagined walking beneath King Wenceslaus, gently stepping over flickering tapers and brave students wrapped in knitted scarves.
Next month. That was soon. She would have to start preparing something to say immediately. Next month. Well, if it was next month, she realized, she would have to meet truth and beauty and the transcendent pilsner on her own. For that was the beginning of the new term, and Edward, the Virgil to her wandering Dante (and to everyone else's), would have to stay home and teach, teach other people, teach students. That was a pity. Edward was always good to have around. In case she forgot something. Like her name. Well, she could always make one up. She hadn't traveled alone in years. And after her trips with Edward, orgies of food, sex, and culture, it didn't seem quite possible to travel alone. What would she talk about? And with whom? And Margaret hated to give lectures, suffering from stage fright, losing her place in her notes, forgetting the subject of the talk in mid-sentence. But still—Prague! Kafka's city! Havel's city! And Comenius's city, too, of course.
"Oh, you wrote that book," a young man said to her.
Margaret reddened but stood her ground. She nodded bravely.
"Oh." He smiled and walked away.
A woman began talking to Margaret about the difficulty of assessing the relationship between the forms of popular culture (by which she meant images, she considerately explained) and their consumers. Margaret wondered if she was referring to the Nielsen ratings system, but then the woman noted with some conviction that "pop had never really signified with one discourse," and Margaret knew that she was not. Oh, Prague! she thought. Where are you when I need you?
She thought how much she would miss Edward, even for a week, how much she liked him, how often she saw him, how little Kafka she had read. She found Edward chatting in Russian (It sounded like Russian, but then, who knew? Perhaps he'd learned Polish on the sly, or Czech) with a skinny, handsome man with bad teeth, and when there was a pause, Edward introduced her, she smiled, did not even take in the man's name long enough to forget it, waited till he'd drifted away, and then told Edward she'd been invited to Prague. "To talk about traditions in underground literature," she said.
"Dirty books? That's marvelous. Shall I join you? No, of course I can't if you're off so soon. The term will be just beginning." He offered her a glass of some sort of spiced wine. "What a grisly business Christmas is," he said. "I have been thinking of a plan for calendar reform which would improve matters immensely. It is obviously incompatible with the exciting educational advances of today for children to be expected to remember complex rhymes such as 'Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November,' don't you agree? So I propose that ten months be of thirty-one days each, leaving just two exceptions: February, with its twenty-eight, and December, which would have only twenty-seven days. Consequently, New Year's Eve would come forty-eight hours after Christmas Day and only twenty-four after Boxing Day. The gain for sanity, the boost to production, the sheer beauty of the scheme from all points of view, make me wonder why it has not been promulgated before." He put his arm around her. His hand squeezed her shoulder. "You haven't been away from me, Margaret, in such a very long time."
"Let's go home," Margaret said softly.
"Yes," Edward said, and he kissed her head.
"I'll be lost without you, Edward. Like Virgil without Dante. I mean, Dante without Virgil."
"No, darling. Like Joseph K. You're going to Prague, you see, not to hell."
Margaret frowned, embarrassed, and walked off.
"'Then my leader went on with great strides...'" Edward recited the lines from Dante at the top of his lungs, following her as he spoke. "'Her looks disturbed somewhat with anger; so I left these burdened souls, following the prints of the dear feet.'"
A WEEK OR SO LATER, Till called to invite Margaret to a dinner party in honor of a young unproduced playwright she had taken up. Till discovered young unproduced playwrights. It was a hobby. She was much admired for her generosity, although Margaret had noticed that she then proceeded to give the young unproduced playwrights advice like, Why not take a couple of years off and go to medical school? or, Your work is much too important to be produced in such a small theater, which pretty much assured they would become old unproduced playwrights.
Margaret did not think she could face another evening at Till's large, busy table just yet, so she suggested they have lunch together instead.
"I'll bring Lily, too," Till said.
Yes, Margaret thought. Why not recreate an earlier era, when lonely girlfriends gathered together over coffee shop tables, covered wagons briefly turned away from the wilderness toward the warm fire? Sometimes Margaret wondered if she missed being lonely. There had been a certain down-and-out vigor to her plight which appeared lean, almost glamorous, compared to the round contentment she experienced now.
They met at a hamburger place in the neighborhood. Margaret got there first and watched Till clatter in on gold sequined high heels, rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, or very nearly. Till, like John F. Kennedy, did n
ot wear a coat. It was a gift, she said, her inner warmth.
Together they watched Lily make her entrance. Her cheeks were, as always, just barely flushed, her short wavy hair in easy disarray. An open, beckoning, corruptible-peasant-faced sort of person, she maneuvered through the tables with her lips slightly parted and her eyes slightly glazed. Lily always looked as if she had just been fucked. This look appealed to Margaret. How did one achieve it?
"Oy, what a day," Lily said, sliding into the booth with a motion so fluid and so revealing of the many positive features of her figure that Margaret wondered if she practiced sliding into coffee shop booths, if she went to a health club specializing in coffee-shop-booth-sliding workouts. And one, two, three, sliiide!
"Notice how the menu says 'We,'" Lily said immediately, pointing to Till's open menu with one hand while unzipping her motorcycle jacket with the other. "'We have a meat loaf special today'! Do you think that 'we' includes us? Of course not. The 'we' refers to them. Hello, doll." And she kissed Till on the cheek, then leaned across the table and kissed Margaret.
Margaret now remembered why she hadn't seen Lily much in the years since college. Because she disliked Lily. At least, she disliked a good thirty percent of the words that tumbled happily from Lily's red, cherub lips.
"It's just a menu," Margaret said. And she ordered the meat loaf.
"We have no meat loaf today," said the waitress.
Lily giggled. "Never trust the transparency of meaning, Margaret."
"Now, girls," Till said in the fey, show-biz tone that had been popular among them in college, but that she alone had kept up.
"It's still just a menu," Margaret said irritably.
"I wrote my dissertation about menus," Lily said. Then she turned the sultry warmth of her gaze on Margaret, smiled, squeezed Margaret's arm, and seemed so genuinely pleased to see her that Margaret smiled and knew she must forgive anything Lily said because of the way she said it—the flirtatious, absurdly good-natured warmth; her voice, the whisper of a starlet; and the way she giggled deliciously. And then, perhaps most important, Lily had always seemed to like Margaret so much. That was greatly in her favor.
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