Rameau's Niece

by Cathleen Schine

  Margaret lusted after Dr. Lipi, Dr. Lipi the beautifully proportioned, proselytizing tooth scholar. Once he projected onto a screen slides of bacteria he had scraped from her teeth. Margaret sat attracted, repelled, transfixed. They discussed the anatomy of teeth, Margaret wondering at his unquenchable fascination with the bits and pieces of the mouth, looking at his own mouth, his sensuous lips, his teeth, listening and watching, occasionally offering one of the new names created by Madame de Montigny, to Dr. Lipi's obvious delight. He was an extraordinarily handsome man, muscular but without bulk, his face half soft and sensuous, half craggy and almost unnaturally alert. He stood often in a pose so suggestive and so familiar and yet so unusual that Margaret felt her breathing lose its rhythm and the blood thump crazily in her ears. His wide shoulders and slim torso tilted languorously back, his flat stomach curved in gently, one leg bent at the knee, one arm curled up in front of him until his cupped hand rested in the crook of his neck, as though he were holding something slung over his shoulder, and sometimes he did hold something like that, a manila folder or his blue plastic mask. Margaret stared and stared until she realized that he stood as Michelangelo's David stood, a perfect, magnificent copy, like the one in the square by the Uffizi, the one covered with pigeons. Pigeons would have gathered with pride on Dr. Lipi, so elegantly did he stand, Margaret the pigeon delirious among them.

  Dr. Lipi had a cable dentistry show called "Eye on Your Teeth." He had a tooth spa at Elizabeth Arden. He traveled in private jets to attend to the teeth of the rich and famous. He chatted on about osteoblasts and cement corpuscles, Hertwig's epithelial sheath, and the interglobular spaces of Czermak. And sometimes he wondered if perhaps he didn't owe it to the world to minister to those less fortunate as well.

  "You could have a truck," Margaret suggested. "Like the Lubavitchers."

  As Dr. Lipi gravely considered this suggestion, Margaret considered his lovely, shapely, sinewy arms as they emerged from his short-sleeved shirt, and she thought, He's mad as a hatter, isn't he?

  But the spark of fanaticism was itself a draw. Excitement burned within Dr. Sammy Lipi, glowing embers of proselytizing passion, and excitement excites those around it, like a preacher howling in the stifling shade of a southern tent.

  I believe, Margaret thought. I can floss, oh, Lord! I can floss!

  Just as Richard predicted, Margaret began receiving newsletters from Dr. Lipi. They touched on dental implants, the controversy over fluoridated water, adhesion techniques, base and noble metals, acrylic and porcelain, treatable anatomical deformities, as well as total etch, "wet field" dentin bonding, and intra-oral plating. She kept the letters in her dresser drawer among her socks, taking one out and perusing it occasionally as if it were a billet-doux. But her favorite remained the first, a letter sent routinely to all new patients, an introduction of sorts, entitled "Enlightened Dentistry."

  NEWSLETTER #101

  Dear Patient:

  I am a dentist, it is my job. But in the United States, at the dawning of a new decade, "to dentist" is more than an occupation. With the most recent technological and scientific progress in oral health care, Americans, indeed all of modern mankind, have the opportunity to reach higher than ever before toward dental achievement. Perfection is no longer an unattainable myth, but a real possibility. Dentistry, for me, is a search for that perfection for my patients, for patients everywhere.

  A natural contract exists between each of us and his or her teeth. Each has a responsibility to the other. Man was born with an innate ability to care for his teeth—saliva. Saliva is nature's own cleansing solution. But it is through observation and education that we build on nature's gifts. Observe, keep in touch with your teeth. Listen to what they have to tell you. If you were to pay half as much attention to your teeth as I do, thousands of teeth could be saved each year. A tooth is a terrible thing to waste. Visit your dentist, periodontist, or oral-maxillofacial surgeon for regular checkups.

  And remember, I am here for you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Your teeth don't take vacations. Neither do I.

  As patients, all of us can play a role in the realization of universal dental health.

  Your dentist and fellow patient,

  Dr. Samuel Lipi

  AT LUNCH WITH LILY, this time in the park, Margaret sat on the bench trying not to lose control of her tuna fish sandwich and wondered if love would improve her memory. Could she recall Dr. Lipi's voice? His words? The curve of his neck, the hue of his skin? Perhaps. She wasn't sure, so overwhelmed were all her thoughts of him by simple desire, her own desire.

  The person who is completely deprived of a good memory feels; but he does not judge: judgment implies the comparison of two ideas.

  "I'm in love with my dentist," she said.

  Lily looked at her attentively. Her mouth was full.

  "I think I got married too young. I showed a lack of judgment. Judgment requires comparison."

  "Margaret, you can hardly claim a dearth of experience," Lily said.

  "Yes, but a person completely deprived of a good memory feels but cannot judge. I am completely deprived of a good memory."

  "Judgment is tyranny, Margaret. Anyway, Edward is so sexy."

  "Yeah," Margaret said. She ate her sandwich and silently admired the green of the new grass, the warm air, the pink flush of Lily's cheeks, the highly intellectual nicotine stains on her fingers, the rough whisper of her starlet voice.

  "I like you, Lily," she said, embarrassed by her earlier confession. "You listen to any old crap I feel the need to say." And I to you, she added silently, as Lily happily wondered if the homeless men camped in the tunnel over there had chosen it because of its vaginal resonance.

  Dr. Lipi was in her thoughts. Margaret daydreamed like a teenager. They would go to the beach and walk, the way teenagers went to the beach and walked. They would ride in a car and talk, earnestly, with the radio playing. They would hold hands in the park. In all of these fantasies, Dr. Lipi wore a white dentist's shirt, suggestively unbuttoned, then abruptly removed.

  "Richard," she said to her editor on the phone, "I'm in love with your dentist. Our dentist."

  "Oh, yes, so was I. You'll get over it."

  "No I won't. Will I? Why will I?"

  "When the bill comes."

  "Richard, I'm not joking. I have a burning crush on Dr. Lipi the dentist," Margaret said. She meant to seem as if she were joking, or could be joking, but there must have been something in her voice that betrayed her.

  "What does Edward think of your new interest in dentistry? Planning caps, dear? Laminates, perhaps. Margaret, behave yourself."

  "Why?"

  "Open wide!" Richard said, laughing.

  Dream on, Margaret thought, but she couldn't quite bring herself to say it.

  "Margaret, finish your dirty book, for God's sake," Richard was saying. "Is your husband neglecting you?"

  "No. Edward doesn't neglect anyone. Not even me."

  "Margaret, what ails you these days?" Edward said when she came home from the library and walked past him without saying a word. "It's spring!" He spread his arms dramatically and spoke in his deep, booming teaching voice. "But you come in the door like a blast of winter. The sun pales; gray winds howl; leaves shrivel on their branches." He stopped and then added in an ironic, gently mocking tone, "What is going on, Margaret?"

  Problems were delicate, mysterious objects to him, to be handled gingerly, with a mixture of self-deprecation and awe, as a new father handles a new baby. So few things were problems for Edward that when he encountered one, he slowed down the great roar of his being to a soft purr.

  "What's the matter, Margaret?" he said again, and he put one hand on her shoulder and stroked her cheek with the other. "What have I done?"

  "I don't know," Margaret said.

  "But I've done something?"

  "Have you?"

  "Well, it appears so," he said.

  "Aha!" she said, and turned to walk away.

 
"Margaret," Edward called after her. "Margaret, you know I am a man of unlimited patience. But even unlimited patience has a limit." And his voice was no longer ironic, or gently mocking.

  That desire is a state of uneasiness, everyone who reflects on himself will quickly find. Like hope deferred, desire deferred makes the heart grow sick.

  My desire and my hope had both been deferred at the sight of my pupil lying in the green grove, there bestowing in so liberal a fashion the favors of her understanding on another. And my underlying desire was of so high a pitch that it now raised my uneasiness to such a level that the heart within me cried out, "Give me the thing desired, give it me or I die!" Life itself and all its enjoyments became such a burden that it could not be borne under the lasting and unremoved pressure of such an uneasiness.

  After leaving my student still sitting, with no sign of remorse, upon the shaded green grass, I walked through the grounds of the estate of the Marquise de-, heedless as to my surroundings. I could have been walking in the shade of coconut palms, banana trees, and lemon trees in flower, on the slope of a mountain on a little island in the southern ocean. For all I could see before me was Rameau's niece.

  Anyone reflecting upon the thought he has of the delight which any present or absent thing is apt to produce in him has the idea we call love. I reflected upon the thought of the delight my pupil had produced in me in the past. I reflected upon it helplessly and without end.

  When a man declares in autumn when he is eating them, or in spring when there are none, that he loves grapes, it is no more but that the taste of the grapes delights him. Certainly, I thought, the taste of Rameau's niece had delighted me when she was there to be tasted. And when she was absent, then the recollection of that delight had followed me for hundreds of miles, accompanying me deliciously for days, for week after week, on my trip to Geneva. I had loved her.

  But let an alteration of health or constitution destroy the delight of the taste of grapes, and a man can be said to love grapes no longer. On the contrary, the thought of the pain which anything present or absent is apt to produce in us is what we call hatred.

  When I thought of my pupil, I thought of the pain she had produced in me, and the thought of that pain did indeed produce in me what we call hatred. I hated Rameau's niece.

  The days were getting longer, a little longer, and Margaret waded through swarms of elderly women at the fruit market out into a silvery dusk and an unaccustomed wash of clean, windy air which made her remember many other places and other times, albeit not very specifically. A mountain somewhere in northern Europe or maybe Colorado, a spring walk to school in Massachusetts, a beach, some beach.

  This was it, she realized. In New York, this was spring. She had just experienced it, a moment that recalled other moments, that suggested other places where trees and flowers blossomed, rodents awoke, insects hatched, and birds showed off. And now it was over. Springtime in New York. It had come and gone on that one fresh breeze. A bus roared past. A man stood on the corner holding an empty picture frame to his face, hollering, "I been framed!"

  At home, she threw herself down in the armchair in the living room and looked out at the sky as it grew darker. Was there milk in the grocery bag, or yogurt or chicken or fish? Something she ought to put away? She didn't care. She thought about Dr. Lipi, the way he stared with his sharp eyes. The man on the plane had such soft gray eyes. She'd seen a teenage boy in the lobby with fresh pink cheeks and the slack, greedy face of youth. Margaret leaned her head back. She liked this time of day, when everything faded so softly.

  When the doorbell rang, she jumped and shuddered and realized she must have fallen asleep. The apartment was quite dark now. She stumbled to the door. Edward must have forgotten his keys. Good. Everyone should forget something sometimes. And she would somehow not have wanted him to find her asleep, for when she slept she dreamed. She no longer wanted Edward to know what it was she dreamed about.

  "Hello," she said, blinking at the glare from the hall lights as she opened the door.

  "'Allo," replied the figure in the door. "But look who it is! It is you, the pretty girl from the airplane. Bonjour! 'Allo, 'allo!"

  No, not Edward.

  Margaret looked closer. Those thin lips, moist and pouting. The gray eyes. And the shirt. The green-and-white-striped shirt. It was the man from the plane, the man she dreamed about, the man who fell asleep on her face. But what was he doing here when he was awake, when she was awake? How had he found her? She hadn't told him her address, not even her name. And didn't he have any other shirts? She said nothing in her excitement. Nothing at all.

  "You are astonished to see me."

  Margaret nodded.

  "And I am astonished to see you!"

  But I live here, Margaret thought.

  "I look for Marguerite Nathan."

  "You find her," said Marguerite.

  "Yes? So pleasant that she is you!"

  "Yes. So pleasant." Margaret stared down at the bag of groceries she'd left on the floor by the door. The smell of scallions and overripe strawberries drifted up.

  "You are acquainted with my father. I am Martin Court, son of Jules Court, of Brussels. You have met him in Prague, yes? He gives me your name and location and says I am to meet you. But we meet already!"

  "Yes, we do."

  "That is really something!"

  Margaret looked at the shirt and the blue cashmere blazer and the unself-consciously protruding belly. I'm looking at him too long, she thought.

  "Follow me!" she said.

  In some confusion, she switched on lights, a lot of lights, every light she passed. The apartment glared. Margaret led Martin Court to the living room. She was not looking at him at all now, careful not to look at him. She turned to motion him to take a seat. Martin grasped her hand.

  I will swoon, she thought. She felt ill, and the bright lights burned her sleepy eyes. He had come for her. She was meant to take a lover, and now her lover was here, here for her to take. His hand closed around hers, large and warm around her suddenly icy fingers, tighter and tighter, drawing her toward him. His long fingers, curled around hers, pressed harder and harder, drawing her hand up slightly, but urgently, then down again. Martin Court was shaking her hand.

  "That is really something!" he said again. "Really, really something!"

  Margaret coughed, nodded, and sat down.

  Martin Court was an engineer of absurdly expensive hi-fi equipment whose company was hoping to break into the American market. He had been to New York twice since his father had rescued Margaret from the dangers of Prague's suggestively beautiful architecture, but only now had he found the time to look up the beneficiary of his father's excellent sense of direction.

  Margaret did not want to offer him coffee because he was French and would judge her coffee harshly, until she remembered he was Belgian. "Would you like a cup of coffee?" she said. Her voice sounded sharp to her, the squawk of an unpleasant night bird as it pounced on its prey.

  "Tea."

  In the kitchen, Margaret stood over the kettle and watched it not boil. He was here, in her house. His name was Martin, a name impossible to pronounce properly in French without sounding as if one's sinuses were blocked. His hair fell over his eyes, onto his big, oddly shaped glasses. What did she say to him now? She had already given him her life's history on the plane, told him her secret philistine theories of epistemology. Perhaps she should tell him Edward's Theory of Monogamy and the End of Evolution, a.k.a. Adultery, the Ultimate Self-Sacrifice.

  Margaret heard the front door open.

  "Oh, hello," she heard Edward say.

  "'Allo. I am Martin Court, a friend of Marguerite. You are a friend of Marguerite, too?"

  The kettle whistled shrilly.

  Margaret made a cup of tea for Martin Court and sat down and drank it. She hated tea.

  I will never go out there, she thought. I will stay here, by the stove. I will sleep on the stove like a Russian house serf. It's nice and warm in
here by the stove. Out there, it's too hot.

  She heard them laughing, talking about Wagner and George Bernard Shaw, the advantages of tube amplifiers and the necessity for something called Monster Cable.

  "Margaret," Edward said, coming into the kitchen. "How funny that you met your new chum on the plane. Have you asked him to dinner? He'll keep you company. I can't stay, I'm afraid."

  Margaret looked up at him, torn between suspicion and relief.

  "Department meeting," he said. "Multiculturalism in Literature—Too Little Too Late? I shouldn't think so, but then I have been wrong before. Ah well, the more the merrier. Bring on the cultures, let graduate students at 'em, a new supply of obscure works to grind into obscure theses, the new dry dust of new classics, sprinkled pitilessly upon innocent undergraduates. Perhaps my poets can survive. I can pass them off as homosexuals, or closet homosexuals, or protohomosexuals. Parahomosexuals!"

  "Don't be bitter."

  "No. You're right. It's ludicrous, what goes on, and I quite enjoy it. 'Me imperturbe ... aplomb in the midst of irrational things.' Did you offer the man a drink, darling?"

  He pulled two beers from the refrigerator and walked out.

  "Tea," Margaret said to his back. "I offered him coffee, and he wanted tea."

  But Edward didn't hear. He was already back in the living room with his new pal. Margaret listened to them. Her husband talking to her lover. Well, her lover in theory. Her husband in fact. She would sleep on the stove. In perpetuity.

  Margaret and Martin Court ended up going out to dinner. Margaret took him to the least romantic, noisiest restaurant she could think of, a sports bar with six large-screen television sets. Here I can think, she said to herself, and decide what I must do. Without any music or soft lights to cloud my judgment. Just flashing scoreboards and the din of an angry mob.

  Martin drank a beer, and Margaret watched.

  "I am happy to get to know you," he said.