Rameau's Niece

by Cathleen Schine

He ran his hand through his hair, and Margaret remembered the smell of it and the feel of it against her face.

  "My father and mother like you so much. My father say you are so knowledgeable about prison reform in the United States."

  His hands rested on the polyurethane-coated table. His fingers were long and all nearly the same length, his nails rounded and regular. He wore no wedding ring.

  "Your husband has a good taste in music," he said.

  "Are you married?"

  "Divorced."

  Martin had a polished, elegant manner that occasionally burst into boyishness. Through the cheers, boos, grunts, and squeaks of large sneakers on the televised basketball courts that surrounded them, he remarked that the sports bar was "really something!" He mentioned ways the establishment could upgrade both the video equipment and the audio equipment. He told her he had thought about her many times since their meeting on the plane.

  "Your laryngitis is better," she said:

  Martin stared around him at the young lawyers and stockbrokers and smiled. "America!" he said.

  Several times he refilled her glass of mineral water with as much courtly solicitude as if she had been drinking champagne. At her coronation.

  When her hamburger came, Margaret looked at it with distaste. She was too nervous to eat. Martin watched her with concern.

  "Marguerite, you are not well."

  "I don't look well?"

  "You look very well! Very, very well."

  "Oh."

  "But you look as though you don't feel well, you see?"

  Margaret saw. She saw a beautifully dressed, beautifully mannered, beautiful-faced man with a sexy belly and a kind disposition. No wonder I look as though I feel sick, she thought.

  "My daughter loves New York," Martin was saying. "We have been here together." His daughter was twenty-four.

  "Why, she's almost my age!" Margaret said. The dirty old man. No, no, that didn't fit him at all. The lecherous roué. That didn't fit him either, but it suited Margaret's sense of romantic propriety much better.

  "Yes," he said. "She's very much like you."

  He kissed her good night on both cheeks. Margaret put her hand on his arm, on his cashmere-covered arm.

  "You have the softest clothes," she said.

  He looked at her quizzically. A lock of hair had fallen between his glasses and his left eye. Margaret thought to push it away, but he did it himself first.

  "Good-bye, my friend, my old friend," Martin said. He raised his hand for a taxi.

  Margaret panicked. Was he going? Just like that? Would she never see him again, never again see Martin Court, the man obviously fated to become her lover?

  "I have something for your father," she said quickly. Good thinking, Margaret! "A gift. A book. I'm so grateful. Are you free tomorrow? I'll give it to you then. I'll take you sightseeing. If I don't get lost. I won't get lost. That was a joke."

  "Yes, I know," he said.

  Her hand was still on his sleeve. She pulled it away.

  He reached in his pocket for a datebook. "Friday," he said. "That is good?"

  "That is good."

  "You're very kind, Marguerite," he said as he got into a cab. "Kind to foreigners."

  Margaret walked home thinking that the cheers of sports fans would never be the same for her. The lock of hair that had fallen over Martin's left eye remained, tantalizing, in her mind, a veil she must push aside. Martin. Divorced. One twenty-four-year-old daughter. Forty-nine himself. Mathematics and music, he said, are the same; they are the laws of the universe. Would she care to listen to his electronics sometime? She would be astounded. They were really something!

  Oh yes! she had wanted to say. I'll listen to your electronics. Just plug them in.

  Across the table, bathed in the flickering light of the six TVs, he was irresistible, his face undeniably, obviously, foreign, his voice high-pitched and glamorously out of context.

  Edward was already home. I've been hypnotized, she thought. Don't break my spell. Tall and familiar as a tree in the dark hallway, he put his arms around her, but Margaret thought again of Martin, the man on the plane, in the sports bar, on the sidewalk, a face in a cab.

  "'Not to be in love with you,'" said Edward. "'I can't remember what it was like. It must've been lousy.'" He kissed the top of her head. "Schuyler," he said.

  Guilty, and angry that she felt guilty—for absolutely nothing!—she said, "Why do you always quote other people? Don't you ever have anything to say for yourself?"

  Edward jumped, he was so startled. He looked at her questioningly, then walked away, silent, into the study and closed the door behind him.

  Margaret thought, He will never forgive me. He quotes things out of love and excitement, like a boy rattling a box of shiny pebbles, opening and closing it, then opening it again. I've insulted his pretty stones. I threw them in the river.

  And Margaret had the feeling she had just crossed a line, a line of civility that was required for love. When in love, one felt free and safe to reveal the deepest, most secret truths about oneself. But there were truths about the other person that one never revealed, not because of fear or shame, but out of acceptance—out of love.

  I have been capricious and thoughtless, she realized. Like a child who calls a fat man fat. But she couldn't apologize. Her mouth refused to form the words. She formed so few words for him these days.

  Edward was too courteous to stop speaking to her altogether. But it seemed to her that after this he stopped taking any pleasure in his words. Margaret sometimes waited for him to try to speak to her about their not really speaking, but their silence only grew in authority, a strict and overbearing mother. It never quite let the two of them out of its sight. Edward, the booming Walt Whitman scholar, singing of "Life immense in passion, pulse, and power," lived his life with vigor and joy. It was the only way he knew how. But Margaret had withdrawn vigor and joy, leaving a vacuum, an absence, and he backed away from her uncertainly, like a cat from a puddle. They existed cautiously, new neighbors in their old life.

  Lily sat on the grass in the park, where they now met quite regularly for lunch. She had taken off her shoes, black pointy pumps that lurked, stark and sinister, beside her bare feet on the bright spring grass. She had small, even toes (to match her teeth) dabbed with pearly nail polish.

  Edward was with them, and Margaret was annoyed. She wanted to talk to Lily about Martin. She wanted Lily to herself. Disgruntled, she lay back in the grass, ignoring both of them. They ate their sandwiches and chatted about gardening. Gardening! Well, Edward was to be forgiven, being English and all. But Lily had no excuse. Lily was a garden, didn't she realize that? She tended to herself with such care. What interest could she have left for a patch of dirt with some plant life that required constant nursing and had names impossible to remember, and then, after months of being coddled, died?

  "Gardens are depressing," Margaret said. "Everything dies. Right in front of your eyes."

  "Margaret, you are an absolutist," Edward said.

  "Just don't quote Whitman at me."

  "Oh, Margaret," Lily said.

  Margaret sat up. Lily was looking at Edward with her lavender eyes.

  "Anyway, I like Whitman," Lily said. "He took on the bourgeoisie."

  "He was the bourgeoisie," Margaret said.

  That night, as Margaret watched Edward load the dishwasher and wondered if Dr. Lipi had a girlfriend, Martin called.

  "Marguerite? You are ready? You still wish to be my guide?"

  The thought of her being someone else's guide was appalling. She was the guided. She was very good at being the guided.

  "Yes," she said. What would she show him? What did people do in New York, anyway? "Is there anything in particular you want to do?"

  "Already I have visited to Harlem. On the bus, the touring bus. Ah, that was really something! I saw United Nations and SoHo and East Village and World Trade Center and Brooklyn."

  "Really?"

  "An
d Statue of Liberty from Staten Island ferry."

  "Well. I don't know. The Empire State Building? My aunt used to work on the second floor."

  "No longer? I love this building. I have been there three years."

  "Three years ago."

  "Oui."

  "Oui."

  Margaret pondered. Zabar's?

  "Where are you staying?" she said.

  "Hotel Elysée. You will meet me here, perhaps? Friday. We will have lunch downtown. Then perhaps a museum? I hope to see the Frick Collection. You will join me, yes?"

  Well, Margaret thought, if this is what it entails—following Martin around—perhaps I can be his guide.

  EDWARD HAD GONE OUT for the evening with a professor from Princeton whom his department was hopelessly wooing, so Margaret called Lily. They decided to do what it seemed to Margaret one always did when one required something to do—go to a restaurant. Lily expressed regret at the absence of Edward, but Margaret assured her she need not be so polite.

  "I mean, how much life-affirming quotation can a person stand?" Margaret said. "Let him go show off to undergraduates. He's getting on my nerves."

  Lily looked at her closely. "Margaret," she said, "Edward is not one of your schmucky college boyfriends."

  "No. I didn't know him in college, that's true."

  Margaret wondered if she would tell Lily about Martin, now that she finally had the chance. She observed her own actions these days with great curiosity, as if they were someone else's. I don't seem to be telling her, she noted. I want to, but somehow, given this opportunity at last, I am finding it difficult. I can't after all just announce it: The man on the plane! He's here! He's come for me!

  They decided to go downtown to a restaurant owned by some friends. One of the friends was one of Margaret's college boyfriends, not schmucky at all, except that he had stubbornly preferred boys and came home from a summer in Rome with one who looked almost exactly like him. They had recently opened a restaurant in TriBeCa called Il Conto, and to their dismay, it had been discovered and approved by those people in New York who spend each evening discovering and approving new restaurants. Il Conto was a success. The two startled owners were now required to run it. To take reservations over the phone was easy enough, but then they had to honor them. They had to buy sufficient finocchio. The restaurant was not the toy they had expected, but a business crowded with artists and actors and agents all dressed in black and waiting, beaks gaping, to be fed.

  Whenever Margaret went there, the room, undulating with black-clad figures, roaring with conversation, appeared to her as a massive, many-headed beast, the monstrous offspring of a funeral and a bar mitzvah.

  Their friends were there, bookends in rumpled white shirts and Italian pants.

  "Go away," Jimmy said desperately after he'd kissed them hello. "There's no room. There's no food."

  "Stupid," said Carlo. "There's always room. There's always food."

  They waited at the bar. It was early, so they would not have to wait too long.

  "Maybe I'm not meant to be married," Margaret said, watching Jimmy fondly as he stood miserably at the door greeting patrons. She remembered waiting in the hall of his dorm so that she could accidentally run into him when he came out of his room. I'm going to tell her about Martin now, she thought. "There's this guy I met on the plane—"

  "Margaret, adultery is such a middle-class indulgence."

  "Edward thinks it's one's civic duty."

  Lily frowned. "Edward?" she said thoughtfully.

  Edward. Margaret sat on a barstool and sighed.

  "What is it?" Lily said, responding to the sigh, tilting her head with both playful mock tenderness and real tenderness.

  "Nothing."

  It was as if, once the idea of adultery had come into her head, it was the only idea there. She continued to notice men everywhere, all the time: men in suits, men in jeans; she noticed the bulge running diagonally across the frayed fly of every pair of faded 501s. Just like an old queen, checking out the merchandise. She watched young men in khaki pants filling out deposit slips at the bank; she watched their wrists, showing from their blue oxford cuffs, the way Victorian men had once strained to catch a glimpse of a well-turned ankle. She assessed delivery boys in their rippling bicycle pants. She had become an absurd receptor of sensory stimulation, undiscriminating, insatiable, a monster of empiricism.

  Lily put her hand on Margaret's shoulder and said, again, "What?"

  "Hi!" said a man who had silently—it seemed silent to Margaret anyway—crept up beside them. "You're waiting, too, huh? Like orphans in an orphanage! What a city. My friend is meeting me here. I read about this place."

  He was not bad-looking, a little chunky, a little short, a little weak-chinned, but not bad. Suit a little too expensive. His main flaw in Margaret's eyes—in Margaret's nose, really—was that he was lavishly covered in perfume, or cologne, or whatever men called it. Margaret wrinkled her nose and pulled back. It was a physical reaction. He was dense with spicy fumes. Lily noticed her pull back. She looked at Margaret, then at the man.

  Margaret suddenly realized the man was flirting with them. She realized it when Lily looked at her. She wasn't sure how she knew it from Lily's eyes, but she just suddenly did. He was trying to pick them up.

  Sickened by his scent, Margaret felt dizzy. Flirting with her, with Margaret? She realized she was shocked. Couldn't a person go out to dinner without some creep sidling up to her and stinking up the joint? In a panic of embarrassment, she helplessly listened to him describe his health club, the condo he rented in the Hamptons, and whatever else he thought might induce the ladies to take an interest in him.

  Margaret looked at the floor. Lily's shoes were blue suede and almost square, lifted high up on black rubber platform soles. Margaret tried to think of something to say to drive this impertinent man away. He had not even stopped to take a breather. Should he get a borzoi or a chow, or was a dog too much trouble for someone who took as many vacations as he did?

  "A dog is a problem for someone as independent as me..."

  How dare he, Margaret thought again. I'm a married woman! A married woman? Why, that was an idea. Margaret raised her glass with her left hand, hopefully waving her wedding ring in front of his face. Surely that would do it, would act upon him as a cross on Dracula.

  Some of her drink spilled. The man kept talking.

  "Now my accountant said, 'In your bracket? Move to Connecticut!' But, you know, I'm such a city person..."

  Suddenly, Margaret felt two hands around her waist, Lily's hands. Lily, on the other barstool, pulled Margaret over onto her lap. Her hands were clasped, her arms around Margaret's waist.

  "We're lesbians," Lily said in her alluring voice. She pressed her cheek gently against Margaret's. "We're lovers."

  There was silence then, blessed silence. Margaret felt Lily's body, warm and soft, pressed against her back, beneath her thighs. Lily smiled: Margaret could feel the smile on her own cheek.

  The man, annoyed and embarrassed, turned and walked to the other end of the bar.

  Lily began to laugh. "Asshole," she said.

  Lily moved her head, and Margaret felt her breath on her neck.

  A lesbian? she thought. Lily's lover?

  A lesbian! Lily's lover!

  Margaret found it difficult to breathe. She didn't move from Lily's lap. She couldn't. She didn't want to. This was amazing. She was a lesbian. It had never occurred to her before, but it was undeniable. She was sitting on a sexy girl's lap thinking about sex. What kind of sex? She found that difficult to visualize, in spite of a Chantal Akerman movie she had once seen, but surely that could all be negotiated later. Oh, Lily, Lily, what a discovery I have made on your lap.

  Lily gently pushed her off and Margaret stared at her, nearly speechless, for the remainder of the evening.

  It's all very well to be Lily's lover, but what about Lily? Margaret thought as she lay in bed awake. She couldn't be Lily's lesbian lover unless Lil
y, too, was a lesbian. Lily, Lily, Lily. Margaret felt again the heat of Lily's breath on her neck. She tried to picture Lily at school, walking across the lawn with Till. She remembered visiting their apartment, watching Lily and Till stroke their old, snoring cat.

  And then Margaret had a realization. It wasn't that she learned anything new, only that all the old scattered fragments of information suddenly made a pattern, a big bold unmistakable pattern that only I could have missed, Margaret thought—exchanges of glances, bitter arguments, an estrangement after Till's marriage to the odious Art, an awkward attentiveness to each other now, a way of speaking about each other, of not speaking about each other. Lily and Till. Of course. For years. The roommates. The best of friends. The couple. The lovers.

  Affairs with other women were fashionable at school, Margaret thought. So I'm a late bloomer. Lily, the feel of her and the whisper of her absurd words, Lily, the insinuating Lily, has become irresistible. So who am I to resist?

  Margaret lay in bed beside Edward, listening to his breathing, light and even. You're my husband, she thought. My wonderful husband. And she tenderly touched his head. There's been a terrible misunderstanding. Then she remembered Lily, the heat of Lily's body beneath her own on a barstool at a fashionable restaurant. She hadn't misunderstood that. She laughed and shook her head and said out loud, "This is ridiculous."

  Edward continued his airy breathing undisturbed.

  I am in love with three people and married to another, Margaret thought. But what is love? How do I know I'm in love? To "know" what love, or anything else, is, first I must ask, What is knowledge? Okay: "What is knowledge?" I don't, know.

  And then there are the three propositions. That is, (1) I'm in love with my dentist, (2) I want to sleep with a Belgian hi-fi manufacturer, (3) I am a lesbian. How can I be sure of their validity? Do they correspond to facts? Are they internally logical? Does certainty exist? Why can't I fall asleep? What is sleep? Does sleep exist? Not for me. I must demonstrate the validity of these three propositions. I must demonstrate the validity of sleep. I must verify the three propositions, but first the proposition of sleep. On the other hand, maybe I am asleep, and my inability to fall asleep is a dream.