Rameau's Niece

by Cathleen Schine

  This last idea relaxed her, and Margaret thought no more about it, or about anything at all, drifting peacefully into unconsciousness.

  MARTIN WAS THE KIND OF MAN who floated up stairs in spite of his bulk. He was noiseless, except for the occasional rustle of his elegant clothes. He possessed a calm, radiant satisfaction, almost paternal it was so comforting. There was something effortless about him, as if he were his own daydream.

  He called Margaret "a little barbarian" and had insisted on eating at a barbecue restaurant in the West Village. He was, like Edward, intoxicated with America. He slid through the squalid streets of the city, an apparition of taste and polish.

  "You have so many opinion, Marguerite," he said. "Opinion on everything. You have opinion on traffic lights!"

  "I don't want, to have opinion," she said. "I want to have judgment."

  "Judgment of traffic lights! Yes, yes!" He laughed. "You remind of my daughter, Marguerite."

  Do I, indeed? Margaret thought. It was not the first time he had brought up this daughter who was almost Margaret's age. To Margaret, he didn't seem quite old enough to have such a daughter, but if he needed a little Oedipal spark to his flirtations, by all means, let him dwell on his daughter, his Claudette.

  "I am happy to have such a companion," he said, as they sat down at the pink Formica counter. "I have traveled with Claudette sometimes when she was younger, but now she is busy with her own life. Often I am so alone in a foreign city. It makes me dizzy to be so alone." He laughed again and looked embarrassed.

  "It makes me dizzy, too," she said.

  Oy, does it make me dizzy. She thought of Prague. And she felt his arm against hers on the counter, just as it had been touching hers on the plane. She glanced at him, but he was engrossed in the menu. She felt his arm pressed against hers, a meeting of arms, of minds, of plans and desires, and dared not move her arm away to open her menu.

  As it turned out, she had no need to open her menu. Martin, a gentleman and a connoisseur of southern American cooking, ordered for her.

  As she ate her pork chops all up, like a good girl, she watched Martin's every move, fascinated by the fact of her own attraction to him. Lily and Dr. Lipi receded for the moment before this large, garrulous man in his beautiful clothes. There was something smooth and rich about him, luxurious, like an expensive piece of luggage, the kind one runs one's hand over lovingly, longingly, as it sits, smooth, glistening leather, on a store shelf.

  He was wearing a fine, gray cardigan sweater instead of the cashmere blazer, and a blue-and-white-striped shirt.

  "You changed your shirt," she said.

  He looked at her for a moment, then said, "So did you."

  The Frick was almost unbearably tantalizing, tasteful but odd and idiosyncratic, a jewel of a museum, an ornament, a fantasy to try on with the tap of one's footsteps in the mansion's hallways. No children were allowed, and there were few adults that afternoon. In the hush of old wealth and art, Martin stood.

  I must work this out, Margaret thought. Here is my problem. I want this man. At least I think I do. I think I want this man, therefore I want this man. Yes. That sounded right. It was a beginning anyway, a foundation from which to start.

  Now, what is it I want about him? Do I want to stand beside him and look at a painting by Fragonard in which a pastel woman with smooth, rounded arms and blue bows on her tiny white shoes looks away, startled, holding her arm out toward a man, holding it out to push him away and to draw him closer as he climbs over a wall to find her, while behind them a statue of a naked mother turns from the outstretched arms of her gigantic baby, who seems to be falling to the ground as rambling roses spill over a stone wall and birch trees explode into leafy clouds in the background?

  Martin put his arm around her shoulders and said, "This is really something, yes?"

  "Yes," Margaret said. "It is really something." Yes, she thought. It is. And I want this, I do, I want to stand with Martin and a Fragonard. Then I want Martin to climb over a wall, too, crushing cascades of roses beneath his rubber-soled shoes as he rushes toward me—

  "You have something, Marguerite, for me?" Martin said in a quiet voice.

  "What?" Margaret was startled.

  "I know that you want to give to me,"

  Well, Margaret thought, I wouldn't put it that way exactly. She frowned, unsure what to say.

  "I'm sorry," he said. His hand squeezed her shoulder. "I have embarrassed you."

  "No, no." She leaned against him, unsteady, nearly giddy with the sensation of his arm, of his body. No, no, not embarrassed. On the contrary.

  "You have forgotten the memento," he said. "The book, for my father. Do not be ashamed. We will meet again. Then you will remember. And now I will carry to him your very good wishes."

  Now, yes, you have embarrassed me, she thought.

  Martin parted from her outside the Frick. He had business to attend to. He shook her hand, he kissed her cheeks. Margaret stuttered good-bye. She walked home through the park, in a strong wind, the trees exploding into leafy clouds above her.

  Sometimes she would gaze in fascination at one of her mind's eye's lovers, at Dr. Lipi, or the pursed, moist lips of Martin, or Lily sighing seductively, her big, bright eyes shaded by dark lashes, and then Margaret would suddenly see before her what was before her, and she would realize where she was, on the toilet facing the green tropical birds of the shower curtain; crossing the street against the light; accepting change from the square-faced butcher. She wandered from vision to vision, and from these daydreams of bodies to secret, minute observations of bodies, real bodies, strangers, the bodies of strangers.

  I'm out of control, she thought. But she felt strangely in control, powerful. If she was at the mercy of her desires, those desires were hers, and they swept away all obstacles before them, slashing and burning and building their own fantastical cities.

  I thought the cogito was just a myth. The subject is supposed to be dead. But I am doing this. I, the subject, the cogito. And Margaret felt like beating her chest and giving a Tarzan call of triumph.

  One afternoon, in Lily's funny, cramped studio apartment, filled (satiated) with brightly painted antique dressers and tables hailing from Holland to Argentina, Margaret sat on the enormous platform bed around which the painted dressers seemed to have gathered of their own free will, like birds waiting for seed, and she looked at Lily sitting close beside her. And then she felt herself blush, felt the horrible heat, the wash of sudden soundlessness.

  She said to herself, Look. She's there before you.

  She forced herself to look. She forced herself to hear through the silence roaring in her ears. "Yes," she said in response to something, and she said it nonchalantly and smiled, laughed, then looked more, helplessly now, wanting to look, but unsure of what she saw as she looked at Lily through the warmth and fog of her blush.

  I don't care if you know, she thought. I want you to know. Do you know?

  "So," Lily was saying, "I bought it. Why not?"

  "Why not?" Margaret answered. "Why not?"

  Margaret said good-bye, left the apartment, and stood on the street. When she tried to remember what Lily had bought, she could not. When she tried to remember what Lily had been wearing, she could not. All she could remember was the tilt of Lily's face through the heated blur of her own blush.

  Weary from my wanderings, I stopped beneath a tree, the very tree beneath which I had first stumbled upon Rameau's niece. In her company this garden had seemed a paradise, an Eden from which I was now expelled. There were trees and hedges and glades and flowers still, but sitting among them I sat in a lonely, windswept wilderness.

  The uneasiness a man finds himself in upon the absence of anything whose present enjoyment carries the idea of delight with it is what we call desire, which is greater or less, as that uneasiness is more or less vehement. Rameau's niece was absent from me. The present enjoyment of her would have carried the idea of delight with it. I was filled with uneasiness, ov
erwhelmed with desire, vehement desire.

  It is said that desire is stopped or abated by the opinion of the impossibility or unattainableness of the good proposed. The good I had proposed for myself was quite impossible, but desire, far from being stopped or abated, increased within me, a fire out of control.

  My pupil had been seized perhaps with too quick and lively a passion to be excusable, and yet I found myself trying to excuse her. I turned various ideas over in my mind. I knew I was wrong to do so. But though good and evil work upon the mind, that which immediately determines the will to every voluntary action is the uneasiness of desire.

  At last, confused and weary with the struggle of my mind and my emotions, I wondered if perhaps it was true, after all, that human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us, at every turn, in spite of our endeavors to elude or avoid it. And so until evening I walked along the garden paths, unseeing; and so until evening and beyond, I thought and thought, without understanding.

  Desire is a curious thing, Margaret thought. I want Lily and Dr. Lipi and Martin. Or do I just want? I want to know. I want to know what I want.

  I am sitting reading Aristotle and looking out the window at a high school wrestling team on their way to work out in the park, staring at beautiful bare-chested teenagers in their running shorts. If Rameau's Niece is a philosophical novel, this must be philosophy. Philosophy has a nice hot, dreamy feeling to it, doesn't it?

  For some weeks Margaret had been sitting at her desk staring at the wrestling team as they passed, and devouring books of philosophy. It was a feast, a binge, an uncontrollable, necessary carousing debauch. It was an orgy. Forgetting, said Plato, is the departure of knowledge. We are never the same, always changing, as knowledge departs and we study in order to replace what we have lost. Forgetting allows for constant renewal, and so for immortality.

  Margaret smiled. The Symposium, a book about drunken, married homosexuals sprawled three-deep on couches, telling stories of round creatures sliced in half, their genitals on backward, running about, trying to reunite. Ah, philosophy! The rising stairs toward the mystery of love, of beauty, of the ideal form. Clump, clump, clump, up we go, "from one body to two and from two to all beautiful bodies." Margaret stared out the window at the beautiful bodies. Ten, twelve of them. At the end, says Socrates, we arrive at beauty "through loving boys correctly." Fourteen, fifteen, eighteen, boys.

  Margaret watched them pass beneath her window. The only thing we can be certain about, she thought, is what we want. Was that Rorty? It couldn't be Bertrand Russell. Duns Scotus maybe? It had all become a tantalizing muddle in her head. Surely it was Rorty. The only things that are really evident to us are our own desires.

  I wish mine were evident to me. The only thing that's evident to me is desire itself, great, galloping desire.

  AND HOW are the ivories this morning?"

  "Fine, thank you."

  Margaret watched as Dr. Lipi pulled the clear yellow rubber gloves on, watched his fingers pushing, sliding, first the left hand, then the right, watched the gloves snap on, pressing onto the hairs that showed through like decorative engraved swirls.

  His white shirt, not a dentist's shirt, was opened, unbuttoned quite a ways down. She didn't blame him. One must always present one's good features to their best advantage. But was it hygienic? she wondered.

  She put her head back and opened her mouth as he adorned it with this and that—wedges, sheets of rubber, gurgling hoses. Jingle, jingle, went the gold charms on his necklace. She looked at them carefully. They were teeth, gold teeth. His rubber hands approached. She closed her eyes, ecstatic.

  As Margaret paid her bill (by credit card; Dr. Lipi was so up-to-date), she thought of Richard's warning: You will fall out of love when the bill comes. Yes, nine hundred and fifty dollars did take the bloom off things.

  Dr. Lipi came up and stood at the reception desk beside her. He smiled and patted her shoulder. "Ms. Nathan," he said, "I'm going to miss talking to you."

  Well! Margaret thought, as his hand rested on her shoulder. Nine hundred and fifty dollars or no nine hundred and fifty dollars, I must determine what I really feel. Why, it's one of the primary concerns of a human being, a requirement of the human condition. I must sort out what is real from what is simple metaphysical daydreaming; I must discriminate between facts and nonsense. I must establish certainty with regard to my desire to be humped by my dentist.

  "You know," she mumbled, suddenly inspired, through her novocaine-heavy mouth. "I'm thinking of writing a book about the history of the image of the dentist."

  His eyebrows, beautiful, silky, dark eyebrows, lifted with interest.

  "Dr. Lipi, may I interview you?"

  Martin was gone, to return in a few weeks. Lily, on the contrary, was in constant attendance, showing up at the apartment without warning, sometimes arriving when Margaret was out and then staying, chatting with Edward while she waited. Margaret would walk in, her head full of lascivious thoughts about Martin or Dr. Lipi or Lily herself. Disoriented, almost dizzy at this tableau depicting her own moral failing, Margaret would stare morosely and wonder how Edward, her all-powerful Edward, could have let this happen to her. Edward, she thought, has failed as a husband. All those years together, all those mornings lounging in bed as the light cut through the gaps in the curtains and lay in strips across the floor, as Margaret watched Edward come out of the bathroom, freshly showered, his hair flat, irresistible, not to be resisted, not resisting, either. After all those mornings, Margaret still had contemplated other men, other women!, as if Edward had never existed, as if she hadn't been happy and smoothly languorous in the big, comfortable bed. How, she thought, could he do this to me? How could he fail to protect me from this? If he cared for me at all, this would never have happened.

  All those years just assuming I was happy. How naive. One must assume nothing. One must know. Years spent in libraries so that I could know something, just one thing, well, no, lots of things, well, actually so that I could know everything without forgetting it. Then, poof, it's gone and one must begin again, there's more to know, always more, and whatever one knows it's somehow not enough. And after all those years seeking knowledge, I actually thought one could settle down and Be Married. As if the search, that search at least, could just stop, as if Edward were truth, the goal of all desire. She daydreamed then about Edward and those days when the search had stopped.

  Well, she thought, pulling herself together. Now I am free of illusions, the scales have fallen from my eyes, I must see life for what it is, starting with Dr. Lipi. He is a pure love object. There exists no emotion to cloud my vision. There is only objective analysis, a logical and scientific pursuit of a muscular piece of ass.

  One day, during a long, aimless conversation with Lily on the phone, Margaret heard herself say, "I'm leaving Edward."

  You're what, Margaret? Margaret thought. But, then again, Margaret, Margaret reasoned, I must leave Edward. I know I must. It's sordid to live with Edward and plot the seduction of others. I am engaged in an activity of clarification. How can I clarify with my husband always around? Edward clouds the issue. I must leave. Of course I must leave.

  Nervously (leave Edward? really leave him?), she continued, "We're not getting along, and I think it would be best if we..." She paused. "If we separated for a while."

  There. Maybe she should say it again, just to confirm her commitment to this plan. Perhaps it was indiscreet, relaying this information to Lily. But perhaps she wanted to be indiscreet. Now, there was no going back.

  She knew it was the correct move—to leave Edward. Objectivity was impossible while Edward loped through the halls looking depressed, a force of nature sputtering, sputtering. That's all he did these days. It got worse and worse with each passing week. Guilt, perhaps. Fooling around with all those girls. Or just fatigue, enervated from enslaving his classes with the sheer force of his glorious self. He was glorious, wasn't he? Once, anyway. Now he was miserably depleted
, silent, looking at her, then looking away, saying nothing for days at a time. Edward, saying nothing! The earth was square, the sun refused to rise, words no longer danced for Mr. E., dancing-word ballet master, retired.

  Margaret felt sad and weary with guilt instead of relieved, instead of free at last, free at last. Why really was she telling Lily this? Did she want Lily to feel sorry for her? To comfort her? To jump in and take up the slack? I wonder what I am doing, she thought.

  "Yes," she said. "That's what we must do. Separate."

  "Margaret, come off it."

  I wonder what I am doing, Margaret thought again. "Well, one of these days, anyway," she said.

  And she put off the separation for a while. Where would she go, for one thing? And then, she was used to Edward and his ways. She ignored him and he ignored her and she worked on her book and on her new project, an essay entitled "Culture and Teeth."

  EDWARD ADHERED to his schedule and Margaret did not. She had no schedule of her own to take its place, so she got up later and later each morning. She ate lunch at four or five o'clock, if at all. She skipped dinner. She spent a fair amount of time interviewing Dr. Lipi.

  For Dr. Lipi, every man was his smile, and every woman hers. And when Dr. Lipi entered a room, every smile seemed to cry out to him, "Is there a doctor in the house?" He loved talking about teeth and assumed others loved listening. To Dr. Lipi, there was nothing surprising about Margaret questioning him for her essay.

  One evening, Margaret went to his office as the last patient was leaving. Feeling shy and unsteady, she followed him into an examining room, where he showed her several x-rays of decaying gums.