Rameau's Niece

by Cathleen Schine

  "The menu."

  Lily was smiling, smoking, and thoughtfully examining the daily specials inserted in a special narrow plastic page. Was she pondering the menu as a reification of woman's role, a paradigm of organized control over woman's life, the repressive figuration of woman's qualities and skills?

  "I think I'll have a bacon cheeseburger," Lily said. She took off her swirly coat with its big round button to reveal a tight suede tunic laced up the front in medieval peasant fashion, her breasts spilling over the top. She ran her hands through her short hair, fluffing it.

  "Funny," she said, tilting her head and staring at Margaret. "Funny we didn't really know each other at school." Her whispery voice gave way to a little sigh. She put her hand under her chin and pouted slightly.

  "Well, I guess I didn't see too much of Till or her friends after the first year. I retreated to the library."

  "The library," Lily said softly, "is one of the mechanisms of discipline, capturing the individual in a system of registration and accumulation of documents."

  The way she said it, Margaret thought, in her throaty whisper, sucking on one dainty finger, she made the library sound like soft-core bondage. Oh! Discipline me with your mechanism! More, oh, more!

  "So what are you working on?" Margaret asked, not sure how else to respond to Dewey Decimal de Sade.

  "I'm thinking of writing something about music, for a change. Rachmaninoff," Lily said.

  Margaret sighed. Poor Rachmaninoff. What crime had he committed to cause him to fall prey to this pretentious sexpot fraud?

  "He's not a woman," Margaret said. "Is he?"

  "Ah, but he might just as well have been a woman," Lily said tenderly. "Poor Rachmaninoff."

  "You like Rachmaninoff?" She herself loved Rachmaninoff but saw no reason to tell anyone about it.

  "Look," Lily said, "a case must be made for the second tier. Genius is an oppressive male construct. Genius, genius, genius. Enough with the genius."

  "You like Rachmaninoff because he's second-rate?"

  Lily smiled and began to hum loudly a particularly lush passage from the Symphonic Dances.

  Margaret, though sorely tempted, forced herself not to hum along. One had one's pride. But she did regard Lily with a new respect and with a growing warmth.

  "Do you like Trollope, too?" she asked hopefully.

  Inspired by Lily's description, Margaret went to the mechanism of discipline the next morning, but it failed to live up to its reputation, and she felt restless after only an hour and began to stare into space. The anonymous author of Rameau's Niece had lifted passages from so many philosophers, and with such abandon, that Margaret knew she would be spending months tracking down sources. The author was well versed in the literature of the age. Was he some provincial boy who had come to the glamorous big city to be a philosophe? There were plenty of them in Paris during the Enlightenment, failed intellectuals writing smut and peddling it to get by. Or perhaps he was a bored clergyman passing the time between nones and matins. And why "he"? Couldn't the author have been a woman like Madame de Montigny? Margaret sometimes wondered if Rameau's Niece was written as a hoax, like Diderot's La Religieuse, which Diderot and a friend began as a series of letters to another friend, signing them with the name of a fictitious nun. Or it could have been meant as a vehicle for edification, like classic comics. She had once read a fanciful description of the living quarters of Crébillon père and fils which had the two of them in a garret filled with large dogs drooling and shedding immoderately, and it was thus that Margaret liked to imagine her own author, pen in hand, animals sprawled and snoring on the Louis Quinze chaise.

  She finished the translation almost with regret, the way one finishes a Victorian novel. For now she was torn from the bosom of the manuscript, or it was torn from hers, and she would have to present it to the world. She planned to drop it off with Richard and then have lunch with him that afternoon.

  In the subway, she bought a Street News from a homeless man and read how Marianne Faithfull had been homeless when she was a drug addict, except that sometimes she went to her mother's house to have a bath.

  She was still half an hour early. She looked in some stores, then stood around for a while in the dirty cold, then called Richard.

  "Hi, can we have lunch yet?"

  "Margaret, I've been trying to call you. I'm sorry, dear, no lunch. Where were you off to so early in the morning? An affair with the milkman? At his place? I'm sorry, Margaret, I really am, actually, but it's an emergency. I have an engagement at the Simon Gleason Residence for Senior Citizens."

  "Moving?" Margaret said.

  "Uncle Herbert is moving. Uncle Herbert must move, must be moved, with the greatest dispatch. Uncle Herbert arrived on my doorstep in his pajamas this morning. I left him with my landlady while I find him a suitable place to move to, preferably by this afternoon. Would you like to have lunch with Uncle Herbert, Margaret, since having lunch looms so large in your imagination these days?"

  Margaret put another quarter in the phone as she thought. The path toward socialization seemed to her strewn with insurmountable obstacles. If she wished to have friends, she would have to be a friend, or at the very least approximate however it is that friends behave. But how is that? I am very much downcast, she thought, as they said a century or so ago. And how did friends behave a century or so ago? She seemed to remember a lot of noble withdrawing going on in all those novels, men nobly withdrawing from women to preserve reputations, women nobly withdrawing from men, leaving them to other, more—or less—needy, women. Maybe Margaret should nobly withdraw. Then she could go home.

  "Do you want me to come with you?" She said it impulsively, instinctively, and immediately regretted her words.

  She spent the day trailing Richard from one nursing home to the next. The first was as dirty as a hospital, Richard said. The second too gloomy and full of old people. In the third, the receptionist asked Margaret if it was she who wanted a room, and Margaret politely said, No, it wasn't.

  That was where Richard signed up Uncle Herbert. He was concerned because the place was run by the Salvation Army, and Uncle Herbert did like his little nip. But the room was quite nice. Some of the people there were still functioning rather well. It was clean and nearly cheerful. Richard remarked on all these things in a muted, sadly hopeful manner, as if he were trying to convince himself, or Uncle Herbert, or perhaps Margaret. But Margaret didn't need convincing. In fact, she had been particularly taken aback when the receptionist had asked if it was she who expected to move in, because just a moment before she had been thinking that she might be happy to settle there, that it might be pleasant to live in a place where people you barely knew made the meals, the beds, the conversation. The cool, pale anonymity seemed somehow restful. Edward's boundless vitality sometimes made her want to lie down.

  "It's just that you must be over sixty-five to get in here," the receptionist had hastily explained after Richard began to roar with laughter.

  "Well, Margaret, that is a disappointment," he said, wiping tears from his eyes.

  Margaret was a little disappointed with Richard, actually. She had expected that this personal and emotional experience would cause some kind of bonding, but in fact she felt further from her editor than she ever had in the past. He seemed somehow less interesting outside of the office. There were all these distractions, all these other people and other responsibilities interfering, and she recalled a little wistfully the last time she had seen him, seated at his desk, fussing through several piles of paper until he found one particular pile, her pile. "Aha!" he had cried, with genuine enthusiasm, and she had to catch her breath, waiting as he prepared to turn his attention, pure and unencumbered, to her.

  Margaret thought about Richard a lot after the day they spent touring nursing homes, in ways that were new to her: he appeared to her from unfamiliar angles. The features she identified as Richard had receded and revealed a stranger. Attached to the prim, irritable, rich, and melodiou
s voice had been added a body, a walk, a configuration of gestures. Richard was tall. This was something she had never recognized. He was broad. And in his lavender oxford shirt, his coarse tweed jacket, his pressed corduroy pants, loafers, and gray crew cut, he was oddly fey, instead of simply fey. This troubled her. She had never thought of him in this way, and she didn't want to. Whatever else he was in civilian life, Richard on duty had always been simply her editor, hers. He existed to the extent that he interacted with her, with Margaret Nathan. This other business, this crisply tailored homosexual with a brush cut and an uncle would not do.

  I lay on the bed and contemplated Rameau's niece above me, contemplated those regions of the world of thought which the wise delight to contemplate. (Dare to know! is a proposition we had begun, with considerable energy, to investigate the night before and were continuing now to study in greater detail.) She, too, pondered the situation before her with gentle but eager attention.

  SHE: Is this what our great thinkers mean when they speak of man having already arrived at his highest point of improvement?

  MYSELF: It requires little penetration to perceive how imperfect is still the development of man; how much farther the sphere of his duties, including therein the influence of his actions upon the welfare of his fellow creatures, may be extended—

  Here my pupil, struck by perfect understanding of my carefully chosen words, cried out in a way that did momentarily disconcert me, but I quickly recovered and continued my discourse.

  MYSELF: How much farther the sphere of his duties may be extended—

  She cried out again, but I continued, undeterred.

  MYSELF: ...by a more fixed, a more profound and more accurate...

  At this moment, I admit, I finally broke off my lecture entirely, overcome by my own argument for observing facts and precisely registering sensation.

  In the quiet that followed, I heard her voice, joyful, close to my ear.

  SHE: I still learn! My instruction is not yet finished. When will it be? When I shall no longer be sensible!

  MYSELF: The true delight of virtue is the pleasure of having performed a durable service.

  MARGARET HAD eventually arranged another lunch date with Till, who was now waiting for her outside the narrow restaurant. It wasn't just narrow, it was short, too. There were only four small tables in it, all of them, as always, taken. The restaurant was called You Are Hungry.

  "Do you want to go someplace else?" Till said. "I don't want to go someplace else, but I will if you do."

  "It's freezing," Margaret said, but she did not move. She had already slipped into the mild, semiconscious state adopted during the early stages of waiting in line. Later on, she might explode into a rage. But in neither case did she, or anyone she knew, ever leave and go to another place. "What are you working on?" she said. Till was her friend, she was used to having her as a friend, but Margaret rarely had that much she wanted to say to her.

  "Well, it's about the space shuttle, actually. What people on a space shuttle really talk about, you know? Divorce, childhood, their children's reading scores. There's some singing, too. You know, Margaret, one of the characters is a little like you." Till looked at her in that way she had—deeply and with a single-minded purposeful attention.

  "Really?" Margaret said, embarrassed, but also intrigued. "What am I like?"

  "I don't know, actually."

  Margaret blew on her cold fingers. Till was adorned by fringes today, beaded with jet. Was it a blouse? A jacket? Below she wore a long, tight black silk skirt, and her arms, waist, and neck were encircled by bands of Navajo silver and turquoise.

  "So, have you seen Lily?" Till said.

  "Mm-hmm."

  "Oh."

  Margaret thought that she could now easily begin to talk about what she always talked to Till about, which was basically nothing, a pleasant, comfortable code of small talk that said, We're old friends. But Margaret thought, Is that enough? Shouldn't I try to raise the level of discourse, and so strengthen, heighten, and enrich this friendship?

  When she was younger, she talked to her girlfriends about boys. Maybe Till was going out with a boy and they could talk about it. Or a man. Or an old goat. Of course, maybe she wasn't going out with a man of any age, in which case the question would either offend her or depress her. And even if she was going out with someone, she wouldn't admit it, would she, being happily married and all.

  What should Margaret say now, Margaret? Margaret should talk about current events, Margaret. Cold and confused, she tried to reconstruct her morning conversation with Edward. "So now the, uh, Nicaraguans can advance to a premodern artisan culture," she said.

  "Jimmy Carter makes a wonderful ex-president, doesn't he?"

  Margaret, you will have to remember that. It's more, well, more conversational than what you said. Premodern artisan culture indeed. She shifted from foot to foot. What now? She looked at Till, who jingled pleasantly, like a pony pulling a sled. Margaret smiled. And then Margaret, to her relief, had an inspiration, a conversational idea.

  "You look great, Till," she said. "Radiant." She smiled again, proudly, waiting for a response.

  "So you saw Lily?"

  "Yes. She said menus are a sign of male domination. I think."

  "Oh," Till said. She tapped her little foot. "That's all?"

  "Well, some stuff about the library."

  "Oh. Okay. Um, Margaret, do you want to know a secret?"

  Margaret leaned her head down closer to Till's.

  Till said, "Do you promise not to tell?"

  "Doo-Dah-Doo."

  "No, I'm serious. Promise."

  "I feel that if you trust someone enough to tell them a secret, you have to trust them enough to know they shouldn't tell anyone, and if you have to warn them not to spread it, you shouldn't tell them in the first place."

  "Oh, never mind, I can tell you. You'll forget it right away anyway. I'm seeing someone new."

  "Really?" Margaret was shocked, but also excited. "Really? Don't you feel, well, sort of odd and, don't take this the wrong way, you know what I mean, sort of old, rusty I guess would be a better description, at least it would be for me. Really? What's he like? Why are you doing this?"

  "He's very shrewd, very understanding, and he talks. The other one never said a word. All those hours, all those years, and he just wouldn't speak to me. I felt crazier than when I took up with him. I couldn't take it anymore. What a relief to be rid of him."

  "You left him?"

  Till nodded and smiled.

  Margaret put her hands in her pockets and thought this over. Till's smarmy husband Art was gone! "I never much liked Art," Margaret said.

  "Well, we're writers."

  "Yes," Margaret said. "That's true." What is she talking about? Margaret thought. Why do I never follow the thread of even the simplest conversation? What does writing have to do with her unctuous husband?

  "Art has become a commodity, anyway," Till said.

  "I'm not sure I know what you're talking about. God, you're cold."

  "I'm okay. We'll be inside soon."

  "No, no. I meant ruthless. The way you talk about Art."

  "Art," she said contemptuously. "Who cares about that?"

  "Well, you used to care about Art."

  "Well, sometimes we used to go to galleries, I guess. But not anymore."

  "I should say not."

  "Art holds no charms for you, Margaret. That's obvious."

  "Well, he's so phenomenally vain. I know marriage is a compromise, but I've never understood how you could stand him day to day."

  "Art? Art Turner?"

  "I guess in the beginning he seemed interesting."

  "I guess so," Till said in a tight, angry voice.

  Margaret was very uncomfortable. The wind blew cold and Till's gaze was colder still, but in spite of all of that arctic atmosphere, Margaret began to blush and perspire. "I, I just meant you would probably be better off without him, that's all."

  "Th
at's all? Well, I think actually that's more than enough. You know, Margaret, I share your distaste for the ridiculous contemporary art market, but I fail to see what your opinion of my husband (such a well-kept secret for so long, now unaccountably shared with me), what your opinion, unfair and unkind, what your opinion of my husband, whom I rather like, the man who made your reputation, Margaret, what your thankless opinion of him has to do with it."

  Margaret stared at her. "But the new guy you're seeing—"

  "I fail to see what connection my new psychiatrist has with this, my new psychiatrist with whom I have an appointment in forty-five minutes, thank God, so that I can discuss the behavior of hostile, disloyal friends..." As she spoke, she turned from the restaurant and began walking away, her voice whipping back toward Margaret borne on the icy wind together with a coffee-stained paper napkin. "Does friendship mean nothing at all? This is the unkindest cut of all, at least one of them..."

  Margaret stood in the cold for a while, no longer interested in lunch at You Are Hungry, but reluctant, nevertheless, to give up her place in line.

  Lily did like Trollope, as it turned out. Rachmaninoff, Trollope, and Margaret, too. Whether that meant that Margaret was second-rate, Margaret was not sure, but she would be happy to consort with Rachmaninoff and Trollope any old day, and with Lily, too, which she did more and more frequently.

  For Lily began showing up regularly at the Nathan-Ehrenwerth establishment, stretching out on the couch as if it were a grassy hill and she a pink-cheeked country lass. Margaret would look at her and wonder how she managed to look so odd, in her absurd outfits, and yet so natural, so fitting. For Lily, just sitting was a kind of caress. Or was it that the chair or the couch seemed to caress her? The sofa's cushions appeared softer, as soft as flesh. The chair's slender, rounded wooden arms held her in a delicate embrace.