Rameau's Niece

by Cathleen Schine

  And how could Edward, making his little joke about infidelity, have known, how could either of them have guessed, how much she would enjoy her new solitude? She felt she should guard it, it seemed that precious. No one here knew who she was, no one cared. She was free. There was nothing to spoil the rich alienation she was enjoying!

  In the morning in Paris, she went straight to her hotel in order to sleep. There, a small brass plaque informed her, Casanova had also slept, although with whom the plaque did not say. There was a suit of armor on the staircase, and red carpeting extended up the steps and into her tiny room, which was far taller than it was long. The wall that held the windows was hung with deep crimson velvet drapes, and Margaret felt like a trinket in a little padded box.

  Let me out, she thought, sinking into a deep sleep.

  She woke up in time for dinner, for she had plans to meet Juliette and Jean-Claude at the apartment of one of their friends, a composer whom Margaret knew slightly, an aging avant-gard-ist, small, nervous, generous. He had the habit of hopping from foot to foot (hoof to hoof, Margaret thought, for he looked rather like a goat). When Margaret arrived at his apartment in Passy, he was nearly butting his guests in his eagerness to admit and entertain them. From the windows, a whole wall of them, in his living room, Margaret stared out at the Eiffel Tower.

  Seeing Juliette and Jean-Claude, Margaret grew almost painfully nostalgic for Edward and their first trip together, and she quickly drank several glasses of the composer's excellent wine in memory of that time.

  Oh, Edward, she thought, smiling dreamily at the witty and increasingly blurry French intellectuals the composer had collected around him. The composer himself briefly interrupted his endless shuttle between the door and the table and stood beside Margaret. "You're not eating?" he asked, gesturing toward a table covered with baskets and bowls.

  "No, I'm drinking." She refilled her glass and held it to her lips, savoring the wine. She realized her eyes were closed and that she was swaying with pleasure. She opened them and stood still.

  "So," said the composer. "Prague. Though nothing is going on in Eastern Europe, isn't that so?"

  Margaret stared at him, startled. Had she blacked out briefly, missed some crucial link in this conversation? She searched his face for some clue, but saw only a bony nose, long chin, and a rather long, upper lip, like a goat's.

  "Musically," he added.

  "I'm going to hear the Czech Philharmonic," she said.

  "Czech Philharmonic. Yes, well, limited repertoire," he said over his shoulder as he headed toward some new arrivals.

  Yes, well, when's the last time you toppled a government, you hideous silly chèvre? she thought.

  Margaret noticed she was drinking a glass of wine. Still. Or again. Which was it? How many glasses had there been? Margaret, Margaret, calm yourself. And always remember, the aim of art is not to topple governments, Margaret, any more than it is to support them, so just go sit down over there, right on that alarmingly low leather armchair, you can make it, and drink your nice, tasty wine, close your weary eyes, lean your head a little to this side, where the cushion bulges comfortably. Just like that.

  She had heard one of the composer's own works performed once, an opera. Drums thumped luridly. Corpses were strewn about the stage, which had been splattered with red paint. What was it about? Greed and capitalist corruption and redemption through revolution, certainly. But what was the plot? It was hard to recall, hard to recall even what period it was set in, partly because she was now, she realized, thoroughly drunk, but primarily because there had been so many soldiers in so many different uniforms—World War I Tommies in gas masks, Nazi storm troopers in boots, Napoleonic cuirassiers, Roman legionnaires with ten-foot spears.

  She hadn't thought of the opera, whatever it was called, in many years, and was surprised she remembered as much of it as she did. It was on their first trip together that Edward and Margaret had gone to see this rousing, panhistorical bloodbath, which included several gang-rape scenes during which a chorus chanted, "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" That was the trip on which we decided to get married, Margaret thought, and she opened her eyes and gazed at the composer, twitching toward the door now, with a little more warmth.

  She and Edward had also gone to Versailles on that trip, for neither of them, in all their visits to France, had ever been there. And there they had marveled at a vulgarity so self-confident, so immense, and so ultimately frail. How could people with mirrors that big not realize how puny they themselves were?

  Most of France survived in her memory as vivid fragments, moments immediately preceding or following meals. The meals themselves she remembered in detail. The steak with green peppercorns at a shabby inn famous for its steak with green pepper-corns. The inn was of some historic importance, but Margaret could recall only the steak and on the other side of the steak, Edward watching her, and then, after the steak, the twisted rickety staircase to their closet-sized room and single single bed. A plate of shrimp at an outdoor seaside café, past which a bull ran frantically, chasing a few brave souls and followed by what seemed to be the entire population of the town. What town? That fact was lost forever in the happy scent of garlic and olive oil, the pink of shrimp, the pale dust cloud heralding the arrival of the bull, the thrilling clarity of the very blue sky.

  Only Versailles stood its ground, bigger than any gigot, How conventional, Margaret thought. Why not marvel over the Eiffel Tower as well? But then, I am marveling over the Eiffel Tower, aren't I? There it is, that symbol not of Paris but of all those who come to Paris, not of romance but of one's desire for romance, one's need. Some French writer said he ate lunch at the Eiffel Tower every day because it was the only place in all of Paris from which he would not have to look at the Eiffel Tower. Gide? Maupassant? Roland Barthes? Crébillon fils?

  "I love the Eiffel Tower," she murmured to Juliette, who had perched on the arm of Margaret's chair. "It's on the wallpaper in my aunt Eunice's bathroom."

  Margaret smiled uncomprehendingly at the rest of the French people around her. Smoke filled the room. Juliette had begun deconstructing the Eiffel Tower with all the enthusiasm someone or other had put into constructing it.

  "Who built the Eiffel Tower?" Margaret interrupted Juliette.

  Juliette stared. "Eiffel," she said.

  "Ah."

  "You have read of course Barthes, the little essay? You know? Where he says that the tower has both sexes of sight, that is to say that the tower can both see and be seen."

  "You mean it sticks up and you can also go inside it?" Margaret asked. "Yes, I read it."

  The composer ushered in a new arrival, a young man, and Margaret noticed heads turn. There was a sudden buzz of whispered excitement.

  "That's Henri de Goldbaumois," Juliette whispered. "He is the rising star of France."

  "Movie star?"

  Juliette looked at her pityingly.

  "Rock star," said Margaret.

  "Philosophy," Juliette said patiently. "Star of philosophy."

  De Goldbaumois was surrounded by people, all listening intently.

  "There is only standing room in his lectures," Juliette continued.

  "Really? Meta-Heideggerian semaphorism?"

  Juliette looked at her even more pityingly.

  "You Americans!" she said.

  "Us Americans."

  "He teaches The Federalist Papers " Juliette said with some excitement. "They are by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison and Jean Jay," she added helpfully.

  In another corner, the conversation had become suddenly animated, and Margaret shifted her attention and listened. Real estate and summer homes! Oh! She missed New York, so near and yet so far.

  And then, blotting out the Eiffel Tower and James Madison and the smoky room, a sudden, forceful wave of homesickness for Edward struck Margaret. When the wave receded, she stood weakened in the sand. When he smiles, she thought, his whole face lifts, and his eyes blaze, the lines around them radiating like baroque sunbursts.
What a hideous image, she thought. My poor Edward and his beautiful smile reduced to such a hideous image. I am a terrible wife.

  Absentmindedly, Margaret watched Juliette's dark red lips moving.

  And yet they do look like Baroque sunbursts, don't they, those lines around Edward's eyes? she thought.

  She looked at Juliette's smooth face, at her wide cheeks and high cheekbones, and back at her unsmiling rouge red lips. The red lips parted and came together. Margaret no longer noticed what, if anything, came from them. She wondered how long she had been watching them. Did Juliette know Margaret was staring at her lips? Juliette put a fat cigarette between the red lips. When she removed it, inside a swirl of smoke, Margaret could see the marks of the red lips on the cigarette like fingerprints, no, no, lip prints. She felt strangely moved by the garish smears on the cigarette. "My aunt Eunice used to work in the Empire State Building," she said softly, taking Juliette's hand in her own. "On the second floor." Tears came to Margaret's eyes. "The second floor," she repeated.

  THE NEXT MORNING, she dozed, dozed seriously, on the plane to Prague, a sleek Air France craft that only emphasized to her how small and shabby she herself felt. One day away from Edward and she had become drunk, for the first time in years, and in public, too.

  She tried to take a few notes when she woke up. Margaret had prepared a talk on eighteenth-century French philosophical works printed in Switzerland, then smuggled back across the Swiss border into France and sold by starving Parisian hacks who were then hounded by the police until they disappeared into exile, abject poverty, and utter obscurity. The discovery of Rameau's Niece had drawn her into this study of underground literature, which included not only works by philosophers like Voltaire and Helvétius and Locke, but also titles like Venus, Wild in the Cloister and The Tender Guidance of Dom Bugger, all of them referred to as "philosophical books."

  For her talk in Prague, Margaret had prepared a short selection of anticlerical, antiaristocratic pornographic poems popular at the time, with lines like "Watch the scrofulous count / Upon his trembling sister mount." You see? she would say. Enlightenment philosophy, the search for scientific and moral truth, was as unsettling as incest and debauchery. Truth threatened an unjust and hypocritical rule. Truth was revolutionary. And always must be revolutionary.

  Yeah. That sounded good. In Prague. Now. But then what, Margaret thought. Freedom of expression and freedom to make a living, those Enlightenment bequests, were revolutionary ideas, but once realized, those freedoms turned away from revolution, didn't they? Revolution, democratic revolution, fought to make itself obsolete.

  Margaret stared at one of the translations she had made, a sort of porno-limerick-libel.

  The king's weenie

  Is so royally teeny

  That the poor queenie

  Does not know where to turn.

  Says the cardinal, asked for succor,

  "Sooth! My vows do bid me fuck her.

  So, first this frontal liturgy,

  Then the sacrament of buggery!"

  Ah, freedom, Margaret thought. Freedom from debauchery. Freedom for debauchery. Confused, she leaned her head against the little oval window and faded back to sleep.

  When she woke, Margaret read an essay by Havel she had brought along and felt sheepish and ashamed. For so far from living in truth herself, she lived in a fog, and liked it like that. In Czechoslovakia, where until a few months ago scholars had stoked boilers and writers washed windows, she would be just a gaping voyeur. But then, encouragingly, in Czechoslovakia, Frank Zappa was a major cultural figure. They landed, not too far from a large mound of hay. Margaret saw that the plane was being guided past other aircraft to its parking spot by a small car, its orange paint dull and chipped. There was a red light on the roof of the car and a large sign that said, in English, FOLLOW ME.

  In the little airport, she stared in fascination at the big gold stars on the shoulders of the bored customs officers. She waited for her luggage, surrounded by French and German businessmen. In the taxi, as they drove past blocks of Stalinist housing developments, the Castle in the distance, she listened in inattentive confusion to the driver's tape of a choral group singing, "'Cause you've got personality! Smile! Personality! Charm! Personality..."

  The hotel was a large, slightly run-down place built in the twenties. Her room was heavy in spirit in spite of its being both clean and nearly empty, the windows enormous and facing a building from the turn of the century, judging by the medallions of rather mournful Art Nouveau ladies who stared from the facade.

  "Cheer up, girls," Margaret said to them, as she had no one else to talk to.

  She herself was almost giddy. Without Edward, she felt off-balance, as if one eye were covered. She walked carefully down the wide steps to the dining room, drunk with solitude.

  Dinner alone in a restaurant was a novelty for Margaret. When she somberly spread her napkin on her lap, she noticed its size and how severely starched it was; when she held the large, heavy menu, she consciously experienced its proportions, the sensation of its weight. She wondered what Lily, the menu maven, would have made of Margaret's almost awed response to the leather-bound multilingual price list. But alone, one took nothing for granted, not even the feeling of a menu in one's hands. One sensed everything: for, after all, there was nothing else to do.

  Cabbage and dumplings and goose! At her round table, sitting in her soft, padded chair, Margaret rejoiced. She flipped through her Baedeker's Prague, which she had brought to dinner with her as company, leaned back, and was comfortable and content. They would cook her goose, and she would eat it. Ah, to be on one's own and make such feeble jokes to oneself! It was good that Edward was home, titillating his students with dirty poetry by Walt Whitman, perhaps, but never mind, for she was an authentically isolated soul being served stale rolls by a man in tails in the shadow of a towering bronze statue of a nude woman, her arms flung out dramatically, as if she were taking a bow, Ethel Merman's bow, a bangle bracelet high on each arm emphasizing her nakedness.

  After dinner I will take a walk, Margaret thought. A short walk to the Old Town Square. I am in Prague. I am free in a free city. I am on my own. No one knows I'm here. I can do as I like. No one cares about me. They're too busy being free. I can stare at people and dress badly, and no one will care, no one will even know, because no one knows me.

  She gently nursed her solitude. The sparkle of the silverware occupied her attention for a considerable period of time. She drank mineral water and heard herself swallow. The other tables seemed far away, insignificant islands in the foggy distance, across an impassable sea.

  And then from the shore came a mighty roar, a tidal wave of chatter and exclamations and peals of laughter, a foaming surge of petite elderly women and petite elderly men, a crash of Belgians.

  "We may join you, please? The room is so full. We are from Brussels. You are American? My son is visiting America next week. And New York City. Your address, please? New York City! I will pass it to him! First he is in Paris. You have been in Paris? I am from Brussels, un juge." The man, a trim little fellow in a cardigan sweater beneath his suit jacket, smiled serenely. "I put men in jail."

  His wife nodded her head and said, "Oui! Oui!"

  "My son goes to New York City for business, to Manhattan. This is near to you, Manhattan? We have never visited America—"

  "Oui! Oui!"

  Margaret smiled. The Belgians smiled. The Belgians sat down and smiled some more. At one end of the dining room, there was a podium on which stood a piano and a set of drums and a microphone. Margaret watched with foreboding as a man in a tuxedo sat down behind the drums, another behind the piano and, last, a third limped (his tuxedo seemed to contain at least one wooden leg) to the microphone. Was that a toupee? She had never seen one quite like it, combed down in front of the ears to create wide, flat black sideburns. He lifted a violin and began a whine of misery, bobbing and swaying with a resigned heartiness. Turn the pegs! Margaret thought desperately.
Tune the instrument! The violinist grimaced in a kind of smile. The drummer too smiled unceasingly. Margaret was relieved she could not see the pianist.

  "In America," said the juge, "many men are in jail, the black men and the poor men—"

  "Oui! Oui!"

  "Yes," Margaret said politely.

  "Ah! You are so well informed about American criminal justice system!" said the man.

  "You're American?" said another man excitedly, turning toward her from the next table. "This is very different from America. I know. I've been here two weeks." He paused dramatically, then said, "The people do not know how to make a profit."

  The violinist was playing loudly, vibrantly, and quite out of tune. He is doing this on purpose, Margaret thought. He has tuned his violin to be out of tune. He hates us. Are they really playing Eine kleine Nachtmusik with a snare drum?

  "I'm from L.A.," the man at the next table was saying. "Los Angeles," he explained to the Belgians.

  He was a degenerate-looking man who could have been anywhere from forty to sixty-five, his skin leathery and drawn, an alarming, inhuman yellowish tan, and his eyes glowed from deep sockets, lifeless, meaningless, but shining bright, as if someone had gone out and forgotten to turn them off.

  "Ah! Los Angeles! In Los Angeles, they put the Mexican people in jail, I think," said the juge.

  The American had turned so far toward them that he was able to put his long tan fingers on their table. "I'm a photographer so I notice things," he said. "Take for example your table setting. Not being photographers, you probably haven't noticed, but I've been trained to notice. Now we're in a nice restaurant, in a classy hotel, right? We're being served by guys in monkey suits. They've got all this silver." He lifted Margaret's fork by the tines, as Margaret watched with stunned attention, held it up for all to see, then lifted her glass. "This is real crystal, I'll tell you," he said, pinging the glass, her glass, with the fork, her fork, then shaking his head. "You ever hear of Bohemian crystal? But what's missing? You don't notice, right? But I pick up on things, and these people don't know how to make a profit. Why? Because for all those years, their bosses said, Just fill your quotas, just fill your quotas. So they'd sell ten shirts, then quit for the day. They don't care that fifty more people are standing in a line waiting for shirts and that they have one hundred shirts left in the store. They don't care. They filled their quotas! See my point?" He had returned Margaret's glass, but still held her fork in one hand, thumping it on the white tablecloth. His voice had a thin, droning rhythm, not unlike water dripping from a faucet.