Rameau's Niece

by Cathleen Schine

  Margaret leaned with some difficulty over her seat belt and examined their shoes. The American wore loafers with tassels as small and useless as a whale's internal ankle bone. Smaller, actually, Margaret thought. Whales are quite large, leviathan, aren't they, and even their miniaturized evolutionary detritus must be gigantic. She suddenly, involuntarily, saw before her an image of several dolphins whipping gracefully round and round a deep concrete pool, a memory of Flipper's Sea World, an aquarium she had once visited. Round and round went the dolphins, faster and faster, exposing large, oddly pink extrusions on their pale gray undersides. "Look!" a child had cried. "Dolphin dicks!"

  Our cousins from the deep, Margaret thought. She turned and surveyed the Frenchman's crepe-soled, soft leather oxfords. Our cousin from another land. For a moment she felt that she hated this man. From his thick crepe soles to his light brown hair. Why did she hate him? His elbow was not on her armrest. He neither snored nor carried with him the stale odor of cigar smoke. He had not insulted her. She liked his pants. Why did she hate him?

  She decided she must hate him because he was French. She had never hated the French before, but these things can grow on you. After all, their food was so good, their books were so good, their paintings so good, they dressed so well. Those were reasons enough, surely, to hate them. And then they were smug, they had beautiful cities, they were intellectual Stalinists, they revered bad American movies but had a history of making good movies themselves. They cheated on their wives.

  My, aren't we the cultural-stereotype wallah, Margaret thought. Since really you would die to be French and have those small French female feet that fit into those small shoes they wear. Well, we did have a better revolution.

  She was staring at the Frenchman's face now, a comfortable face just gone the slightest bit fleshy, an extremely French face with thin but sensuously protruding lips that always looked moist, she was quite sure. He has daughters, nymphets, little blossoming girls that he watches with more than paternal interest, Margaret thought. That's what they do there. They're so civilized.

  The man stirred, opened his eyes, put on his glasses, big thick-framed unexpectedly shaped glasses. He had gray eyes, and they looked into hers in such a direct way that Margaret thought she was being appraised, like a stone. Gem quality, but flawed, mister. Try down the block.

  Soon he would speak to her. Then she would have to answer. Perhaps she didn't hate the French, she thought. Perhaps she didn't hate this man, either. Perhaps, what she hated was the inevitability of social relations with him.

  He would speak to her. And she would be required to answer. Edward was not there to do it for her, or even to support her in her own efforts, to remind her of the name of the book of Czech essays she had just finished reading, of the opera she had just seen.

  She'd been in the last row of the tiny gilded opera house. Row thirteen. The opera, by Dvořák or Janáček, it was a little muddled already, had been beautiful and moving, although she was not certain what had taken place. There was a young woman who ran off to meet a young man. An old woman in black (her mother? grandmother? stepmother? mother-in-law?) mistreated her and bossed around a man with some close connection to the young woman (father? husband?). The young woman sank to her knees regularly. The young man she was in love with went away. And in the end, after a thunderstorm, she threw herself in the river.

  Margaret had had a coughing fit in the beginning of the first act and had to climb over a blind man to get out, but after buying some mints at the bar, she had returned to the grandly intimate little golden theater and felt great sympathy for the suffering soprano, whatever the problem might have been.

  Edward would have remembered the name of the opera. He would have known what it was about. Maybe this Frenchman would know. Why do all people from France have those lips, she wondered. It must be from the way they speak. Over the years, their mouths take on that provocative little pout. Oh, how to quash the inevitable, unsolicited bid for an exchange of pleasantries? I don't want to talk. Leave me alone, to fester in unhealthful isolation.

  She felt how close she was to him, the two of them pressed against each other in the narrow airplane seats. He shifted in his seat, and his beautiful shirt, smooth Egyptian cotton, brushed against her bare arm. She guessed he was in his late forties and looked slightly older, owing to French indulgences like insatiable mistresses and cream sauces.

  Oh shut up, Margaret. Edward likes strangers. Be like Edward. He speaks to foreigners. Of course, he is a foreigner. The Frenchman smiled at her, then pushed his glasses up until they rested on top of his head.

  She had always considered cynicism a particularly sour form of provincialism, and it was now clear to her that she had become a sour provincial. But that's what happened when you went off by yourself—you discovered your true self. And her true self, she now knew, was a sexually hysterical, xenophobic, middle-aged midwesterner from the 1930s.

  The Frenchman had gone back to sleep, a thin camel-colored blanket pulled up to his chin. His reading light was on, shining down like a spotlight, illuminating him in his innocent, childlike slumber. One arm was tucked under the blanket, the other hugging the blanket to his chest, his Rolex sparkling in the white glare.

  Without thinking, Margaret reached up and turned off his little light. As she was still leaning over him, the Frenchman opened his eyes. They looked at each other, he in soft, sleepy confusion, she in the awareness that she was looking down at a complete stranger with moist, pouty lips from a distance of six inches.

  "Sorry," she muttered, pulling away from him, from the intimate image of his face and sleepy eyes. Oh, that's why I hate him, she thought. I want to sleep with him.

  He moved his head back and forth slightly, as Europeans do when they mean any number of completely contradictory things, and, clutching his blanket closer, closed his eyes once again.

  I want, I want, I want, Margaret thought. I want to sleep with him. I want to forget I am married and drown myself in an affair with a stranger. No. I want, I want, I want to forget this stranger and drown myself in marriage. No, no, that's not right either. No drowning. I want to observe, to experience, to know! I am in search of truth and beauty. I am a scholar! That's why I want to fuck the French fellow.

  Margaret watched him as he slept. Here was beauty, anyway. A beauty of sorts. If debauched Frenchmen were to your taste. He breathed softly but audibly. Edward, she thought, Why aren't you here? You are my husband. You're meant to protect me, to shelter me, to surround me, to make me forget everything and everyone else.

  Edward engulfed the world; he held out his arms in an irresistible embrace, a gesture of supreme self-love and supreme largess. Margaret admired this ability to co-opt existence, to make it his. She loved Edward for that embrace. She had married him in anticipation of it; then, soothed and warm, she had lived among Edward's enthusiasms, swept up in the wave, the nirvanic swoon of living someone else's life.

  Hey! Drowning again, Margaret, she thought. Waves indeed. Wake up. Smell the flowers. Fuck the Frenchman.

  Adultery, Margaret thought, is an epistemological necessity. Rameau's niece found that out. To know is to fool around. She wasn't married of course. But still. Fuck the Frenchman.

  Margaret got up and made her way to the bathroom. The Frenchman had long eyelashes, she thought. And his eyes, opened so suddenly, had looked at her with such easy amusement. She had expected him to launch his offensive then, having been given an opening, to surge ahead into the unavoidable friendly chat. Why hadn't he?

  As she returned, walking slowly down the long aisle, looking for her seat in the darkened plane, she saw and recognized the top of his head and, it being the only head she recognized, the only object in the entire plane that had any personal relationship to her at all, and because it signified that there beside it was her own place, the crown of light brown hair looked reassuring, familiar.

  Margaret sat down and took out a few sheets of her manuscript of Rameau's Niece and read: "MYSELF:
Simple ideas enter into the mind through the senses pure and unmixed."

  She looked up from the page at the Frenchman. My idea regarding you is simple enough, she thought. She watched him sleep for a while. He was awfully good-looking, in a prosperous, bon vivant sort of way. The more she looked at him, with his pursed lips and his pretty pants, the more oddly alluring she found him.

  "MYSELF: When the understanding is once stored with these simple ideas, it has the power to repeat, compare, and unite them, even to an almost infinite variety, and so can make, at its own pleasure, new complex ideas."

  It had been so long since she had flirted with anybody, she thought. A century, a decade, anyway. She turned back to her reading: "The coldness and hardness which a man feels in a piece of ice are ideas as distinct in the mind as the smell and whiteness of a lily or as the taste of sugar and the smell of a rose."

  The Frenchman stirred slightly.

  His head fell onto her shoulder.

  His temple was pressed against her lips. The coldness and hardness of his glasses was perceived by her chin, and she sensed the smell and whiteness of his skin, as pale and sweet as a lily.

  Oh God, Margaret thought. She could almost taste him, the taste of sugar.

  Go away, she thought, terrified. I was only joking. Daydreaming. It was a secret.

  He would wake up eventually, and then he would be bound to notice that their relationship had assumed a rather intimate physical nature, which he would undoubtedly attribute to her, for how could she possibly say, Look, your face fell onto my lips? She stared into his hair. The pleasant scent of his shampoo, the smell of a rose, filled her nostrils.

  Well, Margaret thought. At least he's not trying to talk to me.

  The rhythm of his breathing made her aware of his whole body, pressing closely onto her own. She shifted, just a bit, and her lips moved across his skin, an experience Margaret found pleasant, too pleasant. In fact, the entire experience of this unfamiliar male body against hers was too pleasant.

  This is not a statue, Margaret told herself. I am not sightseeing. Just move your head away and we'll forget the whole thing ever happened. Your handsome, noble head with its clear gray eyes and long, feminine lashes and thin, moist lips, your head like a lily, a rose, like sugar and ice.

  Each time she tried to move away, he seemed to move with her, snuggling in closer, his head heavier and more intimate. Margaret closed her eyes. But he was still with her. I am very attracted to a strange man sleeping on my shoulder, she thought. What does this mean?

  I am a happily married woman. That is a synthetic proposition, one based on observation, with no inherent, necessary logic. But does observation really support this proposition? Well, I am happy. Yes. Satisfied? Yes, that too. But then if I'm so happily married, why didn't Edward come to Prague to be happy with me? Because of his students? Fuck his students! Oh lord, what if he did fuck his students?

  Margaret suddenly thought of the small university offices where she used to stalk her own professors. The invariable cramped rectangle with its bookshelves, battered desk, worn wooden chairs, and black linoleum floor came back to her, or she returned to it, and to that moment of fear bordering on joy when she would knock on the door.

  Knock, knock.

  Yes, I certainly got my money's worth of higher education, she thought.

  Hello, Mr. So-and-So, I just came by to ask you about Kant's critique of Hume, I want to ask you about Hume and Kant, I have come by for you, I want you. I have waited for weeks but could wait no more. I see you in my dreams, the arrangement of your pens in your pocket in my dreams. The place in the back where your belt misses the belt loop in my dreams. Your scornful interpretation of your colleagues' interpretations of the works of long-dead Germans in my dreams. I dream of these things because they are part of you, professor. I have read your books. But now I want to stop dreaming, stop reading. I have come for you, and I will get you, too. Never mind that I have forgotten all the clever things I thought up last night in bed to impress you so that now I sit before you frowning in concentration on whatever it is you are saying, reduced to hoping you'll find me young enough and adoring enough and willing enough to make up for being stupid and tongue-tied, because that is exactly what will happen, and we both know it, knew it after the first class. There's one every semester, you're thinking. That's what I'm thinking, too.

  Why not? she had always asked herself. There was something so alluring about them. No real evaluation of these men was necessary because these affairs could not lead anywhere. What difference did it make if they turned out to be as smoothly pompous as balloons, swollen with self-love and self-importance, floating with garish indirection above their fellow men? She wasn't stuck with them, was she? That was the wife's problem, wasn't it?

  Oh lord, Margaret thought. I am the wife. I am the wife.

  The Frenchman sighed and burrowed deeper, until his head was resting on her breast. Oh God, just go away, mister. Monsieur. I am a happily married woman. But if I'm a happily married woman, why am I sitting here with this man's head on my breast? Oh, Edward, I'm sorry. What am I doing? I'm not doing anything, actually, but I'm thinking. And why shouldn't I think, anyway, when you're home fucking twenty-eight girls in the bathtub?

  I am a happily married woman. I lust after another man. Happily married women do not lust after other men. Therefore, even though I think I'm happily married, I am not happily married. Or am I?

  The Frenchman opened his pale, seductive eyes and sat up. He ran his hand through his hair, the hair she had just felt against her face, and looked at her with some surprise.

  "Well," she said, feeling herself redden. Well, indeed.

  For a long time, Margaret pretended the Frenchman was not there. He seemed equally embarrassed, for he was silent. Margaret stared in front of her at the blue seat back. Out of the seat back's pocket stuck a laminated drawing of a plane, perfectly intact, which had supposedly just made a crash landing on the Atlantic Ocean. Happy survivors whisked down colorful inflated rubber slides.

  The silence and embarrassment were becoming oppressive. She hadn't done anything wrong. Why should she sit there, tormented and ashamed? Anything would be better than this guilty, confused silence. Even conversation. In fact she longed to talk, to launch into one of those droning exchanges of banalities that would occupy her mind as thoroughly as an army occupies a town, as visiting relatives occupy a living room; it would prevent her from thinking, overwhelming and clouding all sensation in a fog of boredom and convention.

  "So," she said. She looked over at the Frenchman. "Long trip," she said.

  The Frenchman nodded.

  "Longer on the way back. On my way back, that is. On your way back it will be shorter. It always seems shorter on the way back, doesn't it? But in your case it will actually be shorter. For me, it's just a subjective illusion."

  She continued to talk, warming up now, for the Frenchman, to her surprise, was a wonderful listener, nodding, smiling, laughing once in a while, never interrupting to add his own self-involved anecdotes to compete with her self-involved anecdotes. I'm pretty good at this conversation business, Margaret thought. I just needed the proper partner. She began to talk about Prague, about the opera there, about her talk, about the manuscript she had translated.

  "The way ideas are disseminated is interesting, yes. That's what I write about—the history of ideas. But what is really marvelous is the human being's appetite for ideas. We're gourmands, indiscriminate, lustful idea hogs," she said. "Even though sometimes ideas, sometimes philosophy itself, are, is, just stupid. Stupid. Do you know what I mean? For example, for centuries there has been an argument about subjectivity versus objectivity. I mean in one form or another that's what they're always going on about. But that is stupid. Finally, it's just stupid. Obviously what we think or say or notice has to be subjective. But we wouldn't be able to think it, say it, or notice it if there weren't an 'it' to think, say, or notice, would we? And we wouldn't have any subjective info
rmation to project onto it if we hadn't already received that information from objective impressions before. But then again, it's not the 'it' that does the thinking, it's me. This is all so obvious, isn't it? I mean, these people have no common sense. Of course common sense is out of fashion now, anyway—it's an ideological construction of the bourgeois social formation. And there's no subjectivity either anymore, is there, because there's no subject. Because any attempt to act or perceive as a subject suggests that you are trying to conquer the object, and that's bad because it's impossible. You see, meaning is impossible to obtain, so any search for it is false and oppressive. And anyway, the subject is now the object, because we are trapped by language, which determines what we say and what we do. So the object—the world—is now really the subject, because it holds all the cards. Of course, you already know all this, being French. But finally it seems to me that this just brings us back to what I was saying in the first place: subjectivity is rooted in objectivity and objectivity can't really exist without subjectivity. Big deal."

  The Frenchman looked at her with furrowed brows, with his pale gray eyes, and then without showing his teeth, his lips pouting just a bit more, turning up slightly at the corners, he smiled.

  I've made a friend, Margaret thought. Is this really the kind of friend I meant to make, though? she wondered. The kind I kind of want to sleep with?

  "You're awfully quiet," she said after a while.

  He reached into his briefcase, took out a slender leather case with a gold pen and a pad of paper inside.

  "Laryngite," he wrote. He pointed to his throat.

  Margaret stared at her new friend. Laryngite? She took the pad from him, and the little pen.

  "Sorry," she wrote irritably.