Rameau's Niece

by Cathleen Schine

  They sat silently for a while.

  "Was there a dead baby?" the Frenchman suddenly wrote.

  She started to write "Huh?" on the leather-bound pad. Why am I writing? she thought then, and shoved the pad rather ungraciously back to the Frenchman.

  "Huh?" she said.

  "A dead baby in the opera?" he wrote.

  "No. Just a dead girl."

  "Katya Kabanova," he wrote.

  "Oh yeah," Margaret said. "Katya Kabanova."

  In her dream, the Frenchman on the airplane stared at her as if she were a jewel he was appraising. His green-and-white-striped shirt rubbed suggestively against her bare arm. He examined her as if she were a jewel, with a jeweler's glass, while she lay naked on the hotel bed and his green-and-white-striped shirt stretched alluringly across his stomach.

  "Enlightenment," said the Frenchman, "is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage."

  I know, she thought.

  "Nonage," he said, "is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance."

  I know.

  "Kant."

  Kant.

  "Kant said, 'Dare to know,'" said the Frenchman, handing her the jeweler's glass, but keeping hold of her hand once the jeweler's glass was in it. "Dare to know."

  "Okay."

  "FOLLOW ME!" he said, and pulled her into a little orange car with peeling paint.

  Three

  Because of a short journey I was obliged to take, to Geneva to attend to some matters regarding the publication of an edition of my Treatise on Sense and Sociability, I was forced to abandon temporarily my instruction of Rameau's niece. Separated from my pupil for over a month, I found myself bound to her more and more in imagination. I could not concentrate. I tried to write but could not. I tried to find something to do and began one task and gave it up for another, and that for yet another; my hands stopped of their own accord. I had never experienced anything like it.

  At last, my business was successfully completed, much to my advantage, I might add, and yet I had so regretted the necessity for a trip that interrupted the education of my remarkable pupil that I returned with the greatest alacrity at my command.

  Immediately upon reaching the house of the marquise, I inquired as to the whereabouts of Rameau's niece and, hearing that my student was walking alone in the garden, without stopping even to change my clothing, I followed in order to search her out.

  My trip had afforded me many new experiences and given me much time for contemplation of new ideas, as well as the ideas my pupil and I had explored so diligently together, and I longed to impart to my student the fruits of my discoveries and of the many evenings spent in lonely contemplation, as soon as was feasible.

  Walking through the garden, I recalled with rising spirits our first meeting, for memory can produce the most delicious state in a sensitive soul. I recalled how the affection we had conceived for our studies had grown from day to day. I rapturously recounted the observations I had made during our mutual pursuit of enlightenment: her sweet breath; her forehead, white and smooth and beautifully shaped; her eyes, sparkling with curiosity and intelligence; her tiny, dimpled hands; her bosom, firm as a statue and admirably formed; her rounded arms; her neck, exquisitely unusual in its beauty.

  I walked on, thinking of how, after a night of the give and take of rigorous philosophical discussion, of delving unrelentingly for knowledge and for truth, my pupil would wrap her figure, which was of perfect proportions, in a muslin nightgown and leave my room, turning back at the door, running back to me to thank me for my efforts on her behalf, throwing her arms around my neck and covering me with kisses of gratitude. Truly, there is nothing so rewarding as the instruction of the young.

  When Margaret married Edward, she felt as if she'd walked in through a door and closed it gently behind her. Now that door had somehow opened. She'd looked through it, and it would no longer stay shut. It rattled with every breeze.

  I have become an adulteress, she thought. An adulteress in the head. Many people are adulteresses. But until now I was not one of them and could not imagine becoming one of them. Now it is all I imagine.

  She, Margaret Nathan, was one of those hateful people—the doctors who let their wives support them through medical school, then messed around with someone younger. She was the father of three who decided to find himself with his daughter's best friend. She was a restless housewife who became a campaign volunteer only to run off with a losing senatorial candidate. She was a philanderer, a liar, and a cheat, the villain of every pop song ever written.

  In New York, away from statues and mute Frenchmen, Margaret waited for her intemperate, wanton mood to disperse. But it did not. I am obsessed, she realized. I think of nothing else. A visit to the fish market has become a bawdy escapade during which I look at young men in their running tights. I look at the man in Apartment 3E across the hall and I wonder if I will sleep with him. I look at Edward and wonder when I will betray him.

  She had always told Edward everything, but she certainly could not tell him this. He would laugh at first, then, when he understood, he would be disgusted and hurt. Margaret ate with him and slept with him, but she did not really talk to him. The only thing she had to say she could not say to him.

  It seemed impossible, to feel so distant from the man she loved. She had gone to Prague, seen some marble feet, and felt desire. So what? But her adventure played itself out in her imagination, over and over again. The man in the plane, asleep on her breast, burrowed deeper and deeper in her dreams.

  "Look," Edward cried, pulling her to the window. "Look outside." He showed her proudly, as if the deep blue sky, its clarity, its quick white clouds, were his, or at least his doing. "Now out you go. A nice brisk walk. Do you good, darling."

  "I walked in Prague. In New York I sit."

  "Margaret, I'm worried about you. You're so glum and remote. You require cheering up. Shall we go out tonight? Do you want me to buy you a puppy?"

  Margaret sighed.

  "A mink coat? Just like Mummy's?"

  Margaret thought of how they electrocute minks. One of Edward's students, the boy who had grown up on a mink farm, had described it to Margaret at dinner as one of Edward's other students, the adoring girl from the Boston suburb, had listened with a hurt, sad expression.

  "Why are you being so nice to me?" Margaret asked Edward now.

  "Yes, well, perhaps it was misguided. But I felt your absence deeply, Margaret. It's a relief to have you back with me."

  Felt her absence deeply? How deeply? Deeply enough to seek solace elsewhere? A relief to have her back? What did that mean? Why a relief?

  "Didn't you have your students to keep you company, to occupy you?" Margaret said.

  "Well, I suppose."

  Aha! Margaret thought.

  "But it's not really the same thing, is it?"

  Aha!

  She thought about Prague constantly, confused and simply embarrassed by what had happened there. Which was precisely nothing, she reminded herself. Yet that nothing filled her with shame.

  Then again, she thought, if I felt that way, if I felt overwhelmed by desire like that, then my marriage must be lacking. If my marriage is lacking, Edward is lacking. If Edward is lacking, I need something else, someone else. That certainly is sound, logical, circular reasoning. And anyway, who knows what Edward does with those adoring students of his? And if Edward thinks Walt Whitman is so great, then a little overwhelming sensuality and indulgence will strike him as healthful and grand, won't it? Not that he ever has to know.

  For weeks, she went over the same ground, becoming more and more resentful. She had been sexually attracted to a stranger on a plane! How could Edward do this to her?

  I am a fallen woman, she would think, and she would feel sick with a sense of her own dishonor. Edward, she would continue, the be-all and end-all of my existence, is not all, after all. He has failed me. And then she would become angry.

  One afternoon, as she
walked toward the bus stop, seething with regret and fury, she saw a man drop a candy wrapper on the ground. Don't do that, you fool, she thought, outraged. There is a garbage can not two feet from you. Don't litter. And then she laughed at herself, a sinner worried about a litterbug. And then she laughed again out loud and felt a sudden sense of power. She was a sinner! She had already transgressed, just by thinking of it, just by wanting to. Now she had nothing to lose. She was free.

  The force of her attraction to another man, to other men, was exhilarating, an almost kinetic intensity carrying her along with it. Adultery, the failure of loyalty and honesty, was really an act of sublime Romantic rebellion. She had been given a chance at self-fulfillment. That door she'd let click behind her when she married Edward was now wide open, and it opened onto a pilgrim's path, the path to truth and philosophical awakening—to Enlightenment.

  Reason fueled by Romanticism. Or vice versa. She felt herself overcome by an analytical fascination with her own desires. She luxuriated in a cold, cold passion.

  ***

  The marathon editing sessions with Richard became oddly charged now. They worked in Richard's office until the days became a week and then almost two. When Margaret left the office each day it was night. Once, fat wet snowflakes fell, silhouetted by the yellow of the streetlamps. Margaret bumped home in a taxi through the unearthly flurry. Had she eaten? Edward asked her. No, she didn't think so, she said. And she went to bed. Richard's voice, caressing, followed her, murmuring in her dreams.

  "You're never home," Edward said one night, bending over her to kiss her before she fell asleep. "You've left me for an overrefined homosexual pedant." He sometimes referred to Richard as her other husband.

  Each morning she rode to the office on the subway. She could think of three times when she had felt this same tremulous anticipation. When Richard had edited her first book. When she'd gone to a psychiatrist for a year. And her first trip with Edward. Courtship, psychotherapy, editing, Margaret thought. For the true egotist, they are all one.

  She watched Richard as he hung up his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, then furiously slapped through piles of papers on his desk, found something, handed it to his assistant, and sarcastically inquired if he could manage to make three Xeroxed copies. They were where they belonged now, side by side at Richard's desk in Richard's office. No more shapeless world, infinite and buzzing with aimless attention-sucking uncles and nurses and taxi drivers.

  To Margaret's delight, the phone rang, and Richard spluttered, stomped, and finally yanked the receiver toward him, then murmured his silvery "Hello?" At the sound of his voice, Margaret found herself unaccountably happy.

  Perhaps she was in love. Perhaps it was Richard she desired. With gratitude and tenderness, she watched Richard speak into the phone and did not hear what he said. With his close-cropped hair and pink, close-shaven face, he looked very, very clean—radiant, Margaret thought—and she was overcome by a desire to touch that cleanliness, as if some of it, shining and uncomplicated, would rub off on her. To touch Richard, Margaret thought. What an astonishing idea.

  "Margaret," he said, when he'd hung up, "your eyes are glittering and your cheeks are flushed."

  "What?"

  "Do you have the flu?"

  "What? No."

  "You're not contagious, are you?"

  "No."

  "I don't want to catch anything."

  She studied him, so sturdy and well groomed, a refined Ivy League wrestling coach sort of a style. He leaned back in his chair and returned her stare. Richard, she thought. There you are. She smiled at him, excited by her secret thoughts.

  "Germs are airborne," he said gravely.

  Well, it felt like being in love, very much like being in love. She couldn't bear to be away from him. She forgot what to say when they were together. She thought everything he did was wonderful, even the things she knew very well were not wonderful at all but petty and unpleasant. He was her editor, her teacher. She felt indistinct, barely recognizable stirrings of physical desire. Yes, that all sounded right.

  "Richard, I think I'm falling in love with you."

  "You may admire me from afar if you like."

  Her lust for Richard was irritating and short-lived, like a mosquito. Puzzled, though somewhat relieved, Margaret considered possible reasons for this. Richard was not interested in women? Yes, but that made him something of a challenge, and it had not stopped her initial infatuation. She was no longer interested in other men? No. She was still cruising dads pushing strollers in the supermarket.

  We've finished editing! That's all, Margaret realized. And so, didactic lust has bit the dust.

  She turned toward Edward, who was lying beside her in bed, correcting papers, and watched him carefully. He had been unusually quiet this evening. His hair stuck up in tufts so defiant they seemed political. Had he read his students the poem about the boys bathing? The twenty-eight young men? And the one woman watching them? He had, she knew. He had read the poem, and twenty-eight young women had been watching him. He should be reading Whitman to her, not to twenty-eight girls trembling at their desks.

  "How many in your Whitman seminar?" she asked.

  "Nine. That's the cutoff. Nine spotty children who want to know if attendance counts."

  "Does it?"

  "No. They come to class anyway, they arrive early, they stay late, they dog my steps, loyal, adoring little pups jostling one another in their eagerness to approach their master. You know, I can't wait to see them either. Each Tuesday, each Thursday! Completely ignorant, this litter. They stare up at me, hushed. Whitman is astonishing the first time round."

  They stared up at him, hushed. It was part of his magnanimous sense of his own glory, teaching. He rose before a class and presented himself and all he knew, and facing him, in the cloudless morning sunlight of his presence, his students basked, warmed themselves, and grew.

  Which is all very nice, unless you happen to be the wife, Margaret thought. I am the wife.

  I dwelled on happy thoughts of Rameau's niece and our imminent reunion. Barely registering my surroundings, I realized I was headed directly toward a secluded spot to which my pupil and I had often come, a lovely corner of the garden little frequented by anyone but us.

  I heard a rustling, perhaps of skirts, and my heart leapt. Could it be she? Here, in our own corner of the garden, our own private place of study? Had she sensed I would return that day? Had she gone there to await my arrival, knowing I would repair there directly in search of her?

  I reached the place and, oh! that I had lengthened my trip, or that the horse had thrown a shoe, or that I had rested, a long and sound sleep, or changed my clothes, dressing slowly and meticulously, before seeking Rameau's niece. For indeed she was there, my pupil, in that spot where I expected her. The skirts that rustled were hers. But she was not alone, and her skirts rustled not from the breeze, nor as they brushed against a shrub, but as they were lifted and arranged by her companion, pushed here and there as her companion sought their most expeditious disposal.

  Her companion was clearly a man of low birth. He was in fact, the gardener, and I at first assumed this meeting was not of my pupil's choosing; but one look at her face, her gentle, untroubled expression, convinced me otherwise. She was sighing, breathing heavily. Through her half-open eyes she saw me then, and with an effort, she sat up, her clothes draped in disarray, and pushed the gardener from her. A robust young lad with an appealing aspect, he had caught my eye more than once as he toiled in the kitchen garden. But now I looked at him not with admiration, although what I saw of him now was robust indeed as he stood stupidly before me, his breeches below his thighs, his shirt rolled up under his vest. Then, in an instant, he was gone, running, as well he should have, pulling up his breeches as he went.

  I turned to my pupil, now rearranging her skirts, smoothing her bodice. I waited, expecting her to hurl herself at my feet, to beg my forgiveness, trembling, with downcast eyes. Instead, she looked at me, evenl
y and without embarrassment. And, to my further astonishment, she smiled.

  Margaret woke up each morning in a groggy panic. Often she had been dreaming of the Frenchman, and as she opened her eyes she wondered where she was. Then, as the feel of his skin against hers receded further, she would see the Venetian blinds and hear Edward humming in the bathroom. What time was it? What was she forgetting? she wondered. What had she neglected while dreaming of a man she didn't even know? What meeting? What phone call? What bill to be paid? What was she working on? What brilliant ideas had slipped her mind while she slept?

  Restless and disgusted, Margaret tried to console herself with this romantic formulation: To forget is to live in a world of shadows, of unreality. A forgetful person was the only authentic person, for life made no sense and so confusion was the only truth!

  No cigar, Margaret. Try again?

  Forgetfulness is an absence of humanity, of concern for one's fellow man. To forget is to negate. Forgetfulness is nihilism.

  Or perhaps forgetfulness was escapism? Or a sign of purity, an inability to be tainted by the worldly horrors of existence?

  Forgetfulness was insensitivity! Forgetfulness was sensitivity, openness to anything new! Forgetfulness was antipathy! Forgetfulness was sympathy, an embrace of life unencumbered by prejudices!

  Was forgetfulness discretion, the ability to filter out what didn't matter?

  No. Margaret knew the real answer. Forgetfulness was never knowing what mattered. To judge was to compare? Then forgetfulness was an inability to make judgments based on information because of an absence of information. Forgetfulness was stupidity. Margaret shuddered.

  Edward was singing now, and listening to him crow splendidly, Margaret felt anger and disappointment wash over her. I am angry at Edward. Therefore, she thought in an attempt to meet this difficulty in a useful and rational way, Edward must be doing something to make me angry at him. What, though?