Rameau's Niece

by Cathleen Schine

  It was true that Edward was going to be forty in a few months. Perhaps that was it. Everyone knew what that meant, every American anyway. Forty meant mid-life. And mid-life meant mid-life crisis. Husbands chased young girls in order to deny their own mortality. They moved to faraway places with warm climates. They quit their jobs. They chased more young girls to deny their own mortality even more in faraway places with warm climates, where, without jobs, they had plenty of leisure time in which to chase young girls. In the sun. It was almost inconceivable that this was happening to her husband, her Edward, who didn't much care for young girls or tropical vacations, whom she had trusted so completely—but not inconceivable enough.

  Margaret was going to be thirty. In two years, anyway. Being so much younger than Edward had always seemed such a good idea, a deterrent to this absurd phenomenon. But thirty, while still two years away and ten years younger than forty, no longer struck her as being all that young. Edward was going to be forty and have a mid-life crisis. It said so in every pop psychology book in every rack in every airport gift shop. No wonder she was angry at him, Margaret thought.

  "It's bloody awful out there," Edward said one day, his eyes red and teary from the sub-zero wind.

  "What do you mean? It's March. What do you expect. The seasons are very important. It's boring to live in an unchanging climate, day after day, sunny, sunny, sunny. It's enervating and debilitating. The British Empire wasn't built by beachcombers."

  "The British Empire has collapsed, and I'm thinking of joining it. What a ghastly day."

  "I think it's lovely outside. Invigorating," Margaret said.

  "Yes. You are young and foolhardy. But now you have inspired me. What is a little cold to an Englishman? Even an aging Englishman like me? Come, Margaret. A stroll!"

  "I suppose you want to move to Tahiti. You want to retire, don't you?" she said.

  "The women there are far too voluptuous for my taste," Edward said. "But it's a thought."

  Margaret watched him drink a cup of tea and remembered when they had been married only a few weeks, how she would wake up and wonder where she was and look at him with a sudden, powerful recognition and wonder how this had happened to her, how she had wound up beside someone she loved so much that she wanted to wake up beside him forever.

  MARGARET POURED her coffee and turned on the TV in the kitchen. Seated in an armchair by a coffee table, a woman in a navy blue dress and pearls sat demurely reciting obscene rap lyrics. Was she the wife of a senator? An enraged mother moved to unaccustomed political action? A new, white female rap singer with an ironically understated style?

  "Face down, ass up, that's the way we like to"—she paused, gave a small smile, and said in a quiet, refined voice—"F-curse." Her hands were folded in her lap. "Now, does the first amendment require that we expose our children to violence and demeaning sexual rhetoric?" She shook her head slightly. "I don't think so."

  She smiled pleasantly, then lifted up a magazine and began waving it. The magazine looked familiar to Margaret.

  "I would like to refer you to the work of the distinguished historian of ideas, Margaret Nathan, who has shown that pornography has served as a destructive, revolutionary force, leading directly to an epidemic of bloody excess during the French Revolution, to mob violence, to oppression and the destruction of the very freedom these irresponsible young people use as a shield for their unsavory music..."

  Edward laughed. He was just back from running, his sweatshirt hood still up. "Margaret Nathan, public enemy of Public Enemy."

  Margaret turned the set off. This was the final humiliation.

  "Rapping, the root of eighteenth-century chaos, cause of the Terror," Edward went on. With his long red face and tight hood he looked like an emaciated baby. "I always suspected something of the sort. Disc master Robespierre. I wish people would misquote me on television."

  "What do they want from me?" Margaret said, not because it related directly to the immediate situation, but because it was what her grandfather had always said when anything was wrong in any situation. "What do they want from me?"

  Edward said, "Whatever it is, they certainly can't have it. You're mine, mine, mine."

  Margaret wondered what he wanted with her, what he wanted with what was his, his, his. She had been cold and unpleasant to him for weeks. She no longer laughed at his stupid jokes or bothered to ask who he was quoting or told him about her work that day or asked him how to spell a word.

  "I've been very unpleasant," Margaret said. "I'm sorry." She was sorry. But she knew she would continue to be unpleasant. She was angry at Edward. Couldn't he see that? Didn't he notice what a bitch she was? Why did he continue to be nice to her when she was behaving so badly?

  "Yes, well, I think of marriage as being quite like the weather, you know, in that it changes frequently, it's unpredictable, and I just happen to live in a particularly stormy climate. But then I rather like storms. Beautiful, exciting. And then the sun comes out."

  Margaret stared at him, moved and infuriated. Storms indeed. He should only know from storms. The fire next time, pal.

  "Did I ever tell you of my theory of adultery?" Edward continued.

  Margaret sat rigidly in her chair. She stared at her coffee cup. It was a lovely coffee cup, part of a set given to them as a wedding gift by Edward's mother, a professor of anthropology at York University who made her own jewelry and avant-garde furniture. Did Edward's mother know he had a theory of adultery? She probably taught it to him, the old reprobate. But why was she calling Edward's mother an old reprobate? Edward's mother was old. But it was she, Margaret, who was the reprobate. Nearly. And Edward himself, of course.

  "My theory is this: that with monogamy came the end of evolution for the human species. For if a male has only one mate, then the superior male cannot plant his seed hither and thither—"

  "Thither?"

  "Thither. And so, he cannot perpetuate his superiority in lavish numbers, if you see what I mean. As for the female, the superior monogamous female who is capable of enticing all the superior males sniffing about cannot mate with all of them, and so cannot improve the gene pool to any significant extent. Natural selection requires selection. But monogamy precludes that. Swans mate for life. We could all end up like swans, with those absurdly long necks. Enter adultery! The savior of evolution, the hero of the race!"

  "My gene pool's not good enough for you? You're going to fuck around to save the world? Fuck you, Edward. That's a terrible theory. Go back to weather."

  Edward looked at her, alarmed. "I didn't mean you and me, Margaret. That was my point, that we are irresponsible, you and I, thinking only of ourselves instead of the greater good. Monogamy is an indulgence. But perhaps the human race can take care of itself," he added. "And long necks are very pretty, I think. Audrey Hepburn has a lovely long neck."

  "Why don't you go plant your precious seed there?"

  "In her neck?"

  Margaret looked at him. His eyes were almost frightening when she looked at them head on, a pale but piercing blue, unyielding, intense. They took in everything and gave nothing back, not even a clue.

  "You have a lovely long neck, too," Edward said softly. "A splendid neck."

  "Well," she said, "I think I feel a storm coming on." And she walked out of the room.

  Edward didn't argue, he didn't scold her. But she did notice that in spite of a large reservoir of Romantic poetry on the subject of meteorological excess, she left him silent behind her, quoting nothing.

  Margaret sat in the library gazing at the dancing dust, golden and airy, all around, her, from the lofty ceiling to the scuffed wooden floor. Perhaps Jove lurked in this flurry of sunlit particles, cruising for an undergraduate Io.

  She was reading Hobbes, and she thought of Art Turner. "To have received from one, to whom we think ourselves equal, greater benefits than there is hope to requite," wrote Hobbes, "disposeth to counterfeit love; but really secret hatred; and puts a man into the estate of a desperat
e debtor. For benefits oblige, and obligation is thralldom." You can say that again, Margaret thought.

  She got up to go, glancing around the room again. Adieu, Jove, adieu. And, look, there is a girl reading Leaves of Grass. An exquisite little girl with long brown hair, as smooth as silk, and that complexion that girls with silken hair always have. Was this the one? Yes, it was the girl who had come to dinner. Stick to your books, that's a good girl. But what if this was the one? Margaret stared at her, disgusted that Edward could be drawn in by such earnest innocence. Edward is a fool, she thought. Adieu to you both.

  She took an empty but overheated bus home, and her anger rose until she heard a humming in her ears. This is my karma, she thought. As ye sow as a student, so shall ye reap as a faculty wife.

  "You got home awfully late last night," Margaret said.

  "Yes, you were asleep. I like you when you're asleep."

  "I wasn't asleep."

  "Ah. I like you when you pretend you're asleep."

  Margaret noticed that he had changed the subject. The subject was that he had come home late. Why had he come home late? Why had he changed the subject? She thought she knew why, and she didn't like it.

  "You didn't answer my question," she said.

  Edward, cooking his horrible tomatoes and mushrooms for breakfast, looked at her in irritation. "You didn't ask a question," he said.

  "It was implied."

  "How subtle of you, Margaret. I'm so bloody literal-minded, though. I was in the library until it closed, then I went to have a drink with some students. I was home at midnight, wasn't I? What on earth are you sulking about?"

  Margaret's coffee was cold, which seemed typical, symptomatic, symbolic, and Edward's fault for drawing her into this absurd situation. "My coffee is cold. Perhaps you spend too much time at your work," she said.

  "Sunny von Bulow uttered just those very words to Claus. Tread carefully, Margaret."

  Why did he think of Claus von Bulow? Margaret wondered. Von Bulow had been seeing another woman, hadn't he?

  "Yes," Margaret said. "I will. I will tread carefully."

  MARGARET LIKED WATCHING Lily puff on cigarettes and rollick verbally through the iniquities of society as if they were fields of wildflowers and she a little lamb.

  "Cappuccino?" asked the waitress in the coffee shop. "We just got a machine. New machine."

  "Now take the word machine " Lily said. She tilted her head just a bit. "Why not 'da-chine'? Why ma-chine? I'll tell you why not da-chine. Because it is woman, ma, ma-ma, who has been objectified, turned into a ma-chine, a sexual apparatus." Lily smiled contentedly.

  "No cappuccino, I guess," Margaret said to the waitress. Lily, I don't see what I see in you sometimes, except perhaps what you see in me, she thought. You are the pool to my Narcissus.

  As Lily rambled on, Margaret silently admired the color of her eyes, which were almost lavender, and daydreamed. Lily, in her breathless desire to spot the world's linguistic traps, was like a child opening a book, trying to find drawings of animals hidden in pictures of living rooms and shoe stores. Instead of the sour, jaded intellectual that Lily meant to be, she seemed young and open and charmingly naive.

  Lily noticed Margaret staring at her, and she blushed, quiet for a moment. But her blush seemed a sign of comfort. Her very presence was a sigh of contentment and belonging. I belong here, said the sigh. I belong to you and only you—every one of you.

  The essence of charm, Margaret thought, was the ability to see others in their best light, to perceive them honestly in the way they would like to be seen, to present to them an interesting, a marvelous, version of themselves. Lily saw Margaret as a happy, well-rounded bourgeoise, a liberal humanist who was perfectly socialized. Bless you, Margaret thought.

  "Lily," she said, "I have a feeling 'machine' derives from a Greek word, don't you? Did they say 'mama' in Greece?"

  "Oh, well, you—you're in denial, Margaret," Lily said. She held her water glass to her lips but didn't drink, rolling the rim back and forth instead, rather suggestively.

  One of Lily's most appealing peculiarities was her passion for shopping. A reformed suburban princess in so many ways, she still clung to this one bit of unreconstructed behavior, altered considerably by where she shopped and for what but still easily recognizable nevertheless to the trained eye. Lily operated primarily in thrift shops, but she could also be found in SoHo or on Madison Avenue. She viewed clothes as costumes and enjoyed herself immensely on these outings.

  Margaret, who remembered the monotony of her private school uniforms with longing, nevertheless would watch Lily with attentive amusement as she slipped in and out of dressing rooms. It was like playing dolls. Try the poodle skirt and the sweater with pom-poms, then the shimmering cranberry tuxedo jacket or the flowered housedress. Sometimes Margaret would sit in the dressing room with Lily, lazily watching her wriggle into a black cocktail dress or step out, with dainty feet, of short shorts decorated with salt and pepper shakers.

  There was something exclusively feminine about these expeditions, even those on which Pepe Pican tagged along. The piles of rumpled clothing, the lacy flash of bras and underwear, the intimate presence of pale, rounded, slightly scented limbs, intoxicated Margaret with its alluring, somehow exotic familiarity, while outside the dressing room Pepe moodily examined old neckties, which he collected.

  Once Margaret asked Pepe what he was working on.

  "My diction," he said.

  "Do you have a lot of friends?" she asked Lily one day.

  "No. Well, enough. But what I really need is a lover."

  A lover, Margaret thought. Why not? Maybe that really was the way to go. Sordid, perhaps. Disloyal. Or was it her duty to herself? "Maybe that's what I need, too," she said.

  Lily laughed at such a preposterous idea.

  "Well, marriage is not perfect, you know," Margaret said.

  "No. But neither is anything else."

  "You're supposed to say that marriage is an enslavement of my soul."

  "Your soul craves enslavement, Margaret. That's what gives you a sense of security and perpetuates the bourgeois myth of happiness."

  "Oh, yeah. That's right," Margaret said.

  "Stability, happiness, loyalty—these are artificial constructs, disguising themselves as 'the nature of things' in order to prop up the tottering status quo. There is no happiness. Happiness is just another narrative, a net in which we're caught."

  "Just so it doesn't drop me," said Margaret.

  MYSELF: You are my pupil! How can you have done this thing?

  SHE: Sir, the passions can do all things, is that not so?

  MYSELF: Passions! Nonsense!

  SHE: A man, or a woman, without passions is incapable of that degree of attention to which a superior judgment is annexed.

  MYSELF: I hope I do not understand you to question my own attention?

  SHE: Certainly not. You are a teacher of genius.

  MYSELF: Ah.

  SHE: And yet I have read, regarding genius, that a genius is an adventurous leader who penetrates the region of discoveries.

  MYSELF: I find nothing to argue with there.

  SHE: I have read that truths yet unknown wander in the regions of discoveries, waiting for someone to seize them.

  MYSELF: As I have seized?

  SHE: As you have seized, yes, seized the truths that were wandering, waiting for someone to seize them and transport them to this terrestrial sphere. But I have read that once these truths have descended to earth and been perceived by superior minds, they become what might be called common property.

  MYSELF: Common property? What absurdity! What are you saying?

  SHE: A genius lays open the road. As, for example, you have laid open a road, my road. A genius lays open the road so that men of a more common capacity may rush in crowds after him.

  MYSELF: I have done no such thing!

  SHE: For we must remember that common man does have the force necessary to follow the genius, ot
herwise genius would there penetrate alone.

  MYSELF: And what is wrong with that? Why should not genius there penetrate alone?

  SHE: But you yourself have taught me that the end of the social art is to secure and extend for all the enjoyment of the common rights which impartial nature has bequeathed to us all. The only privilege of genius is to make the first track.

  My pupil (or was she now my teacher?) had remained seated upon her shawl as it lay spread on the grass. Could this really be she, this philosopher of her own pleasure? Is this what I had taught her? Her search for knowledge had led her away from me, her teacher. I turned from her and made my way back to the house, disconsolate and miserable.

  THERE WAS AN UNEXPECTED MESSAGE on the answering machine. "Margaret," said a female voice. "I know you haven't seen me in almost ten fucking years, but I'm having a book party. For the book I started when I knew you. So would you come? You better!"

  It was Jessica. Margaret recognized the voice, and she had seen a review of the book, pretty favorable, in the Times last week. It was a mystery set at a local TV station called Murder in Media Res.

  The party was on Tuesday at an East Side grill. Margaret had a terrible toothache, a toothache that rattled her head, but she went, of course. Jessica also had been a reader at the same small publishing house where Margaret had worked one summer. Rhodes Press, now defunct, had published highbrow radical works and Edwardian pornography. There had been several young editors and readers who hung out together that summer.

  Margaret spotted Jessica easily. Her face was ridiculously familiar. She was now a TV journalist who had achieved some notoriety by giving the soundman the finger while still on camera. "I have a kid now," she said. "Can you believe it? I'm married to a lawyer. Can you fucking believe it? Do you still smoke pot? Oh, you never did, did you? I don't anymore. I mean I would if anybody ever had any, which nobody ever does."