Rameau's Niece Read online

  "Shortcut, darling?"

  Margaret never forgot driving off the mountain, and she never forgot how Edward pretended she wasn't shaking, how he made quiet jokes that guided her back to the road and back to the world where cars were aimed at Turin rather than at a heavily wooded abyss.

  She drove slowly, with determination, ecstatic that she had not rolled hideously to a foreign death, and for a moment she felt about the world the way she thought Edward always felt about it, for thirty honking cars trailed irritably behind her, and, glancing in the rearview mirror, all she noticed about them was how brightly they sparkled in the mountain sunlight.

  BEHIND THEIR LIVES stood Edward's schedule, a firm yet supple structure that gave to each day a thousand opportunities. If there were only twenty-four hours, then let them begin! Edward rose not only with the sun, but as if he were the sun. I am here, he seemed to be saying. The day may, indeed must, begin. He ate the same breakfast each morning, but what a breakfast—kippered herring and pumpernickel bread, bacon and eggs, fried tomatoes and mushrooms, Cheerios and sliced bananas, toast and jam and muffins, too. It was a labor-intensive meal, which was perhaps how he could stay so thin and eat so much. He presided over this ecumenical array of bowls, dishes, pots, and pans with smooth efficiency, then, finished, turned to his coffee and his newspapers, sometimes reading aloud to Margaret, unless she objected, which, foul-tempered and puffy-eyed, she often did.

  "I don't care, Edward. I don't care about the Czech Philharmonic just yet."

  "Margaret, one of the things I love about you, and there are so many it fills my soul with joy, but one of the most endearing qualities you have is how sincere you become in petulance." He smiled.

  Margaret, her senses blunted by fatigue and the rich potpourri of breakfast odors, would nevertheless experience his presence then, acutely and pleasantly—the look of him and his touch, without looking or touching—and she would feel rising within her the familiar tide of gratitude and astonishment that she had come to recognize as love.

  Margaret put her hand out and touched his across the table. Far away in Prague, the Czech Philharmonic was actively participating in a democratic revolution. In New York, she was happy and married to Edward. Both of these occurrences seemed equally improbable to Margaret and nearly miraculous. Edward was right: the world was a marvelous place.

  "You really don't mind me," she said. "You like me."

  "Our marriage is a putrid sink of festering lies; a vile, infested prison house into which we have been flung by a careless and callous fate."

  Edward had married Margaret and moved to New York, to Columbia's Comp. Lit. Department, adapting as enthusiastically as the English sparrow, shifting effortlessly from an ancient, orderly university town to the great noise of urban decay. An Americanophile, Edward was a scholar of (of all people and against all academic fashion) Walt Whitman, and he adored the home of his poet.

  Mannahatta! '"A million people—manners free and superb'!" Edward was a man at peace with New York.

  For the next six years, each morning at 7:00, Edward ventured forth into Mannahatta to run around the reservoir. He maintained that it cleared his head, but Margaret noted that running was practically the only exercise that would not affect pectoral muscles in a positive way, and so she was convinced that he underwent the ordeal merely to assure that his British chest would remain sufficiently concave. When he returned home, at exactly 8:40, sweating and loquacious after so much time deprived of both students and books, he would quickly shower and change, eat his extensive breakfast, then walk up to Columbia for his 11:00 class. Home for lunch and a twenty-minute nap. Back to school, for conferences or research or petty, backbiting department meetings, each of which he embraced warmly and without reservation, for they belonged to his life, and therefore to him, and so beamed with a pleasant and interesting reflected light. Home for dinner at 6:30 sharp, whether he had an 8:00 class or not. When he did, home at 10:15. If not, work at home until 11:00. Asleep at 11:30. Up at 6:30 for another round.

  If there were exceptions to this routine—a dinner date, a lecture to give, a concert—the schedule rippled effortlessly and made room. Margaret had never met a more orderly, less rigid soul. Edward's mind, nearly promiscuous in its passionate interests, opened to every new possibility, with one exception: the possibility of failing to do what he had planned to do when he had planned to do it, and of failing to do anything else he wanted to or was required to, as well. And so, every day, like the spinning of the earth, like the silent journey of the stars from one curved horizon to another, Edward's day followed its course. If "willful" and "blessed" were synonyms, they would describe Edward and the gentle, unvarying rhythm of his days.

  Vigorous and effortless, the weeks passed and his life was full. Margaret gazed admiringly, for she herself had no schedule to speak of. Her contributions to the family income, while considerable, came irregularly and from far away. Margaret was almost famous. She had written a biography—a plain, sturdy little biography, a biography as unfashionable, as modest and unassuming as an aproned housewife, which had nevertheless caught the public's fickle eye. The subject, Charlotte de Montigny, had been assigned to her when she was a graduate student in intellectual history looking for a dissertation topic. Wife of a dissolute and ill-tempered minor eighteenth-century aristocrat, Madame de Montigny had consoled herself by becoming an amateur astronomer, an occasional portrait artist, and an avid autodidact of anatomy. "Oh, you might as well take her," Margaret's adviser had said. An aging, eminent professor who drank too much and married too many of his students, he ordered up dissertation topics as if they were dishes at an unsatisfactory restaurant, the only restaurant in town. But this time, the meat loaf had won a prize, several prizes. Margaret was the recipient of grants and royalties, of a postdoctoral sinecure, of a little office at Princeton that was too far away to use.

  But grants and royalties and an unused office across the river did not require a schedule or regular habits. Margaret eavesdropped on Edward as he argued amiably on the telephone with a magazine editor for whom he was reviewing a book.

  "Do you like James Schuyler?" Edward finally asked into the phone. "I do. So American. 'The night is filled with indecisions, to take a downer or an upper, to take a walk, to lie down and relax. I order you: RELAX.'" And then, with great satisfaction, as if that certainly settled the matter, he hung up. Sometimes, when Margaret saw a poem on the printed page, with all its punctuation, its short and long lines, its verses, she would be startled. Living with Edward, she had come to regard poetry as conversation.

  At her desk in the study they shared, Margaret turned back to Voltaire. Voltaire and his mistress had worked together for years, she thought. But they shared a château, not a spare bedroom. They worked in separate, elaborately appointed quarters, a prudent arrangement that made it quite impossible for Madame du Châtelet to waste her working time by listening in on Voltaire's undoubtedly brilliant and entertaining telephone conversations—although she had regularly steamed open his mail. Still, she showed far greater independence than I do, sitting around gawking at my own husband as if he were my first beau, my secret lover, my only friend, and my lifelong mentor.

  Sometimes the depth of her feelings for Edward annoyed her. Am I a domesticated household pet, to take such pleasure from the physical presence of a man reading the Mississippi Review? She got up and put her arms around his neck, burying her face in his silver unmowed lawn of hair. Who does he think he is, strutting around, being happy and punctual all the time?

  "Let's go to Prague together," she said then. "Let's hear the Czech Philharmonic."

  MARGARET SPENT THE DAY at the library. Even the sunlight stepped carefully here on its slow, heavy journey down from the dusty windows high above, whispering to itself, Do not disturb, do not disturb.

  Margaret did not disturb. No one disturbed, which also meant no one disturbed Margaret. Margaret lived in constant fear of casual conversation, in which invariably someone would ask
her about something she had written, and she would not know what they were talking about. Margaret was an authority on many things, with this one qualification—she had forgotten those many things as thoroughly as if she swilled daily from the river Lethe, morning, noon, and night, gulping, gargling, brushing her teeth with the waters of oblivion. Margaret suffered short-lived but all-consuming intellectual passions to which she gave herself over completely, becoming expert enough to be thoughtful. After she wrote about whatever it was that preoccupied her for that moment, she forgot, forgot everything, forgot it altogether, retaining only a pleasant feeling of accomplishment and completion.

  While working on her dissertation, which became her first book, The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny, Margaret had discovered an intriguing eighteenth-century manuscript. She could find no evidence that it had ever been published, and how it had arrived at Midtown Medical Library, she could not yet say.

  It was in the form of a dialogue. Gradually, she came to realize that whole passages of works by Helyétius, Diderot, Kant, Condorcet—everyone who was anyone in the eighteenth century—as well as considerable portions of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, had been lifted, unacknowledged, and scattered through the book. This was not in itself unusual. There were no copyrights, and pirated editions of philosophical works, anthologies of unattributed excerpts, often considerably altered, were common.

  But was this a philosophical work? she wondered. For, in addition to the philosophical content, the story, like much of the literature of that libertine time, was one of seduction.

  Was it then a libertine novel? And if not—if not a philosophical tract and not a libertine novel—what was it? What manner of beast? Margaret was translating it from the French. Her new book, on underground Enlightenment literature, was centered on this bawdy, didactic dialogue. She turned to it each day with increasing pleasure and curiosity. A hybrid creature, feathered, furred, and pink-complexioned, it lay before her, open, waiting, a mysterious coquette, waiting for her, for Margaret. It was called Rameau's Niece.

  RAMEAU'S NIECE

  by Anonymous

  Translated by Margaret Nathan

  It is my custom to whistle while I work. I adopted this habit at a tender age and have found it to be a pleasant accompaniment to the exertions of my occupation, an occupation already so delightful that this further adornment sometimes lifts my spirit to such an unaccustomed height that I thoroughly forget what, in fact, my delightful occupation is.

  On one such occasion, as I whistled merrily, the sounds flew from my pursed lips to join, somewhat humbly, the magnificent song of a lark perched in a tree beneath which I strolled. I turned my eyes toward that delicate creature of heaven and so, my attention averted momentarily from my earthly path, I stumbled.

  My foot had rubbed against a thick, protruding root, causing me to lose my balance, and I thus was flung against a passerby, hitherto unnoticed by me, engaged as I was in my habitual whistling and the aforementioned glance at the feathered messenger of Venus; for the lark's song was indeed a song of love that day, an idea by which I was struck even as I was struck by the beauty of the passerby whom I inadvertently, but rather forcefully, struck.

  SHE: You have lost your footing.

  MYSELF: I have indeed lost my footing. But let us hope that I have not lost my head, for surely, just this moment, I have lost my heart! What a lovely apparition to appear before me, here where I expected only solitude.

  She was indeed lovely. Lovely? She was exquisite, a girl whose many qualities, each one remarkable on its own, created together a sense of harmony, of consistency, of perfect unity—in short, of beauty! I felt all of this immediately, before even I realized I was experiencing anything at all, for her grace was of such subtle power that the effect seemed to be obtained without any effort. And so too, effortlessly, was it apprehended, and welcomed, by me.

  MYSELF: Will you forgive me?

  SHE: I cannot forgive you for an act instigated not by you but by chance; nor would I forgive you for an act that gives me the pleasure of meeting again, after all these years, the friend of my uncle and a philosopher of such brilliance. For let me confess, sir, I have often desired to see you again. Your Treatise on Sense and Sociability has been my most intimate companion this past year.

  How extraordinary. A little girl (she was no more than sixteen) had chosen for company a work of mine, a rather difficult one, too. Why, it was in her small and delicate hand at that very moment! She pressed the book—my book—almost reverently to her breast.

  SHE: I have so many questions.

  As did I, the first and most pressing of which was, Who was she?

  This I knew not. But, yet, I felt I knew something of greater weight, for her desire to struggle toward the freedom to make use of her reason was clear to me. And so too was my obligation to accompany—no, to lead her on her journey. Without my knowledge, I had been chosen to be (indeed, judging by the book in her little white hand, I already was) her guide on a journey toward enlightenment. Here was an innocent child, unspoiled, seeking an education.

  MYSELF: But how is it that you know me? And who is your uncle?

  I tell you now, dear reader, that I addressed these questions to the lovely girl in a state of agitation, for in my distress at disturbing an innocent young lady by clumsily bumping into her on a deserted and narrow garden path, and in my excitement at discovering a pupil so eager, I had quite forgotten to step aside to let her pass, and so was standing in such intimate proximity to her that I felt her breast heaving, in shock at the surprise of the initial encounter, no doubt, against my own chest, her little hand clutching still my modest treatise on sociability now pressed between our two hearts.

  I longed to teach her then, to be her friend, to be employed incessantly in promoting her felicity and increasing it by every sort of pleasure.

  And, longing thus, foreseeing the pleasure and happiness of such an arrangement, and standing thrust against her as I was, I became conscious of another feeling—a sudden and enormous surge of emotion on my part.

  Recognizing my inability to control this swelling of sentiment in a situation of such delightful propinquity, and fearing that the girl might herself sense this sudden fullness of feeling and become alarmed, I moved back a pace.

  SHE: Don't be startled, sir. I am not a stranger to you, only a stranger in this figure, for you have not seen me since I was a child. I am Rameau's niece.

  EDWARD HAD NO DIFFICULTIES at dinner parties. If he had been seated beside a rock, he would have quickly begun an animated discussion of its layers of granite or sandstone or lime, its life underground, its ocean journeys and aspirations for the future. Intoxicated by this encounter, he would regale Margaret with tales of the rock's history, which he would tell with such enthusiasm and such grace that she would laugh and hope that some day she too might sit beside a stone at dinner. And the stone? It would sigh and bask in its newly realized glory, its importance and beauty, necessity and dignity—I pave roads and build towers, I form mountains, I rest on the throats of gracious ladies!

  Margaret, on the other hand—well, sometimes she thought about what it would be like to sit next to herself at a dinner party. She would have nothing to say. And neither would she.

  Unable to ask the initial dinner-party question (the question to ask at a dinner party, at least at the kinds of dinner parties she attended, was either "What is your field?" or "What are you working on?" depending on the degree of familiarity between participants in the exchange), unable to ask the question because of a feeling that she ought already to know the answer but didn't, or that the answer was "Nothing" and would make the question seem aggressive and cruel, she would sit in an agonized silence that she, in the next chair, also paralyzed and mute, would interpret as disdain, boredom, or, worst of all, stupidity.

  Edward told her that her appalling memory was cleansing, that she came to everything fresh, and so it was a virtue. But he was wrong. A poor memory robs a person of dig
nity, Margaret knew. She had some standing in the world, but none of it had been achieved at dinner parties.

  But here we are, Margaret thought, as she and Edward entered a large West Side apartment, the walls around them enameled, glistening, slick as ice. The ceiling, she thought, looking up—you could skate on the ceiling, gravity aside.

  Edward whispered in her ear, "'And most of the jokes you just can't catch, like dirty words rubbed off a slate, and the songs are loud but somehow dim and it gets so terribly late."' Edward had taken to quoting only American poets since moving to New York. "Elizabeth Bishop," he said gently, answering her helpless look.

  The couple giving the party were named Till and Art Turner. Margaret had roomed with Till in college, an unforgettable experience that involved witnessing constant rehearsing of Till's roles in various avant-garde student productions, many of them musicals.

  Till's husband, Art, a tall, handsome man with a short beard and lovely teeth, stood at the door. He was a highly regarded writer who never seemed to write anything, which somehow only added to his reputation. He was a man of integrity. He smiled, shook hands, smiled, smiled, and smiled. He whispered to some, loudly announced others, his attentiveness calling attention to itself.