Till Turner was nicknamed Turner Off by one critic, but most of them welcomed her ability to churn out a new play every single year. Her apartment was old and the rooms large and square, not narrow and rectangular as in most New York apartments. Although Margaret was perfectly happy in her own apartment, when she went out she found herself inattentively, but invariably, appraising, and wanting, someone else's. She would stand, panting from the six flights of stairs, in a narrow garret in the East Village, trying to keep her balance on the slanted floor; or step out onto a balcony not much bigger than a shoe box from an apartment on Second Avenue and Sixty-eighth Street and listen to the traffic bray below; or search the dark, endless hall of a railroad flat near Columbia, looking for the dreary bathroom. It didn't matter where she was—every apartment had something, a leaking but romantic skylight, a view, a shower fixture. She vaguely wanted all of them, and of all of them the one she vaguely wanted most was this one, Till Turner's. Sunlight streamed through the treetops to the broad windows during the day. Beyond the trees was the park and then the river. At night, the lights of New Jersey twinkled merrily through the leaves: you over there may ridicule us over here, the New Jersey lights seemed to say, but look, just look who you're staring at, and look who we get to watch!
Now Till was leaning over the back of Lily's chair, speaking rapidly and softly to Lily, and Margaret watched them with envy, wishing someone, anyone, would at that moment speak rapidly and softly to her, or even loudly and excruciatingly slowly. Till looked up and saw that Margaret was watching. She pulled away from Lily with a little laugh.
"I haven't seen Lily in a long time," she said. She laughed again and moved on to another guest.
"Margaret!" said Lily from across the table, her head tilted to one side as if Margaret were a very rare bird indeed. "In the dream, we were reading Ovid together. Translating for a course. Wild? In straight-backed chairs. Just like Mr. Griswold's class, remember?"
"I've never studied Latin," Margaret said. "I never read Ovid."
"Of course you have," Lily said reassuringly. "And you're absolutely scandalous, with your best seller and all your prizes. I'm so envious I could spit." She reached out and put her hand on Margaret's and patted it and didn't seem the least bit envious, only amused.
"Don't spit," Margaret said.
Maybe I should hone my poor socialization skills with Lily, Margaret thought halfheartedly, noticing Lily's vintage white silk suit. She's exotic. She looks like a post-quickie-divorce Las Vegas bride.
Till, in and out of the room, up and down in her seat, back and forth and round and round among the guests, now approached Margaret's vicinity. Thank God she won't wonder at my magnificent simplicity the way her unbearable husband did. Margaret thought she heard Art discussing his SAT scores. He was forty years old. "It was an onerous burden. I cheated to bring them down, of course."
Till stood beside Margaret now. Her appearance had a biblical quality, flowing in various ways and directions—skirts, hair, scarves, and sleeves. In her deep voice, a hoarse, gravelly melody of slightly Southern intonation, she said "Telephone" to the girl beside Margaret with such resonance and respect that the telephone ceased all at once to be a convenience and returned instead to its early, almost mythic stature—it was again an invention. As the girl beside her silently rose and wafted away, Margaret wondered anew at Till.
"Margaret," Till said, and she looked at Margaret with such evident interest and approval, such enthusiasm. This, Margaret thought, is a kind of power. To make other people feel they are important to you. "Margaret," Till repeated, as if her very name were a joy to the senses and the intellect both. "What are you working on?"
"A sequel."
"Ah. Margaret the scholar. I admire you, Margaret. I mean, your work actually has stature. You don't know that because you're so absurdly self-effacing, but you have an impact on people, on the way people think..."
Margaret said, "Marchons, marchons."
But her work did march victoriously, and she sometimes watched its odd popularity with alarm. The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny had been reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review as "an unusually accessible, one might even say readable, work of scholarship that addresses issues as relevant to twentieth-century women as to the women of the Age of Enlightenment," and had crept onto the best-seller list, where it settled in for nineteen weeks.
"By the end of the eighteenth century," the review said, "the sturdy peasant had replaced the delicate aristocrat as the physical ideal. Breast-feeding, says Nathan, became a national obsession: 'The bosom metamorphosed from decorative bauble to natural wonder. Charlotte de Montigny, a student of anatomy and therefore conscious of these changes in sentiment, recognized them as revolutionary and sought to name them. She did this by renaming the human body in a little-known tract called Anatomie sans culotte.'"
Who cares? Margaret had wondered, reading the review. Only I care. Only I, who have spent so much of my adult life with this woman and her body parts. No one else could possibly care.