Rameau's Niece

WHEN MARGARET had been very young and single, people, also very young and single, had constantly dropped by. They would telephone from the street corner or just ring the bell and come and sit on the couch with her and discuss how much they hated being so young and so single and, more often than not, so unemployed. Margaret sighed. What golden days those were, sitting in the gloom. The dimming afternoon light. Slouched on the sofa until it was really quite dark. Too lazy to reach up and turn on a light. Drinking coffee, having lunch delivered from the coffee shop across the street, dinner delivered from the coffee shop across the street from the first coffee shop. (She was too ashamed to get both meals from the same place. She had once almost ordered a poached egg for breakfast and had it delivered, but decided at the last minute that it would be decadent.)

Since marrying Edward, Margaret's social life had taken a peculiar turn. She went out more than she ever had in the past but seemed to know fewer and fewer people. She met people—Edward's colleagues, Till's chattering circle. She met other historians, too, although she had managed to keep her academic activities to a minimum. She hated to teach, and after the success of The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny she had not needed to. She belonged to a group, a seminar of pseuds (as Edward, who also belonged, called it) which brought her into contact with people from other disciplines. She had lunches with magazine editors. And so her universe, once the narrow university, was now slightly broader, perhaps, but considerably more ephemeral. And the comfort of friendship—the kinds of casual, open-ended encounters she had once had with friends—now occurred almost exclusively between her and her husband.

Margaret didn't really mind the change; indeed, for a long time she didn't even notice. Edward made up for a great deal. He filled a lot of space. Listening to him, she was busy. She struggled to recall names, dates, everything she had firmly believed in two hours before. Edward remembered vigorously, joyously, as if the act of remembering was itself a magnificent physical pleasure.

Sometimes she wondered if he didn't fill up a little too much space, for she was aware of him even as she thought her own thoughts. And every once in a while the rhythm of those old, long days, when she and her thoughts were alone, would come back to her, like a song, and she would feel a sense of nostalgia for a time when all was expectation and nothing was expected from her.





Her old friends, or at least her old ways of friendship, seemed to have slipped away when she wasn't paying attention. Had she simply forgotten them, along with their names? Had her forgetfulness hardened to callousness? Margaret didn't like to think of herself as a callous person—it wounded her vanity—and she disliked the idea of losing anything, anything at all. Thinking this way, she felt a familiar urge, a compelling desire, not for something specific, just for more. Seek, and ye shall find. Then ye shall forget. So, ye'll just have to seek again.

Forgetfulness was the engine that moved her. And if it compelled her to frenzied gathering of facts and ideas into books, surely she could gather friends to her bosom, too.

Being a methodical as well as a suggestible person, and having spent the morning reading Francis Bacon, she decided to test the inductive method of reasoning by making lists of former friends and looking for a characteristic common to all of them by which she might arrive at a general law of friendship gone awry.

The names fell into two categories: those she had lost interest in, and those who had lost interest in her. She looked briefly at the column of names of people she had lost interest in, considered calling one or two, then lost interest. The other list, those who had lost interest in her, was baffling, and the only general law she could arrive at was that they were disloyal. This was of course a tautology and surely not what Francis Bacon had been driving at, but then he died of a cold caught while testing his theories of refrigeration by shoving snow into a chicken.

Margaret called Richard, her editor. In a way almost unheard of for the editor of an academic, he watched over her like a hen, clucking and fussing and proud. He admired her, protected her, manipulated her. He actually edited, too. Margaret recognized that she was smiled upon by fortune, even if this blessing came to her by way of Art Turner and was itself of a highly irritable, even petulant, nature.

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