A woman began talking to Margaret about the difficulty of assessing the relationship between the forms of popular culture (by which she meant images, she considerately explained) and their consumers. Margaret wondered if she was referring to the Nielsen ratings system, but then the woman noted with some conviction that "pop had never really signified with one discourse," and Margaret knew that she was not. Oh, Prague! she thought. Where are you when I need you?
She thought how much she would miss Edward, even for a week, how much she liked him, how often she saw him, how little Kafka she had read. She found Edward chatting in Russian (It sounded like Russian, but then, who knew? Perhaps he'd learned Polish on the sly, or Czech) with a skinny, handsome man with bad teeth, and when there was a pause, Edward introduced her, she smiled, did not even take in the man's name long enough to forget it, waited till he'd drifted away, and then told Edward she'd been invited to Prague. "To talk about traditions in underground literature," she said.
"Dirty books? That's marvelous. Shall I join you? No, of course I can't if you're off so soon. The term will be just beginning." He offered her a glass of some sort of spiced wine. "What a grisly business Christmas is," he said. "I have been thinking of a plan for calendar reform which would improve matters immensely. It is obviously incompatible with the exciting educational advances of today for children to be expected to remember complex rhymes such as 'Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November,' don't you agree? So I propose that ten months be of thirty-one days each, leaving just two exceptions: February, with its twenty-eight, and December, which would have only twenty-seven days. Consequently, New Year's Eve would come forty-eight hours after Christmas Day and only twenty-four after Boxing Day. The gain for sanity, the boost to production, the sheer beauty of the scheme from all points of view, make me wonder why it has not been promulgated before." He put his arm around her. His hand squeezed her shoulder. "You haven't been away from me, Margaret, in such a very long time."
"Let's go home," Margaret said softly.
"Yes," Edward said, and he kissed her head.
"I'll be lost without you, Edward. Like Virgil without Dante. I mean, Dante without Virgil."
"No, darling. Like Joseph K. You're going to Prague, you see, not to hell."
Margaret frowned, embarrassed, and walked off.
"'Then my leader went on with great strides...'" Edward recited the lines from Dante at the top of his lungs, following her as he spoke. "'Her looks disturbed somewhat with anger; so I left these burdened souls, following the prints of the dear feet.'"
A WEEK OR SO LATER, Till called to invite Margaret to a dinner party in honor of a young unproduced playwright she had taken up. Till discovered young unproduced playwrights. It was a hobby. She was much admired for her generosity, although Margaret had noticed that she then proceeded to give the young unproduced playwrights advice like, Why not take a couple of years off and go to medical school? or, Your work is much too important to be produced in such a small theater, which pretty much assured they would become old unproduced playwrights.
Margaret did not think she could face another evening at Till's large, busy table just yet, so she suggested they have lunch together instead.
"I'll bring Lily, too," Till said.
Yes, Margaret thought. Why not recreate an earlier era, when lonely girlfriends gathered together over coffee shop tables, covered wagons briefly turned away from the wilderness toward the warm fire? Sometimes Margaret wondered if she missed being lonely. There had been a certain down-and-out vigor to her plight which appeared lean, almost glamorous, compared to the round contentment she experienced now.
They met at a hamburger place in the neighborhood. Margaret got there first and watched Till clatter in on gold sequined high heels, rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, or very nearly. Till, like John F. Kennedy, did not wear a coat. It was a gift, she said, her inner warmth.
Together they watched Lily make her entrance. Her cheeks were, as always, just barely flushed, her short wavy hair in easy disarray. An open, beckoning, corruptible-peasant-faced sort of person, she maneuvered through the tables with her lips slightly parted and her eyes slightly glazed. Lily always looked as if she had just been fucked. This look appealed to Margaret. How did one achieve it?
"Oy, what a day," Lily said, sliding into the booth with a motion so fluid and so revealing of the many positive features of her figure that Margaret wondered if she practiced sliding into coffee shop booths, if she went to a health club specializing in coffee-shop-booth-sliding workouts. And one, two, three, sliiide!
"Notice how the menu says 'We,'" Lily said immediately, pointing to Till's open menu with one hand while unzipping her motorcycle jacket with the other. "'We have a meat loaf special today'! Do you think that 'we' includes us? Of course not. The 'we' refers to them. Hello, doll." And she kissed Till on the cheek, then leaned across the table and kissed Margaret.
Margaret now remembered why she hadn't seen Lily much in the years since college. Because she disliked Lily. At least, she disliked a good thirty percent of the words that tumbled happily from Lily's red, cherub lips.