"Margaret, Margaret, literature is, is what?" cried Jean-Claude. "The acquisition and distribution of cultural capital!" Jean-Claude, having warmed noticeably to both the wine and to his subject, slapped Margaret heartily on the back. "Good? Bad? Pooh! The project of the Enlightenment is dead! Invert the hierarchy of judgment!" He raised his glass and laughed. "Long live the liberation of the signifier!"
"Well," said Edward, after joining the toast, "the wine is awfully good. Thank God, my dears, you haven't inverted that particular hierarchy."
"Ah, well, the wine," said both the host and hostess, grinning with pride, shrugging in their lovely, loose sweaters. "The wine—of course."
In honor of the visiting American, Juliette had adapted her cuisine, making hamburgers. Then Edward and Margaret retired to the guest room, which was the entire top floor of the house, a beautiful room, and when she saw it, Margaret thought, with some envy, Ah, the French, so much taste, so little brain, for the room was decorated in the most luxurious velvets and brocades and tasseled cabbage-rose drapes and a Herman Miller sofa and butterfly chairs and original Eames and Knoll pieces, a marvelous, elegant, witty combination, a happy marriage of minimalisme and Gothic romance.
Outside, the wind howled, rattling the shutters. Margaret sank her head into the square feather pillows and listened. Creak creak. Clunk clunk. "Is this the attic?" she said. "Are we in the attic?"
"I suppose it is. The attic. That sounds a bit portentous. What will happen here? What will happen here tonight? This very drear and drafty night? Perhaps the enraged Enlightenment will haunt us, armed with sharpened quill. 'I have been wronged!' Ah, Juliette and Jean-Claude—they open cultural doors. They are cultural doors."
"Did you see the door of their refrigerator?" Margaret said. Juliette and Jean-Claude had proudly shown them the refrigerator, a high-tech, extremely wide, remarkably shallow apparatus behind a door of elaborately carved wood.
"Yes," Edward said. "Theirs is a very pure and cerebral socialism."
Creak creak, said the shutters.
Margaret picked up a paperback from the bedside table. The cover showed a dark-haired (raven-haired, she corrected herself) woman, her head thrown back, and beside her a beautiful black woman, head thrown back too, both of whom seemed to be bound, in an indistinct way (perhaps they were just sort of tangled) on a dock. The book was called Desire's Dominion.
"Well, they're very considerate, your friends, aren't they?" She lay back, closed her eyes, and listened to the wind outside. "Do you like France, Edward?"
Edward leaned down and whispered, "'Thanks to the human heart by which we live, thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, to me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.'"
"To whom is that addressed?" she asked. "Who is the meanest flower that blows? Me or France?"
"Neither. It's my manifesto. Neither of you is in any way mean. I just like Wordsworth. And you. And France."
"How very un-British of you."
But Edward had spent most of his childhood summers in France. It was where he'd met Jean-Claude, on one of those summer holidays. Margaret thought of Jean-Claude and Edward, skinny boys in skimpy but still baggy bathing trunks, digging among the rocks on the Normandy shore. She thought of the "Immortality" ode. Now, whenever she thought of Jean-Claude, she would think of Wordsworth's lines, she would remember a boy she never met, until he'd become a considerate, fatuous post-modern man, on a beach she'd never seen, and tears would come to her eyes. How annoying; to be so vulnerable to poetry, to Edward.
"Did you ever see Splendor in the Grass?" she said, as some kind of revenge. "That was a post-Gothic romance."
Before that trip, Margaret never drank, not even wine; and she rarely drank after it. But during those weeks, she was quite thoroughly drunk every day.
The sun came up each morning to find her snoring in the starched white sheets of some plump little pension bed. No, she thought, when Edward tried to wake her. No, you see, I've moved in, I'm quite settled here and cannot be shifted, not ever, certainly not by you, Edward, whoever you are. And through half-open eyes she watched him get dressed, marveling at how the British could have conquered the world with such skinny, sunken chests.
"Maybe you should wear tight pants tucked into boots, you know?" she said. "Like Mick Jagger."
"Undoubtedly."
Sometimes she could pull him back to bed, sometimes not. She didn't care. She didn't care about anything except scenery and wine and food and pictures in echoing galleries and churches in echoing squares and Edward in the same ill-fitting brown suit.