"It's just a menu," Margaret said. And she ordered the meat loaf.
"We have no meat loaf today," said the waitress.
Lily giggled. "Never trust the transparency of meaning, Margaret."
"Now, girls," Till said in the fey, show-biz tone that had been popular among them in college, but that she alone had kept up.
"It's still just a menu," Margaret said irritably.
"I wrote my dissertation about menus," Lily said. Then she turned the sultry warmth of her gaze on Margaret, smiled, squeezed Margaret's arm, and seemed so genuinely pleased to see her that Margaret smiled and knew she must forgive anything Lily said because of the way she said it—the flirtatious, absurdly good-natured warmth; her voice, the whisper of a starlet; and the way she giggled deliciously. And then, perhaps most important, Lily had always seemed to like Margaret so much. That was greatly in her favor.
"They leave their telltale signs everywhere," Lily continued, looking at her own menu in its dark green plastic cover. "The text of their exclusion is so public. Oh, I like your do, Margaret," she added, patting Margaret's hair, which had just been cut. Then she leaned forward, and continued, "You know, I wake up in the morning and I feel like a sex object."
Because she thought this sounded glamorous, Margaret examined Lily more closely. The tight black leather skirt was de rigueur for a feminist art critic, she supposed. But the red lace bodice seemed a more personal statement. Well, if one had shapely shoulders and beautiful breasts, the left breast blessed further with a beauty mark, why shouldn't one display them? If this caused men to leer at one and treat one as a sex object, it was a reflection on them, the men, wasn't it? There was something wonderfully innocent and nearly tragic about Lily, Margaret thought, like a flower, bursting with gaudy color and health, swaying in the garden breeze, alluring by nature, but shy of every admiring glance, seeing there its own—pluck!—mortality.
***
We determined that we could do no better, in the pursuit of enlightened understanding, than to examine the nature of friendship using our own growing friendship as a model. My pupil, my "friend," had already set for herself a course of reading of such a noble and ambitious tone, a road leading to such heights and yet lined with such pitfalls, that I felt compelled, as a friend, to accompany her, to act as her guide, to take her hand and lead her.
MYSELF: Education determines a man. Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education. But you, you have somehow escaped and remained as un-stained as a chad. Now your education can begin. First, your senses will awaken. You will see and hear and smell, you will taste and you will touch. And then, ah! As your senses awaken, all the inlets to the mind are set open; now, now, all the objects of nature will rush thither.
SHE: Thither?
MYSELF: Thither.
SHE: To the inlets?
MYSELF: They will rush into the deepest inlets. To all the inlets of the mind.
Rameau's niece, formerly a wretched, sniveling infant (as I vividly recalled when once she identified herself), an indefatigable nuisance, petulant, weeping, quarreling with other little nuisances, a graceless, unruly thing, who had yet been worshiped as a goddess by her parents, blinded as they were by nature, was now truly a goddess. Please, do not deceive yourselves that my judgment was likewise clouded by parental sentiment. I felt not at all like a parent to this exquisite little girl whom any man of discernment would have described, as I often did to myself, as a figure of such elevating charms that just to look at her, the way her shoulders curved in relation to the equally elegant curve of her white neck, and the manner in which her waist, with its own, quite unique little curve, yet was bound up so eloquently with the rest, was to experience that these curves achieved a most pleasing unity of effect, an effect of beauty so powerful that I confess that during one of our meetings (this time in the library, for it was raining), before I could even realize what I was doing, I had flung myself to my knees before her.
Alone in the room, the others having retired, we faced each other, she seated, still clutching the volume she had been reading, myself at her feet, wondering what I had done and fearing more than anything her displeasure at my intemperate behavior, when suddenly the silence was broken by her soft, pure voice. My pupil began to read aloud.