"The menu."
Lily was smiling, smoking, and thoughtfully examining the daily specials inserted in a special narrow plastic page. Was she pondering the menu as a reification of woman's role, a paradigm of organized control over woman's life, the repressive figuration of woman's qualities and skills?
"I think I'll have a bacon cheeseburger," Lily said. She took off her swirly coat with its big round button to reveal a tight suede tunic laced up the front in medieval peasant fashion, her breasts spilling over the top. She ran her hands through her short hair, fluffing it.
"Funny," she said, tilting her head and staring at Margaret. "Funny we didn't really know each other at school." Her whispery voice gave way to a little sigh. She put her hand under her chin and pouted slightly.
"Well, I guess I didn't see too much of Till or her friends after the first year. I retreated to the library."
"The library," Lily said softly, "is one of the mechanisms of discipline, capturing the individual in a system of registration and accumulation of documents."
The way she said it, Margaret thought, in her throaty whisper, sucking on one dainty finger, she made the library sound like soft-core bondage. Oh! Discipline me with your mechanism! More, oh, more!
"So what are you working on?" Margaret asked, not sure how else to respond to Dewey Decimal de Sade.
"I'm thinking of writing something about music, for a change. Rachmaninoff," Lily said.
Margaret sighed. Poor Rachmaninoff. What crime had he committed to cause him to fall prey to this pretentious sexpot fraud?
"He's not a woman," Margaret said. "Is he?"
"Ah, but he might just as well have been a woman," Lily said tenderly. "Poor Rachmaninoff."
"You like Rachmaninoff?" She herself loved Rachmaninoff but saw no reason to tell anyone about it.
"Look," Lily said, "a case must be made for the second tier. Genius is an oppressive male construct. Genius, genius, genius. Enough with the genius."
"You like Rachmaninoff because he's second-rate?"
Lily smiled and began to hum loudly a particularly lush passage from the Symphonic Dances.
Margaret, though sorely tempted, forced herself not to hum along. One had one's pride. But she did regard Lily with a new respect and with a growing warmth.
"Do you like Trollope, too?" she asked hopefully.
Inspired by Lily's description, Margaret went to the mechanism of discipline the next morning, but it failed to live up to its reputation, and she felt restless after only an hour and began to stare into space. The anonymous author of Rameau's Niece had lifted passages from so many philosophers, and with such abandon, that Margaret knew she would be spending months tracking down sources. The author was well versed in the literature of the age. Was he some provincial boy who had come to the glamorous big city to be a philosophe? There were plenty of them in Paris during the Enlightenment, failed intellectuals writing smut and peddling it to get by. Or perhaps he was a bored clergyman passing the time between nones and matins. And why "he"? Couldn't the author have been a woman like Madame de Montigny? Margaret sometimes wondered if Rameau's Niece was written as a hoax, like Diderot's La Religieuse, which Diderot and a friend began as a series of letters to another friend, signing them with the name of a fictitious nun. Or it could have been meant as a vehicle for edification, like classic comics. She had once read a fanciful description of the living quarters of Crébillon père and fils which had the two of them in a garret filled with large dogs drooling and shedding immoderately, and it was thus that Margaret liked to imagine her own author, pen in hand, animals sprawled and snoring on the Louis Quinze chaise.
She finished the translation almost with regret, the way one finishes a Victorian novel. For now she was torn from the bosom of the manuscript, or it was torn from hers, and she would have to present it to the world. She planned to drop it off with Richard and then have lunch with him that afternoon.
In the subway, she bought a Street News from a homeless man and read how Marianne Faithfull had been homeless when she was a drug addict, except that sometimes she went to her mother's house to have a bath.
She was still half an hour early. She looked in some stores, then stood around for a while in the dirty cold, then called Richard.
"Hi, can we have lunch yet?"
"Margaret, I've been trying to call you. I'm sorry, dear, no lunch. Where were you off to so early in the morning? An affair with the milkman? At his place? I'm sorry, Margaret, I really am, actually, but it's an emergency. I have an engagement at the Simon Gleason Residence for Senior Citizens."