"Moving?" Margaret said.
"Uncle Herbert is moving. Uncle Herbert must move, must be moved, with the greatest dispatch. Uncle Herbert arrived on my doorstep in his pajamas this morning. I left him with my landlady while I find him a suitable place to move to, preferably by this afternoon. Would you like to have lunch with Uncle Herbert, Margaret, since having lunch looms so large in your imagination these days?"
Margaret put another quarter in the phone as she thought. The path toward socialization seemed to her strewn with insurmountable obstacles. If she wished to have friends, she would have to be a friend, or at the very least approximate however it is that friends behave. But how is that? I am very much downcast, she thought, as they said a century or so ago. And how did friends behave a century or so ago? She seemed to remember a lot of noble withdrawing going on in all those novels, men nobly withdrawing from women to preserve reputations, women nobly withdrawing from men, leaving them to other, more—or less—needy, women. Maybe Margaret should nobly withdraw. Then she could go home.
"Do you want me to come with you?" She said it impulsively, instinctively, and immediately regretted her words.
She spent the day trailing Richard from one nursing home to the next. The first was as dirty as a hospital, Richard said. The second too gloomy and full of old people. In the third, the receptionist asked Margaret if it was she who wanted a room, and Margaret politely said, No, it wasn't.
That was where Richard signed up Uncle Herbert. He was concerned because the place was run by the Salvation Army, and Uncle Herbert did like his little nip. But the room was quite nice. Some of the people there were still functioning rather well. It was clean and nearly cheerful. Richard remarked on all these things in a muted, sadly hopeful manner, as if he were trying to convince himself, or Uncle Herbert, or perhaps Margaret. But Margaret didn't need convincing. In fact, she had been particularly taken aback when the receptionist had asked if it was she who expected to move in, because just a moment before she had been thinking that she might be happy to settle there, that it might be pleasant to live in a place where people you barely knew made the meals, the beds, the conversation. The cool, pale anonymity seemed somehow restful. Edward's boundless vitality sometimes made her want to lie down.
"It's just that you must be over sixty-five to get in here," the receptionist had hastily explained after Richard began to roar with laughter.
"Well, Margaret, that is a disappointment," he said, wiping tears from his eyes.
Margaret was a little disappointed with Richard, actually. She had expected that this personal and emotional experience would cause some kind of bonding, but in fact she felt further from her editor than she ever had in the past. He seemed somehow less interesting outside of the office. There were all these distractions, all these other people and other responsibilities interfering, and she recalled a little wistfully the last time she had seen him, seated at his desk, fussing through several piles of paper until he found one particular pile, her pile. "Aha!" he had cried, with genuine enthusiasm, and she had to catch her breath, waiting as he prepared to turn his attention, pure and unencumbered, to her.
Margaret thought about Richard a lot after the day they spent touring nursing homes, in ways that were new to her: he appeared to her from unfamiliar angles. The features she identified as Richard had receded and revealed a stranger. Attached to the prim, irritable, rich, and melodious voice had been added a body, a walk, a configuration of gestures. Richard was tall. This was something she had never recognized. He was broad. And in his lavender oxford shirt, his coarse tweed jacket, his pressed corduroy pants, loafers, and gray crew cut, he was oddly fey, instead of simply fey. This troubled her. She had never thought of him in this way, and she didn't want to. Whatever else he was in civilian life, Richard on duty had always been simply her editor, hers. He existed to the extent that he interacted with her, with Margaret Nathan. This other business, this crisply tailored homosexual with a brush cut and an uncle would not do.
I lay on the bed and contemplated Rameau's niece above me, contemplated those regions of the world of thought which the wise delight to contemplate. (Dare to know! is a proposition we had begun, with considerable energy, to investigate the night before and were continuing now to study in greater detail.) She, too, pondered the situation before her with gentle but eager attention.
SHE: Is this what our great thinkers mean when they speak of man having already arrived at his highest point of improvement?
MYSELF: It requires little penetration to perceive how imperfect is still the development of man; how much farther the sphere of his duties, including therein the influence of his actions upon the welfare of his fellow creatures, may be extended—