"Philosophy," Juliette said patiently. "Star of philosophy."
De Goldbaumois was surrounded by people, all listening intently.
"There is only standing room in his lectures," Juliette continued.
"Really? Meta-Heideggerian semaphorism?"
Juliette looked at her even more pityingly.
"You Americans!" she said.
"Us Americans."
"He teaches The Federalist Papers " Juliette said with some excitement. "They are by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison and Jean Jay," she added helpfully.
In another corner, the conversation had become suddenly animated, and Margaret shifted her attention and listened. Real estate and summer homes! Oh! She missed New York, so near and yet so far.
And then, blotting out the Eiffel Tower and James Madison and the smoky room, a sudden, forceful wave of homesickness for Edward struck Margaret. When the wave receded, she stood weakened in the sand. When he smiles, she thought, his whole face lifts, and his eyes blaze, the lines around them radiating like baroque sunbursts. What a hideous image, she thought. My poor Edward and his beautiful smile reduced to such a hideous image. I am a terrible wife.
Absentmindedly, Margaret watched Juliette's dark red lips moving.
And yet they do look like Baroque sunbursts, don't they, those lines around Edward's eyes? she thought.
She looked at Juliette's smooth face, at her wide cheeks and high cheekbones, and back at her unsmiling rouge red lips. The red lips parted and came together. Margaret no longer noticed what, if anything, came from them. She wondered how long she had been watching them. Did Juliette know Margaret was staring at her lips? Juliette put a fat cigarette between the red lips. When she removed it, inside a swirl of smoke, Margaret could see the marks of the red lips on the cigarette like fingerprints, no, no, lip prints. She felt strangely moved by the garish smears on the cigarette. "My aunt Eunice used to work in the Empire State Building," she said softly, taking Juliette's hand in her own. "On the second floor." Tears came to Margaret's eyes. "The second floor," she repeated.
THE NEXT MORNING, she dozed, dozed seriously, on the plane to Prague, a sleek Air France craft that only emphasized to her how small and shabby she herself felt. One day away from Edward and she had become drunk, for the first time in years, and in public, too.
She tried to take a few notes when she woke up. Margaret had prepared a talk on eighteenth-century French philosophical works printed in Switzerland, then smuggled back across the Swiss border into France and sold by starving Parisian hacks who were then hounded by the police until they disappeared into exile, abject poverty, and utter obscurity. The discovery of Rameau's Niece had drawn her into this study of underground literature, which included not only works by philosophers like Voltaire and Helvétius and Locke, but also titles like Venus, Wild in the Cloister and The Tender Guidance of Dom Bugger, all of them referred to as "philosophical books."
For her talk in Prague, Margaret had prepared a short selection of anticlerical, antiaristocratic pornographic poems popular at the time, with lines like "Watch the scrofulous count / Upon his trembling sister mount." You see? she would say. Enlightenment philosophy, the search for scientific and moral truth, was as unsettling as incest and debauchery. Truth threatened an unjust and hypocritical rule. Truth was revolutionary. And always must be revolutionary.
Yeah. That sounded good. In Prague. Now. But then what, Margaret thought. Freedom of expression and freedom to make a living, those Enlightenment bequests, were revolutionary ideas, but once realized, those freedoms turned away from revolution, didn't they? Revolution, democratic revolution, fought to make itself obsolete.
Margaret stared at one of the translations she had made, a sort of porno-limerick-libel.
The king's weenie
Is so royally teeny
That the poor queenie
Does not know where to turn.
Says the cardinal, asked for succor,
"Sooth! My vows do bid me fuck her.
So, first this frontal liturgy,
Then the sacrament of buggery!"
Ah, freedom, Margaret thought. Freedom from debauchery. Freedom for debauchery. Confused, she leaned her head against the little oval window and faded back to sleep.
When she woke, Margaret read an essay by Havel she had brought along and felt sheepish and ashamed. For so far from living in truth herself, she lived in a fog, and liked it like that. In Czechoslovakia, where until a few months ago scholars had stoked boilers and writers washed windows, she would be just a gaping voyeur. But then, encouragingly, in Czechoslovakia, Frank Zappa was a major cultural figure. They landed, not too far from a large mound of hay. Margaret saw that the plane was being guided past other aircraft to its parking spot by a small car, its orange paint dull and chipped. There was a red light on the roof of the car and a large sign that said, in English, FOLLOW ME.