AFTER A TWO-HOUR WAIT in Paris, Margaret boarded the connecting flight to New York. There were men on either side of, her, probably businessmen, one beside her by the window, the other across the aisle, and as they both appeared to be asleep, she felt she could study them without inviting conversation.
The American businessman across the aisle wore the blue pinstripe suit (the jacket off and folded carefully in the overhead compartment) and red foulard tie of one still dressing for success even as success had lost its cachet, the newsmagazines having recently announced the death of the Greed Decade that had made success so successful to begin with. The Frenchman (she had not heard him speak, but he was a Frenchman—they knew how to get that across somehow) was dressed in dove-colored trousers of so fine a material that she longed to touch them and in a pale green-and-white-striped shirt that stretched somehow elegantly over his large belly, as if bellies—good, classic, fashionable bellies—were meant to protrude comme ?a.
Margaret leaned with some difficulty over her seat belt and examined their shoes. The American wore loafers with tassels as small and useless as a whale's internal ankle bone. Smaller, actually, Margaret thought. Whales are quite large, leviathan, aren't they, and even their miniaturized evolutionary detritus must be gigantic. She suddenly, involuntarily, saw before her an image of several dolphins whipping gracefully round and round a deep concrete pool, a memory of Flipper's Sea World, an aquarium she had once visited. Round and round went the dolphins, faster and faster, exposing large, oddly pink extrusions on their pale gray undersides. "Look!" a child had cried. "Dolphin dicks!"
Our cousins from the deep, Margaret thought. She turned and surveyed the Frenchman's crepe-soled, soft leather oxfords. Our cousin from another land. For a moment she felt that she hated this man. From his thick crepe soles to his light brown hair. Why did she hate him? His elbow was not on her armrest. He neither snored nor carried with him the stale odor of cigar smoke. He had not insulted her. She liked his pants. Why did she hate him?
She decided she must hate him because he was French. She had never hated the French before, but these things can grow on you. After all, their food was so good, their books were so good, their paintings so good, they dressed so well. Those were reasons enough, surely, to hate them. And then they were smug, they had beautiful cities, they were intellectual Stalinists, they revered bad American movies but had a history of making good movies themselves. They cheated on their wives.
My, aren't we the cultural-stereotype wallah, Margaret thought. Since really you would die to be French and have those small French female feet that fit into those small shoes they wear. Well, we did have a better revolution.
She was staring at the Frenchman's face now, a comfortable face just gone the slightest bit fleshy, an extremely French face with thin but sensuously protruding lips that always looked moist, she was quite sure. He has daughters, nymphets, little blossoming girls that he watches with more than paternal interest, Margaret thought. That's what they do there. They're so civilized.
The man stirred, opened his eyes, put on his glasses, big thick-framed unexpectedly shaped glasses. He had gray eyes, and they looked into hers in such a direct way that Margaret thought she was being appraised, like a stone. Gem quality, but flawed, mister. Try down the block.
Soon he would speak to her. Then she would have to answer. Perhaps she didn't hate the French, she thought. Perhaps she didn't hate this man, either. Perhaps, what she hated was the inevitability of social relations with him.
He would speak to her. And she would be required to answer. Edward was not there to do it for her, or even to support her in her own efforts, to remind her of the name of the book of Czech essays she had just finished reading, of the opera she had just seen.
She'd been in the last row of the tiny gilded opera house. Row thirteen. The opera, by Dvo?ák or Janá?ek, it was a little muddled already, had been beautiful and moving, although she was not certain what had taken place. There was a young woman who ran off to meet a young man. An old woman in black (her mother? grandmother? stepmother? mother-in-law?) mistreated her and bossed around a man with some close connection to the young woman (father? husband?). The young woman sank to her knees regularly. The young man she was in love with went away. And in the end, after a thunderstorm, she threw herself in the river.