Margaret had had a coughing fit in the beginning of the first act and had to climb over a blind man to get out, but after buying some mints at the bar, she had returned to the grandly intimate little golden theater and felt great sympathy for the suffering soprano, whatever the problem might have been.
Edward would have remembered the name of the opera. He would have known what it was about. Maybe this Frenchman would know. Why do all people from France have those lips, she wondered. It must be from the way they speak. Over the years, their mouths take on that provocative little pout. Oh, how to quash the inevitable, unsolicited bid for an exchange of pleasantries? I don't want to talk. Leave me alone, to fester in unhealthful isolation.
She felt how close she was to him, the two of them pressed against each other in the narrow airplane seats. He shifted in his seat, and his beautiful shirt, smooth Egyptian cotton, brushed against her bare arm. She guessed he was in his late forties and looked slightly older, owing to French indulgences like insatiable mistresses and cream sauces.
Oh shut up, Margaret. Edward likes strangers. Be like Edward. He speaks to foreigners. Of course, he is a foreigner. The Frenchman smiled at her, then pushed his glasses up until they rested on top of his head.
She had always considered cynicism a particularly sour form of provincialism, and it was now clear to her that she had become a sour provincial. But that's what happened when you went off by yourself—you discovered your true self. And her true self, she now knew, was a sexually hysterical, xenophobic, middle-aged midwesterner from the 1930s.
The Frenchman had gone back to sleep, a thin camel-colored blanket pulled up to his chin. His reading light was on, shining down like a spotlight, illuminating him in his innocent, childlike slumber. One arm was tucked under the blanket, the other hugging the blanket to his chest, his Rolex sparkling in the white glare.
Without thinking, Margaret reached up and turned off his little light. As she was still leaning over him, the Frenchman opened his eyes. They looked at each other, he in soft, sleepy confusion, she in the awareness that she was looking down at a complete stranger with moist, pouty lips from a distance of six inches.
"Sorry," she muttered, pulling away from him, from the intimate image of his face and sleepy eyes. Oh, that's why I hate him, she thought. I want to sleep with him.
He moved his head back and forth slightly, as Europeans do when they mean any number of completely contradictory things, and, clutching his blanket closer, closed his eyes once again.
I want, I want, I want, Margaret thought. I want to sleep with him. I want to forget I am married and drown myself in an affair with a stranger. No. I want, I want, I want to forget this stranger and drown myself in marriage. No, no, that's not right either. No drowning. I want to observe, to experience, to know! I am in search of truth and beauty. I am a scholar! That's why I want to fuck the French fellow.
Margaret watched him as he slept. Here was beauty, anyway. A beauty of sorts. If debauched Frenchmen were to your taste. He breathed softly but audibly. Edward, she thought, Why aren't you here? You are my husband. You're meant to protect me, to shelter me, to surround me, to make me forget everything and everyone else.
Edward engulfed the world; he held out his arms in an irresistible embrace, a gesture of supreme self-love and supreme largess. Margaret admired this ability to co-opt existence, to make it his. She loved Edward for that embrace. She had married him in anticipation of it; then, soothed and warm, she had lived among Edward's enthusiasms, swept up in the wave, the nirvanic swoon of living someone else's life.
Hey! Drowning again, Margaret, she thought. Waves indeed. Wake up. Smell the flowers. Fuck the Frenchman.
Adultery, Margaret thought, is an epistemological necessity. Rameau's niece found that out. To know is to fool around. She wasn't married of course. But still. Fuck the Frenchman.
Margaret got up and made her way to the bathroom. The Frenchman had long eyelashes, she thought. And his eyes, opened so suddenly, had looked at her with such easy amusement. She had expected him to launch his offensive then, having been given an opening, to surge ahead into the unavoidable friendly chat. Why hadn't he?
As she returned, walking slowly down the long aisle, looking for her seat in the darkened plane, she saw and recognized the top of his head and, it being the only head she recognized, the only object in the entire plane that had any personal relationship to her at all, and because it signified that there beside it was her own place, the crown of light brown hair looked reassuring, familiar.
Margaret sat down and took out a few sheets of her manuscript of Rameau's Niece and read: "MYSELF: Simple ideas enter into the mind through the senses pure and unmixed."