She looked up from the page at the Frenchman. My idea regarding you is simple enough, she thought. She watched him sleep for a while. He was awfully good-looking, in a prosperous, bon vivant sort of way. The more she looked at him, with his pursed lips and his pretty pants, the more oddly alluring she found him.
"MYSELF: When the understanding is once stored with these simple ideas, it has the power to repeat, compare, and unite them, even to an almost infinite variety, and so can make, at its own pleasure, new complex ideas."
It had been so long since she had flirted with anybody, she thought. A century, a decade, anyway. She turned back to her reading: "The coldness and hardness which a man feels in a piece of ice are ideas as distinct in the mind as the smell and whiteness of a lily or as the taste of sugar and the smell of a rose."
The Frenchman stirred slightly.
His head fell onto her shoulder.
His temple was pressed against her lips. The coldness and hardness of his glasses was perceived by her chin, and she sensed the smell and whiteness of his skin, as pale and sweet as a lily.
Oh God, Margaret thought. She could almost taste him, the taste of sugar.
Go away, she thought, terrified. I was only joking. Daydreaming. It was a secret.
He would wake up eventually, and then he would be bound to notice that their relationship had assumed a rather intimate physical nature, which he would undoubtedly attribute to her, for how could she possibly say, Look, your face fell onto my lips? She stared into his hair. The pleasant scent of his shampoo, the smell of a rose, filled her nostrils.
Well, Margaret thought. At least he's not trying to talk to me.
The rhythm of his breathing made her aware of his whole body, pressing closely onto her own. She shifted, just a bit, and her lips moved across his skin, an experience Margaret found pleasant, too pleasant. In fact, the entire experience of this unfamiliar male body against hers was too pleasant.
This is not a statue, Margaret told herself. I am not sightseeing. Just move your head away and we'll forget the whole thing ever happened. Your handsome, noble head with its clear gray eyes and long, feminine lashes and thin, moist lips, your head like a lily, a rose, like sugar and ice.
Each time she tried to move away, he seemed to move with her, snuggling in closer, his head heavier and more intimate. Margaret closed her eyes. But he was still with her. I am very attracted to a strange man sleeping on my shoulder, she thought. What does this mean?
I am a happily married woman. That is a synthetic proposition, one based on observation, with no inherent, necessary logic. But does observation really support this proposition? Well, I am happy. Yes. Satisfied? Yes, that too. But then if I'm so happily married, why didn't Edward come to Prague to be happy with me? Because of his students? Fuck his students! Oh lord, what if he did fuck his students?
Margaret suddenly thought of the small university offices where she used to stalk her own professors. The invariable cramped rectangle with its bookshelves, battered desk, worn wooden chairs, and black linoleum floor came back to her, or she returned to it, and to that moment of fear bordering on joy when she would knock on the door.
Knock, knock.
Yes, I certainly got my money's worth of higher education, she thought.
Hello, Mr. So-and-So, I just came by to ask you about Kant's critique of Hume, I want to ask you about Hume and Kant, I have come by for you, I want you. I have waited for weeks but could wait no more. I see you in my dreams, the arrangement of your pens in your pocket in my dreams. The place in the back where your belt misses the belt loop in my dreams. Your scornful interpretation of your colleagues' interpretations of the works of long-dead Germans in my dreams. I dream of these things because they are part of you, professor. I have read your books. But now I want to stop dreaming, stop reading. I have come for you, and I will get you, too. Never mind that I have forgotten all the clever things I thought up last night in bed to impress you so that now I sit before you frowning in concentration on whatever it is you are saying, reduced to hoping you'll find me young enough and adoring enough and willing enough to make up for being stupid and tongue-tied, because that is exactly what will happen, and we both know it, knew it after the first class. There's one every semester, you're thinking. That's what I'm thinking, too.
Why not? she had always asked herself. There was something so alluring about them. No real evaluation of these men was necessary because these affairs could not lead anywhere. What difference did it make if they turned out to be as smoothly pompous as balloons, swollen with self-love and self-importance, floating with garish indirection above their fellow men? She wasn't stuck with them, was she? That was the wife's problem, wasn't it?