Oh lord, Margaret thought. I am the wife. I am the wife.
The Frenchman sighed and burrowed deeper, until his head was resting on her breast. Oh God, just go away, mister. Monsieur. I am a happily married woman. But if I'm a happily married woman, why am I sitting here with this man's head on my breast? Oh, Edward, I'm sorry. What am I doing? I'm not doing anything, actually, but I'm thinking. And why shouldn't I think, anyway, when you're home fucking twenty-eight girls in the bathtub?
I am a happily married woman. I lust after another man. Happily married women do not lust after other men. Therefore, even though I think I'm happily married, I am not happily married. Or am I?
The Frenchman opened his pale, seductive eyes and sat up. He ran his hand through his hair, the hair she had just felt against her face, and looked at her with some surprise.
"Well," she said, feeling herself redden. Well, indeed.
For a long time, Margaret pretended the Frenchman was not there. He seemed equally embarrassed, for he was silent. Margaret stared in front of her at the blue seat back. Out of the seat back's pocket stuck a laminated drawing of a plane, perfectly intact, which had supposedly just made a crash landing on the Atlantic Ocean. Happy survivors whisked down colorful inflated rubber slides.
The silence and embarrassment were becoming oppressive. She hadn't done anything wrong. Why should she sit there, tormented and ashamed? Anything would be better than this guilty, confused silence. Even conversation. In fact she longed to talk, to launch into one of those droning exchanges of banalities that would occupy her mind as thoroughly as an army occupies a town, as visiting relatives occupy a living room; it would prevent her from thinking, overwhelming and clouding all sensation in a fog of boredom and convention.
"So," she said. She looked over at the Frenchman. "Long trip," she said.
The Frenchman nodded.
"Longer on the way back. On my way back, that is. On your way back it will be shorter. It always seems shorter on the way back, doesn't it? But in your case it will actually be shorter. For me, it's just a subjective illusion."
She continued to talk, warming up now, for the Frenchman, to her surprise, was a wonderful listener, nodding, smiling, laughing once in a while, never interrupting to add his own self-involved anecdotes to compete with her self-involved anecdotes. I'm pretty good at this conversation business, Margaret thought. I just needed the proper partner. She began to talk about Prague, about the opera there, about her talk, about the manuscript she had translated.
"The way ideas are disseminated is interesting, yes. That's what I write about—the history of ideas. But what is really marvelous is the human being's appetite for ideas. We're gourmands, indiscriminate, lustful idea hogs," she said. "Even though sometimes ideas, sometimes philosophy itself, are, is, just stupid. Stupid. Do you know what I mean? For example, for centuries there has been an argument about subjectivity versus objectivity. I mean in one form or another that's what they're always going on about. But that is stupid. Finally, it's just stupid. Obviously what we think or say or notice has to be subjective. But we wouldn't be able to think it, say it, or notice it if there weren't an 'it' to think, say, or notice, would we? And we wouldn't have any subjective information to project onto it if we hadn't already received that information from objective impressions before. But then again, it's not the 'it' that does the thinking, it's me. This is all so obvious, isn't it? I mean, these people have no common sense. Of course common sense is out of fashion now, anyway—it's an ideological construction of the bourgeois social formation. And there's no subjectivity either anymore, is there, because there's no subject. Because any attempt to act or perceive as a subject suggests that you are trying to conquer the object, and that's bad because it's impossible. You see, meaning is impossible to obtain, so any search for it is false and oppressive. And anyway, the subject is now the object, because we are trapped by language, which determines what we say and what we do. So the object—the world—is now really the subject, because it holds all the cards. Of course, you already know all this, being French. But finally it seems to me that this just brings us back to what I was saying in the first place: subjectivity is rooted in objectivity and objectivity can't really exist without subjectivity. Big deal."
The Frenchman looked at her with furrowed brows, with his pale gray eyes, and then without showing his teeth, his lips pouting just a bit more, turning up slightly at the corners, he smiled.
I've made a friend, Margaret thought. Is this really the kind of friend I meant to make, though? she wondered. The kind I kind of want to sleep with?
"You're awfully quiet," she said after a while.
He reached into his briefcase, took out a slender leather case with a gold pen and a pad of paper inside.