Mannahatta! '"A million people—manners free and superb'!" Edward was a man at peace with New York.
For the next six years, each morning at 7:00, Edward ventured forth into Mannahatta to run around the reservoir. He maintained that it cleared his head, but Margaret noted that running was practically the only exercise that would not affect pectoral muscles in a positive way, and so she was convinced that he underwent the ordeal merely to assure that his British chest would remain sufficiently concave. When he returned home, at exactly 8:40, sweating and loquacious after so much time deprived of both students and books, he would quickly shower and change, eat his extensive breakfast, then walk up to Columbia for his 11:00 class. Home for lunch and a twenty-minute nap. Back to school, for conferences or research or petty, backbiting department meetings, each of which he embraced warmly and without reservation, for they belonged to his life, and therefore to him, and so beamed with a pleasant and interesting reflected light. Home for dinner at 6:30 sharp, whether he had an 8:00 class or not. When he did, home at 10:15. If not, work at home until 11:00. Asleep at 11:30. Up at 6:30 for another round.
If there were exceptions to this routine—a dinner date, a lecture to give, a concert—the schedule rippled effortlessly and made room. Margaret had never met a more orderly, less rigid soul. Edward's mind, nearly promiscuous in its passionate interests, opened to every new possibility, with one exception: the possibility of failing to do what he had planned to do when he had planned to do it, and of failing to do anything else he wanted to or was required to, as well. And so, every day, like the spinning of the earth, like the silent journey of the stars from one curved horizon to another, Edward's day followed its course. If "willful" and "blessed" were synonyms, they would describe Edward and the gentle, unvarying rhythm of his days.
Vigorous and effortless, the weeks passed and his life was full. Margaret gazed admiringly, for she herself had no schedule to speak of. Her contributions to the family income, while considerable, came irregularly and from far away. Margaret was almost famous. She had written a biography—a plain, sturdy little biography, a biography as unfashionable, as modest and unassuming as an aproned housewife, which had nevertheless caught the public's fickle eye. The subject, Charlotte de Montigny, had been assigned to her when she was a graduate student in intellectual history looking for a dissertation topic. Wife of a dissolute and ill-tempered minor eighteenth-century aristocrat, Madame de Montigny had consoled herself by becoming an amateur astronomer, an occasional portrait artist, and an avid autodidact of anatomy. "Oh, you might as well take her," Margaret's adviser had said. An aging, eminent professor who drank too much and married too many of his students, he ordered up dissertation topics as if they were dishes at an unsatisfactory restaurant, the only restaurant in town. But this time, the meat loaf had won a prize, several prizes. Margaret was the recipient of grants and royalties, of a postdoctoral sinecure, of a little office at Princeton that was too far away to use.
But grants and royalties and an unused office across the river did not require a schedule or regular habits. Margaret eavesdropped on Edward as he argued amiably on the telephone with a magazine editor for whom he was reviewing a book.
"Do you like James Schuyler?" Edward finally asked into the phone. "I do. So American. 'The night is filled with indecisions, to take a downer or an upper, to take a walk, to lie down and relax. I order you: RELAX.'" And then, with great satisfaction, as if that certainly settled the matter, he hung up. Sometimes, when Margaret saw a poem on the printed page, with all its punctuation, its short and long lines, its verses, she would be startled. Living with Edward, she had come to regard poetry as conversation.
At her desk in the study they shared, Margaret turned back to Voltaire. Voltaire and his mistress had worked together for years, she thought. But they shared a chateau, not a spare bedroom. They worked in separate, elaborately appointed quarters, a prudent arrangement that made it quite impossible for Madame du Chatelet to waste her working time by listening in on Voltaire's undoubtedly brilliant and entertaining telephone conversations—although she had regularly steamed open his mail. Still, she showed far greater independence than I do, sitting around gawking at my own husband as if he were my first beau, my secret lover, my only friend, and my lifelong mentor.
Sometimes the depth of her feelings for Edward annoyed her. Am I a domesticated household pet, to take such pleasure from the physical presence of a man reading the Mississippi Review? She got up and put her arms around his neck, burying her face in his silver unmowed lawn of hair. Who does he think he is, strutting around, being happy and punctual all the time?
"Let's go to Prague together," she said then. "Let's hear the Czech Philharmonic."