MARGARET LIKED WATCHING Lily puff on cigarettes and rollick verbally through the iniquities of society as if they were fields of wildflowers and she a little lamb.
"Cappuccino?" asked the waitress in the coffee shop. "We just got a machine. New machine."
"Now take the word machine " Lily said. She tilted her head just a bit. "Why not 'da-chine'? Why machine? I'll tell you why not da-chine. Because it is woman, ma, ma-ma, who has been objectified, turned into a machine, a sexual apparatus." Lily smiled contentedly.
"No cappuccino, I guess," Margaret said to the waitress. Lily, I don't see what I see in you sometimes, except perhaps what you see in me, she thought. You are the pool to my Narcissus.
As Lily rambled on, Margaret silently admired the color of her eyes, which were almost lavender, and daydreamed. Lily, in her breathless desire to spot the world's linguistic traps, was like a child opening a book, trying to find drawings of animals hidden in pictures of living rooms and shoe stores. Instead of the sour, jaded intellectual that Lily meant to be, she seemed young and open and charmingly naive.
Lily noticed Margaret staring at her, and she blushed, quiet for a moment. But her blush seemed a sign of comfort. Her very presence was a sigh of contentment and belonging. I belong here, said the sigh. I belong to you and only you—every one of you.
The essence of charm, Margaret thought, was the ability to see others in their best light, to perceive them honestly in the way they would like to be seen, to present to them an interesting, a marvelous, version of themselves. Lily saw Margaret as a happy, well-rounded bourgeoise, a liberal humanist who was perfectly socialized. Bless you, Margaret thought.
"Lily," she said, "I have a feeling 'machine' derives from a Greek word, don't you? Did they say 'mama' in Greece?"
"Oh, well, you—you're in denial, Margaret," Lily said. She held her water glass to her lips but didn't drink, rolling the rim back and forth instead, rather suggestively.
One of Lily's most appealing peculiarities was her passion for shopping. A reformed suburban princess in so many ways, she still clung to this one bit of unreconstructed behavior, altered considerably by where she shopped and for what but still easily recognizable nevertheless to the trained eye. Lily operated primarily in thrift shops, but she could also be found in SoHo or on Madison Avenue. She viewed clothes as costumes and enjoyed herself immensely on these outings.
Margaret, who remembered the monotony of her private school uniforms with longing, nevertheless would watch Lily with attentive amusement as she slipped in and out of dressing rooms. It was like playing dolls. Try the poodle skirt and the sweater with pom-poms, then the shimmering cranberry tuxedo jacket or the flowered housedress. Sometimes Margaret would sit in the dressing room with Lily, lazily watching her wriggle into a black cocktail dress or step out, with dainty feet, of short shorts decorated with salt and pepper shakers.
There was something exclusively feminine about these expeditions, even those on which Pepe Pican tagged along. The piles of rumpled clothing, the lacy flash of bras and underwear, the intimate presence of pale, rounded, slightly scented limbs, intoxicated Margaret with its alluring, somehow exotic familiarity, while outside the dressing room Pepe moodily examined old neckties, which he collected.
Once Margaret asked Pepe what he was working on.
"My diction," he said.
"Do you have a lot of friends?" she asked Lily one day.
"No. Well, enough. But what I really need is a lover."
A lover, Margaret thought. Why not? Maybe that really was the way to go. Sordid, perhaps. Disloyal. Or was it her duty to herself? "Maybe that's what I need, too," she said.
Lily laughed at such a preposterous idea.
"Well, marriage is not perfect, you know," Margaret said.
"No. But neither is anything else."
"You're supposed to say that marriage is an enslavement of my soul."
"Your soul craves enslavement, Margaret. That's what gives you a sense of security and perpetuates the bourgeois myth of happiness."
"Oh, yeah. That's right," Margaret said.
"Stability, happiness, loyalty—these are artificial constructs, disguising themselves as 'the nature of things' in order to prop up the tottering status quo. There is no happiness. Happiness is just another narrative, a net in which we're caught."
"Just so it doesn't drop me," said Margaret.
MYSELF: You are my pupil! How can you have done this thing?
SHE: Sir, the passions can do all things, is that not so?
MYSELF: Passions! Nonsense!
SHE: A man, or a woman, without passions is incapable of that degree of attention to which a superior judgment is annexed.
MYSELF: I hope I do not understand you to question my own attention?
SHE: Certainly not. You are a teacher of genius.
MYSELF: Ah.