SHE: And yet I have read, regarding genius, that a genius is an adventurous leader who penetrates the region of discoveries.
MYSELF: I find nothing to argue with there.
SHE: I have read that truths yet unknown wander in the regions of discoveries, waiting for someone to seize them.
MYSELF: As I have seized?
SHE: As you have seized, yes, seized the truths that were wandering, waiting for someone to seize them and transport them to this terrestrial sphere. But I have read that once these truths have descended to earth and been perceived by superior minds, they become what might be called common property.
MYSELF: Common property? What absurdity! What are you saying?
SHE: A genius lays open the road. As, for example, you have laid open a road, my road. A genius lays open the road so that men of a more common capacity may rush in crowds after him.
MYSELF: I have done no such thing!
SHE: For we must remember that common man does have the force necessary to follow the genius, otherwise genius would there penetrate alone.
MYSELF: And what is wrong with that? Why should not genius there penetrate alone?
SHE: But you yourself have taught me that the end of the social art is to secure and extend for all the enjoyment of the common rights which impartial nature has bequeathed to us all. The only privilege of genius is to make the first track.
My pupil (or was she now my teacher?) had remained seated upon her shawl as it lay spread on the grass. Could this really be she, this philosopher of her own pleasure? Is this what I had taught her? Her search for knowledge had led her away from me, her teacher. I turned from her and made my way back to the house, disconsolate and miserable.
THERE WAS AN UNEXPECTED MESSAGE on the answering machine. "Margaret," said a female voice. "I know you haven't seen me in almost ten fucking years, but I'm having a book party. For the book I started when I knew you. So would you come? You better!"
It was Jessica. Margaret recognized the voice, and she had seen a review of the book, pretty favorable, in the Times last week. It was a mystery set at a local TV station called Murder in Media Res.
The party was on Tuesday at an East Side grill. Margaret had a terrible toothache, a toothache that rattled her head, but she went, of course. Jessica also had been a reader at the same small publishing house where Margaret had worked one summer. Rhodes Press, now defunct, had published highbrow radical works and Edwardian pornography. There had been several young editors and readers who hung out together that summer.
Margaret spotted Jessica easily. Her face was ridiculously familiar. She was now a TV journalist who had achieved some notoriety by giving the soundman the finger while still on camera. "I have a kid now," she said. "Can you believe it? I'm married to a lawyer. Can you fucking believe it? Do you still smoke pot? Oh, you never did, did you? I don't anymore. I mean I would if anybody ever had any, which nobody ever does."
Edward had to leave the party early to give a lecture somewhere. Margaret, who found herself daily more angry at and less tolerant of Edward, had not even bothered to ask what about or to whom, and after he was gone, she stood surrounded by her old friends. The icy cold of her demure glass of mineral water, with its bright, slender wedge of lime, rolled across her bad tooth in shattering pain. She considered having some wine to numb things a bit, but then remembered her bibulous evening in Paris, and so, uncomfortable and sober, she observed with fascinated nostalgia the four men standing with her and Jessica. She realized that she had slept with all four. Teddy, who had become a tenured professor of comp. lit. specializing in narratology, now had long stylish hair and was wearing a sharkskin suit and delicate Italian loafers that looked like pumps or bedroom slippers, in spite of which he still had a lugubrious physical charm.
"I can't smoke pot now," he said. "Fucking cocaine fucked me. I said to my students, 'What do Sherlock Holmes and Freud have in common?' And this girl says, 'Drug addiction?' I said, 'Why do you put it that way? Not drug addiction, you idiot. Cocaine.' Margaret, it's fucking amazing, but you look just the same. We all look the fucking same to each other, because we're all ten years older. You know, you taught me to speak like this, Jessica. I grew up in a nice home, then I met you. I never say 'fuck' to my students."
"Girlfriend?" Jessica said.
"Two years. New apartment, thirtieth floor. Great view. So now I've got vertigo and go to a fucking shrink twice a week."
"I thought narratology was passé," Margaret said, annoyed somehow that he had a steady girlfriend. He had a hangdog Russian Jewish face that she had always found irresistible. "In France they're reading James Madison."