She lay back on her bed now, wet, and cursed her throbbing tooth and cursed Edward's students more.
They never slept together, not that summer, not in Florence. They never even acknowledged it as a possibility. He was married, and Margaret liked his wife. She liked his wife more than she liked him, actually. He was blustery, assertive, boyish. His wife was capable and witty in a surprisingly straightforward way. They never slept together that summer. But Margaret visited them in Chicago the following winter. Then they slept together. It had seemed inevitable. Awful, sneaky, dishonest, exciting, and inevitable. Margaret was sickened whenever she thought of it, pleasant as the actual encounter had been. It was the worst thing she had ever done.
Edward came into the room.
"Why do you look so miserable?" he said. "Your tooth again?"
"No. I'm thinking of the worst thing I ever did."
"And what's that? Raped all those students in Gainesville?"
"I can't tell you. I can't tell anyone."
Edward looked intrigued. "Margaret! What can it be?"
For a moment, the new strangeness between them forgot itself, forgot to assert itself, and Margaret kissed Edward's hand as he stroked her cheek. He lifted a lock of wet hair, dropped it, and made a face. "What can it be?" he said again, then stood up and walked away, his mind already on something else.
Margaret sat up and brushed her hair and tried to forget the worst thing she ever did.
She decided to call Richard. "Do you have a good dentist?" she asked.
"Yes. He takes dentistry awfully seriously. I receive regular correspondence from him keeping me up to date on late-breaking developments in the field of teeth. Extremely expensive. Handsome—"
"I'm almost done with the book," she told him. "And it's just as well. I'm turning into a libertine. I think I used to be a libertine, actually. I sometimes think I'd like to be a libertine again."
"How athletic of you even to be able to contemplate such a thing, Margaret."
IN THE WAITING ROOM, she wondered what Richard's dentist would look like. Perhaps he would look like her last dentist, who retired at the age of fifty, a trim, tennis-playing, Jewish, art-collecting man with a slightly receding hairline. She had been to several dentists in her life, and all of them had looked like that, so perhaps he would, too. She sat on the modular couch in the sunken well in the gray-carpeted waiting room (there was carpeting on the walls, as well as the floor) and put her hand to her cheek where the tooth throbbed.
She took some photocopied sheets of Rousseau's émile from her briefcase. She had traced several sections of Rameau's Niece to émile. The strategy of the anonymous hack author of Rameau's Niece had been to lift lines, paragraphs, a phrase, whatever he chose from whomever he chose, and use them in whatever ways he chose. The result may have been incoherent at times, but it always maintained an unmistakably libertine sensibility, a sense of a world order as tangled as bed sheets.
"I am aware of my soul," she read from émile. "It is known to me in feeling and in thought; I know what it is without knowing its essence; I cannot reason about ideas which are unknown to me. What I do know is this, that my personal identity depends upon memory, and that to be indeed the same self I must remember that I have existed. Now after death I could not recall what I was when alive unless I also remembered what I felt and therefore what I did; and I have no doubt that this remembrance will one day form the happiness of the good and the torment of the bad."
That leaves me out, Margaret thought as she imagined herself floating in some confusion through the heavens. I forget, she would say to the celestial gatekeeper. I forget, and so I am not.
She closed her eyes, listened to the woman across the room turn the pages of a magazine, opened her eyes, looked briefly and enviously at the woman, who had white hair and a short mohair jacket and a sensible skirt and sensible shoes and probably sense as well. What a good idea, Margaret thought, to be sensible.
"Just put it on the right line. Don't screw me up," said another waiting patient, a woman in late middle age sitting beside a man filling out insurance forms. Margaret assumed he was her husband, but then he said, "You're treating me like my wife. You're getting to be like my wife." Maybe she was his mother.
"She's a pain, but she's beautiful. My wife is beautiful," he was saying. "Her skin—"
"Dream," said the woman sharply.
"What-ya mean, 'dream'?"
"Like a dream," she said. "Skin like a dream."
Margaret turned from the pages of émile to some pages from Rameau's Niece. "MYSELF: What I do know is this, that my personal identity depends upon memory. For the body will be worn out and destroyed by the division of its parts. But does the promise of storms stop our enjoyment of today's beautiful sun?
"After death, I would not be able to recall what I was when alive unless I also remembered what I felt and therefore what I did. Let us, therefore, dear pupil, feel and do and so create memories worthy of eternity."