"I know that you want to give to me,"
Well, Margaret thought, I wouldn't put it that way exactly. She frowned, unsure what to say.
"I'm sorry," he said. His hand squeezed her shoulder. "I have embarrassed you."
"No, no." She leaned against him, unsteady, nearly giddy with the sensation of his arm, of his body. No, no, not embarrassed. On the contrary.
"You have forgotten the memento," he said. "The book, for my father. Do not be ashamed. We will meet again. Then you will remember. And now I will carry to him your very good wishes."
Now, yes, you have embarrassed me, she thought.
Martin parted from her outside the Frick. He had business to attend to. He shook her hand, he kissed her cheeks. Margaret stuttered good-bye. She walked home through the park, in a strong wind, the trees exploding into leafy clouds above her.
Sometimes she would gaze in fascination at one of her mind's eye's lovers, at Dr. Lipi, or the pursed, moist lips of Martin, or Lily sighing seductively, her big, bright eyes shaded by dark lashes, and then Margaret would suddenly see before her what was before her, and she would realize where she was, on the toilet facing the green tropical birds of the shower curtain; crossing the street against the light; accepting change from the square-faced butcher. She wandered from vision to vision, and from these daydreams of bodies to secret, minute observations of bodies, real bodies, strangers, the bodies of strangers.
I'm out of control, she thought. But she felt strangely in control, powerful. If she was at the mercy of her desires, those desires were hers, and they swept away all obstacles before them, slashing and burning and building their own fantastical cities.
I thought the cogito was just a myth. The subject is supposed to be dead. But I am doing this. I, the subject, the cogito. And Margaret felt like beating her chest and giving a Tarzan call of triumph.
One afternoon, in Lily's funny, cramped studio apartment, filled (satiated) with brightly painted antique dressers and tables hailing from Holland to Argentina, Margaret sat on the enormous platform bed around which the painted dressers seemed to have gathered of their own free will, like birds waiting for seed, and she looked at Lily sitting close beside her. And then she felt herself blush, felt the horrible heat, the wash of sudden soundlessness.
She said to herself, Look. She's there before you.
She forced herself to look. She forced herself to hear through the silence roaring in her ears. "Yes," she said in response to something, and she said it nonchalantly and smiled, laughed, then looked more, helplessly now, wanting to look, but unsure of what she saw as she looked at Lily through the warmth and fog of her blush.
I don't care if you know, she thought. I want you to know. Do you know?
"So," Lily was saying, "I bought it. Why not?"
"Why not?" Margaret answered. "Why not?"
Margaret said good-bye, left the apartment, and stood on the street. When she tried to remember what Lily had bought, she could not. When she tried to remember what Lily had been wearing, she could not. All she could remember was the tilt of Lily's face through the heated blur of her own blush.
Weary from my wanderings, I stopped beneath a tree, the very tree beneath which I had first stumbled upon Rameau's niece. In her company this garden had seemed a paradise, an Eden from which I was now expelled. There were trees and hedges and glades and flowers still, but sitting among them I sat in a lonely, windswept wilderness.
The uneasiness a man finds himself in upon the absence of anything whose present enjoyment carries the idea of delight with it is what we call desire, which is greater or less, as that uneasiness is more or less vehement. Rameau's niece was absent from me. The present enjoyment of her would have carried the idea of delight with it. I was filled with uneasiness, overwhelmed with desire, vehement desire.
It is said that desire is stopped or abated by the opinion of the impossibility or unattainableness of the good proposed. The good I had proposed for myself was quite impossible, but desire, far from being stopped or abated, increased within me, a fire out of control.
My pupil had been seized perhaps with too quick and lively a passion to be excusable, and yet I found myself trying to excuse her. I turned various ideas over in my mind. I knew I was wrong to do so. But though good and evil work upon the mind, that which immediately determines the will to every voluntary action is the uneasiness of desire.
At last, confused and weary with the struggle of my mind and my emotions, I wondered if perhaps it was true, after all, that human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us, at every turn, in spite of our endeavors to elude or avoid it. And so until evening I walked along the garden paths, unseeing; and so until evening and beyond, I thought and thought, without understanding.