The couple giving the party were named Till and Art Turner. Margaret had roomed with Till in college, an unforgettable experience that involved witnessing constant rehearsing of Till's roles in various avant-garde student productions, many of them musicals.
Till's husband, Art, a tall, handsome man with a short beard and lovely teeth, stood at the door. He was a highly regarded writer who never seemed to write anything, which somehow only added to his reputation. He was a man of integrity. He smiled, shook hands, smiled, smiled, and smiled. He whispered to some, loudly announced others, his attentiveness calling attention to itself.
It was Art who, in a flurry of self-importance, had insisted on taking Margaret's doctoral dissertation to an editor he knew, only to see it become the best-selling Anatomy of Madame de Montigny. Art and Margaret had never forgiven each other.
He is a monster, Margaret thought, watching him greet his guests. An unholy monster of manipulation guarding the castle gate, a man who has learned the meaning, the secret, of other people's vanity and uses it to feed his own. Come, he seemed to say, submit to excessive flattery, my excessive flattery, come along. And as you sheepishly (shucks, you really mean it?) accepted his invitation, the gate slammed: clank. And you were—still outside.
He rolled back his head and exposed his very good teeth. "Ah, here's my little discovery."
Margaret looked down at the thick forest green carpet, guilty. But it sickens him, too, she thought. It sickens him too that his help helped.
"You're marvelous, Margaret, marvelous," he said. "Open, simple, lacking all affectation."
What Margaret had said, the inspiration for his effusive welcome, was "Hello." She tried to smile in a friendly, grateful way, but felt immediately that she had failed.
"A conceptual breakthrough in the critical biography," he was saying. "The field can never be the same, never recover from this onslaught of..." He paused. "Well. How modestly you carry your genius, Margaret. I'm sure no one would ever suspect it was there at all." And he turned his shining smile to his next guest.
Not only didn't people observe genius in Margaret—they detected very little intelligence at all. It was Margaret's fate, or misfortune as she saw it, to have inherited from her mother a face that was pleasant and decorative enough, but that in no way expressed her temperament or personality. As she suffered from panic, shyness, and critical disdain for her fellow man, all her fellow man saw was a pretty young woman with undignified Shirley Temple curls, a spray of freckles across her nose, and a wide eager look in her brown eyes which might easily be interpreted as cheerful self-confidence.
Would that I were sallow and severe and haughty, she thought, my thin hair in a tight French knot. But Margaret looked jolly and content instead.
She sat down, turned, and noted that she was mercifully not sitting next to herself. She was beside a man known to her slightly, and only by meetings at parties such as this one. There he sits, she thought, patiently waiting to be unable to strike up an interesting conversation with me.
He was a writer, a fairly fashionable one from the East Side with a brownstone and a table at the sort of restaurant at which writers had tables, a best seller or two in his past, and a small, lingering portion of celebrity that she found particularly intimidating. He was just famous enough so that she ought to know some basic facts about him but not famous enough so that she did. She, on the other hand, had written a famous book, and enough had been written about her book so that she expected people to know what it was she had written about, but it was the kind of book that assured that no one had.
She glanced around, looking for Edward, listening for his voice, hearing only other voices gliding stylishly through the topics of the day. This is what people did at dinner parties: talk. But the talk existed on some level beyond communication. It was decorative.