MARGARET LAY on Dr. Lipi's bed and looked out the window at the sparkling murk of the city sky. Perfection is perfect, she thought. That much I have established to be true. A perfect performance by a perfect performer. Why don't I care?
Dr. Lipi slept peacefully beside her, golden and relaxed in his naked sleep. She looked at him with distaste. Big deal. Big fucking deal. Senses, bah! Without senses there would be no needs. Hey! Lipi! Did I need this? Are you necessary, Dr. Lipi? Did you follow unavoidably from certain conditions? Are you an a priori kind of guy?
Where was Edward? she wondered. Had he stayed at Lily's? What a sordid affair. Two sordid affairs. Dr. Lipi, the sleeping statue, stirred. Margaret moved away from him and tried not to cry. His beauty appalled her. Strange and abstract, it glowed before her; and yet Dr. Lipi and his beauty were not strange and abstract, not to her, not anymore. Dr. Lipi was concrete and familiar now. Which made it all seem that much more strange and abstract.
This is not my bed, she thought, staring resentfully at his face resting peacefully on the pillow. You are not the man beside whom I sleep.
For once, her memory did not fail her, would not fail her. The failure of her memory failed her. She could not forget what she had done. She could only remember it. In perfect detail. And she could not forget Edward, dripping wet, dripping the drops of the guilty, a husband stepping from a shower that was not his own, cleansed but not clean. She could not forget Lily, either, the feel of her, and her own dizzy uneasiness as she grasped the waist of the girl she then discovered had been boffing her husband. She could not forget Dr. Lipi, the ardent dentist, a man so devoted to his art that he saw himself as more than himself, as an exemplar, an exemplar that must proselytize its own cause, that must proselytize itself. If he awoke now, he would talk of the art of love, his love. He would earnestly relate to her exactly what she wanted to forget. He would look at her with those odd, narrow eyes and kiss her with those curvaceous lips, and he would narrate and explain the significance of his use of eyes and lips in terms of endowing her with pleasure, and through pleasure, oral and emotional health. In terms of the oral and emotional health of the nation, too. Nay, the world!
Oh, I should have stayed safely coiled among Martin's speaker cables. Or lain on my narrow cot, harangued by the tolling of Richard's clocks. Or better yet, I should have stayed at home. With Edward. Where I belong. Where he belongs. But now, there is no home. There is no Edward. Edward does not exist. Not even logically.
Margaret quietly slipped into her clothes and wrote Dr. Lipi a note. "Organs produce needs; and conversely, needs produce organs. But I can't see you anymore. I'm married. Teeth be with you, Margaret."
I'M MARRIED. A true statement. I am an adulteress married to an adulterer. You can't be an adulteress without being married. I'm married, all right.
She went back to Richard's, back to the narrow, bumpy, sagging cot among the chaotic chimes, and she wept. She wept all night, getting up now and then to look at her swollen face in the mirror, a sight that filled her with such intense self-pity that she began to weep again, harder than before.
The sun would soon come up, or so one would assume from the weak light that made it through the dirty window of Richard's maid's room. But then, the truth of whether the sun would come up or not was impossible for her to determine, wasn't it? She had not yet actually seen it come up, had she? So, she thought, what is the nature of the evidence that assures us, lying swollen-eyed on our pallet, of any real existence or matter of fact beyond the present testimony of our senses or the records of our memory? Even if I have seen the sun come up a thousand times before, even if I have read books about it coming up, even if I have it on the best authority that it comes up every single day, it is possible that today is the day the sun does not come up. Causes and effects are discoverable not by reason but by experience. I cannot reason with certainty that the sun will come up. So there is no certainty.
Margaret, that's just stupid, Margaret thought. Your life is over, but the fucking sun will come up and you know it. The desire for knowledge is a folie a une. And you are a fool.
Observe, observe. You observed Dr. Lipi. You observed for half the night, didn't you? And what did you see? Things you had no business seeing. And how about observing your husband shtup-ping your friend? How about observing that without Edward you are nothing? You feel like nothing, you want nothing, you are nothing.