Rameau's Niece Read Online Free PDF Page A

government had fallen that day. Was it really Romania? She wished she was at a dinner party in Romania, beneath the family's single forty-watt light bulb, a spotty boiled potato on her plate. What a trivial person you are, Margaret, she thought. All the Romanians want to be here, where we're free. Free to be trivial.
    Margaret put her chin in her hand and watched Till. Till reached for her wine, and a joyous rattling chorus rose up, a choir of bangle bracelets. Her jacket was iridescent green, her long crimped hair jet black, her teeth white and large. At the head of the table, she jingled and sparkled as a goddess would, omniscient, powerful, confident.
    Till Turner was first and foremost a hostess, but she found, time to write, too. She was a playwright whose enormously popular body of work concentrated on small groups of women sitting in large moving vehicles—there was an airplane play, another on a bus, a train, a ferry—jouncing along, chewing the old bones of their lives until whole skeletons of marriage and divorce and aged parents and teenage children, an ossuary of relationships, lay gleaming white around them, clickety-clack.
    Till Turner was nicknamed Turner Off by one critic, but most of them welcomed her ability to churn out a new play every single year. Her apartment was old and the rooms large and square, not narrow and rectangular as in most New York apartments. Although Margaret was perfectly happy in her own apartment, when she went out she found herself inattentively, but invariably, appraising, and wanting, someone else's. She would stand, panting from the six flights of stairs, in a narrow garret in the East Village, trying to keep her balance on the slanted floor; or step out onto a balcony not much bigger than a shoe box from an apartment on Second Avenue and Sixty-eighth Street and listen to the traffic bray below; or search the dark, endless hall of a railroad flat near Columbia, looking for the dreary bathroom. It didn't matter where she was—every apartment had something, a leaking but romantic skylight, a view, a shower fixture. She vaguely wanted all of them, and of all of them the one she vaguely wanted most was this one, Till Turner's. Sunlight streamed through the treetops to the broad windows during the day. Beyond the trees was the park and then the river. At night, the lights of New Jersey twinkled merrily through the leaves: you over there may ridicule us over here, the New Jersey lights seemed to say, but look, just look who you're staring at, and look who we get to watch!
    Now Till was leaning over the back of Lily's chair, speaking rapidly and softly to Lily, and Margaret watched them with envy, wishing someone, anyone, would at that moment speak rapidly and softly to her, or even loudly and excruciatingly slowly. Till looked up and saw that Margaret was watching. She pulled away from Lily with a little laugh.
    "I haven't seen Lily in a long time," she said. She laughed again and moved on to another guest.
    "Margaret!" said Lily from across the table, her head tilted to one side as if Margaret were a very rare bird indeed. "In the dream, we were reading Ovid together. Translating for a course. Wild? In straight-backed chairs. Just like Mr. Griswold's class, remember?"
    "I've never studied Latin," Margaret said. "I never read Ovid."
    "Of course you have," Lily said reassuringly. "And you're absolutely scandalous, with your best seller and all your prizes. I'm so envious I could spit." She reached out and put her hand on Margaret's and patted it and didn't seem the least bit envious, only amused.
    "Don't spit," Margaret said.
    Maybe I should hone my poor socialization skills with Lily, Margaret thought halfheartedly, noticing Lily's vintage white silk suit. She's exotic. She looks like a post-quickie-divorce Las Vegas bride.
    Till, in and out of the room, up and down in her seat, back and forth and round and round among the guests, now approached Margaret's vicinity. Thank God she won't