Rameau's Niece Read Online Free PDF Page B

Paris and she doesn't know a soul." She kissed Margaret on both cheeks, in honor of Dominique, no doubt, and returned to her duties.
    So the girl who'd been sitting beside Margaret was named Dominique and came from France. No wonder her scent was so, so—scented. Well, certainly I know what it feels like to sit on the outside looking in. But will I be able to do my part for the foreigner with the overdeveloped taste for perfume? Margaret asked herself.
    She was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. The room was warm, the talk noisy. The gossip about craven producers and publishers, about billionaire real estate magnates (the popes and monarchs of this particular circle of urban courtiers), the revelations and snickers about other writers, all floated tantalizingly by. She couldn't keep the names straight. Ron Perelman and Richard Perle; she knew she disapproved of them both, but which one for which reason? She could not recall. Well, yes, now she could, now that the conversation had turned to something else. Harold Brodkey or Joseph Brodsky? Saul Steinberg or Saul Steinberg? Oh, where was that perfumed Parisian, who had none of these worries, who knew that every American was a gangster, a cowboy, or an arbitrageur?
    I have forgotten even more than I ever knew, Margaret thought. Names and dates, faces, theories—she sought them with a kind of desperation. She could never possess them, not really, and so they had become for her precious, moving, full of wonder. Margaret had become a connoisseur of these treasures, they were so rare, so delicate, so easily destroyed. Insatiable, she had studied history in college and then in graduate school, plunging into dusty libraries and dreary indices as if they were pools of clear, cool water.
    Margaret was considered an important new voice after the publication of her book. But by those who met her, at conferences or even at dinner, she was considered a mute, and so a fool. I don't want to be a mute fool, she thought. I want to be witty and wise. Like Edward. If only Edward were a ventriloquist. I could move my mouth and not worry about what came out. And I could sit on his knee!
    The man next to her was still next to her, wasn't he? Well, perhaps she could say she had loved his last book. She hadn't read it. But it's possible she would have loved it if she had. Her mother had read it over the summer, and she had loved it. She could say that.
    Across from her, beyond the baskets and bowls and platters of fashionable food, there was a skinny man who, with his red, shiny, bald head, reminded her of her Uncle Harry. Maybe, like Uncle Harry, he would let her puff on his cigar and then, when it was bedtime and she had to go to her room, slip her a new, crisp dollar bill. Next to him, Lily discussed life-size human figures, knitted and stuffed with cotton rags, which she referred to as sculptures. Margaret thought of the toy monkeys made from gray and red socks. She wondered if Lily actually knitted sculptures, clicking her needles in a SoHo rocking chair, or if she merely admired them. And then she remembered—Lily was a critic of something. Art? Yes, sort of. She was the editor of a trendy feminist art journal.
The Gaze.
And she wrote a column about women's health issues, "Body Text," for some place like
Harper's Bazaar.
    Margaret stared miserably at her plate. I am too self-centered, she thought. Too vain and too easily bored.
    "Well," the author said in response to something Margaret had, as usual, missed, "if men have no close friends, and that's what they say, that men have no close friends, then why are there so many buddy-buddy movies? I wonder if the reason is just that, that men have so few close friends. American men have created this myth..."
    Margaret mused on her own self-absorption. If people expect anything of me, I resent them and feel incompetent and ill at ease. And yet I expect so much, and if I don't get it, I feel only contempt. I'm sort of an asshole, she