Free Rameau's Niece by Cathleen Schine Page B

her, and she likes you, I think this is a good thing. This friendship."
    "Well, I don't know. I can call her, I guess. If I want to. Thank you for taking such an interest in me and my socialization."

    Margaret did meet Lily that week, at the same coffee shop. Why not? Lily blew in wearing a short swirling coat held closed by one large button and black spandex leggings, her complexion tinted by the cold, fresh air. Margaret noticed her teeth, which were small, all the same size, and white, like little tiles.
    "Hello, doll," Lily said, lighting a cigarette and exhaling a cloud of smoke straight up into the air, 1930s style. "Have you read your Ovid, yet, Margaret?" She reached for a menu. "The menu!"
    "The menu."
    Lily was smiling, smoking, and thoughtfully examining the daily specials inserted in a special narrow plastic page. Was she pondering the menu as a reification of woman's role, a paradigm of organized control over woman's life, the repressive figuration of woman's qualities and skills?
    "I think I'll have a bacon cheeseburger," Lily said. She took off her swirly coat with its big round button to reveal a tight suede tunic laced up the front in medieval peasant fashion, her breasts spilling over the top. She ran her hands through her short hair, fluffing it.
    "Funny," she said, tilting her head and staring at Margaret. "Funny we didn't really know each other at school." Her whispery voice gave way to a little sigh. She put her hand under her chin and pouted slightly.
    "Well, I guess I didn't see too much of Till or her friends after the first year. I retreated to the library."
    "The library," Lily said softly, "is one of the mechanisms of discipline, capturing the individual in a system of registration and accumulation of documents."
    The way she said it, Margaret thought, in her throaty whisper, sucking on one dainty finger, she made the library sound like soft-core bondage. Oh! Discipline me with your mechanism! More, oh, more!
    "So what are you working on?" Margaret asked, not sure how else to respond to Dewey Decimal de Sade.
    "I'm thinking of writing something about music, for a change. Rachmaninoff," Lily said.
    Margaret sighed. Poor Rachmaninoff. What crime had he committed to cause him to fall prey to this pretentious sexpot fraud?
    "He's not a woman," Margaret said. "Is he?"
    "Ah, but he might just as well have been a woman," Lily said tenderly. "Poor Rachmaninoff."
    "You
like
Rachmaninoff?" She herself loved Rachmaninoff but saw no reason to tell anyone about it.
    "Look," Lily said, "a case must be made for the second tier. Genius is an oppressive male construct. Genius, genius, genius. Enough with the genius."
    "You like Rachmaninoff because he's
second-rate?
"
    Lily smiled and began to hum loudly a particularly lush passage from the Symphonic Dances.
    Margaret, though sorely tempted, forced herself not to hum along. One had one's pride. But she did regard Lily with a new respect and with a growing warmth.
    "Do you like Trollope, too?" she asked hopefully.

    Inspired by Lily's description, Margaret went to the mechanism of discipline the next morning, but it failed to live up to its reputation, and she felt restless after only an hour and began to stare into space. The anonymous author of
Rameau's Niece
had lifted passages from so many philosophers, and with such abandon, that Margaret knew she would be spending months tracking down sources. The author was well versed in the literature of the age. Was he some provincial boy who had come to the glamorous big city to be a philosophe? There were plenty of them in Paris during the Enlightenment, failed intellectuals writing smut and peddling it to get by. Or perhaps he was a bored clergyman passing the time between nones and matins. And why "he"? Couldn't the author have been a woman like Madame de Montigny? Margaret sometimes wondered if
Rameau's Niece
was written as a hoax, like Diderot's
La Religieuse,
which Diderot and a friend began as a series of letters