She Is Me by Cathleen Schine Page B

heroine within spitting distance of Emma Bovary could have anything but small, lovely feet.
    Elizabeth rubbed one of her own feet against her other ankle. Sandpaper. A wide swathe of sandpaper. That was Elizabeth’s foot.
    She listened to the construction noises of a neighborhood on the way up. The house was oddly cool, not at all what she had expected. Even the attic. Two shimmering green parrots sat on a telephone wire. A flock of them lived in the palm tree next door, the progeny of pets who had escaped.
    “The Way Madame Bovary Lives Now: Tragedy, Farce, and Cliché in the Age of Ikea.” It wasn’t a bad paper. She had an old college friend who was an editor at
Tikkun
and desperate for last-minute copy.
    “Some piece on peace has dropped out, I wonder why, don’t you have something, anything, in a drawer?”
    Elizabeth had just finished this paper, and though
Tikkun
was not a suitable academic journal and would not help her get tenure, she was not sure she was a suitable academic or that she really wanted tenure.
    Is adultery tragedy? Or is it farce? Was that the part of the paper that interested Volfmann? Perhaps he had liked the part about cliché. The word “cliché” originally described a metal plate that clicked and reproduced the same image, over and over, mechanically. Elizabeth flipped through Flaubert’s collection of clichés,
The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas,
looking for inspiration. But most of the entries did not translate well, more because of the passing of time than the shift to English. Rather than a dictionary of familiar clichés, it read like the historical document it had become. What remained fresh and clear were not the expressions themselves but the forms used to express the clichés. These were timeless. The knowingness and importance of tone that was merged with the emptiness of the information—the portentous commonplace—this was instantly recognizable. “Horizons. Find them beautiful in nature, dark in politics; Enthusiasm. Called forth exclusively by the return of Napoleon’s ashes. Always indescribable: the newspaper takes two columns to tell you so.”
    But the very idea of cliché, the repetition of machinery in a printing press, the horror at repetition, had become itself a cliché.
    “I don’t want
The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit,
” Volfmann had said. “I want cutting-edge banality.”
    “So . . . a farce . . .”
    “I don’t know,” Volfmann said, shaking his head. “Cutting-edge banality seems like tragedy to me.”
    Elizabeth didn’t know what to make of Volfmann. He talked about the bottom line and demographics and grosses. He was crude and yelled at people on the phone. But he was smarter than she was. She saw that right away. And she wondered if that made her like him more, or less. Because she did like him.
    She suddenly remembered him closing his eyes, just for a moment, as he listened to someone on the phone. When he opened them, he’d looked right at her, caught her watching him, and she had blushed.
    Farce, farce, tragedy, tragedy, squawk, squawk. One parrot seemed to be raping another parrot. The coffee was no longer hot. Her mother had colon cancer. Her grandmother had skin cancer. Adultery was neither tragedy nor farce. It was simple self-indulgence. Madame Bovary was an ass.
    She went into the bathroom, turned on the water, and leaned her forehead against the cool tile.
    “Madame Bovary is an ass,” she said to Brett at dinner.
    “A piece of ass,” he said.
    “Why can’t people be content . . .” she said.
    “Ass is a donkey,” Harry said. “Grandma said.”
    “. . . and appreciate what they have?”
    Brett sighed. She saw his foot tapping.
    “Am I boring you?” she said. She felt the blood rising to her cheeks as it always did when she was even the slightest bit emotional.
    “I’m trying to decide if being content and appreciating what you have is a romantic notion,” he said, smiling, “or an antiromantic notion.”
    Larry