The Love of My Youth (11 page)

Miranda and her friends go to Colony Records on Broadway and Fiftieth. They find something called the
Joan Baez Songbook
, which has on its cover a picture of the singer on a beach in California called Big Sur. They plan to travel there after high school graduation. They are hoping one of their parents will lend them a car.

They pore over the book, relieved beyond all telling that it provides, not only guitar chords, but also the possibility for piano accompaniment. Now the problem is: to find a song that will not lose by being accompanied by piano rather than guitar.

They buy the book. They look over it on the train. They look over it in Miranda’s bedroom. They settle on “Plaisir d’Amour,” sung first in French. Miranda has studied French for eleven months, her accent is considered “excellent.” But suppose Suzanne (Suzzi) chooses a French song. This is considered, then rejected. They know their enemy. They know that her imagination is set not on Paris (where her mother might be buying her clothes) but on London, where the Beatles live. She has had her hair cut in the short geometric style invented by Vidal Sassoon, and she paints her eyelids with a single thick black stroke.

They’re right: Suzzi doesn’t choose a French song, she chooses a song by an English singer, Dusty Springfield. “You don’t have to say you love me just be close at hand.” They don’t know that she means it as a message to Mr. Jameson: that she has no desire, in her desire for him, to curtail his freedom.

Has Charles Jameson, though, understood this secret message? And perhaps wished to remove himself from this desire, the desire of a girl whose new haircut, new makeup, have removed her from the territory of the girlish, transporting her over the line into the territory of the womanly, a territory he finds much more dangerous, much less comfortable? What he treasures in the female, particularly as he sees it is now in the process of becoming obsolete, its form melting away like a lump of sugar in a cup of tea: innocent girlishness. Girlish ardor.

So Suzanne (Suzzi) has miscalculated. Singing her modern song with her modern haircut and short modern skirt, she represents for Charles Jameson all that he would like, in the female, kept back.

Miranda, her light brown hair unstyled, reaching below her shoulders, her flower-print shirtwaist dress, her simple song of heartfelt love and its potential sorrows, has touched, in Charles Jameson, exactly the right note. He sees that she is virtuous, and thinks of the Old English word “virtu.” She is like a sturdy, unperfumed flower, a hollyhock, white, lightish pink. Her hands with their short, unvarnished, rounded nails, seem both cool and warm, as if, touching them, you might be comforted but never urged.

Miranda’s eyes fall on the boy seated at the piano, on Adam, whom she looks at briefly and then looks away from. She thinks: He is beautiful. She has never in life (though she’s read of it in books) seen hair like his, so black it seems shot through with blue, and she thinks “Black, black, black is the color of my true love’s hair,” which Joan Baez has sung night after night in the darkness of Miranda’s bedroom. She wants to refuse the word “beautiful” because “beautiful” is not a word used for boys in those years. Yet it returns like a wave over a slick shoreline. Beautiful, she thinks, he is beautiful, and she thinks of this boy whose name, Adam, is the only thing she knows about him, except for the fact that he’s a serious musician. Their eyes meet, and they both blush. She looks not at his face but at his beautiful hands, the traces of dark hair that make him so excitingly ungirlish.

So it begins with music, with a singing girl, and a boy, playing the piano to accompany her song.

Plaisir d’amour
Endure qu’un moment
Chagrin d’amour endure
La vie
.

The joys of love
Are but a moment long
The pain of love endures
Your whole life long.

Adam and Miranda, one just sixteen, one nearly, neither of them knowing the joys of love or its attendant, some would say, inevitable sorrow.

So it begins, the rest of the story. A love story like any other, conforming to certain patterns (rhythmic), revealing certain strains and inflections (class; gender, though the word is not yet in vogue) but most particularly shaped by its time, its moment in history: the mid-1960s to the beginning of the 1970s. Though many people would say that in 1964 the ’60s have not yet begun: they will begin a year later, in 1965. But certainly we are not in the ’50s. Rebellion is in the air, but it is not, for now, called revolution. Rather: “nonconformity.” There are signs of change; money is not important; respectability, security, are nothing. The worst thing you can be called in those years: phony.

There is no falseness in either of them, Adam and Miranda, and what they will soon regularly call “our love.”

There is one small falsity, however, a necessary one, committed by Miranda to set things in motion. Because, although she thinks of herself as a modern girl, free of the constraints that she believes have hobbled her mother and her mother’s generation, she would find it unthinkable to ask a boy out on a date.

And she has never been asked on a date before, so the whole notion of “date” shimmers in the distance, desirable, unattainable, the Islands of the Blest, Mount Rushmore, Shangri-la.

So a few weeks later she pretends to just happen to be on the same New York–bound train as Adam. She knows which train he takes into the city every week because she engages in an activity that would now be known as stalking. She sees that, although formerly he took the 3:47 train on Fridays, now he takes the 11:30 on Saturdays; she assumes he is going to the city for his lesson.

For three weeks they have been in the same room three afternoons a week, rehearsing with the Glee Club. They have never been in the company of fewer than thirty others. They have yet to exchange a word.

Not only does she find him beautiful, she also finds him the embodiment of a life that is far from everything her father stands for. Her father: efficient, always certain, ready at a moment’s notice to dismiss the tentative, the circumspect.

Sometimes she gets to the music room early hoping to be alone with him, but she always hears him playing the piano and when she peeks in the door his look is so intent she would be ashamed to interrupt him. And she is excited by his intensity; it creates in her a hunger as avid, and she would like to be as public in her avidity for him as he is toward his music. But that is impossible. She must pretend to be in the same place as he is by accident. She must pretend to accidentally drop books so that he will pick them up.

And when Adam sees her on the train he finds himself strangled with anxiety. Because he has found
her
beautiful, her hair like a cool stream down her back; he would like to bury his hot face in it, and her careful, sensible but supple hands, and her voice singing “the joys of love” with a clarity he yearns for when he plays, for example, the mazurkas of Chopin. But she need not strive for it; this clarity is who she is.

So when she says, “Hi, oh, we’re on the same train,” he can’t think of anything to reply.

It is, he thinks, easy for her to find things to say.

“I’m going to the Museum of Modern Art,” she says, casually. “I’m really interested in Monet. My mother has this book about him and I thought maybe I’d ask Mrs. Lucas if I could do a term paper on the French Impressionists for history. I know that’s a little weird, but she’s kind of, you know, easygoing.”

She made that up a second before: that she will go to the Museum of Modern Art. She has never been there; she has been to the Metropolitan with her mother. But they don’t visit the Impressionists there; her mother prefers the cool vaultings of the Metropolitan; she loves the Gainsborough ladies, the Goya ladies, the ladies of Ingres and David, and she once said she found the Impressionists “a bit rushed for my tastes.”

Adam is in a panic because he doesn’t know where the Museum of Modern Art is. He never does anything in the city but go to his lessons and then get back on the train. Unless he stops for a grilled-cheese sandwich and a Coke at the luncheonette on Broadway and Eighty-fourth Street.

“That’s great,” he says.

She spends the entire day in Grand Central Terminal, her eye on every Westchester train, so that she can pretend just to happen to be on the same one. He gets on a train three hours later.

“How was the museum?”

Now it is her turn to panic. She hadn’t thought that she would have to tell this lie, and she thinks she’s been very stupid.

“Nice,” she says. “Really nice. How was your lesson?”

“Oh, good. I have a really great teacher.”

“Oh,” she says. “What’s his name?”

And somehow, this simple question, answered simply with the name “Henry Levi,” frees Adam to begin speaking. About Henry Levi, his apartment, his family in Germany that perished. And then Miranda speaks about Anne Frank, and they discuss the fact that both their fathers fought in the war in Europe and never speak of it.

“So I’ll see you in school,” he says as they part to walk home in separate directions from the train station.

“Yes,” she says, drenched in her failure like a hungry animal caught in a rainstorm.

But they have talked to each other, and the next weekend she gets on the train and says, “I’m going back to the museum,” and he says, “Oh maybe I could meet you there after my lesson,” and she says, “Oh great,” and they are both frightened because neither of them knows where the museum is. But they find it, they look at Monet’s water lilies and Matisse’s swimming pool and Picasso’s
Guernica
, and his goat. She chatters and feels a fool, he is nearly mute and feels a fool, and they go back on the train and say again, “See you in school.”

And then there is the dance, his first, which he goes to only so that he can dance with her. And he smells her hair, so clean and promising, so exciting and reassuring, and two weeks later, the unthinkable: he asks her to the movies.

Zorba the Greek
.

It is, for both of them, incredibly, their first date. She has never been asked out on dates because the boys in her class are afraid of her. They think she is contemptuous of them, but she isn’t; it’s just that she can’t place them in a category she can understand. They seem to her not quite real. They aren’t the little boys she’d played with easily, but they so obviously aren’t men, if by men she was meant to understand someone who could be the object of desire. Her ideas about desirable men come from movies and books: Rick in
Casablanca
, Marlon Brando in
On the Waterfront
, Professor Bhaer in
Little Women
, Mr. Rochester in
Jane Eyre
. The boys she sees in school seem far too solid; there is no space in them for the depth that would call out to her. They’re right that she isn’t interested in them, but it isn’t for the reasons they think.

She is not alone among her friends in this failure to connect. Among the four of them there is a total of two and a half dates. The popular girls, athletic or fashionable or daring, have dates every weekend, but Miranda and her friends, members of the Glee Club, the Debate Club, the school newspaper, the literary magazine … they don’t know why … they feel their failure. But it hasn’t happened.

Her first date with Adam is as extensively discussed as the arrival of the Beatles. They think it’s wonderful that he suggested
Zorba the Greek
. It proves he’s got imagination; she’s lucky he’s an artistic type.

She loves the movie; she’s almost drunk on it, and after it (all during it, he is in a literal sweat with the desire to hold her hand and the impossibility of doing it, not least because his palms are clammy with anxiety and she might, he fears, find that unappetizing) she takes his hand and says: That’s what I want from my life, real life, strong life, life and death, and to lose yourself in that kind of dancing. I mean, his little son dies and instead of weeping he dances. God, that’s what I want. I can’t wait to get to Europe where people really live instead of this damn Westchester keeping up with the Joneses. Look, it’s snowing, she says, and she puts her head back and opens her mouth, sticks out her tongue and starts swaying to the Zorba music she’s humming. He’s embarrassed, at first, on the street, but then they turn a corner, no one’s on the street, no one can see them, and he lets her dance him down the street, his heart is full, she is the most wonderful person he has ever known, he would like to kiss her but he’s afraid, but he does squeeze her hand, and they go on dancing. The snow falls on her hair and he would like to brush it off, but thinks he mustn’t, and then does and says, “Maybe before vacation we could see another movie.”

And then another movie and another, and the slow anguishing prospect of hand holding and first kisses (neither has kissed anyone before) and then meeting after school, the shock of Christmas vacation, unable to say they will miss each other, and more movies … it’s the only place they can go that they can kiss. Hours of kissing, blissful kissing, imagining nothing more is possible for them. The pride of sore, dry lips. They kiss through the entire three and a half hours of
Dr. Zhivago
and are terrified that their parents (by which they mean her father) will ask them what the movie is about.

He is afraid of her father. Her brother makes him feel unmanly. Her mother’s anxiety creates in him a terrible tenderness. It is much easier for her in his house.

And then he feels he must tell Henry Levi, and Henry is immediately practical and clinical. He speaks of “prophylactics,” and Adam is abashed, and Henry sees his mistake and says, “Bring the young lady with you to a lesson sometime.”

He says to his wife: It is important that he not be lost in the whirlwind of adolescent sex. It’s good for him to have a girl, but it can’t interfere with his music.