The Love of My Youth (15 page)

One spring break she was talking to the woman who cleaned her parents’ house. She was from Guatemala. Clare noticed that whenever she smiled she covered her mouth. She dared to ask why: It’s my teeth, my teeth are rotten: no one should see me smile. Clare took her to the dentist. The dentist struck her as modest and intelligent, and compassionate in a way that she found pleasingly offhand. She asked him about his work. She began exploring dentistry. It was, she found, the most neglected area of health among the poor. This interested her. She preferred the humility of the people she consulted to the triumphalist arrogance of medical doctors.

She limits her practice to four days a week. One day a week, she deals with the teeth of autistic children, who are terrified even to be touched, to say nothing of the invasive touch their troubled mouths require. The problem engages her. One of the things Adam loves about his wife is that what others call impossible she calls interesting. She also finds life somewhat hilarious. She laughs in a way that some of the faculty wives consider too loud. He loved hearing Clare and his mother laugh. And yet, the daughter of a family that was spared misfortune for three generations, she can be shocked by misfortune: she drops down to a place where no one can find her, like a stone disappearing at the bottom of a well. Was she drawn to him because, genetically spared tragedy, she saw in him her drastic other? He does not say to Miranda:
When I met her I was a dead man
. Nor does he tell her that Clare told him, “I think I’ve been a little in love with you since I was twelve years old. More than a little.” Then she regretted it, and he, too, wished she’d never said it: it was embarrassing, a slightly indecent cliché.

“She leaves domestic life to me,” he says. “She works much longer hours than I do.”

He does not mention the nature of her work, and Miranda notices this. She suspects that Clare works in fashion or finance. She guesses that she earns more than Adam, and that he is abashed by this. All this makes her glad that she decided to think well of Clare even before she found she had a colleague in untidiness, which has made her feel her decision was completely right.

“And your husband?”

“Yonatan’s at home in the world of things. He doesn’t lose track of them. Objects obey him. They don’t, as they do with me, fly out of his hands, maliciously hide themselves, disguise themselves, take themselves out of straight rows and careful piles simply out of spite.”

She doesn’t want to talk about her husband. He is as different from Adam as he can be (it was one of the things she prized in him: his refusal to agonize, how rare it was for him to take offense). She will certainly not tell Adam that, statistically speaking, three-quarters of their domestic arguments center on her untidiness. The other quarter arise because she finds him too indulgent with their sons.

“If you love me why won’t you keep the house as it needs to be in order for me to be happy?” he says, each time with genuine surprise.

“Because,” she says as if this argument were the first, “I can’t.”

“You aren’t afraid of disorder? Of being overwhelmed by chaos?” Adam asks.

“I have been overwhelmed by it. I was, as you know, overwhelmed in Pakistan during the typhoon, and I thought that I could never do that kind of work again. But then I’d been screwing around two years, working in a coffee shop in San Francisco. Fatima’s father got in touch with me. He was working for the WHO, and there was a great project to eradicate smallpox in India. He knew I was good at organization, so he invited me to join him. And I did, and it was wonderful. And yet, I didn’t want a life in which I had to overcome that chaos every day. I realized I wanted a more orderly life. By ‘orderly’ I meant safer. So a certain kind of chaos, yes. But I’m more afraid of people who believe it’s their job to keep disorder at bay. We are, as a species, disorderly.”

“No, Miranda, I don’t agree with that. Where would we get the idea of order from if it weren’t somehow an inherent appetite? Think of this city. It gives us pleasure because of its formal beauty. And music, music isn’t possible without order!”

“But Rome’s also incredibly chaotic, and that’s because people live here. Our pleasure in the order is connected to things, and people aren’t things. People will not fall into place. That is their greatness. That’s why Rome is great: it’s a living place, not a museum.”

He indicates the place where the bus that she needs will stop. The bus will take her down the Via delle Botteghe Oscure. He remembers in the 1950s there was a distinguished literary journal with that name:
Botteghe Oscure
. The fifties, a time of great cultural achievement in Rome. Fellini, Rossellini, Pasolini, Moravia, Ginzburg, Montale, Morante. Now Italian literature, Italian film, are marginal to the point, he thinks, of almost total irrelevance. Botteghe Oscure. The dark shops. They are standing in front of a shop that sells cheap shoes that can only indicate a willingness for cheap sex. The shoes make him sad; he can’t believe the purchase of gold plastic platform shoes, or white leather boots, red-sequined strappy shoes with thin high heels, can lead to any kind of lasting happiness.

“I think we were wrong in thinking that people who said they didn’t want to change would be happy to do it if we just showed them the way,” Adam says.

“How terrible, though, to be young and not to believe in the possibility of change! I felt, when I was young, as though the weather were becoming different. As if the light had changed and the shadows were thinner. My heart lifted at the possibility of the new world we would make!”

“The possibility of what?”

“The possibility of possibility. That people would be more just, I guess, was the most important possibility to me.”

“I sometimes think that there are horrors now that we could not even have imagined.”

“I refuse to live without hope.”

“What kind of hope?”

“Is there a wrong kind? A right kind? There is patience, isn’t there? Patient hope. When I came back from India, we were so hopeful. We had, you see, Adam, succeeded in eradicating one of the most lethal diseases in the world. We had got rid of smallpox. It was a fantastic success, the smallpox project. The whole world got behind it, and it was really rather simple. People going around talking to people and working with people in personal ways. We were responsible for the vaccinations of millions, and the disease was wiped out. And so we thought: Well, we have vaccines, we have antibiotics, these devastating epidemics are a thing of the past. And then AIDS appeared, and we realized that our hope had just been an illusion. That was when I changed my training from infectious diseases to environmental health. I wanted something smaller, something contained. If I could see a problem that, with patience and attention, I could do something about solving, then I could still have hope.”

“Of all the people I’ve known, you are the most impatient. I could never understand it: you were the most impatient, and yet often the most calm. And the most able to sit still and solve a problem.”

“I might no longer be that person you knew. Or thought you knew.”

“Who are you, then?”

“Someone to whom, like you, a great many things have happened. So the person I am was the one I was and also another person, perhaps many other persons.”

“And yet you consider yourself hopeful?”

“Because the opposite suggests a way I will not live.”

“I have to go to Lucy’s school now, to see if I can help her with her Bach partita. Which I hope, at her recital next month, she will play very well.”

“And so if you have hope in her you are by necessity a hopeful person.”

“If that is the way you want to see it, yes. But it isn’t the only way.”

“But, Adam, do admit: it’s not the worst.”

Thursday, October 18
THE VILLA BORGHESE
“We’re at an Age When We Must Take Care Not to Be Embarrassing”

“You see, it didn’t rain, after all, like you thought it would,” she says.

“And you want to see it as a sign of something.”

“No, a sign of nothing. A piece of luck.”

“What would a piece of luck look like? A coin? A shell? A hunk of bread and cheese?”

She enjoys this kind of play with him. It was who they were, people who played in this way. She doesn’t have people now who play in this way with her.

He angles his chin toward a boy and girl in identical black pants and boots, embracing on a bench. At their feet: two helmets, one garnet colored, one emerald.

“And these two, are they lucky? Lucky in their heedlessness?”

“What do you want me to say, Adam? You want to know what I think of them? What they’re doing?”

“Is this the lack of self-consciousness we were saying the other day was so wonderful in the young? I must say I don’t find this wonderful. I don’t understand it. How can she feel so comfortable, her legs wrapped around him, kissing him, then taking a bite of her sandwich, then looking at the trees, then going back to kissing him, all the time squeezing her legs around his waist? What can he be going through? I remember what it was like at that age. Anything could arouse you … an ad for panty hose. I guess it was stockings then. Somebody saying the word ‘stockings.’ And here she is almost fucking him in public. Yet he seems not to have lost his equanimity.”

“You make it sound so ugly!”

“I’d prefer not to be seeing it.”

“You’re embarrassed.”

“I suppose so, yes.”

She thinks of Yonatan, who is never embarrassed. He might not even notice the two young people, or he might embarrass Miranda and the boys by shouting out “Go for it.”

“They seem quite free of it,” she says. “Embarrassment. What a strange thing it is, embarrassment, so powerful, yet no one acknowledges it as one of the important human states. And it’s so physical. The accident of people’s coloring makes it legible, or not. If you’re fair your face turns red, and anyone around you knows you’re suffering. If you’re darker, well, your secret stays with you.”

“I was always far more liable to embarrassment than you. I could be struck dumb by embarrassment. It never seemed to stop you. I’ve got better.”

“Our first date,
Zorba the Greek
, when I started dancing in the street, after I went home I was terrified that I’d embarrassed you and you wouldn’t want to see me again.”

“No, I thought you were wonderful. Precisely because you seemed so free of embarrassment.”

“If you’ve got better, I’ve got worse. I’m so aware now that we’re at an age when we must take care not to be embarrassing. To dress in a way that acknowledges that some things are past. Think of hair color. You have to do it well, because if it’s done badly everyone has to feel sorry for you for having to dye your hair. And you have to avoid dying it certain colors so that it appears that you’re pretending not to dye it or that you’re making a joke of yourself by acknowledging too loudly that it’s fake. A joke no one’s amused by, they’re turned off by your supposition that it might be amusing. Which is why I spend what you might think is an appalling amount of money to make myself exactly the right shade of blonde. A sign that I haven’t given up, but that I know there are standards, and I live up to them.”

“But whose standards are they?”

“I don’t know, Adam, but I know they’re real, and it is about not wanting to be embarrassing. Unaware of how you’re being seen. I don’t want to be one of those women at weddings doing the alley cat. Or the electric slide.”

“What’s the electric slide?”

“The extent of your refinement sometimes takes my breath away, sir,” she says, punching him lightly on the arm. “Never mind, Adam, I couldn’t possibly explain the electric slide to you. Content yourself with knowing it’s a kind of group dance. You can live perfectly well without knowing more.”

“But can
you
live perfectly well without dancing?”

“Well, I still dance. But more formal dances,” she says. She doesn’t want to go on about this. It’s connected to something about her marriage that she imagines would give him an opportunity for, if not contempt (Adam is not by nature contemptuous), then condescension of which he is, she knows, entirely capable. She’s glad Adam hasn’t asked about her and her husband,
How did you meet?

They met, or rather they recognized each other, while taking a class in salsa dancing. Among the middle-aged hopefuls and the brilliant peacocks who by day flipped burgers or pushed clothes down the street on garment racks, they acknowledged they had seen each other at public health meetings. She was two years older; thirty-three to his thirty-one, though she wouldn’t have guessed it: he was almost completely bald. Neither of them had been married.

For their tenth anniversary, Yonatan had a dancing floor built in their basement. Two nights a week they dance; they are clear with each other that, in twenty-six years, they had, as dancing partners, not improved enough to be taken seriously by the serious dancers. Which makes them very glad. She loves what Yonatan had said about it: “All day we are brilliant and accomplished. Two nights a week we are both pleased to be mediocre.” She understands that this would offend Adam: he would never allow himself even a temporary sojourn into the mediocre, especially if it were willed. She wouldn’t want Adam to see her in her dancing outfit: purposely cheap with a low back and ruffled hem, a clinging top, high-heeled shoes with straps, and, her favorite pair: scarlet with red, blue, and purple sequins. She feels herself falling back into the idea of her husband, as if, exhausted, she is allowing herself to fall back into her own bed, their bed: a king-sized bed, with four king-sized pillows. She imagines that Adam and Clare wouldn’t consider a king-sized bed.

“You seem much more aware of being looked at than you were when you were younger,” Adam says.

She would like to tell him that he’s both right and wrong, but to explain the ways he’s wrong, she’d have to talk about Yonatan. She thinks of herself dancing, her backless dress. Her sequined high-heeled slippers. Dancing with Yonatan, she’s perfectly happy to be looked at. Perhaps because Yonatan never thinks of being looked at. The unease happens when she is looked at on her own. To be looked at alone, as an older woman, she thinks, is to be unsafe, in danger. In danger from what? From ridicule, she understands. Pity, perhaps. Perhaps: contempt. With Yonatan the two categories—pity, contempt—seem entirely remote.

“It’s one of those differences between men and women. As a young woman, you’re looked at all the time. You can’t choose the nature of the looking. It’s abundant, almost a natural event like rain or thunder. A problem sometimes also, like heavy rain, dangerous thunder. Anonymous desire. Anonymous censure. Then you age, and you realize you’ve become invisible. You hunger for the element you once despised or took for granted. But now there’s a new understanding. Being looked at, as a rare commodity, has to be considered carefully. You can no longer afford to be occasionally looked at with contempt, because the other salvaging looks—approbation, admiration—may not be coming your way any time that you can count on. Sometimes you appreciate the invisibility. You’re newly free. But embarrassment, the look that says,
Don’t you know who you are? You’re too old for that
, I fear it like, I don’t know, food poisoning maybe.

“More than anything, though, I fear being thought of as a ‘game girl.’ Those women traveling around in groups wearing red hats. Or maybe they’re purple hats. In cafés or museums or national parks. Some game girl wrote a book,
When I Grow Old I Shall Wear Purple
. Well, the truth is, no one gives a shit what you wear when you’re old unless they’re embarrassed by it. So better not wear purple, just in case. Subtle, neutral shades: blacks, taupes. A bit of mourning for the end of youth is called for. A muter palette. More explorations of shades of gray. Dove. Pearl. A nice alternative to the blush of mortification. Just the right degree of blondness; a blondness that understands its relationship to gray.”

“I don’t want to think of you as never dancing.”

She won’t tell him that it’s something he needn’t worry about. “When was the last time
you
danced, Adam?”

“With you, I think.”

With an entirely pleasant wifely pride, she thinks of Yonatan. “But if you danced me down this row of magnolias it would be embarrassing. Even these two wrapped around each other on the bench would be embarrassed. And then we would have to be embarrassed. And to be embarrassed, and embarrassing here, in Rome, in front of all these Europeans, no, that wouldn’t do.”

“Because to be American is always to run the risk of being embarrassing.”

“I envy people from small republics whose history no one knows and therefore could never resent.”

“So, let’s sit here quietly, like people from a quiet country, so no one will know where we were born.”

“A man and a woman, here in Rome, in this lovely place, under these old wonderful trees that have seen so much. Causing no problems. Embarrassing no one.”

“Especially, thank God, ourselves.”