The Love of My Youth (18 page)

He doesn’t tell Henry Levi that refusing to accompany Miranda on the march will put him in another kind of danger. The danger of losing her. Whom he is not afraid to think of, to speak of, even, as the love of his life.

They are slipping away from each other as if they were standing on a muddy bank holding on to each other, trying to be completely still although they feel their footing giving way.

Only a year earlier when they were both leaving home for college, it seemed everything would be quite easy.

From the day that she moves into the dorm, Miranda knows that she is lucky in her roommate, Valerie, from a small town outside Omaha, bouncy and pleasant and pleased with everything. She wants to major in art history. Miranda’s arriving at college with a boyfriend, a musician, gives her, for Valerie, a great cachet. There are what are called parietal hours, two hours on Sunday when boys are allowed in dormitory rooms. Quite early on, Miranda confided her sexual status to Valerie, who was honored to leave the room on Sundays. And so for the first time Adam and Miranda are free from the fear of intrusion and surveillance. For the first time, they are safe in her bed.

Miranda makes a new friend every week. Her closest friends live on the same dormitory floor: Lydia, from Needles, California, who likes geology, and tall Renee from Philadelphia who urges Miranda to take Russian, and Marian from Chicago who is one of the first to major in African studies. They think Adam is wonderful; his distance from contemporary culture makes him seem precious, a museum piece, a fragile porcelain. They tease him about his ignorance of rock and roll. When he says, “Some of it’s very good, the Beatles, for example, some of their harmonies are quite complex. They’re very interesting,” “Oh, for God’s sake, Adam,” Renee says, and laughs that laugh that makes everyone want to be standing next to her. “Saying the Beatles are interesting is like saying ice cream is interesting. Maybe it is, yeah, and you could analyze it: there’s cream, there’s sugar, there’s the ice and the machines that make it. But in the end it’s just fucking fabulous and you’re really glad it’s in the world.”

Everyone suddenly seems to be saying “fuck,” using the adjective “fucking” in the easy, habitual way they used to say “groovy.” Renee denies it, but Valerie and Lydia admit to being jealous of Miranda’s wifely status. They all feel free to say how good-looking he is: his beautiful hair, his beautiful eyes, how easily he blushes. Lonely and inadequate in their single beds, they dream of what she has. Adam’s shyness, his seriousness, touch the maternal in them. If Miranda isn’t in when he calls, they speak to him as if her absence were a deprivation he must be protected from. As if not hearing her voice, he will feel starved and they must feed him.

They are very young, Adam and Miranda. Their bodies are continually miraculous to each other. They have never seen other bodies, and so for them both, the body of the other is all bodies, or the first body: they are Eve and Adam in the Garden, and the apple has not yet been thought of, tasted, known. Their skins are fresh, unblemished; not having touched other skins, they do not fully understand this; their joy in each other is absolute; there is nothing to which it can be compared. Each touch is arousing; they can hardly wait to be in each other’s arms. Having come together first as almost children, they had not had time for the malice that corrupts desire, that mixes it with punishment and blame. Making love soon became quite customary; it was as if it were something they had never not done. Customary, and yet still miraculous. Often they say to each other, lying in each other’s arms, “I am happy. I am very happy.”

How did it darken? Was it that the world was getting darker in those days, a daily darkening, a cloudy thickening? Miranda volunteers for draft counseling; the sister of Rob, how can she not, and Rose at home is counseling neighbor boys to resist the draft: assuring them that they’re behaving justly; helping them relocate to Canada, directing them to psychiatrists who will swear that they are psychologically unfit for battle, that they would bring danger to their fellow soldiers; that this risk should, in the interest of the war effort, be avoided at all costs.

For a time, Miranda moves in a well-meaning pastel-colored clutch of colleagues and companions: Quakers, Unitarians, left-wing Catholics and Jews, people whose parents had voted for Adlai Stevenson. She sings in the dormitory lounge the songs of Peter, Paul and Mary. The edgiest lyrics that come out of her mouth are “Accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone … For the times they are a-changin’.”

Was it because the music changed? That Dylan became ironic, angry, that the Beatles moved from vaudeville to LSD? And then there are no more parietal hours; the young women of Wellesley will no longer accept that they should be told when men are or are not allowed into their rooms. And so now they are allowed in more and more, and suddenly there are male voices in the hall, male presences in the dining room.

Tall Renee experiments with drugs because of her new boyfriend, Arnold, who is from Florida and insists that only through pharmaceuticals can enlightenment be found. Two weekends into the second semester of sophomore year, Marian decides that she no longer wants to be friends with Miranda and Lydia and Renee and Valerie; she doesn’t even want to live on the same hall with them, although they’d gone to great trouble the year before to assure that they’d all be together. She is put off because they are so uncomfortable with her boyfriend, Roger, who has hair unlike any hair they have ever known (it’s called an Afro, Marian tells them), who is silent and sullen and makes no attempt to engage the girls in conversation, who disappears for long periods and then is suddenly there, who is not a student; they don’t know exactly what he does. They fear that their anxiety is racially motivated, and they try to conceal it; but even with Renee, who is the most relaxed, the tension is clearly there. Some of the groups with which Miranda is involved have given up an unequivocal commitment to nonviolence.

Adam does, in the end, go with Miranda to the march on the Pentagon. He sits with her on the bus, but what he does at the march isn’t enough for her and they both know it. He’s uncomfortable; she knows he’s worried about his hands. He is too shy to shout out slogans and can’t bring himself to walk in silence with his two middle fingers formed into a V. He knows that she’s grateful to him for going. He knows, too, that for the first time she considers the possibility that she might wish he were other than he is.

•   •   •

During spring break 1968, Adam and Miranda visit Rob on the farm in Manitoba. The bus trip takes them two days; they are filthy and tired when they arrive in Winnipeg, picked up by Rob in a battered truck, and filthy as they are. He lives on a commune; they are shocked at how ramshackle everything is, how hard everyone works, how humorless the people are. No sign of spring has come; the snow melts halfheartedly in puddles that half reflect the empty trees. The people with whom Rob lives, many of them draft evaders, are too exhausted to care about music or poetry; they seem too worn out even for ideas. Rob is affectionate, but he speaks to Adam and Miranda as if he were speaking to slow, though good-hearted, children. She sees that he thinks, like her father, that he knows more than she will ever know. She feels around the edges of his love a flickering of contempt, which he tries to stifle, but she senses that what has always been between them is now like a page saved from the fire, but nonetheless singed.

On the bus ride home, she weeps in Adam’s arms, and he consoles her, saying, Rob is tired, he’s overworked, he’s still in shock, he’ll come around, he loves you. Thinking of his feelings for his sister, Jo. Unconditional love. The older for the younger. The stronger for the weaker. My sister. My brother. Nothing, he believes, can change that. Inherited from Rose the primitive conviction: blood is thicker than water.

This belief makes him different, he knows, from his fellow serious musicians. His place in the family headed by Rose and Sal. His love for his family. His easy breathing of the family air. Who don’t know exactly what he does all day, but believe his grandfather when he says, “It’s in the blood.” What blood? Adam wonders. Can what I feel for this music have to do with blood? And yet, of course, he knows it does; his blood makes his fingers move, makes his head swoon and his heart sing. Yes, of course, it is a thing of blood. As is his love for Miranda, which he cannot talk of to his friends, who seem never to have breathed ordinary human air, only some other element, not oxygen enriched, or perhaps superenriched: the air of music. They don’t understand the ordinary world, the give-and-take of ties that are called familial affection. Nor do they understand what he has for Miranda, this love, necessary, automatic as breathing, natural as swimming in the sea.

They don’t have girlfriends, or they have too many girlfriends because girls like throwing themselves at musicians, thinking they are making themselves a place in the world of high culture. Or they have difficult girlfriends, or they discover that it is men they love, and the musicians who are girls weep and are exhausted because the boys don’t understand them and they are exhausted from their incomprehension, and then the boys become more fractious, trying to handle their own exhaustion, and the exhaustion of the girls, and the mutual incomprehension. So Adam goes to Miranda often in the evenings and every Sunday (you are my Sabbath, he says to her) for refreshment, renewal, rest. The release and replenishment of his desire, which is, he says, like Moses’s burning bush (Boy, they got you with that religious imagery, Miranda says, temperamentally uninterested in religion). Well, perhaps; nevertheless my love for you burns and burns and is never consumed.

On the Greyhound bus on the way home from Manitoba their skin turns livid in the bad false light. Adam is ashamed when his eyes fall on his pale hands, remembering the look of them beside Rob’s: callused, bandaged, chapped. Capable hands. The capable, he knows, are always contemptuous of those whom they consider the merely accomplished. Rob didn’t used to be contemptuous of him. But Adam knows that he is now.

“My brother’s changed,” Miranda says. “He’s become a bitter person.”

Adam knows that Miranda is right. Her brother is bitter about his country and his family. Bitterness is eating him away. There is a core that is there, steely, undiminished. It has not been reduced; rather it has hardened. He is himself, but harder. Adam allows Miranda to weep in his arms. His heart is broken for her; she has suffered a loss that has something to do with blood. He had always admired Rob and somehow feeling that Rob liked him, approved of him for his sister, made him feel more valuable; it was good to be valued in the world of men like Rob.

Normal men.

He is glad to be comforting Miranda. It’s so rare nowadays that she needs anything from him. His need of her is so obvious, so constant, everyone acknowledges it: that he needs Miranda and he always will need her because people with musical gifts like his need other people in the world to get them through. Because what they do is so difficult, so impossible. Requires so many hours of practice: hours behind closed doors, the hands, the back, put in unnatural positions, positions which must be held, repeated, held. Such heroic concentration. All of it taking its toll on physical and mental health: these breakdowns must be warded off, kept back by a vigilance that cannot come from the musician himself: he hasn’t the time for it, the mental space. But without it: the music will be lost to the world, or its quality diminished beyond recognition, even beyond worth.

The war escalates; the numbers of the dead pile up and up, the cities burn up, and Miranda has to work harder, pull her mind away from what she is really thinking about to concentrate on his question: should I prepare the Schumann sonata or the Beethoven bagatelles? He says he doesn’t want her opinion as a trained musician; he just wants her as a sounding board. For the first time, she feels, by this task, rendered inanimate; for the first time, she isn’t sure she likes it. Being a sounding board. It occurs to her that a sounding board is not a person but a thing. Unliving. Unalive.

Just as Adam has chosen the Schumann over the Beethoven, Martin Luther King Jr. is shot. Dr. King, whom Miranda continued to revere although some of her friends grew contemptuous of him and his insistence on nonviolence. As Rob has become contemptuous. Contempt is in the air. It is a space at the front of the shelf now, easily reached for, easily available. And then Robert Kennedy is shot, shot in a hotel kitchen by someone with a name and an origin that seem bizarre. How can it be: another violent death, another Kennedy cut down by violence? How ridiculous they now seem: the endless heated arguments:
Do you support McCarthy or Kennedy?
When anyone can be so easily, so absurdly, cut down. She runs to Rose, and they weep in the kitchen because they saw him, they saw him up close, and they did not see Dr. King, and Bobby is the second brother to be killed, but they worry: is that saying something wrong, something bad about them? Rose still believes one must vote for Hubert Humphrey, she is working for him at Democratic campaign headquarters; Miranda says, No, I won’t support him until he disavows the war. The war is the most important thing. And Rose says, I don’t believe anything is
the most important thing
. There are many important things which Nixon will prevent. And Humphrey is a good man. Nixon is not.

Rose and Miranda don’t like to argue with each other. Does Rose understand that Miranda is moving away from her son? It is possible that even Miranda doesn’t understand it.

All spring, Adam prepares Brahms’s
Seven Fantasies;
in May, he will enter a competition. His principal teacher, Madame Rostavska, and Henry Levi, in consultation, decide that this is a good choice for him. It avoids the expected competition choice: it is not a virtuotistic piece, but it will show off Adam’s talents, his ability to range among moods and tones, his gift for subtle, deep interpretation. If he is selected, he will study in Rome with Stuarto Roncalli. He is putting in more hours in the practice room than he has ever done. He listens to Henry Levi, to Madame Rostavska: he listens to everyone, everyone is telling him different things. Henry Levi says: You must concentrate on the transition between note and note. Every transition must be clean, crisp. You must honor the emptiness, the silences. He concentrates on no. 3: the Sturm und Drang Capriccio in G minor. He urges Adam to emphasize the stately processional aspect of the central section. Madame Rostavska is most concerned with no. 4: an intermezzo in E major. She reminds Adam that Brahms originally called this a nocturne; she urges him to imagine moonlit descending figures, the calm transformation that results in a serene end. He dreams the notes; he hears in his nightmares his teachers’ conflicting advice. Miranda brings him sandwiches and tea with lemon and honey; these are their suppers every night for the month of May.