The Love of My Youth (24 page)

“You just need to be quiet now,” she says. It has taken all the will she has to say only these seven words, to keep back the words she wanted to say.
Blindness. Ignorance. Malign ignorant blindness
.

She understands that it wouldn’t be a good idea to pour on his head the years of boiling rage at the uncomprehendingness of men. And she’s exhausted by the fight, the fight she feels she’s been in for so long, tired of hearing herself say, “You’ll never understand.” Worn out by the erosion of the belief that any of this can be resolved by talk, and by the effort to put into words what she knows on her skin, that of course rape isn’t worse than death, but it is a loss of self no man can fall victim to.

But he isn’t understanding that he should be quiet. He’s determined that the greatness of the statue not be diminished by a reflex of collective outrage. She has asked him to be quiet, but her asking him only increases his determination to make her see his point.

“The consolation is, of course, that she’s turned into the laurel. Sacred tree of the poets. All poetry derives from her.”

She is walking very fast; she no longer considers that the stents in his heart should cause her to accommodate to him. Can he really be saying that? Worse, can he really believe in that idea of consolation?

“I have no patience with the idea that the sacrifice of a woman is worth it in the cause of art. I don’t think any of Bernini’s art is worth one drop of his mistress’s blood.”

“So you will refuse to look at Bernini?”

“I will never be able to look at him again in the same way. Not without a sense of unease at my pleasure.”

“And if my pleasure is unmixed with unease, then I’m some sort of brute who doesn’t care about the shedding of a woman’s blood.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you thought it. I know you, Miranda, I know that’s what you thought.”

“You don’t know me at all.”

“But you think you know me.”

She doesn’t want to pour the scalding brew of a rage against male power onto Adam’s head. He is a good man. She understands this. He has suffered a terrible loss of one wife. He loves his second wife; above all things he loves his daughter. He has not hurt women. Except, perhaps, herself. And she was not destroyed. She is, after all, the wife of another good man, the mother of two good sons. As the mother of sons, she abhors the wholesale criticism of the male gender. She doesn’t spend her days collecting grievances, demanding redress. Today, she feels unhinged: all these representations of female violation and male power. It has brought her to a place that isn’t properly hers at all. An old place she has long since ceased to visit.

“Can we just go somewhere and sit and not talk?” she says.

“Of course.”

Silent, unhappy, disliking each other, they walk toward the lake. He points to a bench. She would like to lose all potential for language to the sound of the water in the fountains. She thinks of all the anger that has been so much part of the engine of her life. She has said it was anger against injustice. She used to feel it was the fuel without which there could be no movement of the machinery of change. Now she is no longer sure.

Perhaps, she thinks, it is impossible, this business of being man and woman. We will never understand each other.

He wishes he were with Clare and not Miranda. Clare, almost incapable of anger, puzzled by it; causing her to blink in that way she has, as if the light were suddenly too bright. Clare, incapable of generalized resentment. Incapable of even forming in her mind a sentence beginning with the words “all men.” Perhaps it’s simply that she’s younger, not part of that angry, pioneering generation. But no, he thinks, it’s that she always takes the larger view. Or perhaps in this kind of case, the more modulated one.

Miranda sits and mourns the days given over to anger. Wasted days. She wishes Yonatan were here. It is possible that she and Yonatan would be having the same argument as she is having now with Adam. They might even be angry with each other, as she is angry with Adam. But the anger would have a different flavor, a different color. Clearer, without residue. And held in the vessel of a complex and satisfying life. She has no life with Adam: only these days. She wants to let go of this clogged mess she’s holding on to with such fierce determination.

She has an idea of what might help. If she observes something, with no pressure for understanding, something in the natural world, she will regain herself. This is her father’s gift: the taste for observation. Her father’s curse: the taste for anger. She takes out of her purse a turquoise pad for which she paid too much. She waits till her eye falls on what it needs. A bush that a week ago, when she bought the pad, might have been splendid, now holding on to its last brilliant red leaves. Tomorrow, in a few days, even these will be gone. Floating in the water of this thing called a lake, too small really to be what she thinks of as a proper lake, this smallish pool of gray-green water, surrounded by a temple and a goddess, worshipped once, now headless and anonymous.

Red leaves turning purple, or perhaps blue-brown, are scooped up by a boy in a black T-shirt, skimming leaves from the surface of the water with his net, the handle silver, the netting white.

On the shore: three overturned rowboats, dark green.

Beside them: six white ducks.

Four gray waterbirds, whose name she doesn’t know, but will, before the night is out, discover. Her evening’s project: find an Internet site for Italian waterbirds.

It would be good if one of them could say something to create a place where they could meet: a bridge over their differences, the differences that thirty-six years have muted but not bleached away. But neither of them can say a word.

“I’m going to ask that you do me the favor of leaving me here,” she says.

“Of course,” he says. “I’ll do as you like.”

“If I can stay here quietly sitting in the sun and resting like this and just looking at these things, I’ll be better than I was, I promise.”

“You don’t need to be better, you know.”

“Everyone needs to be better.”

“And if they can’t be?”

“Then they should be left alone.”

September 1970

It has struck Adam over the years, as he has thought and rethought that time, that, in the memory, months blur. The quality of one’s life in October might have been radically different from its September counterpart, but unless some natural disaster occurred or some personal disaster happened, so that the day on the calendar was markable and separable, we are vague and imprecise about the route of change through our past.

But he is sure that between September and November 1970, he and Miranda were growing apart. He couldn’t say: it began on September 1 and by the seventh the slope was steeper, and by October 1 they had reached a critical mass of separateness. No, he couldn’t say that. But what he could say in remembering that time was that when Fatima telegraphed Miranda in late November and said, “We need you here,” it was less difficult for them both to contemplate being apart than it had been a year before, or even than it would have been in August, when they were swimming in the Long Island Sound, eating a picnic lunch provided by his mother.

The rhythms of their lives had grown radically different. She’d been hired full-time by Planned Parenthood; she was working from nine to five; her commute was half an hour. He was a student and could make his own schedule; if he stayed practicing till midnight, he could make up the debit of fatigue the next day by sleeping late. She could not. They had played at this rhythmic unevenness in Rome, but it wasn’t the same; he was always home when she was; they relaxed every evening and all weekend, exploring, wandering, eating, happily making love. Her job was unpaid; she was a volunteer, therefore still a child.

But now she is an office worker. A paid employee. She had hoped she’d be making policy in the area of reproductive rights, but most of the time she’s making appointments for clients who, hobbled by shame or a lifetime habit of not keeping appointments, too often fail to show up.

She was told that clients would be sensitive and easily abashed. Particularly if they weren’t married. Contraception has only been legal in the state of Massachusetts for ten years.

It is noticed by the people in charge of the clinic that Miranda’s demeanor of unruffled calm is a great asset. It’s easy for her to conceal her impatience, because she is most often sympathetic. She has an almost endless sympathy, an admiration, for the women who do show up, who are taking their lives and their futures in their own hands. She tells herself it would be better if she could muster sympathy without admiration, but she can’t.

But often she’s bored, and boredom is fatiguing, and in Miranda’s case, fatigue fuels her impatience, which she can’t express at work. Adam bears the brunt. His pleasure in ordinary things, which used to charm her, now seems irritating. She wants to say:
So what if there are new McIntosh apples in the store, so what if the color of the sky turns from pink to blue to gray in ten minutes’ time, so what if Madame Rostavska is pleased with your phrasing of the first movement of Mozart’s K 271?
She wants to rub his face in the sorrow of the world, in the difficult lives of her clients. She can’t remember when issues of phrasing and tempi that she had once found so pressing began to seem more than irrelevant: a bore. And what is worse: she doesn’t like the Messiaen. She’d grown used to his playing the record of whatever piece he was preparing, over and over again, lifting the needle up, putting it down again and again at the same place. She’d grown used to his doing whatever it was she was doing—reading, talking to friends, performing household chores—while he was doing this with Schubert or Beethoven, but she finds the Messiaen disturbing. It steals her peace. He tries to make her appreciate the approximation of birdsong, of bells—the great range of mood: from terror to contemplation. But she just says, “I’ll be happy when this is over and you’re back to Schubert.”

He knows that she’s tired, that she doesn’t like her job; he knows that she’s staying in Boston to be with him so he can finish the work he’d missed when he’d had to take a semester off because of mono. He’s grateful to her, delighted and aroused by the mix of lightness and solidity that make up her physical presence; his desire for her is as ardent and as constant as it has always been: there’s no need even to acknowledge it. She doesn’t seem to notice that he isn’t talking to her about the music he’s playing; he never mentions the intense conversations he’s having with Beverly about the Messiaen.

Beverly copies Messiaen’s comments on the piece they are playing,
Visions de l’Amen
. On a piece of thick ivory paper, she copies in a calligraphic hand what Messiaen has said about the role of the two pianos. “
Vision de l’Amen
was conceived and written for two pianos, demanding from these instruments their maximum force and diversity of sounds. I have entrusted the rhythmic difficulty, clusters of chords, all that is velocity, character, and tone quality to the first piano. I have entrusted the principal melody, thematic elements and all that expresses emotion and power, to the second piano.” In blue ink, she made delicate drawings of two birds and underneath wrote, in a finer script, “From the second piano to the first.”

He doesn’t bring this home; he leaves it in his locker; it’s the first thing he’s ever concealed from Miranda. And he’s even more determined to keep from her the card, light blue, the words written in brown ink, which she took from Messiaen’s comments on the “Amen of Desire,” one of the seven “Amens” that make up the piece. “There are two themes of desire. The first, slow, ecstatic, and yearning with deep tenderness, already the peaceful perfume of Paradise. The second is extremely passionate; here the soul is torn by the terrible love that appears carnal (see the Song of Songs) but there is nothing carnal about it, only paroxysm of the thirst of love. The two principal voices seem to merge into each other and nothing remains but the harmonious silence of heaven.”

Below the words, she had drawn two angels, invisible beneath their conjoined wings. He tells himself that this is only her expression of their connection as musicians; that, like Messiaen, what she meant by “desire” was spiritual: certainly not a threat. But he understands that Miranda might not see it that way.

And he doesn’t share with Miranda his extensive worries about Beverly, who has tried to kill herself again and given the emergency room his number as the number of the person to be called. She’s twenty-one; she no longer needs to give her parents’ number. Mutt and Jeff, she called her parents, full of contempt for them: a stockbroker and an interior decorator from Greenwich, Connecticut. She says Adam is the only person in her whole life with whom she has ever felt entirely safe.

Adam understands Miranda’s impatience with, if not Beverly (whom she’d hardly met: he was careful of that), then the kind of girl Beverly is. Miranda has said he must stop saying “girl” for someone their age now and use the word “woman,” but Beverly doesn’t seem anywhere near being a woman to him. He knows what Miranda would say if he told her about Beverly:
She needs to go out and see people in the world with real problems. I’d like to take her to Bangladesh for one day
.

Somehow, in the chaos of her life, Beverly keeps very good track of Miranda’s schedule and never phones except when Miranda is at work. She seems always to know the nights Miranda works, the mornings she doesn’t go in till eleven. Each morning when he arrives at his practice room, he finds a small card from her, a witty drawing, a musical joke. He keeps them in his locker, wondering what he’ll do with them when he graduates.

Physically, Beverly is almost comically opposite to Miranda. She is dark eyed; Miranda’s eyes are grayish green; Beverly’s hair is black and thick and always in a tangle; she pins it to the top of her head, but it is always falling down, and it’s almost a tic with her (he finds this charming) to be continually pinning it up. Sometimes, she sticks pencils in the bun she makes of her hair as if she were a Chinese woman using hair sticks. Her legs are long and almost worryingly slender; she is vain about them and wears the shortest skirts she can. He loves Miranda’s thick straight legs, to him like the trunks of beautiful trees, but he knows she is distressed by them and covers them in jeans or long peasant skirts. Miranda’s breasts are small; they sit neatly on her rib cage: innocent, tender. He will not allow himself to think of Beverly’s breasts, even when he knows she is purposely brushing against him so that he’ll have to. But though he’s tried to banish the thought, he knows Beverly’s bosom is fuller than Miranda’s, particularly in relation to her birdlike frame.

•   •   •

Adam believes that if only Beverly could spend time with his mother she’d be much better. Rose would feed her and give her advice, and that would lead to her greater happiness. But then Beverly might say:
What’s happiness? I don’t believe in happiness
. He doesn’t know if she would say it in her bitter voice, or her wounded one: he can never predict which Beverly he is going to encounter: the hissing snake, the trembling rabbit, the soaring bird of brilliant song. Adam understands that his mother is incapable of offering comfort without offering food, and that if Rose offered Beverly food she might not eat it. Beverly has a long list of foods that are “too, too sick making.” So of course he wouldn’t try to introduce them, particularly since he knows how much Miranda would dislike Beverly, and it would be wrong to try to place her under Rose’s wing, where Miranda has pride of place.

Miranda sees that the kind of conversation she and Adam always had is stalled now, as if some dam, whose construction she had failed to notice, has cut off the stream of their shared life. But she doesn’t want to think about it because then she would have to understand her part in it, the depths of her own boredom. She agrees to go for a drink with Jeremy Sussman, a medical student who is organizing a storefront clinic, and allows him to kiss her, but she runs away (he laughs nastily at her escape down the street), and she is ashamed that she allowed herself to get this close once again to the danger of betrayal. This time, though, she goes right back to Adam, and her silence, her evasion—“Where were you?” “Oh, just having a drink with Valerie”—is the first time she has directly lied to him, as opposed to keeping something back, and so the stream is befouled now, clogged yet more.

And when Fatima’s telegram arrives, “We need you here,” both Adam and Miranda understand that it is right for her to go. She will be away for his recital, and she expresses her regret, but both of them understand that they are secretly relieved. She will, she assures him, be back home for his solo recital: the last three Beethoven sonatas. She is particularly fond, she tells him, of Opus 110; Think of me when you’re practicing it, she tells him.

“As if I don’t always think of you,” he says, wondering, just a bit, if that’s still true.

Realizing that he can’t make Beverly’s life better through contact with his mother, he makes what he thinks is the second-best choice. He’s listened to Miranda for years when she says how important it is to have girl- (now women) friends. So he convinces Valerie it would be an act of kindness to spend time with Beverly, and to his surprise Valerie, too, becomes fond of her. He knows what Miranda would say,
That doesn’t mean anything, Valerie likes everybody
. Beverly invites Valerie to go on what she calls “a thrift shop crawl.” They come back with bags of clothing that could have been costumes from thirties screwball comedies, or later Betty Grable films: a big-shouldered beaver coat, a beaded handbag, a cinch-waist polka-dot dress with a white patent-leather belt.

“All for five dollars, it’s unbelievable fun,” Valerie says, and soon she has included some of Miranda’s other friends on her expeditions with Beverly. Only the more law abiding, less adventurous of the friends had stayed on in Boston after graduation; Renee is in Morocco with a Moroccan boyfriend, Lydia has gone out to San Francisco to an art scene she found more “open.” So those who are left are serious, purposeful, concerned with doing good, still with the residue of pleasing their teachers clinging to them, although they are officially, now, not students. They feel in Beverly’s company steered into a more adventurous and less safe world. A world that simultaneously harks back to their mothers’ youths (the choice of Manhattans over hashish, stiletto heels over cowboy boots, velvet capes over Aztec ponchos) and skates close to a world of danger their mothers wouldn’t even have the name for. Do they believe that Adam and Miranda are inviolable, as safe as Fort Knox, so there’s no need to be concerned about his spending time with Beverly? Is that why they don’t mention her in their letters to Miranda? Or are they keeping something from her, something that might disturb her in her new difficult life? Or have they secretly come under Beverly’s sway, because they’re tired of Miranda’s certainty, her calm, silent judgments?

And Adam feels in having introduced Beverly into this female society that he takes a new place among them. No longer is he the pampered, gifted boy whom they must instruct about the world while protecting him from it. In knowing Beverly, he showed himself, in a larger sense, more knowing. On Beverly’s advice, he grows a beard. Beverly’s voice, the cigaretty undertone, her diction, at once sharp-edged and louche, challenge him in a new way. She talks passionately about artistic growth. She says he must break out of the comfortable cocoon of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where he feels so easily at rest and listen to the music of John Cage and Varèse and Schoenberg. Particularly of Messiaen, whose synesthesia fascinates her. She talks about Messiaen’s idea that each chord represents a specific color. She says that unless he lets the dark bitter tones enter in he will remain a competent pianist, but one among many, and if he wants to break out of that circle and enter the circle of the great, “I don’t believe in words like ‘great,’ not for myself anyway,” he says and she replies with impatience, flicking the ash of her cigarette on the floor, “Oh, nonsense, Adam, you must dream big and your dreams must include chaos and darkness.”