The Love of My Youth (27 page)

Tuesday, October 30
THE CAPITOLINE,
THE MEDUSA
“The One Place I Can Mourn My Wife”

She climbs the many shallow steps, her eye on a huge equestrian statue, Marcus Aurelius, colossally astride the universe as he is colossally astride his horse. The horse, free of the responsibility of rule, seems far more eager than his rider. At the far end of the piazza, two reclining gods, meant to indicate the Tiber and the Nile, hold what she tells herself can’t be gigantic penises: they must be some fertility symbol, she tells herself. On the other hand, they do seem quite relaxed, much more relaxed than the emperor or the stone twins, the Dioscuri, flanking the staircase: the emperor, the twins, so tense with the responsibilities of empire.

She worries that the steps were difficult for Adam and wonders if he arrived before her so she wouldn’t have to observe his effort. She tells herself that the steps are shallow, the climb gradual. He stands between the stone twins, his hand shielding his eyes from the pure Roman sun, which, unlike yesterday, is now doing its good work of plain illumination. It bleaches the stones pure white; it nourishes the pinks and yellows of the neighboring walls. All possibility of cloudiness has long ago been burned away.

He nods to her, and even this greeting, she sees, is difficult for him to give. She doesn’t know what he wants to show her.

Taking her hand, he nearly pulls her along, and in the pressure on her wrist she hears,
Not this, not that, don’t stop don’t look at that, it isn’t what we’re here for
.

She is swept past rooms painted from floor to ceiling with the story of the Roman victory over the Etruscans. As they pass through the room devoted to the statue of the she wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, he tightens his grip, annoyed at the knot of schoolchildren and their earnest teacher who explains the origins of the city of their birth.

“Just here,” he says, a moment after. They stop before a marble head. Bernini’s
Medusa
.

He drops her hand and moves apart from her. She is uneasy being even this close to him. She feels like an intruder.

Her eye falls on the statue’s parted lips. Open—in anguish, or exhaustion? The blank eyes finished, overwhelmed. The snakes that are her hair are by contrast lively and amused. Their mouths are making hissing jokes. They are where they belong.

Miranda is afraid to say a word.

“She looks so miserable,” he says. “In the stories of the Medusa, the focus is never on her, what she might be suffering with a headful of snakes, her own horror at what becomes of people at the sight of her, at the sight of what she can’t help but be. I look at the snakes now as a kind of excess of vitality. Too much life for her, and there’s not a thing she can do about it. So I stand here and say to Beverly: I’m sorry. I feared you. I resented you. I couldn’t love you. I was turned to stone.”

She knows that what she says will not be of the slightest use, and yet she feels that she must say it.

“You know, of course, that it wasn’t your fault. It was an illness.”

She looks up at the suffering face. The face of marble. And Adam’s face, a suffering face of flesh and bone and blood. She thinks: For years that woman whose name I have not even been able to pronounce, this woman, Adam’s wife, whom I could think of only as the one for whom I was betrayed, the one who stole my hopefulness, my innocence, that woman was someone I felt free to hate. Felt free to say I hated. And so I felt free to be a person who says the words “I hate.” This woman whose death I did not mourn. Whose suicide meant nothing to me but a kind of bitter satisfaction. Grim, the satisfaction, nevertheless satisfaction is what it must be called. This woman whose suffering I would not credit, called manipulation, a thief’s sleight of hand.

And looking at the statue’s empty ruined eyes, the desperate mouth, and Adam’s posture, hands at his sides, spine rigid, she weeps as he cannot for the poor destroyed creature who brought in her wake such damage, such harm.

“You know this is Costanza, of the ruined face,” he says.

Is he expecting her to say something? Some reiteration of her earlier outrage, a rekindling of the Galleria Borghese coals? Some reassertion that all Bernini’s art was not worth one drop of her blood? She can’t bring her mind to such considerations now. She is thinking of something else. Something terrible she did. Or didn’t do. The harm inflicted on a woman dead three hundred years ago now seems, in comparison, a distant, an invisible horizon.

“I need to tell you something I should have told you long ago,” she says. “Can we go somewhere we can talk?”

“There’s a nice café here, it’s usually quiet.”

They pass the original Marcus Aurelius on his horse (the one in the piazza, it turns out, is a copy: this one is kept indoors out of the weather), gentler somehow in the modern room newly designed for it. The emperor is domesticated here, made kinder by his place among the disembodied heads, each ten feet high, surrounding him. They pass Etruscans, calm, reclining on their tombs. Peaceful. Connubial.

At the end of a series of corridors, flanked by showcases they ignore, they come to the café. The room itself is full of light, and it opens onto a terrace bordered by dwarf trees in terra-cotta pots, and a balustrade upon which one can lean to see the whole of Rome.

“Shall I get two coffees?” he says.

She nods, although she doesn’t at all want a coffee.

She walks inside and sits at a table below a blown-up black-and-white photo of a fragment of a sculpture. The high small breasts of a young girl, her torso, the beginnings of her sex. The girl cups one breast, coyly half concealing a ripe nipple, and with the other half hides her crotch. Miranda feels, to her distress, aroused. Crawling, or climbing up the surface of her skin: a moving heat. She hopes that she shows nothing. She thinks of the term “hectic flush.” She doesn’t want to be sitting with Adam feeling these sensations, which she tells herself are no more meaningful than sweat. You can’t, she tells herself, be responsible for your arousal. You can be responsible for what you do afterward. But she cannot convince herself.

How can this be happening at this moment, when she must confess one of the worst things she has ever done, and why is the sight of a teasing adolescent girl the cause of something she would do anything rather than experience right now? She has just listened to a man speak of the failure of love, of madness, of self-inflicted death. She must reveal her own transgression. And now she is aroused. She knows that if Yonatan were here, they could turn her surprising arousal into a sexy joke, a kind of foreplay. They could walk out of this bright morning light into the perpetual twilight of the Via Margutta flat, pull back the heavy coverlet, and make joyful easygoing love between the cool expensive sheets. But she is not with Yonatan now, not with her husband, but with Adam, her first love. With whom sex could never have anything about it of a joke.

They had given each other their virginity at a time when the word had weight. A solemn word, an ancient concept. For them, being lovers stood for leaving home. Too young, too inexpert, they couldn’t make a place for play. There were no words for what they did but “making love.” They said “making,” but they believed they had invented something.

She must pull herself out of this. She must stand in a cold place, an open place, the space of penitence, atonement.

“As I said, I have to tell you something.”

He meets her eye for the first time that day.

“Probably you don’t really have to tell me at all.”

“I do, Adam, because for years I have allowed you to think of yourself in relation to me as the betrayer. But in fact I betrayed you first. I slept with Toby Winthrop long before you slept with Beverly. During the Cambodian demonstrations, when you were home sick. He made me feel it was a kind of cowardice not to do it. Right afterward, I was hard on myself. But I convinced myself that telling you would only make things worse. I felt I’d be asking your forgiveness for something I knew was unforgivable.”

“I have no place in my thoughts anymore for the category ‘unforgivable.’ ”

“And yet I feel you must forgive me.”

“Me? I forgive you? It is I who need forgiveness.”

“Oh, Adam, we were both so young. And it seems, as we are here, living as we’ve lived, entirely beside the point.”

“The point?”

“The point is: we have had our lives. The point is: we are here.”

They take each other’s hands.

And then it enters, thickening itself against the background of the old trees and the domes and campaniles. Desire. They could once again be lovers. It would not be difficult. It would, in some way, be the most natural thing.

Something happens to the both of them. They are taken up, taken out, taken away. They are in their bodies, they are in this café, they are in this moment in late October in the year 2007, and yet they are somewhere else entirely. In younger bodies, other places, walking on streets, dancing, swimming, freezing in winter, sweltering in summer, climbing stairs, sitting at desks or tables. Not these tables. And yet these tables, yes. They have both been taken up, they are both somewhere that is not in their present bodies, but they are experiencing it differently.

He is watching himself from a great distance, himself or not himself, it could be the corpse that was himself, or someone who had never been born who has his name, but the name has no meaning. He—and who is he—he knows it is himself, one to whom the word “I” would properly be applied, and he uses the word, for lack of any other, but it has no meaning. He hears a whirring; he senses a darkness. Then on a screen: images that change too quickly for interpretation. He is everything in the room. He is the room, the darkness, the hot light of the projector, the smoke that rises up before the light, the beam of light that makes the images, the screen. The images, of course, they are images of him and of Miranda. But they will not stand still. They are their present selves and their past selves. Impossible to say: which is the real one. On which should I depend.

Then he hears a snap. The film has broken. The lights are turned on; the darkness vanishes.

She hears not a whirring but a rushing. It is a sound she heard when she was the closest she has ever come to death.

She was with Yonatan on a holiday in New Mexico. They had been warned by the owner of their bed-and-breakfast to pay attention if they saw a sign on the highway that said
WARNING: DIP
. The warning was about what could happen in the arroyos, which, he said, pedantically, you may or may not know is the Spanish word for ditch.

Perhaps it was his pedantry, perhaps it was the fact that Yonatan, who had come of age in the Israeli army, was constitutionally unable to take seriously the warnings of people he did not think of as “experts.” He was always sure that people were “overreacting,” “paranoid,” “afraid of their own shadows.” She, too, was suspicious of what she perceived as the excessive timidity of many of their friends, particularly in relation to their children. They talked about the American obsession to create for children what Yonatan called “a shockproof world.” When she relived that day, though, she was always grateful that the children had not been with them.

They’d been told that if they saw even a cupful of water in an arroyo near the sign
WARNING: DIP
, they should turn back immediately. You think there’s no problem because the sky is blue, no sign of rain, but it’s not about the rain you can see, it’s about the rain in the mountains. “Terrifying things can happen in a matter of seconds. I mean seconds,” the annoying bed-and-breakfast host had said. “So, you take my word you see even a cupful of water in one of those suckers, you turn back.”

It was a sunny day, and they saw the water. “Do you think it’s a cupful or half a cup?” Yonatan said. “No more than three-quarters,” Miranda responded. But suddenly, the arroyo was filling, and they couldn’t stop fast enough. They put on their brakes and skidded right into the middle of the dip. They were only there a few seconds when the wall of water hit them. They rolled up the windows. Just as they did, the car was picked up, turned around, carried down the arroyo for a quarter mile; they could hear large boulders bouncing in the water close to them; they thought they were going to be dumped into the Rio Grande, which was only another quarter of a mile away.

But somehow the car got stopped by a rock too large to have been moved by the water. And they sat in the car, pressed up against the boulder, the water going over the top of the roof. Then as always happens in an arroyo, the wave lasted only a moment or so. The water dropped; they were able to open the window. They sat there until the water was down to almost nothing, which it was in a few minutes, and they walked away. Trembling, they held each other and then laughed; they said they shouldn’t be allowed out in the world unsupervised, that they’d never tell the host that he’d been right, they should have listened.

As Adam was everything in the dark room, Miranda is everything in the arroyo: the dry ditch suddenly filling up, the car picked up and carried, her terror, her husband’s terror, her relief. She remembers something else about the water in an arroyo. What quickly becomes a gushing stream began by only little fingerlings of water. They collected and became something enormous, something dangerous and powerful. But if she had listened to the conventional wisdom, she would have been quite safe.

Had she known all along that seeing Adam was putting herself at risk? The risk, she had thought, was reliving her sorrow. It had never occurred to her that the risk might be to her fidelity, the hard-won peace of a shared life. But she had not been honest with herself: the flirty conversations, the accidental or only tender brushing of hands or arms. Had she always known what she was doing? Had she wanted this all along?

And what, she asks herself, now, does she want?

Whatever has taken them up has, at the same moment, released them. They are back in their bodies, back in the present moment of their present lives.