The Love of My Youth (4 page)

“So we’re here for the rest of our lives?”

“Or until someone comes in.”

“Jesus, poor Valerie,” he says.

“And here I was imagining her living la dolce vita. And I was irritated by her chirpiness. Now it seems heroic. Is there such a thing as heroic chirpiness?”

“And the mother. Dear God.”

“Do you think she’s evil? Or just batty.”

“We always disagreed about that, whether things were signs of madness or wickedness.”

“Which side was I on? I can’t remember now.”

“I can’t either. And now I have no idea which side I’m on.”

“If I ring the buzzer, we’ll get Valerie’s apartment and she can probably buzz us out.”

“No need, someone’s coming,” he says.

A young mother pushing a stroller puts her key into the door. She is model thin and model surly in black jeans, high heels, and a leather bustier. She looks at them impatiently and moves aside to let them out.

“I’ll just get a taxi here,” she says, lifting her arm.

He takes her arm and lowers it. “No,” he says. “I want to talk to you. I want to know about your life.”

The touch of his hand on her arm is shocking. She’s disturbed by it, yet it would be absurd to show any sort of reaction.

“My life,” she says. “My life is fine.”

“I’d like to see you at least once more. There are things I’d like to tell you. And to ask. Perhaps we could go for a walk. Where are you staying?”

“Near Piazza del Popolo. The Via Margutta.”

Ah, he thinks, so she is wealthier than I. Then he remembers: she always was. He wants to indicate that this is of no importance. So he whistles. “Ritzy,” he says, purposely using a joke word to suggest that no one can take money seriously.

“A little too upmarket for my comfort,” Miranda says. “You’d think Val would have been able to figure that out.”

“It was always remarkable what Val seemed not to be taking in. Perhaps that’s how she’s got herself into this situation.”

“Are we fated to always be the people we were? Always making the same mistakes?”

He assumes she knows this is a question with no answer.

“Where you live is near my daughter’s school. I walk her there every morning. She has lessons from ten to three. Are you free in the morning?”

“My meetings begin in the afternoons.”

“Well, then, shall we meet at the top of the Pincio at ten tomorrow morning?”

The request alarms her. She’d wanted to see what he looked like; she told herself it would be just a glimpse. But to see him again: that takes things out of the realm of accident, and curiosity and chance. But to refuse: that, almost, suggests that she is frightened of something, that he is important in her present life in a way that he certainly is not.

“Just for a short walk,” she says.

He is ridiculously pleased that she’s agreed to it.

“A short walk in the Borghese Gardens. Just as long as you like.”

“All right,” she says, not knowing what it is that she’s agreed to.

Monday, October 8
THE PINCIO
“Now We Are Both Orphans”

They both slept badly, and, looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, Miranda is distressed at the toll the sleepless night has taken. She can no longer be unmarked by sleepless nights; bruise-colored pouches form below her eyes; it’s impossible that she enjoy the sight of her face. She showers; the hot water helps. She opens the red quilted bag that holds her cosmetics: it is larger than she would ever have predicted, particularly since she prides herself on wearing very little makeup. She wouldn’t dream of wearing eye shadow before six, as some people wouldn’t dream of taking a drink before sundown. But she has invested in an impressive array of moisturizers and creams to even her skin tone. One claims that it can “disappear those telltale signs.” She opens a two-inch-round pot of under-eye cream; it contains aloe, honey, and bee pollen. She knows she’s a sucker for invisible cosmetics that claim to be found in nature.

She applies a light peach-toned foundation, a peach-colored lipstick, changes the small silver ear hoops for her pearl studs. She thinks she looks much better. It is important to her that Adam not think she’s one of those women who always look worn out.

She doesn’t know what she wants him to think, only that it is important that there are some things he doesn’t think about her. But what, exactly, does she want from this meeting today? It was one reason for her sleeplessness: she doesn’t know what she wants, and this is unlike her. Around three, when the heavy Italian furniture began to seem unreal and menacing, she understood that this is one of the important reasons to see him: only he can give her a particular kind of information that at her age seems crucial. Is she the person that she was?

And of course, there’s simple curiosity, not only about him, because her connection to him didn’t begin and end with him, it extended to his family. In the years that she was with him, his parents and his sister were important to her. And she knows nothing of what had happened to them in nearly forty years. Certainly, it’s natural to want to know. Valerie could give her some idea of what turns Adam’s life has taken, but Miranda couldn’t expect her to know about Adam’s sister, Jo.

It would be very good to know about these people whom, whatever had happened to her ideas of Adam, she had never ceased to be fond of. In his mother’s case, to love. This is something anyone would want to do. And they’re just going for a walk in the park. “It’s not just a walk in the park.” That was one of those phrases that people had begun using recently. But it would be just a walk in the park. She has a friend who is a rocket scientist, and he likes to say that people can never say of him, “Well, he’s not a rocket scientist,” because, in fact, he is.

It is, after all, a park, one of the largest in the world, the Villa Borghese, although the name suggests rather a large stone structure than the green expanse, the great varieties of trees—umbrella pine, plane, ilex, magnolia—and the running children and the strolling lovers. And how, she wonders, can the same word apply to this place and to Yosemite, dedicated to the exclusion of the very civilization this place celebrates. She climbs the stairs from the Piazza del Popolo to the Pincian Hill, the high point that marks the park’s beginning.

She looks over the balustrade and sees, written in chalk on the road below, some words that even her inadequate Italian can unlock:
E DOPO UN ANNO SIAMO ANCORA QUI A PARLAR D’AMORE
. And after a year we are here again to speak of love. “Love,” like “park,” a word inadequate to all its different meanings. What will she and Adam speak about? What will it have to do with love? She wonders who wrote the words on the dangerous road, where cars come whizzing by, alarming the more timid tourists. She imagines that, whoever they were, they must have been young.

She was young the last time she was here. She hasn’t been here for nearly forty years, but she remembers being happy. It made her comfortable, as other parks in great cities, Central Park, the Luxembourg, Hyde or Regent’s Park, did not. It seemed somehow more accommodating, presenting more suggestions than demands. Promises. What did it promise? Something open-minded and expansive. Possibilities.

Of the possibilities connected to her seeing Adam, there did not seem to be many risks. They would simply be catching up. They would be exchanging information. They would be taking a walk in the park.

She mentioned it to her husband, but without much emphasis. There was no need, she thought, to make much of it. She would find out about Adam’s family. Would she be finding out, in addition, something about herself? That would remain to be seen. She wouldn’t think about that now.

•   •   •

Adam’s sleeplessness was an intermittently pleasurable mixture of anxiety and relief. The relief made a change in the relation of his body to the world: he feels himself lighter, less weighed down, as if he’d been a hit-and-run driver who had, after years, discovered that the crumpled body he left at the side of the road had been seen to leap and dance. What does he want her to do, or say? What does he want her to say to him? What does he want? He wants to know the shape, the texture, of her life. At the same time, he is afraid of some things he can imagine she might want to say. And he wonders if he is foolish to open himself to the scalding shame that once was the medium in which he lived his days. But what can she say that would be worse than what he’s said to himself? Does he want her to say that he has been forgiven, does he want to hear the words “It was so long ago. I never think of it”? That would mean she never thinks of him, and he understands that he doesn’t want that.

He says to his daughter, over breakfast, “I’m going to meet a very old friend. I’m eager to find out what’s happened to her. Do you realize, Lulu, that the amount of time I haven’t seen her is equal to twice the number of years you’ve been alive?”

“Dad, you love making those kind of calculations,” she says, kissing him on the top of his head. “Don’t wear that shirt, it makes you look paunchy.” Has she intuited something: that he was unusually concerned about how he looked all day? “Luckily, I have my fashion adviser with me,” he says, disappearing into the bedroom and presenting himself to her in a light wool rust-colored shirt, looser fitting: a larger size. Then he is gripped by a new anxiety: in meeting Miranda in Rome, has he involved Lucy in a kind of deception, is she a partner in his infidelity? But he’s not being unfaithful; he knows that Clare would want him to speak to Miranda; she always worries that he buries too much of the past. He’ll tell her about it, of course he will, next time they talk, next Saturday. But there’s no need to make a special call to speak about it now. And he will be very careful not to say anything about his morning to his daughter.

He sees her looking over the balustrade. How young she looks, he thinks, in her black jeans and wheat-colored jacket. He imagines that people would think she is five, even ten, years younger than he.

She takes in the city’s expanse. She has not, for many years, lived in a large city. And the two large cities she lived in—Boston and Rome—she lived in with him. She sees that he’s uncomfortable—she recognizes, from a span of forty years, the gesture that marks his unease. His hands are in his pockets; she can’t hear the accompanying sound, but she knows that he is jingling his change. Well, then, it will be up to her. She will plunge right in with wanting the news of his family. Any beginning will be awkward, uncomfortable, the thing is to make a beginning, and as a beginning, she thinks, this is as good as many, better than most.

She can’t bear avoiding saying things that must be said. This is, she knows, her way, a way that those who love and admire her call directness, those who dislike her call brutality. It was always her way, but her marriage to Yonatan has made it her first instinct now. Seconds after they have said hello she asks him about his mother.

“My mother died eight years ago.”

Miranda leans on the stone balustrade, puts her weight on it, presses into it so that the stones abrade her dry palms. She looks over the Roman morning, at Saint Peter’s and the other domes whose names she does not know but vows before she leaves she will be able to identify. The horseshoe of the Piazza del Popolo, with the obelisk that she has learned was built by the emperor Hadrian in honor of his lover Antoninus. But what are those terra-cotta-tiled domes? She will find out. Her father’s daughter: one of her first lessons: “You must know the names of things.”

“I always thought I’d see your mother again. That one day we’d meet, and it would be as it always was.”

“She was sad that you never got in touch.”

“We had a difficult last meeting.”

She will not say what is in her mind:
I wanted her to be on my side, to vilify you, to be with me against you
. But she wouldn’t. She said, “But you must understand he is my son. He has only one mother. I can never not be with him. I can never be against him. You want me to be against him, and this I can never do.”

Miranda is unwilling to bring up the past, a dark wave that could all too easily drown them. She does not yet know who he is, whom she is with. It is far too soon to know; she has been alone with him only for minutes, if not seconds: time in the elevator, time stuck between the two doors of Valerie’s building, time when he hailed her a cab and made this plan: that they would meet for just as long as she liked to walk in the Villa Borghese.

“My mother loved you very much. She was always happy with you. You were the girl she wanted to be.”

“Perhaps at first.”

“My mother didn’t change the way she felt about someone once she decided they were hers. And you were hers. Nothing could change that.”

Miranda refuses to begin speaking this way.

“Her death, how was her death? I hope it wasn’t difficult.”

“A few difficult weeks. Not much pain because Jo, but you wouldn’t know this, of course you wouldn’t, is a hospice nurse.”

“Jo, it makes me happy just to think of her. She was a perfect little girl. Her life? Has it been happy?”

“Yes, I would say she’s had a happy life. She’s found just the right work for herself. She always knows, she says, that she is doing good. And her husband—well, Phil seems to have trouble holding on to a job. He wanted to be an architect—but, who knows what happened? Once again, it doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing we talk about. I mean my family. Her son is a sculptor, very charming, though once again we don’t talk about his work. It seems to be all about rubber tires. I think she supports him, too. She was wonderful at the end with my mother.”

Miranda thinks, I would love to see Jo again. Jo, whom I entirely, uncomplicatedly loved. Jo, who was fifteen last time I saw her.

An old woman is holding an ice-cream cone to the lips of an old man in a wheelchair. The breeze ruffles the man’s white hair. She pats his lips with a light blue cloth handkerchief.

“My mother’s mind was clear almost until the end,” Adam says. “A few days of derangement, which had, even in their dreadfulness, a comic aspect. Knowing my mother, it’s not surprising. When one of the doctors or nurses or helpers would come in the room she’d say, ‘Oh, your son plays the piano, too.’ ”

Miranda doesn’t think it’s amusing, doesn’t even pretend to laugh. She doesn’t believe Adam thinks it’s funny, but is used to saying it is, or that it has its comic aspects, because this is a way of breaking up the flat glass sheet of death.

“Do you still play the piano?”

“Not much. I’m much more concerned with teaching my students, directing the chorus.”

So you have lost a very great deal, she wants to say, but only exhales the single syllable, “Ah.”

“And what about your father?” she asks. “He was such a nice man. I don’t think I heard him speak more than five sentences, ever. I don’t even know his first name.”

“He didn’t like it, maybe that’s why. It was Sal. Salvatore. He died soon after my mother. He just had a heart attack, sitting in front of the television. He died the way he lived, not making a fuss, not causing any problems. I think he had no interest in living after my mother died. It was only about six months.”

She doesn’t know what he wants her to say to this. Her eye falls on a dog with the body of a golden retriever and the head of a cocker spaniel. She’d like to draw his attention to it, so they could take their minds off sadness, but it seems, she knows, wrong: she doesn’t want him to think her unserious, unable to hold dark thoughts. And besides, she remembers: he doesn’t like dogs. He’d been bitten by a dog when he was only three. There was a small scar on his right thigh. Was it still there? Were scars one of the things that escaped time? Or had age covered even that mark, that sign of history.

The dog’s master whistles; he runs off on his disproportionately long legs.

“I’d heard about your parents’ accident,” Adam says. “From my mother, of course, who was very saddened by it. She liked your mother. I think they went on seeing each other afterward … but I don’t know. It’s the kind of thing my mother would have kept from me.”

“I blamed my father for the accident. I still do. He had no business driving those icy roads.”

“Well, we don’t know.”

“No, I suppose not. But my father and I never came to terms. Not after what happened with my brother.”

“I was frightened of your father. I never got over that.”

“I think he liked frightening people.”

“He didn’t frighten you. And I think he liked that, too.”

“It’s hard for me to credit him with anything. But I guess my powers of observation—which after all is what I do with my life—well, I guess he gave me that. On those walks in the woods. His teaching me the names of trees and birds.”

“And Rob, how is he?”

“I’m hardly in touch with my brother now. He’s still farming in Manitoba … he’s become quite bitter, quite isolated. He thinks I’m soft and frivolous, I know it. Like many people who live entirely honorable lives he has no problems being judgmental and openly critical. It makes being with him unpleasant … and it’s difficult to get there and, well, so many difficult things. I learned from him the pain of being the victim of that kind of righteousness. I like to think it made me less tempted by self-righteousness.”