The Love of My Youth (5 page)

“You’ll forgive me if I find the idea of you being soft and frivolous almost hilarious.”

“Well, you’d be surprised. And you don’t know Rob.”

“Did your mother live to see your children?”

“She died when Jeremy was three and Benjamin eight months. But seeing her with them made me kinder to her, I think. You were kind to my mother. Kinder than I, I think.”

“I wouldn’t say you were unkind, but you could be impatient.”

“Your constant kindness to her gave me leave to be impatient.”

“I knew that it annoyed you when I sat and listened to her when she offered me tea at the kitchen table.”

“I was bored out of my mind. I thought you were encouraging each other to be boring.”

“How you hated being bored! More than anyone I’ve ever known! You fled from boredom as if you were fleeing from infection.”

“The plague of boredom. It does make me feel like I’m about to suffocate. Death by drowning. Death by boredom.”

“I never found your mother boring.”

“No one ever bored you.”

“It’s true. I find almost everyone interesting. Perhaps because it always strikes me as quite strange that any of us is alive.”

She thinks this is a wonderful thing to have said, and it is the kind of thing people she knows now do not say. She wonders if he always said things like this, if they were always talking this way to each other.

“So now we are both orphans,” she says. “I wonder how common that is, if we are statistically unlucky. Orphans: it sounds like something we’re too old to be. What it means is there’s no one between us and—what would you call it?—the hereafter.”

“Shall we walk?” he asks.

They walk down a lane bordered by large old trees, their leaves turned nearly bronze from autumn dryness, but no less lush for that. They walk between rows of white marble heads, busts of the famous, many of whose identities they do not know. Someone has drawn, with Magic Marker, a mustache on Petrarch.

“Your mother had beautiful hands,” he says. “They always seemed very soft and cool to me. They smelt of a very light perfume. I think it was her lotion: Jergens. When I smell that almond fragrance, I always think of her.”

“I think about the way your mother cooked. Those wonderful thick soups. The sauces: those enormous pots of tomato sauce going on the stove all day and we’d come in and she’d dip a piece of bread in the sauce and hand it to us on a plate, and we’d eat it with a knife and fork. It was so simple, so delicious. So entirely satisfying.”

“Well, she was Roman. I guess that’s why I’m happy here.”

“The mother country.”

“Have you been in Rome since …” He doesn’t want to say,
since the time we were here together
. He says instead, “Since 1969?”

“No, I’ve only been to Europe for conferences since then. And not here. Paris, Berlin, London, but not here. Not Rome. As a family we traveled in the West. Hiking and camping trips. My boys liked that. I had a horror of trooping them through churches and museums. And if we went abroad it was to visit my husband’s family in Israel.”

Her husband is a Jew, he thinks. Are her children? Can they be Jews if she is not: the maternal line being the important one.

“I know the city very well,” he says. “I still have family here. There are things I’d like to show you. Things we didn’t see when we were here. Things you wouldn’t think to see when young, or living poor, as we were then, or thought we were, although of course compared to those living quite near us, it was a joke. And we were working hard here, both of us, and there were all those terribly long dinners at my cousins’.” He doesn’t say,
And in the hours when we might have been sightseeing, we were making love
, but they both understand this.

“There’s a lot of Rome you haven’t seen,” he adds. “Well, of course there’s always a lot no one has seen, but I want to propose something to you.”

The last time you proposed something
, she wants to say,
we were sixteen years old and what you proposed was marriage
.

“What?”

“I suppose it’s a favor to me, and of course I understand I’m the last person in the world to whom you owe a favor. But walking with you, talking with you, well, we can have conversations unlike any others. The last time I saw you I was a young man. Now, well, I’m not an old man, but today a young woman got up to give me a seat on the bus. And I took it. You’re here for three weeks. If we could meet to walk, and I could show you the city, my mother’s city, the city I love most, and we could talk a little every day … well, I think it might be wonderful.”

What, she wonders, is at stake in his offer? What has she got to lose? She has three weeks in Rome, she has paid an exorbitant amount for the apartment, and it’s a city where there is no one she knows, except for Valerie, whom she has no wish to see. She had thought her sightseeing would be solitary or in the company of some colleague as unlearned as herself.

And if she agrees, what will she be giving up? Her position as a victim. The pleasure, like a sharp taste in the mouth, like the taste of vinegar, ginger, arugula, the darkest chocolate: the deep satisfaction of a cherished bitterness. He would like her forgiveness.
Well
, she wants to say,
it’s too late
. Because the truth is: forgiveness is irrelevant now because the pain he caused her is long gone and, painless, forgiveness is not difficult, therefore perhaps not worth much. But, then, if it is painless, why not give it? And there is that thing for which she needs forgiveness, the thing he doesn’t even know.

Most probably, it is a very bad idea. She doesn’t even know exactly what it is to which she is agreeing.

But she does agree. Partly because she is more off balance than she imagined she would be, more at sea. Yonatan, having lived many places, spoken many languages, never feels a stranger; she has depended on him to root her in a new place. When she’d thought of being alone here she’d considered it a luxury, one she’d been promising herself since the children were old enough not to need her.

Having felt at home in India, in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, she hadn’t imagined that in Rome she would feel overwhelmed by strangeness. But in those other places, she’d had a job; she was doing something that was of use, something she knew how to do. In a strange culture without work, she’d come to realize, you are a child. She doesn’t consider going to meetings at a conference real work. Talking and listening to people, foreigners themselves, in a hotel that could be anywhere on earth: it isn’t being part of the life of the city. You’re just a different kind of tourist.

And as a tourist, there is nothing you can do for anyone, except perhaps give them your money. You must depend, like a child, on people doing things for you. And not being able to be of use made her feel she didn’t know herself. She had no place to stand. She didn’t like feeling inexpert. She couldn’t bear the idea of herself as TOURIST, couldn’t stand the image of herself on a street holding a map, standing in front of a monument, paging through a guidebook. And even what at first had seemed exciting and charming to her in her apartment now oppressed her. The cool excessive space. The huge door with the knob as big as a cantaloupe. The marble floor where the sound of her heels seemed somehow meaningful, portentous. The window with a view onto the street, whose complicated shutter had delighted her, now seemed encumbered and unwieldy. She hadn’t lived in a large city for a quarter of a century. The traffic menaced her; often she found herself getting lost. Yonatan was never afraid of getting lost; he thought it was an adventure. He had no problem looking like a tourist. “I am a tourist,” he would say, “why shouldn’t I look like one?”

And so, the possibility that Adam offered struck her as more desirable than it might in other circumstances. She wasn’t pleased with herself, that the idea of a man to accompany her made such a difference. Of course she’d tell Yonatan about it. He knew about Adam, but it was possible he didn’t remember. Yonatan’s relationship to the past was radically different from hers. He had left Israel because he felt smothered by “an excessive past.” Too much history, too little geography, he said. He loved America: he loved the idea of starting over. It was another thing he didn’t like about Israel: everyone knew everyone, he said. So you had to be whoever everybody thought you were. He loved the idea of being a stranger in a strange land. So of course he would say, “It’s a wonderful opportunity, to see Rome with someone who really knows the city. It would be ridiculous not to.”

She is Yonatan’s wife; she has been for more than a quarter of a century. She is Yonatan’s wife; she is the girl betrayed by Adam. She is a woman, nearly sixty, who has earned the right to do something like this. But something like what? she asks herself. Of all the voices in her mind, Yonatan’s is the clearest. “It would be foolish not to,” she hears him say.

“Yes, all right,” she says to Adam. Yes. “I’d like that.

“Some days we’ll have only a little time. We can meet here, and take short walks. Then some days, we may perhaps see something, or get something to eat and drink. What I would like is to promise you that we will see one beautiful thing every day. What that thing will be I don’t know. We’ll play it by ear.”

“Play it by ear? What can that mean to a trained musician?”

“You forget that’s how I learned. By ear. I listened. Everything followed from that.”

“All right,” she says. “We’ll meet. We’ll walk and talk. We’ll see what happens.” She is happy with the imposition of rules, of limits. Only one thing per day. Only walking and talking.

“I think my mother would like it,” he says.

She wants to cool the temperature, as if what they were doing were an ordinary thing. She doesn’t want the invocation of his mother.

“Tomorrow, I have to go to Alitalia. My husband’s arranged an upgrade for me for the way home. He’s very good at things like that.”

Tuesday, October 9
THE VIA VENETO, THE PIAZZA BARBERINI
“I Wanted to Make Some Kind of Mark”

Her business with Alitalia is completed more easily than she had thought; the beautifully coiffed, beautifully made-up girls behind the counter are breathtakingly efficient. She knows she mustn’t call them girls, although they are, however competent, the age of her sons. They could be her daughters, the lack of which, when she sees a certain kind of young woman, particularly a competent and lovely one, she continues to mourn.

“Let’s walk up the Via Veneto,” he says. “Remember when we went into the city to see
La Dolce Vita
at the Thalia?”

“Oh,” she says, “we thought we were glamorous, didn’t we, sitting in the Thalia holding hands. Pretending we didn’t just get off a suburban train. They seemed so wonderful. Those Europeans who were truly glamorous in a way that we could never be, who, however glamorous we thought we were, would always be more glamorous. It seemed a real, an important category. Glamour. The glamorous. We were as susceptible to it as secretaries buying movie magazines, but we thought we were better because our categories were European. European glamour. Now I can’t even imagine that it would be important, or that it once was. Anouk Aimée driving at night in sunglasses. Why did we think that was so marvelous? It was pretty stupid, not to say insane. But she did look great.”

She thinks it’s all right to invoke the past this way; she can think of it as describing the behavior of a cohort rather than the behavior of Adam and Miranda as teenagers in love. The threat of intimacy has been bleached, dipped in the vat of the general.

“I watched the movie again, recently,” he says. “It didn’t age well. It seemed pretentious. All those people trying to be daring, trying to be wicked, like good children thinking they’re bad when they can’t even imagine what real badness would be like. What followed, in the way of rebellion, made their efforts look absurd. That made me sad, for myself, and for all the things that don’t stand the test of time but were, for some little time, important. Like this street, the Via Veneto. This street used to be considered important, the important place to be if you wanted to meet important people. Now it’s just a place for rich tourists who don’t know where they’re really supposed to be. But I’m still fond of it. Walking down this hill, passing these great hotels where probably only rich Japanese stay now. But I still feel the presence of the glamorous ghosts. I can imagine them happy here, in spite of everything, enjoying the lines of the buildings and the generous old trees.”

“Oh God,” she says, “there’s that horrible church, with the crypt we went into because that weird guy told us we should.”

“What was his name?”

“Dudley. Or Bentley … how did we know him?”

“I think he was a friend of Beverly’s.”

She doesn’t want to say:
Well, of course
.

“It was the first thing he wanted to see in Rome,” Adam says. “The Capuchin church with the crypt where the monks had taken the bones of their dead brothers and made things of them. Arches made of bones, light fixtures, working light fixtures, sockets with lightbulbs in them that were real sockets from pelvises. Bone filigrees and flowers. And then some skeletons in their monks’ habits.”

“I hated it. And I remember he said, ‘But aren’t they doing what all art does? Making something of death, something to be looked at, enjoyed. Only they’re a little more literal. But isn’t that just a kind of radical honesty?’ ”

“I remember how angry you got. And the angrier you got, the cooler, the more ironic, he became. You walked away, and left me to deal with him. I remember what you said, ‘Death is not a metaphor. It is real. The dead are not material. They had their lives. They should be honored.’ ”

“I remember he laughed at my use of the word ‘honor.’ I didn’t hit him, did I? I know I wanted to.”

“No, you just walked away. Leaving me to deal with him and his weirdo ideas.”

“I think I went just here, just where we are now, to the Triton Fountain and wet my handkerchief and cooled my face. I loved that fountain! They were my favorite thing about Rome, the fountains. Now of course I worry about the waste of water.”

“Is it waste? It seems to have been going on for a long time. I think the Romans have no shortage of water.”

“Yes, it’s been going on for a long time, but once it was really practical. People needed those fountains for water to drink and wash from. Now they’re merely ornamental.”

It occurs to him that in all the time he has been in Rome he has never once worried about the waste of water implied in his beloved fountains. And the fact that she does marks between them a very great difference. He doesn’t like what she’s making him feel; her concern seems willed, dishonest, and she is spoiling his pleasure for an idea he doesn’t think she can really believe in.

They risk their lives crossing the Piazza Barberini to stand by the fountain. The sun is at its height; they shield their eyes, but even so they look away, down to the ground from time to time, to rest them.

“Neptune, the sea god,” she says, looking up, continuing to shield her eyes from the sun. Refreshing, she thinks, refreshed, the sun is never a problem for Neptune; he’s always cooled by the water. Then she notices that in fact he isn’t drinking from the shell at his lips, but blowing into it: he’s making music. And the music, made of water, falls back down on him to refresh him again and again. She notices, too, that his hair, drenched, falls down his back stick straight, and this is unusual; usually the gods are curly headed. If she were in Berkeley, she thinks, someone would be making a point of that, a political point. Was Bernini trying to suggest a primitivism, is it an acknowledgment of the aboriginal presence destroyed by colonialism? That is the kind of thing people in Berkeley would say. And although she loves her home, she’s glad to be away from it.

Surrounding the god is a circle of dolphins. She wants to say—why is she so defensive—
On one vacation my sons and I went to a place in Hawaii where you can swim with dolphins. Real dolphins
, she wants to say,
not stone ones
. She dips her hand in the cooling water; she doesn’t want to be unpleasant. Or she does and doesn’t like it in herself; hopes she can keep it hidden; hopes she can keep from saying what she feels. To say what you feel, she’s learned, is a luxury; you can only afford it if you’ve built up a balance of trust. She didn’t know it when she was young, but she knows it now. It’s often better not to say what you feel.

They walk uphill on the Via Barberini. He points to a statue in an arch, flanked by two other statues. “This is meant to be Moses,” he says. “It’s a failure, obviously, but the artist’s failure was unusually public. It’s called the Acqua Felice. The ‘happy water.’ The pope, who was actually a peasant, commissioned it as a monument to himself, but he thought calling it the Acqua Felice rather than naming it after himself was a sign of modesty. Moses is holding the tablets, except that he shouldn’t have been given them yet when he brought the water into the desert, which is what is supposed to be commemorated. The proportions as you can see are all wrong. He’s stocky, like an overage, out-of-shape wrestler.”

He is doing it now, the kind of talking she dislikes in foreign cities: the tone of the tourist guide has entered, the art historian. She always dislikes commentary on the beautiful. What can you say—after you say,
Oh yes, that’s wonderful
—that isn’t diminishing, that isn’t more about you and your wanting to be praised than it is about the beautiful thing you’ve seen. Language, she thinks, should at such moments be banned. Pointing can be allowed: nodding, gestures with the chin. Perhaps jumping up and down. But words, she thinks: People should be fined for speaking in the face of something beautiful.

His words have made her mind shut down, like one of those metal shutters storekeepers pull down here at closing time. She remembers that he always had that potential; sometimes when he talked to her about music, she couldn’t listen. His attention to the formal details leached the pleasure for her. She calls up an old resentment: he had stolen music from her. She had loved to sing; their first encounter was about her singing. But after she took up with him, she didn’t sing again. Believing anything she could do with music would be, compared with what he did, inferior and false. So now she wants to pull him down from the false heights of his aesthetic pedestal.

She moves closer to the statue of Moses. “Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion in
The Wizard of Oz
,” she says. “And why the horns? They make him somehow more lovable or approachable than Moses usually seems.”

“I suppose if you look at it like that, it’s amusing.”

“But you don’t want to be amused.”

“No, it disturbs me. I think it’s a mess. Some historians say the statue’s a mess because the funds were cut at the last minute, or because the sculptor was rushed. That it wasn’t his fault. But I think it was his fault, because he allowed something to be presented that should not have been presented. People said he was trying to be Michelangelo, which he had no right even to consider, because he was nothing but a hack. The statue became a laughingstock. He killed himself from shame.”

“What a terrible thing,” Miranda says. “It’s understandable, but that doesn’t make it less terrible. You want to grab him by the shoulders and say, ‘It’s not worth your life.’ ”

“What is, then, worth a life?”

“Nothing.”

“I won’t accept that. Then we’re only animals, living to survive.”

“I can see giving up your own life to save the life of another person, certainly your own child. But for a statue, an unliving thing. No.”

“I’m not sure. Isn’t it possible to no longer want to live because your work is a failure? If you’ve lived for your work, which is not, I think, the worst thing to live for. In our fantasies about the artist’s life we never include the reality that most art that is made is a failure. We believe that it’s important to leave a mark, but it doesn’t occur to us that it might be a bad mark, undistinguished or corrupt, a mark that would be better unleft. There’s no need even for mediocre art, to say nothing of bad art. Whereas in your field to be adequate is OK; it’s better to do an adequate job than to leave the job completely undone.”

“You know nothing about what I do,” she says, wondering when he became so rigid, so punitive. Should she take the time to educate him, or allow this to be one more thing she holds against him, one more grievance she can keep, like a stone inside her shoe.

“Mediocre work of the kind I do, of the kind people like me do, could lead to sickness and death. Real death, not just an unfortunate aesthetic moment. Nevertheless, I repeat what I said: a failure of proportion in stone is not something that should lead to death.”

She knows he hasn’t heard her. Or has chosen not to. Because she understands that he’s not really talking about the statue of Moses, about Michelangelo and the Renaissance popes and the suicidal sculptor. He’s talking about himself. He’s describing his life out loud. He wants her to know something: that he has given something up. But does he want her to know it, or does he want to know it himself? She doesn’t know whom his words are meant for. But she understands the sorrow behind the words, and like the sharp rattle of the lifting shutters, indicating morning on the Roman streets, some signal has been heard. Something has lifted in her, something has opened up.

“But what is it,” he says, to her, to someone else, she thinks, to no one, “this impulse to make a mark?”

He wants her to talk about this with him; he wants her to say something about his life. That it is all right, the way that he has lived it. Something has lifted, but not entirely. To give him what he wants, that understanding, would require a giving over of an old grievance. And she isn’t ready for that yet.

He takes her into Santa Maria della Vittoria, a church that in its overembellishment does not please her. Gold and marble: the materials of wealth and power. Everything she has devoted her life to being against. Why would he think this is something she would like? But then, why would he know what she would like? They haven’t seen each other for nearly forty years.

He leads her to the front left side, to Bernini’s Saint Teresa. “Is this not worth it?” he asks.

“Worth what?”

“A life.”

“It’s not a question I have to consider. Which is why I live as I do.”

He sees that she’s unmoved. He is angry with himself: he knows this isn’t the kind of thing she likes. Her taste always retained something of the American Puritan: she liked bare hills, slate skies, pastures fenced with stones. He should have led her up to this; taken her first to something plainer, more austere.

Her resistance angers him. This is his favorite place on earth, and he won’t allow her to spoil it for him. He wants to say:
This is greatness, this richness, this celebration of life, the gold rays, the flow of the fabric, what is done with marble that seems so light it can’t be stone, her abandonment, the sharpness of the golden arrow, the sweetness of the angel’s face
. But he thinks it’s better to say nothing.

She wants to say,
She’s having an orgasm
. But she won’t. She focuses on the entirely relaxed foot, surrounded by plain air, the only plainness in the room.

“I like the pleased face of the angel,” she says. “But those guys on the balcony looking on: what creeps.”

“Just looking on, the donor’s family leaving no mark. Bernini’s life left a mark. He won’t be forgotten. Do you really mean that it doesn’t matter to you whether your work will be known after you die?”

“I never imagined it would. I just wanted to do something that would help people.”

“I wanted to make some kind of mark. For a time I thought I would. That my work would be remembered. That I would move something forward, maybe a quarter of an inch, and people for whom music was important would know. Is it really true that you never had such thoughts?”