The Love of My Youth (7 page)

When we knew each other before, she thinks, we weren’t parents. And then she thinks: It’s not only that we weren’t parents, it’s much more than that. We weren’t who we are. We were young; we were younger than his daughter, Lucy, is now. There were things we believed; there were things we wouldn’t have even begun to imagine. He thought he would be a great musician; I thought I would change the world, which I believed was open to me and everything that I would bring about. We thought that we would be each other’s one true love. We believed in that idea: the one true love. Now, it is impossible that we should believe that, living as we have lived, having loved others. It is not the case that he was my one true love. Only that he was my first.
First. One
. The two words, so similar, yet calling up radically different conceptions of the world. One: the only. First: an accident of order: a series. Nothing fated. Nothing not susceptible to change. Change, therefore, loss.

She wonders: Is this the most important thing that can be said about us, that we are not who we were.

Thursday, October 11
THE CAMPO DEI FIORI
“You Might Be Surprised to Know I Cook and Garden”

It is difficult for him to find her in the riot of colors: fruit and flowers, cheap goods for sale—most undesirable to him: wool hats, plastic shoes. He considers buying a set of white ceramic cups, an aluminum pot for heating milk. Then he sees her; she is examining a hill of different-colored eggplants: blue-black; white and variegated, a marbling of dark red and cream. He sees from her posture that she is happy.

She is carrying a bright blue plastic bag.

“What’s in the bag?” he asks.

She opens it; he looks inside. A jar of capers, the size of the ones they’d eaten at Valerie’s (so she’d been taken by them, too); two cellophane envelopes, one of beans of various colors, one he can’t identify. He asks her what the grain is called.

“Farro,”
she says, “a kind of barley. It’s hard to find in America, but very common here.”

“What will you do with it?”

“Eventually, when I take it home, I’ll make a soup. With it and with these lovely beans. Look, Adam, the stripy red and white, the ruby colored, then the black and among them all the ordinary bright green peas. Aren’t they wonderful?”

“You’ll make a soup? You?”

“Yes. You might be surprised to know I cook and garden.”

“Well, I am surprised. You who were so hostile to domestic life. My mother understood that; she said you should never learn to cook, you didn’t enjoy it, it would become a tyranny. You would ask her to teach you and she would say, ‘No, just talk to me, tell me something interesting, something I need to know.’ She said she cooked because she loved it, so it would never be a tyranny for her, it was a friendship. But for you … she didn’t want you to be enslaved to it, like so many women were. But then, you know, after she went back to school, particularly when she started law school, she just sort of stopped. She’d cook for special occasions, but then she’d say, ‘There are just so many things I’m more interested in.’ The secret of my mother was that she really didn’t do things unless she wanted to do them. Of course there were a lot of things she really wanted to do, that she enjoyed doing. That was why she always made people around her feel so free.”

“Your mother went to law school?”

“Yes. My mother had a life as a lawyer for a happy twenty years. She took the bar when she was fifty. She worked with a group of lawyers who did domestic law. She was terrific with women who’d been abused, who were afraid of their husbands.”

“What did she know of that? If ever there was a woman who wasn’t afraid of her husband …”

“But somehow she understood being afraid … even though I think for my mother the world was essentially a kind of joke, sometimes a good joke, sometimes a bad one, sometimes a cruel one, sometimes an enjoyable one. But there seemed to be a very great deal she understood.”

“And when she stopped cooking, you weren’t angry?”

“I wasn’t living in the house. It was Jo and my father who paid the price. Only, they didn’t seem to be paying anything. Somehow they both learned to cook well enough, and they did it together, and they enjoyed that. It wasn’t fabulous, like when my mother did it, but it was, somehow, fine. And then on holidays my mother would produce, well, masterpieces.”

What he doesn’t say: that Beverly hated the holidays. She made fun of all the food, saying, “ ‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ is Rose in action.” She’d go home and vomit in the bathroom and then say she had to stay in bed for days: she’d been poisoned.

“But you, Miranda, how did you come to it? Cooking, I mean.”

“I somehow started reading cookbooks. It could only happen when I stopped being afraid of turning into my mother.”

“Your mother was very kind to me. Do you remember, when I got mono and my mother was back in school, your mother would come over during the day and bring me the kind of food my mother never would have made me: Jell-O with real cherries in it, custards, very light foods that were exactly what I needed. And she was good about us, Miranda. She might not have been. The time she caught us in your bed. She might have made us feel terrible about it. But she just closed the door and never said anything.”

“No, she never mentioned it. Not a word. Not even to me. Never. And you see, that was a kind of agony for me. Because I never knew what she was thinking, or when she might, out of nowhere, mention it. Or whether she’d told my father, or someday wake up and think she had to. I never knew what she thought about it. What it made her think of me. Whether it changed the way she felt about me, whether she thought I’d become a different person, whether she couldn’t love me in the same way anymore. Oh, I know she loved me. But what the flavor of that love was or who it was she thought she loved—that I would never know.”

“You’re too exacting.”

“Well, if you like. But I never knew what her love meant, what it meant to her to love me. Was she excited by her love for me, made anxious, saddened, consoled, envious, ambitious?”

“Perhaps all those things. You know from the way you are with your own children.”

“She seemed afraid to touch me. Afraid of touching any of us too much. Maybe of touching anything: now that I think of it, she touched everything rather tentatively, rather fearfully, as if she were afraid of leaving a mark that would be somehow corrupting, hurtful. Perhaps diminishing. Her embraces were always abashed, they always felt provisional. My children’s bodies were always so delicious to me. I kissed them and hugged them all the time. I loved having their skin against my skin. I had to think about it carefully as they got older: they were boys, after all. What should my relationship be to these new bodies? The bodies of men. The soft skin growing coarser, the round limbs thinning, lengthening, the curls becoming straight. Oh, and the first signs: hair on the legs and then the cheek you put your lips on, expecting the old swoony pillow. Suddenly whiskers. Like your father. Like every other man. And then you know they are no longer yours.”

She stops, knowing it’s easier for a mother to speak this way of her sons than a father of his daughter. She doesn’t want to create a difficulty. But he seems not to have seen a boulder in the road.

What he sees is the statue of Giordano Bruno, at the far end of the piazza. He would like to talk to her about Giordano Bruno, who believed not only that the earth traveled around the sun but that the sun was only one of a number of stars, perhaps all equally important. Burned by the Inquisition. Adam takes in his austere unpleased countenance, his hands gripping his forbidden book, and thinks: Well, this is Italy, placing a monument to intellect in the midst of this celebration of the undiscriminating pleasures of the tongue, surrounding it by sugary pink and yellow buildings that suggest, not the life of the mind, but the succulence of fruit or the confectionary instability of some of the candies for sale in the open bins. The buildings’ lightness makes them seem insubstantial: how can they stand up to weather? And yet they have, they’ve endured, as the statue of Bruno has endured, suggesting entirely different things about the nature of the world.

He’d like to talk about this with Miranda. But he sees that she is entirely absorbed in the luxuriant array of fruits and vegetables, and that it would annoy her if he interrupted her delights to talk about a Renaissance philosopher. He envies her ability to lose herself in the physical world, to distract herself in the pleasures of what can be tasted, touched, smelled. It is one of the things he understands about himself: he has never been able to lose himself to this sort of distraction. His distractions come from music, which, as someone famously said, has no smell.

“I often wondered where you got your physical exuberance. Your parents were both so reserved. You were always throwing your arms around people. Sometimes, they didn’t know what to do, but mostly, even if they didn’t know exactly how to respond, you made them happy.”

“Well, I’ve toned down now.”

He would like to say,
That’s such a shame
, but says instead, “Tell me about your garden.”

“Where I live, in Berkeley, things grow easily and well, though we have to be very careful of water. But the growing season is long. I have all sorts of things in my garden, oranges, lemons, tomatoes that are like, well, like they are here, but all colors, some called heirlooms, that’s funny isn’t it, as if you had tomato seeds on a shelf beside the ancestral bronzes. Broccoli even. And my roses: one is called Chrysler red. Like a great big splashy convertible among the delicate pinks.”

He’s thinking, she can see, of something else.

“Do you remember that Rilke poem we both liked?” he says. “We both liked it so much we set ourselves the task of memorizing it. The bowl of roses, how he described all the different colors, ‘the anonymous pink that picked up the bitter aftertaste of violet … that one made of cambrick, like a dress / the soft breath of the warm slip still clinging to it / both flung off in the morning shadows / near an old forest pool.’ ”

He’s embarrassed that he has said something that calls up the image of clothing cast aside. He says quickly, “A group of friends and I have agreed to memorize one poem a week. I guess that’s what I do instead of gardening. I read about flowers instead of growing them. I often wish I did more things that ordinary people do.”

“It was difficult for me to discover how to live an ordinary life,” Miranda says. “A life in a house that didn’t make me feel I was drowning. Or suffocated. There were so many things I didn’t want to do my mother’s way. The anxious way. I didn’t want to be always saying to my children, Be careful with that … wash your hands. Don’t sit there. And there was the other kind of domestic life, the Berkeley kind, dinner parties that were Olympic events. Decoration as a competitive sport. I didn’t want any part of that either. Particularly after I’d lived in places where there was so much hardship, so little comfort. Where each decision involving food and shelter had to be carefully considered. I remember my mother sent me some cans of tuna fish when I was working in India. I would wash out the cans and throw them away, and the people in the village were shocked: they could do twenty things with an empty tuna-fish can. To them it was a sort of treasure. So I began to think of things a new way. But I didn’t want that other kind of Berkeley way, that false renunciation. I think I could only live an ordinary domestic life after I had children. And after I’d known Yonatan. Being Israeli, so many things were just not issues for him. Food, clothing, shelter: they were important, and they were to be enjoyed. But not to be making any kind of point; simply for themselves.”

What she doesn’t say to Adam:
One of the reasons I married Yonatan was that he seemed to find so few things difficult. He liked to say, “After the ’67 War, everything seems easy.” One of the reasons I married him was because he was so unlike you
. But she doesn’t want to be bringing her husband too much into the conversation, too much into the space where she is, with Adam, now. This hum and bustle of ordinary life. This celebration of what has been given, what can be taken. For the asking. For a price.

Instead, she says: “One of the things I had to understand about myself was how much I wanted an ordinary life. I had thought I would spend my life working in the developing world, in India or Pakistan or Bangladesh, all of which I’d worked in. But after I came back from India the last time, and I met Yonatan, I realized that I had grown weary and discouraged. That the kind of people who were good at that kind of work had the temperament to just do what they were doing and be satisfied that they were moving the mountain just an inch or two. They didn’t keep feeling crushed by the size of the mountain, as I did. So I had to live with falling out of love with myself, with falling out of love with the heroic person I had never really been, but only dreamed I was. And I wanted children, children whose safety and health I wouldn’t have to worry about every day. As most of the mothers of the world do.”

“You still feel bad about it.”

“Yes, I fear we will all be grotesquely punished for taking much too much of the world’s goods.”

“But cooking, and in your garden, and with your children, certainly you must think you are moving the mountain a little bit.”

“When they were younger, certainly I did. I was happiest when I had quite young children. I was tired, very tired, because I was working, too, but I never wondered: What will I do today that will make sense? Everything made sense. If I made a soup I could think: Well, I did something with the day that was a good thing. I nourished my children. I bathed my children. I put them to bed. And then I went to bed, and believe me sometimes I was weeping with fatigue. And yet in those years everything made sense.”

“I cook a little, but I don’t enjoy it. It always seems to take so much time and then everyone eats it so quickly.”

She doesn’t say,
Does your wife cook? Is she a good cook?
She knows her own competitiveness and she doesn’t want to create any areas of competition. She prefers thinking of, talking about, his mother.

“What I felt in your mother’s house, what I wanted for my children, was a place of safety and expansiveness. I think my mother would have been better off if she’d just set the house on fire and run off with only what she could hold in her hands or in her pockets. She seemed so trapped, so frightened. I didn’t want an entrapping, fearful house. I wanted a house where everyone was free and happy.”

“Did you do it?”

“Who’s happy? Who’s free?”

“Freer and happier, then?”

“Freer and happier than I was in the house when I was growing up? Freer and happier than my mother was? I think so, yes.”

She doesn’t ask him about how he lives in his house. She doesn’t believe it’s important to him. And she knows that in at least one of the houses of his life, tragedy happened. Horror. Does he still live in the same house? She doesn’t want to speak about that yet. Not here, in the Campo dei Fiori. Instead she says, “Let’s buy some of these grapes.” She buys what seems to him an excessively large bunch: dark purple, nearly black. She holds them to the light.