The Love of My Youth (8 page)

Friday, October 12
THE VILLA BORGHESE
“I Suppose You Find That Music Sentimental”

They are sitting by the puppet theater, a rough, unpainted bungalow that looks provisional and out of place among the serious official buildings that are also a part of the park, that remind you that it was once the estate of wealthy and powerful men who moved the world with their little fingers. A sign says that the show will begin in an hour and a half. Some instrument—it sounds like a player piano—is producing music that could be the accompaniment to a silent film. Miranda can’t identify the melody, but she knows it’s from a time when songs were required to be innocent: girls on bicycles built for two, or kissing boys in a rowboat. The music, which she has no wish to judge, pleases her, and she’s about to lean back into it, like an accommodating but perhaps untasteful chair. Then she remembers whom she’s with. She is with Adam.

“I suppose you find that music sentimental,” she says.

Adam puts both hands in his pockets, as if he’s hiding something from her. “Does it matter whether I do or not?” he says. “What would it mean to you if I said yes, I think it’s sentimental.”

“Now it doesn’t matter. But once it would have made me very angry. And I would have been scared, and then insulted and then angry, yes, scared, insulted, angry, all at the same time that I might be accused of being sentimental. Now I think: Yes, I am, in some things, sentimental, and so what?”

“What do you mean by ‘sentimental’?”

“It implies, I’d think, excess,” she says.

“Excess of what?”

“Sentiment.”

“By which is meant?”

“Emotion. Feeling.”

“But what would ‘excess’ mean? Is there a fixed, a proper, amount of it that mustn’t be overspent?”

“I do know there is such a thing as sentimentality,” she says, “and it makes you physically sick with that sickness that tells you something’s wrong. Hallmark cards. Hummel statues.”

“But my mother loved her Hummel statues and I loved my mother.”

“And I loved your mother. And I loved how she loved her statue of the little girl feeding the sparrows, the one of the little boy playing the violin.”

“I would never have begrudged her that pleasure.”

“But me you did begrudge. You didn’t know what to do when you had to support me walking out of
West Side Story
because I couldn’t walk by myself, I was crying so hard.”

“It was the middle of the day. I didn’t know you very well. I was sixteen. I was afraid of what my friends would think … not that I really had any friends, but the friends I imagined I might have if they knew I had a girlfriend. I was wrong, of course, but I was young. Only sixteen years away from being born, from nonexistence. Sixteen years ago, at forty-three, I was a recognizable version of myself. A teacher, a husband, a father.”

Once again, he seems to want to speak in a way she does not.

“My sons are on your side about
West Side Story
, by the way. They tease me about it. They hum, ‘There’s a place for us, somewhere a place for us …’ and they hand me a box of tissues they’ve hidden behind their backs. My son Jeremy likes to tell his friends that his mother cried over a yogurt lid. A yogurt lid, it’s true. One day I read the lid on a Dannon yogurt carton, and it told the history of Dannon, which is the story of a Jewish immigrant who brought the recipe for yogurt with him when he had to flee Fascist Italy, and he named the yogurt Dannon after his son, whose nickname was Dannone. And I cried.”

He wants to say,
Did you cry because your husband and your sons are Jewish?
But he says instead, “They seem like nice boys, your sons.”

“They are nice boys. You were a nice boy, Adam. A very nice boy. Only sometimes you weren’t so nice to me about music.”

Neither of them says what they are both thinking: that what was done to Miranda by Adam, what Miranda experienced at his hands, was far outside the category which could be appropriately described as “nice.”

“You kept saying to me, ‘There are certain standards, Miranda.’ I sometimes thought you used music to hurt me.” She doesn’t say:
Because of you I have not listened again to serious music in a serious way. Because of you I have left a kind of consideration of what you called great art. I take my children to Yosemite instead of the Louvre. Neither of them has had a single music lesson. If I asked them if they knew who Shostakovich was, they might look at me in puzzlement and say, in unison, “Who?” This, Adam, is because of you
.

“I never meant to hurt you,” he says, and they both pretend to understand he’s talking about music. “I don’t think you ever knew how frightened I was all the time. That I would be discovered not to know what the standards were. That I’d be exposed as the impostor I knew myself to be. That they’d take away my place at the table. Which in the end, I gave away myself.”

No, Adam, no
, she wants to say.
We will not talk like this. Not yet
. “Do you remember our terrible fight about Janis Joplin?”

“No.”

“I adored her. You said that she was fat and ugly, that she shrieked and howled, that she was the embodiment of everything coarse. You rarely spoke that way, so harshly. But it made me terribly angry. I said she was telling the truth about everything you and your musical friends wanted to keep hidden, that they worked to hide.”

Now it is he who doesn’t want to follow this line of talk. “This music, coming from this puppet theater, this music you’re afraid I’m going to call sentimental, well you’re wrong. I’m enjoying it very much.”

“Oh,” she says, not knowing how to understand this.

“But I know you’ll want to leave before the puppet show. I’m assuming that you still hate puppets.”

“More than ever,” she says.

That he knows this about her, that he remembers that she hates puppets, makes her eyes fill. And she doesn’t want him to see. She pretends to tie her shoe. To stop her tears, she thinks of her sons, for whom her tendency to cry too easily is a good joke. Her sons: tall, strong, happy, or, perhaps better to say, neither for the moment unhappy. An old woman once told her, “You can only be as happy as your unhappiest child.”

“You know, I liked
West Side Story
,” he says. “I thought it was Bernstein’s best work.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was afraid even to say it aloud. In the circles in which I moved in those days, it was impossible to say you liked
West Side Story
.”

Saturday, October 13
TRASTEVERE
“Some Things in the World Have Got Better. It’s Important Not to Forget That”

They plan to meet in the Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere. She has no memory of it. Perhaps they never came here, or perhaps she has forgotten: it was nearly forty years ago. But no, she couldn’t have forgotten this perfect space. The joy of a perfect space makes her feel like a creature made of lightness; almost, she could fly. But why this sense of joy … because of the color of the buildings, all beautiful, crowded against one another? Peach with green shutters. Dove’s wing blue-gray, ocher. Burnt sienna. Did the names of those colors come to her mind because she encountered them first in her box of Crayola crayons? The box she had to be old enough to deserve: a reward, a sign of growth, maturity, responsibility perhaps, even expertise. In those days, just seeing the words—“ocher,” “raw umber,” “burnt sienna”—was exciting. Not knowing why, she knew the words naming those crayons promised a larger life. In that large box was one crayon whose name was “flesh.” The assumption: all flesh is the color of pinkish chalk. She wonders if the Crayola people have become sensitive enough to have some different name for that crayon now. Maybe “chalky peach.” In the center of the piazza is a fountain around which tourists sit: disconsolate, regretful. Do they just, she wonders, want to be back home? The water sings, how can it not enliven them. But they are not enlivened. They are fagged out, spent.

She thinks at first that there are six frogs surrounding the fountain’s jets of water, but then she sees that they aren’t animals at all, only playful shapes, and that is what the fountain demands: an understanding of this place of playfulness. Which the glum tourists seem incapable of even beginning to understand. Beside them, young people smoke and flirt. With a hardly concealed urgency what seems like a small army of dark-skinned men are trying to sell electrified toys: mice, cats, dogs, frogs, or neon-colored circles of plastic tubing that make a whistling sound when they are swung, like a lariat, overhead. The church, with its gilded apse and mosaic saints who look down on the foolishness or beauty of the people who will soon be gone—as they are gone from life, but here now, in some way, taking part in something, stone that is, or some more permanent kind of life—these saints seem far beyond abashment. Nothing can shock them, she thinks, nothing can disappoint. Their inapproachability comes to her as potent reassurance. She does not know of what.

She sees that the square is the home for another kind of life, more habitual, more domestic. There are people who come here every day; it is their work to be here; they are homeless, and they sit or squat; they beg in a sluggish, aimless, almost offhand way, and their dogs, flea bitten, interested only in their masters, sniff the cobblestones, forage for the leftovers of the careless tourists, close their eyes ecstatically against the noonday sun. Established in a corner of the square, sitting on a camp stool, a woman with wild hair, ripped stockings, ruined shoes, is concentrating avidly on a piece of needlepoint. Miranda looks to see if there is a cup at her feet, if she is some specialized form of beggar. But she doesn’t seem to want anything from the others in the square. It is simply where she is, where she always is.

And walking in and out, chattering, seeing nothing but the place they need to be next, matrons with string bags make their way down the side streets. Some of them have settled down for a late morning coffee; two, perfectly but unfashionably coiffed, cut, with a fine precision, a
cornetto
into identical halves.

She turns up a little street, passes an ancient-looking stone building that is in fact a garage. The men inside it are wearing greasy overalls with their names stitched on the pockets.
GUIDO
, the names say,
GIANNI
, but they could as easily say
BILL
or
RICK
. The smell of oil and gasoline is a shock; she’s reminded that this is a real city, and that the saints on the church are forgotten most of the time by most of its citizens. A large, hot-looking German shepherd lies in the doorway, while his master, five feet away, lies underneath a shiny, red, clearly quite costly car, whose fate is in his hands.

Adam is waiting for her at the workman’s café he described. There are four tables outside; he asks if she’d like to sit at one of them.

“No,” she says, “I’m too nervous about running into Valerie. This is her neighborhood.”

“Oh, God,” he says. “I guess I’ve done such a good job of blocking Valerie out of my mind I hadn’t even thought of that. We must, must, get in touch with her.”

“Absolutely, we must,” Miranda says. And they giggle like naughty children, understanding that they won’t be doing it anytime soon.

•   •   •

They’re seated at one of a series of long tables, each covered with brown butcher paper. Only one dish is served at each meal, and your bill is calculated on the brown paper that serves as your tablecloth. When your bill is done, that part of the paper is ripped off and handed to you … and the rest of the paper is ripped and thrown away after you leave.

A few feet from where Adam stands, there is a salmon-colored wall covered by a bougainvillea, a blanket of sheer purple that makes the orange seem neutral, matte. How, she wonders, can these flowers grow so lush, and climb so high? It isn’t, after all, the tropics. They have winter here; the hints of it are in the air when she wakes in the middle of the night.

The waitresses that serve them and the others in the restaurant all seem related; their children run in and out. They are affectionate and tender to them, but to their customers, regulars and tourists alike, they are impatient, rough. A small, round-shouldered woman in English tweeds sits alone, reading a newspaper. Another—it is impossible to tell if it is a man or a woman—shares pasta with a fox terrier and takes half of it home. There is only one offering on the menu:
pasta arrabbiata
, and, for a second course, lentils and sausages. Come
contorno
they can order
insalata mista
or
puntarelle
, which Adam recommends: it’s a kind of chicory with a dressing made of oil, vinegar, and anchovies. It’s available only in the fall. They order wine and a bottle of mineral water but are given only one glass apiece. The roughness, the lack of
cortesia
, pleases her, as does the savory goodness of each dish she eats, the vivid flavors, spicy tomato, peppery meat and beans, bitter greens drenched in salty fish and vinegar and oil.

•   •   •

They walk together to the piazza. A bit overfull, her senses more fuzzy than she would like (she isn’t used to wine at lunch), she makes her way to the fountain to sit for a moment in the sun.

Her eye falls on a beggar woman, hunched almost double, her foot twisted inward. She is making mumbling, supplicating noises; she is invoking the Madonna, and calling all the women beautiful, the men generous. Miranda puts a euro in her filthy paper cup.

“You see, Adam, some things in the world have got better. It’s important not to forget that. This beggar woman. What do you see when you see her? Someone tragic, a victim, or someone pathetic, annoying, perhaps criminal, almost certainly manipulative? Whatever we see, she’s not what we want to be looking at. We want to be seeing the color of the walls, the angle of the sun on the water in the fountain. We don’t want to have to be thinking: What should be done for this woman, and who should do it? The church? The state? The family?”

“It isn’t the kind of thing I think about: what should be done with her, about her. I hope someone else is thinking about it, someone like you, maybe, who has an idea of what could be done that would be of real use.”

“I look at her and understand that she had polio. And that polio is gone from large parts of the world. And that it happened in our lifetime. Do you remember when we were little and every summer people were afraid there’d be another polio epidemic? Our parents were afraid of public swimming pools. They wouldn’t let us go to the movies, and the movies were the only place with air-conditioning. They might be afraid of sitting near a fountain like this. And then, suddenly, it was over. That gripping fear. Poof. Over. Because of human endeavor, human intelligence.

“When I worked in India on the smallpox project, and I would see face after ruined face, and afterward, after an exhausting day knocking on the doors of strangers, urging them to be vaccinated … and you know how I’ve always hated asking for things, I would say to myself, I’m doing this so there will be no more ruined faces. Except I never said it out loud. I don’t even remember what I said to the people whose doors I knocked on. We were given a script by UNICEF; we weren’t supposed to deviate from it by even a syllable. I couldn’t say what I was thinking, I’m doing this to work against death because the dead have become invisible. I couldn’t even think of it that way after a very short while, the idea of working against death, lessening the tide of death. It was overwhelming to contemplate the millions and millions dead to smallpox. Whereas if I could make my mind focus on one face, that could be seen and known and understood; if I could say, ‘I’m doing it so this one face won’t be ruined,’ then I wasn’t overwhelmed.”

“You did something that you know helped relieve suffering,” he says. “When we were young together and we spoke so easily in such high terms, you said, ‘I want to relieve suffering.’ And I said, ‘I want to create beauty.’ ”

“You could say we’ve both done something of what we wanted. And are still doing it. Not everyone can say that.”

“Come,” he said, “let’s walk off our lunch.”

They cross the Tiber, walk down the Via Giulia. She stops in front of the gigantic head, its mouth a spigot of running water that falls into its marble bowl, and she thinks how strange it is: the face is tortured, but the sound of water introduces play, the element of joy.

In the Piazza Farnese, she asks: “Why do I like those fountains. They’re kind of like big bathtubs …” But he knows she really doesn’t want an answer.

The Campo dei Fiori, denuded now of fruits and vegetables, has become a wasteland, a garbage dump; the Roman street sweepers, as glamorous, Adam thinks, as fashion models, haven’t made their way here yet; they’re seeing the
campo
at its worst. They pass through it quickly, cross the ugly, threatening Corso Vittorio Emanuele, turning down too many streets for Miranda to account for, and suddenly they are there: the Piazza Navona, Bernini’s lolling gods. She imagines that if she should say to them,
What is right? What is good? What is to be done about the poor?
, they would answer,
What are you talking about? There is sun and water. Here is my galloping horse, and the lion chasing him. How pleasant life is: how clear and swift the flow of water, how firm and supple human flesh
.

“You tell me, I must admit some things are better,” Adam says, sitting on the railing by the statue of the god meant to stand for the Danube, “but you must admit no one could accomplish anything like this now. We’ve lost the grand scale. Who would spend what would be required on what they would think of as useless space, space whose only use is pleasure? For the gathering of people and the sound of running water.”

Does she trust him enough to say what she is really thinking, to confess her anxiety: her Protestant guilt for crimes committed centuries before she was born. A response she dislikes in herself, but cannot banish. Partly because it is also a source of her greatest vanity. Not physical vanity, which she gave over long ago, but ethical:
Unlike you, I do not forget
. But she wants to say it, if only because it was the kind of thing she could have said when they were young.

“To have accomplished this, grotesque inequalities were necessary. Such projects are possible only if one forgets about the labor involved, if one forgets about an ideal of justice.”

“But aren’t you glad they did it? Wouldn’t we all be poorer without it?”

“But what about the children of the poor …”

“Miranda, you just can’t be talking this way right now, not in this place, not on a day like today. Just save it, I promise we can talk about the poor another time. Right now, I’d like to buy you an ice cream. Fix your mind here. Choose now: three flavors.”

She sees that she has made a mistake. When they were young, he might have loved her for worrying about the poor in the midst of what seemed to be a great party: the sound of the water, the delights of harmonious space, the coming and going of all these people and the great fixed stone gods. But now, she knows, she seems ridiculous to him, pretentious, even boorish. She seems that way to herself, although she knows that everything she’s said is right.

“I will choose hazelnut, coffee, pistachio, and give up thinking about the impossible poor, the miserable dead.” She is trying to make a joke of her seriousness, because she can see that it is laughable, really, particularly here. Yet she means everything she said. But she knows she must pretend not to mean it. She must pretend to think herself absurd, to believe that nothing is more important than the best possible choice of ice cream. Or else she will be one of those unbearable people, one of those people no one wants to be with. And she wants him to want to be with her.

“For now,” he says, putting his hand on her shoulder. It’s the first time he’s allowed himself to touch her, and they both understand that something has changed and that they must not acknowledge that it has.

“Tomorrow,” he says, “we’ll only be able to take a short walk. And we’ll have to meet early. Lucy and I are going to see my cousins in Orvieto.”

“Yes,” she says. “How nice.” She’s relieved. He has a life in Rome apart from her, and she is glad to take her place among the things in his life that are unimportant, provisional, able to be let go. At the same time, a small wet patch forms below her ribs, coldish, thickish: she will be more alone tomorrow than he will. He will have his daughter, his cousins. She wonders if any of his aunts and uncles are still alive. She thinks of them and the long Sunday meals she was once invited to be a part of. Tomorrow, when he’s surrounded by loving, familiar people, she’ll be on her own.