The Love of My Youth

by Mary Gordon

  Harriet stays with her daughter and Adam for two weeks; she sleeps on the foldout sofa in the living room, shy at the idea of Miranda and Adam in the marital bed. And she knows, though she says nothing, that they are slipping away from each other and at night she weeps quietly because she sees too clearly the end of it. Was Bill right all along? These beautiful young people who loved each other, had loved each other, are perhaps not the people they were. Who are they, then? Adam with his beard. Miranda with the shadows underneath her eyes.

  Her mother leaves, but Miranda can’t go back to work; she barely has the energy to shower and dress herself. She forces herself to shop and cook, but her only appetite is for bland food. Omelets. Potatoes slathered in butter. Occasionally, a hamburger. A vegetable overcooked and unadorned. She finds it difficult to make love to Adam. Her body seems an unhealthy thing; she has been, she thinks, literally diseased. She doesn’t want to expose Adam to this disease, its traces, and its history. His forceful health seems more than she can bear, as if she’d been living in a cave and could only experience the noonday sun as an assault. When she wakes from fitful daytime sleep, she often dislikes the unfresh smell of her body, and the idea of another shower exhausts her. He body feels heavy to her; it is making her move with difficulty, and she focuses on her hair, hanging down her back four inches above her waist or in a heavy braid; but the labor of braiding often strikes her as impossible. One day—it is cold and gray and at four the sun has stopped making even false gestures of illumination—she gets a scissors and standing in front of the bathroom mirror chops her hair off till it is nothing but a boyish cap.

  The shushshush of the scissors, the hill of hair building around her feet, dry but soft, a delightful texture to walk in or through, give her the first energized pleasure she has known since she’s been sick, or perhaps since the tornado and the people it struck replaced her energy with despair. Then she looks at her face. She likes the bare look of it, the light look. She sweeps the hair up and puts it in a paper sack.

  She is proud; she sees herself a heroine.

  She never thought of what it might mean to Adam. He comes home at ten. She anticipates the delight of putting her hot face up against the coldness of his beard; he is bringing her the outside, January, the liveliness of winter and its clarity. But she sees in his eyes, seeing her new hair, a look of horror. “What have you done,” he says, and then, unpardonable: “What have you done to me.”

  “To you? I thought it was my hair. My body.”

  He can’t unsay what he has said. Anything he says would be ridiculous: Of course it’s your body, of course I know that. He says instead, “I can see that it would be more comfortable.”

  He goes into the bathroom to take a shower. What is it that he is trying to wash off? His own sense of having been betrayed? He knows that he is wrong to feel betrayed. But how can she have done it? Her beautiful hair that he so loved, like honey on her shoulders, his grandfather had said, her tender hair, promising, abundant. Of course it wasn’t his, and yet he knew that she did what she did to him, to take something from him. Because he thinks perhaps she knows about Beverly, and whatever she does, whatever she takes from or does to him, she’s right, because he has squandered everything, he is unworthy of her love.

  Is it sensible to say that everything that happened was because of Miranda’s hair? Because she cut her hair? It needn’t have proceeded as it did. She might have fallen into his arms weeping and said, I don’t know why I did it, I’ll never have it again, my hair, my beautiful hair. And he might have said, No, no, you’ll have it again, it will grow back and we can have it again. Would he have used the word “we”? And would that have made her angry all over? Or could they have wept together, could he have kissed the ill-cut ends of her cropped hair and said, Poor hair, poor head, poor darling, you were tired, your body was too heavy for you, everything was too heavy, everything was too hard.

  But this wasn’t possible because she could not admit regret. To say nothing of a joint mourning for something she insisted had happened through her choice, an act of freedom. As she would have said in those days, in those years, an act of liberation.

  Instead of weeping in his arms, she goes down to New York, to visit Valerie, who is working in her uncle’s real estate office and has “an adorable apartment in the Village. Come down,” she said. “We’ll see Merce Cunningham. He’s bald. Or we could see Hair.”

  And that weekend in the practice rooms Beverly tells Adam she’s thinking of suicide again, that she’d tried heroin and she really really liked it, it was a sense of well-being greater than any other. He knows this is a false bravado, but he allows himself to interpret it as a kind of strength, a strength that enables him to tell her about Miranda’s hair. She is tender, maternal, sympathetic. Poor boy, poor sweet boy, she says. She tries to distract him, telling him about seeing Peter Serkin play Mozart, Webern, Schoenberg, and their very own Messiaen against a background of black and red psychedelic lights. She tells him how handsome Peter Serkin is, but that he’s married and has a baby. She suggests that otherwise she would have offered herself to him. He finds himself, to his incomprehension, jealous. In her tenderest voice, she asks him if he’s thought about the Freudian implications of Miranda’s cutting her hair. “Maybe I’ve had too much analysis … but I don’t think I’m too far off the mark to bring up symbols of castration.”

  Later he will regularly associate Beverly with snakes, but this is the first time the association rises up in his mind. The serpent in the garden. He feels the strike of her words. He feels the poison in his blood, but relishes it, hungers for it. He wants her now; he wants to take her, not pretending, like the last time, that it’s accidental, comforting, but because he wants her bitterness, her jagged understanding of the world. And she says, “Well, well, punishing the golden girl with the dark lady.” She laughs her bitter laugh, and then she cries, “You think I’m defiled and you want to defile yourself with me,” and he says, No, no, of course not, of course not. But he cannot say he loves her.

  For the first time he makes love, or has sex, without the slightest tenderness, pounding at something, wanting to get to something to tear it down. And he is pleased with himself because this is being the kind of man he has never allowed himself to be. The wildness that he had felt in his frustrated fantasies before Miranda, when twelve, thirteen, fourteen, the irresistible forcefulness of this thing that was him but could not be him, inexorable, unloving, something he knew must be erased: for the first time it is of use. And now with Beverly he thinks, “I can be what I thought I could not. I can use this power. Isn’t this the Dionysiac? Isn’t this the source of art? I can approach this darkness. I need no longer be my mother’s son. Any mother’s son.”

  • • •

  Miranda comes home after the weekend in New York. He sees it’s done her good. Valerie took her to a fancy hairdresser who made something stylish of her butchery. She’s wearing large gold hoop earrings; she has bought a black turtleneck which suits her boyish torso, and she throws her arms around him and, half horrified at his own defilement (perhaps Beverly was right to use that word), half exhilarated, he enters Miranda’s body which is different to him now, not the only female body he has known, and he knows more than she, he is older than she will ever be, and she is, in her innocence, a child, and he, uninnocent, a man.

  She goes back to work; she is praised for her heroic months in Pakistan and for her abiding competence. The music Adam now seems interested in playing is moving in a direction she can’t follow. Neither will acknowledge that both are guilty of violence (her hair, his infidelity) and they are newly kind to each other, as if they had traveled a great distance and are now, tentatively, home.

  April comes, the days are warm, the sun is stronger, and the evening falls later. They eat sandwiches for supper by the river, and they walk hand in hand. He is finishing his time as a regular university student. Next year he will enter the New England conservatory and be nothing but a musician, not st
udying history or languages or philosophy or art. Only a musician: chosen above many others, for this purpose, this gift. They will stay in their apartment; Miranda will keep her job.

  And two days before graduation, Beverly comes into the practice rooms, and says, “Guess what, you knocked me up.”

  Later he understood that a cliché became literal in his body. People say, “My blood ran cold,” and they don’t mean it, but he felt a freezing liquid travel in his veins, without a sense of warmth and no connection to his heart.

  “But you told me you were on the pill.”

  “But I’m not that good about being regular with something you have to take every day. And you know, I take so many pills, you can’t really blame me for forgetting one every once in a while.”

  What he cannot say, because he will not be that brutal (this is a way that men are brutal that he will not allow himself to be): How do you know it’s mine?

  His first thought is: She needs to talk to Miranda about getting an abortion. Abortion is illegal, but Miranda has been involved for years with finding doctors who get around the law. One of the most common ways around the law, he knows, is psychiatrists going on record to say that an abortion is necessary because of the precarious state of the mother’s mental health. Surely this would apply to Beverly. But instantly he understands: Miranda is the last person in the world he can go to for help. He mentions, nevertheless, the possibility of abortion.

  “The bad news is, it’s too late to get rid of it. I never know when my periods are. I often miss a month or two, and I just went to the doctor because I thought I had the flu and guess what, voilà, five months gone.”

  He thinks it is somewhat better that it happened the first time they made love, which at least had something of tenderness, than the second time, which was a dark time, where tenderness was not anywhere in sight.

  In his mind he hears the word “better,” but soon it turns to “bitter,” and he feels this is a bitter outcome, a bitter fate. And he remembers that he had craved her bitterness and now he will drown in it.

  When he thinks of those days later, it is not the events or words he calls up, but tastes and tones. The taste of bitterness. A tone like a gong, a dark unmelodic sound: the end of something. No turning back. Or the sound of buzzing wires, a downed wire on the road, signaling the approach of danger, death.

  Beverly regularly becomes hysterical, moving from tears to howls of laughter that seem inhuman. You’re laughing like a hyena, he wants to say to her, you’ve become a beast. Then scalding, torrential tears. I want to kill myself, I’ll kill myself and take the baby with me.

  He thinks of the word “baby” and then “mine.” He must think of himself now using the word “father,” which he believed he would not be doing for a very long time, until much more of his life had been lived. Until words like “career,” “future,” “livelihood” would be things he had a clear sense of, things possibly under his control.

  “I’ll take care of everything,” he says, and she looks at him with that murderous sharp bitterness that will never leave her eyes again when she looks at him. Never, even when she is looking at her child, will her eyes be drained of bitterness, and certainly never when she looks at him. Only sometimes she is entirely desperate, and then her eyes are drained of everything: eyes empty as the blank eyes of a ruined statue: an empty blankness that nothing could ever fill.

  He doesn’t know what to do. He does something he’s ashamed of doing, even as he does it, but it’s the only thing he can think of. He goes home to his parents. Runs home to his parents: what could be a more humiliating cliché. For someone’s father. A man.

  Rose asks practical questions: how far along.

  Five months.

  Her beautiful generous lips disappear into an unfamiliar line.

  “I see, then, it’s too late.”

  Too late for her son to have a happy life.

  Too late for her to have Miranda for her daughter.

  “She could go away somewhere to have it, then put it up for adoption.”

  And even as she says it, some old instinct of blood forbids, for all of them, the prospect of a child brought up by strangers. A child with their features living in the world unknown to them, unreared by its own.

  “I’ll have to marry her.”

  “Yes,” his mother says. “You will.”

  His father says, “A child is always a blessing.”

  His mother says, “Unfortunately that’s not true.”

  And his father, sterner than Adam has ever heard him, says, “Rose, you must not say that. You must not say that ever again.”

  Adam breaks down. “How will I tell Miranda?”

  “There is no good way,” his mother says.

  “It must be done, though, son, and soon,” says Sal.

  He hates himself for thinking, when Beverly threatens to kill herself, that he sometimes wishes that she would. She says she’s thought of adoption, of course, but she wants “the kid,” and if he doesn’t want to be “in on it,” she’ll do it by herself. She’ll go on welfare. “Possibly I have hidden depths. Hidden resources.” Then she laughs her hyena laugh.

  At least she was never a woman he thought he loved.

  • • •

  The hour of dread. The moment that must be lived. The leaden day. Heavy as lead, as lightless.

  “Miranda, there is something I must tell you. It’s a terrible thing.”

  And says the words.

  “Yes, well, I see you have no choice,” she says.

  She doesn’t know who is saying those words, or where they are coming from. Some mouth not hers. Someone with a body; she is outside her body. She is watching herself, her bloodless face, her freezing hands, but she is seeing these things from a distance, a cold height, unsheltered, incalculably far away. She is not standing on this place, this promontory, but hovering above it, weightless. Gravity, the law of cause, have been taken from her. This is a thing that cannot have happened. She does know whom it has happened to. Herself, but someone she has never known. She will know this person now; from now on, when she says “myself,” it will be the person to whom this thing has happened. She thinks she is going to be sick, and she doesn’t want him to see or know that. Above all, she doesn’t want to be in the place he is.

  She goes into the bathroom where he can hear that she has washed her face. He cannot see that she is sitting on the floor rocking herself like a mad child, tears coming down her face like sweat. She can’t stop them, but she can stop herself from making the accompanying sounds. The only thing to be done is to act. To act quickly. To become the new person she now is. To end that other life.

  And she comes out, blank-faced, the tears pouring out, wetting her face, but soundlessly, and when she speaks her voice is not choking with tears, but flat and slack, like the expression of her eyes. She is hearing a phrase in her mind, over and over the words, I am not the beloved’s and the beloved is not mine.

  “You have to leave here now,” she says. “You have to be with her. Your place is with her now, not with me. I’ll go away. I’ll go to Valerie’s for a week. When I come back, I want all of your things gone.”

  He sees that saying this has made her lose her slackness. Her fists are clenched; she has dug her nails into the palms of her hands and they are bleeding. Her tears have not stopped. She hasn’t raised her voice.

  “Good-bye, Adam,” she says.

  “When will I see you? When will I see you again?”

  “I don’t know, Adam,” she says, in a dead voice. “Probably, I think, never.”

  Monday, October 29

  THE PIAZZA DEL POPOLO, THE VILLA BORGHESE

  “In Order to Have Had the Children We Have, We Had to Lead Our Lives Exactly As We Did. Therefore, There Can Be No Regrets”

  She lifts the phone and wonders whether there will ever come a time in her life when she won’t have to make this kind of call. The call that says forgive me: my bad temper, my irritability, my rudeness.
Does it matter that she wasn’t so bad as she might have been, that she kept back many of the vile things she wanted to say? No, she thinks, a coin of acid settling at the back of her tongue, you can’t be forgiven for the thing you’ve spared someone from knowing. Or what would be the point of sparing them?

  “I’ll take you for a drink at Rosati’s,” she says. “I know it’s noisy, smack in the middle of the Popolo, but I like the waiters’ uniforms. Like out of a forties movie.”

  “I’d enjoy that, but then I hope that we can walk a bit. It’s nearly our last day, and we have the weather.”

  “Yes,” she says, “I’d like that, too.”

  • • •

  They meet at four, drink prosecco in the crowded amiable outdoors, the café that seems part of the street, only just not a victim of the traffic. She pays the check, not even looking at the amount, aware that she’s paying for the location, not what they have eaten and drunk. Then amiability vanishes; they try to cross the street; cars careen around the corner, making a wide circle; Vespas stop inches from their toes; buses belch smoke and show no signs of slowing down. She closes her eyes and takes his hand to cross. “I’m not used to this kind of traffic,” she says. “I don’t spend much time in cities anymore.”

  She lets go of his hand at the bottom of the staircase. Then they walk, with a deliberate slowness on her part, up the steps to the park.

  “This light is strange for Rome,” he says. “Rome without full sun seems somehow not itself. But I love it; it’s like another place. Melancholy.”