The Love of My Youth

by Mary Gordon

  “I very much like the word ‘melancholy.’ It’s much better than ‘depression.’ ” She is grateful to him for forestalling any further gesture of apology.

  They walk more deeply into the tree-filled avenue.

  “It’s almost too appropriate for one of our last walks,” he says. “The weather of regret.”

  “Regret for what?” she says sharply. “Our lives have been our lives.”

  “A regret for the life we didn’t have together.”

  She is grateful to him for saying it out loud, but she will not let him rest in what she knows to be untrue. She does not regret not having had a life with him, because having had a life with him would have meant not having had the life she has. These days have taught her that: what happened was all right. Was right.

  “What I think of often is the mystery that if we hadn’t lived our lives exactly as we have, but I mean exactly, we wouldn’t have the children we have. There would be no Benjamin, no Jeremy. No Lucy. And the world without them is unthinkable. 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.”

  He sits on a stone bench. He puts his head in his hands, a gesture that he knows is almost too symbolic, almost a parody. Yet he can’t resist it: the symbolic seems the only possible posture for the impossible things that he feels now must be said.

  “That’s not the whole of my life as the father of children. There is Lucy. But then there is Raphael, my son by Beverly. My son who doesn’t want to know me, my son who lives a life I find so foreign, so horrifying. A life that has brought harm to the world. My son and I are, to each other, entirely unknowable.”

  “I don’t know anything about your son.”

  “You know the circumstances of his birth.”

  There is nothing for her to say: of course it is a thing she knows.

  “From the moment of his birth, his life was swaddled in unhappiness. Unhappiness seeped into the cracks of every place we lived. The months in the apartment in Beacon Hill. And then, almost immediately, Henry Levi found me the job teaching music at Grenham. Which I have never left. But every house we lived in there … the air was poisoned with unhappiness. The houses were never ours and never had what Beverly believed was the only kind of light that could make her happy. It was in one of those faculty houses that she killed herself. Her note said, ‘Sorry, it’s too dark for me. Here.’ ”

  Miranda doesn’t know what to do with her eyes or her hands. Touch him? Not touch him? Meet his eyes or look away?

  “So the school moved Raphael and me to another house, but Raphael had breathed in all that sadness. Sadness and loss. And I saw him grow into a boy who enjoyed doing harm. I had to know that my son was a bully. He enjoyed humiliation. He enjoyed humiliating me. He thought I was weak. He despised music. He left home as soon as he could. Enlisted in the army at eighteen. He didn’t tell me; the only one he told was my father. Somehow he responded to my father’s kindness … perhaps he understood that my father was sympathetic to Beverly. But my father was sympathetic to everyone, and I think that endless unquestioning kindness was important to Raphael. Certainly, he didn’t get it from me. He must have known that his aggressiveness was something I judged, and judged harshly. I don’t know why my father didn’t; he was the least aggressive man I’ve ever known.

  “Anyway, Raphael joined the army, and he was very successful: he was always good at languages, and during the first Gulf War they sent him to school to learn Arabic; he was soon fluent, and apparently that led to a series of rapid promotions. I don’t know quite what his rank is, I don’t know even what he does, but it’s something important. We rarely speak. Now he’s become involved in an Evangelical church, and he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me or Clare or Lucy. His wife wrote me a letter to say that they thought our ‘permissive lifestyle was a danger to their children.’ When I asked what she meant—our lifestyle couldn’t be more circumscribed—she said it was that we had a lot of homosexual friends. I have grandchildren I have never seen. I know their names and ages, but Raphael has never even sent a picture. The last time he called, he mentioned that he was ‘involved in some things in Iraq.’ He said, ‘I bet you have a problem with Abu Ghraib.’

  “I said I did. I asked if he had anything to do with it.

  “He went silent, then he laughed. His laugh was terrible to me. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Call me up, Dad, when you have any idea how the world really works.’

  “And so it is impossible for me to be spared regret. Every time I see films of Abu Ghraib I ask the question: Would it have been better if my son had not been born?”

  “But you don’t know that he was involved in torture.”

  “But I can’t say with any certainty that he wasn’t. It was part of his desire to humiliate me not to tell me either way. I had to understand that his saying that one word ‘maybe’ was a special kind of sadism. So that if I imagine he was involved, I have the guilt of thinking the worst about my son. And if I refuse to imagine that he might be, I bear the burden of not having the courage to imagine the worst, and I have to know that his contempt for me is earned.”

  She walks a bit away from him, stands in the middle of the road. She thinks that it is possible that she has never heard anything so disturbing. What could be a worse sentence: It would have been better if my child had not been born.

  And most disturbing to her is her own reaction. Her stripe of satisfaction: that what he and Beverly did ended not in beauty or in consolation, did not justify the thing they did. Did to her. But what can that possibly mean: “did to her.” What was done was done to a young girl. Twenty-two years old. She is now nearly sixty. What was done marked her, but if she is truthful, she must ask herself: did it mark her as much as having a talent for statistics, or having met Yonatan and lived with him for nearly thirty years, being married to an Israeli, having two sons, sons instead of daughters, being chosen for the grant that has shaped her work for a decade or more. Of course what happened, happened to her. She thinks of the word “her,” and it buzzes around her head, turning meaningless. Her is me. But her is not me. Her is not this woman, standing here in this dim light on an afternoon in Rome, looking at a man whose life has, far more than hers, been marked by suffering.

  She sees him sitting, his head in his hand, as the light thickens around him. And she cannot feel anything but sorrow.

  “We’re close to November now,” she says, “the early end of light.”

  She sits beside him and the streetlamps, art nouveau, that flank the road turn gradually pink, then yellow, then a yellow-white.

  “Time to go,” he says. “My daughter.”

  “Yes. And so you see it is the right thing to have no regrets.”

  “Tomorrow I would like to bring you to the one place I can mourn my wife.”

  His voice is strange to her; it is not his own. He is speaking and not speaking to her. What he has said about his son has emptied him of something. The flatness of his tone is, she understands, a substitute for weeping. Tears, though, would have brought relief; the emptying would be a kind of cleansing. The dryness in his voice alarms her; it can lead to nothing.

  They are terrible words, those words “the one place I can mourn my wife,” and she can only guess the effort it has taken him over the years to say them. To say them in a tone that comes close to the ordinary. To say them in a way that has anything at all to do with the way he said, “We’ll go see the paintings of Caravaggio, the view of Rome from the orange garden.”

  They agree to meet in the morning at the top of the Capitoline Hill.

  Tuesday, October 30

  THE CAPITOLINE, THE MEDUSA

  “The One Place I Can Mourn My Wife”

  She climbs the many shallow steps, her eye on a huge equestrian statue, Marcus Aurelius, colossally astride the universe as he is colossally astride his horse. The horse, free of the responsibility of rule, seems far more eager than his rider. At the far end of the
piazza, two reclining gods, meant to indicate the Tiber and the Nile, hold what she tells herself can’t be gigantic penises: they must be some fertility symbol, she tells herself. On the other hand, they do seem quite relaxed, much more relaxed than the emperor or the stone twins, the Dioscuri, flanking the staircase: the emperor, the twins, so tense with the responsibilities of empire.

  She worries that the steps were difficult for Adam and wonders if he arrived before her so she wouldn’t have to observe his effort. She tells herself that the steps are shallow, the climb gradual. He stands between the stone twins, his hand shielding his eyes from the pure Roman sun, which, unlike yesterday, is now doing its good work of plain illumination. It bleaches the stones pure white; it nourishes the pinks and yellows of the neighboring walls. All possibility of cloudiness has long ago been burned away.

  He nods to her, and even this greeting, she sees, is difficult for him to give. She doesn’t know what he wants to show her.

  Taking her hand, he nearly pulls her along, and in the pressure on her wrist she hears, Not this, not that, don’t stop don’t look at that, it isn’t what we’re here for.

  She is swept past rooms painted from floor to ceiling with the story of the Roman victory over the Etruscans. As they pass through the room devoted to the statue of the she wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, he tightens his grip, annoyed at the knot of schoolchildren and their earnest teacher who explains the origins of the city of their birth.

  “Just here,” he says, a moment after. They stop before a marble head. Bernini’s Medusa.

  He drops her hand and moves apart from her. She is uneasy being even this close to him. She feels like an intruder.

  Her eye falls on the statue’s parted lips. Open—in anguish, or exhaustion? The blank eyes finished, overwhelmed. The snakes that are her hair are by contrast lively and amused. Their mouths are making hissing jokes. They are where they belong.

  Miranda is afraid to say a word.

  “She looks so miserable,” he says. “In the stories of the Medusa, the focus is never on her, what she might be suffering with a headful of snakes, her own horror at what becomes of people at the sight of her, at the sight of what she can’t help but be. I look at the snakes now as a kind of excess of vitality. Too much life for her, and there’s not a thing she can do about it. So I stand here and say to Beverly: I’m sorry. I feared you. I resented you. I couldn’t love you. I was turned to stone.”

  She knows that what she says will not be of the slightest use, and yet she feels that she must say it.

  “You know, of course, that it wasn’t your fault. It was an illness.”

  She looks up at the suffering face. The face of marble. And Adam’s face, a suffering face of flesh and bone and blood. She thinks: For years that woman whose name I have not even been able to pronounce, this woman, Adam’s wife, whom I could think of only as the one for whom I was betrayed, the one who stole my hopefulness, my innocence, that woman was someone I felt free to hate. Felt free to say I hated. And so I felt free to be a person who says the words “I hate.” This woman whose death I did not mourn. Whose suicide meant nothing to me but a kind of bitter satisfaction. Grim, the satisfaction, nevertheless satisfaction is what it must be called. This woman whose suffering I would not credit, called manipulation, a thief’s sleight of hand.

  And looking at the statue’s empty ruined eyes, the desperate mouth, and Adam’s posture, hands at his sides, spine rigid, she weeps as he cannot for the poor destroyed creature who brought in her wake such damage, such harm.

  “You know this is Costanza, of the ruined face,” he says.

  Is he expecting her to say something? Some reiteration of her earlier outrage, a rekindling of the Galleria Borghese coals? Some reassertion that all Bernini’s art was not worth one drop of her blood? She can’t bring her mind to such considerations now. She is thinking of something else. Something terrible she did. Or didn’t do. The harm inflicted on a woman dead three hundred years ago now seems, in comparison, a distant, an invisible horizon.

  “I need to tell you something I should have told you long ago,” she says. “Can we go somewhere we can talk?”

  “There’s a nice café here, it’s usually quiet.”

  They pass the original Marcus Aurelius on his horse (the one in the piazza, it turns out, is a copy: this one is kept indoors out of the weather), gentler somehow in the modern room newly designed for it. The emperor is domesticated here, made kinder by his place among the disembodied heads, each ten feet high, surrounding him. They pass Etruscans, calm, reclining on their tombs. Peaceful. Connubial.

  At the end of a series of corridors, flanked by showcases they ignore, they come to the café. The room itself is full of light, and it opens onto a terrace bordered by dwarf trees in terra-cotta pots, and a balustrade upon which one can lean to see the whole of Rome.

  “Shall I get two coffees?” he says.

  She nods, although she doesn’t at all want a coffee.

  She walks inside and sits at a table below a blown-up black-and-white photo of a fragment of a sculpture. The high small breasts of a young girl, her torso, the beginnings of her sex. The girl cups one breast, coyly half concealing a ripe nipple, and with the other half hides her crotch. Miranda feels, to her distress, aroused. Crawling, or climbing up the surface of her skin: a moving heat. She hopes that she shows nothing. She thinks of the term “hectic flush.” She doesn’t want to be sitting with Adam feeling these sensations, which she tells herself are no more meaningful than sweat. You can’t, she tells herself, be responsible for your arousal. You can be responsible for what you do afterward. But she cannot convince herself.

  How can this be happening at this moment, when she must confess one of the worst things she has ever done, and why is the sight of a teasing adolescent girl the cause of something she would do anything rather than experience right now? She has just listened to a man speak of the failure of love, of madness, of self-inflicted death. She must reveal her own transgression. And now she is aroused. She knows that if Yonatan were here, they could turn her surprising arousal into a sexy joke, a kind of foreplay. They could walk out of this bright morning light into the perpetual twilight of the Via Margutta flat, pull back the heavy coverlet, and make joyful easygoing love between the cool expensive sheets. But she is not with Yonatan now, not with her husband, but with Adam, her first love. With whom sex could never have anything about it of a joke.

  They had given each other their virginity at a time when the word had weight. A solemn word, an ancient concept. For them, being lovers stood for leaving home. Too young, too inexpert, they couldn’t make a place for play. There were no words for what they did but “making love.” They said “making,” but they believed they had invented something.

  She must pull herself out of this. She must stand in a cold place, an open place, the space of penitence, atonement.

  “As I said, I have to tell you something.”

  He meets her eye for the first time that day.

  “Probably you don’t really have to tell me at all.”

  “I do, Adam, because for years I have allowed you to think of yourself in relation to me as the betrayer. But in fact I betrayed you first. I slept with Toby Winthrop long before you slept with Beverly. During the Cambodian demonstrations, when you were home sick. He made me feel it was a kind of cowardice not to do it. Right afterward, I was hard on myself. But I convinced myself that telling you would only make things worse. I felt I’d be asking your forgiveness for something I knew was unforgivable.”

  “I have no place in my thoughts anymore for the category ‘unforgivable.’ ”

  “And yet I feel you must forgive me.”

  “Me? I forgive you? It is I who need forgiveness.”

  “Oh, Adam, we were both so young. And it seems, as we are here, living as we’ve lived, entirely beside the point.”

  “The point?”

  “The point is: we have had our lives. The point is: we are here.”


  They take each other’s hands.

  And then it enters, thickening itself against the background of the old trees and the domes and campaniles. Desire. They could once again be lovers. It would not be difficult. It would, in some way, be the most natural thing.

  Something happens to the both of them. They are taken up, taken out, taken away. They are in their bodies, they are in this café, they are in this moment in late October in the year 2007, and yet they are somewhere else entirely. In younger bodies, other places, walking on streets, dancing, swimming, freezing in winter, sweltering in summer, climbing stairs, sitting at desks or tables. Not these tables. And yet these tables, yes. They have both been taken up, they are both somewhere that is not in their present bodies, but they are experiencing it differently.

  He is watching himself from a great distance, himself or not himself, it could be the corpse that was himself, or someone who had never been born who has his name, but the name has no meaning. He—and who is he—he knows it is himself, one to whom the word “I” would properly be applied, and he uses the word, for lack of any other, but it has no meaning. He hears a whirring; he senses a darkness. Then on a screen: images that change too quickly for interpretation. He is everything in the room. He is the room, the darkness, the hot light of the projector, the smoke that rises up before the light, the beam of light that makes the images, the screen. The images, of course, they are images of him and of Miranda. But they will not stand still. They are their present selves and their past selves. Impossible to say: which is the real one. On which should I depend.

  Then he hears a snap. The film has broken. The lights are turned on; the darkness vanishes.

  She hears not a whirring but a rushing. It is a sound she heard when she was the closest she has ever come to death.

  She was with Yonatan on a holiday in New Mexico. They had been warned by the owner of their bed-and-breakfast to pay attention if they saw a sign on the highway that said WARNING: DIP. The warning was about what could happen in the arroyos, which, he said, pedantically, you may or may not know is the Spanish word for ditch.