The Love of My Youth

by Mary Gordon

  Perhaps it was his pedantry, perhaps it was the fact that Yonatan, who had come of age in the Israeli army, was constitutionally unable to take seriously the warnings of people he did not think of as “experts.” He was always sure that people were “overreacting,” “paranoid,” “afraid of their own shadows.” She, too, was suspicious of what she perceived as the excessive timidity of many of their friends, particularly in relation to their children. They talked about the American obsession to create for children what Yonatan called “a shockproof world.” When she relived that day, though, she was always grateful that the children had not been with them.

  They’d been told that if they saw even a cupful of water in an arroyo near the sign WARNING: DIP, they should turn back immediately. You think there’s no problem because the sky is blue, no sign of rain, but it’s not about the rain you can see, it’s about the rain in the mountains. “Terrifying things can happen in a matter of seconds. I mean seconds,” the annoying bed-and-breakfast host had said. “So, you take my word you see even a cupful of water in one of those suckers, you turn back.”

  It was a sunny day, and they saw the water. “Do you think it’s a cupful or half a cup?” Yonatan said. “No more than three-quarters,” Miranda responded. But suddenly, the arroyo was filling, and they couldn’t stop fast enough. They put on their brakes and skidded right into the middle of the dip. They were only there a few seconds when the wall of water hit them. They rolled up the windows. Just as they did, the car was picked up, turned around, carried down the arroyo for a quarter mile; they could hear large boulders bouncing in the water close to them; they thought they were going to be dumped into the Rio Grande, which was only another quarter of a mile away.

  But somehow the car got stopped by a rock too large to have been moved by the water. And they sat in the car, pressed up against the boulder, the water going over the top of the roof. Then as always happens in an arroyo, the wave lasted only a moment or so. The water dropped; they were able to open the window. They sat there until the water was down to almost nothing, which it was in a few minutes, and they walked away. Trembling, they held each other and then laughed; they said they shouldn’t be allowed out in the world unsupervised, that they’d never tell the host that he’d been right, they should have listened.

  As Adam was everything in the dark room, Miranda is everything in the arroyo: the dry ditch suddenly filling up, the car picked up and carried, her terror, her husband’s terror, her relief. She remembers something else about the water in an arroyo. What quickly becomes a gushing stream began by only little fingerlings of water. They collected and became something enormous, something dangerous and powerful. But if she had listened to the conventional wisdom, she would have been quite safe.

  Had she known all along that seeing Adam was putting herself at risk? The risk, she had thought, was reliving her sorrow. It had never occurred to her that the risk might be to her fidelity, the hard-won peace of a shared life. But she had not been honest with herself: the flirty conversations, the accidental or only tender brushing of hands or arms. Had she always known what she was doing? Had she wanted this all along?

  And what, she asks herself, now, does she want?

  Whatever has taken them up has, at the same moment, released them. They are back in their bodies, back in the present moment of their present lives.

  What do I want? Adam asks himself. He remembers a therapist asking him once, “When you say you want sex, what is it that you really want?”

  His eye falls on Miranda, the sprinkling of freckles on her downy forearm, the airy sharpness of her scent—expensive, probably, no longer the innocent demotic scent of Breck shampoo, the lightness she has never lost. She is a lovely woman, he thinks. This is a woman I would like to take in my arms. He castigates himself for not allowing himself to say what he really means: into my bed.

  What do you want, what do you want? Miranda sees the words, black letters against a white sky. Should I? Should we? The words form a question, and the question mark shimmers beside them, glimmering like a hook.

  She is exactly where she is: in the body of a woman nearing sixty, at high noon in a public place where people who seem to value the great art of the past are paying much too much for what they eat and drink. The noise is not the noise of the flood in the arroyo; it’s the cappuccino machine, providing milky comfort for the well-, or relatively well-, to-do. The boulder that stopped the car in the arroyo has placed itself squarely in her path. She won’t do it. She won’t put herself, her long complicated marriage, in danger. She won’t do it simply because there is a question of her doing it or not doing it. Because the grammatical mood of her desire came to her in the interrogative. Should I? What do I want? Or the subjunctive: what if.

  The answer to the question is no for the precise reason that the question came to her in the form of a question. It came to her as a question because she is, she knows, no longer young. She is able to form a question because she is far from the inexorability of young desire. What came to her, what took her up, took her away, was certainly desire. But desire without urgency. Desire that could be refused, cast aside, ignored.

  Able to calculate in this way, able to imagine these terms, she knows the act would lose its innocence. It would be an act of the mind. Cold. Without the warm lovely freshness that makes of desire a desirable thing. She thinks of the couple on the bench at the Villa Borghese of whom Adam said contemptuously, “They were practically fucking in front of everybody.” But they, she thinks, were innocent. We would not be. She looks at Adam’s forearms, and the beautiful dark hair that covers them. She looks at his hands, the same hands she first loved at sixteen. She remembers that he was the first male person of whom she used the word “beautiful.” She finds him beautiful still. But she will not make this cut into the crust of the firm earth she walks on. She will build a bridge over the arroyo. A construction for safe conduct. They will not be swallowed up.

  He is no longer in the dark room. The light has been switched on; at once a relief and a sadness to him. He will not do it; he will not hurt Clare; he will not have to face the dreadful encounter with Lucy, cooking her supper, having just betrayed her mother. Something has been lost, and yet, he thinks he has been saved. At least from an error in category. He’s been saved from the unseemly error, made by so many men, even great men, of a certain age: the error of confusing desire with a fear of death. She is a lovely woman. But did he want to make love to her because she is a lovely woman, or as a way of denying the loop of time? And whom would he be making love to, who would be the real object of his desire? The lovely woman, nearly sixty now, the girl she was, whom he had wounded? Or his own young self, his youth, forever in the past? The past is past, and it is not recoverable. In the present, as they are, pledged to other people, it is right that they no longer know themselves as lovers.

  She is a lovely woman and he doesn’t want to say to her, I do desire you, but not enough to warrant the complications it would create for my life. This is, he knows, a brutal sentence. He sends up a prayer to the impervious Roman gods: Please make her understand that we must not speak of this. Please ensure her silence.

  His prayer is heard. They walk outside, into the bright air. They unclasp their hands, and then, arm in arm, they circle the terrace, taking it all in: Rome, about which everything important certainly has already been said. She puts her head, companionably, on his shoulder.

  Between them, there are no words.

  Wednesday, October 31

  THE VILLA BORGHESE

  “Any Minute Now That Man Will Insist That You Buy Me a Rose”

  Her plane will leave at 6:00 p.m., the flight will be long, twelve hours, and she knows that it is a good thing for her to take a real walk before; she has learned this helps with jet lag. So she suggests that on their last day they arrive at the park early and walk from one end to the other: from the Pincio to the Galleria and then back.

  They approach the fountain of the Cavalli Marini, cheerful
horses, lounging, supporting on their heads the bowl of the fountain, their manes sluiced by its streaming jets. She dips her hands in the water; the early morning chill pleases and saddens her: it is the end of something.

  And as she is staring at the cheerful marble horses, a truck approaches. She can see horses’ heads pushing their way out of the truck’s opening. Three policemen jump out, let down the back, and push a lever that releases a metal ramp. And like a joke in a dream, a joke that the dreamer can’t quite comprehend, they lead to the horse fountain five real horses. Elegantly, extravagantly uniformed, their knee-high boots gleaming like the horses’ hides, their brass buttons, professionally brushed and polished, the handsome young policemen lead the horses to the water. Their shining flanks, black, gray, and chestnut, shine in the sun. Hard to believe, she thinks, this brilliance can be natural. And the horses drink from the fountain of the horses, and she takes Adam’s hand and says, “Isn’t this wonderful? Isn’t this just a lovely piece of luck.”

  The policemen mount their horses and trot or canter away. It is as if they had never been there, as if they had dreamed it all.

  She can see that he is too downcast to enjoy it. But despite himself, the horses’ cantering, their insistence on their own liveliness, engage him, and she can feel his spirits lift. They walk into a little bower where they can hear a smaller fountain. The light falls through the trees, blurred shafts of whiteness that transform, when they reach the water in the fountain’s bowl, into dazzling lozenges that blink and shimmer.

  Adam and Miranda sit down on a bench and listen to the water.

  A man with copper-colored skin and a mustache like a dirty toothbrush and a comical hat, like an organ-grinder’s, the kind of hat no one wears anymore, saunters toward them, as if he had no real purpose in his walk.

  He is holding roses wrapped in white paper. The leafy light falls on the paper, revealing the roses as he walks unsteadily, crabwise, only partially in their direction.

  “Any minute now that man will insist that you buy me a rose,” Miranda says.

  “And what shall I do about it? What should I do?”

  “I think you should buy one.”

  “I think I should not, that I should tell him to go away.”

  “Why?”

  “For so many reasons.”

  “Which reasons.”

  “It’s a ridiculous way to make a living. It shouldn’t be encouraged.”

  “Make a living. Why is a living something we should have to make?”

  “The flowers aren’t fresh. They’re wilting.”

  “If you tell him to go away, he won’t decide to change his life. He will only be a little more unhappy. If you tell him to go away, where will he go?”

  “That probably can’t be imagined by the likes of us. We don’t even know where he’s from.”

  “East Africa. Some part of India. One of the new Russian republics.”

  “We can’t begin to understand where he comes from. Or what he hopes for.”

  “Doesn’t everybody hope for the same thing?”

  “Perhaps he hopes more than anything for a very large car. Or to play on a soccer team, or in a band. Perhaps he dances beautifully, a dance no one here knows the steps of or the name for. Or perhaps he wakes up every night screaming because of the horrors he’s seen.”

  “Then shouldn’t you give him a few euros for a rose?”

  “No, it would be giving a false sign.”

  “Of what? To whom?”

  “To everyone here who’d see us. And on our last day, it would be, well, another kind of wrong sign. A sign that we are something we are not.”

  “And what are we? Who are we?”

  “I am Adam. You are Miranda.”

  “And we have always been. Doesn’t that rate a flower?”

  “We aren’t who we were,” he says.

  “Who are we, then?”

  “People who haven’t seen each other for more than half our lives. People who walk in a park together, eat meals together, enjoy the streets or the art, for an hour at a time, for a week or two, then go back to being who we were.”

  “And how will we think of this? Of who we were in these days, which are as real as any other days, after all, any other days that we have lived. We haven’t made them up,” Miranda says.

  “Except, in a way, we have. Here we’re not in the world.”

  “Where are we, then?”

  “Some dream, someplace, I don’t know what to call it.”

  “Flower, mister, buy a flower. Very pretty. And the lady, very pretty. Nice.”

  “Take this,” Adam says, handing the man a five-euro note. “But no flower.”

  The man nods his head conveying nothing, everything. He lays a flower on the bench. He runs away, as if he’s afraid they’ll chase him.

  “Just leave it here, then,” Miranda says. “Someone will find it and take it as a good sign. A sign of good luck. For our part, we have both been lucky.”

  She takes his hand. “It’s time to go,” she says.

  They walk out to the road. “Stand here, Adam, just stand here. It will be easier for me to remember if I can remember other things. You against this pale sky, the red, or is it purple, of these leaves. And the silly palms, and the yellow of the plane trees. And the building, and the heads of all those poets, or whoever they are that made someone think they deserved to be remembered. By the likes of us.”

  “I can’t leave the flower back there on that bench. It seems a heartless gesture.”

  “And if you give it to me, if I take it, what kind of gesture would that be?”

  “I’m afraid it might be obvious. And sentimental.”

  “We say ‘obvious’ and ‘sentimental’ because many people have done it before us. But perhaps that’s a good thing. So let’s say it’s an obvious gesture, a sentimental gesture. Something that many people have already done. Couldn’t we say it’s another kind of gesture as well. Perhaps, a grateful one.”

  “Grateful? To whom?”

  “This light,” she says, spreading her arms. “These trees.”

  “Oh, yes, I see,” he says. “These trees. This light.”

  The Love of My Youth

  ~ A PANTHEON BOOKS READING GROUP GUIDE ~

  Questions for Discussion

  The Love of My Youth is, from the title onward, a novel about age. Do Adam’s and Miranda’s experiences of youth and/or older age speak to your own? Do they ring true to the course of a life? “When you are young, [Miranda] thinks, you never believe that courage isn’t enough. That the imaginative, original decision isn’t always the right one” [this page]. How does the idea of choice play into their actions as teenagers and then at the end of the story, when they separately decide not to become lovers again?

  Have you been to Rome? Do Gordon’s descriptions of the piazzas and museums, the artwork and puppet theater, the poor beggars and the upscale restaurants reflect your memories of the city? How does having the main characters walk around the city help you experience it? How do you think the landscape and the food (“the vivid flavors, spicy tomato, peppery meat and beans, bitter greens drenched in salty fish and vinegar and oil” [this page]) fit into Adam’s and Miranda’s ideas about beauty, especially in comparison to their different views on artists such as Bernini?

  Do Adam and Miranda’s discussions ring true to their characters? Why do you think Gordon chose to structure the novel in this way, focusing on their conversations, and then including flashbacks to the years of their youth? What do you make of Miranda’s statement that it “excites her to be speaking this way, a way she no longer speaks” [this page]? Do you think there is a language you share with your first love that is different from any subsequent relationship?

  This is a novel of firsts—first loves and first endings. The phrase “the first” arises frequently, including “for the first time she considers the possibility that she might wish he were other than he is” [this page], and, regarding Beverly’s atten
tions to Adam, “the first thing he has been reluctant to talk about to Miranda” [this page]. What other firsts take place in the novel, and how do they drive the narrative? What do they say about how we come to know ourselves and experience another person?

  In what ways does Gordon bring to life the novel’s two time periods: 1964–1970 and then 2007? Is one era more alive on the page or are they equally successful at illuminating Adam’s and Miranda’s pasts and presents, as individuals within a generation at the forefront of so many changes?

  With the exception of the opening, Gordon titles each contemporary chapter with the date, place(s), and a quote. Why do you think she choose this format? Does it act to enrich or distract from your experience of the narrative? Why do you think a quote from Miranda almost always heads the chapters?

  Do you find meaning in the fact that Adam’s name exists in the reverse spelling of Miranda’s? Adam is, of course, the name of the first man in the Bible, his story beginning before he and Eve taste of the Tree of Knowledge. Do you think Adam’s name fits his character and, if so, in what ways?

  Questions of self-identity play a fundamental role in the novel. Miranda asks, “Are we fated to always be the people we were? Always making the same mistakes?” [this page] and then, at a different moment, wonders “Is this the most important thing that can be said about us, that we are not who we were?” [this page]. Perhaps as a way of combining these ideas, she also says that she is “someone to whom, like [Adam], a great many things have happened. So the person I am was the one I was and also another person, perhaps many other persons” [this page]. What is Gordon saying about how well we can know ourselves? How is that related to our ability to deeply understand another person? Did Adam and Miranda truly know each other when they were young? Do they see each other, and themselves, more clearly now that they are older? Do you feel you have a confident grasp on your own identity, or do you feel it shifting through the years?