The Love of My Youth (17 page)

Sunday, October 21
THE RESTAURANT, THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
“I Am Not Ready to Be Seen As No Longer Young”

The restaurant is actually part of the Museum of Modern Art. They walk up the elaborate marble staircase, through the doors flanked by Corinthian columns, not even stopping to buy a ticket. He’s told her the collection is undistinguished, not worth the steep admission price. “You don’t come to Rome for museums,” he tells her. “There are only one or two that are really world class.”

They’re more dressed up than they’ve been since their first night at Valerie’s. She’s wearing a black silk pantsuit; underneath the jacket, a silky jade-colored shirt. He wonders if the shirt is sleeveless. He thinks of his memories of her arms: freckled, lightly muscled.

In all the time they’ve been together, all these days in Rome, he hasn’t seen her legs. She wears long skirts or pants. Her legs were always a vexation to her; he had found them beautiful, arousing. Worried that he knows she’s thinking in this way, he doesn’t compliment her on her outfit, as he’d thought of doing, before his imagination took off in a direction that causes him unease.

She’s reserved a table outdoors, on the veranda. They look out over the park, the park that she’s come to know well because of their daily walks.

“The sky is white today,” she says. “The flat pines are beautiful against it. The pines of Rome.”

“I like the pines, and I always wanted to like the music, the Respighi, but I can’t.”

“Umbrella pines. I love the shape they make against this white sky. I think what I love most in Rome are things seen against the sky. And things that are what they are because of water. Bridges. Fountains. The sound of fountains. The reflections of the bridges, of the arches of the bridges, repeating themselves in the river. Particularly at dusk. At twilight. What’s the difference between twilight and dusk?”

“That’s the kind of thing you know, that you wonder about, that I never would. And I meant to ask you, what’s the name of those trees with the small leaves. In all my years in Rome, I’ve never known. And it seemed like the sort of thing I should have known, so I was always embarrassed to ask anyone. It always seemed too late to be asking.”

“Ilex,” she says. “I’m glad you’re not embarrassed to ask me.”

“Because you know it’s the sort of thing I’ve never known.”

“It is, Adam, the sort of thing you could learn.”

“But you learned very young, from your father.”

“Yes, those were times I know that we were happy, walking in the woods.”

Her father, she knows, wouldn’t approve of spending so much money on a meal.

“Every time I’ve passed this place, I wanted to have lunch here,” Miranda says. “The view is wonderful, but there are some places you don’t want to eat alone. Or with someone who’d fuss about the price. It might be different for a man. Although things have changed. When I was younger, it was rare to see a woman in a good restaurant eating on her own. Traveling in India, it’s almost impossible. If you’re eating on your own reading a book, a young woman of the restaurant family will come and take your hand and tell you it’s terrible for a woman to be eating alone with a book, and you’re just swept up, into a family life that I am simultaneously delighted by and appalled by—I mean, I’m appalled by the theft of my privacy.”

“There’s no Italian word for privacy.”

“How can that be?”

“There’s a word for solitude, but that’s different, almost religious. The right to privacy: that’s very northern.”

“You only have to travel a bit south or east to be shocked at how northern you really are. How important things like people arriving on time become. When you have to understand that when you say two o’clock you mean two o’clock, and the people you are with mean ‘sometime between two and seven.’ ”

“You’re no longer habitually late.”

“No: Yonatan cured me of that.” She doesn’t want to be talking about her husband now. “Let’s order something luxurious. The sort of thing that would shock my father. Have the most expensive thing on the menu.”

“But suppose the most expensive thing on the menu isn’t the thing I want?”

“Yes, that would be a problem. Then let’s say: have whatever you want and don’t think, for a moment, about money.”

This is impossible for him. And he is not entirely at ease with a woman saying those words to him, implying that the check will be paid by her. Still not entirely at ease that his wife earns more than he. But he knows that is a foolishness, one he can just let go. And this is Miranda, and he is Adam, and it is much too late for that; he knows it is beneath him.

“Lobster risotto,” he says, “to start.”

“Yes, and then?”

“Cinghiale,”
he says. “Boar.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve been told it’s the season. How frightening boars are: those tusks. Digging for truffles. What a strange animal. Threatening, but discriminating. Bloodthirsty, yet a friend of the table.”

“Look around: most of the men are gray haired, like me. It’s because it costs a lot to eat here.”

“But the women are not gray haired. Not one. Even I’m not; though without chemical help, I would be.”

“I think you’re more worried about getting older than I am.”

“It’s harder for a woman. A finality occurs. One day you’re fecund and the next day barren. Bang. No more children for you. Do you know how lucky you are? I won’t have the chance again. You must have been in your forties when Lucy was born. And there wasn’t the slightest worry attached to that. You could have another twenty-five children if you wanted.”

“But I don’t, of course, want.”

“I may have had too much to drink, or they’re taking too long bringing the food, but I want to tell you something. It happened last night. Someone who gave a paper at the conference was staying at a very fancy hotel. Not the Hassler, but something up there like that. He invited us all for drinks. It was one of those very modern places where the bathrooms make you think you wandered into a conceptual art installation by mistake. You think maybe some German did the sinks, some postmodernist you’re not hip enough to know the name of, and you can never find the water faucets. There were only two toilets. I went into one, and before I sat down I saw there were spots of blood all over the seat. So I went into the other toilet.

“After I washed my hands I noticed the Asian woman who was handing out the towels. At first I was horrified that she’d think the blood was mine, and think of me as unclean. But then I hoped she thought it was mine, so she would think of me as still young. Young enough to menstruate. Still vital. I gave her an enormous tip, because I wanted her to think both things at once: that the blood was mine, and wasn’t mine, that I was not unclean but not infertile. I suppose I am not ready to be seen as no longer young.”

The waiter brings the food; it’s not very good. Neither of them wants to remark on this.

“We’re more than halfway through,” Miranda says.

“Through what?”

“Our life.”

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,”
Adam says, making a face so she won’t think him pretentious.

“Past the median.”

“Postmeridian.”

“Postmeridian. It just means after noon.”

“Dolce?”
the waiter asks. He hands the menu to Miranda, and translates for her, “Sweet?”

September 1967

She knows he doesn’t want to go, and that it’s difficult for him to tell her.

The march on the Pentagon. The biggest antiwar demonstration ever planned. The government will have to understand that they are wrong to be in Vietnam. The war will have to end.

Miranda and her friends have been planning for it, negotiating with bus companies, attending training sessions: what to do if you’re teargassed, if the cops approach you intending to beat you up. Miranda’s father doesn’t believe that any policeman would dream of harming his daughter. He would not, however, have dreamed that his daughter, in blue jeans and a work shirt, a bandanna around her neck, would be carrying in a knapsack bottles of water and tubes of Vaseline (smear the Vaseline on your face, then douse the bandanna and cover your face in case of teargas). Small bottles of iodine to treat potential wounds. He would never have dreamed that his daughter would be a “demonstrator,” that she could imagine she had anything to fear from the police, that she would be shouting (so unladylike! he had raised her to be a lady like his mother, like her mother) phrases that were ridiculous to him, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

There is not, she believes, anything more important than stopping the war. When she arrived at Wellesley, in September 1966, a little more than a year before, she did not know she would be thinking this. She thought the most important thing was choosing the right classes for her first semester. Would she study Russian or continue with French? Should she do her science requirement in her freshman year? What would her roommate think of her new blanket, a Hudson Bay (cream, trisected by three bands: turquoise, orange, gold), which she and her mother had shopped for and which she loved, the first domestic item owned only by her, not by her mother, her father, though paid for, of course, by them.

Two days before he will leave for Boston, she spreads the new blanket out on the floor of her bedroom. Her mother is shopping in the city; she has read about a special kind of cloth bag that will prevent clothes from being wrinkled when they’re folded in a suitcase. She is determined that Miranda will have several.

Adam and Miranda lie on the blanket; he is running his palms against the soft wool. She tells Adam she’s signed up for a course in music theory. He is rarely angry, but he looks angry now; a beautiful russet creeps up toward his brows and he says, “I don’t want you to do that,” and that, too, is odd; he never asks her for anything, but she can ask him why because they love each other, nothing can hurt their love or weaken this bond, which she knows will go on unto death. So without fear she asks, “Why?” and he says, “I want you, when you listen, to listen to
me
playing. To listen to me, not the music. I need to know you love me as a man, not as a musician.”

She is thrilled to hear him speak this way. To refer to himself as a man. He is, after all, only eighteen and perhaps has never before used the word to describe himself. And because his using it in her hearing frightens them both at first (as if they were inhabiting a room they’d been told they had no right to enter), and then seems entirely right—they have moved not only into another room but to another country: they are citizens of the grown-up world.

“I need to let my eye fall on you sometimes when I’m playing and not be worrying that you’re judging every nuance, every pressure of the pedal, every tempo of every phrase. I live with being judged, all the time, I’m judged and judged and judged. I need you to be in a place away from it all.”

She is ennobled by his words; he’s asking something of her, something womanly, saintly, asking her to give something up (a kind of knowledge), to be willing to empty herself of something she doesn’t even yet possess: to enhance her own emptiness. (She thinks of the word “womb,” which she prefers to “uterus”; her womb is empty, but only temporarily, waiting for his child.) Her emptiness will help him give birth to his own greatness. He wants her to be
not music
. He wants the blankness, a blank slate, no, a blank shoreline, dry firm sand where he can set his foot and feel safe.

She takes her model from Sylvia Levi, who enjoyed her work as phlebotomist, enjoyed, as she said, colleagues who didn’t know Bach from boogie-woogie, and yes she missed her job when they agreed that Henry was earning enough money and didn’t need her salary, what he needed was her attention, that she should be able to listen to him. Like that dog, she said, cocking her head in imitation of the RCA Victor dog in front of the gramophone. What he wants is for me to listen and respond, without musical training, without criticism, just listen, and make a place where he can eat and sleep and entertain his friends in comfort and of course after all these years of listening I have learned enough so that I know something about what he does but not so much so that he has to be afraid. They are so afraid these men who have given themselves to music. What they do is so demanding, in a way so dangerous, that it is our place, as their women, to make a safe harbor. To make the harbor safe. Miranda believes it is an honorable role and the one to which she has especially been called: the woman behind, beside, the great man. Enabling, rather than possessing, greatness.

Miranda never asked Sylvia
Is this why you never had children?
because she would then have to say,
I will give up a great deal, but that I will not give up
. She and Adam talk about their children; he will teach them music; she will teach them to swim, and to know the names of trees and the varieties of birds. Which she was taught by her father. Who taught her brother as well. Her brother to whom her father now vows he will never again speak. The three of them sharing binoculars. Her father whispering: Listen. Or pointing: Just there.

It is in some ways a mistake, his keeping her away from the world of his music. Because it takes up most of his time, and all the people he knows use their time in the same way, but she is using her time differently, meeting people very different from anyone he knows or has known. Almost immediately, she is taken up by people she likes on campus who tell her that to resist the war is the most important thing, and she knows they’re right, because it’s life and death they are talking about, real lives, real death. What is at stake is more important than anything that has come into her sights before.

And then there is Rob, her brother, who has left home, who has mortified his father, terrified his mother. He is now in Canada, in some town they have never heard of, somewhere in Manitoba. And he cannot come home.

Her brother resisting, evading, or, in her father’s words, dodging the draft.

Her brother, running for his life.

Her father shouting. Her father, insulting, accusing. “We risked our lives to make the world safe for little punks like you who think your lives are too good to risk for the idea of freedom.”

And her mother wringing her hands. “Oh stop Bill oh don’t.”

And her brother, his hair golden in the sun that pours through the windows that June day, despite her mother’s trying to keep the damaging light out. Not answering, his jaw clenched, saying, “I know you’ll never understand.”

But Miranda understands; she fights her father; she tells her father her brother is a hero; it is more courageous to say no to evil than to go along with it. What about Nuremberg? We are more like the Nazis than we are like the English and Americans in your war. She calls it “your war,” as if he’d started it. And he says, “Little girl, you don’t know a goddamn thing.”

Her brother, five years older, looked at adoringly, although they do not inhabit the same world. Her brother who rode her on the handlebars of his bicycle and gave her piggyback rides and took her camping, just the two of them, cooking their meals on the Primus stove. Her brother, quiet, practical, his father’s son, the two of them in the garage, sawing, painting, hammering, her brother, engineering student at Cornell, her brother with the lovely girls and their stiff hair and their swishing skirts and their high sharp scents driving away in the convertible he saved and saved for … now her brother has left home, can’t return, and her father says, “And don’t think of coming back to this house, you’ve burned your bridges.” Her mother says nothing, but her lips thin into an invisible line of paralyzed grief. And Miranda cannot give her mother sympathy because she won’t stand up to her husband on her son’s behalf. But Miranda will stand up to her father, so every dinner is a fight, every night’s peace is destroyed, and Rob is somewhere in Manitoba, homesteading, he says, and she will visit him in the summer if she can save the money, and of course she will. She will go with Adam; she will be sure she does.

By 1967 the weather has changed; it is no longer early spring; it is high noon; the sun falls like a blade on everything, shedding its overclear light. Everything is as clear as it can be. Or it is entirely invisible, entirely incomprehensible to sight and understanding. So if it is not high noon it is black midnight; it is the land of death and darkness or it is the land of unprecedented hope and transformation. But it is not the land of their birth.

Now Miranda’s brother has left home, as it turns out never to return from a place they all had only thought of as
prairie
, featureless on a map whose details they had always believed were of no importance to them. So with all this happening to her family, to the world, how can she think anything is as important as the war, the source of unnameable horrors and one grief she can all too familiarly name. How can she believe it matters if she studies French or Russian. She would like to take a course on seventeenth-century poetry, but she will not allow herself. She will study economics, history, biology. She will be premed; she will become a doctor and serve the poor: in rural Appalachia, in Harlem, or in Africa or India, she’s not yet sure.

But what is important to Adam in September of 1967? He understands that Miranda is right; nothing is more important than stopping the machine of death. On the other hand, or at the same time, his allegiance is to the great music of the past, and he must honor that allegiance by attending to the demands of the music, which requires many many hours a day of practice. Playing and replaying the same notes, the same phrases, trying to master the
Hammerklavier
, agonizing over fingering as Miranda is agonizing over napalmed children and the destruction of the land and culture of Vietnam. He believes Henry Levi (shouldn’t he know best, given his history?). When Adam talked to him about his guilt for not being more involved in Miranda’s antiwar activities, he had said:

“Wars have always happened and human beings have always done hideous things to one another, more hideous than you can imagine. And above all, or underneath it all, this music goes on, must go on. The question must be not only why do we live but what do we live for? And one of the most important answers, Adam, you must believe me about this, is for beauty. For beauty whose greatness goes on and on.

“Don’t think, Adam, that I don’t question all this. That I don’t sometimes think I’m misusing or wasting my life. But when I begin to feel this way, I think of the curators in the Hermitage during the Siege of Leningrad. They were starving, hiding themselves in the museum while unimaginable horrors were going on outside. People selling human flesh in the black markets—you can’t even imagine. But the curators stayed on in the museum. The great paintings had been taken away, hidden. But they took each other on imaginary tours, pointing to the empty spaces on the walls where their beloved paintings had been. They described them in detail to one another, knowing that some of them might not survive, that the paintings might not survive, and that at least the memory of them should be preserved, somehow. To me, these people were heroes. The kind of heroes that help me live my life.”

And walking down Riverside Drive, waiting to meet Miranda for their last time in the park before they go back to school that September of 1967, Adam feels at peace. He will serve the world through his music; Miranda will serve it through protesting the horrible unjust war.

Then in September Miranda asks him to come with her to the demonstration at the Pentagon. It will be a great event, she says; it is necessary that everyone participate; it is their moment in history. Not to go would be like not standing up to Hitler. Adam thinks of Henry Levi, who left Germany because of Hitler. Henry Levi left and his parents did not. Henry Levi lived and his parents did not. But Henry Levi tells him he must not participate in demonstrations because if he were beaten, if something happened to his hands, if they were injured, there would be no hope for a career. He suggests that Adam try to organize other music students to present concerts in protest against the war. But he must not go to demonstrations himself. He must not put himself in danger.

Adam sews (he will not ask Miranda to sew for him) a black armband onto the sleeves of all his jackets so that wherever he goes and particularly if he is performing in public he can be seen to be opposing the war.

He knows this isn’t enough for Miranda; she praises him, but he can hear the reservation in her praise. And she can hear that her political friends disturb him; he doesn’t trust them, he thinks they love violence because they are confusing it with something else, some other romantic category: courage or sex. The boys with their uncombed hair and dirty jeans talk about stockpiling guns in basements, about blowing up banks or laboratories. And Miranda’s friends look up at them adoringly, and then invite the boys with their uncombed hair into their beds.