by Mary Gordon
She has got to the balustrade before him. She sees him coming to the top of the staircase, that his pace is slow, and that he stops to catch his breath, holding his hand to his chest. She has noticed that she has had to alter her pace to accommodate his. Another way of saying it: she had to slow herself down. She remembers being impatient with his slowness, yet sometimes dependent on it: her safety valve, her brakes. Sometimes when she was most in love, his slowness was arousing to her, a promise of large leisure.
She pretends not to see him; she looks away. But now it is she who’s been too slow. He sees that she has seen him.
Seeing him leaning heavily on the stone banister, stopping to catch his breath, she feels drenched in a wave of sorrow. How ridiculous, she thinks, keeping alive the grievances of nearly half a century, even the irritations of the day before. With a new acuteness, she feels in the bones of her back the two words “time” and “past.” She thinks of a hymn her mother sang sometimes … did her mother miss churchgoing, was it another of her capitulations to her husband, the strength of whose assertions she never could resist? She hears her mother’s voice, “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away; they fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.”
An incredible cliché, the river of time. But she thinks of the grievance she has cherished against Adam, and all of a sudden she wants to cast it into a river, let it be borne away … somewhere, into some ocean where it will be drowned, a victim of its own insignificance. He had hurt her, badly. She had not been destroyed. Her life was, by any measure, prosperous. And when he hurt her they were both young. Whatever they are now, they are no longer young.
Seeing him before her, she thinks: Soon, who knows when, soon we will no longer be in this life. And it seems to her, suddenly, of the utmost folly to cherish a grievance against this man, this fellow creature, who has, like her, lost youth, and, unlike her, health. She is full of gratitude for this opportunity: something can be done with the past, it can’t be recaptured but it won’t fly forgotten as a dream, and the bitterness of it need not triumph. She sees the pallor of his skin. Can she ask him, Are you all right?
Or: Are you healthy?
What is the opposite of healthy?
Unhealthy?
Unwell?
Ill?
Sick?
Afflicted?
Close to death?
She thinks of the phrase “rude health.” Odd, as if health were an offense, a carelessness, an insult.
She has always had rude health.
She has enjoyed good health.
What is the nature of this enjoyment? How would you name this kind of joy?
He knows that she’s seen something, and, misunderstanding the nature of her work, or assuming that because she’s married to a doctor there’s a body of knowledge she has picked up at the breakfast table, in the marriage bed, he assumes she’s making a diagnosis. That he is being judged.
“My wind isn’t what it was.”
“No, none of ours is.” This is a lie; she can actually run farther now than she could when they were together. She is never out of breath.
He will not waste her time. “I have a stent in my heart.”
Stent, she thinks, an ugly word. It always reminds her of a fetal pig. She won’t insult him, trivialize him, by saying something in response. She waits for him to speak again.
“I had a heart attack eight years ago. I thought I was dying. It did seem like an attack: swift, sudden, a shocking pain. Then a kind of brightness. I became quite calm. I thought, So this is it, then. Later, thinking about it, I tried to understand what I meant by those words. ‘This.’ ‘It.’ ‘Then.’ ”
“You weren’t frightened?”
“I was sad. For so many years, I hadn’t liked my life. It was too difficult for me. But I’d been given a second chance. With Clare. With Lucy. And as I thought I might be dying, I thought about how dear life was. I thought of the category: dearness. How I would miss my life. Life. Not only those I loved, but at that moment I was thinking: I will miss trees. I became quite sad thinking that, if I died, I would no longer see trees. Death seemed to me bereftness, a landscape bereft of trees.”
“The trees here are remarkable,” she says, knowing she shouldn’t want to change the subject or steer the sentence away from the part of it that spoke of death to the part of it that spoke of trees. But she can’t speak of death to him, not as they are now, knowing each other so little, strangers to each other. It seems unseemly, impolite. She has, she feels, no place to stand, as if a chair has been pulled out from under her as she was preparing to take her seat at table, as if she is standing on the quicksand from the movies that frightened her as a child. She is being cast down, sucked under, by the impossibility of a response.
“What are they, I wonder, these trees. I believe they are called ilex. And there are the cypresses. And those wonderful Roman pines. Umbrella pines, aren’t they called?”
“You always knew the names of trees,” he says. He doesn’t say to her, When I thought I was dying, when I thought about missing trees, I thought of you. That I would die without learning the names of trees. He says, “I always thought someday you’d teach me.”
“I thought about it,” she says. “But when I tried, I saw that it made you feel overwhelmed, and I always just dropped it.” She reads the sign at the corner of the road they’ve just turned into. “Viale Magnolia,” she says. “So obviously these trees, with the glossy green leaves, are magnolias. And see those wonderful reddish ones, they’re almost wine colored, the leaves, they’re copper beeches.”
“Well, so I’ve learned the names of two trees now. But I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I’ll never be able to identify trees. Of the humilities that I have gathered, the most difficult is accepting all the things that I will never know.”
“One morning I woke up,” she says, “and heard my own voice saying, coming out of a dream, ‘I will never know Russian.’ So much followed then, ‘I will never play the cello or learn to knit. I will never understand economics.’ The truth is, I won’t even try.”
“But think of all you do know. About the natural world. And you’re a scientist.”
“Only a nonscientist would call someone a scientist. It’s like someone saying to you, ‘You’re in the arts.’ ”
“I’ll bet you understand string theory.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Chaos theory?”
“Yes.”
“The different arguments: is energy particles or waves?”
“Um-hm.”
“The uncertainty principle?”
“Enough to speak about it without sounding like a fool.”
“Would you explain it to me?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“You wouldn’t enjoy listening. You’d try, you wouldn’t understand right away, you’d work to understand, then you’d get that look, and I couldn’t stand to see you looking so defeated.”
He is moved by her using the phrase “that look.” He would like to touch her face.
“You’re right, of course,” he says instead.
“Did it change the way you lived, the heart attack?”
“It changed, if not my life, my way of living. I had to change my habits. I stopped smoking. I watch what I eat.”
“I can’t imagine that. You ate voraciously. You ate whatever you liked, and you were the thinnest person I knew. It made me furious.”
“I remember your crying once when I ate a second jelly doughnut.”
“I was crying from sheer jealousy; I was trying to lose five pounds.”
“You can rest now. I’ll never eat another jelly doughnut. And you clearly don’t need to lose five pounds.”
“There’s not a woman on earth who doesn’t think she needs to lose five pounds,” she says, then regrets her response. Because what he’s said suggests that he’s been looking at her body. Looking with approval. And she’s glad of that. She shake
s her head, a gesture of refusal she hopes he can’t read. She won’t allow this. Particularly her own satisfaction. It’s the sort of thing that will have to be kept out of their time together.
She laughs a laugh she hopes he doesn’t know is false. “Even if you knew you were going to die tomorrow? Wouldn’t you say, ‘I’m dying tomorrow, so I’ll eat a jelly doughnut.’ ”
“Speaking of cuisine,” he says, pointing a few yards from where they are standing. They have just passed the merry-go-round, whose tinny music seems so out of place as an accompaniment to the grand view from the Pincio, the belvedere. Mothers and children are clustered around a cart, sheltered from the sun by a yellow-and-blue umbrella. Printed on the umbrella, in white letters SABRETT’S.
“Sabrett’s,” she says. “What in God’s name is a kosher hot-dog stand doing in the Villa Borghese?”
“I think it’s called capitalism,” he says.
“Do you think it’s an American who fell in love with Rome? Or an Italian who fell in love with New York hot dogs?”
“Maybe it was my mother sending it as a gift so we could stop, for one minute, being so damn serious.”
“Shall I buy you one?”
“I don’t think my cardiologist would approve.”
“And I’m a vegetarian. God, sometimes I’m appalled at the amount of time I spend thinking about food.”
“It was humiliating when I had to understand how important food was to me. Butter. It seemed ridiculous to say, ‘I mourn the loss of butter.’ But I do. And it was humbling, because I’d never exercised, and I had to hire someone called a personal trainer. Whom I grew to love. At first I thought: we have nothing in common. He has never heard of Debussy. He told me he has never read a book from beginning to end. He’s from the Dominican Republic. He’s twenty-three; he has a wife and two children. I have, as I said, come to love him now, to be grateful, moved by this wonderful boy because of whom I must question all the things I never thought to question. What is the value of a certain kind of music, without which I thought it was impossible to have an admirable life? And yet he does, he does have an admirable life; he’s careful, he’s patient, he’s enormously kind, he has wonderful humor, and, well, he knows all sorts of things I don’t; it’s possible he saved my life, a life devoted to a kind of music he has no notion of.”
“When I think of how we lived!” she says. “We smoked, we drank, we stayed up late and slept till noon, we ate French fries and drank Coke, we mocked athletes. And now I have a personal trainer, too. I will never again have a jelly doughnut either! I limit myself to three glasses of wine a week. What have we given up for an ideal of health?”
“Oh, all those nights of talk, talk, talk.”
“It was a way of discovering who we were.”
“Who were we? Who are we now? Are we the same people that we were?”
“Impossible to imagine those young people who we were saying the sentence ‘I belong to a gym.’ And yet I do belong to a gym, and sometimes I think, in all the hours I spend in the gym, what might I be doing? Learning the Russian I say I have no time to learn? Involving myself in local politics.”
“There’s not an infinity of time. You think there is when you’re young. You never imagine that there are some things that will just be given up. Lost.”
“And not only negligible things. Things of great value.”
“Then we lived in a way, or maybe it was a way of being alive that allowed us to feel we could use words like ‘beauty,’ ‘justice,’ ‘wisdom.’ Maybe you had to have stayed up all night and drank and smoked too much to feel easy about using those words. Put beside those words, how pale the word ‘health’ seems. It seems pathetic. Ridiculous. But it’s how we live, I suppose how we must live.”
“Is health life?”
“There isn’t life without it, so, yes, I suppose it is.”
“And pleasure?”
“Oh, pleasure, that, it seems, has become less important.”
“Yes, you’re right, and I think that’s rather sad.”
“Or is it just a kind of wisdom proper to our age?”
“But which is it—wisdom or defeat?”
“It might be hard to tell.”
“No, Adam, I won’t leave it at that. Pleasure now: it’s something that we choose rather than something that lands on us. And I won’t say that’s sad. It doesn’t come crashing over you, like a wave. It’s a lake you see from a distance, and then enter, it’s lovely, as lovely as thought, maybe lovelier. But it’s not the ocean.”
“So: a calm lake. No surprises. No wave turning you over and over, lifting you up, letting you down somewhere far from where you started.”
“Of course there are surprises. It would be terrible if there were not.”
“The biggest surprise, I suppose, will be death. Which ought to be no surprise at all.”
She wonders whether his close approach to death has made him think like that. She won’t indulge him in this kind of talk, this kind of thinking.
“But on the way there are some surprises that we can take real pleasure in. Just for their surprisingness. A kosher hot dog in the elegant Villa Borghese.”
“Even if we can’t eat it.”
“Not can’t: choose not to.”
So, he thinks, she has not lost her faith in the power of will. He doesn’t know if he likes or dislikes her for it.
She looks at her watch. If she doesn’t hurry now she’ll be late for her meeting. She can’t afford to slow her pace for him. She walks quickly toward the stairway saying over her shoulder, “You stay here, I have to rush. Tomorrow, I’ll meet you at the Campo dei Fiori. How early can you get there?”
“Nine-thirty. I leave Lucy at her school at nine.”
She would have preferred an earlier time, so that the choice of fruits and vegetables wouldn’t be diminished by the industrious early risers, those ancient ladies with their baskets and string bags: implacable, unerring, unconcerned for manners, justice: wanting what they want. But Adam has a duty to his daughter, and that must come first: as a mother this is something she will never be able not to know. A parent must always put responsibility to the child before pleasure. Not in this case, she thinks, impossibly far ahead.
When we knew each other before, she thinks, we weren’t parents. And then she thinks: It’s not only that we weren’t parents, it’s much more than that. We weren’t who we are. We were young; we were younger than his daughter, Lucy, is now. There were things we believed; there were things we wouldn’t have even begun to imagine. He thought he would be a great musician; I thought I would change the world, which I believed was open to me and everything that I would bring about. We thought that we would be each other’s one true love. We believed in that idea: the one true love. Now, it is impossible that we should believe that, living as we have lived, having loved others. It is not the case that he was my one true love. Only that he was my first. First. One. The two words, so similar, yet calling up radically different conceptions of the world. One: the only. First: an accident of order: a series. Nothing fated. Nothing not susceptible to change. Change, therefore, loss.
She wonders: Is this the most important thing that can be said about us, that we are not who we were.
Thursday, October 11
THE CAMPO DEI FIORI
“You Might Be Surprised to Know I Cook and Garden”
It is difficult for him to find her in the riot of colors: fruit and flowers, cheap goods for sale—most undesirable to him: wool hats, plastic shoes. He considers buying a set of white ceramic cups, an aluminum pot for heating milk. Then he sees her; she is examining a hill of different-colored eggplants: blue-black; white and variegated, a marbling of dark red and cream. He sees from her posture that she is happy.
She is carrying a bright blue plastic bag.
“What’s in the bag?” he asks.
She opens it; he looks inside. A jar of capers, the size of the ones they’d eaten at Valerie’s (so she’d been taken by the
m, too); two cellophane envelopes, one of beans of various colors, one he can’t identify. He asks her what the grain is called.
“Farro,” she says, “a kind of barley. It’s hard to find in America, but very common here.”
“What will you do with it?”
“Eventually, when I take it home, I’ll make a soup. With it and with these lovely beans. Look, Adam, the stripy red and white, the ruby colored, then the black and among them all the ordinary bright green peas. Aren’t they wonderful?”
“You’ll make a soup? You?”
“Yes. You might be surprised to know I cook and garden.”
“Well, I am surprised. You who were so hostile to domestic life. My mother understood that; she said you should never learn to cook, you didn’t enjoy it, it would become a tyranny. You would ask her to teach you and she would say, ‘No, just talk to me, tell me something interesting, something I need to know.’ She said she cooked because she loved it, so it would never be a tyranny for her, it was a friendship. But for you … she didn’t want you to be enslaved to it, like so many women were. But then, you know, after she went back to school, particularly when she started law school, she just sort of stopped. She’d cook for special occasions, but then she’d say, ‘There are just so many things I’m more interested in.’ The secret of my mother was that she really didn’t do things unless she wanted to do them. Of course there were a lot of things she really wanted to do, that she enjoyed doing. That was why she always made people around her feel so free.”
“Your mother went to law school?”
“Yes. My mother had a life as a lawyer for a happy twenty years. She took the bar when she was fifty. She worked with a group of lawyers who did domestic law. She was terrific with women who’d been abused, who were afraid of their husbands.”
“What did she know of that? If ever there was a woman who wasn’t afraid of her husband …”
“But somehow she understood being afraid … even though I think for my mother the world was essentially a kind of joke, sometimes a good joke, sometimes a bad one, sometimes a cruel one, sometimes an enjoyable one. But there seemed to be a very great deal she understood.”
