by Mary Gordon
“They still believe in that old dream that turned into a nightmare. They are still capable of that kind of belief,” Miranda says.
“What is it, though, that they believe in? After what history has shown them? How can they still believe in it? What do they have faith in? Right here in this place where twenty years ago Aldo Moro was killed by the Red Brigade.”
“The Red Brigade: so serious once, now a kind of period piece, like transistor radios or Studebakers. Of course these young people don’t see that, in the future people may think of them as an irrelevant anachronism. Perhaps for all the things they have refused to see.”
“Is it possible that there can be no hope without some kind of blindness?”
“Were we wrong to be so hopeful?” Miranda asks. “We had our blindnesses, God knows. There were so many things we didn’t see. Or wouldn’t. How I argued with my father! I ruined so many dinners. The anguish I created for my mother, like a kind of weather she had to fear every night when the sun set. It was the age in which dinners were ruined regularly, not from private quarrels only, but for what was called principle. There were some things I was wrong about, and yet I’m certain even now that I was more right than my father. That he was deeply and centrally wrong. His vision could lead to nothing but hopelessness, suspicions, fear. The Cold War. It froze all life. It froze it dead. He said he was a person of faith, and yet he believed that human beings were inherently weak and corrupt and that it is our job in the world to stop the dark forces that are the truest thing about us.”
“I think he must have been afraid.”
“I know what he was most afraid of. What he feared most was disorder. The old order would be overturned: he really believed that if people just behaved themselves and worked hard, and were clean and sober and patriotic, they would prosper, as he had. But any kind of disorder made him crazy. He would come into my bedroom and see that it was untidy and that my mother was unable to compel me to tidiness and this would arouse a kind of raging despair. So I aroused despair in both my parents. In my father because of my untidiness and in my mother because of my insistence upon argument. Well, I guess my arguing made him despair, too: it was one more sign of disorder. Children were supposed to be subservient to parents. They were never to challenge them. God, if he heard some of the things my kids have said to me!”
He doesn’t want to say, Lucy is never rude. He says instead, “The state of your room made me feel hopeless, too.”
“Is Clare tidy?”
“She’s even worse than you.”
They laugh together.
How strange, he thinks, the first, the only, thing she’s asked me about my wife had to do with her tidiness. Is it that Miranda had, in the intervening years, learned tact? Is that why she hadn’t asked the first question: What does she do?
What does she do? Those were the words people used, and what they meant was What is her occupation. But after all, that was only a part of what people did all day. Nonetheless, it was the easiest way to begin an understanding of someone’s identity. A better question, he supposed, than Who is your family?—the kind of tribal placement an Italian might be interested in. So what did it mean that before Miranda asked “What does Clare do,” she asked, “Is Clare tidy?”
And he understands suddenly that he had to be asked for information about his wife; he had no impulse to speak about her. Does this mean that he feels even seeing Miranda is a kind of infidelity, something that needs to be kept separate from his married life? He knows that’s part of it. But in Clare’s case, it is both more and less than that. Saying what she does for a living would not shed light on who she is. It would cloak her in incomprehensibility. Clare’s job does not explain her.
Clare is a dentist.
How could he explain that this was something Clare liked about her job—that, as she said, it was for people either a joke, a source of boredom, or a cause for recoil. And that it is part of what he loves about her: the slant, even ironic posture she takes toward life, a determination to be sensible and yet surprising. The way she has of blinking several times before she speaks, as if she were always standing in a light a bit too bright, whose brightness no one else seems to be acknowledging.
He has known her since she was thirteen years old. She was the daughter of the head of the history department, John Sargent, an expert on Shaw’s Brigade of black soldiers who volunteered to fight in the Civil War. Clare Sargent. He couldn’t remember paying attention to her; he was drowning in his own life, his life with Beverly and Raphael. He remembered a girl small for her age, with a head of curly red hair that seemed too heavy for her body, who at the school Christmas fair sold the wooden animals she had whittled; he once bought one for Raphael. A squirrel, perhaps a chipmunk. She wasn’t one of the faculty teenagers who babysat; she didn’t sing in the chorus. Then she was off to Yale, and then to dental school. He was one of those people who stopped listening when he heard the word “dentistry.”
How did it happen, that she became his wife? It was soon after his son, Raphael, left home. Adam had broken a front tooth; he was mortified; he hadn’t been to a dentist in ten years. Who recommended her? He can’t remember now. She fixed his tooth. She mentioned that she was on her way to Rome. He gave her names of restaurants.
She brought him back a model of the Colosseum made of marzipan. He felt he hadn’t laughed in years. She said—the awkward flirtation of someone unschooled in it—You see, I’m hoping you’ll eat it and then you’ll find yourself back in my chair. She told him why she became a dentist: because she had grown up among people (her father, who taught history, her mother, the school librarian) who were never sure that what they did was important. At Yale, she thought of architecture. It was clear to her she liked building things, but had no talent to design them. And no patience with the lack of concern among her classmates for how people actually lived. She thought of medicine. She disliked the premeds so intensely that when, standing on line to sign up for organic chemistry lab, she saw a burly junior push a small woman to the ground to sign up before her, she took herself off the premed list. Also, she said, she didn’t like the thought of having someone’s life in her hands. That you could kill someone by making the wrong decision, or not paying attention at some crucial point.
One spring break she was talking to the woman who cleaned her parents’ house. She was from Guatemala. Clare noticed that whenever she smiled she covered her mouth. She dared to ask why: It’s my teeth, my teeth are rotten: no one should see me smile. Clare took her to the dentist. The dentist struck her as modest and intelligent, and compassionate in a way that she found pleasingly offhand. She asked him about his work. She began exploring dentistry. It was, she found, the most neglected area of health among the poor. This interested her. She preferred the humility of the people she consulted to the triumphalist arrogance of medical doctors.
She limits her practice to four days a week. One day a week, she deals with the teeth of autistic children, who are terrified even to be touched, to say nothing of the invasive touch their troubled mouths require. The problem engages her. One of the things Adam loves about his wife is that what others call impossible she calls interesting. She also finds life somewhat hilarious. She laughs in a way that some of the faculty wives consider too loud. He loved hearing Clare and his mother laugh. And yet, the daughter of a family that was spared misfortune for three generations, she can be shocked by misfortune: she drops down to a place where no one can find her, like a stone disappearing at the bottom of a well. Was she drawn to him because, genetically spared tragedy, she saw in him her drastic other? He does not say to Miranda: When I met her I was a dead man. Nor does he tell her that Clare told him, “I think I’ve been a little in love with you since I was twelve years old. More than a little.” Then she regretted it, and he, too, wished she’d never said it: it was embarrassing, a slightly indecent cliché.
“She leaves domestic life to me,” he says. “She works much longer hours than I do.”
He does not mention the nature of her work, and Miranda notices this. She suspects that Clare works in fashion or finance. She guesses that she earns more than Adam, and that he is abashed by this. All this makes her glad that she decided to think well of Clare even before she found she had a colleague in untidiness, which has made her feel her decision was completely right.
“And your husband?”
“Yonatan’s at home in the world of things. He doesn’t lose track of them. Objects obey him. They don’t, as they do with me, fly out of his hands, maliciously hide themselves, disguise themselves, take themselves out of straight rows and careful piles simply out of spite.”
She doesn’t want to talk about her husband. He is as different from Adam as he can be (it was one of the things she prized in him: his refusal to agonize, how rare it was for him to take offense). She will certainly not tell Adam that, statistically speaking, three-quarters of their domestic arguments center on her untidiness. The other quarter arise because she finds him too indulgent with their sons.
“If you love me why won’t you keep the house as it needs to be in order for me to be happy?” he says, each time with genuine surprise.
“Because,” she says as if this argument were the first, “I can’t.”
“You aren’t afraid of disorder? Of being overwhelmed by chaos?” Adam asks.
“I have been overwhelmed by it. I was, as you know, overwhelmed in Pakistan during the typhoon, and I thought that I could never do that kind of work again. But then I’d been screwing around two years, working in a coffee shop in San Francisco. Fatima’s father got in touch with me. He was working for the WHO, and there was a great project to eradicate smallpox in India. He knew I was good at organization, so he invited me to join him. And I did, and it was wonderful. And yet, I didn’t want a life in which I had to overcome that chaos every day. I realized I wanted a more orderly life. By ‘orderly’ I meant safer. So a certain kind of chaos, yes. But I’m more afraid of people who believe it’s their job to keep disorder at bay. We are, as a species, disorderly.”
“No, Miranda, I don’t agree with that. Where would we get the idea of order from if it weren’t somehow an inherent appetite? Think of this city. It gives us pleasure because of its formal beauty. And music, music isn’t possible without order!”
“But Rome’s also incredibly chaotic, and that’s because people live here. Our pleasure in the order is connected to things, and people aren’t things. People will not fall into place. That is their greatness. That’s why Rome is great: it’s a living place, not a museum.”
He indicates the place where the bus that she needs will stop. The bus will take her down the Via delle Botteghe Oscure. He remembers in the 1950s there was a distinguished literary journal with that name: Botteghe Oscure. The fifties, a time of great cultural achievement in Rome. Fellini, Rossellini, Pasolini, Moravia, Ginzburg, Montale, Morante. Now Italian literature, Italian film, are marginal to the point, he thinks, of almost total irrelevance. Botteghe Oscure. The dark shops. They are standing in front of a shop that sells cheap shoes that can only indicate a willingness for cheap sex. The shoes make him sad; he can’t believe the purchase of gold plastic platform shoes, or white leather boots, red-sequined strappy shoes with thin high heels, can lead to any kind of lasting happiness.
“I think we were wrong in thinking that people who said they didn’t want to change would be happy to do it if we just showed them the way,” Adam says.
“How terrible, though, to be young and not to believe in the possibility of change! I felt, when I was young, as though the weather were becoming different. As if the light had changed and the shadows were thinner. My heart lifted at the possibility of the new world we would make!”
“The possibility of what?”
“The possibility of possibility. That people would be more just, I guess, was the most important possibility to me.”
“I sometimes think that there are horrors now that we could not even have imagined.”
“I refuse to live without hope.”
“What kind of hope?”
“Is there a wrong kind? A right kind? There is patience, isn’t there? Patient hope. When I came back from India, we were so hopeful. We had, you see, Adam, succeeded in eradicating one of the most lethal diseases in the world. We had got rid of smallpox. It was a fantastic success, the smallpox project. The whole world got behind it, and it was really rather simple. People going around talking to people and working with people in personal ways. We were responsible for the vaccinations of millions, and the disease was wiped out. And so we thought: Well, we have vaccines, we have antibiotics, these devastating epidemics are a thing of the past. And then AIDS appeared, and we realized that our hope had just been an illusion. That was when I changed my training from infectious diseases to environmental health. I wanted something smaller, something contained. If I could see a problem that, with patience and attention, I could do something about solving, then I could still have hope.”
“Of all the people I’ve known, you are the most impatient. I could never understand it: you were the most impatient, and yet often the most calm. And the most able to sit still and solve a problem.”
“I might no longer be that person you knew. Or thought you knew.”
“Who are you, then?”
“Someone to whom, like you, a great many things have happened. So the person I am was the one I was and also another person, perhaps many other persons.”
“And yet you consider yourself hopeful?”
“Because the opposite suggests a way I will not live.”
“I have to go to Lucy’s school now, to see if I can help her with her Bach partita. Which I hope, at her recital next month, she will play very well.”
“And so if you have hope in her you are by necessity a hopeful person.”
“If that is the way you want to see it, yes. But it isn’t the only way.”
“But, Adam, do admit: it’s not the worst.”
Thursday, October 18
THE VILLA BORGHESE
“We’re at an Age When We Must Take Care Not to Be Embarrassing”
“You see, it didn’t rain, after all, like you thought it would,” she says.
“And you want to see it as a sign of something.”
“No, a sign of nothing. A piece of luck.”
“What would a piece of luck look like? A coin? A shell? A hunk of bread and cheese?”
She enjoys this kind of play with him. It was who they were, people who played in this way. She doesn’t have people now who play in this way with her.
He angles his chin toward a boy and girl in identical black pants and boots, embracing on a bench. At their feet: two helmets, one garnet colored, one emerald.
“And these two, are they lucky? Lucky in their heedlessness?”
“What do you want me to say, Adam? You want to know what I think of them? What they’re doing?”
“Is this the lack of self-consciousness we were saying the other day was so wonderful in the young? I must say I don’t find this wonderful. I don’t understand it. How can she feel so comfortable, her legs wrapped around him, kissing him, then taking a bite of her sandwich, then looking at the trees, then going back to kissing him, all the time squeezing her legs around his waist? What can he be going through? I remember what it was like at that age. Anything could arouse you … an ad for panty hose. I guess it was stockings then. Somebody saying the word ‘stockings.’ And here she is almost fucking him in public. Yet he seems not to have lost his equanimity.”
“You make it sound so ugly!”
“I’d prefer not to be seeing it.”
“You’re embarrassed.”
“I suppose so, yes.”
She thinks of Yonatan, who is never embarrassed. He might not even notice the two young people, or he might embarrass Miranda and the boys by shouting out “Go for it.”
“They seem quite free of it,” she says. “Embarrassment. What a strange thing it is, embarr
assment, so powerful, yet no one acknowledges it as one of the important human states. And it’s so physical. The accident of people’s coloring makes it legible, or not. If you’re fair your face turns red, and anyone around you knows you’re suffering. If you’re darker, well, your secret stays with you.”
“I was always far more liable to embarrassment than you. I could be struck dumb by embarrassment. It never seemed to stop you. I’ve got better.”
“Our first date, Zorba the Greek, when I started dancing in the street, after I went home I was terrified that I’d embarrassed you and you wouldn’t want to see me again.”
“No, I thought you were wonderful. Precisely because you seemed so free of embarrassment.”
“If you’ve got better, I’ve got worse. I’m so aware now that we’re at an age when we must take care not to be embarrassing. To dress in a way that acknowledges that some things are past. Think of hair color. You have to do it well, because if it’s done badly everyone has to feel sorry for you for having to dye your hair. And you have to avoid dying it certain colors so that it appears that you’re pretending not to dye it or that you’re making a joke of yourself by acknowledging too loudly that it’s fake. A joke no one’s amused by, they’re turned off by your supposition that it might be amusing. Which is why I spend what you might think is an appalling amount of money to make myself exactly the right shade of blonde. A sign that I haven’t given up, but that I know there are standards, and I live up to them.”
“But whose standards are they?”
“I don’t know, Adam, but I know they’re real, and it is about not wanting to be embarrassing. Unaware of how you’re being seen. I don’t want to be one of those women at weddings doing the alley cat. Or the electric slide.”
“What’s the electric slide?”
“The extent of your refinement sometimes takes my breath away, sir,” she says, punching him lightly on the arm. “Never mind, Adam, I couldn’t possibly explain the electric slide to you. Content yourself with knowing it’s a kind of group dance. You can live perfectly well without knowing more.”
