by Mary Gordon
“Well, who wouldn’t, Adam?”
“You might understand that not everyone would.”
“Bullshit. They would if they thought they could get away with it.”
“Can you bear to see one more?”
“Of course, Adam, I’m not that pathetic.”
“I was just worried that your head was bad.”
“I’ll decide how I’m feeling, Adam, and believe me, I’ll let you know. Now that we’re here, I’m very glad to be seeing this. He understands it all, Bernini, how vulnerable women are to that male force. And he understands her anguish: those wonderful tears on her cheeks … The pressure of his fingers into the flesh of her thighs: he’s denting her flesh, and he doesn’t even know it. He doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t see anything except his own desire. He really understood it, Bernini: that male blindness.”
“And yet he was capable of the most terrible brutality to a woman. When he found out that his model, with whom he was passionately in love, or at least he was sexually obsessed with her, well, when he found out she was also sleeping with his younger brother, he tried to kill his brother and then paid his servant with two flasks of wine to cut up his mistress’s face. The servant did as he was told. He cut her face up for two flasks of wine.”
“What happened to her? Did she die of it?”
“No, she lived on to old age, or a relatively old age. But she was sent to prison for adultery. Bernini went unpunished. The pope said: ‘Rome is not Rome without Bernini.’ He was told to marry, which he did, and fathered eleven children and then got religion.”
Her head pounds now and she says, “I wish you hadn’t told me that. Now I will always have to think of that when I think of anything of Bernini’s. It makes me feel there is no hope for people. If someone can have the understanding that he did, and for it to have no effect on the way he acts!”
“I’m sorry, perhaps I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Why, Adam? I’m not a child. It’s always better to know things.” She is contradicting herself, but she doesn’t care. She means both parts of the contradiction equally, and she’s too tired to articulate this for his sake.
“I should have waited to tell you until we’d seen this,” he says, taking her into a nearly empty room. Just left of the center of the room is a statue: two figures, a man, or boy perhaps, a woman, or perhaps a girl.
“Daphne and Apollo,” he says, “do you know the story?”
“No, I never wrote a paper about them.”
“It’s in Ovid. In the Metamorphoses. Apollo is taunting Cupid, calling him a foolish boy, saying he had no right to use arrows, which were the weapons of a man. To punish him, Cupid shoots two arrows, the golden one, the one that excites desire, into Apollo’s breast, and the leaden one, the one that repels love, into Daphne’s. Daphne was a girl, a nymph, who never wanted to marry. She loved the woods, she loved her father. She told her father, who by the way was a river god, that she wanted to remain unmarried, like Diana, and to stay with him. Her father said: ‘Your face will not allow it.’ She doesn’t understand. He tells her that her beauty is a fate she can’t escape. Apollo pursues her; she flees him and just as he’s about to catch and ravish her she prays to her father, the river god, to transform her into something impervious to Apollo’s advances. So her father turns her into a tree. See, just as Apollo touches her, her skin turns to bark, her hair to leaves, her arms to branches.”
Miranda walks around, wanting to see all sides of the sculpture, the beautiful foot of the young god, the girl’s hair turning to leaves, her lovely limbs becoming branches. What has been captured is the rush of motion. Impossible to tell if she is turning toward him or away from him. Can he see her? Does his hand on her stomach sense the agitated beating of her heart?
“They’re so young,” Miranda says. “They’re hardly even grown-ups. And he doesn’t even seem to notice that she’s turning into a tree beneath his hand. It’s there again, that male unconsciousness, a slightly different brand from Pluto’s but basically the same thing. He looks like he’s going to keep right on, even though her skin is bark. Just as Pluto is going to keep right on, although Proserpina is in despair.”
“But they seem very different to me. Apollo and Daphne are both so young, so Apollo doesn’t seem in the slightest bit brutal to me. And it isn’t completely Apollo’s fault: he’s been shot by Cupid with that poisoned arrow. But what I don’t understand—first, from the perspective of someone who wants to stay alive as long as possible—is why turning into a tree is preferable to being violated? And as a father, why turning your daughter into a tree is a better move than helping her back to life after something horrible has happened to her. He’s lost his daughter to the forest.”
She wonders if he’s being purposely, aggressively obtuse.
“You just need to be quiet now,” she says. It has taken all the will she has to say only these seven words, to keep back the words she wanted to say. Blindness. Ignorance. Malign ignorant blindness.
She understands that it wouldn’t be a good idea to pour on his head the years of boiling rage at the uncomprehendingness of men. And she’s exhausted by the fight, the fight she feels she’s been in for so long, tired of hearing herself say, “You’ll never understand.” Worn out by the erosion of the belief that any of this can be resolved by talk, and by the effort to put into words what she knows on her skin, that of course rape isn’t worse than death, but it is a loss of self no man can fall victim to.
But he isn’t understanding that he should be quiet. He’s determined that the greatness of the statue not be diminished by a reflex of collective outrage. She has asked him to be quiet, but her asking him only increases his determination to make her see his point.
“The consolation is, of course, that she’s turned into the laurel. Sacred tree of the poets. All poetry derives from her.”
She is walking very fast; she no longer considers that the stents in his heart should cause her to accommodate to him. Can he really be saying that? Worse, can he really believe in that idea of consolation?
“I have no patience with the idea that the sacrifice of a woman is worth it in the cause of art. I don’t think any of Bernini’s art is worth one drop of his mistress’s blood.”
“So you will refuse to look at Bernini?”
“I will never be able to look at him again in the same way. Not without a sense of unease at my pleasure.”
“And if my pleasure is unmixed with unease, then I’m some sort of brute who doesn’t care about the shedding of a woman’s blood.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you thought it. I know you, Miranda, I know that’s what you thought.”
“You don’t know me at all.”
“But you think you know me.”
She doesn’t want to pour the scalding brew of a rage against male power onto Adam’s head. He is a good man. She understands this. He has suffered a terrible loss of one wife. He loves his second wife; above all things he loves his daughter. He has not hurt women. Except, perhaps, herself. And she was not destroyed. She is, after all, the wife of another good man, the mother of two good sons. As the mother of sons, she abhors the wholesale criticism of the male gender. She doesn’t spend her days collecting grievances, demanding redress. Today, she feels unhinged: all these representations of female violation and male power. It has brought her to a place that isn’t properly hers at all. An old place she has long since ceased to visit.
“Can we just go somewhere and sit and not talk?” she says.
“Of course.”
Silent, unhappy, disliking each other, they walk toward the lake. He points to a bench. She would like to lose all potential for language to the sound of the water in the fountains. She thinks of all the anger that has been so much part of the engine of her life. She has said it was anger against injustice. She used to feel it was the fuel without which there could be no movement of the machinery of change. Now she is no longer sure.
&nbs
p; Perhaps, she thinks, it is impossible, this business of being man and woman. We will never understand each other.
He wishes he were with Clare and not Miranda. Clare, almost incapable of anger, puzzled by it; causing her to blink in that way she has, as if the light were suddenly too bright. Clare, incapable of generalized resentment. Incapable of even forming in her mind a sentence beginning with the words “all men.” Perhaps it’s simply that she’s younger, not part of that angry, pioneering generation. But no, he thinks, it’s that she always takes the larger view. Or perhaps in this kind of case, the more modulated one.
Miranda sits and mourns the days given over to anger. Wasted days. She wishes Yonatan were here. It is possible that she and Yonatan would be having the same argument as she is having now with Adam. They might even be angry with each other, as she is angry with Adam. But the anger would have a different flavor, a different color. Clearer, without residue. And held in the vessel of a complex and satisfying life. She has no life with Adam: only these days. She wants to let go of this clogged mess she’s holding on to with such fierce determination.
She has an idea of what might help. If she observes something, with no pressure for understanding, something in the natural world, she will regain herself. This is her father’s gift: the taste for observation. Her father’s curse: the taste for anger. She takes out of her purse a turquoise pad for which she paid too much. She waits till her eye falls on what it needs. A bush that a week ago, when she bought the pad, might have been splendid, now holding on to its last brilliant red leaves. Tomorrow, in a few days, even these will be gone. Floating in the water of this thing called a lake, too small really to be what she thinks of as a proper lake, this smallish pool of gray-green water, surrounded by a temple and a goddess, worshipped once, now headless and anonymous.
Red leaves turning purple, or perhaps blue-brown, are scooped up by a boy in a black T-shirt, skimming leaves from the surface of the water with his net, the handle silver, the netting white.
On the shore: three overturned rowboats, dark green.
Beside them: six white ducks.
Four gray waterbirds, whose name she doesn’t know, but will, before the night is out, discover. Her evening’s project: find an Internet site for Italian waterbirds.
It would be good if one of them could say something to create a place where they could meet: a bridge over their differences, the differences that thirty-six years have muted but not bleached away. But neither of them can say a word.
“I’m going to ask that you do me the favor of leaving me here,” she says.
“Of course,” he says. “I’ll do as you like.”
“If I can stay here quietly sitting in the sun and resting like this and just looking at these things, I’ll be better than I was, I promise.”
“You don’t need to be better, you know.”
“Everyone needs to be better.”
“And if they can’t be?”
“Then they should be left alone.”
September 1970
It has struck Adam over the years, as he has thought and rethought that time, that, in the memory, months blur. The quality of one’s life in October might have been radically different from its September counterpart, but unless some natural disaster occurred or some personal disaster happened, so that the day on the calendar was markable and separable, we are vague and imprecise about the route of change through our past.
But he is sure that between September and November 1970, he and Miranda were growing apart. He couldn’t say: it began on September 1 and by the seventh the slope was steeper, and by October 1 they had reached a critical mass of separateness. No, he couldn’t say that. But what he could say in remembering that time was that when Fatima telegraphed Miranda in late November and said, “We need you here,” it was less difficult for them both to contemplate being apart than it had been a year before, or even than it would have been in August, when they were swimming in the Long Island Sound, eating a picnic lunch provided by his mother.
The rhythms of their lives had grown radically different. She’d been hired full-time by Planned Parenthood; she was working from nine to five; her commute was half an hour. He was a student and could make his own schedule; if he stayed practicing till midnight, he could make up the debit of fatigue the next day by sleeping late. She could not. They had played at this rhythmic unevenness in Rome, but it wasn’t the same; he was always home when she was; they relaxed every evening and all weekend, exploring, wandering, eating, happily making love. Her job was unpaid; she was a volunteer, therefore still a child.
But now she is an office worker. A paid employee. She had hoped she’d be making policy in the area of reproductive rights, but most of the time she’s making appointments for clients who, hobbled by shame or a lifetime habit of not keeping appointments, too often fail to show up.
She was told that clients would be sensitive and easily abashed. Particularly if they weren’t married. Contraception has only been legal in the state of Massachusetts for ten years.
It is noticed by the people in charge of the clinic that Miranda’s demeanor of unruffled calm is a great asset. It’s easy for her to conceal her impatience, because she is most often sympathetic. She has an almost endless sympathy, an admiration, for the women who do show up, who are taking their lives and their futures in their own hands. She tells herself it would be better if she could muster sympathy without admiration, but she can’t.
But often she’s bored, and boredom is fatiguing, and in Miranda’s case, fatigue fuels her impatience, which she can’t express at work. Adam bears the brunt. His pleasure in ordinary things, which used to charm her, now seems irritating. She wants to say: So what if there are new McIntosh apples in the store, so what if the color of the sky turns from pink to blue to gray in ten minutes’ time, so what if Madame Rostavska is pleased with your phrasing of the first movement of Mozart’s K 271? She wants to rub his face in the sorrow of the world, in the difficult lives of her clients. She can’t remember when issues of phrasing and tempi that she had once found so pressing began to seem more than irrelevant: a bore. And what is worse: she doesn’t like the Messiaen. She’d grown used to his playing the record of whatever piece he was preparing, over and over again, lifting the needle up, putting it down again and again at the same place. She’d grown used to his doing whatever it was she was doing—reading, talking to friends, performing household chores—while he was doing this with Schubert or Beethoven, but she finds the Messiaen disturbing. It steals her peace. He tries to make her appreciate the approximation of birdsong, of bells—the great range of mood: from terror to contemplation. But she just says, “I’ll be happy when this is over and you’re back to Schubert.”
He knows that she’s tired, that she doesn’t like her job; he knows that she’s staying in Boston to be with him so he can finish the work he’d missed when he’d had to take a semester off because of mono. He’s grateful to her, delighted and aroused by the mix of lightness and solidity that make up her physical presence; his desire for her is as ardent and as constant as it has always been: there’s no need even to acknowledge it. She doesn’t seem to notice that he isn’t talking to her about the music he’s playing; he never mentions the intense conversations he’s having with Beverly about the Messiaen.
Beverly copies Messiaen’s comments on the piece they are playing, Visions de l’Amen. On a piece of thick ivory paper, she copies in a calligraphic hand what Messiaen has said about the role of the two pianos. “Vision de l’Amen was conceived and written for two pianos, demanding from these instruments their maximum force and diversity of sounds. I have entrusted the rhythmic difficulty, clusters of chords, all that is velocity, character, and tone quality to the first piano. I have entrusted the principal melody, thematic elements and all that expresses emotion and power, to the second piano.” In blue ink, she made delicate drawings of two birds and underneath wrote, in a finer script, “From the second piano to the first.”
He
doesn’t bring this home; he leaves it in his locker; it’s the first thing he’s ever concealed from Miranda. And he’s even more determined to keep from her the card, light blue, the words written in brown ink, which she took from Messiaen’s comments on the “Amen of Desire,” one of the seven “Amens” that make up the piece. “There are two themes of desire. The first, slow, ecstatic, and yearning with deep tenderness, already the peaceful perfume of Paradise. The second is extremely passionate; here the soul is torn by the terrible love that appears carnal (see the Song of Songs) but there is nothing carnal about it, only paroxysm of the thirst of love. The two principal voices seem to merge into each other and nothing remains but the harmonious silence of heaven.”
Below the words, she had drawn two angels, invisible beneath their conjoined wings. He tells himself that this is only her expression of their connection as musicians; that, like Messiaen, what she meant by “desire” was spiritual: certainly not a threat. But he understands that Miranda might not see it that way.
And he doesn’t share with Miranda his extensive worries about Beverly, who has tried to kill herself again and given the emergency room his number as the number of the person to be called. She’s twenty-one; she no longer needs to give her parents’ number. Mutt and Jeff, she called her parents, full of contempt for them: a stockbroker and an interior decorator from Greenwich, Connecticut. She says Adam is the only person in her whole life with whom she has ever felt entirely safe.
Adam understands Miranda’s impatience with, if not Beverly (whom she’d hardly met: he was careful of that), then the kind of girl Beverly is. Miranda has said he must stop saying “girl” for someone their age now and use the word “woman,” but Beverly doesn’t seem anywhere near being a woman to him. He knows what Miranda would say if he told her about Beverly: She needs to go out and see people in the world with real problems. I’d like to take her to Bangladesh for one day.
Somehow, in the chaos of her life, Beverly keeps very good track of Miranda’s schedule and never phones except when Miranda is at work. She seems always to know the nights Miranda works, the mornings she doesn’t go in till eleven. Each morning when he arrives at his practice room, he finds a small card from her, a witty drawing, a musical joke. He keeps them in his locker, wondering what he’ll do with them when he graduates.
