The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [100]
“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.
Perhaps, she thinks, it is impossible, this business of being man and woman. We