The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [101]
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.