The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [102]
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