The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [103]
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.
Physically, Beverly is almost comically opposite to Miranda. She is dark eyed; Miranda’s eyes are grayish green; Beverly’s hair is black and thick and always in a tangle; she pins it to the top of her head, but it is always falling down, and it’s almost a tic with her (he finds this charming) to be continually pinning it up. Sometimes, she sticks pencils in the bun she makes of her hair as if she were a Chinese woman using hair sticks. Her legs are long and almost worryingly slender; she is vain about them and wears the shortest skirts she can. He loves Miranda’s thick straight legs, to him like the trunks of beautiful trees, but he knows she is distressed by them and covers them in jeans or long peasant skirts. Miranda’s breasts are small; they sit neatly on her rib cage: innocent, tender. He will not allow himself to think of Beverly’s breasts, even when he knows she is purposely brushing against him so that he’ll have to. But though he’s tried to banish the thought, he knows Beverly’s bosom is fuller than Miranda’s, particularly in relation to her birdlike frame.
• • •
Adam believes that if only Beverly could spend time with his mother she’d be much better. Rose would feed her and give her advice, and that would lead to her greater happiness. But then Beverly might say: What’s happiness? I don’t believe in happiness. He doesn’t know if she would say it in her bitter voice, or her wounded one: he can never predict which Beverly he is going to encounter: the hissing snake, the trembling rabbit,