The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [109]
“To you? I thought it was my hair. My body.”
He can’t unsay what he has said. Anything he says would be ridiculous: Of course it’s your body, of course I know that. He says instead, “I can see that it would be more comfortable.”
He goes into the bathroom to take a shower. What is it that he is trying to wash off? His own sense of having been betrayed? He knows that he is wrong to feel betrayed. But how can she have done it? Her beautiful hair that he so loved, like honey on her shoulders, his grandfather had said, her tender hair, promising, abundant. Of course it wasn’t his, and yet he knew that she did what she did to him, to take something from him. Because he thinks perhaps she knows about Beverly, and whatever she does, whatever she takes from or does to him, she’s right, because he has squandered everything, he is unworthy of her love.
Is it sensible to say that everything that happened was because of Miranda’s hair? Because she cut her hair? It needn’t have proceeded as it did. She might have fallen into his arms weeping and said, I don’t know why I did it, I’ll never have it again, my hair, my beautiful hair. And he might have said, No, no, you’ll have it again, it will grow back and we can have it again. Would he have used the word “we”? And would that have made her angry all over? Or could they have wept together, could he have kissed the ill-cut ends of her cropped hair and said, Poor hair, poor head, poor darling, you were tired, your body was too heavy for you, everything was too heavy, everything was too hard.
But this wasn’t possible because she could not admit regret. To say nothing of a joint mourning for something she insisted had happened through her choice, an act of freedom. As she would have said in those days, in those years, an act of liberation.
Instead of weeping in his arms, she goes down to New York, to visit Valerie, who is working in her uncle’s real estate office and has “an adorable apartment in the Village. Come down,” she said. “We’ll see Merce Cunningham. He’s bald. Or we could see Hair.”
And that weekend in the practice rooms Beverly tells Adam she’s thinking of suicide again, that she’d tried heroin and she really really liked it, it was a sense of well-being greater than any other. He knows this is a false bravado, but he allows himself to interpret it as a kind of strength, a strength that enables him to tell her about Miranda’s hair. She is tender, maternal, sympathetic. Poor boy, poor sweet boy, she says. She tries to distract him, telling him about seeing Peter Serkin play Mozart, Webern, Schoenberg, and their very own Messiaen against a background of black and red psychedelic lights. She tells him how handsome Peter Serkin is, but that he’s married and has a baby. She suggests that otherwise she would have offered herself to him. He finds himself, to his incomprehension, jealous. In her tenderest voice, she asks him if he’s thought about the Freudian implications of Miranda’s cutting her hair. “Maybe I’ve had too much analysis … but I don’t think I’m too far off the mark to bring up symbols of castration.”
Later he will regularly associate Beverly with snakes, but this is the first time the association rises up in his mind. The serpent in the garden. He feels the strike of her words. He feels the poison in his blood, but relishes it, hungers for it. He wants her now; he wants to take her, not pretending, like the last time, that it’s accidental, comforting, but because he wants her bitterness, her jagged understanding of the world. And she says, “Well, well, punishing the golden girl with the dark lady.” She laughs her bitter laugh, and then she cries, “You think I’m defiled and you want to defile yourself with me,” and he says, No, no, of course not, of course not. But he cannot say he loves her.
For the first time he makes love, or has sex, without the slightest tenderness, pounding at something, wanting to get to something to tear it down. And he is pleased with himself because this is being the kind of man he has