The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [110]
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Miranda comes home after the weekend in New York. He sees it’s done her good. Valerie took her to a fancy hairdresser who made something stylish of her butchery. She’s wearing large gold hoop earrings; she has bought a black turtleneck which suits her boyish torso, and she throws her arms around him and, half horrified at his own defilement (perhaps Beverly was right to use that word), half exhilarated, he enters Miranda’s body which is different to him now, not the only female body he has known, and he knows more than she, he is older than she will ever be, and she is, in her innocence, a child, and he, uninnocent, a man.
She goes back to work; she is praised for her heroic months in Pakistan and for her abiding competence. The music Adam now seems interested in playing is moving in a direction she can’t follow. Neither will acknowledge that both are guilty of violence (her hair, his infidelity) and they are newly kind to each other, as if they had traveled a great distance and are now, tentatively, home.
April comes, the days are warm, the sun is stronger, and the evening falls later. They eat sandwiches for supper by the river, and they walk hand in hand. He is finishing his time as a regular university student. Next year he will enter the New England conservatory and be nothing but a musician, not studying history or languages or philosophy or art. Only a musician: chosen above many others, for this purpose, this gift. They will stay in their apartment; Miranda will keep her job.
And two days before graduation, Beverly comes into the practice rooms, and says, “Guess what, you knocked me up.”
Later he understood that a cliché became literal in his body. People say, “My blood ran cold,” and they don’t mean it, but he felt a freezing liquid travel in his veins, without a sense of warmth and no connection to his heart.
“But you told me you were on the pill.”
“But I’m not that good about being regular with something you have to take every day. And you know, I take so many pills, you can’t really blame me for forgetting one every once in a while.”
What he cannot say, because he will not be that brutal (this is a way that men are brutal that he will not allow himself to be): How do you know it’s mine?
His first thought is: She needs to talk to Miranda about getting an abortion. Abortion is illegal, but Miranda has been involved for years with finding doctors who get around the law. One of the most common ways around the law, he knows, is psychiatrists going on record to say that an abortion is necessary because of the precarious state of the mother’s mental health. Surely this would apply to Beverly. But instantly he understands: Miranda is the last person in the world he can go to for help. He mentions, nevertheless, the possibility of abortion.
“The bad news is, it’s too late to get rid of it. I never know when my periods are. I often miss a month or two, and I just went to the doctor because I thought I had the flu and guess what, voilà, five months gone.”
He thinks it is somewhat better that it happened the first time they made love, which at least had something of tenderness, than the second time, which was a dark time, where tenderness was not anywhere in sight.
In his mind he hears the word “better,” but soon it turns to “bitter,” and he feels this is a bitter outcome, a bitter fate. And he remembers that he had craved her bitterness and now he will drown in it.
When he thinks of those days later, it is not the events or words he calls up, but tastes and tones. The taste