The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [112]
And she comes out, blank-faced, the tears pouring out, wetting her face, but soundlessly, and when she speaks her voice is not choking with tears, but flat and slack, like the expression of her eyes. She is hearing a phrase in her mind, over and over the words, I am not the beloved’s and the beloved is not mine.
“You have to leave here now,” she says. “You have to be with her. Your place is with her now, not with me. I’ll go away. I’ll go to Valerie’s for a week. When I come back, I want all of your things gone.”
He sees that saying this has made her lose her slackness. Her fists are clenched; she has dug her nails into the palms of her hands and they are bleeding. Her tears have not stopped. She hasn’t raised her voice.
“Good-bye, Adam,” she says.
“When will I see you? When will I see you again?”
“I don’t know, Adam,” she says, in a dead voice. “Probably, I think, never.”
Monday, October 29
THE PIAZZA DEL POPOLO, THE VILLA BORGHESE
“In Order to Have Had the Children We Have, We Had to Lead Our Lives Exactly As We Did. Therefore, There Can Be No Regrets”
She lifts the phone and wonders whether there will ever come a time in her life when she won’t have to make this kind of call. The call that says forgive me: my bad temper, my irritability, my rudeness. Does it matter that she wasn’t so bad as she might have been, that she kept back many of the vile things she wanted to say? No, she thinks, a coin of acid settling at the back of her tongue, you can’t be forgiven for the thing you’ve spared someone from knowing. Or what would be the point of sparing them?
“I’ll take you for a drink at Rosati’s,” she says. “I know it’s noisy, smack in the middle of the Popolo, but I like the waiters’ uniforms. Like out of a forties movie.”
“I’d enjoy that, but then I hope that we can walk a bit. It’s nearly our last day, and we have the weather.”
“Yes,” she says, “I’d like that, too.”
• • •
They meet at four, drink prosecco in the crowded amiable outdoors, the café that seems part of the street, only just not a victim of the traffic. She pays the check, not even looking at the amount, aware that she’s paying for the location, not what they have eaten and drunk. Then amiability vanishes; they try to cross the street; cars careen around the corner, making a wide circle; Vespas stop inches from their toes; buses belch smoke and show no signs of slowing down. She closes her eyes and takes his hand to cross. “I’m not used to this kind of traffic,” she says. “I don’t spend much time in cities anymore.”
She lets go of his hand at the bottom of the staircase. Then they walk, with a deliberate slowness on her part, up the steps to the park.
“This light is strange for Rome,” he says. “Rome without full sun seems somehow not itself. But I love it; it’s like another place. Melancholy.”
“I very much like the word ‘melancholy.’ It’s much better than ‘depression.’ ” She is grateful to him for forestalling any further gesture of apology.
They walk more deeply into the tree-filled avenue.
“It’s almost too appropriate for one of our last walks,” he says. “The weather of regret.”
“Regret for what?” she says sharply. “Our lives have been our lives.”
“A regret for the life we didn’t have together.”
She is grateful to him for saying it out loud, but she will not let him rest in what she knows to be untrue. She does not regret not having had a life with him, because having had a life with him would have meant not having had the life she has. These days have taught her that: what happened was all right. Was right.
“What I think of often is the mystery that if we hadn’t lived our lives exactly as we have, but I mean exactly, we wouldn’t have the children we have. There would be no Benjamin, no Jeremy. No Lucy. And the world without them is unthinkable. In