The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [116]
She walks inside and sits at a table below a blown-up black-and-white photo of a fragment of a sculpture. The high small breasts of a young girl, her torso, the beginnings of her sex. The girl cups one breast, coyly half concealing a ripe nipple, and with the other half hides her crotch. Miranda feels, to her distress, aroused. Crawling, or climbing up the surface of her skin: a moving heat. She hopes that she shows nothing. She thinks of the term “hectic flush.” She doesn’t want to be sitting with Adam feeling these sensations, which she tells herself are no more meaningful than sweat. You can’t, she tells herself, be responsible for your arousal. You can be responsible for what you do afterward. But she cannot convince herself.
How can this be happening at this moment, when she must confess one of the worst things she has ever done, and why is the sight of a teasing adolescent girl the cause of something she would do anything rather than experience right now? She has just listened to a man speak of the failure of love, of madness, of self-inflicted death. She must reveal her own transgression. And now she is aroused. She knows that if Yonatan were here, they could turn her surprising arousal into a sexy joke, a kind of foreplay. They could walk out of this bright morning light into the perpetual twilight of the Via Margutta flat, pull back the heavy coverlet, and make joyful easygoing love between the cool expensive sheets. But she is not with Yonatan now, not with her husband, but with Adam, her first love. With whom sex could never have anything about it of a joke.
They had given each other their virginity at a time when the word had weight. A solemn word, an ancient concept. For them, being lovers stood for leaving home. Too young, too inexpert, they couldn’t make a place for play. There were no words for what they did but “making love.” They said “making,” but they believed they had invented something.
She must pull herself out of this. She must stand in a cold place, an open place, the space of penitence, atonement.
“As I said, I have to tell you something.”
He meets her eye for the first time that day.
“Probably you don’t really have to tell me at all.”
“I do, Adam, because for years I have allowed you to think of yourself in relation to me as the betrayer. But in fact I betrayed you first. I slept with Toby Winthrop long before you slept with Beverly. During the Cambodian demonstrations, when you were home sick. He made me feel it was a kind of cowardice not to do it. Right afterward, I was hard on myself. But I convinced myself that telling you would only make things worse. I felt I’d be asking your forgiveness for something I knew was unforgivable.”
“I have no place in my thoughts anymore for the category ‘unforgivable.’ ”
“And yet I feel you must forgive me.”
“Me? I forgive you? It is I who need forgiveness.”
“Oh, Adam, we were both so young. And it seems, as we are here, living as we’ve lived, entirely beside the point.”
“The point?”
“The point is: we have had our lives. The point is: we are here.”
They take each other’s hands.
And then it enters, thickening itself against the background of the old trees and the domes and campaniles. Desire. They could once again be lovers. It would not be difficult. It would, in some way, be the most natural thing.
Something happens to the both of them. They are taken up, taken out, taken away. They are in their bodies, they are in this café, they are in this moment in late October in the year 2007, and yet they are somewhere else entirely. In younger bodies, other places, walking on streets, dancing, swimming, freezing in winter, sweltering in summer, climbing stairs, sitting at desks or tables. Not these tables. And yet these tables, yes. They have both been taken up, they are both somewhere that is not in their present bodies, but they are experiencing it differently.
He is watching himself from a great distance, himself or not himself, it could be the corpse that was himself, or someone who had never been born who has his name, but the name has no meaning.