The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [118]
Had she known all along that seeing Adam was putting herself at risk? The risk, she had thought, was reliving her sorrow. It had never occurred to her that the risk might be to her fidelity, the hard-won peace of a shared life. But she had not been honest with herself: the flirty conversations, the accidental or only tender brushing of hands or arms. Had she always known what she was doing? Had she wanted this all along?
And what, she asks herself, now, does she want?
Whatever has taken them up has, at the same moment, released them. They are back in their bodies, back in the present moment of their present lives.
What do I want? Adam asks himself. He remembers a therapist asking him once, “When you say you want sex, what is it that you really want?”
His eye falls on Miranda, the sprinkling of freckles on her downy forearm, the airy sharpness of her scent—expensive, probably, no longer the innocent demotic scent of Breck shampoo, the lightness she has never lost. She is a lovely woman, he thinks. This is a woman I would like to take in my arms. He castigates himself for not allowing himself to say what he really means: into my bed.
What do you want, what do you want? Miranda sees the words, black letters against a white sky. Should I? Should we? The words form a question, and the question mark shimmers beside them, glimmering like a hook.
She is exactly where she is: in the body of a woman nearing sixty, at high noon in a public place where people who seem to value the great art of the past are paying much too much for what they eat and drink. The noise is not the noise of the flood in the arroyo; it’s the cappuccino machine, providing milky comfort for the well-, or relatively well-, to-do. The boulder that stopped the car in the arroyo has placed itself squarely in her path. She won’t do it. She won’t put herself, her long complicated marriage, in danger. She won’t do it simply because there is a question of her doing it or not doing it. Because the grammatical mood of her desire came to her in the interrogative. Should I? What do I want? Or the subjunctive: what if.
The answer to the question is no for the precise reason that the question came to her in the form of a question. It came to her as a question because she is, she knows, no longer young. She is able to form a question because she is far from the inexorability of young desire. What came to her, what took her up, took her away, was certainly desire. But desire without urgency. Desire that could be refused, cast aside, ignored.
Able to calculate in this way, able to imagine these terms, she knows the act would lose its innocence. It would be an act of the mind. Cold. Without the warm lovely freshness that makes of desire a desirable thing. She thinks of the couple on the bench at the Villa Borghese of whom Adam said contemptuously, “They were practically fucking in front of everybody.” But they, she thinks, were innocent. We would not be. She looks at Adam’s forearms, and the beautiful dark hair that covers them. She looks at his hands, the same hands she first loved at sixteen. She remembers that he was the first male person of whom she used the word “beautiful.” She finds him beautiful still. But she will not make this cut into the crust of the firm earth she walks on. She will build a bridge over the arroyo. A construction for safe conduct. They will not be swallowed up.
He is no longer in the dark room. The light has been switched on; at once a relief and a sadness to him. He will not do it; he will not hurt Clare; he will not have to face the dreadful encounter with Lucy, cooking her supper, having just betrayed her mother. Something has been lost, and yet, he thinks he has been saved. At least from an error in category. He’s been saved from the unseemly error, made by so many men, even great men, of a certain age: the error of confusing desire with a fear of death. She is a lovely woman. But did he want to make love to her because she is a lovely woman, or as a way of denying the loop of