The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [12]
She applies a light peach-toned foundation, a peach-colored lipstick, changes the small silver ear hoops for her pearl studs. She thinks she looks much better. It is important to her that Adam not think she’s one of those women who always look worn out.
She doesn’t know what she wants him to think, only that it is important that there are some things he doesn’t think about her. But what, exactly, does she want from this meeting today? It was one reason for her sleeplessness: she doesn’t know what she wants, and this is unlike her. Around three, when the heavy Italian furniture began to seem unreal and menacing, she understood that this is one of the important reasons to see him: only he can give her a particular kind of information that at her age seems crucial. Is she the person that she was?
And of course, there’s simple curiosity, not only about him, because her connection to him didn’t begin and end with him, it extended to his family. In the years that she was with him, his parents and his sister were important to her. And she knows nothing of what had happened to them in nearly forty years. Certainly, it’s natural to want to know. Valerie could give her some idea of what turns Adam’s life has taken, but Miranda couldn’t expect her to know about Adam’s sister, Jo.
It would be very good to know about these people whom, whatever had happened to her ideas of Adam, she had never ceased to be fond of. In his mother’s case, to love. This is something anyone would want to do. And they’re just going for a walk in the park. “It’s not just a walk in the park.” That was one of those phrases that people had begun using recently. But it would be just a walk in the park. She has a friend who is a rocket scientist, and he likes to say that people can never say of him, “Well, he’s not a rocket scientist,” because, in fact, he is.
It is, after all, a park, one of the largest in the world, the Villa Borghese, although the name suggests rather a large stone structure than the green expanse, the great varieties of trees—umbrella pine, plane, ilex, magnolia—and the running children and the strolling lovers. And how, she wonders, can the same word apply to this place and to Yosemite, dedicated to the exclusion of the very civilization this place celebrates. She climbs the stairs from the Piazza del Popolo to the Pincian Hill, the high point that marks the park’s beginning.
She looks over the balustrade and sees, written in chalk on the road below, some words that even her inadequate Italian can unlock: E DOPO UN ANNO SIAMO ANCORA QUI A PARLAR D’AMORE. And after a year we are here again to speak of love. “Love,” like “park,” a word inadequate to all its different meanings. What will she and Adam speak about? What will it have to do with love? She wonders who wrote the words on the dangerous road, where cars come whizzing by, alarming the more timid tourists. She imagines that, whoever they were, they must have been young.
She was young the last time she was here. She hasn’t been here for nearly forty years, but she remembers being happy. It made her comfortable, as other parks in great cities, Central Park, the Luxembourg, Hyde or Regent’s Park, did not. It seemed somehow more accommodating, presenting more suggestions than demands. Promises. What did it promise? Something open-minded and expansive. Possibilities.
Of the possibilities connected to her seeing Adam, there did not seem to be many risks. They would simply be catching up. They would be exchanging information. They would be taking a walk in the park.
She mentioned it to her husband, but without much emphasis. There was no need, she thought, to make much of it. She