The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [120]
“That probably can’t be imagined by the likes of us. We don’t even know where he’s from.”
“East Africa. Some part of India. One of the new Russian republics.”
“We can’t begin to understand where he comes from. Or what he hopes for.”
“Doesn’t everybody hope for the same thing?”
“Perhaps he hopes more than anything for a very large car. Or to play on a soccer team, or in a band. Perhaps he dances beautifully, a dance no one here knows the steps of or the name for. Or perhaps he wakes up every night screaming because of the horrors he’s seen.”
“Then shouldn’t you give him a few euros for a rose?”
“No, it would be giving a false sign.”
“Of what? To whom?”
“To everyone here who’d see us. And on our last day, it would be, well, another kind of wrong sign. A sign that we are something we are not.”
“And what are we? Who are we?”
“I am Adam. You are Miranda.”
“And we have always been. Doesn’t that rate a flower?”
“We aren’t who we were,” he says.
“Who are we, then?”
“People who haven’t seen each other for more than half our lives. People who walk in a park together, eat meals together, enjoy the streets or the art, for an hour at a time, for a week or two, then go back to being who we were.”
“And how will we think of this? Of who we were in these days, which are as real as any other days, after all, any other days that we have lived. We haven’t made them up,” Miranda says.
“Except, in a way, we have. Here we’re not in the world.”
“Where are we, then?”
“Some dream, someplace, I don’t know what to call it.”
“Flower, mister, buy a flower. Very pretty. And the lady, very pretty. Nice.”
“Take this,” Adam says, handing the man a five-euro note. “But no flower.”
The man nods his head conveying nothing, everything. He lays a flower on the bench. He runs away, as if he’s afraid they’ll chase him.
“Just leave it here, then,” Miranda says. “Someone will find it and take it as a good sign. A sign of good luck. For our part, we have both been lucky.”
She takes his hand. “It’s time to go,” she says.
They walk out to the road. “Stand here, Adam, just stand here. It will be easier for me to remember if I can remember other things. You against this pale sky, the red, or is it purple, of these leaves. And the silly palms, and the yellow of the plane trees. And the building, and the heads of all those poets, or whoever they are that made someone think they deserved to be remembered. By the likes of us.”
“I can’t leave the flower back there on that bench. It seems a heartless gesture.”
“And if you give it to me, if I take it, what kind of gesture would that be?”
“I’m afraid it might be obvious. And sentimental.”
“We say ‘obvious’ and ‘sentimental’ because many people have done it before us. But perhaps that’s a good thing. So let’s say it’s an obvious gesture, a sentimental gesture. Something that many people have already done. Couldn’t we say it’s another kind of gesture as well. Perhaps, a grateful one.”
“Grateful? To whom?”
“This light,” she says, spreading her arms. “These trees.”
“Oh, yes, I see,” he says. “These trees. This light.”
The Love of My Youth
~ A PANTHEON BOOKS READING GROUP GUIDE ~
Questions for Discussion
The Love of My Youth is, from the title onward, a novel about age. Do Adam’s and Miranda’s experiences of youth and/or older age speak to your own? Do they ring true to the course of a life? “When you are young, [Miranda] thinks, you never believe that courage isn’t enough. That the imaginative, original decision isn’t always the right one” [this page]. How does the idea of choice play into their actions as teenagers and then at the end of the story, when they separately decide not to become lovers again?
Have you been to Rome? Do Gordon’s descriptions of the piazzas and museums, the artwork and puppet theater, the poor beggars and the upscale restaurants reflect your memories of the city? How does having the main characters walk around the city help you experience it?