The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [17]
And as a tourist, there is nothing you can do for anyone, except perhaps give them your money. You must depend, like a child, on people doing things for you. And not being able to be of use made her feel she didn’t know herself. She had no place to stand. She didn’t like feeling inexpert. She couldn’t bear the idea of herself as TOURIST, couldn’t stand the image of herself on a street holding a map, standing in front of a monument, paging through a guidebook. And even what at first had seemed exciting and charming to her in her apartment now oppressed her. The cool excessive space. The huge door with the knob as big as a cantaloupe. The marble floor where the sound of her heels seemed somehow meaningful, portentous. The window with a view onto the street, whose complicated shutter had delighted her, now seemed encumbered and unwieldy. She hadn’t lived in a large city for a quarter of a century. The traffic menaced her; often she found herself getting lost. Yonatan was never afraid of getting lost; he thought it was an adventure. He had no problem looking like a tourist. “I am a tourist,” he would say, “why shouldn’t I look like one?”
And so, the possibility that Adam offered struck her as more desirable than it might in other circumstances. She wasn’t pleased with herself, that the idea of a man to accompany her made such a difference. Of course she’d tell Yonatan about it. He knew about Adam, but it was possible he didn’t remember. Yonatan’s relationship to the past was radically different from hers. He had left Israel because he felt smothered by “an excessive past.” Too much history, too little geography, he said. He loved America: he loved the idea of starting over. It was another thing he didn’t like about Israel: everyone knew everyone, he said. So you had to be whoever everybody thought you were. He loved the idea of being a stranger in a strange land. So of course he would say, “It’s a wonderful opportunity, to see Rome with someone who really knows the city. It would be ridiculous not to.”
She is Yonatan’s wife; she has been for more than a quarter of a century. She is Yonatan’s wife; she is the girl betrayed by Adam. She is a woman, nearly sixty, who has earned the right to do something like this. But something like what? she asks herself. Of all the voices in her mind, Yonatan’s is the clearest. “It would be foolish not to,” she hears him say.
“Yes, all right,” she says to Adam. Yes. “I’d like that.
“Some days we’ll have only a little time. We can meet here, and take short walks. Then some days, we may perhaps see something, or get something to eat and drink. What I would like is to promise you that we will see one beautiful thing every day. What that thing will be I don’t know. We’ll play it by ear.”
“Play it by ear? What can that mean to a trained musician?”
“You forget that’s how I learned. By ear. I listened. Everything followed from that.”
“All right,” she says. “We’ll meet. We’ll walk and talk. We’ll see what happens.” She is happy with the imposition of rules, of limits. Only one thing per day. Only walking and talking.
“I think my mother would like it,” he says.
She wants to cool the temperature, as if what they were doing were an ordinary thing. She doesn’t want the invocation of his mother.
“Tomorrow, I have to go to Alitalia. My husband’s arranged an upgrade for me for the way home. He’s very good at things like that.”
Tuesday, October 9
THE VIA VENETO, THE PIAZZA BARBERINI
“I Wanted to Make Some Kind of Mark”
Her business with Alitalia is completed more easily than she had thought; the beautifully coiffed, beautifully made-up girls behind the counter are breathtakingly efficient. She knows she mustn’t call them girls, although they are, however competent, the age of her sons. They could be her daughters, the lack of which, when she sees a certain kind of young woman, particularly a competent and lovely one, she continues to mourn.
“Let’s walk up the Via Veneto,” he says. “Remember when we went into the