The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [18]
“Oh,” she says, “we thought we were glamorous, didn’t we, sitting in the Thalia holding hands. Pretending we didn’t just get off a suburban train. They seemed so wonderful. Those Europeans who were truly glamorous in a way that we could never be, who, however glamorous we thought we were, would always be more glamorous. It seemed a real, an important category. Glamour. The glamorous. We were as susceptible to it as secretaries buying movie magazines, but we thought we were better because our categories were European. European glamour. Now I can’t even imagine that it would be important, or that it once was. Anouk Aimée driving at night in sunglasses. Why did we think that was so marvelous? It was pretty stupid, not to say insane. But she did look great.”
She thinks it’s all right to invoke the past this way; she can think of it as describing the behavior of a cohort rather than the behavior of Adam and Miranda as teenagers in love. The threat of intimacy has been bleached, dipped in the vat of the general.
“I watched the movie again, recently,” he says. “It didn’t age well. It seemed pretentious. All those people trying to be daring, trying to be wicked, like good children thinking they’re bad when they can’t even imagine what real badness would be like. What followed, in the way of rebellion, made their efforts look absurd. That made me sad, for myself, and for all the things that don’t stand the test of time but were, for some little time, important. Like this street, the Via Veneto. This street used to be considered important, the important place to be if you wanted to meet important people. Now it’s just a place for rich tourists who don’t know where they’re really supposed to be. But I’m still fond of it. Walking down this hill, passing these great hotels where probably only rich Japanese stay now. But I still feel the presence of the glamorous ghosts. I can imagine them happy here, in spite of everything, enjoying the lines of the buildings and the generous old trees.”
“Oh God,” she says, “there’s that horrible church, with the crypt we went into because that weird guy told us we should.”
“What was his name?”
“Dudley. Or Bentley … how did we know him?”
“I think he was a friend of Beverly’s.”
She doesn’t want to say: Well, of course.
“It was the first thing he wanted to see in Rome,” Adam says. “The Capuchin church with the crypt where the monks had taken the bones of their dead brothers and made things of them. Arches made of bones, light fixtures, working light fixtures, sockets with lightbulbs in them that were real sockets from pelvises. Bone filigrees and flowers. And then some skeletons in their monks’ habits.”
“I hated it. And I remember he said, ‘But aren’t they doing what all art does? Making something of death, something to be looked at, enjoyed. Only they’re a little more literal. But isn’t that just a kind of radical honesty?’ ”
“I remember how angry you got. And the angrier you got, the cooler, the more ironic, he became. You walked away, and left me to deal with him. I remember what you said, ‘Death is not a metaphor. It is real. The dead are not material. They had their lives. They should be honored.’ ”
“I remember he laughed at my use of the word ‘honor.’ I didn’t hit him, did I? I know I wanted to.”
“No, you just walked away. Leaving me to deal with him and his weirdo ideas.”
“I think I went just here, just where we are now, to the Triton Fountain and wet my handkerchief and cooled my face. I loved that fountain! They were my favorite thing about Rome, the fountains. Now of course I worry about the waste of water.”
“Is it waste? It seems to have been going on for a long time. I think the Romans have no shortage of water.”
“Yes, it’s been going on for a long time, but once it was really practical. People needed those fountains for water to drink and wash from. Now they’re merely ornamental.”
It occurs to him that in all the time he has been in Rome he has never once worried about the waste of water implied in his beloved fountains. And the fact