The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [22]
“A sacrifice to an ideal of greatness.”
“To a possibility.”
“And if she decides it’s not for her?”
“Then she decides,” he says, bowing his head toward the marble woman, concentrating, though Miranda doesn’t know it, on the relaxed and undemanding foot.
Wednesday, October 10
THE VILLA BORGHESE
“What Have We Given Up for an Ideal of Health?”
She has a meeting that begins, unusually, at ten o’clock; they agree to meet for a short, early morning walk.
The day before had been a disappointment to the both of them; each had found the other wanting; both telephoned their spouses, flush with the pleasure of being able to speak critically, yet truthfully: to make the point that really, there was no danger. “I had forgotten what a pedant he could be,” she told her husband. “What did we do in the days before we could invoke the term ‘politically correct’?” he asked his wife.
She has got to the balustrade before him. She sees him coming to the top of the staircase, that his pace is slow, and that he stops to catch his breath, holding his hand to his chest. She has noticed that she has had to alter her pace to accommodate his. Another way of saying it: she had to slow herself down. She remembers being impatient with his slowness, yet sometimes dependent on it: her safety valve, her brakes. Sometimes when she was most in love, his slowness was arousing to her, a promise of large leisure.
She pretends not to see him; she looks away. But now it is she who’s been too slow. He sees that she has seen him.
Seeing him leaning heavily on the stone banister, stopping to catch his breath, she feels drenched in a wave of sorrow. How ridiculous, she thinks, keeping alive the grievances of nearly half a century, even the irritations of the day before. With a new acuteness, she feels in the bones of her back the two words “time” and “past.” She thinks of a hymn her mother sang sometimes … did her mother miss churchgoing, was it another of her capitulations to her husband, the strength of whose assertions she never could resist? She hears her mother’s voice, “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away; they fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.”
An incredible cliché, the river of time. But she thinks of the grievance she has cherished against Adam, and all of a sudden she wants to cast it into a river, let it be borne away … somewhere, into some ocean where it will be drowned, a victim of its own insignificance. He had hurt her, badly. She had not been destroyed. Her life was, by any measure, prosperous. And when he hurt her they were both young. Whatever they are now, they are no longer young.
Seeing him before her, she thinks: Soon, who knows when, soon we will no longer be in this life. And it seems to her, suddenly, of the utmost folly to cherish a grievance against this man, this fellow creature, who has, like her, lost youth, and, unlike her, health. She is full of gratitude for this opportunity: something can be done with the past, it can’t be recaptured but it won’t fly forgotten as a dream, and the bitterness of it need not triumph. She sees the pallor of his skin. Can she ask him, Are you all right?
Or: Are you healthy?
What is the opposite of healthy?
Unhealthy?
Unwell?
Ill?
Sick?
Afflicted?
Close to death?
She thinks of the phrase “rude health.” Odd, as if health were an offense, a carelessness, an insult.
She has always had rude health.
She has enjoyed good health.
What is the nature of this enjoyment? How would you name this kind of joy?
He knows that she’s seen something, and, misunderstanding the nature of her work, or assuming that because she’s married to a doctor there’s a body of knowledge she has picked up at the breakfast table, in the marriage bed, he assumes she’s making