The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [23]
“My wind isn’t what it was.”
“No, none of ours is.” This is a lie; she can actually run farther now than she could when they were together. She is never out of breath.
He will not waste her time. “I have a stent in my heart.”
Stent, she thinks, an ugly word. It always reminds her of a fetal pig. She won’t insult him, trivialize him, by saying something in response. She waits for him to speak again.
“I had a heart attack eight years ago. I thought I was dying. It did seem like an attack: swift, sudden, a shocking pain. Then a kind of brightness. I became quite calm. I thought, So this is it, then. Later, thinking about it, I tried to understand what I meant by those words. ‘This.’ ‘It.’ ‘Then.’ ”
“You weren’t frightened?”
“I was sad. For so many years, I hadn’t liked my life. It was too difficult for me. But I’d been given a second chance. With Clare. With Lucy. And as I thought I might be dying, I thought about how dear life was. I thought of the category: dearness. How I would miss my life. Life. Not only those I loved, but at that moment I was thinking: I will miss trees. I became quite sad thinking that, if I died, I would no longer see trees. Death seemed to me bereftness, a landscape bereft of trees.”
“The trees here are remarkable,” she says, knowing she shouldn’t want to change the subject or steer the sentence away from the part of it that spoke of death to the part of it that spoke of trees. But she can’t speak of death to him, not as they are now, knowing each other so little, strangers to each other. It seems unseemly, impolite. She has, she feels, no place to stand, as if a chair has been pulled out from under her as she was preparing to take her seat at table, as if she is standing on the quicksand from the movies that frightened her as a child. She is being cast down, sucked under, by the impossibility of a response.
“What are they, I wonder, these trees. I believe they are called ilex. And there are the cypresses. And those wonderful Roman pines. Umbrella pines, aren’t they called?”
“You always knew the names of trees,” he says. He doesn’t say to her, When I thought I was dying, when I thought about missing trees, I thought of you. That I would die without learning the names of trees. He says, “I always thought someday you’d teach me.”
“I thought about it,” she says. “But when I tried, I saw that it made you feel overwhelmed, and I always just dropped it.” She reads the sign at the corner of the road they’ve just turned into. “Viale Magnolia,” she says. “So obviously these trees, with the glossy green leaves, are magnolias. And see those wonderful reddish ones, they’re almost wine colored, the leaves, they’re copper beeches.”
“Well, so I’ve learned the names of two trees now. But I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I’ll never be able to identify trees. Of the humilities that I have gathered, the most difficult is accepting all the things that I will never know.”
“One morning I woke up,” she says, “and heard my own voice saying, coming out of a dream, ‘I will never know Russian.’ So much followed then, ‘I will never play the cello or learn to knit. I will never understand economics.’ The truth is, I won’t even try.”
“But think of all you do know. About the natural world. And you’re a scientist.”
“Only a nonscientist would call someone a scientist. It’s like someone saying to you, ‘You’re in the arts.’ ”
“I’ll bet you understand string theory.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Chaos theory?”
“Yes.”
“The different arguments: is energy particles or waves?”
“Um-hm.”
“The uncertainty principle?”
“Enough to speak about it without sounding like a fool.”
“Would you explain it to me?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“You wouldn’t enjoy listening. You’d try, you wouldn’t understand right away, you’d work to understand, then you’d get that look, and I couldn’t stand to see you looking so defeated.”
He is moved by her using the phrase “that look.” He would like to touch her face.
“You’re right, of course,” he says instead.
“Did it change the way you lived, the heart attack?”
“It