The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [24]
“I can’t imagine that. You ate voraciously. You ate whatever you liked, and you were the thinnest person I knew. It made me furious.”
“I remember your crying once when I ate a second jelly doughnut.”
“I was crying from sheer jealousy; I was trying to lose five pounds.”
“You can rest now. I’ll never eat another jelly doughnut. And you clearly don’t need to lose five pounds.”
“There’s not a woman on earth who doesn’t think she needs to lose five pounds,” she says, then regrets her response. Because what he’s said suggests that he’s been looking at her body. Looking with approval. And she’s glad of that. She shakes her head, a gesture of refusal she hopes he can’t read. She won’t allow this. Particularly her own satisfaction. It’s the sort of thing that will have to be kept out of their time together.
She laughs a laugh she hopes he doesn’t know is false. “Even if you knew you were going to die tomorrow? Wouldn’t you say, ‘I’m dying tomorrow, so I’ll eat a jelly doughnut.’ ”
“Speaking of cuisine,” he says, pointing a few yards from where they are standing. They have just passed the merry-go-round, whose tinny music seems so out of place as an accompaniment to the grand view from the Pincio, the belvedere. Mothers and children are clustered around a cart, sheltered from the sun by a yellow-and-blue umbrella. Printed on the umbrella, in white letters SABRETT’S.
“Sabrett’s,” she says. “What in God’s name is a kosher hot-dog stand doing in the Villa Borghese?”
“I think it’s called capitalism,” he says.
“Do you think it’s an American who fell in love with Rome? Or an Italian who fell in love with New York hot dogs?”
“Maybe it was my mother sending it as a gift so we could stop, for one minute, being so damn serious.”
“Shall I buy you one?”
“I don’t think my cardiologist would approve.”
“And I’m a vegetarian. God, sometimes I’m appalled at the amount of time I spend thinking about food.”
“It was humiliating when I had to understand how important food was to me. Butter. It seemed ridiculous to say, ‘I mourn the loss of butter.’ But I do. And it was humbling, because I’d never exercised, and I had to hire someone called a personal trainer. Whom I grew to love. At first I thought: we have nothing in common. He has never heard of Debussy. He told me he has never read a book from beginning to end. He’s from the Dominican Republic. He’s twenty-three; he has a wife and two children. I have, as I said, come to love him now, to be grateful, moved by this wonderful boy because of whom I must question all the things I never thought to question. What is the value of a certain kind of music, without which I thought it was impossible to have an admirable life? And yet he does, he does have an admirable life; he’s careful, he’s patient, he’s enormously kind, he has wonderful humor, and, well, he knows all sorts of things I don’t; it’s possible he saved my life, a life devoted to a kind of music he has no notion of.”
“When I think of how we lived!” she says. “We smoked, we drank, we stayed up late and slept till noon, we ate French fries and drank Coke, we mocked athletes. And now I have a personal trainer, too. I will never again have a jelly doughnut either! I limit myself to three glasses of wine a week. What have we given up for an ideal of health?”
“Oh, all those nights of talk, talk, talk.”
“It was a way of discovering who we were.”
“Who were we? Who are we now? Are we the same people that we were?”
“Impossible to imagine those young people who we were saying the sentence ‘I belong to a gym.’ And yet I do belong to a gym, and sometimes I think, in all the hours I spend in the gym, what might I be doing? Learning the Russian I say I have no time to learn? Involving myself in local politics.”
“There’s not an infinity of time. You think there is when you’re young. You never imagine that there are some things that will just be given up. Lost.”
“And not only negligible things. Things of great value.”
“Then we lived