The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [25]
“Is health life?”
“There isn’t life without it, so, yes, I suppose it is.”
“And pleasure?”
“Oh, pleasure, that, it seems, has become less important.”
“Yes, you’re right, and I think that’s rather sad.”
“Or is it just a kind of wisdom proper to our age?”
“But which is it—wisdom or defeat?”
“It might be hard to tell.”
“No, Adam, I won’t leave it at that. Pleasure now: it’s something that we choose rather than something that lands on us. And I won’t say that’s sad. It doesn’t come crashing over you, like a wave. It’s a lake you see from a distance, and then enter, it’s lovely, as lovely as thought, maybe lovelier. But it’s not the ocean.”
“So: a calm lake. No surprises. No wave turning you over and over, lifting you up, letting you down somewhere far from where you started.”
“Of course there are surprises. It would be terrible if there were not.”
“The biggest surprise, I suppose, will be death. Which ought to be no surprise at all.”
She wonders whether his close approach to death has made him think like that. She won’t indulge him in this kind of talk, this kind of thinking.
“But on the way there are some surprises that we can take real pleasure in. Just for their surprisingness. A kosher hot dog in the elegant Villa Borghese.”
“Even if we can’t eat it.”
“Not can’t: choose not to.”
So, he thinks, she has not lost her faith in the power of will. He doesn’t know if he likes or dislikes her for it.
She looks at her watch. If she doesn’t hurry now she’ll be late for her meeting. She can’t afford to slow her pace for him. She walks quickly toward the stairway saying over her shoulder, “You stay here, I have to rush. Tomorrow, I’ll meet you at the Campo dei Fiori. How early can you get there?”
“Nine-thirty. I leave Lucy at her school at nine.”
She would have preferred an earlier time, so that the choice of fruits and vegetables wouldn’t be diminished by the industrious early risers, those ancient ladies with their baskets and string bags: implacable, unerring, unconcerned for manners, justice: wanting what they want. But Adam has a duty to his daughter, and that must come first: as a mother this is something she will never be able not to know. A parent must always put responsibility to the child before pleasure. Not in this case, she thinks, impossibly far ahead.
When we knew each other before, she thinks, we weren’t parents. And then she thinks: It’s not only that we weren’t parents, it’s much more than that. We weren’t who we are. We were young; we were younger than his daughter, Lucy, is now. There were things we believed; there were things we wouldn’t have even begun to imagine. He thought he would be a great musician; I thought I would change the world, which I believed was open to me and everything that I would bring about. We thought that we would be each other’s one true love. We believed in that idea: the one true love. Now, it is impossible that we should believe that, living as we have lived, having loved others. It is not the case that he was my one true love. Only that he was my first. First. One. The two words, so similar, yet calling up radically different conceptions of the world. One: the only. First: an accident of order: a series. Nothing fated. Nothing not susceptible to change. Change, therefore, loss.
She wonders: Is this the most important thing that can be said about us, that we are not who we were.
Thursday, October 11
THE CAMPO DEI FIORI
“You Might Be Surprised to Know I Cook and Garden”
It is difficult for him to find her in the riot of colors: fruit and flowers, cheap goods for sale—most undesirable to him: wool hats, plastic shoes. He considers buying a set of white ceramic cups, an aluminum pot for