The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [27]
“You’re too exacting.”
“Well, if you like. But I never knew what her love meant, what it meant to her to love me. Was she excited by her love for me, made anxious, saddened, consoled, envious, ambitious?”
“Perhaps all those things. You know from the way you are with your own children.”
“She seemed afraid to touch me. Afraid of touching any of us too much. Maybe of touching anything: now that I think of it, she touched everything rather tentatively, rather fearfully, as if she were afraid of leaving a mark that would be somehow corrupting, hurtful. Perhaps diminishing. Her embraces were always abashed, they always felt provisional. My children’s bodies were always so delicious to me. I kissed them and hugged them all the time. I loved having their skin against my skin. I had to think about it carefully as they got older: they were boys, after all. What should my relationship be to these new bodies? The bodies of men. The soft skin growing coarser, the round limbs thinning, lengthening, the curls becoming straight. Oh, and the first signs: hair on the legs and then the cheek you put your lips on, expecting the old swoony pillow. Suddenly whiskers. Like your father. Like every other man. And then you know they are no longer yours.”
She stops, knowing it’s easier for a mother to speak this way of her sons than a father of his daughter. She doesn’t want to create a difficulty. But he seems not to have seen a boulder in the road.
What he sees is the statue of Giordano Bruno, at the far end of the piazza. He would like to talk to her about Giordano Bruno, who believed not only that the earth traveled around the sun but that the sun was only one of a number of stars, perhaps all equally important. Burned by the Inquisition. Adam takes in his austere unpleased countenance, his hands gripping his forbidden book, and thinks: Well, this is Italy, placing a monument to intellect in the midst of this celebration of the undiscriminating pleasures of the tongue, surrounding it by sugary pink and yellow buildings that suggest, not the life of the mind, but the succulence of fruit or the confectionary instability of some of the candies for sale in the open bins. The buildings’ lightness makes them seem insubstantial: how can they stand up to weather? And yet they have, they’ve endured, as the statue of Bruno has endured, suggesting entirely different things about the nature of the world.
He’d like to talk about this with Miranda. But he sees that she is entirely absorbed in the luxuriant array of fruits and vegetables, and that it would annoy her if he interrupted her delights to talk about a Renaissance philosopher. He envies her ability to lose herself in the physical world, to distract herself in the pleasures of what can be tasted, touched, smelled. It is one of the things he understands about himself: he has never been able to lose himself to this sort of distraction. His distractions come from music, which, as someone famously said, has no smell.
“I often wondered where you got your physical exuberance. Your parents were both so reserved. You were always throwing your arms around people. Sometimes, they didn’t know what to do, but mostly, even if they didn’t know exactly how to respond, you made them happy.”
“Well, I’ve toned down now.”
He would like to say, That’s such a shame, but says instead, “Tell me about your garden.”
“Where I live, in Berkeley, things grow easily and well, though we have to be very careful of water. But the growing season is long. I have all sorts of things in my garden, oranges, lemons, tomatoes that are like, well, like they are here, but all colors,