The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [3]
Turning from the mirror, he glances at his hands. Nails round, cut short. Pianist’s hands. He has not achieved fame, success, even, but he has not given over his calling. She had loved his hands. She would kiss his fingers and turn his hands over one at a time, and kiss the palms. Her lips, moist, their touch preceded by a warm moist breath (he had found it quite unbearably arousing). “My darling love, my genius boy. What joy you bring with these wonderful hands. You make beautiful music. You make beautiful love. I hope to see your hands the last thing before I close my eyes in death.”
She was capable of speaking ridiculously like that. She was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old. She felt free always to overstate, to shed tears. To use terms that were too large: “genius,” “love,” “death.” He had a perfectly ordinary pair of hands. He was, for a serious pianist, only moderately gifted. As for his skill at lovemaking: there was no skill, no art … no notion that there was a better way. Or a worse. They were only two young people, ordinary in their youth, their ardor.
It was easier when he thought like that. But it was not the truth, and he would not dishonor the past, the two of them as young, by such a dismissal. In their innocence, in their belief in life and in each other, in the clarity of their desire that had no residue of punishment or will to humiliate or dominate or shame, they had been a thing of beauty. Valuable. Not ever, would he betray that. His youth. Their youth. She was the love of his youth. He is no longer young. And she, too, has lost youth. But he will not betray it.
He remembers dancing with Miranda for the first time. It was near Thanksgiving; he had not yet asked her out. Someone had a party in a basement, and although the air outside was taking on a chill, the air in the dark basement was thick with the sense of intense exertion and young lust, hanging like a curtain along with the residual smell of the family beer. He felt about to burst, burst into flame, with longing, longing quick as a flame spreading over a dry ground. A flame he could never imagine extinguishing, never going out. He remembered her writing down a word first because she liked it, second because she wanted to do well on her SATs. “Fulvous,” the word was.
No one at the party dreamed of doing more than kissing. Or perhaps the more adventurous might try touching a girl’s breasts. In six months, when many of them turned sixteen and the times they were a-changing, heated discussions among the girls would be the norm: how far could you let him go, after how long.
The first night when he danced with Miranda, holding her, he put his mouth against her hair and inhaled the exacting innocence of her shampoo. Clean, maddening. He did feel driven mad with desire, with shame, certain she could not be feeling anything like what he was feeling. When they were dancing, she lifted her chin so that a kiss would happen. It did not. He was too afraid.
Forty years later, he feels the clutch of gratitude. Never in Miranda was there the slightest hint, not the smallest suggestion, that he, male, was monstrous and she, female, shocked, pure. They shared ardor. It was she who suggested they become lovers. They were sixteen years old. Daring then. Now? So commonplace as to be unworthy of mention. They were sitting by the river and she said, “Adam, you need to know something. I want everything that you want, maybe more, maybe worse.” Was it possible that her skin was always warm, even in winter, as if she carried with her always some hint of early June? So he could leave behind the