The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [30]
“It was the middle of the day. I didn’t know you very well. I was sixteen. I was afraid of what my friends would think … not that I really had any friends, but the friends I imagined I might have if they knew I had a girlfriend. I was wrong, of course, but I was young. Only sixteen years away from being born, from nonexistence. Sixteen years ago, at forty-three, I was a recognizable version of myself. A teacher, a husband, a father.”
Once again, he seems to want to speak in a way she does not.
“My sons are on your side about West Side Story, by the way. They tease me about it. They hum, ‘There’s a place for us, somewhere a place for us …’ and they hand me a box of tissues they’ve hidden behind their backs. My son Jeremy likes to tell his friends that his mother cried over a yogurt lid. A yogurt lid, it’s true. One day I read the lid on a Dannon yogurt carton, and it told the history of Dannon, which is the story of a Jewish immigrant who brought the recipe for yogurt with him when he had to flee Fascist Italy, and he named the yogurt Dannon after his son, whose nickname was Dannone. And I cried.”
He wants to say, Did you cry because your husband and your sons are Jewish? But he says instead, “They seem like nice boys, your sons.”
“They are nice boys. You were a nice boy, Adam. A very nice boy. Only sometimes you weren’t so nice to me about music.”
Neither of them says what they are both thinking: that what was done to Miranda by Adam, what Miranda experienced at his hands, was far outside the category which could be appropriately described as “nice.”
“You kept saying to me, ‘There are certain standards, Miranda.’ I sometimes thought you used music to hurt me.” She doesn’t say: Because of you I have not listened again to serious music in a serious way. Because of you I have left a kind of consideration of what you called great art. I take my children to Yosemite instead of the Louvre. Neither of them has had a single music lesson. If I asked them if they knew who Shostakovich was, they might look at me in puzzlement and say, in unison, “Who?” This, Adam, is because of you.
“I never meant to hurt you,” he says, and they both pretend to understand he’s talking about music. “I don’t think you ever knew how frightened I was all the time. That I would be discovered not to know what the standards were. That I’d be exposed as the impostor I knew myself to be. That they’d take away my place at the table. Which in the end, I gave away myself.”
No, Adam, no, she wants to say. We will not talk like this. Not yet. “Do you remember our terrible fight about Janis Joplin?”
“No.”
“I adored her. You said that she was fat and ugly, that she shrieked and howled, that she was the embodiment of everything coarse. You rarely spoke that way, so harshly. But it made me terribly angry. I said she was telling the truth about everything you and your musical friends wanted to keep hidden, that they worked to hide.”
Now it is he who doesn’t want to follow this line of talk. “This music, coming from this puppet theater, this music you’re afraid I’m going to call sentimental, well you’re wrong. I’m enjoying it very much.”
“Oh,” she says, not knowing how to understand this.
“But I know you’ll want to leave before the puppet show. I’m assuming that you still hate puppets.”
“More than ever,” she says.
That he knows this about her, that he remembers that she hates puppets, makes her eyes fill. And she doesn’t want him to see. She pretends to tie her shoe. To stop her tears, she thinks of her sons, for whom her tendency to cry too easily is a good joke. Her sons: tall, strong, happy, or, perhaps better to say, neither for the moment unhappy. An old woman once told her, “You can only be as happy as your unhappiest child.”
“You know, I liked West Side Story,” he says. “I thought it was Bernstein’s best work.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was afraid even to say it aloud. In the circles in which I moved