The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [43]
“Do you think he’s cute?”
“Who?”
“Adam.”
“He’s really shy. I think he’s kind of a snob. He takes these special piano lessons in the city. He’s a big pianist, or something. He’s going to accompany the Glee Club this year.”
“Well, then, I guess we’ll get to know him.”
“Probably, yeah.”
They don’t think of him for the rest of the thirty-five-minute train ride.
They are not thinking of him, but he is thinking of them, because although he is a kind boy, a gentle boy, who loves his mother and his sister and the great music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although he is what everyone who knows him even slightly (the train conductor) or quite well (his mother, his sister) would consider a good boy, he is tormented by the wild and to him incomprehensible and unimaginable urgings of his body. He does not focus on Miranda any more than on any of her friends. He will not allow details to connect his random and generalized desire for any female at all to someone he might know, with the face of a girl or girls who exist in the same world as he, so defiling does he consider his desires. And he would never dream of buying pornography or anything approaching it. The source of his imaginings: women in bikinis seen on postcards tacked up on the wall of the garage where his father gets his car repaired. A calendar found in the same location. He thinks that he must be mad or loathsome to call up these images so often; he can’t understand that the same body that dwells on these images is capable of reproducing the great pure invaluable music of Schubert and Fauré.
Miranda and her friends go to Colony Records on Broadway and Fiftieth. They find something called the Joan Baez Songbook, which has on its cover a picture of the singer on a beach in California called Big Sur. They plan to travel there after high school graduation. They are hoping one of their parents will lend them a car.
They pore over the book, relieved beyond all telling that it provides, not only guitar chords, but also the possibility for piano accompaniment. Now the problem is: to find a song that will not lose by being accompanied by piano rather than guitar.
They buy the book. They look over it on the train. They look over it in Miranda’s bedroom. They settle on “Plaisir d’Amour,” sung first in French. Miranda has studied French for eleven months, her accent is considered “excellent.” But suppose Suzanne (Suzzi) chooses a French song. This is considered, then rejected. They know their enemy. They know that her imagination is set not on Paris (where her mother might be buying her clothes) but on London, where the Beatles live. She has had her hair cut in the short geometric style invented by Vidal Sassoon, and she paints her eyelids with a single thick black stroke.
They’re right: Suzzi doesn’t choose a French song, she chooses a song by an English singer, Dusty Springfield. “You don’t have to say you love me just be close at hand.” They don’t know that she means it as a message to Mr. Jameson: that she has no desire, in her desire for him, to curtail his freedom.
Has Charles Jameson, though, understood this secret message? And perhaps wished to remove himself from this desire, the desire of a girl whose new haircut, new makeup, have removed her from the territory of the girlish, transporting her over the line into the territory of the womanly, a territory he finds much more dangerous, much less comfortable? What he treasures in the female, particularly as he sees it is now in the process of becoming obsolete, its form melting away like a lump of sugar in a cup of tea: innocent girlishness. Girlish ardor.
So Suzanne (Suzzi) has miscalculated. Singing her modern song with her modern haircut and short modern skirt, she represents for Charles Jameson all that he would like, in the female, kept back.
Miranda, her light brown hair unstyled, reaching below her shoulders,