The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [44]
Miranda’s eyes fall on the boy seated at the piano, on Adam, whom she looks at briefly and then looks away from. She thinks: He is beautiful. She has never in life (though she’s read of it in books) seen hair like his, so black it seems shot through with blue, and she thinks “Black, black, black is the color of my true love’s hair,” which Joan Baez has sung night after night in the darkness of Miranda’s bedroom. She wants to refuse the word “beautiful” because “beautiful” is not a word used for boys in those years. Yet it returns like a wave over a slick shoreline. Beautiful, she thinks, he is beautiful, and she thinks of this boy whose name, Adam, is the only thing she knows about him, except for the fact that he’s a serious musician. Their eyes meet, and they both blush. She looks not at his face but at his beautiful hands, the traces of dark hair that make him so excitingly ungirlish.
So it begins with music, with a singing girl, and a boy, playing the piano to accompany her song.
Plaisir d’amour
Endure qu’un moment
Chagrin d’amour endure
La vie.
The joys of love
Are but a moment long
The pain of love endures
Your whole life long.
Adam and Miranda, one just sixteen, one nearly, neither of them knowing the joys of love or its attendant, some would say, inevitable sorrow.
So it begins, the rest of the story. A love story like any other, conforming to certain patterns (rhythmic), revealing certain strains and inflections (class; gender, though the word is not yet in vogue) but most particularly shaped by its time, its moment in history: the mid-1960s to the beginning of the 1970s. Though many people would say that in 1964 the ’60s have not yet begun: they will begin a year later, in 1965. But certainly we are not in the ’50s. Rebellion is in the air, but it is not, for now, called revolution. Rather: “nonconformity.” There are signs of change; money is not important; respectability, security, are nothing. The worst thing you can be called in those years: phony.
There is no falseness in either of them, Adam and Miranda, and what they will soon regularly call “our love.”
There is one small falsity, however, a necessary one, committed by Miranda to set things in motion. Because, although she thinks of herself as a modern girl, free of the constraints that she believes have hobbled her mother and her mother’s generation, she would find it unthinkable to ask a boy out on a date.
And she has never been asked on a date before, so the whole notion of “date” shimmers in the distance, desirable, unattainable, the Islands of the Blest, Mount Rushmore, Shangri-la.
So a few weeks later she pretends to just happen to be on the same New York–bound train as Adam. She knows which train he takes into the city every week because she engages in an activity that would now be known as stalking. She sees that, although formerly he took the 3:47 train on Fridays, now he takes the 11:30 on Saturdays; she assumes he is going to the city for his lesson.
For three weeks they have been in the same room three afternoons a week, rehearsing with the Glee Club. They have never been in the company of fewer than thirty others. They have yet to exchange a word.
Not only does she find him beautiful, she also finds him the embodiment of a life that is far from everything her father stands for. Her father: efficient, always certain, ready at a moment’s notice to dismiss the tentative, the circumspect.
Sometimes she gets to the music room early hoping to be alone with him, but she always hears him playing the piano and when she peeks in the door his look is so intent she would be ashamed to interrupt