The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [45]
And when Adam sees her on the train he finds himself strangled with anxiety. Because he has found her beautiful, her hair like a cool stream down her back; he would like to bury his hot face in it, and her careful, sensible but supple hands, and her voice singing “the joys of love” with a clarity he yearns for when he plays, for example, the mazurkas of Chopin. But she need not strive for it; this clarity is who she is.
So when she says, “Hi, oh, we’re on the same train,” he can’t think of anything to reply.
It is, he thinks, easy for her to find things to say.
“I’m going to the Museum of Modern Art,” she says, casually. “I’m really interested in Monet. My mother has this book about him and I thought maybe I’d ask Mrs. Lucas if I could do a term paper on the French Impressionists for history. I know that’s a little weird, but she’s kind of, you know, easygoing.”
She made that up a second before: that she will go to the Museum of Modern Art. She has never been there; she has been to the Metropolitan with her mother. But they don’t visit the Impressionists there; her mother prefers the cool vaultings of the Metropolitan; she loves the Gainsborough ladies, the Goya ladies, the ladies of Ingres and David, and she once said she found the Impressionists “a bit rushed for my tastes.”
Adam is in a panic because he doesn’t know where the Museum of Modern Art is. He never does anything in the city but go to his lessons and then get back on the train. Unless he stops for a grilled-cheese sandwich and a Coke at the luncheonette on Broadway and Eighty-fourth Street.
“That’s great,” he says.
She spends the entire day in Grand Central Terminal, her eye on every Westchester train, so that she can pretend just to happen to be on the same one. He gets on a train three hours later.
“How was the museum?”
Now it is her turn to panic. She hadn’t thought that she would have to tell this lie, and she thinks she’s been very stupid.
“Nice,” she says. “Really nice. How was your lesson?”
“Oh, good. I have a really great teacher.”
“Oh,” she says. “What’s his name?”
And somehow, this simple question, answered simply with the name “Henry Levi,” frees Adam to begin speaking. About Henry Levi, his apartment, his family in Germany that perished. And then Miranda speaks about Anne Frank, and they discuss the fact that both their fathers fought in the war in Europe and never speak of it.
“So I’ll see you in school,” he says as they part to walk home in separate directions from the train station.
“Yes,” she says, drenched in her failure like a hungry animal caught in a rainstorm.
But they have talked to each other, and the next weekend she gets on the train and says, “I’m going back to the museum,” and he says, “Oh maybe I could meet you there after my lesson,” and she says, “Oh great,” and they are both frightened because neither of them knows where the museum is. But they find it, they look at Monet’s water lilies and Matisse’s swimming pool and Picasso’s Guernica, and his goat. She chatters and feels a fool, he is nearly mute and feels a fool, and they go back on the train and say again, “See you in school.”
And then there is the dance, his first, which he goes to only so that he can dance with her. And he smells her hair, so clean and promising, so exciting and reassuring, and two weeks later, the unthinkable: he asks her to the movies.
Zorba the Greek.
It is, for both of them, incredibly, their first date. She has never been asked out on dates because the boys in her class are afraid of her. They think she is contemptuous of them, but she isn’t; it’s just that she can’t place them in a category she can understand. They seem to her not quite real. They aren’t the little boys she’d played with easily, but they so obviously