The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [5]
Turning to the left, he sees the older campanile of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, gentler, undemanding. And as if made of another substance, or an entry from another dream, the mountains, covered, even now in snow. What mountains are they? This is the kind of thing he never knows, that Miranda always knew. But what he wants to look at is not the dome of Saint Peter’s or the tower of Santa Maria in Cosmedin or the snow-covered hills. He wants to be looking at the winking bottles: the color, the silly joyful purposeless activity, the vivid game of catching sun. And it seems to him possible in the improbableness of its heat, its lavishness, its wrongheaded generosity, to allow himself to give up the responsibility, the habit of northern judgment, and to enjoy the spectacle of the playful bobbing plastic bottles, the colorful unnatural blues and greens—the temporary pleasure of what, if it must be given its proper name, would be called: detritus in a vortex. But why, he asks himself, why think of what is proper? Why invoke the word “propriety”? Not in this light. Not right now.
Valerie has given Miranda instructions on how to get from her apartment on the elegant Via Margutta, just off Piazza del Popolo, to Valerie’s place across the Tiber in Trastevere. The streets seem particularly empty to her, like empty aquaria, as if they were not just uninhabited, but drained. According to Valerie, the journey will be easy: you take an electric bus on the Corso, which leaves you at Largo Argentina, where you get a tram. But tickets must be purchased at a newspaper kiosk, and the one in Miranda’s neighborhood was all out of tickets. It was late Saturday night when she had got around to buying them, and today, Sunday, the kiosks are all shuttered. It is one of the times she thinks perhaps it was a mistake to rent an apartment instead of staying at a hotel; in a hotel, the concierge would be of help, telling her where to get bus tickets on a Sunday, perhaps even providing them. But aside from Valerie, there is no one in Rome she knows. The woman who owns her apartment lives in London. Well, there is someone else in Rome she knows. Adam. But that is of no use to her, no use at all.
She will take a cab.
It was Valerie who had found her the apartment, Valerie with whom, somehow, she was still in touch, even though there were people she’d known in college whom she’d been much closer to, much fonder of, who interested her much more. But that was the way with people like Valerie. The energetic, organized ones who sent out Christmas letters and compiled alumnae e-mail lists. And Valerie was goodhearted, oceanically accepting of everyone, and endlessly persistent, so it would have taken a deliberate and quite cruel effort of will to cut her out of your life. And besides, what she had done was not unadmirable. She’d lived in Rome for thirty years. After traveling around, earning her living everywhere and nowhere as a waitress or a nanny or singing in the subway, she met Giancarlo, a painter. Now she made a living brokering apartments for traveling Americans; she had arranged flats for both Adam and Miranda. Valerie and Giancarlo lived with his mother in an apartment overlooking the Tiber. They had not had children.
And it was Valerie who, either not noticing that she was doing something difficult or else knowing perfectly well that it was difficult, had told her about the suicide of Adam’s wife. That he had married again. And most recently, discussed