The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [55]
“I felt sometimes grotesque as a young man in that body. You helped me with that.”
She doesn’t want to acknowledge what he said. The implications would tear something open that she wants sealed up. The implications of his gratitude. And she doesn’t want to allow the question: do I still find him beautiful?
“How would we have been different if we’d known how beautiful we were? Would we have been more confident? More generous? Kinder? More unkind?”
“Perhaps we would have felt free to do whatever we liked. That we, for instance, didn’t have to be studious, or decent, or honest,” Adam says.
“So you think beauty is a danger, then?”
“No, I don’t. I walk the streets here, early in the morning, sometimes when no one is up. The street sweepers are clearing the incredible debris from the night before. They spray water on the stones, a mist comes up over them, it all seems quite unreal, the mist, and then suddenly these great stone figures, those statues—does anybody even know who they are anymore—suddenly they come alive. Everything my eye falls on is beautiful, the color of the walls, the detail on a doorway, a marble slab with ancient writing on it in the middle of a patch of weeds, and I think, How beautiful this is, and when I’m thinking of that I can’t think of anything else. Or I don’t allow myself to.”
“But I wonder: are Romans happier than other people? I know they can’t be, because if they don’t have work, if they have no access to justice, if there are problems in their families, if they’re ill or mad, no fountain in the world, no sun on stone, can make it seem worthwhile.”
“At the hardest moments of my life, I listened to Beethoven’s sonatas. And they brought me to a place that allowed me to believe that life could be otherwise than the way I was living it.”
“I wish I knew what made people happy,” Miranda says.
“Why do you think it’s just one thing?”
“Well, what kinds of things. Then we would know how we should live, how the lives of people should be organized.”
“Those kinds of ideas frighten me. I’d rather listen to the plashing of a fountain.”
“Isn’t it funny, the word ‘plash.’ A word used for only one quite limited situation. Water in a fountain. But Adam, we must think of how to make a better world or the worst people will make a worse one.”
She hears a new impatience in his voice. “If I am kind to the people I encounter,” he says, “if I help my daughter to add to the world’s beauty, if I introduce my students to a sublime music they might otherwise not have known, haven’t I made the world better? Are you saying that I don’t have the right to the sound of the fountain? The joy of watching these young people?”
“But what will happen to the young people if we who aren’t young aren’t paying attention?”
“If we had known we were beautiful, would we have been paying attention only to ourselves?”
“I wish someone had said just once, some stranger, it would have to be a stranger, seeing the two of us, How beautiful you are. Because if it were a stranger I might have believed him. And if it had been said of the two of us, not just me alone.”
“Do you tell your sons they’re beautiful?”
“I did, when they were younger. I felt I couldn’t when they became men. Do you tell Lucy?”
“Again, like you, I can’t, now that she’s no longer a child.”
“And do you want it for her? That she knows she’s beautiful?”
“I want her, like these young ones throwing the ball and laughing, to be thinking of something else, or not thinking about anything, just enjoying throwing a ball to each other on a sunny day, just living a life. How wonderful, though, never to have felt that you were undesirable,” Adam says.
He is disturbed that he’s used the word “desirable”: at the same time he’s glad of the risk; he enjoys the heedlessness, a young man’s luxury, in which, even when he was young, he rarely indulged.
“Desirable,