The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [60]
She limits her practice to four days a week. One day a week, she deals with the teeth of autistic children, who are terrified even to be touched, to say nothing of the invasive touch their troubled mouths require. The problem engages her. One of the things Adam loves about his wife is that what others call impossible she calls interesting. She also finds life somewhat hilarious. She laughs in a way that some of the faculty wives consider too loud. He loved hearing Clare and his mother laugh. And yet, the daughter of a family that was spared misfortune for three generations, she can be shocked by misfortune: she drops down to a place where no one can find her, like a stone disappearing at the bottom of a well. Was she drawn to him because, genetically spared tragedy, she saw in him her drastic other? He does not say to Miranda: When I met her I was a dead man. Nor does he tell her that Clare told him, “I think I’ve been a little in love with you since I was twelve years old. More than a little.” Then she regretted it, and he, too, wished she’d never said it: it was embarrassing, a slightly indecent cliché.
“She leaves domestic life to me,” he says. “She works much longer hours than I do.”
He does not mention the nature of her work, and Miranda notices this. She suspects that Clare works in fashion or finance. She guesses that she earns more than Adam, and that he is abashed by this. All this makes her glad that she decided to think well of Clare even before she found she had a colleague in untidiness, which has made her feel her decision was completely right.
“And your husband?”
“Yonatan’s at home in the world of things. He doesn’t lose track of them. Objects obey him. They don’t, as they do with me, fly out of his hands, maliciously hide themselves, disguise themselves, take themselves out of straight rows and careful piles simply out of spite.”
She doesn’t want to talk about her husband. He is as different from Adam as he can be (it was one of the things she prized in him: his refusal to agonize, how rare it was for him to take offense). She will certainly not tell Adam that, statistically speaking, three-quarters of their domestic arguments center on her untidiness. The other quarter arise because she finds him too indulgent with their sons.
“If you love me why won’t you keep the house as it needs to be in order for me to be happy?” he says, each time with genuine surprise.
“Because,” she says as if this argument were the first, “I can’t.”
“You aren’t afraid of disorder? Of being overwhelmed by chaos?” Adam asks.
“I have been overwhelmed by it. I was, as you know, overwhelmed in Pakistan during the typhoon, and I thought that I could never do that kind of work again. But then I’d been screwing around two years, working in a coffee shop in San Francisco. Fatima’s father got in touch with me. He was working for the WHO, and there was a great project to eradicate smallpox in India. He knew I was good at organization, so he invited me to join him. And I did, and it was wonderful. And yet, I didn’t want a life in which I had to overcome that chaos every day. I realized I wanted a more orderly life. By ‘orderly’ I meant safer. So a certain kind of chaos, yes. But I’m more afraid of people who believe it’s their job to keep disorder at bay. We are, as a species, disorderly.”
“No, Miranda, I don’t agree with that. Where would we get the idea of order from if it weren’t somehow an inherent appetite? Think of this city. It gives us pleasure because of its formal beauty. And music, music isn’t possible without order!”
“But Rome’s also incredibly chaotic, and that’s because people live here. Our pleasure in the order is connected to things, and people aren’t things. People will not fall into place. That is their greatness. That’s why Rome is great: it’s a living