The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [62]
“And these two, are they lucky? Lucky in their heedlessness?”
“What do you want me to say, Adam? You want to know what I think of them? What they’re doing?”
“Is this the lack of self-consciousness we were saying the other day was so wonderful in the young? I must say I don’t find this wonderful. I don’t understand it. How can she feel so comfortable, her legs wrapped around him, kissing him, then taking a bite of her sandwich, then looking at the trees, then going back to kissing him, all the time squeezing her legs around his waist? What can he be going through? I remember what it was like at that age. Anything could arouse you … an ad for panty hose. I guess it was stockings then. Somebody saying the word ‘stockings.’ And here she is almost fucking him in public. Yet he seems not to have lost his equanimity.”
“You make it sound so ugly!”
“I’d prefer not to be seeing it.”
“You’re embarrassed.”
“I suppose so, yes.”
She thinks of Yonatan, who is never embarrassed. He might not even notice the two young people, or he might embarrass Miranda and the boys by shouting out “Go for it.”
“They seem quite free of it,” she says. “Embarrassment. What a strange thing it is, embarrassment, so powerful, yet no one acknowledges it as one of the important human states. And it’s so physical. The accident of people’s coloring makes it legible, or not. If you’re fair your face turns red, and anyone around you knows you’re suffering. If you’re darker, well, your secret stays with you.”
“I was always far more liable to embarrassment than you. I could be struck dumb by embarrassment. It never seemed to stop you. I’ve got better.”
“Our first date, Zorba the Greek, when I started dancing in the street, after I went home I was terrified that I’d embarrassed you and you wouldn’t want to see me again.”
“No, I thought you were wonderful. Precisely because you seemed so free of embarrassment.”
“If you’ve got better, I’ve got worse. I’m so aware now that we’re at an age when we must take care not to be embarrassing. To dress in a way that acknowledges that some things are past. Think of hair color. You have to do it well, because if it’s done badly everyone has to feel sorry for you for having to dye your hair. And you have to avoid dying it certain colors so that it appears that you’re pretending not to dye it or that you’re making a joke of yourself by acknowledging too loudly that it’s fake. A joke no one’s amused by, they’re turned off by your supposition that it might be amusing. Which is why I spend what you might think is an appalling amount of money to make myself exactly the right shade of blonde. A sign that I haven’t given up, but that I know there are standards, and I live up to them.”
“But whose standards are they?”
“I don’t know, Adam, but I know they’re real, and it is about not wanting to be embarrassing. Unaware of how you’re being seen. I don’t want to be one of those women at weddings doing the alley cat. Or the electric slide.”
“What’s the electric slide?”
“The extent of your refinement sometimes takes my breath away, sir,” she says, punching him lightly on the arm. “Never mind, Adam, I couldn’t possibly explain the electric slide to you. Content yourself with knowing it’s a kind of group dance. You can live perfectly well without knowing more.”
“But can you live perfectly well without dancing?”
“Well, I still dance. But more formal dances,” she says. She doesn’t want to go on about this. It’s connected to something about her marriage that she imagines would give him an opportunity for, if not contempt (Adam is not by nature contemptuous), then condescension of which he is, she knows, entirely capable. She’s glad Adam hasn’t asked about her and her husband, How did you meet?
They met, or rather they recognized each other, while taking a class in salsa dancing. Among the middle-aged hopefuls and the brilliant peacocks who by day flipped burgers or pushed clothes down the street on garment racks, they acknowledged they had seen each other at public health meetings. She was two years older; thirty-three