The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [63]
For their tenth anniversary, Yonatan had a dancing floor built in their basement. Two nights a week they dance; they are clear with each other that, in twenty-six years, they had, as dancing partners, not improved enough to be taken seriously by the serious dancers. Which makes them very glad. She loves what Yonatan had said about it: “All day we are brilliant and accomplished. Two nights a week we are both pleased to be mediocre.” She understands that this would offend Adam: he would never allow himself even a temporary sojourn into the mediocre, especially if it were willed. She wouldn’t want Adam to see her in her dancing outfit: purposely cheap with a low back and ruffled hem, a clinging top, high-heeled shoes with straps, and, her favorite pair: scarlet with red, blue, and purple sequins. She feels herself falling back into the idea of her husband, as if, exhausted, she is allowing herself to fall back into her own bed, their bed: a king-sized bed, with four king-sized pillows. She imagines that Adam and Clare wouldn’t consider a king-sized bed.
“You seem much more aware of being looked at than you were when you were younger,” Adam says.
She would like to tell him that he’s both right and wrong, but to explain the ways he’s wrong, she’d have to talk about Yonatan. She thinks of herself dancing, her backless dress. Her sequined high-heeled slippers. Dancing with Yonatan, she’s perfectly happy to be looked at. Perhaps because Yonatan never thinks of being looked at. The unease happens when she is looked at on her own. To be looked at alone, as an older woman, she thinks, is to be unsafe, in danger. In danger from what? From ridicule, she understands. Pity, perhaps. Perhaps: contempt. With Yonatan the two categories—pity, contempt—seem entirely remote.
“It’s one of those differences between men and women. As a young woman, you’re looked at all the time. You can’t choose the nature of the looking. It’s abundant, almost a natural event like rain or thunder. A problem sometimes also, like heavy rain, dangerous thunder. Anonymous desire. Anonymous censure. Then you age, and you realize you’ve become invisible. You hunger for the element you once despised or took for granted. But now there’s a new understanding. Being looked at, as a rare commodity, has to be considered carefully. You can no longer afford to be occasionally looked at with contempt, because the other salvaging looks—approbation, admiration—may not be coming your way any time that you can count on. Sometimes you appreciate the invisibility. You’re newly free. But embarrassment, the look that says, Don’t you know who you are? You’re too old for that, I fear it like, I don’t know, food poisoning maybe.
“More than anything, though, I fear being thought of as a ‘game girl.’ Those women traveling around in groups wearing red hats. Or maybe they’re purple hats. In cafés or museums or national parks. Some game girl wrote a book, When I Grow Old I Shall Wear Purple. Well, the truth is, no one gives a shit what you wear when you’re old unless they’re embarrassed by it. So better not wear purple, just in case. Subtle, neutral shades: blacks, taupes. A bit of mourning for the end of youth is called for. A muter palette. More explorations of shades of gray. Dove. Pearl. A nice alternative to the blush of mortification. Just the right degree of blondness; a blondness that understands its relationship to gray.”
“I don’t want to think of you as never dancing.”
She won’t tell him that it’s something he needn’t worry about. “When was the last time you danced, Adam?”
“With you, I think.”
With an entirely pleasant wifely pride, she thinks of Yonatan. “But if you danced me down this row of magnolias it would be embarrassing. Even these two wrapped around each other on the bench would be embarrassed. And then we would have to be embarrassed. And to be embarrassed, and embarrassing here, in Rome, in front of all these Europeans, no, that wouldn’t do.”