The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [68]
“Only at several removes, and I don’t know what the long-term effects will be. I told you, I gave up that kind of ambition because I wanted an ordinary life. A life for my children with the things money can buy. Health and safety.”
“Is that what money buys? Health and safety?”
“And quiet. And privacy.”
“And beauty. Tomorrow I’ll take you to a beautiful café.”
“No, Adam, tomorrow I will take you to a place I’ve wanted to go. It is, I think, quite beautiful. The kind of place we would never have dreamed of entering when we were young. It’s expensive. But I can afford it. It’s the kind of thing you can almost never say: I have enough money. People will talk about almost anything else, the most intimate, the most mortifying things, before they’ll mention money. We don’t want to be poor, but we don’t want to admit we’re not.”
“And if we had lived poor, as we said we would when we were young, going to this kind of restaurant is the sort of thing we would never have hope of doing. Would we be more or less happy? More or less unhappy? I know people, my God the money some of my students come from, people who think about money all the time. They have too much money, and they aren’t happy. I know that’s the wrong thing.”
“And the right thing?”
“Ah, that I can never seem to settle on.” His face seems to her to have darkened; but perhaps it’s only that he’s moved into the shadow of the overhanging leaves.
Sunday, October 21
THE RESTAURANT, THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
“I Am Not Ready to Be Seen As No Longer Young”
The restaurant is actually part of the Museum of Modern Art. They walk up the elaborate marble staircase, through the doors flanked by Corinthian columns, not even stopping to buy a ticket. He’s told her the collection is undistinguished, not worth the steep admission price. “You don’t come to Rome for museums,” he tells her. “There are only one or two that are really world class.”
They’re more dressed up than they’ve been since their first night at Valerie’s. She’s wearing a black silk pantsuit; underneath the jacket, a silky jade-colored shirt. He wonders if the shirt is sleeveless. He thinks of his memories of her arms: freckled, lightly muscled.
In all the time they’ve been together, all these days in Rome, he hasn’t seen her legs. She wears long skirts or pants. Her legs were always a vexation to her; he had found them beautiful, arousing. Worried that he knows she’s thinking in this way, he doesn’t compliment her on her outfit, as he’d thought of doing, before his imagination took off in a direction that causes him unease.
She’s reserved a table outdoors, on the veranda. They look out over the park, the park that she’s come to know well because of their daily walks.
“The sky is white today,” she says. “The flat pines are beautiful against it. The pines of Rome.”
“I like the pines, and I always wanted to like the music, the Respighi, but I can’t.”
“Umbrella pines. I love the shape they make against this white sky. I think what I love most in Rome are things seen against the sky. And things that are what they are because of water. Bridges. Fountains. The sound of fountains. The reflections of the bridges, of the arches of the bridges, repeating themselves in the river. Particularly at dusk. At twilight. What’s the difference between twilight and dusk?”
“That’s the kind of thing you know, that you wonder about, that I never would. And I meant to ask you, what’s the name of those trees with the small leaves. In all my years in Rome, I’ve never known. And it seemed like the sort of thing I should have known, so I was always embarrassed to ask anyone. It always seemed too late to be asking.”
“Ilex,” she says. “I’m glad you’re not embarrassed to ask me.”
“Because you know it’s the sort of thing I’ve never known.”
“It is,