The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [69]
“But you learned very young, from your father.”
“Yes, those were times I know that we were happy, walking in the woods.”
Her father, she knows, wouldn’t approve of spending so much money on a meal.
“Every time I’ve passed this place, I wanted to have lunch here,” Miranda says. “The view is wonderful, but there are some places you don’t want to eat alone. Or with someone who’d fuss about the price. It might be different for a man. Although things have changed. When I was younger, it was rare to see a woman in a good restaurant eating on her own. Traveling in India, it’s almost impossible. If you’re eating on your own reading a book, a young woman of the restaurant family will come and take your hand and tell you it’s terrible for a woman to be eating alone with a book, and you’re just swept up, into a family life that I am simultaneously delighted by and appalled by—I mean, I’m appalled by the theft of my privacy.”
“There’s no Italian word for privacy.”
“How can that be?”
“There’s a word for solitude, but that’s different, almost religious. The right to privacy: that’s very northern.”
“You only have to travel a bit south or east to be shocked at how northern you really are. How important things like people arriving on time become. When you have to understand that when you say two o’clock you mean two o’clock, and the people you are with mean ‘sometime between two and seven.’ ”
“You’re no longer habitually late.”
“No: Yonatan cured me of that.” She doesn’t want to be talking about her husband now. “Let’s order something luxurious. The sort of thing that would shock my father. Have the most expensive thing on the menu.”
“But suppose the most expensive thing on the menu isn’t the thing I want?”
“Yes, that would be a problem. Then let’s say: have whatever you want and don’t think, for a moment, about money.”
This is impossible for him. And he is not entirely at ease with a woman saying those words to him, implying that the check will be paid by her. Still not entirely at ease that his wife earns more than he. But he knows that is a foolishness, one he can just let go. And this is Miranda, and he is Adam, and it is much too late for that; he knows it is beneath him.
“Lobster risotto,” he says, “to start.”
“Yes, and then?”
“Cinghiale,” he says. “Boar.”
“Oh, yes, I’ve been told it’s the season. How frightening boars are: those tusks. Digging for truffles. What a strange animal. Threatening, but discriminating. Bloodthirsty, yet a friend of the table.”
“Look around: most of the men are gray haired, like me. It’s because it costs a lot to eat here.”
“But the women are not gray haired. Not one. Even I’m not; though without chemical help, I would be.”
“I think you’re more worried about getting older than I am.”
“It’s harder for a woman. A finality occurs. One day you’re fecund and the next day barren. Bang. No more children for you. Do you know how lucky you are? I won’t have the chance again. You must have been in your forties when Lucy was born. And there wasn’t the slightest worry attached to that. You could have another twenty-five children if you wanted.”
“But I don’t, of course, want.”
“I may have had too much to drink, or they’re taking too long bringing the food, but I want to tell you something. It happened last night. Someone who gave a paper at the conference was staying at a very fancy hotel. Not the Hassler, but something up there like that. He invited us all for drinks. It was one of those very modern places where the bathrooms make you think you wandered into a conceptual art installation by mistake. You think maybe some German did the sinks, some postmodernist you’re not hip enough to know the name of, and you can never find the water faucets. There were only two toilets. I went into one, and before I sat down I saw there were spots of blood all over the seat. So I went into the other toilet.
“After I washed my hands I noticed the Asian woman who was handing out the towels. At first I was horrified that she’d think the blood was mine, and think of me as