The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [7]
Seated in one of the rose-colored chairs is Giancarlo, Valerie’s husband, who has not aged in fifteen years. His hair is still dark; his face, covered by a fashionable stubble, seems untouched by middle age. He rises, almost reluctantly, as if he’d rather be sitting, and he kisses Miranda on both cheeks. She sees that between the third and fourth fingers of his right hand he is holding one of Napoleon’s soldiers.
Not rising, her bird face taken up entirely by dark glasses, is Giancarlo’s mother who, directionlessly, indicating her lack of inclination or perhaps it is her failing sight, extends a clawlike but beautifully manicured hand. On the fourth finger of her hand there are three rings: a gold wedding band, a circle of diamonds, an emerald baguette. Miranda is glad the woman can’t see her nails; she never gets a manicure; she clips her nails in the tub: short, round, and serviceable.
Giancarlo asks if his mother is comfortable. She says nothing. Valerie presents prosecco. The doorbell rings and Miranda is sick with fear. It is too late, and she knows she is wrong to be here. Let the past go, her husband would have said, if she’d asked him if she should do it. Let it go unless you know that it can help you.
Why did she think that seeing Adam could do her a blessed thing but harm?
Strange to use the phrase, she thinks. A blessed thing. What’s the opposite of “blessed”?
“Cursed.”
No, that’s too strong.
Perhaps, “difficult.”
But because a thing was difficult, it did not mean it shouldn’t be attempted. Fear must be got past.
She is afraid now.
It is ridiculous.
She’d gone years without thinking of him. Yonatan and her children don’t know about him. If she’d mentioned his name, they’d have said, Who?
• • •
And yet he had been for some years the most important person in her life.
But their question would be right. Who? It is her question now as well. Perhaps the answer would be: The love of my youth. But where, she wonders, should the accent fall? On which word? “Love”? Meaning both an experience and a person. Love: she has loved others, loved again. But he had been her first love. And he had gone on with his life after they were no longer in each other’s lives. But if you put the accent on youth, that, certainly, was gone. Gone for good.
She has no idea whom she’ll be meeting now the door opens and it has become too late.
She hears his voice as he walks down the hall with Valerie. The voices of the dead. She thinks of what happened when her friend Richard died and she called his number by mistake and heard his voice on his answering machine. She was first horrified. Then comforted. She hung up and called again and then again. As if she could, by doing this, keep him with her.
But Adam hadn’t died. And yes, it is a voice she knew, a voice she remembers, and the sound of it stirs her, lights a match between her ribs, the two of them located below her breast bone, to the right of what she knows to be her heart. Something has kindled. A sharp-edged spot of heat, painful but not unbearable.
She would not have known him.
They are trying to compose their faces so that they are blanks. Giancarlo half rises from his chair; Adam comes toward him, and shakes his hand.
“So, here we all are,” Valerie says.
“Valerie, that is a stupid thing to say,” Giancarlo’s mother hisses. “As if we were not here. Or could not be here if we are here.”
Miranda knew that what Valerie said was stupid, but the old woman’s saying it is hateful, and it makes her feel hateful for sharing the thought. For it isn’t true, what the old lady said, at least not completely. They are here. But they