The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [80]
They have families they live with, these new friends, and they invite Adam and Miranda for Sunday dinners that go on for hours and that have a cast of characters it is impossible to remember, sometimes, even, to count. And they are invited to Rose’s family in Orvieto, who do not ask the details of Adam’s and Miranda’s living arrangements; they are shopkeepers, the family; they sell cheese and bread and olive oil. Afterward Adam and Miranda get on the train back to Rome dizzy from the funicular and stuffed from a day of endless, interlocking meals, carrying bags and bags of food as if they were returning to the Arctic rather than the great city of Rome.
And so they spent that summer walking the streets, avoiding the American students on the Spanish Steps (We’re not like them, Adam, tell me we’re not like them), a month of streets marked by fountains and public sculpture and concerts which seem to be everywhere, every night, and free, and the scent of flowering trees and frying food and laundry flapping in the heartlessly blue sky, the sound of whirring sewing machines and snatches of songs flung out onto the Via Nomentana way past midnight.
She had meant, originally, to go to Pakistan that summer to work in Lahore with her friend Fatima in the clinic of her father who is a doctor there. She has told Adam she must do it the next summer, and he says, yes, of course, but this is a once in a lifetime chance, and afterward she knows that he was right; she wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Even for the responsibility of saving the afflicted poor.
The things that vexed and separated them seem far away. Miranda reads the International Herald Tribune occasionally, but there is no television in the apartment so he doesn’t have to hear her every night railing as Walter Cronkite describes napalmed bodies as he would back home. She leaves the railing to the Italian radicals, whose slogans she can’t begin to understand. She takes the bus each day, a forty-minute ride beside ordinary Italians who seem absorbed in ordinary lives, and that seems right; it’s all right for her to be absorbed in what seems ordinary Roman life: colors and smells and textures. After all, she is working hard on something important, reports on sorghum and terracing and irrigation. Adam and Miranda can hardly remember what seemed so troubling between them; whatever it was has disappeared, dissolved like the miles that turned to nothing as the plane rose up over New York and crossed the fretful cold gray-green Atlantic. It seems that they have all the time in the world. Each day they tell themselves that they are lucky.
Then they go home; the days shorten; the October sky turns blue-black at five o’clock; there are no longer enough hours in the day. Is this the same sky, they ask each other, as the Roman sky? Is the sun the same sun? Why is the light so different? It is only with Adam that Miranda can have this kind of conversation: tender, speculative, playful. This habit of mind has no place in the diction of her serious friends, who know it’s their job to change the world.
She is spending more time in the biology lab; her real love is botany, but after her summer at FAO she has decided on a double major in biology and economics, which pleases the premed adviser: she thinks Miranda’s prospects are excellent. Miranda is still counseling draft resisters. She is back to smoking pot.
And Adam is doing as he has always done: practicing, practicing. He is absorbed in the relationships among the last Schubert sonatas: when he tries to speak about this to Miranda she says, “Um-hm, interesting,” but he knows she isn’t interested. Madame Rostavska, a Russian, continues to believe that the technical training he received from Henry Levi is all wrong. Henry Levi insisted on his doing stretching exercises that were painful; he believed that without a certain amount of pain the proper stretching could not be accomplished. Madame Rostavska says that that’s “typical German sadism,” and gives him a new set of exercises, which do not hurt but are more time-consuming