The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [82]
Adam tells Miranda that the three of them are very happy playing cards in the time when he can keep awake, but it makes her impatient to hear about it; her days are spent at meetings, mimeographing leaflets, making demands on the university, mourning the dead. And listening to a new conversation: the women who say they’re not going to mimeograph, not going to make coffee; they have their own issues, they want a voice. They do not want to be the servants of men. And so when she is called to come home, it feels like she’s being called to be a servant, and she understands now she has no wish to be a servant. She can hardly bring herself to go home for even one weekend. Rose senses her impatience, sees how Miranda tends her son and says, “You might want to rethink being a doctor. I’m not sure you like being around sick people very much.”
In his bed at home, Adam, exhausted, frightened, missing her, is terrified because he is playing the piano less than he has since he was seven years old. He can, for minutes at a time, study the scores of the Schubert sonatas, perform Madame Rostavska’s stretching exercises, but to sit at the piano for any time at all: he simply doesn’t have the strength. And the piano, he knows, is a jealous lover. He may very well be punished by the loss of a technique he will never be able to recoup. Because although he is a boy who enjoys life, and he is kind and infinitely sympathetic, he is also the terrified lover of a dominating beloved, who can give or withhold, whom he has no choice but to serve. And when Miranda comes to lie beside him in the half-dark room, the smell of his insufficiently washed body, the indolence that lodges in his beard, make her feel clammy and suffocated, and for the first time his body is not a delight to her; for the first time, being next to it is not where she wants to be. She wants to get away, outside, into the cold, into the icy spring wind, back to school, back to the fire of this moment.
And one night, high with fatigue and the sense of purpose, she somehow allows Toby Winthrop to convince her that not to have sex with him is to give in to an oppressive hierarchy of monogamy. She thinks of Adam lying heavy and sweaty underneath his childhood blankets, and Toby’s body—wire lean and bristling with rage and contempt—seems to her newly desirable.
Afterward, trying to sleep beside Toby, she is struck cold with the wrongness of what she’s done; she gets up in the middle of the night, runs back to her dorm, and weeps in Valerie’s arms: “What have I done. I’m awful. I’m despicable. I don’t deserve him.” And Valerie says, “Look, it’s crazy times, everyone’s a little crazy … just don’t ever tell Adam. For God’s sake, it won’t hurt him if he never knows. The cruel thing would be to tell him. What you did was stupid. But don’t be cruel.”
And Miranda allows herself to believe this is the best course. She doesn’t speak to Toby Winthrop again; she does not work again with his organization, but joins another group, less militant, with more women in charge. When she sees him somewhere—at a demonstration, or on the street—he always smiles and makes a gun shape of his hand and pretends to shoot her, and the contemptuous look in his eye is simultaneously humiliating and arousing to her.
Her last weeks of college are sluiced by her shame. Her graduation is overshadowed by Cambodia and Kent State; her last classes were anticlimactic, and she has missed so many she does not graduate summa, magna, or cum laude as she had always expected, as everyone had thought she would.
Adam must make up the course work he has missed, so he takes some summer courses. He wants to do more theory;