The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [83]
He wants to talk to her about chromatic scales and contrapuntal structures; his theory classes and composition classes are teaching him a language to which she has no access and in which she has no interest. She is a worker now; she must get to a desk at nine and not leave it till five; she leaves their apartment in Somerville at eight and gets home at six, if there’s not a meeting, and Adam, proud of her and her work in the world, is also excited by the music coming to him in new ways through his learning about singing and conducting, and Miranda says, Yes, it’s wonderful honey, wonderful sweetie, but he can tell she isn’t listening as she used to, and he is frightened by her distance, by her new energy as a woman of the world.
Most of the time, except on the weekends, they are apart. She’s at work; he is in the practice room, the one next to Beverly, who has returned to school after her time off (“Both of us, Adam, lying in half-dark rooms; you in your mother’s house, me in the bin, much fancier, much more costly”), and she does listen to his excitement about voice and conducting, and the relationship among the last Schubert sonatas. And she signs up for those classes with him. Madame Rostavska, a Russian, and a sentimentalist, calls him into her office one day and asks him to do “a mitzvah, Adam, do you know what a mitzvah is? In Jewish tradition: a kind act, a good work. Beverly would like you to work with her on the Messiaen ‘Amen.’ She’s a fragile girl, very gifted, she’s suffered a great deal. I think, as musicians you could learn from each other. She’s a passionate pianist, but lacks your discipline. You could benefit from a touch of her wildness.”
Adam blushes; he says he’d like to think about it. He does not speak about it to Miranda. He doesn’t speak of it to anyone, but he is drawn to the challenge of expanding his range as a musician. Messiaen is not someone he had ever thought of much, but the technical demands of his keyboard music, he knows, are enormous. Certainly it will be good for him to stretch himself like this. The question: will the stretch be painful, like Henry Levi’s stretches, or mysterious in their effects, like Madame Rostavska’s? He tells Madame Rostavska he will be glad to do the two-piano piece. Beverly throws her arms around him. When she lifts her arms, he smells the rank uncleanness of her sweat mixed with the harsh sweetness of a perfume he will later know is called Ma Griffe. He is disturbed that it excites him. He will learn that ma griffe is French for “my claw,” and he will wonder if it was for the suggestion of animal aggression that Beverly chose it.
And in November, Fatima, back in Pakistan, gets in touch with Miranda after the Bhola cyclone: the worst natural disaster in the subcontinent in the century. A telegram: old-fashioned in its brief imperative. “Come now. All is chaos. We need you here.”
Monday, October 22
THE CLOISTER OF THE QUATTRO CORONATI
“Some People I Have Just Let Go”
“I want to take you to one of my favorite places, a restful place in this city that seems to have no interest in rest.”
Looking out the bus window, she sees the Piramide, and then the headquarters of FAO, the Food and Agricultural Organization, where she worked during the summer of 1969. She can hardly remember the details of her work, that work that was so crucial to her at