The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [85]
“Couldn’t we just say, ‘Thank you for having us for drinks, your apartment is lovely and thank you for making our holiday more enjoyable.’ ”
She feels annoyance rising, an oblong at the back of her neck, heating the cool place that was left there by the cloister’s silence. “First of all, Adam, we can’t say ‘we.’ And this isn’t a holiday for me; I’ve been working.”
Ah, he thinks, she hasn’t lost her anxiety that she isn’t working hard enough. That she hasn’t done enough. What were her words? That she’s “let herself off the hook.” As if any kind of pleasure were an unearned release. From what? He never knew what it meant to her to be “on the hook.” It seemed somehow desirable to her, in a way he never understood.
“It would be good to write some kind of note, though,” Adam says.
“Of course you’re right. And you probably will write a note and I probably won’t. I’ll get paralyzed. I’ll go silent because of the impossibility of finding the right thing to say. Something that’s truthful and not wounding. But in my own defense, it’s not just this situation: I’m terrible at writing thank-you notes. My husband writes the thank-you notes, if any get written.
“So you see we’re different now,” Miranda goes on. “It’s you who thinks of the right thing and does it, and I who somehow can’t. I who don’t know what to say or how to say it. It’s because of just this sort of thing that there are some people I have just let go.”
“I was always astonished at the number of people in your life. Wherever we went, it always took much longer to get there than I thought it would because of all the people who wanted to greet you. And whom, therefore, I had to greet.”
“Well, yes, I came to see it was too much. I came to the point where I didn’t want to have any new friends. I wanted to have a card printed up that said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t get to know you because there are already too many people in my life.’ ”
“But of course you would never do that, because you really hate hurting people’s feelings. Although you like being witty, being thought amusing and sharp. I never knew you to hurt anyone out of malice. You hurt people when you weren’t paying attention. When you were distracted.”
“That kind of carelessness, I’ve come to see, is a kind of malice.”
“No, Miranda, no, it’s not. I’ve known people who take pleasure in hurting. Who enjoy humiliation. That was never you.”
“Nevertheless, I have hurt people. And then, in my guilt about that, my inability to face the harm I’ve done, I turn away from them. We can forgive those who trespass against us. We can’t forgive the ones we’ve trespassed against.”
“I have very few friends.” He sighs. She can’t bear to see the sadness that is shadowing his face. It’s not right; he should have more friends. She doesn’t want him to suffer an additional burden: the conviction that it’s because of something wrong in him.
“But you, for example, kept in regular touch with Valerie all these years. I never answered her cards. I think I sent her birth announcements and changes of address and, well, when she came to the Bay Area I think I saw her, maybe once or twice in twenty years. But you, I know, kept writing. I only phoned her because I read in the Wellesley alumnae magazine that she had the business renting out apartments in Rome.”
“My friends are of long standing. But sometimes, we don’t see each other for many months, sometimes years. And I suppose, like you, I’m not that interested in making new ones. The people we see, well, we see them because of Clare.”
“I don’t think I want new friends and then I meet someone and I fall in love with them. I long to know them. I feel my life will be impoverished unless I get to know them. Like this German woman I met at the conference. She’s trying to set up mental health facilities in the former East Germany, which is much poorer than West. Her kids are just my kids’ age, though they’re girls,