The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [88]
It’s the first time they’ve met after dark and the first time he has treated her. She feels a little ripple of unease. Is this breaking the rules, or bending them? She makes sure that she calls Yonatan before she leaves; she has told him about Adam; she mentions that they’ll be having spaghetti with clams.
“I envy you,” he says. “I sometimes wonder if my passion for shellfish is a kind of compensation for their rejection by generations of my ancestors.”
They meet at eight by the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva: Bernini’s saddled elephant.
“It’s such a funny presence here, this elephant, as if someone had set up a petting zoo down the road from the Pentagon,” she muses.
“At one time it was known as Porcino, ‘little piggy,’ then it was called Pulcino, which means ‘little chick,’ people don’t know whether it was called that because it was short or because the church belonged to the Dominicans and one of their major charities was to help young women needing dowries; apparently they made a procession here in the courtyard every year. By the way, right here to your left, this building was the headquarters of the Inquisition, where Galileo was tried.”
“So how do I understand this place: the little pig, the little chick, and the murderous Inquisition.”
“I have no idea. I never try. I just try to take it in, as if I were some kind of creature without a mind, one of those flies whose eyes are disproportionately large in relation to its body. A creature who doesn’t have a brain at all. Just an eye, a skin. A sense of smell.”
The restaurant is between Piazza Minerva and the Pantheon. The evening is unseasonably warm; she’s wearing a sleeveless silk shirt, lemon-colored, which she covers with a pumpkin-colored scarf she’d bought just that day. The conference is over; her friends have gone home. She knows that it’s something she won’t do with Adam, shopping, so she spent her day buying gifts for Yonatan and the boys. For him: a white straw Borsalino; for the boys, who seem to have no interest in clothes, cotton sweaters: two apiece, in shades of blue whose subtle difference one from the other they would never take into account. Having thought of her husband and her sons, she felt free to indulge herself; agonizing over the scarves—pumpkin or turquoise—she knew she should not choose both. In the end, the pumpkin won, though all day long she mourned the turquoise, lost for good.
It is warm enough for them to eat outside, although she sees that the regulars make their way into their customary inner tables, and although she enjoys the last of October’s warmth, she’d prefer that they were inside, away from the tourists, who order in English, all the wrong things. But the waiter seems to know Adam, seems to approve of his selections, and she relaxes in the pleasure of feeling that she is perceived, not as a tourist, but as someone who belongs.
He orders an expensive bottle of wine, and she worries that it is something that he really can’t afford.
“It’s from Orvieto,” he says when it’s presented to them. “Rose’s home. I thought we’d drink to her.”
She begins to tear, and pretends to have dropped her napkin. Forgive me, Rose, she says to the beloved ghost. Somehow I always thought there’d be more time.
“OK,” she says. “Tomorrow I’m going to call Valerie. Let’s meet her for lunch, maybe Friday.”
“Yes, all right,” he says.
Their pasta arrives and, although she’s said clams are something that she eats, she eats them rarely, and she feels a bit transgressive: they taste, after all, more like meat than anything she’s had in quite a while. But she thinks of Rose, and needs to believe that Rose forgives all her transgressions, among which the eating of clams is not, by a long shot, she knows, the worst.
The food and wine have made them quiet, and they walk the hundred yards in silence. Above the Pantheon, the sky is inky, blue-black with hints of silver. Miranda leans back to look above the overwhelming roundness