Free The Love of My Youth by Mary Gordon

important food was to me. Butter. It seemed ridiculous to say, ‘I mourn the loss of butter.’ But I do. And it was humbling, because I’d never exercised, and I had to hire someone called a personal trainer. Whom I grew to love. At first I thought: we have nothing in common. He has never heard of Debussy. He told me he has never read a book from beginning to end. He’s from the Dominican Republic. He’s twenty-three; he has a wife and two children. I have, as I said, come to love him now, to be grateful, moved by this wonderful boy because of whom I must question all the things I never thought to question. What is the value of a certain kind of music, without which I thought it was impossible to have an admirable life? And yet he does, he does have an admirable life; he’s careful, he’s patient, he’s enormously kind, he has wonderful humor, and, well, he knows all sorts of things I don’t; it’s possible he saved my life, a life devoted to a kind of music he has no notion of.”
    “When I think of how we lived!” she says. “We smoked, we drank, we stayed up late and slept till noon, we ate French fries and drank Coke, we mocked athletes. And now I have a personal trainer, too. I will never again have a jelly doughnut either! I limit myself to three glasses of wine a week. What have we given up for an ideal of health?”
    “Oh, all those nights of talk, talk, talk.”
    “It was a way of discovering who we were.”
    “Who were we? Who are we now? Are we the same people that we were?”
    “Impossible to imagine those young people who we were saying the sentence ‘I belong to a gym.’ And yet I do belong to a gym, and sometimes I think, in all the hours I spend in the gym, what might I be doing? Learning the Russian I say I have no time to learn? Involving myself in local politics.”
    “There’s not an infinity of time. You think there is when you’re young. You never imagine that there are some things that will just be given up. Lost.”
    “And not only negligible things. Things of great value.”
    “Then we lived in a way, or maybe it was a way of being alive that allowed us to feel we could use words like ‘beauty,’ ‘justice,’ ‘wisdom.’ Maybe you had to have stayed up all night and drank and smoked too much to feel easy about using those words. Put beside those words, how pale the word ‘health’ seems. It seems pathetic. Ridiculous. But it’s how we live, I suppose how we must live.”
    “Is health life?”
    “There isn’t life without it, so, yes, I suppose it is.”
    “And pleasure?”
    “Oh, pleasure, that, it seems, has become less important.”
    “Yes, you’re right, and I think that’s rather sad.”
    “Or is it just a kind of wisdom proper to our age?”
    “But which is it—wisdom or defeat?”
    “It might be hard to tell.”
    “No, Adam, I won’t leave it at that. Pleasure now: it’s something that we choose rather than something that lands on us. And I won’t say that’s sad. It doesn’t come crashing over you, like a wave. It’s a lake you see from a distance, and then enter, it’s lovely, as lovely as thought, maybe lovelier. But it’s not the ocean.”
    “So: a calm lake. No surprises. No wave turning you over and over, lifting you up, letting you down somewhere far from where you started.”
    “Of course there are surprises. It would be terrible if there were not.”
    “The biggest surprise, I suppose, will be death. Which ought to be no surprise at all.”
    She wonders whether his close approach to death has made him think like that. She won’t indulge him in this kind of talk, this kind of thinking.
    “But on the way there are some surprises that we can take real pleasure in. Just for their surprisingness. A kosher hot dog in the elegant Villa Borghese.”
    “Even if we can’t eat it.”
    “Not can’t: choose not to.”
    So, he thinks, she has not lost her faith in the power of will. He doesn’t know if he likes or dislikes her for