Losing Julia Read online

  My darling Janet is married, which complicates things, but not happily married, which raises possibilities. She has no children, but wants them, which raises more questions, and she treats me like an elder statesman, which can be exciting, though I’d rather be seen as a sweaty stable boy.

  Janet’s thick blond hair is parted on the side, curled behind her ears and cut just above shoulder length. She has, quite possibly, the most beautiful neck I’ve ever seen, which means something at my age. And her breasts! Even in winter they are indisputable, a flagrant and august presence beneath her noble sweater, which is not to detract from her mischievous fanny, ever beckoning as it recedes lockstep down the hallway, left right left right. Follow me. Anywhere, Janet, you gorgeous creature. If I could have just one woman for one night, it would be Janet, and I’d be dead by morning. Au revoir!

  Erica is in her mid-forties, I’d guess, with green eyes, thick black hair and a dark, Mediterranean complexion. About five foot six, she has strong slender legs, darling kneecaps and exquisitely lithe arms. Already twice divorced, she has probably slept with more men than Janet and Sarah combined, and spit a few out for breakfast. But what strikes me most about Erica is how she manages to be both tough and feminine simultaneously, which drives me crazy.

  I shuffle down the hallway toward the nurses’ station, where Sarah is studying a clipboard. “Good morning, Sarah,” I say, wishing I could bury my face in that soft, salacious mane and start all over again.

  “Hi, Patrick,” she chirps, firing off a huge smile that makes me sad. She always seems so happy to see me that I cannot help but take it personally, though of course she does that to everybody.

  “What a beautiful dress,” I say.

  “It’s my uniform, you old clown,” she says, making me feel very old indeed. She heads off down the hallway, clipboard pressed to her chest, her head cocked slightly to one side. I head for a chair, quaking.

  I’d love to get laid one more time before I die. Seriously. And truth be told, I get a lot less picky as I get older. (Some nights I am kept awake by the faces of women I once turned away during my brief and misguided heyday.) I am, essentially, a horny eighteen-year-old trapped in the carcass of an Egyptian mummy. If youth is wasted on the young, and it is, recklessly so, then old age is wasted on the infirm: all that wisdom crammed into a dog that no longer hunts. And still I fantasize like a freshman.

  But my lonely lust isn’t what hurts the most. The worst thing is that nobody even wants to touch me anymore.

  OR IS IT all the regrets, those desperate creatures that hound each day and hour and minute of an old man’s life? Sometimes when I feel the panic coming, I will pour a second glass of brandy and drink it straight away, but I try to be careful or the brandy and the pills I take will throw impromptu parties that I don’t care to host.

  Today I feel especially anxious, a gnawing or buzzing just below my chest as though I’m infested with termites. I should go to lunch before the kitchen closes but I’m too nervous to leave my room, where I sit in the corner in the orange-colored chair with stained fabric that itches even through a cotton shirt.

  My joints ache and my eyesight seems more blurry than usual. If I were younger I’d make an appointment with my doctor and tell him that something is wrong, but at my age things are supposed to be wrong. “Well, of course you feel like shit, Mr. Delaney, you’re eighty-one. Your insides are shriveling up and you’re going to die soon. What you need is a paleontologist, not a doctor.”

  I reach for a book from a stack in the corner. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception. I turn the pages until I reach a passage I have underlined:

  Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.

  Then I close the book, slowly rise from my chair and head for my closet stash to fix myself a drink.

  I GOT A new roommate today. A short guy with watery eyes, their color long faded, hysterically tiny feet tucked into baby blue loafers and big age spots all over his forehead. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the fate of his predecessors. Anyway I’ve decided not to get too chummy. The good-byes are killing me.

  His name is Martin Dansfield. His daughter Trudy wheeled him in. She’s some big shot ad executive from Chicago. A real bitch, if you ask me, telling him where to hang his pants and which drawers to put his underwear in and not to make too many phone calls since she’s footing the bill.

  When she disappeared into the bathroom I leaned over to him and whispered, “Tell her not to use too much of the toilet paper because I’m footing half that bill.”

  He laughed so hard that I was afraid he’d expire on me.

  After Trudy left I gave him a quick rundown on which nurses to avoid, which to seek out, and which I’d already claimed as mine. Then I took him down to the recreation room to introduce him around.

  “UP, UP, UP! You’re going to be late for PT!” It’s Cindy, my least favorite nurse, who storms into my room like the ringleader of an angry mob headed for Frankenstein’s castle. I have fallen asleep after lunch, and she is standing next to my bed with a look of mild repugnance. I don’t think she likes old people, not that I blame her.

  “How are we going to work those muscles if you’re just lying in this bed? Up, up, up!” she barks.

  I used to work my muscles in bed, but that’s neither here nor there, especially to Cindy. I rise slowly without looking at her. “I can find my own way there, thank you,” I say, taking the cup full of pills she thrusts toward me. Her forearms are huge and I wonder if she resents having to lift old people for a living. When I die, I surely hope she is not the one who finds me.

  The exercise room is down two hallways past the recreation room. I walk steadily, wondering how long I can keep the wheelchairs at bay. I watch them glide past across the glassy linoleum sea bearing their ancient and often oblivious cargo to and fro.

  Hanford, a tall black physical therapist with the largest smile at Great Oaks, and maybe even California, waits for me in the doorway, smiling. The first time I met him he told me, “You know, Patrick, some people think life is too short to put up with shit and other people say life is too short to let shit get to you. My problem is that I think most people are full of shit.”

  He greets me by gripping my shoulders and guides me toward a treadmill. “How ya doing today?” he asks.

  “Feeling like a coiled jungle cat,” I say. “It s just a question of when to pounce.”

  “Easy on the oysters.”

  “Chrimeny, if they serve oysters one more time, I’m gonna have to call a hooker.” I hold the handrails tightly and try to lift my knees high as I walk. Rain is pounding against the window as though searching for an opening. I remember the metallic ping ping ping of rain against corrugated iron.

  “You were in Vietnam, weren’t you, Hanford?”

  “Hundred and First Airborne,” he says. Behind him in the corner a large silver fan sways back and forth.

  “Nasty business,” I say.

  “Nasty business,” he says. “You ever in the service?”

  “Pershing’s army.”

  He thought for a moment. “That’s the First War, right? Early part of the century now, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m impressed, Hanford. Some folks aren’t sure whether I fought in the War of the Roses or the Thirty Years’ War.”

  “Frankly I thought you was on one of them Crusades.”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  He presses a button on the treadmill, raising the incline. “So you gonna tell me what it was like?”

  “I’m running out of breath here.”

  He slowed the speed down. “Better?”

  “Better.”

  “You on the lines?”

  “I could smell the sauerkraut.”

  “Shit boy! How long?”

  “Couple of months.
”

  “Ever get shot?”

  “Shrapnel,” I say, tapping my thigh.

  “Gassed?”

  “Yep.”

  “What’s that shit do, choke you?”

  “Depends on the gas. With mustard gas it could be hours before you felt the effects. Then your skin started blistering like it was coming off, especially in your armpits and groin, and your eyes clamped shut with pain and it began eating away at your bronchial tubes. The severe cases slowly suffocated to death.”

  “Some nasty shit.”

  I nod.

  “So what the hell was the point?” he asks, after a few minutes.

  “The point?” I pause.

  “Yeah, the point.”

  “Well, for starters we were going to stop German militarism once and for all. But I think the real point was that everybody’s honor was on the line.”

  “Honor? Shit,” he shrugs. “Screw honor.”

  “What about you, what were you fighting for?” I ask, wheezing as I step off the treadmill and take the small white towel he hands me.

  “Oh that’s easy,” he says. “I was fighting to save my ass.”

  Then I lie down on a bed and he lifts my limbs one by one as we listen to the rain.

  In the charge, I got within fifty feet of the German machine-gun nests when a bullet plowed through the top of my skull… As I lay there I could plainly see the German gunners and hear them talking. They could see I was not dead and I watched them as they prepared to finish me. They reloaded their gun and turned it on me. The first three bullets went through my legs and hip and the rest splashed up dust and dirt around my head and body. Evidently thinking they had done a good job the Boches turned their gun to other parts of the field.

  —Joyce Lewis, United States Marines.

  BANG BANG BANG I jolt up from sleep as a timber falls from the ceiling of the dugout, smacking my shoulder. Then another, dirt and smoke filling the air.

  “You all right?” asks Daniel, pulling himself to his feet. Light from a flare pours through a large crack in the roof and illuminates his face, which is bleeding.

  Another blast. We’re on the floor again, Daniel’s legs across my head.

  “Son of a bitch,” he says.

  “Can you move?” I ask.

  “Yeah, I’m okay. Let’s get out before it collapses.” I scramble up the stairs behind him. Figures are crouched at the bottom of the trench. Others scurry back and forth, hunched over.

  “It’s like a fucking meteor shower,” says a voice to my left.

  To my right I see Lawton huddled near the entrance to the dugout and shaking uncontrollably.

  I move down the line past Page. His face is rigid and his nose is bleeding heavily. I pat him on the back.

  The explosions start again and we throw ourselves down onto the earth until I am clawing at my helmet and burrowing desperately into the dirt. Bits and pieces of metal and wood and debris fly around the trenches. I wonder if I am cut or bleeding but I feel nothing because my body has gone rigid, fully contracted. I hold on to myself trying to keep from being pulled apart by the concussions. I move down the trench until I stumble into Tometti hugging the dirt and softly singing an Italian ballad. Tears streak down his dirty face. I think of his girlfriend Teresa and wonder what she would think if she could see him this way.

  Another tremendous blast. Am I buried? I push away at the dirt. No, I can breathe. But dirt is in my mouth and throat.

  “Give me a hand!” cries Giles, standing near a collapsed section of trench. I see Daniel behind him. Thank God. We dig frantically with our hands and picks and shovels. Everything glows white then red beneath the volcanic sky, flickering and flashing through the smoke. I find a finger, then a hand. I tear at the dirt, searching for a face.

  “Over here. Delaney’s found one!” says Giles.

  I feel a shoulder, then a chin and a nose. “Pull!”

  It’s Tometti. Dirt is packed tightly in his mouth and nostrils and ears. With my fingers I clear his mouth and turn him and shake him until he begins coughing. I turn to dig some more. Another body. No, a boot. I tug at it and it comes easily. The leg is severed at the knee.

  Page and I struggle with a third body that seems to be buried almost straight upside down. A voice shouts, “Grab your rifles. Stand to! They’re attacking!”

  I hear shouts and I notice my fingers are bleeding as I search through the dirt and rocks and splintered wood for the upside-down man’s face. I feel an ear, a clump of hair. I gently pull. The forehead is missing. Page? No, a young kid from another squad. Farm boy from Nebraska, I think. I lay the head down. Someone grabs me and pulls me away.

  Where is my rifle?

  A trench mortar to my right and two of the BARs we hauled up the previous night begin firing. I listen and watch as everything slows down until I feel almost completely removed; a distant observer to some strange and horrible catastrophe. My ears are ringing but I am not afraid. I look slowly left, then right.

  Nothing matters but the firing of the machine guns. I listen to their ruthless work, raking back and forth with fierce mathematical certainty. That’s it: we are fighting a tremendous numbers game. Bullets versus bodies, artillery shells versus battalions, bandages versus wounds, medics versus the wounded, gas versus lungs, flamethrowers versus human flesh. What matters is volume and quantity, quantity of boots and canteens and rations and rifles and privates and lieutenants and planes and ships and submarines. Won’t someone call the score?

  The Germans are in our wire now yet I fear nothing. Anger surges. I scream. Did I scream? Destroy it all. Everything. Fury and destruction. Now! Come for this cornered animal, yellow teeth bared. Rabid.

  Try me.

  I pull a rifle from a body stretched across the duckboards, then struggle to pull a bayonet from its scabbard. The latch is broken. The bayonet is bent. I throw it down and search for another. As I look I can hear rapid German phrases, both angry and scared, and wonder if German is the language of war. It sounds like it to me, a series of urgent commands being passed down the chain of command. Does “I love you” in German really sound like “I love you,” or is it more in the tone of “I’m gonna beat the shit out of you”? This is interesting to me because language has been an awful problem in this war, at least for those of us who would like to put it into words but can’t because the necessary words don’t and can’t ever exist. Carnage; murderous fire; mass, ritualized slaughter; gaping and septic wounds blackened with disease and flies, white bone protruding from flesh; ten thousand men cut down in an afternoon, their bodies spread across no-man’s- land like a grotesque quilt.

  There, my bayonet is fixed. Cold steel. I am cold ruthless steel. My fists are tight and my temples hurt; the muscles in my neck are taut. I want to get my death over with. Now. I look up and see one then two then three Germans with their long field-gray coats and flared helmets dropping down into our trenches firing rifles and pistols and tossing stick bombs and lunging with their bayonets. I fire my rifle (did I close my eyes?) and then jab jab jab with my bayonet pushing and slashing in blind fury DIE DIE DIE.

  Daniel grabs me and shakes me. Then Page and Giles and I crawl to the top of the parapet and lie on our stomachs and fire at the retreating shadows that flee like ghosts across the pocked, swaying earth.

  For the rest of the day we repair our trenches, bury the dead and haul up more ammunition. I remember nobody talked much though we listened very carefully.

  LIEBER GOTT, hilf mir! Bitte, lieber Gott! Bitte, lieber Gott …

  [Dear God, help me! Please, dear God! Please, dear God… ]

  THAT NIGHT in the darkness amid the moans and the lingering smell of cordite I realized that the earth itself was bleeding, its wrists slashed deep down to the arteries along a line called the Western Front. I wondered how long it would take to hemorrhage to death. A few more months? A year at the most?

  “I WISH they’d shut up,” says Tometti, rubbing his palms up and down his face like a man w
ho thought he had spiders crawling on him. The moans and screams of hundreds of men, mostly Germans, drifted across no-man’s-land. Tometti takes out his knife and tries to cut a small piece of hard bread he pulled from his pocket but his hands shake too badly and he puts the knife away. Then he crosses his arms in front of him and jams his hands into his armpits.

  Some of the sounds are remarkably animallike, the shrieking of dozens of creatures big and small that have stepped into steel traps. My knees feel weak and I wonder if sound alone can make you faint.

  “They are fucking Huns,” says Lawton, whose dirty face is nicked with cuts, some of them an inch long. He pats Tometti gently on the back. “Just fucking Huns.”

  “Yeah, fucking Huns,” repeats Tometti in a whisper.

  Whoever tries to interfere with my task I shall crush.

  —Kaiser Wilhelm II.

  OUR FIRST STOP in Verdun was at the Cimetière National de Douaumont on the east bank of the Meuse. We walked among the rows and rows of simple white crosses that guarded a silence so absolute and dense that it pressed against my eardrums like water at the bottom of a very deep pool. That one there, he was a new father and next to him, the last of three brothers killed and that one there was to have been a poet and that one a teacher and over there a great scientist and that one a writer and that one a priest and that one there, there in the corner, well that one could have been you, oui?