Losing Julia Read online

  I dressed slowly, double-knotting my shoelaces so I wouldn’t trip.

  At least I am finally beginning to understand that all the other anxieties of our lives have a proper and inevitable lineage; that perhaps Julia was right: they are all just misplaced fears of death and decay, of the unshakable dread that we are mere cosmic nutrients, utterly and ridiculously superfluous. That’s why we cling so desperately to religion and art: they are our most profound and eloquent responses to our vile predicament, bold assertions that our lives mean something after all.

  I stood before the mirror and combed my hair, then flossed and put on my watch, pausing to wind it. After double-checking that my pants zipper was up, I headed down the hall to the cafeteria, trying to decide between Cheerios and Cornflakes and wondering whether Dr. Tompkins left all his patients in such good cheer.

  I CHOSE CHEERIOS but couldn’t finish the bowl. Now I’m sitting on a bench in the hallway, desperate for a glimpse of Sarah or Janet or Erica; anything to ward off the despair.

  It’s this waiting that kills me. More even than the smell and the grayness and the infirmity; all of us waiting like cows in a holding pen, waiting to be shoved and prodded and pulled down the chute into eternity. Every day we are fed and dressed and pushed into common rooms like so much chattel to sit and wait and fart until finally it’s our turn to be spirited away into the darkness, our Johnny coats flapping in the wind.

  Death’s inexorable approach puts extraordinary pressure on each day, so much so that instead of enjoying what I have left I simply seize up, unable to bear the tension. I don’t just see the sand slipping through the hourglass I hear it, a constant flowing hissing sound that grows louder and louder with each passing hour.

  That’s why nothing’s quite so important to the elderly as convincing themselves that they didn’t squander vast chunks of their lives, which of course most of us did, frittering away the days like pocket change, which is why our seething resentments and regrets threaten to engulf us, until each thought begins with, “If only I… ” or “I always wanted to… ” In old age life’s cowardice finally catches up with us. And we recoil at the waste.

  That’s what all the stories are about, the endless monologues that old men and women deliver to anyone who will listen. Our lives feel fuller when we can weave them into stories, even if not all the stories are true and even if we are really just filibustering, hoping our number won’t be called—so long as we keep talking.

  Time’s a sneaky son of a bitch, no doubt about it. I don’t think we ever really live in the present; instead, we’re either just this side of the past or the future, wavering anxiously between anticipation and recollection. That’s where I lived my life, always wanting, longing, wishing. And so, somehow, the days slipped by until I knew I’d never fall in love again; never remarry and live in a house with other voices and heartbeats. A few miscalculations early on and soon I’d sailed all the way into a neighboring galaxy with no chance of getting back. And just thinking about it makes me panic like I’m being held under water.

  Oh well, screw it. Everybody here is way off course; light-years from the nearest inhabitable planet, just somersaulting through the miasma. No wonder such a big part of growing old is learning to lower one’s expectations, only we call that maturity and wisdom so as not to sound too defeatist.

  When you are young you demand ecstasy; when you are old you settle for anything short of agony.

  Anything.

  I SUPPOSE that’s why I write letters to Nurse Sarah. Love letters, if you must. It started as a lark six months ago, a hobby for an old man trying to unload what love he has left. Now I write her once a week, usually two pages or so, the musings of one person who finds solace in the presence—even just the existence—of another.

  They are anonymous, of course, mailed to her home address in plain white envelopes. She even shows them to me. The first time I trembled as she read my words out loud, standing by my bedside one morning with one hand pressed against her chest. Now I fear she may be falling for this man, or at least with his words and their possibilities. I don’t know how to stop without hurting her or me.

  “Listen to this one,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder as she stood beside my chair in the recreation room, which was empty. “He says, ‘Beauty is the face of love, and love the feeling of enlightenment.’”

  “Not bad.”

  “And look at his handwriting. I didn’t know any man could write like that. It looks like the Declaration of Independence.”

  I agreed that the writing was quite striking and wondered aloud what that said about the author.

  “He’s obviously well-educated,” she said. “God, this is torture!”

  Yes, it is.

  By now she has divvied up all the men in her life into three very distinct categories: those she hopes are the authors, a small group indeed; those she is certain are not the authors, which of course includes me; and those she fervently hopes are not the authors, the largest group by far. She scrutinizes everybody: the man at the checkout counter, the waiter at the restaurant, the policeman who issues her a speeding ticket, her friends’ husbands. Especially her friends’ husbands.

  “I’ll bet he’s married and that’s why he won’t identify himself,” she said one morning as she checked my pulse. “I mean, if he really feels this way about me, you’d think he’d want to at least ask me for a date, wouldn’t you?”

  “I’m sure he’d love a date,” I said. “Maybe he’s afraid there is something about him that you wouldn’t like.”

  “Oh, like Cyrano de Bergerac?” She frowned. “You think maybe he’s really ugly?”

  “Or paralyzed or blind or deaf; it could be anything, really. Maybe he’s quite young.”

  “Not with this handwriting. That’s no teenager. Besides, teenagers can’t write this kind of stuff.”

  “No, you’re right.”

  “Well, I wish he’d give me some way to contact him,” she said. “This relationship is very one-sided. I don’t see what’s in it for him.”

  I shrugged.

  She folded her hands tightly across her chest. “Well, if he doesn’t give me his address soon, I’m simply going to stop opening his letters.”

  That afternoon I took the bus into town and paid for a post office box.

  The first letter from her was wary and full of questions. Gradually, she opened up. Now she is friendly, even passionate. Last week she sent me a picture of herself standing in front of a rosebush in her backyard. I picked the picture out myself.

  “Which one do you think I should send?” she had asked, offering me five choices. None of them showed her figure— she wanted to be modest—so I chose the one where she was starting to laugh and reaching for her face. I keep it in my wallet. I wrote back that her face in the picture was like a talisman or amulet that gave me hope and purpose even though I knew that it was Julia’s face I was really looking for.

  Now Sarah has threatened to stop writing unless I too send a photo of myself.

  “HEY DANIEL, you got any more cigarettes?” We were lying side by side in a hayloft a few miles from the front, passing a bottle of pinard back and forth and talking in the darkness.

  “In my pack.”

  “Shit, I can’t see a thing. Hold on.” I reached for the candle stub I kept in my pocket.

  “You got matches?”

  “Yeah, here.”

  I lit the candle. The light flickered off the hay and bathed everything in a faint yellow glow. Something in the far corner of the barn flapped in the air and disappeared. Daniel fumbled with his knapsack, then pulled out a pack of Sweet Caporals.

  We each lit one and lay back.

  “I’m almost finished with the poem I’ve been working on,” said Daniel, with a slight slur. I wondered if he was drunk. I rarely saw him drunk.

  “The one to Julia? Your epic?”

  “I was thinking of showing it to you before I send it.”

  “I don’t know much ab
out poetry,” I said, taking a deep drag of my cigarette. I watched the smoke mingle with my words.

  “You don’t need to. That’s the beauty of it.”

  “Sure, I’ll look at it.” I couldn’t wait to read it.

  “I don’t know how I’ll tell my parents,” he said, flicking the ash from his cigarette into his palm, then wiping it against his pants leg.

  “Have you heard from them yet?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand how… ”

  “I keep writing.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  He looked at me. “Don’t be so sure,” he said.

  “But why, if they don’t write back?”

  “Because I’m not in a position to hold a lot of grudges.”

  “Well, I’m sure they’ll soften up.”

  He shrugged.

  After a few minutes I blew out my candle and placed the stub back into my pocket. Then I lay back again and closed my eyes.

  “Patrick?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re all right.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I mean that.”

  “You too.”

  He pushed the bottle of pinard up against my shoulder. I took it, sat up and brought it to my lips, swishing the rough red wine around my mouth before swallowing.

  “Mind if I give you some advice?” he asked.

  “Shoot.”

  “Don’t let this war ruin you.”

  His comment took me aback. “Ruin me? It’s not going to ruin me, so long as I don’t get my balls shot off.”

  “I mean it. It’s going to ruin a lot of people. Don’t let it ruin you, all right?”

  “I’ll do my best—so long as I’m in one piece. Otherwise I may be a bit surly.”

  “Agreed.” He took the bottle from me and raised it to his lips, then exhaled loudly.

  “You know the thing that surprises me most about the war?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “It’s so damn lonely.”

  “I hadn’t really thought of it that way. There are so many shitty aspects to the whole enterprise that no single… hey, you’re not making a pass, are you?”

  He burst out laughing.

  “Because I can sleep outside… ”

  “Dream on.” He took another swig.

  “I think you’re drunk.”

  “I’m just unwinding,” he said.

  “Or unraveling.”

  He threw a clump of hay at me.

  We were quiet for a few minutes, then he said, “If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be?”

  “A warm bed,” I said, taking the bottle back from him.

  “I’d like to be on a tropical island, lying on the sand so that the waves just lapped my feet,” he said.

  “Are you going to talk like this all night?”

  “Actually, Julia can’t swim.”

  “She can stay on the beach.” I handed the bottle back to him.

  “She’s due next month. I hope she’s okay,” he said.

  “Sure she is.”

  “You know it’s funny, I really don’t feel like I’m going to be a father. I mean it hasn’t sunk in yet. It seems so… so far away.”

  He was quiet for a minute, then said, “Can you imagine holding a baby? Your own baby? Jesus.”

  “I can imagine holding yours easier than holding mine.”

  “I wonder what it’ll look like. To think that it’s some combination of me and Julia.”

  “It’s gonna be a beauty.”

  He put out his cigarette against a floorboard. “I won’t be able to afford a house. I have no insurance. Christ, what kind of a father am I going to be?”

  I looked at Daniel lying on his back, eyes to the ceiling. “You’ll be a great father. I know it.” I imagined him with a child and how wonderful he’d be. Lucky child.

  I closed my eyes again and listened to the distant thud thud of the guns. Suddenly a long, low rumble caught my attention. I sat up. “What was that?”

  Daniel was quiet a moment, then said, “Thunder.”

  “Thunder?”

  “Yes, thunder.”

  Again, a long deep growl in the distance.

  “It is thunder, isn’t it?” I said. “Doesn’t that remind you of being a kid and lying awake at night, all warm and safe under the covers?”

  The next rumble was louder. Five minutes later it began to rain, the drops slapping against the roof of the barn, which was just a few feet above our heads. Then lightning flashed through a small window just beyond our feet. Then again, followed by a tremendous crack of thunder. I jumped. “Jesus.”

  In the next flash I saw that Daniel was sitting up.

  “You can’t hear them,” he said.

  “Hear what?”

  “The guns. You can’t hear the guns.” He was smiling.

  I listened. “No, you can’t, can you?”

  “That’s good,” he said.

  In the next flash I saw that he was lying on his back again with his eyes closed.

  “Yes, that’s very good,” I said.

  JULIA’S BLOUSE was damp with sweat as we reached the hilltop and in the light breeze I caught the scent of her skin. I stood beside her and wiped the back of my neck and forehead with my handkerchief. We looked down at a patchwork of fields and woods that fanned out across a broad plain until the woods finally gave way to the fields. To the left old trench lines snaked across the ground like great big welts. And everywhere shell holes still gouged the earth as though from some ancient meteorite shower.

  “What a gorgeous day,” she said, smiling up toward the sky, where a thin white lace of high clouds inched quietly past, each cloud spaced perfectly apart like the folds in desert sand.

  “I remember being a child and lying on my back in the grass and watching the clouds drift past,” I said. “There was nothing else in the world but me and those clouds and the grass beneath me.”

  “Happiness to me was lying in bed at night during a thunderstorm and feeling warm and dry and knowing that my mother was just in the next room.”

  “I used to curl up in bed with my dog and read him stories by candlelight.”

  “You read your dog stories?”

  “He was a smart dog.”

  She smiled, then kicked away leaves and sat down. I sat across from her on a rock.

  “Happiness is different for adults, don’t you think?” she asked. “Much too fleeting. Like something you can’t see if you stare straight at it.”

  “I think for a lot of people happiness is just the absence of discomfort,” I said.

  “That’s not enough for me,” she said.

  “It’s not enough for me either. During the war we all insisted that whatever else we did in life we’d make sure we were happy, otherwise what was the point?” I laughed at the recollection. “Can’t you see all these young men congratulating each other on how happy they were going to be if only they didn’t get their butts shot off?”

  “Well, I’m happy you didn’t,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “I hope you don’t feel guilty… ”

  “For surviving? Yes, I do a bit, but it’s more a sense of responsibility; that I’ve got to make something of my life—get it right—because I was lucky enough to get a second chance.”

  “That’s a lot of pressure.”

  “But that was the point of everything we talked about: we were going to live when the war ended. Take everything in. Make our own rules. Not waste a minute.”

  “But nobody can do that.”

  “No, but we can try,” I said.

  She reached into her bag and took out some grapes, carefully pulling them apart into two bunches and handing one to me. I took it and placed it in my lap, pulling the grapes off one by one as I looked out over the valley.

  “At least you’re not normal,” she said.

  “I’m not?”

  “No, thank goodn
ess. Don’t you find normal people boring? They conceal all the important things.” Then her expression grew serious as she said, “I really haven’t enjoyed someone’s company so much in years.”

  “Neither have I.” I felt the burn in my chest again. Could she ever fall for me or was it just the friendship she needed? But who could remain friends like this? It was unbearable.

  She stood up and brushed off her skirt. “Shall we walk?”

  As the path narrowed, I let her walk in front of me. In the breeze I caught the lovely scent of her perfume. Strange, how emotional smells can be. And individual. As distinct as faces.

  After an hour we stopped again in a clearing near a pile of splintered timbers. Behind them was a mound of rusty tin cans and next to them some empty and broken ammunition crates. I pulled out a bottle of wine and removed the cork. We had forgotten glasses so we drank from the bottle, passing it back and forth.

  “What do you think about when you paint?” I asked.

  “Everything.” She smiled to herself. “Daniel thought that artists were trying to repair themselves, to heal themselves through their work. He admired them because he thought they salvaged something from human misery. But sometimes I think that art is more like the hot lava that spews from a volcano, originating miles underground.”

  “The accounting business doesn’t allow for a lot of spewing.”

  “No, I wouldn’t imagine it does.” Her smile grew. Whenever she smiled her face reddened slightly, which made her expression seem unusually genuine.

  “I think just about everybody would like to be an artist, if they had the talent,” I said. “Art seems to get right to the point.”

  She took a swig from the bottle and handed it back.

  “What inspires your painting?”

  “I guess it’s all the things that I want to say but can’t. Not with words.”

  “And do you get to say them that way, with your brush?”

  “I get to try to say them. That’s enough.” She lit a cigarette, exhaling slowly. “Without art; without paintings, books, sculpture and music, the human soul would be quite impenetrable, don’t you think?”