Losing Julia Read online

  Other days the hands look older and filthy dirty with broken nails and lacerations and I see them tremble as they grip a rifle. The noise is tremendous and I want to warn him but I can’t and I watch as he scrambles up the dirt with those hands clawing to the top and he staggers to his feet and runs, running madly until he disappears into smoke and horror. Careful!

  And me? Ha! I look like I’m 120, give or take. A small ember from a once-roaring fire. The older I get, the more out of place I feel, like a weekend guest still loitering around the cottage on Sunday night because he’s got no place else to go. How awkward, to feel a burden. Better to pack my things and move on. But please, before I go, isn’t there supposed to be some sort of resolution? A denouement before the final curtain? Redemption? Atonement? Extreme unction, perhaps? I feel none. Just loose ends that snap and crackle like downed electrical lines.

  Some mornings when I confront the mirror—it’s always a bitter confrontation—I recoil, shocked by the once-ruddy face that abruptly (at least that’s how it feels) turned ashen gray before sagging into layers like cheap shingles on a tear down. My hair, once light brown and thick, is a deathly gray, not a color really but what remains when there is no color left; the stuff on old corpses that are disinterred so that promising Ph.D.’s can examine whether the poor bugger was poisoned with arsenic after all, which of course he was.

  Staring at the gaunt silhouette in the mirror, which stares back with imploring eyes, I realize my body has abdicated. The anarchists are on the palace grounds.

  You can’t see me, can you? Not if you are young and still unbeaten. I am black and white fading to gray; you are living color. I am driven by pain; you by passion. I am a shadow, diaphanous and bent. An OLD MAN. A SENIOR citizen. A GERIATRIC. At best, I’ve devolved into one of those quaint caricatures, grandmas and grandpas with fishy breath and worn to the nub buttoned-down sweaters (buttoned down because we can no longer manage a pullover).

  To you, I look as though I have always been old, a permanent disfigurement upon the human landscape and a painful reminder of the road ahead. (Though you don’t really believe you’ll ever look this bad, do you?) To me, the face in the mirror continues to torment long after the initial, degrading changes, like being convicted and punished daily for the crime of simply hanging in there day after day.

  Grant me that I did hang in there, never boarding a doomed plane, never inhaling a deadly virus, never crushed by a car. For eighty-one years I have ducked and dodged the slings and arrows of outrageous bullshit. Missed me, bastards! Six months on the Western Front and the whole goddamn German Army—the jack-booted Jägers, the Landwehr and the Sturmtruppen, the Scharfschützen and the Flammentruppen and the Prussian Guard—couldn’t lay a fucking finger on me. (Well, maybe a few fingers, but not enough to do the job.) Kiss my ass, Ludendorff! (You butcher.)

  Yet finally, I am brought to my swollen knees by a hundred thousand indignities, small slices of the blade that have drained the blood from my face.

  And I’m so tired.

  I HAVE A black and white photo of me at thirty-four, standing by the ocean with a child in each arm like Atlas himself, my hair slicked straight back by the sea, which I can still taste. Shadows accentuate my biceps, my jawline, my abdomen. My body, then loyal servant to my soul, was stronger than its master, and much more intriguing, especially around women.

  How strange: one minute I was gazing toward the future, a head full of hopes and plans—endless plans—and the next thing I know, poof! I’m poking through the charred remains of my past, dumbfounded.

  Old age is a bloody rout.

  I thought dying old would be easier than dying young. Now I see how that very expectation makes it so much worse. Die young and fists clench with rage; die old and shoulders merely shrug. If you are young and dying, you are embraced with love and sympathy; charities exist solely to accommodate your final wishes. If you are old and dying, well you’re right on course, aren’t you? Take too long about it and the looks begin; subdued impatience at first, then glares as though you’ve been lingering at a window table in a crowded upscale restaurant long after your coffee has gone cold, the table cleared of everything but stains and crumbs.

  How about some commotion, a stir caused by the spreading news of my imminent demise? If the world would just wince momentarily at my passing. No need for flags at half mast (though I’d love it), but just a flinch, a brief pause before everyone returns to the busy business of life. Please, some sort of fuss somewhere. Anything but that bitter rationalization that he’s had a good life and his time has come and it’s all for the better now isn’t it dear oh I’m starving shall we order out Chinese?

  I had intended to be braver at this age, a fearless old fart beyond intimidation. Even a role model of sorts for the young and afraid, like the last Civil War veteran leading the town parade, chin up, eyes glinting, seen it all and survived. After all, the worst possible thing that could happen to me is bound to happen any day now, so what’s to fear but a little flatulence as I shuffle past the nurses’ station?

  And how I fear flatulence, which rattles the nursing home like car alarms in the city. “It tolls for thee,” quips the ubiquitous Oscar Bellamy, wagging his finger at the offender as he patrols the hallways in his squeaky wheelchair. For the first time in my life, flatulence is no longer a source of mild bemusement but genuine alarm. A loss of control. A clarion call from hell.

  Control. Here at the Great Oaks Home for Assisted Living—and dying—control means having possession of the call button. Everything else is careening out of control, which is why we are all here in the first place. We piss in our pants, we drool, we cry uncontrollably, we smell, we leak.

  That’s it, really. We have all sprung unstoppable leaks. We’re hissing to death, deflating old rafts adrift in the sea, flat out of flares and shit out of luck.

  I really must get some rest.

  Know your rifle. The rifle is the soldier’s fighting weapon, given to him by the Government with which to defend his country and himself.

  It is the soldier’s best friend.

  He should know it and understand it. He should learn its peculiarities, if it has any—that is, if it shoots high or low; to the left or to the right. And just as one makes allowance for the peculiarities of a friend, so should the soldier, in firing, make allowance for the peculiarities of his rifle—his best friend.

  —Privates’ Manual, 1917.

  THIS MORNING I looked in the mirror and saw just the outlines of my uniform, new and neatly pressed. What am I? Nineteen? A freshly minted soldier in the American Expeditionary Forces. One of Pershing’s doughboys. An eager transfusion for the drained armies of the West, bled silly in a monstrous, thunderous draw.

  I sit stiffly next to Mother and Father at the Hostess House at Camp Merritt, listening to their instructions on how to deport myself and what to avoid and most of all to stay safe. On the last day we are issued our steel helmets, and each man gets a new safety razor in a khaki kit with a trench mirror, a gift from the government. Early the next morning we march in the darkness to Cresskill Station, where we board a train to Hoboken. Then we march through the city to the docks, where we take coffee, doughnuts and apples from a table run by smiling women from the Red Cross, then fill out safe arrival cards to be mailed home from France.

  Six ships of differing sizes await us, each dazzle-painted to confuse German subs. On the side of the largest ship the silhouette of a small destroyer facing backward has been painted. We point and laugh loudly as we march up the gangplanks, waving back at mothers and fathers and wives and aunts and uncles and children. Black smoke belches from two dark gray funnels as thick, pythonlike ropes are tossed onto the pier where seagulls flap over food.

  France. Son of a bitch! I’m sailing for France. The war! I hear the band playing and flags snapping in the wind and the cool ocean air reddens my cheeks as I stand at the railing, leaning forward so I can look straight down and see the dark blue water sluicing by the side of the
ship. Most of the men have been ordered below deck until we clear the harbor to prevent German spies from estimating our troop strength. But I and a few dozen others have been allowed to remain on deck to smile and wave our campaign hats, lest those waving from the piers and smaller boats feel ignored. A fireboat salutes us with great arches of water as we pass the Statue of Liberty, the brave sons of America steaming east to join the valiant sons of France and Britain and Germany and Russia and Italy and Austria and Canada and Belgium and Bulgaria and Turkey and Australia in the greatest test of manhood in human history. A worldwide war!

  ON SHIP we play cards and study phrase books and listen to lectures and sleep in shifts. The soldier whose bunk I share is seasick, and I am dizzy with the smell. During twice-daily abandon-ship drills I stare at the dark frothing water and try to imagine jumping in. No, the fire would have to be at my back. But what about burning oil? Does it really burn upon the water? I look out on the horizon and see one of our escorting destroyers, a thin trail of smoke rising behind the sleek gray silhouette as it zigzags toward France. We are seven days out, three to go.

  As we enter the danger zone we are issued life jackets, which we must wear night and day. Lying in my bunk in the darkness, far below the waterline, I rehearse what I’d do if a torpedo struck. Then I try to imagine what the war will be like. Not what it will look like, but what it will feel like to be at the front. To be under fire. To shoot back. I peer out from my bedroll at the other men, some asleep, others just getting dressed. If they can do it, I can do it.

  We disembark at Saint-Nazaire, a sea of olive-drab khaki ordered left and right by MPs with scowls and whistles pinched between their thin lips. On the docks and wharves hundreds of black stevedores dressed in denim overalls unload crate after crate, their biceps straining beneath sweat-stained shirts, while bands of sullen German prisoners under guard shovel coal. We fall in and march and stop and march until eventually we are led into straw-lined boxcars, much smaller than ours, labeled “40 hommes—8 chevaux” on the sides in big white letters. We sit for six hours before moving, guarded by more MPs who line the tracks. I watch as the freight cars are loaded with horses, mules, rolling kitchens, machine gun carts, baled hay, ammunition, water carts, supply wagons, artillery and objects I’d never seen before. We pull forward, then stop in a railroad siding for two more hours. Then finally, the train heaves and creaks forward, clickety clacking through the French countryside, which looks remarkably tranquil and unmolested. Certainly land worth defending.

  At Langres we march and drill with bayonets and gas masks and grenades, Stokes mortars and Chauchat machine guns, and listen to lectures by hard-looking French and British liaisons who make us wish that we too were veterans. We build trenches and lay wire and then attack trenches with carefully orchestrated leapfrogs of one company over another until we are lost in clouds of dust. And then week after week of drilling until we are numb with boredom. We want only to face the Germans, to prove ourselves in battle! To show what Americans can do. Hundreds of thousands of Americans.

  Then, finally, my turn. I am going to the front!

  I run my hands along the smooth stock of my Springfield rifle. I strap my puttees on tight. I stand and salute. I march farther and farther east, bent under the weight of my pack.

  If only you could see me now, Father.

  Thunder in the distance. Streaming refugees. Our pace quickens.

  Now everything changes: trees are snapped and splintered, the thick-walled farmhouses are smashed, collapsed upon themselves in piles of stone. Dead horses. Rows of wooden crosses. Has some leviathan run amok? The earth convulses.

  Father?

  Mother?

  Oh shit.

  Father!

  What was it that the British poet and war hero Siegfried Sassoon said, that the war was a murderous “exploitation of courage”?

  Ferocious courage. Ferocious exploitation.

  Peer pressure gone berserk.

  Nurse? I think I have soiled my sheets.

  There could never before in war have been a more perfect target than this solid wall of khaki men… There was only one possible order to give: “Fire until the barrels burst.”

  —Diary of the German 57th Regiment

  THE ROAD FROM the monument to the hotel was narrow and rough. As I followed Julia’s car I tried to think of all the things I should tell her, but I couldn’t, not clearly. I didn’t know where to begin.

  We got to the hotel just after seven p.m. My room was on the third floor facing the street; Julia’s was on the second. After washing my hands and face in the enamel washbowl, I stood before the free-standing oval mirror, studying the red lines that fanned out from my corneas. In the corner of my eyes, the first traces of wrinkles arched toward my temples. I’d always assumed that I’d get better-looking as I aged, a consolation for my miserable teenage years, when acne and testosterone conspired to drive me to the brink of madness. That my looks might further deteriorate with time had only recently occurred to me.

  I wasn’t unattractive. Not too short, with a slight but sinewy build, fair skin, hazel eyes, a good hairline and a smile that seemed to make people trust me. I had good teeth too, even though they remained largely hidden in my smallish mouth. Though I lacked any obvious flaws, I remained eminently average-looking, in that no single feature nudged me into the better than average-looking crowd.

  I walked over to the dresser, picked up my comb and tried to impose some order on my hair, which was light brown and unruly. Frankly, I hated being average-looking, especially since none of the women who appealed to me were average-looking, which meant I was always working with a handicap. And Julia? I thought of her full smile and the whiteness of her neck and the way her eyes were set deep beneath dark eyebrows. I imagined the fullness of her breasts beneath her dress and how it would feel to trace their gentle curves with my hands. But men like me could never touch women like her. Daniel, yes, not me.

  I’d always been shy, my inborn confidence stripped by my ineptness at any and all sports, so that I took refuge in books, which helped neither my social skills nor coordination. And I’d always found girls—at least the ones that interested me—especially intimidating, certain they were acutely attuned to my every flaw. Altogether, high school was a disaster from which I still hadn’t fully recovered. I was, at best, seen as a “nice boy,” the kind that parents like to pat on the top of the head and teachers entrust with weighty missions to the office. When an attractive girl approached me, it was inevitably to confide how much she adored one of my strapping friends.

  And yet, at the memorial, Julia had seemed attentive; interested even. I tried to imagine what she was doing in her room and how she felt about meeting me. The futile daydreams of a married man. Pathetic. My heart quickened and I stood in front of the mirror, staring.

  Careful Paddy.

  We met in the lobby at eight p.m. I was there early, sitting on a small sofa flipping quickly through a magazine.

  “Oh there you are,” she said. That smile. I stood quickly. She had changed into a white shirt and burgundy-colored pants—Charlotte wouldn’t have been caught dead in pants—while her hair was pulled back in a bun and she wore a simple pair of silver hoop earrings. I had to keep from staring at the gentle curves of her hips, which suggested all sorts of other perfect proportions.

  “You look… absolutely great,” I said.

  She smiled shyly. “Thank you.” We stood in silence for a moment, then she looked down at her hands, winced and said, “I forgot my purse.” She bounded back up the stairs.

  When she returned she held the worn brown leather purse up, as if to demonstrate that it was now securely in her possession, then said, “I’ve had a few days to look around and I know a wonderful little cafe just four blocks from here.”

  “Lead the way,” I said, placing my hand gently against the small of her back.

  Outside the air was cooler and laced with the earthy scent of fall, which always made me nostalgic. We walked
slowly, brushing each other, and I tried not to think of how long we would have before we had to say good-bye.

  I studied the buildings, noting which were old and which had been completely rebuilt since the war. When we passed the clock tower I remembered that I once drank at a bar around the corner in a building that now housed a bakery. Perhaps the town’s consumption of beer wasn’t what it was ten years ago.

  “This has been such an adventure for me,” she said. “It’s such a beautiful country.”

  “Oh yeah, it’s one hell of a place,” I said.

  She gave me a strange look.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that when I was in Paris listening to all these tourists gasping over the culture and architecture and cuisine, as though they’d completely forgotten that… ” I couldn’t think of how to finish.

  “Forgotten what? Tell me.”

  “That the world damn near bled to death here, that’s what.” I pulled out a cigarette and lit it quickly.

  She waited for me to continue.

  “I don’t mean to sound so bitter.” I smiled to myself. “That’s the one thing my parents kept telling me when I came home, that I’d become cynical. The funny thing is, before the war I didn’t have even a hint of irony in me. I was so simple.”

  “I’m glad you’re not simple anymore.”

  “Well if I sound too bitter, just shut me up.”

  “I’m not sure I’d want to.” She gave me a longer look and a smile that made me want to kiss her. What’s with me?

  “How long have you been in France?” I asked.

  “Two weeks, mostly in Paris. I’ve been here for a few days. It’s quite a lovely little town, not anything like it was during the war, I’m sure. Maybe we can take a hike tomorrow? I’d like to see some of the countryside.”