Losing Julia (17 page)

“You don’t have to say anything. I’m just glad that you’re here.”

She pulled a piece of bread from a baguette and handed it to me. “I worry about smothering Robin with too much love. I just have no one else.”

“There are worse fates for children.”

She pulled out a piece of cheese and began unwrapping it. “There are so many times I wish I could ask Daniel what to do. I even try to imagine what he would tell me, how he would handle a situation.”

I put my wineglass down. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

She looked at me expectantly.

“Daniel was writing you a marriage proposal.”

Her expression froze.

“It was in the form of a long poem. He spent weeks working on it. It was dozens of pages long when he died. I promised to find you and tell you but I didn’t know your last name. All your letters disappeared with him. Everything.”

She sat perfectly still for a moment, looking down. I watched her hands, which trembled slightly. After a few minutes I asked, “How did you know he had died?”

She tried to smile through her tears. “We had this very simple system that allowed me to keep track on a map of where he was. I’d simply put together the second letter in every third line of his letters and they would spell out where he was and whether things were going well or not. So I knew he was at the front, and when the letters stopped coming, I knew he was dead.”

She folded a cloth napkin and wiped her face, then took a deep breath and sat up straight. “I’m really not sure what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. Sometimes I feel like I’m already old, like all the best things in my life are memories, except for Robin.”

“You can’t think that way.”

She shrugged, then handed me a piece of cheese. “My friends tell me it’s time to put Daniel behind me and find another man and get married. They’re afraid I’m going to end up an old spinster.”

“I don’t imagine that happening to you.”

“But I don’t want to get married. Why should I? Besides, I’m not what most men are looking for in a wife.”

“I don’t know—”

“It’s true. I hate to cook and I hate to clean and I’m disorganized and messy and I don’t like wearing makeup. I also snore.”

“You snore?”

She blushed slightly. “Only when I’m really tired.”

“I don’t believe you snore.”

“It’s not like I rattle the windows.”

“Daniel snored.”

“I remember.”

“I think he kept the Germans up a few nights. I used to worry that they’d try to silence him with a couple of well- placed mortar rounds.”

“I used to kick him.”

“So did I. Only with my boots on.”

She laughed, then asked, “Do you like being married?”

“Do I like it? Sure I do. Why do—”

“I don’t mean to pry. It’s just that I see so many unhappy couples. I’d much rather be single all my life than marry the wrong person.”

“Nobody plans to marry the wrong person.”

“Of course not.” She took another sip of her wine, then lit a cigarette. “It’s always amazed me that so many people do find someone to marry. It seems like such a long shot, to stumble across the right person at the right time. Most of the men I meet are so utterly self-absorbed, prattling on about themselves for hours.” She paused, then looked up at me with a laugh. “But you’re not like that.”

“Maybe I just don’t have that much to prattle on about.”

“I bet you do.”

She leaned back on both elbows again, letting the cigarette smoke slowly rise from her mouth. I could see the outline of her breasts, her nipples pushing through her dress. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, rather too quickly. “Or something awfully close to it.”

“Is that how you felt about your wife when you first met her?”

I blushed. “No, I mean not exactly.” I tried to find the right words. “I was attracted to her. She seemed nice. It was a more gradual process. It’s funny that you ask because the guys in our squad had endless debates about love and romance. You have to realize we had a lot of time on our hands.”

“Sounds like an unusual group of men.”

“The best.” I thought of Giles and Tometti and Lawton and Daniel, of our late-night talks curled up in a dugout or on duty or marching, all the funny stories and laughter and dirty jokes and hopes and longings and loneliness. “I think that’s what saved me.”

“And what did you all decide?” She was smiling.

“About love? Well for starters we decided we all wanted to fall in love at first sight, like Daniel had with you.”

She looked momentarily flustered.

“But we couldn’t decide whether love at first sight could last, whether that feeling, that intoxicating attraction, that passion, could be sustained, or whether it just wore off. Nonetheless, we were desperate to find out.”

“I guess I’ll never know that now.” She took another slow drag of her cigarette, then extinguished it in the grass. “Tell me, did you have a girlfriend during the war?”

I suppressed the urge to lie. “No. To be honest, I was envious of Daniel.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t. I’ll bet you were quite popular growing up.”

“What, are you kidding? Pudgy Paddy?”

“Pudgy Paddy?”

I winced. “It was a phase. My mother used to make these cookies… ”

“Pudgy Paddy. It’s catchy. I was called Pinky.”

“Pinky?”

“I had pinkeye on and off for most of sixth grade. It went from one eye to the other and then back again. It was quite charming.”

“I had pinkeye the night of the high school dance.”

“You didn’t.”

“Fortunately, I didn’t have a date.”

“You didn’t either? Aren’t we a pair?” She brushed her hand against my forearm.

I studied her face. She didn’t
know
the power she held.

“I always kept to myself at school,” she said. “I never really felt comfortable with other kids. They seemed so unpredictable to me. And I was teased because I couldn’t afford the right clothes. Little girls can be quite cruel.”

“Another loner,” I said, smiling to myself as I pulled off another piece of bread, added a slice of cheese and began eating it.

“I prefer loners,” she said. “They’re the most interesting people.”

“If you can get to them.”

She laughed. “Before I met Daniel I didn’t know you didn’t have to be so alone.”

Was I lonely, even with a wife and son? I was, and I hadn’t even noticed.

She rose to her feet and brushed herself off. “It’s hard to find the right person, isn’t it? Someone you can love without losing yourself?”

I nodded and stood up, feeling cornered by her questions. What if I simply told her what I felt? Would that scare her? Would she feel sorry for Charlotte? How could I explain to her that it wasn’t just a physical attraction; that I wasn’t another lecherous husband on the make? How could I tell her the truth without overwhelming her?

A biplane passed overhead, low and droning. I felt an instinctive chill of fear. We both watched it until it disappeared. Then Julia turned to me, looking suddenly serious, and said, “How did you let go of the war; of the things you saw and did?”

“I’m not sure that I have.” I looked at her and she held my gaze. Her eyes looked curious, as though she were searching for something.

“How often do you see the other men, the ones who came home?”

“Used to be once a year. We’d drink ourselves into a stupor. But now people are starting to drift off. Either they don’t want to be reminded of the war anymore or they’re just too busy trying to raise families and make a living.” She was now standing close to me.

“The saddest part is, it’s not the same even when we are together. Most of the guys are so different now; preoccupied. I hardly recognize them.”

“Life does that,” she said, plucking a bright red leaf from a nearby branch and running her fingertips along its surface, as if memorizing its texture. I imagined her fingertips running across my skin.

I lit a cigarette, shaking the match hard before tossing it to the ground. “You know the strangest part of it all, the war I mean? I’ve never felt so alive in all my life. Everything: my hearing, sense of smell, my vision, my taste buds; it was all so magnified. I noticed
everything.”

That was the secret delight of war, wasn’t it? That at least for once in your life, everything was on the line.
Everything mattered.

“That probably had something to do with being shot at.”

I laughed. “But doesn’t it seem a little pathetic, that we have to have a gun to our heads to fully value life?”

“Yes, come to think of it, it does.”

“Actually, I believe that falling in love has the same effect—without quite so many downsides.”

“Oh really?” Her full smile pressed her cheeks back toward the outer corners of her eyes, lifting her nose slightly.

I imagined holding her face and kissing her lips, her eyes, her chin. Was I falling in love? No, I’d already fallen, from the first moment I’d seen her; her eyes and nose and hair and laugh and hands and her smell and the things she said and the warm tone of her voice and the shape of her ears and her gestures and her easy smile. Especially her smile.

I reached for the wine bottle and poured more wine.

“Do you mind if we stay longer?” she asked. “I’d like to paint some more if you don’t—”

“Not at all.” I handed her a glass and we stood facing each other. Above, plump white clouds slowly crept past and the air felt cooler. In the distance I saw several cows clustered on the slope of a hill. “I’m curious, have you always wanted to be a painter?”

She nodded, then took a sip of her wine. “Somehow it makes me feel better. After Daniel died it’s all I wanted to do.”

She was standing so close to me, her head tilted slightly up toward mine. I longed to reach out and grab her in my arms. Couldn’t I? No, I couldn’t. So many reasons why I couldn’t. Yet none seemed convincing. I leaned forward and kissed her quickly on the lips, then stepped back to look at her face. I thought she seemed to blush as she dropped the leaf she was holding. She opened her mouth as if to speak, then stopped herself and turned and walked back to her canvas.

I WAS SITTING
in the lounge this afternoon when I looked up from my book and noticed that I was surrounded by the No Names. The No Names are people who no longer talk; people whose souls have long since fled and whose eyes are like the vandalized windows of an abandoned farmhouse, the grass coming up through the porch steps and the front door half open, leading to cluttered darkness. They just sit all day, sucking air in, and breathing it out. Just breathing. I call them the No Names because I can’t bear to learn their names. Not after they’ve already died. Who wants to acquaint themselves with a name that no longer registers?

I closed my book and hurried back to my room.

YOU’VE AGED
well, Patrick.

You think so? I don’t. This place depresses me. All these old people, most of them long dead only they don’t know it.

I want to ask you something.

Please. Anything.

Just one question.

I’m ready.

Well, after all these years, after everything you’ve seen, do you still think life is a tragedy?

Oh yes, Julia, I do. But there are some very funny moments. This just isn’t one of them.