Losing Julia (2 page)

“Yes, I’m still at it.”

“I’d love to see some of your work.”

“Give me a few more years.” She removed her scarf and shook her hair, which was a thick brown, before running her hands through its wavy softness. Her gestures were slow and deliberate.

I put my coat down and we sat on the granite step that ran along the base of the monument and stared out at the sodden field, which was still marred with bits of barbed wire and marked off with signs that warned
TERRAIN INTERDIT
(forbidden ground) in large red letters. Julia turned and ran her fingers along the freshly engraved names.

As we sat in silence I felt nervous in her presence and wondered what to say. Should I talk about Daniel? The war?

“You have a child?” I asked finally.

“Yes, Robin.” Her smile returned. “A friend of mine is looking after her. It’s the first time we’ve ever been apart.”

I thought of Sean and how he always screamed with delight when I returned home from work, barreling down the hallway to the front door. Already I’d begun to miss him: his chubby little face, the way he mispronounced things, his endless noisemaking. Since he was born I’d even turned down business that would have taken me out of town.

“And you?”

“A son. He’s with my wife in Paris. She’s not much for this kind of thing.”

“Not too many people are.” She was right of course. I suppose that’s why I was so glad that she had come. I knew it would have meant a lot to Daniel. Death is such a lonely thing that it seems important for loved ones to know where you faced it. And Daniel and the others faced it just yards from where we were standing.

I looked down at the wet ground, wondering what fragments of war it still held.

“Mind if I ask you a question?” said Julia, standing up and turning toward me.

I raised my hands. “Anything.”

“Why did you come here?”

I shrugged.

“Wouldn’t you rather forget? I can’t imagine what you think about.”

“I can’t imagine explaining what I think about.”

She stared at me so intently that I had to look away. I tried to think how to describe all the reasons I had to come back to France. “I feel closer to them here. Closer to a big part of me. It’s hard to explain, really, but I had to come.”

“To say good-bye?”

“To say hello.”

A sad smile spread across her face. I stood up next to her and we both looked out over the meadow, which was gradually being swallowed by a thick mist.

I pulled out a pack of cigarettes, offering her one. Then I lit a match and cupped my hands in front of her face, watching the light play on her cheeks. Her face looked so lovely to me—those piercing green eyes set in a slight squint, as though she were concentrating extra hard—that I felt self-conscious, wanting desperately for her to like me, which always seemed to make me less likable.

“It’s getting cold,” she said, pulling the collar of her coat tighter around her neck. “Look, the fog has completely covered the field. Like a shroud.”

The headlights of a passing car swooped across the field, briefly illuminating the monument.

Julia ran her fingers along the etched names once more. “It’s so lonely here,” she said.

“It sure as hell ought to be,” I said, taking a long drag from my cigarette.

“It doesn’t upset you?”

“Not right now. To tell you the truth I’m almost enjoying it.” It was true: after ten years of being stalked by memories it felt good to be back; sad but good, as though I belonged here.

She gave me a sideways look. “So if I’ve got it right, you favor dark, lonely and rainy places?”

“Only with the right company,” I said, stomping my cigarette butt out. She kept looking at me, smiling. I looked down at my watch. “It’s getting late. Are you staying in town?”

“At the Hotel Concorde.”

“So am I.”

“Really?” A blush?

We began walking down the gravel path to where our cars were parked. “Any chance I could buy you dinner tonight?” I asked, hoping she wouldn’t detect the nervousness in my voice.

“Yes, I’d like that,” she said.

As she got in her car she turned toward me and I could see she was crying.

“Patrick?” she whispered. I leaned forward to hear her.

“Yes?”

She looked at me closely. “I need to know what happened.

You must tell me exactly what happened.”

WHAT HAPPENED.

I’m still not sure. Not completely. Too many holes. But I keep asking the question, asking over and over until I am limp with exhaustion. And I always come back to that first day I met her; to that face looking up at me with those sad beautiful eyes and those trembling lips and that soft struggling voice.

I always come back to Julia.

I can still see her clearly, even with these fading eyes of mine. Not for much longer though. You see, I am eighty-one now and everything hurts, sometimes all at once. Feet, knees, hips, lower back, stomach, head. One false step and smash, old man Delaney will splinter into a thousand pieces of brittle bone on cold cement. Then pneumonia and slow suffocation with concerned faces staring down at me like I’m laid out under glass; thick, heavy glass pressing against my wheezing chest. And finally, a forced retreat through drug-induced mists with voices calling fainter and fainter and me unable to scream until Patrick Delaney, loving father of two children, three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren; failed husband to one failed marriage (long long ago and mostly my fault); lover of many (but not nearly enough, which causes me tremendous grief); fiercely loyal friend to a few (all dead now but one, who can barely hear); disappears with a last shallow and putrid exhale.

Shit.

I’ve planned the funeral. Nothing starchy or pompous. Just a few words of comfort to mislead the survivors (no use dwelling on what’s in store for them), a few of my favorite songs—“If Ever I Would Leave You,” “There’s a Place for Us,” “Shenandoah”; I keep a list—and an absolute ban on holy pabulum, since I don’t believe a bit of it anyway. My ashes are to be discreetly scattered in the vineyards of Napa Valley—a deep, velvety cabernet, I’ve requested—giving me one last shot at the lips of an appreciative woman. The instructions, handwritten on two pages, are in an envelope in the top drawer of my bed stand. Waiting.

So am I, though with scant enthusiasm. The fact that I still floss is simply my way of saying, “Up yours, Lord; you can destroy my spirit but not my gums.” Not yet.

Strange how we labor all our lives to preserve our teeth—the one body part most likely to reemerge a few million years later from beneath the sands of the East African Rift, our incisors the subject of award-winning documentaries. I look at my teeth and remember how, as a boy, the whine of the dentist drill and the sickly taste of enamel so rudely challenged my adolescent sense of immortality. Head back and mouth open in an animallike snarl, I squeezed the hand rests and struggled not to cry.

Where are you, boy? I stare into the wood-framed mirror just above the small oak dresser in my room, searching. Some days I catch just a glimpse of him in the corner of my eyes, a small and frightened youth now buried beneath the rubble. Come back here, boy!

Sometimes I see him in my hands, now gnarled and splotchy but still, unmistakably, his hands too. I see them fumble with a ball, work a mitt, dig in the sand for hours. He’s a kind boy, shy and uncertain yet full of yearning. Baby fat still hides the knuckles. He runs with the awkward gait of a newborn colt. Always running. Come back!

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?