Losing Julia (31 page)

“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 goodness. 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?”

She looked at me with an expression I hadn’t seen before, excitement tugging at the corners of her eyes, as though she had suddenly found something she was looking for. Then she stood and leaned against a birch tree, her arms stretched behind her around the trunk, and said, “When I was in Paris I went to the Louvre. It was my first visit. I was overwhelmed!”

I could see it immediately in her eyes and I thought of how wonderful it would be to wander through the Louvre with her, arm in arm and painting by painting, and then sit by the Seine and watch the world from the safety of our togetherness.

“I spent all day wandering up and down the hallways, staring at the
Mona Lisa
and Canova’s
Psyche and Cupid
and the
Venus de Milo
and Caravaggio’s
The Death of the Virgin
and hundreds of other works in all shapes and sizes and colors. My feet were killing me. And just before I was about to leave, I was staring at Michelangelo’s
The Dying Slave
, and I suddenly realized that every single work I had seen expressed the same thing, the same intense longing for beauty and immortality and justice and compassion. It was as though all of these artists from throughout history were there in those long hallways crying out the same anguished plea in a thousand different languages. I burst into tears and started running. I just had to get out.”

I said nothing as I watched the beautiful woman with tears in her green eyes running from the Louvre and then through the Tuileries, disappearing in a crowd.

“After that I didn’t feel so alone anymore. Suddenly I realized that the deepest, most, indescribable parts of my soul had been felt and understood and transcribed by these artists. But it made me sad too, because I realized that that is the best we can do: to express our longings and pain. We can never stop it.”

“But is everything in the Louvre so sad?”

“Most of it seemed sad to me. Exquisitely sad, because it was so beautiful too. The entire human soul is on display there. It’s all said.”

“And the comfort is in knowing that it’s been said.”

She nodded. “And when I thought of what it took to make those works, painting or sculpting by candlelight with tired limbs and strained eyes, well I knew those artists must have been suffering tremendously deep inside. Can’t you see them, toiling away all their lives because they have to?”

I tried, but I kept coming back to her smile and then the tears and the woman fleeing from the Louvre.

DANIEL AND I
were foraging for apples in an orchard when we came across a wrecked Fokker, the front end smashed into the ground and the tail pointing in the air. The pilot was still in his seat, slumped forward and covered with flies. We both peered into the cockpit but the smell drove us away.

“How long you figure he’s been here?” I said, walking slowly around the plane and staring at the big black crosses painted on the tail and wings and fuselage, which was punctured by a row of bullet holes.

“Couple of days,” said Daniel, inserting his finger into one of the bullet holes.

Neither of us had seen a plane up close before and we spent several minutes studying it and running our hands along it and tapping it with our boots, as though we’d come across the carcass of a predator that we weren’t convinced was dead.

“I wonder if he’s one of those famous aces?” I asked, looking again at the pilot, whose face was so mangled that I had to turn away.

Daniel shrugged. “We should bury him.”

“You’re joking?” Though I knew immediately that he wasn’t.

Daniel pulled out the small trench shovel from his pack, walked a few paces from the plane and began digging. We switched off every twenty minutes until we had a carved out a shallow but serviceable grave.

Then we crawled through the wreckage of the fuselage until we were on either side of the pilot. Grabbing him under the armpits, we counted to three and heaved. He didn’t budge. We shifted positions, then tried again, squinching our faces at the smell and trying to blow away the flies.

“It’s useless,” I said, jumping down off the wreckage after we’d struggled for fifteen minutes. “His legs are trapped.”

“We’ve got to get him out,” said Daniel, yanking again on the pilot’s arm.

“What does it matter? Christ, the guy’s dead.”

“Wouldn’t you want to be buried?”

“I’m not sure I’d give a shit,” I said. Did I? Neither option seemed appealing.

Daniel crawled up on the fuselage, then stood above and behind the pilot and began pulling frantically at his coat. “Come on, damn it!” He yanked again and again, until the sweat was pouring down his face, then finally he let go and smashed his fist against the plane. Then he slid down against the side of the wreckage and buried his hand in the crook of his elbow.

I’d never seen him lose control before and it unnerved me, like a child seeing his father cry. I went over to him and put my arm on his shoulder. “Come on,” I said. “Time to go.”

Daniel banged his free hand against the side of the plane again. I could see his shoulders shaking.

After a few minutes of silence he slowly stood up, packed his shovel and picked up his sack of apples. Then we walked on through the orchard and to the road and headed back to camp.

My senses are charred; I don’t take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write Deceased over their letters.

—Wilfred Owen, British Army, in a letter home.

Killed in action, 1918, seven days before the Armistice.

I SKIPPED
dinner last night. Instead I sat in my room at my desk and worked on a drawing of Julia. I thought I had something for a while, at least the mouth and the high curve of the cheekbones. Then it fell apart on me so that I couldn’t even look at it anymore. I put it into my drawer, next to the others. Then I went outside and sat and looked up at the stars until my neck ached.

Ever since I was a child, stars have made me feel wonderfully insignificant. Maybe it’s because the heavens are one of the few things large enough to dwarf my own problems, to place even my acute anxiety into some perspective. I’m quite content to feel diminished if my problems are equally demeaned, which is why I love oceans and hate Sunday nights.

I closed my eyes for a moment. In the vast darkness I saw my grandmother sitting next to me on the front porch, rocking. She held my hand in hers and sang, “I see the moon, the moon sees me, the moon sees somebody I’d like to see… ”

I opened my eyes and wrapped my sweater tight and stared at the flickering pinpoints above, feeling the chronology of my life tumble out of order. I could be eight years old now, or twelve, or twenty-four, or thirty-four, or fifty-eight; the stars look exactly the same. How many other things in our lives remain constant even as we decay? Not enough.

Do I want an epitaph? I made a note to think about whether I might be willing to hang my hat on a pithy phrase for eternity, though I doubt it. What on earth would I say? THE JIG IS UP?

I read once that the sun will expire in about five billion years. Not an immediate concern but I can’t help wondering: if we knew for certain that the human race and all we’ve created would eventually be destroyed in a great big solar surgical scrub, would it change anything? Certainly all of the world’s problems would suddenly be cast in a more temporary light, though the same would be true for the planet’s rain forests and art treasures. The knowledge of our ultimate annihilation would be no small blow to our illusions of self-importance and would make our Darwinian scramble to pass on our genes laughable. (After all, who would want
their
offspring to be around when the lights go out?)