Losing Julia (45 page)

There in the corner, with a bowl of apples in her lap and matching lipstick smeared all over her front teeth, sits Mitzie Smith, dressed (thank God) in her favorite lime green dress and hat and smiling ear to ear. “Surprise!”

TIME IS
doing strange things again, so that the present seems increasingly irrelevant while the past comes ever sharper into focus. Some days I am plunged backward as though dunked under water, suddenly remembering things I had forgotten for years. It’s really not a bad sensation. In many ways I enjoy it; the feeling that I’m drawing closer to people and places long left behind. Maybe the past doesn’t keep irrevocably receding. Maybe in old age time loops back on itself so that we can return to the things that meant the most to us (and flee the mounting horrors of the present).

Today, for example, I could almost insist it’s 1941. Sudden news about a place called Pearl Harbor. Frozen faces held near large wooden radios that crackle with distant voices. Clumps of people in the streets exchanging questions, shopping bags at their feet. The trees are bare and there are Christmas decorations in the shop windows. Everybody moves fast and there seem to be more cars on the road than usual. So it’s war then. Is San Francisco safe? Where’s the Japanese fleet? How quickly will we mobilize and how old will the army draft ’em this time?

And that sick feeling low in my stomach as I sit by the window of my small cottage near the high school campus where I teach, a pile of student papers in my lap. I am dressed in a dark gray sweater and slippers and watching as the low white sky turns gray and then bluish-black.

Europe has already gone mad again. Hitler in Paris. The Luftwaffe over London. My God, the Great War was just the beginning.

IT WAS STILL
light when I got back to Paris. I stood outside the hotel for a few minutes before I went in, watching my reflection in a windowpane, then smiled as best I could when Charlotte opened the door to our room. I tried to tell her about the memorial and the trenches and the forts at Verdun but I couldn’t find the right words and I was worried that I sounded nervous. Then I sat in a chair in the corner with Sean on my lap and listened as she told me all the places that she and Margaret had been and where they’d eaten and what fun they’d been having.

As I sat there with my chin resting on the top of Sean’s head and my arms wrapped around his waist I stared at Charlotte and reminded myself of all the wonderful things about her: her smile and her laughter and the way she was with Sean and her soft hair and smooth hands and then all the things we’d been through together. As I watched her and listened to her stories I knew that I still loved her and that I could never leave. But I also knew that I would never feel the kinds of things that I felt with Julia. Not even close.

Sean loved the sailboat. From the minute I walked in the door he followed me everywhere, one fist locked on my pants leg. We wrestled on the bed with the pillows, then used a blanket to build a makeshift fort in the comer where we sat in the semidarkness enjoying the cozy sense of safety and secretiveness. After I read him three books I tucked him into bed, lying next to him until he fell asleep, head against my chest. Then I went down the hall and took a shower, gave Charlotte a kiss and a hug and crawled into bed, telling her I was tired. The next day, a little before noon, I walked to the Arc de Triomphe and waited for Julia.

I’M SITTING
at the breakfast table, hemmed in by wheelchairs and staring down at my uneaten food, and suddenly I miss Daniel. Terribly so. It feels like a hunger, or the cravings I felt when I quit smoking. Only worse. I feel tearfully desperate for something I can’t have.

One person dies and the whole world looks sadder, hollowed out so that you hear echoes in places where there aren’t supposed to be any. Each passing day and month and year is an accumulation of absences; of people, places and events that a loved one will never see or know about. When you have suffered a terrible loss you look at things and think: I wonder what he would have made of that? Wouldn’t he have enjoyed this and oh God he would have hated that and shit this reminds me of him.

When people die it’s as though the earth itself opens briefly and swallows them up.

The last thing people do when they die is to change all the people who loved them. I can still feel the dead reverberating through my own life, sometimes with the delicacy of ripples on a pond, other times with the force of shock waves. And the strangest thing is how much talking the dead still do; talking in our heads. I’ve actually grown quite fond of it.

But I can’t shake the sadness. Sometimes nostalgia swamps me like a flash flood and leaves me floating facedown amid the flotsam of the past. Not the nostalgia that comes with the change of the seasons—which is as good as sad gets; a rusty, blood red if you gave it a color—but the deeper, more funereal longing. Melancholy, if you will.

I know that the act of remembering the past changes it and it’s a bloody good thing too or growing old would be utterly intolerable. At a certain age you realize that living life is only the first step, then you’ve got to figure what to make of your experiences, which is actually much more critical than the experiences themselves. That’s what old age is for, when you pass the days scouring your memory like the wretched Filipinos who scavenge Manila’s city dump, sorting images and sensations into various heaps that are then relentlessly revised, resorted and repressed until finally, when you are wheeled out for display each Thanksgiving and Christmas, you respond to each and every inquiry with a polished reiteration of your accomplishments before nodding off.

I WAS CLOSING
the bookstore on a Friday evening in November when a woman in a long gray raincoat knocked on the glass panes of the front door. The rain beaded down her hat and onto her shoulders and strands of dark brown hair were stuck to her cheeks, which were flushed. When I opened the door she smiled and thanked me.

She resembled Julia, only younger. Julia would be in her late fifties then, as was I.

“Do you mind? I just want to get one book.”

“Not at all, come in.” I switched the main light back on. She took her hat off and shook her hair. I felt a burning sensation in my chest.

“Take your time. Can I help you find something?”

“D. H. Lawrence,
Women in Love.
”

“Right over here.”

“Oh great. I finally have a night to myself and I promised I’d read a good book. No TV or junk magazines.” She carried the book over to the counter. I rang it up.

“Feel free to browse some more. I’m in no hurry.” Can you ask a woman to read with you? No, not a stranger.

“I’m all set now, thanks.” She held up the book. “Have you read much Lawrence?”

“A bit.”

“I read this once in school only I don’t remember any of it.”

“I don’t remember things I read last week,” I said.

“I don’t think people should read the really important books until they are at least thirty, not unless they promise to read them again.”

“What do you like to read?”

“I used to enjoy reading history and biographies, that sort of thing. But a couple of years ago I just stopped reading books. Don’t ask me why. Anyway, I’ve decided to start reading again only this time I want to read fiction. I’ve missed so much.”

Should I ask her for a cup of coffee? No, she’s twenty years younger than me. She’s a customer. But God the resemblance.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you in here before.”

“I live on the west side. I was in the area.”

“You’re not from California by any chance, are you?”

“No, why do you ask?”

“You remind me of someone.”

“I have a cousin… ”

“Julia?”

“No, Ann.”

“Well anyway, I hope you come back.”

She smiled. “I will.” She picked up her book, turned toward the door, then stopped. What eyes. “Are you the owner? “

“Yes.”

“It must be nice to own a bookstore. I’d like that.”

“It’s not very profitable.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t care about the money. Just to be around all these books.” She looked around. “I’ve even thought of taking a job in a bookstore.”

“What do you do now?”

“I’m not working at the moment.”

“Let me know if you’re looking for a job. I might need somebody.” Ridiculous. I’d go bankrupt in a month.

“I will.” She paused at the door. “Maybe next time you could recommend a book for me?”

“I’d be happy to. Any particular author or subject?”

“No, you pick it. I’d like that.” Another big smile, full of promise.

“Why then I will.”

After she left I turned off the overhead light, went over to the display window and watched her walk across the street and down the sidewalk. It was still raining but she hadn’t bothered to put her hat on. When she turned the corner I turned the lights back on and began going through the shelves, looking for ideas. I stayed until after midnight, finally making a pile of twelve books I thought she might like. But which one?
The Brothers Karamazov? A Room of One’s Own? Anna Karenina?
The poetry of John Keats or perhaps John Donne?
The Good Soldier? Look Homeward, Angel? Lie Down in Darkness?

The next day I took away some books and added more. After a week I had whittled the stack down to six books, which I kept on the counter behind the cash register. I thought if I offered her six, she could take her pick and that way I wouldn’t feel so awfully responsible. A week later I suddenly switched two of the books, then switched them back again. I also kept a list by my bed stand, in case something came to me in the night.

The hard part was imagining her reading each book. Would she be in bed—by a husband, perhaps—or by a fire, or sitting at a table in the kitchen with a cup of coffee? When she read would she ever think of me, looking for what it was that made me recommend the book? Can a person fall in love that way? No, of course not.

After a month I moved the books to the shelf beneath the cash register, where they stayed until two weeks after that, when I moved them to the back room. Then one day two months later I reshelved the books. When I got home I tore up the list.