Losing Julia (49 page)

Suddenly Julia stopped, pushed me up against a lamppost and kissed me. I wrapped my arms around the small of her back and pulled her against me. When we started walking again she smiled at me and said, “I’m famished.”

“Food?”

She nodded and said, “Then more kisses.”

I kissed her again. “Deal.”

We made our way to the Boulevard Saint-Germain where we stopped for dinner at a large brasserie.

As we took our seats Julia leaned toward me and asked, “Do you think I should have visited Daniel’s parents? I’ve thought about it a lot—they are Robin’s grandparents—but I couldn’t stand the idea of being turned away.”

“I don’t know. They’d be pretty old by now.”

“It bothers me,” she said.

“I can understand why.” I paused for a minute, then said, “You must miss your mother a great deal.”

She nodded slowly. “There are so many times when I wish I could ask her for advice. She was so good at the difficult decisions. I’m afraid that I’m not.”

How was I at the difficult decisions?

“And I wish Robin could have been old enough to know her. She was all the family I’ve got.”

“At least Robin’s got a wonderful mother like you.”

“But I’m not sure that’s enough. I worry about her, not having a real family, not having a father or aunts or uncles or grandparents or even a house full of memories.”

I couldn’t think of what to say. Finally I said, “I’d love to meet her someday.”

“Yes, I’d like that too.”

The waiter brought the menus. “Do you understand any of this?” asked Julia, looking up at me.

“Not a word. I just choose randomly.”

“Then I’ll have what you have.”

“Of course I may get the brains.”

“Don’t you dare.”

She picked up the wine list. “Do you feel like champagne? I’ve only had it once before.”

“Then let’s remedy that.” I ordered a bottle.

After we drank a toast I leaned forward and kissed her and said, “You know something? Daniel was right, everything does look different now.”

“What do you mean?” She was smiling.

“I mean that I’ve never seen things this way before. Not this fork or that plate or the people at the next table or the trees or the buildings or the sky. It’s all completely different.”

She reached over and squeezed my hand. Then her smile slipped from her face. “When I first met you at the monument I felt scared,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because certain people can change your life forever.”

Did she really believe I could change her life? No, I’d never be what Daniel was to her. Nobody could. “You’ve changed mine,” I said.

She nodded slowly. “To us,” she said, raising her glass.

“To us.”

She lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke up toward the ceiling. “What time do you have to get back?”

I looked down at my watch. “Not for hours.”

“Would you take me dancing then? Just for a little while?”

“As long as you promise not to laugh at me.”

“Why would I laugh at you?” she asked.

“Because I’m a lousy dancer.”

“Good, we’ll be perfect together.”

We found a small nightclub not far from the restaurant, ordered drinks and then danced nonstop for an hour, laughing and kissing and trying not to fall over each other. Julia was full of animation as she tried to show me some steps and I noticed how the band members watched her and how she made them smile and I realized that she was the kind of person who changed the feeling in a room, so that others suddenly feel that they are in the right place. Is that the secret of life, to surround yourself with people who are so full of passion, people who know sadness but not bitterness? I looked into her face, which was alive with excitement, and then into her eyes, which were full of all the things you can only say with your eyes.

“Now just move your left foot like this,” she said, demonstrating.

“You’re gorgeous,” I said, whispering into her ear.

“You’re not listening.”

“I was distracted. Anyway, I was raised not to stare at a woman’s feet.”

“I’m granting a special dispensation,” she said.

“I’ll take it,” I said, staring down at her legs as she demonstrated a dance step once again.

When we returned to our seats my shirt clung to my chest and back with sweat but I didn’t care. I wanted to stay out all night.

“This has been such a wonderful day,” said Julia, pulling her chair next to mine. “It’s so different from my life.”

“Mine too.” I thought about that: how I felt as though I’d walked right out of my previous life and all its constraints and assumptions, if only for a few hours. Then I thought of Sean lying in his bed asleep, curled up like a tiny animal. Did he wonder why Daddy didn’t give him a kiss good night?

“I think it’s the unlived parts of our lives that fascinate us the most,” she said, swiveling her empty glass in her hand. “So much remains dormant.”

“But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

“No, but it usually is, isn’t it?”

We sat for a while and then danced again, until I stepped on Julia’s foot for the third time.

“It really doesn’t hurt,” she said, covering her mouth with her hands and trying to stifle laughter. “Honest.”

“Let’s give it a brief rest in any case,” I said. When we returned to our table a well-dressed man with a friendly red face approached us.

“You like the band?” he asked, leaning over us.

“They’re wonderful,” said Julia.

He nodded approvingly.

“You’re the owner?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said proudly.

“It’s a very lovely place,” said Julia.

He studied us for a moment, resumed his large smile and said, “You are engaged, no?”

“Oh, no—”

“Yes, yes we are,” I said. “How did you guess?”

Julia turned quickly and looked at me. I ignored her.

“I can always tell,” he said. “It’s in the language of the body and the eyes and the face. I never miss it. Allow me to buy you a drink.” He turned and signaled a waiter. Then he leaned toward me and said, “Your fiancée is very beautiful.”

“She is, isn’t she?”

Julia was still staring at me, blushing.

“When will you be married?”

I turned to Julia and took her hand. “Darling?”

She looked at me, then at the owner. “That’s a little tricky,” she stuttered. “Things to iron out and all. The relatives. Finding the right spot… ”

“Don’t put it off,” he said, looking at me. “Such a woman is easily lost.” He winked. I hesitated before winking back.

When he left Julia leaned over and pinched me. “You’re drunk,” she said, smiling coyly.

“I just wanted to see what it would feel like to say that. I hope you’re not embarrassed.”

“Maybe caught off guard.” She folded her cocktail napkin, then unfolded it. “So how did it feel?”

Again the burning in the chest, only stronger this time. “Good,” I said softly. “Very good.”

She blushed again and looked down at her napkin. When the band started up she stood and took my hand and led me back to the dance floor. I wrapped both my arms around her waist and she slung her arms around my neck, resting her cheek against mine so that my lips were near her ear.

“When do you go back to the States?” she asked.

“A week from today.” Then I quickly added, “But I could change it, or send Charlotte and her sister and Sean ahead.”

I felt her pull away slightly.

“You can’t do that.”

“I could come with you to Florence.” Could I?

She pulled back more and looked at me. “You can’t come with me, don’t you see?”

I tried to think of what to say but I couldn’t; the drinks had blurred my thoughts. How could I not be with her? But there was Charlotte and Sean. Too much in the way. Every choice impossible.

“Just hold me,” she said, leaning against me again.

So I held her as close as I could and closed my eyes, letting the music take me.

I’VE DECIDED
to start smoking again. Just an occasional cigar out on the porch after dinner. I quit a pack-a-day habit in 1960, when a nagging cough convinced me that the surgeon general didn’t smoke. That was the second biggest heartbreak of my life.

Cigarettes had been my punctuation in life, the periods, commas, hyphens and exclamation points (especially after sex) by which I divided and organized my day. Without them I felt like one endless run-on sentence; a formless, structureless bundle of anguish, always off balance, like a person forced to go weeks without looking at a clock. I groped and pawed at my shirt pocket as though searching for a phantom limb. What on earth to do with my hands, hour after hour, day after day, week after week? I studied other nonsmokers to see what they did with their hands, but nothing felt natural, and my hands, particularly my right hand, fidgeted and twitched like those of a seamstress newly unemployed for the first time in decades.

After women and children—and sometimes before—cigarettes were the great love of my life, the one ever-satisfying constant. When I quit, it seemed that I was destined to spend the rest of my years in a state of acute discomfort, as though the very purpose of my life, the battle that would expend my life’s energies, would be to not smoke. At bars I would position myself downwind from the nearest smoker and discreetly hyperventilate. In my dreams I sucked down three and four packs a night in desperate compensation.

Gradually, the cravings subsided, until cigarettes faded into the background like an ex-spouse; impossible to completely forget but no longer right in my face. But now? What the hell, right? So my clothes will stink again. Not stinking hasn’t helped much lately. And frankly, I could use a vice.

So it’s settled. Tomorrow I’ll take the bus into town and walk to The Smoke Shop and buy a box of Montecristo Double Coronas from the walk-in sliding glass humidor. That should last me.

I WAS WALKING
down the hallway to my room to use the bathroom when Erica smiled at me. Not just with her mouth but with her whole face, as though the curtains of a large stage had suddenly been pulled back to reveal a full orchestra, the instruments gleaming.

Oh, Lord.

I wonder what makes such a smile so hopeful and restorative; why beauty sometimes looks like a solution to life’s most pressing problems, so much so that you want to drown in another, to wrap yourself around them like a speeding car around a telephone pole, horn blaring.

I think beauty represents a need in the eye of the beholder, a need that is never quite met. What you see isn’t what you get; what you see is what you never get, which is why you can’t stop staring.

“Hello, Erica.”

When I got to my room I went to the bathroom, purposely avoiding the mirror, then grabbed my sketch pad and headed outside.

I FEEL LIKE
shit today, a miserable bundle of mounting symptoms. Dr. Tompkins hovered over me briefly, and someone hooked me to an IV. I think I saw Sarah but I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything.

I remember another time, with nurses and doctors leaning over me. First the dressing station, just behind the front, where a medic administered antitetanic serum, then painted the shrapnel wound in my right thigh with iodine and taped a large absorbent pad over it. Then I was placed on the ground in a large crowded courtyard for twelve hours, until two men in bloody tunics finally lifted me into an ambulance and drove me back three or four miles to an evacuation hospital. Then more waiting on the packed floor of a dark corridor until I was carried into an operating room lit by the bare jet flame of a portable acetylene generator. The silver surgical instruments laid out on a white enamel table rattled occasionally as explosions shook the room and the overwhelming smell of chlorine, gas, gangrene, acetylene and ether made me gag. I struggled not to vomit as a tired-looking nurse smeared Vaseline on my face and then placed a mask over it and administered ether. I fought it briefly but two men held me down.