Losing Julia (55 page)

I FINALLY
captured Julia. Not perfectly. But closer than I’ve ever gotten before. Certainly closer than I’ll ever get again. I spent four days on the drawing, sequestering myself in my room for the final day.

I’ve taped her to the wall above my bed. Everybody asks about her. Robert said she was hotter than hot. Martin conceded she was every bit as beautiful as Lara.

I like to sit in my orange chair and stare at her. I feel so proud, knowing I’ll never lose her now. It’s comforting too, having her there, watching over me. How I did it, I don’t know. But I’ve been trying for fifty years. It’s wonderful to be able to look at her again.

IS IT WORTH
being saved if one is consequently damned? That’s what happened, isn’t it? I’m sitting here, looking at Julia’s picture, and I realize that she made my whole life seem worthwhile, even the worst parts. And yet she ruined it too, so that I was never content again with Charlotte (might not I have been happy enough with her if I’d never met Julia?), and so that the rest of my life was haunted by the knowledge of what I had once had and then lost.

Does everything we have become a searing loss? Is that what the end is all about? And how long would the feelings have endured? Would Daniel and Julia have lasted a lifetime together without losing their passion? What about me and Julia? How would we have aged together?

I study her face on the wall; her eyes (I’ve got them!) and hair and lips and neck. Well, if we are all inexorably doomed in the end, then at least I’ve known what it’s like to be saved, if only for a few days.

IF I CAN’T
have love again before I die—and it’s looking rather unlikely these days—I’d at least like to decant a bit of wisdom, some comforting compilation of beliefs or corpus of insight; a distillation of all I have seen and thought so that I can say, “Aha, there’s the rub,” and nod knowingly before I depart.

It’s after midnight now and I’m sitting by the window, my journal open in my lap, my pen in hand, just sitting and thinking and listening to Martin’s slow, sonorous breathing across the room.

Suddenly, it all seems so funny to me that I begin laughing, laughing so hard that I have to think bad thoughts in order to catch my breath. What wretches we are! Congenital narcissists who cling like drowning rats to the notion of a self that is fixed and strong and permanent, a delusion defended by material possessions and job titles and diplomas and bolstered by drugs and therapy and social convention. (Ironically, the more effective our false selves, the more we compromise our deeper selves.) And so if only briefly, we are emboldened by the illusion that we are in charge. Look out, world!

But alas, the pitiable little self always gets whooped in the end, pummeled by disease and humiliated by decay and finally trumped by death. Try as we might to make our little stand, we shall soon be swept from the rocks and back into the cosmic soup, and to fight back is only to suffer more.

What then is life but a desperate, hilarious, passionate and finally tragic bid to prove that we are more than hideously sensitive fertilizer? The quest! And so we stumble forth, seeking salvation through love and heroism, the royal roads to the soul. Sancho, my horse!

Martin snores louder. I look over at him, then up at Julia above my bed. Then I lean back, smiling.

Love is self-explanatory: the right person makes you feel well-nigh immortal, vaccinating you with their affections. So long as you remain in their heart you are safe, or better than safe even, for a while at least. You are, momentarily, in a state of grace.

Our quest for heroism is more awkward. Not the obvious heroism that earns medals and applause but the heroism of daily life. Go to Princeton and you’re an educational hero; run a marathon and you’re an athletic hero; make loads of money and you’re a financial hero—the alpha hero of our culture. Each occupation and role in life has its own exacting rituals for advancement and reward, from the employee-of-the-month parking space to stock options. The point is not the Princeton degree or the marathon medallion or the money or the parking space, it’s what these things say about us, that we are special and unique; that momentarily at least, we have risen head and shoulders above the clamoring masses to be giddily succored by premonitions of divinity.

The crisis of our age is not that we have proven adept at slaughtering each other in ever greater numbers (that’s just a technological feat), it’s that more and more of us have a gnawing sense that we are engaged in silly make-work heroism, not the stuff that’s in our genes, the true heroism of tribal rituals. (How ironic that primitive cultures were so much better at offering members a heroic sense of self-worth.)

Maybe the turning point came during the Great War, when machines first made a mockery of man. Men marched into battle because they longed to be heroes, but the sheer vastness of the carnage swallowed up individual acts of bravery so that even valor became meaningless until finally it was so routinely demanded and thus demeaned that the only way to make a name for yourself was to top Corporal Alvin York, and he single-handedly killed some twenty-eight Germans and captured 132 others.

TWENTY-EIGHT
is not that many, really. Not for the Great War. You see, it was possible for a well-placed machine gunner to kill a thousand men in a morning’s work, so long as the gun didn’t jam.

It is important to understand that.

I LAY
awake, unable to sleep. Or am I afraid to dream?

“MARTIN?”
The sun pushed through the white slats and painted bright horizontal streaks against the far wall. I could hear the nurses shaking bottles of pills and liquids as they prepared the morning medical cart, which rattled down the hallways like a small locomotive. “Martin?” I called again. He was perfectly still, on his back with the covers up to his chin. “Martin?” Then I knew and pushed the red button near my headboard again and again and I reached out and grabbed hold of him and cried out as loud as I could.

Martin.

That afternoon I called Lara. After I told her she couldn’t speak so I said I’d call back and hung up gently. Sitting there in the phone booth with my hand still on the receiver I got the idea to pull out the Yellow Pages and make another call on Martin’s behalf. And for Lara too. A proper send-off.

Then I went out back and sat on a bench beneath the largest oak tree, not far from where Howard -and I had buried Eleanor Kravitski’s pennies. I cried for two hours.

I GREETED
Martin’s daughter just before the service, expecting inquiries about his last minutes or days or weeks. Instead she simply leaned forward and whispered, “We’ll come by his room later and pick up his things.” Then she turned and headed for her seat.

Dozens of old men and women and staff members packed the back pews of the chapel, the wheelchairs forming two additional pews. The service itself was deeply and profoundly anonymous; not one reference to Martin’s life or beliefs, just a generic soliloquy on the rather pedestrian and predictable fate of all of us poor sods. I sat perfectly still, studying the large white sculpture of Jesus on the cross that hung above the altar and wondering how much it really hurt to be crucified or if there were worse things.

I decided there were worse things.