We Were Beautiful Once

by Joseph Carvalko

  “Why’d you think?”

  “Maybe because I let you feel me up?” She grinned.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” he said, unable to hide his smirk.

  “I love it when you try to hide your smile.”

  “I ain’t tryin’ to hide nothing.”

  “Roger, do you think we’ll last?”

  Roger’s look went from playful to serious. She tried looking him in the eye, but he turned away.

  “Roger? You’re scaring me. Will it last?”

  Roger was mute.

  “Well? Will it?”

  “Julie, I’ve got bad news.”

  She felt a chill pass through her. Tears welled in her eyes. “Bad news?” she whispered.

  Beyond the yews a crow picked at the carcass of a small rodent. The trees were barren, and the sun was no longer visible behind high cirrus clouds.

  “I got drafted.”

  Her brows rose as her eyes bloomed into fullness: he wasn’t breaking up! Everything else could be solved. Then her brows furrowed. She drew a deep breath and prepared for Roger’s explanation.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Means... I’m soon to be in the Army.”

  Her eyes swelled with tears again. Her lips tightened, her mouth went dry. “You’re leaving?” she said softly.

  “Ain’t leavin’ you. I’m going to the Army.”

  The old tightness in her throat returned. She moved from the boulder toward a leafless tree. Roger kicked the frozen ground, jamming his hands into his jacket.

  “Right after New Year’s, I’ll be shoving off to Fort Dix. From there, who knows?”

  “I... I suppose, you can do something? I mean get out of it, right? My brother’s in ROTC, maybe you can talk to him. He might have an idea. He’ll be home from college next week.”

  “It’s no use. I already quit my job.”

  “Wh... Wh... ” she whirled around to face him. “Roger! Why?”

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  “So you’re just gonna leave?”

  “Well, yes and no,” Roger spoke tentatively, “Julie... Julie, I know a, a small hotel, let’s go there.”

  Julie would remember this room—a steel framed bed with the thin, feather-stuffed pad, coffee-stained oak dresser, a maple credenza with a yellowed mirror that had lost most of its silver. A Gideon Bible was closed on a discolored doily. The window was stuck partly open at the top and a radiator creaked beneath it. The wallpaper had different patterns on adjacent walls, oddly reminding her how badly she wanted Roger, but how scared she was. It was her first time. But the credenza and dresser—leftovers from the First World War—made her think about the furniture in her bedroom, and these things made her unafraid.

  Julie stood in the middle of the room, her belly pressed against Roger. She closed her eyes, felt his stiffness. Roger touched the back of her blue flowered dress and undid its row of small buttons. His calloused carpenter hands lightly lifted the dress off her shoulder; it fell to the floor, exposing the whiteness of her chest and the silver locket hanging from her neck. His thumbs slid beneath the thin satin straps of her slip. She felt like a calla lily on a naked stem—every organ inside her waking, blossoming into experience. She wanted Roger kissing every part of her that burned with desire. She saw him take stock of her smallness, unadorned and imagined he might be looking at her like one looks at a half-naked mannequin at Macy’s. Never taking her eyes off his face, she sat on the bed, waiting for him to undress. She felt nervous. Fearing her teeth might start chattering she laid back and slipped beneath the covers, where the sheet felt cool on her back. Covered now, she disrobed completely.

  The lavender pink sky gleamed through the translucent prism of the gritty window. She kept her eyes on Roger as he stripped off and slipped in next to her. His body was on fire. Nervous, aroused, excited, scared, quiet tears flowed down her cheeks over her lips, she embraced him, saying, “I love you so much, Roger. So afraid, so afraid... that what we have will die, if I don’t see you. What if something happened to us?”

  They made love, and as the lavender pink sky turned silver gray, Julie lost all sensible measure of time. Each lay in the other’s limerence, her head on his shoulder, his arm behind his head. A tawny, orange-winged monarch flew from the window sill to the foot of the bed. She raised herself on one elbow.

  “Roger, a butterfly!” She followed the insect’s minute movements and reached down to coax it onto her hand.

  The bug flapped its wings and flew toward the window. She drew her finger down Roger’s forehead, over his nose, lips, chin. “You know, Roger, a butterfly holds a person’s soul.”

  He squinted, smiled and turned his head toward her. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but I like to think it’s true.”

  “Whose soul?”

  “I don’t know, they say it could be someone who’s alive, or dying or already dead.” She pulled her hand from the sheet, raised it in the direction of the creature that flew from the window to the ceiling in the far corner, where the lengthwise wallpaper stripes ran counter to the paper on the adjacent wall, the black margins and veins on its wings making the incongruent wallpaper congruous. “Maybe ours!” she said, turning over to smile at Roger.

  He let out a breath of resignation. “If I were a reckless god, I’d unbuckle Nature’s hair and let it fall on her shoulders, letting all the days we’ve had together come undone again.” He put his arms around her, burying his face in her breasts so she could not see the ocean filling his eyes.

  “You’re a poet, you know. The way you think. Feel.”

  Nothing stirred. Julie wanted it that way—to freeze time if she could. She whispered, “I guess what I’m afraid of more than anything in the world, is that what we have right now may someday fade.”

  Daylight fell further into the horizon, the striped wallpaper disappeared, and the butterfly flapped its wings, stalled them upright, and finally vanished through a small opening into the cold void of winter. In their nakedness, they met each other no longer as strangers, in longing, in lust, no longer searching for warmth and tenderness. Roger filled the voids, erasing all Julie’s perceived imperfections: her awkwardness, her loneliness, her frailty.

  As they left the hotel, a light snow fell. At the corner, Julie looked back and noticed how quickly their tracks were covered.

  “Roger, tell me you will always love me. Tell me, tell me and keep telling me while you’re away, so I can hear it over and over. So I know you’re there.”

  Roger stopped and pulled her close. “Julie, most things in life are figments of our imagination. They only exist because we’re conscious of them. Music’s that way. If we disappeared, music would only be noise to the universe. Love’s different. It is beyond our conscious being, it’s that place where beauty, song, the spirit live. If we accept it, it never vanishes. Never.”

  The light turned red and Roger loosened his grip, but she grabbed and held onto his coat, afraid to let go—aware how close she was to a new order of time, when all things emotionally temporal would suspend until her man returned.

  On the train home that night she wrote:

  I know now that I will never have to hurry through life searching to feel what we have at this moment. If for no other reason than today, I shall always love you. If for nothing else, I shall always know that whatever I do, wherever I go, it will be not futile or in vain, because all things will be forever cast in this moment—be it my music or that unnamed thing which I have yet to meet, or that unknown thing, for which I claim to live. From this moment, it is you.

  The next week Julie and Roger met in Bridgeport for the last time. Outfitted in navy blue pea coats and rubber boots, the couple spent the day walking arm in arm along the beach at Seaside Park. Gray and white gulls flew overhead, shrieking open-throated for a scrap of bread. Except for the gulls and two resolute fishermen casting off the stony breakwaters, they had the foamy lips of the ocean to themselves. The Januar
y tide ebbed and flowed—the long moments of silence marked by the breaking waves that kept time like brushes against the drumhead of a lonely snare.

  “I used to do a lot of fishing when I was a kid, right out there,” Roger said with a longing in his voice. “My dad and I, we’d get there at dark so we’d see the sun come up. The ocean and sky would wake up across that span of 180 degrees. And depending on the way the earth turned, every day was a new brilliance. Blink and you’d see patterns within patterns in a world that brought us a day that had never before existed.”

  Julie loved the poetry in him, and the utter freedom it allowed her own words—words that for most of her life were inside her, tied at the base of her tongue. “I see that in us, Roger. It seems love invents a new splendor every morning since the day we met.” They walked until the new tide came in and the sun found its way to the western sky. A strong gale roiled the ever-darkening green gray waves and stung their faces.

  A weathered old man in a black woolen overcoat walked toward them. “Sir, would you take a picture of me and my girl?” Roger asked hopefully.

  “Sure,” he said, in a gravelly German accent.

  Roger pressed the camera into the man’s oversized hand. “Look in here and press this.”

  Roger grabbed Julie’s bundled waist, and they posed in a mist blowing from an up-tick in wind. The man stepped back, and Julie imagined how they filled the eyepiece: two faces, hers under her mother’s paisley kerchief, Roger’s under a black pea cap. The man’s finger located the small silver button. He steadied the camera. “Lächeln. Sagen Käse, eh.”

  Feeling Julie shiver beside him, Roger squeezed her. “I think he means smile.”

  The shutter snapped, a frame of silver halide exposed two smiling lovers in the light of a low, winter sun. As the man handed the camera to Roger, he smiled widely, and Julie heard him say, “Lucky man.” Roger thanked him. Julie blushed, then lifted her chin, smiled, staunchly feeling in that moment a woman invincible to her core.

  The two lovers moved away from the shore, avoiding the occasional wave that broke free to chart a new high, washing away all earthly footprints. The gulls vanished one by one. Roger and Julie walked into a headwind for nearly a mile to the five story, arched entrance to the park where she would take the number 5 bus to the Barnum line and where Roger would take the number 2 to the train station. Alone at the stop, they held each other, wordless. It started to rain. A number 2 came and went. Then, too soon, a number 5 came into sight. She boarded, finding a seat adjacent to where Roger stood against the wet wind, promising to be resolute. She focused straight ahead, but then at the last moment turned her head and Roger appeared on the other side of the rain streaked glass, mottled and sparkling. The bus hissed and lumbered forward, until the lovers, one from the other disappeared. Slumping beneath the sill, Julie let all the tears she had dammed flow like the rain slipping passed the slippery glass, imagining the lonely winter ahead—the long one, the one where only the nature of things outside human influence would decide if she were to ever see Roger again. And believing with the passion of first love, that of course, she would.

  ***

  During the first five months of Roger’s Army life, the couple exchanged dozens of letters. On June 2, 1950, Roger read orders posted on the bulletin board: Private Roger Girardin, San Diego, California, Naval Station, port of embarkation. Assignment: 1st Battalion, 21st Regiment, 24th Infantry Division, Japan. Arrival estimated June 21, 1950. Report to Command H.

  Julie had written to him often about her loneliness, and he felt answerable for her sadness, but just before he embarked on his new assignment, he wrote:

  Yes, yes we do have better days ahead. Days when we can pick morning like a wild flower again, when we can love life again (when I know you are there, I truly love life), when we can spend our days with each other and grow old. Right now I cannot see you, your smile, your nakedness. It’s empty here because I can’t hear you whisper, laugh, or moan, or even hear your beautiful complaints. These things are what fill me up.

  The barrack’s lights went out promptly at nine. Roger placed the letter in the outgoing mail. Twenty days later, he received her reply:

  Roger, you speak of our love so wonderfully. See, this is why I love you so much & why it’s so hard to ever move on—each day is a struggle. Last night I played the violin from three till dawn. The workers leaving to make the six o’clock whistle must have heard me all the way to the bus stop.

  After he read Julie’s letter he noticed a small crepe paper with something hidden inside still in the envelope. He unfolded the paper and found three blue-button wild flowers neatly pressed and pasted to a tiny card that read: From My Secret Garden.

  That evening, Roger, Julie and millions of Americans picked up their newspapers. The headlines all read: NORTH KOREA INVADES THE SOUTH.

  Road to Suwon

  ON JUNE 25, 1950, IT RAINED HARD ALONG the invisible line separating the two Koreas. Sometime in the early morning, rumors flooded Seoul that the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA), had crossed the 38th parallel. Three days later, the NKPA stormed into the capital killing, wounding and capturing thousands. Taken by surprise, the Republic of Korea’s (ROK) government based in Seoul set up operations twenty miles south, in Suwon. President Truman ordered troops flown into the country, in what he described as a police action—giving the impression he was sending forces in for crowd control. Less concerned with how it played at home, General Douglas MacArthur ordered the 1st Battalion, 21st Regiment, 24th Infantry Division to Suwon, to hold the line of advancing NKPA. Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Brad Babcock, a contingent of four hundred and six men departed from Itazuke Air Base, Japan on the morning of July 1. Included among the troops were a few war horses, like WWII veteran Sergeant Joe Johns, a burly thirty-year-old with one ear, and a large contingent of green privates—like Roger Girardin, the lanky twenty-three-year-old.

  Accounts of well-orchestrated troop movements going awry litter military history, and Korea was no exception. Instead of flying to Suwon, the Air Force dropped the men on a landing strip outside of Pusan, hundreds of miles south of the intended destination. Babcock quickly organized a caravan and moved seventeen miles to board a train that would take the troops partway to Suwon. Since the train wasn’t ready for boarding, Babcock ordered the mess sergeant to break out a chow line, but when his adjutant informed him that, except for the sergeant, the rest of the cooks were left in Japan, he revised his order—C-Rations. The troops were off to a shaky start.

  Roger and his fellow neophytes deploying to the front for the first time did not dwell much on food but on the abstract anticipation of combat. They feared the unidentified, saw a boding evil in everything—from the orderliness of lines to the simplest staccato commands—that seemed loud and exaggerated. On the platform, waiting to board an old steam train, Roger watched the officers, hushed and heads lowered, sluggishly moving toward the rickety, wooden second-class cabins.

  Sergeant Johns stood at the front of the formation.

  “This fucking place smells like shit,” he grumbled.

  “Smells like rotten cabbage, Sarge,” blurted the man next to Roger.

  “No one asked you, soldier.”

  A local high school band played a Sousa march near the locomotive, as commands were shouted over horns, calling for the men to climb aboard. In the brown boxcars coupled behind the officer’s second-class cabins, the stench of cabbage gave way to the smell of hay, piss and animal crap. Each man found a spot suited to his level of anxiety: edgy talkers and listeners, readers (comics, novels, bibles) letter writers, poker players. Most men were sweat-soaked to the bone. Roger chose a corner strewn with hardened nuggets of dog shit, pushed them aside, and flopped down onto floorboards suspiciously stained with dried blood.

  A steam whistle blew. The cars jerked forward as the locomotive chuffed from the station, spitting and spewing a silver-white vaporous exhaust, its sound swallowing the oompah-pah of the golden tubas. A
steady acceleration, a repetition of articulating connecting rods, the mechanical growls as the wheels bore down on the tracks—muffling the bass drums that had earlier drowned the shouts of the officers bringing the men to order. In due course the train relaxed under a steady quickening, its cadence eventually calming Roger’s unease. He pulled Julie’s last letter from his knapsack, and his eyes closed before he finished reading the last line.

  At 0800, July 2, the train pulled into Taejon, its whistle startling Roger out of a restless sleep. Some diehards were still playing poker. The men jumped from the cars and assembled in rows ten feet from the tracks. On command, they broke formation, found a dusty space alongside the dirty, gray, clapboard station, opened rations for a second time and shot the breeze—reminding Roger of the Boy Scouts he once saw headed for summer camp.

  While the men bivouacked, Colonel Babcock and a band of soldiers, including Roger, drove jeeps north to Osan to survey and choose a location they would defend if the NK headed toward Pusan as predicted. A few miles south of the village of Suwon the colonel found what he was looking for: a group of small hills that crossed a road—a pinch point for troops moving through. He designated one—a three-hundred foot elevation, Hill 116—to serve as his “vantage point.” That night the troops boarded another train to Pyongtaek, leaving them with a ten-mile march that began at midnight. Three hours later, in a light rain, they reached a muddy flat one-half mile south of Hill 116, where men from the 52nd Field Artillery Battalion were setting up artillery armed with high explosive anti-tank shells.

  Roger woke at dawn to the sound of radio chatter. “T-34 tank from the interior. Look to the north, sir.” Two lookouts about twenty feet away heard the report, too. One of them poked his head out of the brush, scanning the horizon through field glasses blurred by a steady downpour. Handing the glasses to the man next to him, he snarled, “It’s crawling like a motherfuckin’ bug.” Thirty minutes later, other tanks were visible. The radioman reported, “I think there are eight, maybe more, sir.”