I never actually heard what Martin said to Lara when he called her but I could see his face from across the lounge, all flushed and wiggly. We had rehearsed his opening lines.
“Just tell her you heard she was still alive and you just wanted to say hello, since, coincidentally, you’re still alive too.”
“You mean, ‘Hello, Lara? This is Martin, as in the twenty-year-old who loved you but got another woman pregnant only now I’m almost eighty and can hardly piss so what’s new with you?’”
“Close enough. And talk loud. She’s probably hard of hearing.”
After ten minutes by the phone booth, hand on the receiver, still safe in its hook, Martin retreated, requesting a small glass of brandy. He cringed as he took a sip, then another.
“Courage, my boy,” I said as he put down the glass. “She’s just an old lady, remember? An old bag. Probably ugly as sin.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” he said, shuffling back toward the phone booth. “An old biddy. A granny. Probably got one of those purple Afros that she keeps by her bed stand at night next to her teeth and her hearing aids.” He did a little shuffle dance as he approached the phone.
When he shuffled back across the room a half hour later he patted me on the shoulder and whispered, “Thanks.” Then he padded off down the hallway toward our room, humming a song I did not recognize.
MARTIN AND LARA got to talking once a week. He also wrote her letters from his bed nearly every morning, propping himself up with pillows and using a piece of stained wood from the arts and crafts shop, which he placed across his lap.
“It’s still her voice,” he said one night as we lay in our beds.
“Well, whose voice did you expect?”
“But it was so long ago.”
“I don’t feel so different. Do you?”
“No, I just never imagined she would still sound so familiar.”
Martin didn’t like to talk about Lara too much, as though sharing her might spoil it, but I did manage to pry a little out of him. She had married twice, had two kids from each marriage, was in remarkably good health and financially secure. Her first letter, written on light blue finely textured Crane’s stationery with matching envelope, arrived just six days after their first phone conversation. Martin handed it to me.
“You don’t mind?” I asked.
He gestured for me to read. It began:
My Dearest Martin,
You damned fool, I went away that summer because you
never asked me to stay. Don’t you know I was absolutely
devastated when I found out? I loved you…
After I finished it I handed it back, then stood up, patted him on the shoulder and headed to the cafeteria. When I returned he was still sitting on his bed, the letter on his lap.
Two months later he sat down next to me on a bench outside and announced, “I’m going to Boston.”
“To visit Lara?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“In three weeks. She’s offered to pay, said she has all the money she needs and then some. I just made my reservations.” His head and hands shook more than usual.
“Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.” I tried to smile.
“I may need some help packing.” He nervously rubbed his palms on his knees.
“Clean underwear. Bring clean underwear.”
WHAT IF Julia is widowed? The thought has been nagging me all day. But where did she live and what last name did she go by? I didn’t know where to begin.
And I couldn’t begin. I couldn’t search again. Not anymore. And if she had died I didn’t want to know. I couldn’t bear that, to be the last of the three. And I couldn’t bear to have her see me like this: such a wreck of a man.
No, I couldn’t stand to lose her all over again.
OSCAR DIED this morning, or sometime in the night. I saw them wheel him out just before breakfast, which ended any chance of working up an appetite.
I never did get to double-check his pulse, but I’ve made a note to contact his relatives and make sure he’s not cremated. Oscar would have hated that.
Neither Martin nor I felt like doing much all day, but after dinner we decided to play checkers in Oscar’s honor. His board was still there, tucked into the back pouch of his wheelchair, which was parked by his empty bed. Howard and Mitzie joined in and soon we had a feisty tournament going, which Martin won. After we finished we took a vote on whether to keep Oscar’s checkerboard or put it back with his other belongings. By unanimous proclamation we decided to keep it.
TODAY COULD be better than most days. Considerably better. Possibly even great. After months of pleading we’ve finally been promised a real live model for art class. A woman. Maybe even a naked woman. I’ve always dreamed of livening up Great Oaks’s art program with a model; some biologically blessed local college student looking for a few extra bucks. Usually we are asked to sketch vases and plastic fruits laid out on a card table, sometimes the same vases and plastic fruits that we painted the week before and the week before that too. I often refuse, preferring to draw my landscapes and portraits from memory. But today I am willing to break new ground.
I arrive at the classroom door half an hour early, determined to get a front-row seat. When the door finally opens at ten sharp, several dozen of us, including many men attending their first art class in over sixty years, hurry in. A large curtain is hung over the front left corner of the room. I claim a seat directly in front of it, overjoyed by my good fortune. Then I open my pad to a fresh sheet of paper and carefully lay out my pastels. The instructor stands before the curtain, hushing the class. “Today, as promised, we have a beautiful model who has agreed to sit for us.” I rub my hands together, then strain for a glimpse beneath the curtain of a collegiate toe or two. A shadow moves. Was it clothed? How utterly sublime. Then with one grand motion the instructor pulls the curtain away and stands back, both arms in the air.
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.
I WAITED for two hours at the Arc de Triomphe, walking back and forth and then sitting at a nearby cafe and drinking three cups of coffee. I thought I saw her once but it was someone else. All I could think of was the sound of her knock on my door and the look on her face with those tears rolling down and the way her skin felt against mine.
When I got back to the hotel there was a note from Charlotte saying that she and Margaret had gone out for lunch and then sight-seeing. Sean was playing with a sitter they had hired, the daughter of the concierge. I paid her and pulled out Sean’s stroller and then took him on a walk through Paris, following the route that Daniel, Page, Lawton and I had taken ten years before.
I WAITED the next day and the next one too, standing in the cool rain from eleven-thirty a.m. until twelve-thirty p.m., then hurrying back to the hotel to meet Charlotte and Margaret. My matches got wet so I lit one cigarette off the other, until I finished the pack. Still, I was glad that it rained.
I WAS DOZING on the blue chair in the recreation room, sketchbook on my lap, when Sarah tapped me on the shoulder.
“You’ll miss lunch.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Oh come on now. I’m not going to let you wither away.”
“You can’t stop me from withering away.”
“Now don’t get started.” She sat on the edge of my chair and rested a hand on my shoulder. “I want to ask you something.”
I looked up, slowly grazing my eyes across her neck.
“Jeffrey’s school is having Voices of History Week next month and we—he—was wondering if you might speak.”
Losing Julia Page 26