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.
Later I awoke to another nurse cutting away my bandages. Then a doctor probed the wound with instruments and swabbed it with gauze soaked in Dakin’s solution. Then he removed small red rubber tubes that had been partly buried in the wound and replaced them with new tubes, which dangled out of the wound after it was dressed again. Every two hours a nurse poured more Dakin’s solution through a glass reservoir and into the tubes to irrigate the wound, until it was time to dress it again.
“How are you doing, Patrick?”
It’s a soft voice, close to my face. A warm hand is pressed against my forehead. I stare upward at the light until I see a nurse. Sarah. Yes, Sarah. I nod and then slowly run my right hand down to my right thigh and feel the long scar with my fingertips. With the other hand I hold tightly to the emergency call button.
I WISH GOD still worked. Or at least I wish some of the substitutes were more reassuring; that there was some plausible alternative to unretouched reality, a way to skirt the messy stuff. A rebuttal to the darkness.
Let’s see, there’s materialism (If I’m just a doomed creature at least I’ll be a comfortable, well-attired one, God-like in my furnishings if not my chromosomes); there’s science (The idea that we might outsmart God, somehow pick his locks and take over the controls—hah!); there’s the woozy notion of salvation through self-knowledge, though it’s awfully expensive and besides, it doesn’t stop the pain (Insight alone never does, on the contrary, it can strip wounds raw); and there is love, which also seems flawed, but not as flawed perhaps.
So if I can’t be writ large upon the heavens, if I can’t
entrust myself to God,
then at least let me alight upon the soul of
a woman, if only briefly
before I plummet.
I DIDN’T SEE Julia the next day. There was no time. I took care of Sean in the morning and then we met Charlotte and Margaret for a picnic in the Bois de Boulogne. When we got back to the hotel Sean took a nap while Margaret went for a walk. Charlotte and I sat and played cards and then I went out for an hour, hurrying over to Julia’s hotel to leave her a note telling her I’d try to see her the next day and that I missed her. On the way back I stopped at a store and bought her a gift.
We ate dinner that night at a small restaurant on the Champs-Elysées but left early after Sean unexpectedly hurled a spoon across the dining room, knocking a small, decorative vase off a ledge, which landed on a woman’s plate, cracking it and the vase and causing the woman to erupt in expletives. (I never knew he possessed such an arm.) After I settled with the owner we went for a stroll along the Seine. Margaret was talkative but both Charlotte and I were quiet. I couldn’t decide whether that was normal or whether Charlotte sensed that I was full of secrets; secrets that I feared were tumbling from my eyes.
When we got back to the hotel Margaret and Charlotte wrote letters while I read a book to Sean.
“We haven’t been to Versailles yet,” said Charlotte, l
icking an envelope. “Why don’t we go tomorrow?”
“That’s a wonderful idea!” said Margaret. “I’ve been reading all about it.”
“But there’s so much I still want to see in Paris,” I said.
“You can’t miss Versailles,” said Charlotte.
“The truth is, I don’t feel very good,” I said, putting down the book and lifting Sean off my lap.
Charlotte eyed me closely.
“He has been acting strange,” said Margaret, who often spoke of me as though I were in another room. I never did like Margaret, and my feelings for her now were testing new lows. “Maybe you should go and buy yourself a new suit.”
“A new suit?”
“Might make you feel better.”
“Really?”
When Margaret left the room, Charlotte said, “Are you all right? You seem a little… ”
“I’m fine. Just tired.”
“You’re mad that I didn’t go to the dedication with you, aren’t you?”
“No, not at all.”
“I should have gone. It was selfish of me not to.”
“I’m not mad. I promise. Anyway, you would have been bored.”
“But I should have been with you.” She came closer and gave me a hug. Then she looked up at me and said, “You have to let go of it eventually.”
“Let go?”
“It’s been ten years.”
“Ten years.”
“You can’t let it ruin your life.” She leaned forward and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “You get some sleep.”
They left at nine the next morning. I jumped out of bed as soon as the door closed, then bathed and dressed and ran to Julia’s hotel. She was in the sparse dining room beyond the lobby having breakfast.
“I’ve got the whole day free,” I said.
She stood and kissed me. “Where are they?”
“Versailles.” I laughed to myself. “I can just see my sister-in-law looking at herself in all those mirrors. They’ll be there for days.”
“So what shall we do?” Julia asked, sitting back down and sipping her coffee.
“Why don’t we lock ourselves in your room and see what happens?”
She pulled out her room key and dangled it in front of me. Her smile made me hunger for her skin against mine.
The waiter came and took my order. When my breakfast arrived I wolfed it down, with Julia watching, then paid the bill and followed her to her room. As soon as she closed the door I picked her up and spun her in the air and carried her to the bed, laying her down gently. We undressed each other wordlessly, then sat up on the bed on our knees, looking at each other and tracing our fingers across each other’s skin. I ran my hands down her back and along her thighs and then up along her sides and shoulders before gently cupping her breasts and kissing them and pushing her down against the pillow. As we made love she struggled not to cry out and afterward we clung to each other in silence. I don’t know how much time passed.
“There’s so much I want to know about you,” I said, sitting up and reaching for my cigarettes.
“There is not much to tell.”
“I think there always is.” I lit one, then passed it to her. We were lying side by side on our elbows, facing each other.
“Ask me then.”
“When is your birthday?”
“October twenty-eighth.”
“Who’s your favorite author?”
“Emily Brontë. Then Tolstoy.”
“Composer?”
“Chopin.”
“Color?”
“Depends on the day.”
“Season?”
“Fall.”
“Which do you prefer, mountains or beaches?”
“Beaches.”
“Are you more interested in the past or the future?”
“Oh, definitely the past.”
“Do you play any instruments?”
“I wanted to. We didn’t have the money.”
“Are you a morning or a night person?”
“Both.”
“You can’t be both.”
“Who says so?”
“Do you have trouble sleeping?”
“Only since I met you.” She smiled.
“What’s your favorite food?”
“English.”
“English?”
“I’m joking. Italian, actually, though I’m not a food person. And remember, I’m an awful cook.”
“I’ll cook you a meal someday,” I said.
“When is someday?”
I leaned back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling, noticing the cracks in the light blue paint.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” she said. “Anyway, we have all day. Let’s talk about today.” She rolled over on top of me.
“First, I have something for you.” I slid out from under her and reached for my coat. I pulled a slim box from one of the pockets and handed it to her.
She opened it slowly, keeping her eyes on me. When she saw the necklace she closed the box quickly, then opened it again.
She studied my face for a moment, then looked down again at the thin gold necklace, which carried a sapphire pendant. “It’s stunning,” she said.
“Put it on.”
She carefully pulled it out of the box and clasped it around her neck. “I’ve never had anything this beautiful.” She stood and looked in the mirror. “You’re crazy, Patrick.”
“That I am.” I got up and stood behind her and put my arms around her waist, running my hands slowly up her stomach to her breasts. She gradually arched her back and turned her head to kiss me. Once I was inside of her I came quickly and powerfully and then found myself on the verge of tears. So this is it: this is how close two people can feel.
When we got back in bed we lay facing each other and looking into each other’s eyes for several minutes without talking.
“You’ve made everything else worth it; everything I’ve been through. I didn’t feel that way before I met you.”
“Because of the war… she asked softly, tracing her fingers along my face.
I nodded. She kissed my forehead and then hugged me.
“During the war I used to think it was no longer right for people to laugh and sing, not with all the butchery. And I couldn’t bear to think of the rich sitting on plush velvet seats in the opera houses of Paris and Berlin and Vienna, just a train ride from hell. It seemed almost criminal.”
“And what did Daniel think?”
I smiled. “He thought we had to keep laughing.”
AFTER WE dressed Julia wanted to take her easel down to the quay for a few hours and try to paint the boats on the Seine. We stopped near the Pont Neuf across from the narrow tip of the Île de la Cité and after she had set up I sat nearby and watched her.
“Do you mind me staring?” I asked.
“I’m flattered.”
She began mixing paints on her palette, then dabbed her brush and leaned toward the canvas. I looked at her long fingers and her wrists and her arms and her legs and then back at her fingers, which carefully stroked the paintbrush back and forth.
“Do you know how I feel right now?”
She looked over at me. “How?”
“I can’t really describe it.”
“Try.”
I thought for a moment. “I think the only reason a lot of people hang in there day after day is because they hope that one day they’ll feel like this.” I looked out over the river and watched a boat glide by. “Daniel once asked me if I’d ever been in love. He knew I hadn’t. I think that worried him and now I understand why.”
She put down her brush and stared at me. Her eyes were exceptionally clear and full of intent.
“He knew I had nothing to hold on to. No memory of utter joy and ecstasy. Nothing that could endure the desolation. Whereas even in the worst of it, he had a place to go. He had you.”
She was silent for a while, still staring at me, and then she picked up her
brush and began painting again. “So now you’ll always have a place to go,” she said, trying her best to smile.
I SAT THERE for two hours, just watching her and feeling the sun on my face and listening to the sounds of Paris. I’d never felt that way before: so rapturous and serene, as though I had stumbled upon the answers to life’s hardest questions. What I kept thinking was that I wished everybody had a chance to know such a feeling, if only for a day. Especially the millions who died in the dirt and the mud. Otherwise, what was the sense in being born?
After Julia finished we took her things back to her hotel, then went window-shopping, leaning against each other as we peered into storefronts and laughed and marveled at various items on display. As we passed a church we heard music playing and went inside and stood near the back listening to a small concert performed by university students. I tried to make out the story in the stained glass above them but couldn’t, except for the last scene. Jesus again, suspended from the cross and looking down at us, desperate for a cleaning.
We stayed until the end of the concert, then walked to the Bois de Boulogne. When we reached the grass Julia bent over and took off her shoes, holding them in one hand. “Did you know that I’m very fast?” she asked.
“I didn’t.”
“It’s true.”
“How fast?”
“Probably faster than you,” she said, smiling.
“That’s not so fast,” I said. “Bet I can catch you before you reach that tree over there.”
“Only if I let you,” she said. Then she kissed me quickly, turned and took off running. I followed, trying not to laugh out loud as I struggled to catch up. Just before she reached the tree she turned and spread her arms out, catching me so that I fell on top of her.
“I was closing in,” I said, rolling over so that she was on top of me.
“I couldn’t wait any longer,” she said. “Besides, I know how much men hate to lose.” She began tickling me until I rolled back over on her and pinned her down. As I began kissing her I felt overwhelmed with the desire to be inside of her.
Losing Julia Page 29