Losing Julia

by Hull, Jonathan

  “How did it go?” he asked, looking amused and not a little relieved.

  “She purred like a cat,” I said, struggling to dismount. “Thank you. I know you didn’t have to do that.”

  “My pleasure. Glad you had fun.”

  I walked the five blocks back to the bus stop, then returned to Great Oaks. That evening, I was in bed by seven p.m., unable to shake a sense of sadness in my throat.

  “WORD IS we’re going to hit the Hindenburg line,” said Page, walking somewhere in front of me. I looked over at Lawton, who’d been unusually quiet lately. He didn’t look back.

  “What exactly is the Hindenburg line?” asked Giles.

  “Their main defensive line,” said Page.

  “Oh shit.”

  “How far do you suppose we’ll go?” I asked.

  “To Berlin,” said Page.

  “Berlin? Shit. That’s far, isn’t it?” asked Giles.

  “Not so far as we can’t get there,” said Page.

  “I’d just like to get my hands on some of that beer,” said Giles.

  “And a fraulein or two,” I said.

  “War‘ll end before we get to Berlin,” said Daniel.

  “You really think so?” I asked.

  “No way. Not the Germans. We’re going to Berlin,” said Page.

  “How long do you think the war will last?” I asked Daniel.

  “Maybe another year,” he said.

  “Maybe forever,” said Giles. “Like one of those hundred-year wars.”

  “Jesus, you think so?” asked Lawton. Giles nodded grimly.

  “Wouldn’t you hate to be the last guy to get shot before the war ends?” I said.

  “Soon as we get to Berlin, it’s no patrols or raids for me,” said Giles.

  “Just how exactly do wars like these end?” I asked. “Is there like a bell or something?”

  “Both sides announce that it’s over,” said Daniel, sidestepping a large pothole in the road.

  “Like at a certain time?” I asked. “Like, keep shooting each other until right after lunch and then call it quits?”

  “Something like that,” said Daniel.

  “How the hell are we going to know that they know that the war is over?” asked Giles. “I mean, what if we think it ends at three p.m. and they’ve been told four p.m., or they’re on Berlin time or whatever?”

  “I’m not putting my goddamn head up,” I said.

  “Well, they’ll have to surrender. We’ll just wait for them to surrender,” said Daniel.

  “I just don’t see those bastards surrendering,” said Giles.

  “That’s because we haven’t beaten them yet,” I said.

  “So we’ve got to take the Hindenburg line,” said Page.

  “Yeah, maybe that’ll do it,” said Lawton.

  “What exactly does the Hindenburg line look like?” I asked.

  “Big fucking trench,” said Lawton. “Tons of wire, machine-gun nests pointing every which way.”

  “No fucking worry,” said Giles, clearing his throat to spit again.

  I mustn’t show them that I’m afraid—because one of the things that spreads quickest of all is fear. If people in trenches start to shout and scream with fear it spreads like a flame so the best thing is to quieten the bloke, either brain him or, if need be, finish him.

  —C. Miles, British Army.

  AFTER MARCHING most of the night we sat near a burned-out farmhouse and had a breakfast of rice with Karo syrup, then marched another two miles to a rocky clearing, where we were ordered to dig rifle pits. Daniel and I made a two-man pit, then sat down and lit cigarettes. As he smoked, Daniel ran his fingernails along the seams of his clothes, squishing lice. I pulled out an old letter from my father, reread it and placed it back in my pocket. His tone was unusually sentimental, which made me worry that he was ill. Or maybe he was afraid that there were things he wouldn’t get to say if his son never came home. Would I come home? I searched again for some gut feeling, the kind of intuitive certainty that so many other soldiers seemed to have about their lives, but felt none.

  “So it’s true, that you’ve never been in love?” Daniel was staring at me.

  “In love? Not really. Why do you ask?”

  “It changes everything. Even the way things look and sound.”

  I nodded.

  “But it’s different than I had imagined,” he said.

  “Better?”

  “Yes. But more frightening.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because you can’t imagine what you’d do without that person.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  “But you think about it. The amazing thing is that it was just chance that we met. That’s what it gets down to in life. A bit of luck.”

  “Well, at least you’ve got it.”

  “So far.” He pressed his thumb into the seam of his pants.

  Watching him made me itch. I scratched myself and then swung my hand at the flies that hovered over my head, bouncing blindly off my hair, which was matted with sweat and dirt. “Wish they’d spray some creosol.”

  Daniel blew smoke at my head.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “The strangest thing is that I couldn’t tell you why I’m in love.”

  “But Julia sounds wonderful.”

  “She is. I just couldn’t tell you what exactly it is that I love. I can name the parts, but not the whole. I can’t tell you why I love her and not other women who are attractive and smart and funny and kind.”

  “But so long as you feel it.”

  “Still, I’d like to know, to have some understanding of it. If we can’t really grasp why we are in love, then what’s to keep us from falling out of love just as mysteriously?”

  “That doesn’t sound likely.”

  “No, I don’t think so. But I wish it didn’t feel so inexplicable, like a spell or something.” He pulled out a letter from Julia and began reading it. “She’s volunteered making bandages. Says if she wasn’t pregnant she’d join the Red Cross and try to get shipped to France.”

  “Then you’re lucky she’s pregnant. Christ, I hated the crossing, sitting belowdecks at night with all the portholes covered up and just those little blue lights to see by, waiting for torpedoes to start slamming into the hull.”

  “She’d be a wonderful nurse.”

  “She can nurse you when you get home.”

  He grinned. “You’ll come visit us?”

  “Of course.”

  He closed his eyes for a minute. Then he said, “You know something, I’m not afraid anymore.”

  “You never seemed very scared to me.” His remark made me uncomfortable.

  “Oh, but I was.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that since it makes no difference whether I’m afraid or not, I’ve decided not to be afraid.”

  “You’ve decided that?”

  “Yes, I’ve decided that.”

  Galston approached us. “MacGuire, Delaney, grab your shovels and go with Giles.”

  Giles waved us over. “Back behind those trees there,” he pointed. We followed him.

  “Trenches?” I asked.

  “Graves,” said Giles.

  “Oh,” I said. Daniel was silent.

  There were three neat rows of bodies in a small clearing, each covered with a sprinkling of chloride of lime. Two other soldiers sat resting near a row of shallow pits.

  “Another three feet deeper,” said the tall one.

  “Gotcha,” said Giles.

  I looked over at the corpses, at the boots just like mine with the heels together and the toes splayed out sideways and the puttees just like mine and the torn and bloodied pants and shirts just like mine only they were dusted with lime and far too small now for their bloated occupants.

  “Which battalion?” asked Daniel.

  “I don’t know,” said the smaller soldier, wiping sweat from his forehead with his for
earm. “They passed through yesterday, going north. Shell got these boys.”

  “Are we supposed to bury them?” I asked.

  “No, you just dig the holes.”

  I stripped off my gear and began digging.

  I COULDN’T find Julia the next morning. I sat at one of the tables in front of the hotel for over an hour sipping coffee and waiting, but she didn’t appear. I walked around town for a while, stopping at a bakery to buy a baguette, which I ate on the spot. Then I returned to the hotel and sat in the lobby reading a book for two hours and listening to the tick tock of a large grandfather clock in the corner. When it chimed noon, I approached the concierge and asked if he had seen her.

  “Your American friend? Why yes, she was up very early this morning. Left around six a.m., I believe.”

  “But she didn’t check out?”

  “No no, she didn’t check out.”

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  “It wasn’t my business.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You are concerned?” He scrutinized me with raised eyebrows.

  “No, everything is fine, thank you.”

  That afternoon I called the hotel in Paris and left a message for Charlotte saying that I would be back the next day around dinnertime. Then I went shopping for a present for Sean, finally settling on a small wooden sailboat painted red and blue with thick canvas sails and a working rudder. After I organized my things on my bed, I sat down in front of the hotel again and had another cup of coffee, followed by a glass of white wine. Was she lost? I couldn’t imagine her finding the hotel on her own—or even the town for that matter.

  Just after six p.m. she appeared, walking quickly down the street toward the hotel and carrying her shoulder bag, which looked heavy. When she saw me she waved and smiled, and then asked if she could buy me dinner after she had a chance to clean up. I never asked her where she had been. I could tell she didn’t want me to.

  “MARTIN, what day is it today?”

  “Tuesday. No, Wednesday. Heck, I’m not sure.” He went out into the hall, struggling to tie the belt of his bathrobe as he walked, then returned. “It’s Monday,” he said.

  Ah, Monday. Miserable Monday. I lay back against my pillow, sighing deeply.

  I’ve always hated Mondays, the whole lot of them. Too much whiplash, snapping the tired masses to attention. God’s way, perhaps, of reminding us that we are not masters of our fate, no matter how deluded we became during the weekend respite.

  Twelve years after retiring I still awaken Monday mornings with a sense of dread, that “Here we go again” feeling low in the gut as the roller coaster click click clicks to the very top and then AAHHHHHH!

  It starts Sunday afternoon between four and five, depending on the season, when the weekend and all its once-protean possibilities suddenly sputter out and I find myself feeling remarkably ill-equipped to deal with the coming cataclysms; as though, in just two days, I had lost all my muscle tone, my wits, my courage and my defenses for the rough-and-tumble of the big nasty world where I must soon present my miserable little self for duty. On Sunday afternoons I realize that I have gone completely and utterly soft.

  Screw Mondays.

  THE BOOKMOBILE came by today. I think of it as the elderly person’s Good Humor truck, only I can’t get out the door quite so fast. I borrowed four books: a biography of Tolstoy, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and two weighty-looking tracts on Eastern philosophy, which I’ve decided to reconsider. (When Western philosophy fails me, as it inevitably does, I flee to Eastern philosophy, then back again in frustration. Why spend hours sitting in an uncomfortable position struggling to achieve nothingness when death should do the job rather more efficiently?)

  I miss my books. I gave most of them away when I sold the house. I had 2,142 of them, not counting the books at my store, which I considered mine as well, my darling pets up for adoption. The kids took what they wanted and the rest I gave to a local library. I’ve felt naked ever since, like a soldier stripped of his weapons.

  Like most bookworms I read so as not to be alone, which often annoys those who are trying to make conversation with me. Lately I’ve taken to rereading the classics of my youth—a rare chance to relive the past—though I must confess that some of the books aren’t what I remember at all.

  Books aren’t just my defenses, the sandbags I use to fortify my position; they are also the building blocks of my soul, and I am the sum of all I read. The truth is, reading about life has always proved much more satisfactory than living it, and certainly reading about people is far more interesting than actually sitting across from them at, say, a dinner party. On the page people come alive: they have sex, they travel, they reveal their deepest thoughts, they struggle against overwhelming odds, they search for meaning. In person, well, few dinner partners do any of these things.

  Reading has gotten a lot harder, which depresses me more than most things. My eyes strain too quickly, and what information does make it to my brain is often misfiled or simply discarded. I dread the fate of Mitzie, who reads the same three books over and over year after year (The Yearling, Main Street, and The House of Mirth). “I like them and I know they’ll be good,” she says. “I say stick with a sure thing.” It helps, of course, if the old slate wipes itself clean every few months.

  If I had two lives, I would devote the first one to reading (and maybe the second as well). I understand that up until the early 1800s a learned person could read almost every book of consequence ever published, a prospect that titillates me to no end.

  I buy new books once a month, taking the 42 bus to Cooper’s on Fourth Street. The selection is appalling: a few literary titles squeezed among row upon row of business tracts and weight-loss manuals and brightly colored self- improvement guides with retouched photos of pharmacologically enhanced men and women on the cover. (Doesn’t anyone realize that the best self-help books are in the literature section?) But Cooper’s is the only bookstore left since Hartley’s, a family-run business, closed down two years ago. Last month I went to Cooper’s looking for Pershing’s memoirs, which I had a sudden urge to reread. In the aisle marked “military history” I found three rows of books on Vietnam, four rows on World War II and one book on World War I: The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman. On the bus ride back I couldn’t stop wondering if all those men would have died quite so willingly had they seen that bookshelf or whether they were just so many trees falling silently in the forest.

  Have you forgotten yet?

  Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

  —Siegfried Sassoon, “Aftermath, March 1919.”

  DANIEL SITS on an ammunition box in the dugout writing by candlelight as we wait out our bombardment of the German lines. Our attack begins at five a.m. I feel filthy and tired as I sit and clean my rifle. Three weeks in the Argonne and I haven’t removed my clothes. Not once.

  A loud explosion rattles the dugout. Bits of dirt fall on my helmet and clothes.

  “That ought to cut a pretty path through their wire,” says Page, tightening his puttees.

  “Bullshit. They’ve always got wire left. Since when don’t they have any fucking wire left?” says Giles, fingering a tooth that has been bothering him all week. “How are you supposed to get your hands on the bastards when they’re always hiding behind all that fucking wire?”

  I look over at Daniel. It strikes me that he always seems much older than me, though we’re the same age. I watch as he rereads what he has written, his forehead creasing before a slight smile comes to his face. Does Julia have a photo of him? She must. Does she look at it every day, trying to remember the gleam of his eyes and the tone of his voice—deep but full of compassion, like a good minister’s—and his broad shoulders and the strength of his large hands? Does she show it off to friends or keep it on her bed stand and how does it make her feel to look at? Is it even worth having a lover who is halfway around the world at war? At least the men know
their lovers are safe—maybe not always faithful but safe—but the women? How do they even sleep?

  When Daniel finishes reading he tucks the letter into his shirt pocket, then adjusts his helmet and reaches for his rifle. Soon we are side by side in the line waiting to go over the top, our helmets tipped down to our eyebrows. Lawton is on my left and beside him is Page.

  “You scared?” asks Page, offering me a cigarette.

  “Yeah, I’m scared.”

  “Me too,” he says.

  “Just up and over,” I say, trying to calm myself.

  “Yeah, just up and over.”

  He finishes his cigarette and then quickly lights another.

  “What time is it? I gotta go take a shit,” he says.

  “You got about two minutes.”

  “Oh Christ, forget it.”

  I look down at my hands, which are shaking uncontrollably. My breathing is fast and shallow and I feel sick to my stomach.

  I look over at Daniel. He turns his head toward me; then tries to calm me with his eyes, the way a parent does with a child about to perform a recital. Then he reaches out and pats me on the back.

  “You’ll be all right,” he says. “Just stick near me.”

  I nod, then check my gear again. Daniel uses his sleeve to wipe the sweat from his eyes.

  “You know something, Patrick?” he whispers, leaning close to me.

  “What?”

  He hesitates, staring at me.

  “What is it? Tell me.”

  “I finally… ”

  The whistle shrieks and we scramble up over the top and begin running, thousands of us streaming across the sunken field through thick black smoke toward the German line, which erupts in fire. Men to my left and right start dropping and twice I stumble. I catch a glimpse of Daniel up ahead of me, then lose him. A concussion knocks me down. I scramble back to my feet. The air is filled with things. Something is in my eye. Ahead of me a figure crumples. Then another. I jump over them, struggling to stay on my feet.