Losing Julia

by Hull, Jonathan

  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.

  As the service ended, the door of the chapel opened and a lone bagpipe player in full kilt appeared. The minister looked confused while Martin’s daughter twisted her head back to see what was happening. I winked at Howard, who sat just across the aisle from me, then closed my eyes and tilted my head back as the music began to play. I didn’t bother to stop the warm tears that coursed down my face and onto my shirt.

  Good-bye, my friend.

  After the final note I stood up, slipped out of the chapel and hurried back to my room, where I placed Martin’s favorite belongings in a small box and addressed it to Lara. Then I flagged Robert down as he walked past my room.

  “Do me a favor, Robert.”

  “Of course.”

  “Mail this for me, would you?” I placed a ten-dollar bill on top of the box and handed it to him.

  “I’ll pick it up after work,” he said.

  “Would you mind keeping it in your supply room until you leave? It’s a special favor.”

  “Yeah sure, of course.”

  “And one more thing.” I reached back into my closet and grabbed the helmet. “Would
you give this to Hanford?” He looked at it, then back at me, then nodded and turned to leave.

  “Robert… ”

  “Yes?”

  I paused. “Nothing. Take care.”

  “You too, Mr. Delaney.”

  When he left I put “Shenandoah” on my tape deck and sat down at my desk and wrote a note to Robert, which I propped up against the tape deck. Then I wrote a one-page letter to Sarah that I enclosed in an envelope along with the best black and white photo of me I could find, which was taken when I was thirty-four, just one year older than she was now. I recently had the photo reprinted so that at least the paper it was on would look fresh.

  Then I put the envelope on my pillow and began to pack. First I packed my small suitcase, careful to wrap the bottle of Scotch in two sweaters. Then I placed my journals, wallet, passport and two books into the light brown leather bag I bought at Abercrombie and Fitch in New York in 1928, just before sailing to France with Charlotte and her sister and Sean. When I finished I walked down the corridor and found an empty wheelchair, which I brought back to my room. I placed my luggage in the chair and covered it with a blanket, then sat on the edge of the bed, breathing hard as I looked around the room.

  When I got up I stood before the mirror and combed my hair, then walked over to my bed and carefully took down my drawing of Julia, pausing to stare at it before rolling it tightly and tucking it into my leather bag. Then I peered down the hallway, grabbed the wheelchair and headed out. At the taxi stand I handed my suitcase to a young Middle Eastern man who smiled reverentially as I asked him to stop at my bank and then head for the airport.

  The tragedy of man is what dies inside himself while he still lives.

  —Albert Schweitzer

  FROM THE BACKSEAT of the taxi I scrutinized the driver’s dashboard, which was pasted with pictures of smiling children and a flag whose nationality I did not recognize. He drove fast, too fast, but I felt no fear as we hurtled across the Golden Gate Bridge heading south. I think one of my children has a photo of me standing on that bridge the day it opened in 1937, during one of my trips out west. I remember drinking too much one evening at a bar near Fisherman’s Wharf and walking all night through the city, secretly hoping I’d run into Julia again, even if she was with her husband. Did I sing aloud as I stumbled and lurched down streets shimmering from the ocean mist?

  I noticed the taxi driver eyeing me occasionally through the rearview mirror, flashing smiles like a ship’s signalman. “Beautiful day, eh?” he said through the mirror.

  “Yes,” I said to the mirror.

  “You have big family?” he asked.

  “Medium size, I guess. Three great-grandchildren.” I smiled reflexively and suppressed an urge to pull out their pictures, though I might have if he hadn’t been driving so fast.

  “I have two grandchildren,” he smiled. As he pointed to the little faces pasted to his dashboard he seemed to talk faster and faster and I lost track of what he was saying. I felt disoriented and dizzy as a sudden panic tightened my chest and I couldn’t explain to myself what I was doing in this taxi or where I was going. The feeling made my eyes water and I stared down at my leather shoulder bag until I could trace my way back to that morning and my decision to leave. “I’m going to Paris today,” I said finally, with perhaps too little conviction.

  “I hate the French,” he said, still holding a smile. “Not like Americans. I lived two years in France and never once felt welcomed. Very rude people.” I imagined him barreling down the Champs-Elysées in a tiny Peugeot with French pedestrians fleeing every which way.

  “Americans have one problem,” he continued, leaning into the top of the steering wheel. “They don’t take care of family. Now everybody lives so far apart it’s crazy, you know?” I nodded. “You tell me how people are going to survive without family?” I nodded again. “My mother, she’s eighty-five, she’s been living with me five years, since my father died. She has dementia, you know? Doesn’t even recognize her own son, her own son me, Achmed, but what am I going to do, dump her on the street?” I shook my head. “Me, I respect my elders,” he said.

  “Glad to hear that,” I said, feeling elderly indeed.

  “I respect family. Even if I can’t stand them, like my brother, an idiot, always borrowing money from me, can’t hold a job, lazy son of bitch, you know?”

  I watched his eyes dancing in the rearview mirror and wondered if he was driving from memory.

  “And my wife, bless her, she’s a good cook, a good mother, but after we got married she got fat, you know? Now she’s a big woman. Big woman. Fat as a manatee. You know what a manatee is? Big animal, a manatee. But what am I going to do, break up my family because my wife is fat as a manatee? No way, not me. See, I’m a family man. Respect the family.”

  AT THE AIRPORT I mailed Sean and Kelly each a packet of letters with instructions not to open them until they reached the ages written in large numbers on the outside of each envelope. I paid for the ticket to Paris with fifty-dollar bills from the large brown leather wallet I made at the crafts shop last fall and kept hidden in the back of my closet beneath some dirty clothes. (Even greed has its limits.) The woman at the ticket counter asked if I was traveling alone, which I think surprised her because she quickly offered to have an employee wheel me to the gate. To make her feel better I told her I had family waiting at the other end and I tried to smile even though my hips ached from the walking.

  I was the first to board and I slipped the young man who had pushed me through the airport a five-dollar bill before steadying myself with my cane and walking back to row nineteen. I had a window seat which was good in case I managed to sleep during the flight. After I placed my bag beneath the seat and tightened my seat belt I waited for the other passengers and watched the luggage glide up a conveyor belt and disappear; some of it, I imagined, never to be seen again.

  As I sat there staring out the window I suddenly remembered how during our last night together in Paris Julia had asked me if I thought that love was the purpose of our lives and I had said yes, it has to be, because it’s the only thing we have that’s stronger than our pain. I hadn’t thought about it that way until I’d said it, but I’m certain now that I was right.

  I pulled down the window shade and rested my head against a pillow and when I closed my eyes I could see Julia sitting across the table from me and leaning forward the way she did when she had something important to say.

  “I feel lucky then,” she had said, bringing that smile into her eyes.

  “But you’re still young. You still have—”

  “But I have been lucky, don’t you think? I mean compared to most people?”

  “In some ways.”

  After the waiter refilled our glasses she looked up at me and said, “Do you feel like anyone really knows you?”

  “A few people,” I said, though I knew it wasn’t true.

  “You’re rare then,” she said, gently extinguishing her cigarette in a small white china ashtray.

  “You think so?” I felt foolish now.

  “Oh yes, because I think most people are so well hidden that they lose the very meaning of their lives.” She paused, then said, “That’s what I don’t want.”

  “To feel lost?”

  “From myself. To feel that I’m betraying myself.”

  “But surely… ”

  “It’s hard to say what you feel sometimes, isn’t it?” she asked. “Maybe that’s why the really important things in our lives have hidden meanings.”

  “You think so?”

  “Oh, I’m quite sure of it,” she said. “That’s how we keep our dreams alive.” I looked at her hands and noticed they were shaking. She began talking quickly: “What I’m trying to say is that I think we all look for clues that we are not utterly alone. Clues we find in literature and paintings and music and even in someone’s eyes; clues that demonstrate that someone else has felt the same indescribable feelings, seen the same things or passed by the same spot
even if it was by candlelight three hundred years ago. It means everything, like finding footprints in the sand of a deserted island.”

  I LOST YOUR footprints Julia.

  I BROUGHT along William Manchester’s The Arms of Krupp, which I now pulled from the seat pocket and placed on my lap. I am curious about the family that made all those guns that were once pointed in my direction. As the plane lurched back from the gate a stewardess offered me a blanket, which I took. Then I watched closely as she demonstrated the safety procedures.

  I stare far too much at stewardesses, as if I’m part of the audience watching a show, forgetting that they can see perfectly well that I’m staring and it’s not a show but a poor-paying job. There were two female flight attendants, a tall, bony brunette with sharp features and a shorter blonde with heavy makeup. I immediately decided that the brunette was divorced two or three years ago from a heavy drinker who fails to make child support payments and now she’s struggling to raise two pimply boys in junior high who desperately need orthodontic work. The blonde is single and rooms with two other flight attendants who all dream of marrying well and decorating huge houses in floral patterns with all-white carpeting and huge kitchens with really functional center islands. I wondered if she’d tolerate an old man worth $100,000 but assumed she’s set on a flight captain or better. Anyway, I prefer the brunette.

  As the plane took off I stared out the window and smiled, enjoying the dull drone of the engines. I slept through the layover at JFK, which was confusing, but at least I got some rest. When I noticed that it was just after midnight I looked out the window and imagined the black waves miles below, and beneath them miles of cold and silent darkness. I thought of Oscar Bellamy and his checkerboard and his endless fears and I wondered how he felt about flying over oceans. Not so good, I decided.