Losing Julia (58 page)

“I’ll have one too,” I said, turning back to look out the window.

Two drinks and several confessions later, the young man turned to me and said, “I have a problem.” I looked at the way his eyebrows huddled together and I knew he was serious so I raised my eyebrows in invitation and waited. “I think my wife is having an affair.”

“You
think
she is?”

“Well, I’m not positive, but let’s just say that my marriage is a mess.”

“Do you have children?”

“Thank God no,” he said. “Though I suppose children might have held us together.”

“Let me tell you something—and I love kids—but having children to improve a marriage is like shooting the dog to kill the fleas.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“What does your wife do?”

“She’s a stockbroker, very successful.”

“You two powerhouses ever see each other?”

“It’s hard, juggling our careers and all.”

“Do you like the way she smells?”

“What?”

“Your wife. Does she smell right to you?”

“No one’s ever asked me that. I guess so. Sometimes. I don’t know.”

“Think about it,” I said. “I will.”

“Are you having an affair?”

“No, but I can’t say I’m not attracted to other women.”

“Trust me, you’ll never be able to say that, not with a straight face. What makes you think your wife is having an affair?”

“There’s this guy she works with. We were at an office party. They weren’t flirting or anything, but I saw this look.”

“Ah,
that
look.”

“Yeah, I mean don’t you think it shows, on people’s faces, when they’ve slept together? I think I could walk into a room and pick out people who slept together thirty years ago.”

“It’s my experience that everyone who is the least bit interesting has at least one terrible little secret, usually about sex or money.”

“The scary part is, I’m not sure that I care anymore. I’m not sure I still love her. And we’ve only been married for three years.”

“Married years are like dog years,” I said. “And you don’t even have kids yet; you’re not even incorporated.”

“I can’t imagine. Even sharing a bathroom is trying. It looks more like a trauma center when she’s done. You’d think people had been brought back from the brink of death in there.”

“It’s tough, them being human and all.”

“But when I see other women and imagine being with them, I know it would be only a matter of time before I took them for granted too. That’s just human nature, right?”

I shrugged.

“Maybe my expectations are too high,” he said.

“Mine were so high that I’m still single.”

“Your whole life?” He looked incredulous.

“No, I was married once. But not happily.”

“Do you suppose everyone who is married secretly wonders if they could do better? Find a better fit?”

“Of course. And some not so secretly. Do you want in on a terrible secret?”

“Sure,” he said, hesitantly.

I lowered my voice. “No matter what you do, you’ll always be plagued by the sense that your life is slipping away and that other people are having better sex than you. Much better.”

He buried his face in his hands.

“But if it’s any comfort, everyone else feels that way too.”

“That’s
so
depressing,” he said. “I remember when Ann and I were just dating. We must have talked on the phone five times a day. We slept on top of each other. Do you think there is any way to sustain that feeling, at least a little longer?”

“Restrict your conjugal visits to a minimum. Don’t look in each other’s closets. Use separate bathrooms. Don’t ask too many questions.”

He finished off his glass of Scotch and looked around for a flight attendant. Then he said, “I had this English teacher once—God, he really ruined literature for me, tearing it into little shreds and then demanding to know what each shred meant, when of course only he had the correct interpretation, which probably eluded even the poor author himself. I wanted to tell him that maybe Byron was hammered when he wrote that stanza but I couldn’t afford to flunk. Anyway, this teacher used to say that romantic love was false love, just a temporary intoxication based on idealization and mystery, while true love—or rational love—was based on knowledge and respect and compassion and maturity, which sounds fine until you actually compare how the two feel. Wow, what a difference. I’ll take romantic love any day. Do you remember your first crush?
Shit.
” He turned and looked back down the aisle for a flight attendant.

“I do.”

“Or how about when you found out that a girl had a crush on you. What a
feeling,
like you were omnipotent.”

“Didn’t happen much.”

“Me neither.” He waved his hand at a flight attendant, who ignored him. “So what do you do, just keep them on a pedestal? Never consummate the relationship? That’s torture! I nearly had a breakdown in seventh grade sitting next to Sally Manley every day.”

“The dues we paid in the hard coinage of puberty,” I said, which made him laugh. “It’s torture because you’ll always wonder if maybe that love, that feeling of romantic love, could have been sustained with the right person.”

He paused a moment, biting the edge of his thumbnail, then said, “I wonder how long it would last, if you loved somebody from afar. Somebody you couldn’t be with or even touch.”

“I suppose the feeling would last a very long time.”

“I wonder if it’s worth it. If it’s bearable. Like the wife who secretly longs for her neighbor’s husband all her life, or the man who secretly wishes he had married a former girlfriend or who falls in love with his brother-in-law’s sister. That sort of thing.”

“I don’t think people who love from afar have much choice in the matter.”

He rubbed his eyes and ran his hands through his hair, a gesture I haven’t been able to pull off for several decades. “I think I’m getting a headache,” he said, as he rose and headed for the lavatory. When he returned he turned toward me and said, “Do you mind if I ask how old you are?”

“Pushing eighty,” I lied.

“Wow. You don’t seem that old.”

“That’s because I’m still breathing.”

“What were you dreaming about earlier, when you woke with such a start? You looked terribly frightened.”

“I was.” What was I dreaming about? I couldn’t remember. “At my age it gets harder and harder to distinguish dreams from reality, the past from the present. My life is now so heavily weighted toward the past that I feel sometimes like a listing ship.”

“A lot of flashbacks, huh?”

“Tons of flashbacks,” I smiled.

DEAR JULIA:
I’m finally going back, back to France. I’m on a plane now, somewhere over the ocean. Technically, I think I’ve run away. But don’t worry, I feel good. And I’ve met the nicest young man.
Did you ever go back again? Was it harder or easier the second time? I hope it’s not much harder.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking that maybe I’m not such a fool after all, that maybe my choice in life wasn’t between loving you and finding someone else to love; maybe it was between loving you as I have or being like all those people who don’t have any love at all, people without any magic in their lives; without any stars to guide them. So I don’t feel so bad. I’ve got the Northern Light. I always have.
Love,
Patrick

I SLEPT AGAIN
for half an hour and awoke with stomach cramps. I carefully made my way to the bathrooms, where I had to stand in line behind a tall teenager with headphones on. Once inside I carefully latched the door and began unbuckling my pants. Just as I sat down the red return-to-cabin light flashed on and the plane began to shake. I ignored it and held tight to a handgrip. When I finished I glanced down in the toilet before flushing. Blood. I washed my hands, careful to clean the sink area with my towelette, then struggled with the door latch before opening it. When I returned to my seat, the young man was back at work, a pile of papers in his lap. From the way he kept blinking and rubbing his temples I could tell he was having trouble concentrating.

“Was your father a lawyer?” I asked.

“Oh no, he was a small-time businessman, always jumping from one thing to another. A deli, a bunch of car washes, that kind of thing. He was always on the verge of the big breakthrough.”

“He’s dead?”

“Died three years ago. We had to put my mother in a nursing home last winter. She’s got Pick’s disease. One of those dementia diseases.”

“That’s tough.”

He stuffed his paperwork into the seat pocket. “We tried to keep her at home as long as we could but she was starting to set off the smoke detectors every time she got near the kitchen. I was afraid she’d end up at the grocery store in her bathrobe.”

“Or without her bathrobe.”

“Yeah.” He slowly shook his head back and forth. “We’re paying a fortune for this rest home—it’s the best one we could find—but God it’s so depressing. I hate even going to visit her. Keep out of those places if you can.”

“Sounds like good advice.”

“I go in to see her and there are all these people sitting around spoon-feeding their parents and wiping their mouths and it smells like—”

“Piss. It smells like piss.”

He looked at me for a moment. “You’re right. Piss. And it’s kind of—”

“Musty. Tomblike.”

“Exactly,” he said, pointing a finger at me. “First thing I did after she got sick was to make a living will out for myself. I say, ‘Pull the plug friends.
Sayonara.’”

“Master of your fate,” I nodded.

He nodded vigorously, then stared up at the ceiling. “You know, the thing I never forget is that my parents never seemed happy their whole lives.”

“Of course not. They were your parents, right? They weren’t supposed to be happy. They’re supposed to haunt you like the ghosts of Christmas future unless you mend your ways. Don’t you ever hear the rattle of those chains at night?” He chuckled. “Your job is to make amends for their failures.”

“That’ll keep me busy.”

“So what do you really want to do?”

“Want to do?”

“With your life.”

“Ah, with my life. Well, let’s see, a lot of things. I guess I really just want to be successful.”

“What do you consider success?”

“A good salary, recognition in my field.”

“That’s all bullshit.”

“Bullshit?”

“Yeah, men have defined success all wrong, which is why they are such crotchety old farts when they get to be my age and realize what fools they’ve been, sacrificing their marriages, their children, their health and their souls to their careers, all so they can be considered a somebody at work, which is like hitching your star to the nearest fire hydrant. Who gives a shit, except the other careerists who’ve made the same catastrophic mistake with their lives, and so are desperate to defend the entitlements of being a somebody, lest somebodyism be exposed for what it is: an ill-fated pyramid scheme.” I laughed out loud, then took another big swig of Scotch. “It’s a self-esteem problem, which is why men jumped out of windows during the stock market crash. It wasn’t the money—you know damn well they would have paid all that and more to ransom their life—it was the fact that their money represented their sense of worth. Without it they felt worthless; already dead.”

“Well, since you’re so goddamn wise, why don’t you just tell me what you did so I can just emulate the maestro?”

“I’m afraid that would be disastrous.”

“Oh really?” He leaned toward me. “How did
you
fuck up?”

“In more ways than I can explain.”

“I’m listening.”

I paused for a moment, then said, “I guess I was always waiting for things to happen that didn’t happen. I married the wrong woman. I never spent enough time with my kids. That kind of thing.” I picked up my drink and finished it.

“Well, at least you didn’t keel over at the office.”

“That’s a real relief.”

“So what would you do if you were me?” I could see him brace himself.

“If I could be in your shoes for a day? I suppose the first thing I’d do is to get laid—and I am being serious—then I’d figure out whether I really loved my wife for the right reasons, and if I did I’d try to get her back. If I didn’t, I’d move on.”