Losing Julia (34 page)

He smiled back.

“What do you think?” asked Page.

“It’s pretty good.”

“But do you think it’s true, that there is only one other person out there for us?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Daniel. “Giles, what do you think?”

“Well, personally, I can think of three girls from my hometown that I’d give my right arm for, and it’s a small town. So, if there are, say, fifty counties in Ohio, each with at least… ”

“You have no taste,” said Tometti, turning his attention back to Teresa.

“So let’s say you’re lucky enough to find this person, does it last?” I asked.

“The love?” asked Daniel.

“No, not just the love. My parents love each other. I mean more than that. What you were talking about earlier. That magic.”

“I don’t know yet,” said Daniel.

“I have my doubts,” I said. “I’m not sure that we ever feel like we’re whole for long.”

“I think Delaney’s right,” said Page. “Besides, I’ve always felt there was something sad about beauty.”

“Is that what they teach you at Harvard?” asked Lawton.

“Because it’s usually unattainable,” I said, agreeing with Page.

“Or we know we won’t always be around to enjoy it,” said Daniel.

“So even beauty is about death,” said Page.

“You guys are fucking nuts,” said Giles, spitting out the back of the truck.

“Or maybe the allure of beauty is that it defies death, at least temporarily,” said Daniel, who had his hands folded under his armpits. “It’s like looking at heaven.”

“So now we’re talking about angels, am I right?” asked Lawton.

“Am I following here?”

Giles spit again.

“Here, hand me that,” said Page, extending his hand toward Tometti’s photograph. When he was done I took the photo but my hands shook so badly that I couldn’t see her clearly. I handed her back to Tometti, buried my hands into my armpits and spent the next few hours imagining crawling naked into bed next to Julia.

“SO, WHAT’S
she like in bed?” It’s a question I’d been wanting to ask for months and as Daniel and I stood guard by a huge stack of ammunition crates in the predawn darkness, I decided to give it a shot.

“I’m not going to tell you what she’s like in bed.”

That’s another thing that was unusual about Daniel: he didn’t boast about his conquests, real or imagined. In fact, he was the only soldier I ever met who didn’t like to talk about sex, as though it was too fine a thing to be bandied about with a couple of louse-ridden men.

“Just in general.”

“In general?”

“Yeah, in general.”

“She’s passionate.”

“How passionate?”

He looked at me and grinned. I longed for a cigarette, but we were under strict orders not to smoke. “Very passionate.”

“As in… ”

“As in,
very
passionate.”

“I see.”

For the rest of the day I tried to visualize
very
passionate.

By evening I was practically lisping.

THIS AFTERNOON
I fell asleep in a large brown reading chair in the recreation room and dreamed about precious little Amy Sperling, the sweet-smelling apparition who hypnotized me throughout the eighth grade. Is Amy really in her eighties now, with East Bloc ankles and reverse biceps that sag and sway like the gullet of a pelican when she walks? I don’t believe it. Not my Amy Sperling. To me, Amy will always be fourteen, her soft features framed with even softer blond hair that made barrettes do things that barrettes haven’t done since.

Amy was one of the smartest girls at Winthrop Junior High. She had perfect posture and perfect clothes and a melodious laugh that ricocheted around her perfect teeth before dancing off down the hallway like a shiny stone skipping perfectly across the water. Even the way she carried her books, clutched to her breast with one or both hands, caused me enormous grief. (To be one of her books!) And the way she stood at the blackboard and made her letters, so flawless and ornamental, while my illegible efforts caused the blackboard to shriek with horror no matter how I held the chalk.

When I knew she wasn’t home I would walk by her house just to stare at the windows and wonder which one was hers and what on earth did her bedroom look like? No matter how I tried to picture it, the details of her room were inconceivable to me; I saw only a holy place bathed in blinding light. What I would have given for just a swath of her sheets, a relic of my dear sweet Amy with the perfect barrettes!

I don’t think Amy ever looked at me more than twice during that school year, but when she did, adrenaline flooded my insides and I felt the same giddy feeling one might get in the presence of royalty or fame. To my mind, Amy had the power to transform mere boys into White Knights with just a glance. Sitting but three seats away from her I felt, finally, that I was ensconced right smack in the sultry center of the universe.

I wasn’t always faithful to Amy. After all, Nina Zumbrowski and her long black hair and blue eyes were only six seats away. Nina didn’t look at me much either, but never mind. That made it easier to stare without being noticed. And how I stared, absorbed in the delicacy of her wrists, her neck and her shoulders, which seemed to twitch back and forth in unison with her fanny. I knew with certainty that if Nina but kissed me, I would get straight As for the rest of my life, and I knew with certainty that Nina would never kiss me.

I ARRANGED
for a piano to be delivered the Tuesday morning of Howard’s birthday, just after lunch. It was a small beat-up black upright that I had rented for a month for twenty dollars. “We’ll get him some lessons and see if he takes to it,” I told Martin.

“You got him a piano?”

“I rented him a piano. From the Yellow Pages. Nothing fancy. Besides, this place needs a piano. Whoever heard of an old folks’ home without a piano?”

“Oh boy, I hope he’s got his inhalator handy when he sees it.”

I smiled as I turned off my reading light.

Three months later Howard held his first recital, a stripped-down version of “Lara’s Theme” from
Doctor Zhivago.
He wore a light blue seersucker suit and a red bow tie and an extra splash of cheap aftershave. I served brandy from the private collection I keep in the back of my closet and wore a blue blazer with a white handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket, which isn’t like me, which was the point. Helen wore a bright green dress that strained at her waistline and her normally garish smile was exaggerated by lipstick that traveled a good way toward her ears. “Oh, I’m just percolating!” she announced as she plopped down in a chair next to me.

The-Woman-Whose-Name-I-Can-Never-Remember looked like Glinda the Good Witch wrapped in various pink gauzy things with her blue hair shaped like topiary while Mitzie wore a long purple evening dress with a great big purple scarf swirled pythonlike around her shoulders. “You know what this is, don’t you?” she asked me conspiratorially. Her front teeth were covered with lipstick and her breath smelled of Kaopectate. “It’s a soirée!”

Howard’s hands trembled at first as they hovered over the keys, as though waiting for some signal from on high. We sat silently and then nervously, eager for him to drown out the rasp of Oscar’s labored breathing. Then Howard leaned forward, closed his eyes tight and began, breathing deeply and swaying back and forth as he gathered speed. He played seven encores that evening as we sat in a circle around him sipping our brandy from Dixie cups and humming and clapping. I wondered if anyone else saw the young boy perched on the piano stool and radiant with pride but I couldn’t be sure. Anyway, I think he was about nine.

SOME DAYS
music is the only thing that makes sense to me, the only experience that confirms what I’ve never been able to articulate even to my closest friends. I wonder if music is the only expression of the soul that is not hopelessly compromised in communication. I think so. In fact, I’m quite certain of it.

Damn. I should have been a musician. Better yet, a great musician married to another great musician, and in the mornings we would leave scores on each other’s pillows.

That would be love, or more precisely, the pure expression of love.

I remember sitting at the symphony in Boston in 1947 and feeling as though I were partaking in a mass seance with the crowd, the music filling in the tremendous gaps between us until it was possible to travel from one to another as though walking on water. Alone in public each of us shared the most intimate and ineffable feelings, feelings that we also shared with Handel and Mozart and Beethoven. It felt, momentarily, as if we were all holding hands somewhere deep inside, bound at our strongest point. When the music stopped, all hands let go. I walked quickly out of the concert hall, desperate to avoid conversation.

MAYBE WHAT
life needs is a good soundtrack, especially during the long stretches when nothing interesting is being said. A soundtrack might dignify things a bit, ennobling us with the proper drama and tension and pathos.

I stroll the hallways, shoulders back, chin up, humming softly. “‘People stop and stare, they don’t bother me, for there’s nowhere else on earth that I would rather be… ’”

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Rodgers and Hammerstein and Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe and Jerry Herman and Maurice Jarre to the orchestra pit now please, Patrick is on the march. Something inspirational, electrifying even, if you would. Thank you kindly.