Losing Julia (44 page)

“Come to Paris!” I shouted. “I’ll be there for two weeks.”

With her back to me she shook her head.

“Please! I’ll look for you at the Arc de Triomphe. At noon. I’ll check every day at noon. Please!“

She raised her hand, then said, “Please go.” Her voice was breaking. My chest ached and I longed desperately to turn back and grab hold of her.

“Please,
Patrick.”

I turned and walked quickly to my car and drove off down the blurry, trembling road.

The picture I have of you has a hole in it from a piece of shell. I have four bullet holes in my overcoat, and my trousers were torn to pieces by a grenade, but I only had my knees cut besides the bullet in my shoulder. The strap to my field glasses was cut by a bullet, my gas mask was cut in half by shrapnel, and my helmet has a dent from a bullet. But they did not get me.

—Maurice V. Griffin, United States Army, in a letter to his wife.

“MARTIN?”
He had just begun to stir and I heard him fumbling for his glasses on his bedside table. Inevitably he knocked over a bottle or two of pills during his search, which helped explain his ruinously high pharmaceutical bills.

“Huh? What?” He pushed his glasses on and began fiddling with his hearing aids.

“I’ve been thinking about Lara.”

“Huh?”

Each morning Martin and I spend several minutes just sitting on the edge of our beds, making sure our rusty gyroscopes are right side up before we stand. At a certain age system checks must be performed before any significant move, while the movement itself must be methodically plotted out in advance. Whoever slips up, dies.

“Lara. Your old flame. How old would she be now?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I’m just curious.”

“Seventy-six,” he said quickly. He sat in his light blue boxers, white T-shirt and black knee-high socks, his hands braced along the sides of the bed, palms down. “But why do you ask?”

Well, you figure she married, right?”

“Yes.”

“So chances are, she is still alive and her husband, whether he was husband number one or two or three, is dead.”

He winced.

“So why don’t we find out where she lives?”

“Patrick, that was almost sixty years ago.”

“Not to you.” He said nothing. “Why not call her, say hello?”

“Jesus, Patrick, are you crazy?”

“More so by the minute.”

She wasn’t hard to find. Martin was sure she’d still be in the Northeast—if she was alive—and he knew she was closely connected to her church. I talked to the minister who said that Mrs. Lara Tennant Hutchinson lived alone in a large house just five blocks from St. Marks. Mr. Hutchinson had died three years ago. Massive heart attack. Collapsed in his golf cart, which rolled into a pond.

I never actually heard what Martin said to Lara when he called her but I could see his face from across the lounge, all flushed and wiggly. We had rehearsed his opening lines.

“Just tell her you heard she was still alive and you just wanted to say hello, since, coincidentally, you’re still alive too.”

“You mean, ‘Hello, Lara? This is Martin, as in the twenty-year-old who loved you but got another woman pregnant only now I’m almost eighty and can hardly piss so what’s new with you?’”

“Close enough. And talk loud. She’s probably hard of hearing.”

After ten minutes by the phone booth, hand on the receiver, still safe in its hook, Martin retreated, requesting a small glass of brandy. He cringed as he took a sip, then another.

“Courage, my boy,” I said as he put down the glass. “She’s just an old lady, remember? An old bag. Probably ugly as sin.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said, shuffling back toward the phone booth. “An old biddy. A granny. Probably got one of those purple Afros that she keeps by her bed stand at night next to her teeth and her hearing aids.” He did a little shuffle dance as he approached the phone.

When he shuffled back across the room a half hour later he patted me on the shoulder and whispered, “Thanks.” Then he padded off down the hallway toward our room, humming a song I did not recognize.

MARTIN AND LARA
got to talking once a week. He also wrote her letters from his bed nearly every morning, propping himself up with pillows and using a piece of stained wood from the arts and crafts shop, which he placed across his lap.

“It’s still her voice,” he said one night as we lay in our beds.

“Well, whose voice did you expect?”

“But it was so long ago.”

“I don’t feel so different. Do you?”

“No, I just never imagined she would still sound so familiar.”

Martin didn’t like to talk about Lara too much, as though sharing her might spoil it, but I did manage to pry a little out of him. She had married twice, had two kids from each marriage, was in remarkably good health and financially secure. Her first letter, written on light blue finely textured Crane’s stationery with matching envelope, arrived just six days after their first phone conversation. Martin handed it to me.

“You don’t mind?” I asked.

He gestured for me to read. It began:

My Dearest Martin,
You damned fool, I went away that summer because you
never asked me to stay. Don’t you know I was absolutely
devastated when I found out? I loved you…

After I finished it I handed it back, then stood up, patted him on the shoulder and headed to the cafeteria. When I returned he was still sitting on his bed, the letter on his lap.

Two months later he sat down next to me on a bench outside and announced, “I’m going to Boston.”

“To visit Lara?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“In three weeks. She’s offered to pay, said she has all the money she needs and then some. I just made my reservations.” His head and hands shook more than usual.

“Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.” I tried to smile.

“I may need some help packing.” He nervously rubbed his palms on his knees.

“Clean underwear. Bring clean underwear.”

WHAT IF
Julia is widowed? The thought has been nagging me all day. But where did she live and what last name did she go by? I didn’t know where to begin.

And I couldn’t begin. I couldn’t search again. Not anymore. And if she had died I didn’t want to know. I couldn’t bear that, to be the last of the three. And I couldn’t bear to have her see me like this: such a wreck of a man.

No, I couldn’t stand to lose her all over again.

OSCAR DIED
this morning, or sometime in the night. I saw them wheel him out just before breakfast, which ended any chance of working up an appetite.

I never did get to double-check his pulse, but I’ve made a note to contact his relatives and make sure he’s not cremated. Oscar would have hated that.

Neither Martin nor I felt like doing much all day, but after dinner we decided to play checkers in Oscar’s honor. His board was still there, tucked into the back pouch of his wheelchair, which was parked by his empty bed. Howard and Mitzie joined in and soon we had a feisty tournament going, which Martin won. After we finished we took a vote on whether to keep Oscar’s checkerboard or put it back with his other belongings. By unanimous proclamation we decided to keep it.

TODAY COULD
be better than most days. Considerably better. Possibly even great. After months of pleading we’ve finally been promised a real live model for art class. A woman. Maybe even a naked woman. I’ve always dreamed of livening up Great Oaks’s art program with a model; some biologically blessed local college student looking for a few extra bucks. Usually we are asked to sketch vases and plastic fruits laid out on a card table, sometimes the same vases and plastic fruits that we painted the week before and the week before that too. I often refuse, preferring to draw my landscapes and portraits from memory. But today I am willing to break new ground.

I arrive at the classroom door half an hour early, determined to get a front-row seat. When the door finally opens at ten sharp, several dozen of us, including many men attending their first art class in over sixty years, hurry in. A large curtain is hung over the front left corner of the room. I claim a seat directly in front of it, overjoyed by my good fortune. Then I open my pad to a fresh sheet of paper and carefully lay out my pastels. The instructor stands before the curtain, hushing the class. “Today, as promised, we have a beautiful model who has agreed to sit for us.” I rub my hands together, then strain for a glimpse beneath the curtain of a collegiate toe or two. A shadow moves. Was it clothed? How utterly sublime. Then with one grand motion the instructor pulls the curtain away and stands back, both arms in the air.