Losing Julia (5 page)

I remembered my excitement the first time I shot an Enfield in training; the smooth feel of the stock and the tension of the trigger and the sudden crack of rifle fire.

“I knew he wouldn’t come back,” she said, wiping her eyes. “After we said good-bye I couldn’t eat for days. It was only when I found out I was pregnant that I understood that I had to go on.”

And how did Daniel feel when he said good-bye? Did he know too? I tried to imagine those last minutes together, then waving from a train.

I took another sip of my brandy and lit a cigarette, feeling unexpectedly drunk.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said, reaching out and touching my arm.

“So am I. I mean I’m glad that you’re… ”

“I know what you mean.” She playfully squeezed my arm before letting go.

I sat up straight in my chair, trying to clear my thoughts. “Were you serious about wanting to take a hike in the countryside tomorrow?”

“I’d love it. Really.”

She smiled and raised her glass, though her eyes were still full of sadness. After we finished the brandies we walked back to the hotel, pausing to stare up at the sky, which hung over us like an immense sieve, sifting the light. In the lobby the concierge gave us our keys and we said good night at the bottom of the stairs. I waited a few minutes before starting up the narrow staircase. In bed that night I lay awake for hours thinking of her and wondering how I could ever explain to her how so many men became names carved in stone.

JULIA.

Julia Julia.

What are you doing to me? And what is it about beauty that intimidates; causing us to kneel somewhere deep inside and pray and wonder just how close we might crawl before being banished from the sanctuary?

“YOU EVER PUT
your hand through a woman’s hair and it’s so soft that you have to look to make sure it’s there?” Daniel asked.

I hadn’t of course, but I wasn’t going to confess that to Daniel. “Nothing like it,” I said, closing my eyes as if lost in reverie.

Daniel MacGuire and I had been up all night laying barbed wire, and now sat in a communications trench smoking cigarettes, which we kept carefully cupped in our hands like captured butterflies.

“I had one photograph of her, taken in Mendocino. But I lost it.”

“So describe her.”

He leaned back, smiling. “I’m not sure where to begin.”

“I have some suggestions.”

He elbowed me. “For starters, she’s got this great wild streak—

did I tell you about the night we snuck into a small empty yacht tied up to the wharf? And she’s—“

“Her appearance. You were going to tell me about her appearance.”

“Oh yeah. Let’s see, she’s about five foot eight, slim but very strong, with these legs… well… what can I say about them?” I imagined silken legs stretching from San Francisco to Paris. “She’s got this playful, innocent expression on her face and a wonderful laugh. What else?” He flicked the ash from his cigarette. “She’s got thick brown hair cut just above her shoulders and parted on the side, full lips and an adorable nose. And her eyes… ” His smile grew. “She’s got these bright green eyes set in a kind of permanent smile, and when you look at them real closely, you feel as though you’re going to fall in.”

Daniel fell first. I tumbled in shortly after.

Daniel? I am so sorry.

SHALL I TELL
you about Daniel and Julia? I’m not sure that I can, that I have the strength. Certainly not today. Not until I feel better. But I’d like to.

If there’s time.

I DON’T SLEEP
that well, which is a shame now that I can finally sleep in whenever I want. I usually have a glass of red wine with dinner, then two thumbs of brandy around nine p.m., which I drink in bed while reading some book or magazine. I read for an hour at most, sometimes the same pages from the previous night—though I’m never quite sure—then fall asleep without much fanfare, my last thoughts lingering on a select (and top secret) group of women with whom I’ve enjoyed a lifelong masturbatory relationship. The trouble starts around two a.m. when I tumble out of my dreams as though shoved from a speeding train. I am careful not to move as I try to shimmy back to wherever I was but soon I am alert to sounds in the hallways. I peek at the clock by my bed, which I hope will say five or five-thirty but usually reads two, the shock of which wakes me further. Then I consider whether to chance a trip to the bathroom, which promises tremendous relief but risks cranking up what metabolism I have left, making sleep impossible; or whether to stay put, rolling on my side to relieve the pressure on my bladder as I attempt to sneak back into sleep like a teenager returning home past curfew. I suppose, on any given night, that a good portion of humanity is agonizing over whether or not to piss. Is anyone satisfied with their decision?

And does everyone feel so utterly inconsequential at two a.m.? So puny? Pathetic even, like the cowardly lion clutching his tail to his face and quivering all over, ready to bolt?

Each night I marvel that I have blundered through another day without making a total ass of myself, then lie awake remembering all the times that I have made an ass of myself. A colossal, epochal ass. I still shudder at the thought of events that took place nearly a century ago, like the time in high school when I went the entire day oblivious to a bleeding pimple on my forehead until sweet, precious Cindy Wheeler, the prettiest girl in Latin class, took pity and offered me a handkerchief (with her initials on it), thus sending my self-esteem into a tailspin from which it never properly recovered. Or the time in college when I stood before my philosophy class to deliver a speech on Hegel’s
The Phenomenology of Spirit
and stood and stood and stood until it was obvious that I could not move my mouth and I was led back to my seat dripping and sputtering like the village idiot.

Or the time I said good-bye to the woman I loved, not knowing I would never see her again.

Maybe insomniacs have more guilt and fear than other people, or maybe they just have more time to feel scared and remorseful. Whatever the case, if you are an insomniac, not sleeping is what you do in life, one of your top two or three defining characteristics, like being fat or short or rich or shy or being a doctor or politician or a hemophiliac. Only worse, especially if you are already fat and short and shy.

While some people count sheep, I tend to tally my short- comings, itemizing all the things that I don’t do well. By about four a.m., I usually start to wonder which is worse, the things that have happened to me or those that haven’t. I think it is the things that haven’t happened, but it’s a tough call, and one which I must make again night after night, weighing my missed opportunities against my egregious errors like some frontier assayer.

I usually fall back to sleep at about four-thirty, plummeting into a psychedelic dreamland that alternately thrills and terrifies me. (As a child I thought my dreams were God’s way of telling me, in the strictest confidence, that I was absolutely unhinged.) We are all eccentrics in our dreams. Lunatics, even.

If I have managed to fall back asleep at four-thirty or five, I usually wake again by six-thirty and begin a mental triage of my pain before attempting to move. On bad days I remain in bed most of the morning, sometimes rocking back and forth to shake the throbs and aches and prickles. If I feel that perhaps this is it, I grab the small metal box with the red call button that hangs next to my bed and hold it to my chest ready to press it the moment I detect a heart attack or hemorrhage or glimpse my parents beckoning me from the other end of some brightly lit tunnel that I’d rather not enter.

I know they say that we come into this world alone and so must leave this world alone, but the leaving it alone is much much worse. On those mornings when my body feels at war with itself, I want somebody anybody to crawl in bed with me and hold me and tell me that the fever has broken and by tomorrow I’ll be well enough for school.

On good days I always shave and shower, careful to cling to the metal bars that ring the bathroom. I still wash my hair every day, though you can’t tell, and I put a small dab of cologne on each cheek to confuse the nurses. (How could something so repulsive smell so
good?
) The toughest part of dressing is getting my feet into my pants, as neither my arms nor my feet are willing to meet halfway. Sometimes I’ll get help—though it depresses me—or if my muscles are really stiff, I’ll turn on my side on my bed and try to squirm down into my pants until I can grab them and wiggle them on. If I wasn’t so fastidious, I might just sleep in the damn things.

By eight a.m. I appear in the dining room for breakfast, usually some pieces of melon, coffee and toast. I used to eat tremendous amounts in the morning, great piles of pancakes and bacon washed down with freshly squeezed orange juice, the pulp crunching between my teeth. But now my body resists, unable to process more than a few feeble calories at a time. The nurses say I’m losing too much weight, but even pizza and ice cream have lost their allure, which is a scary thing, like finding out you no longer enjoy sex or music. (No, I’m not that far gone yet.) I wonder whether there was even a single day of metabolic harmony before I went from fighting to keep fat off to struggling to keep it on. If so, I would dearly like to know what I ate.

After breakfast I either sit down with a book or the newspaper, outside on the porch if it is nice, or if I have signed up for one of the morning activities I paint or play cards or bake cookies or fiddle in the small workshop where we make leather belts and wallets and trinkets to give to our grandchildren. (I loathe the sight of old people sitting around beading and weaving and eating Elmer’s glue but say nothing.)

For lunch I prefer soup and a grilled cheese sandwich with sliced tomatoes in it and lots of ketchup, but of course I take whatever is being offered. Then I usually return to my room to listen to music on my small tape player. Chopin and Mozart and Rachmaninoff are my mainstays, a sort of holy trinity to which I long ago entrusted my soul, but late in life I became smitten by soundtracks:
Doctor Zhivago, Camelot, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Zorba the Greek, Man of La Mancha, Exodus.
Sometimes I fall asleep, though usually I remain awake in the chair in the corner, which is orange and itchy. Then at two-thirty p.m. I go to physical therapy for a forty-five-minute workout, which I suspect is shortening my life span but breaks the routine nonetheless. I try to socialize a bit in the recreation room before dinner because afterward I am often too tired to do anything but sit and watch the nurses go by, which isn’t a bad thing to do when you don’t feel like much else. Then it’s back to bed with my book and brandy, bracing for the night’s demons and debauchery.