Losing Julia (51 page)

“He knew I had nothing to hold on to. No memory of utter joy and ecstasy. Nothing that could endure the desolation. Whereas even in the worst of it, he had a place to go. He had you.”

She was silent for a while, still staring at me, and then she picked up her brush and began painting again. “So now you’ll always have a place to go,” she said, trying her best to smile.

I SAT THERE
for two hours, just watching her and feeling the sun on my face and listening to the sounds of Paris. I’d never felt that way before: so rapturous and serene, as though I had stumbled upon the answers to life’s hardest questions. What I kept thinking was that I wished everybody had a chance to know such a feeling, if only for a day. Especially the millions who died in the dirt and the mud. Otherwise, what was the sense in being born?

After Julia finished we took her things back to her hotel, then went window-shopping, leaning against each other as we peered into storefronts and laughed and marveled at various items on display. As we passed a church we heard music playing and went inside and stood near the back listening to a small concert performed by university students. I tried to make out the story in the stained glass above them but couldn’t, except for the last scene. Jesus again, suspended from the cross and looking down at us, desperate for a cleaning.

We stayed until the end of the concert, then walked to the Bois de Boulogne. When we reached the grass Julia bent over and took off her shoes, holding them in one hand. “Did you know that I’m very fast?” she asked.

“I didn’t.”

“It’s true.”

“How fast?”

“Probably faster than you,” she said, smiling.

“That’s not so fast,” I said. “Bet I can catch you before you reach that tree over there.”

“Only if I let you,” she said. Then she kissed me quickly, turned and took off running. I followed, trying not to laugh out loud as I struggled to catch up. Just before she reached the tree she turned and spread her arms out, catching me so that I fell on top of her.

“I was closing in,” I said, rolling over so that she was on top of me.

“I couldn’t wait any longer,” she said. “Besides, I know how much men hate to lose.” She began tickling me until I rolled back over on her and pinned her down. As I began kissing her I felt overwhelmed with the desire to be inside of her.

“Do you have any idea how pretty you are?” I said.

She smiled and said, “Do you have any idea how much I love kissing you?” Then she kissed me quickly all over my face before rolling over back on top of me. I held her face in my hands and stared at her.

“Now you do,” she said. She rolled off me and stood up. We brushed the leaves off each other before walking arm and arm through the park, stopping to watch a group of old men play
boule.

After we left the park we took a taxi to Sacré-Cœur and sat on the sloping lawn, looking out over the city. Julia took my hand and kissed it. “I haven’t felt this content—this peaceful—in so long that I’d almost forgotten what it’s like,” she said.

I turned to say something, hesitated for a minute, then said, “There is something I don’t understand about you.”

“What is that?” She looked anxious.

“I don’t understand how you could be so alone for so many years. Especially someone like you. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Whose life does?”

“Haven’t other men proposed to you?”

“God, no.” She laughed.

“I would have.”

“Patr—”

“It’s true.”

“You shouldn’t say that. It’s too much for me.”

“I can’t bear to think of you being so alone; of us being apart.”

“At least now I’ll always have you to think about.” She leaned against me.

“But that’s not enough. It’s not enough for me. I need to see you and touch you and hold you. At night when I’m in my hotel I can’t sleep because I crave you so badly.”

“I’m here now,” she said, putting her arms around me.

“Don’t you know what people would give for this?” I tried to keep my voice steady. “
Everything,
Julia. Most people would give everything for this.”

She nodded slowly, then rested her head on my chest as I lay back.

“So we’re luckier than most people,” she said softly.

“Are we?”

She didn’t answer.

We must have fallen asleep because when we awoke the sky had changed colors and the air was cooler, portending rain. We walked through the streets of Montmartre for a while, pausing to admire the work of local artists, then stopped for dinner.

“I want to take you to the Louvre,” she said, after we had finished eating.

“I’d love that. Ever since you first told me about going to the Louvre, about how the things that you saw brought tears to your eyes, well, I’ve dreamed of going there with you.”

She looked down at her watch. “You’d better get back to your hotel.”

“There’s a little time.”

“But not enough, is there?”

I leaned forward and took her hand. “I could leave Charlotte.”

She pulled her hand back. “No. No you can’t. Not your wife and son. Please don’t say that.”

“But what will we do?”

She was silent for a moment, then said, “Don’t you understand? There is nothing for us to do.”

“What do you mean? I couldn’t bear to lose you.”

“I couldn’t bear to lose Daniel.”

“But you don’t have to lose me.”

“I never had you,
don’t you see?”

I looked down at the table, fighting back tears. My fists were clenched. “Goddamn it.”

She put her hand on my back and rubbed it. “I should never have come to Paris.”

“Don’t say that.” I lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply.

“I won’t ruin your life, Patrick. I’d rather never see you again than know that I took you away from your wife and child.”

“Do you mean that?”

She nodded slowly as she bit her lip.

“I’d always find you,” I said, leaning toward her. But when I said that I thought I saw fear in her eyes. Of me? Of what she’d done?

“Please don’t make this any harder,” she said.

When the waiter brought the check she insisted on paying it. Outside it was raining lightly and the streets were quiet. We walked slowly back to her hotel, pausing to watch the light from the street lamps skip across the puddles at our feet. We stood out front for a while, unwilling to say good night yet too sad to make hurried love in her room. Finally she said, “Do you know why I was so upset when I visited the Louvre, why I ran out?”

“Why?”

“Because for the first time I realized what the Louvre says.”

“What does it say?”

“That our lives—all of our lives—are a struggle between love and loss.”

“And which wins?”

“That’s what I can’t decide.”

I ran my fingers along her cheek, then kissed her forehead.

“I’ll be waiting for you,” she said, as she turned and walked into her hotel. I watched her cross the lobby to the stairs, then hurried back to my hotel and tiptoed into bed. In the morning when Charlotte asked where I had been I told her I’d felt better and gone down the street for some dinner where I met a French veteran who told wonderful stories and plied me with drink until I could barely walk.

IN THE ROOM
across the hall there lives a blind and partially paralyzed woman named April Lessing. She never comes out, not unless she has to, so I go visit her a few times a week. I sit on the small metal and wood chair next to her bed in the permanent semidarkness and we talk. Sometimes she puts her hands on my face, running her fingers slowly from my forehead down to my chin. It bothered me at first, especially when she described what my face felt like. Nice high cheekbones, but a bit thin in the cheeks, she would say. Good chin. Strong jawline. (If only she knew.) But now I rather enjoy it, though it often feels more revealing than I would like.

April is ninety-two. Her voice is low and hoarse like a smoker’s, though she says she quit forty years ago. She keeps three sets of rosary beads by her bed: one pink, one yellow and one white, and still complains about the reforms of Vatican II. “They took all the mystery out of it,” she says. “Putting the mass in English.”

“I think the idea was that it would be better if people could understand what was being said,” I respond.

“People don’t
want
to understand what’s being said, don’t you see? Once you understand the words the whole thing is not nearly so impressive.”

April’s husband died thirty-six years ago, at the age of sixty-seven. “I told my daughters, ‘Whatever you do, don’t marry an older man unless you plan to marry twice,’” she says. “It’s so silly, women marrying older men when the men die seven or eight years before them anyway! Dumbest thing I ever heard.”

“But if they fall in love… ”

“That’s what happened to me, only I didn’t realize that all the men would die off in their seventies. They were dying like flies at the club we belonged to. Heart attacks on the golf course, strokes in the locker room, seizures in the dining room. Goodness, what a mess! And most of the ladies can’t find a decent second husband because they are all dead or dying or married and dying.”

“I didn’t realize how exceptional I was.”

“Oh, but we’ve given up on you!”

“You have?”

“Why sure, you’re already taken.”

“I am?”

“Of course you are. You’ve been taken all your life. Do you think I’m blind?”

YOU KNOW HOW
when you are young, you can’t imagine forgetting how old you are, whereas once you hit middle age it becomes necessary—especially if the question is fired out of the blue—to consult your fingers? Well, when you get even older the same thing happens with what year it is, not just whether it’s 1980 or 1981 but whether it’s 1980 or 1970. And then you think to yourself, Good God, which young chap is president these days? And as you’re trying to remember you’re suddenly flooded by the childhood smell of pencil shavings, and there you are, emptying the silver and black pencil sharpener bolted to the wall of the classroom near the pretty girl in the blue and white gingham dress, which is why you’re at the pencil sharpener in the first place. And then pain brings you back again, wondering what year it is and who is president.