After You've Gone (20 page)

In her kitchen, in her old robe, Julia moved with a sort of vagueness that Roger found extremely touching. His wife had been a dynamo of organization, and so was Candida. Julia seemed not to have the proper tool for any given task, and most of her knives were dull. But what she produced was
somehow really, really good. (Except for the few things she forgot about and burned.)

Maybe, someday, he would remodel her kitchen for her. Roger thought of that, he imagined Julia in the big generous kitchen that she deserved: all wood, as he saw it, lovely soft grains of wood everywhere, and everything she needed near at hand, a large open rack of all the proper kitchen tools. And Julia there in a heavy dark red silk robe.

He could not resist telling her about this fantasy, tactfully leaving out the detail of the robe.

And Julia in her turn was deeply touched. Her wide amber eyes teared. “That's really lovely of you,” she told him. “To imagine a kitchen for me.”

“Someday I'll make it real,” he promised.

Thus the pattern of their seeing each other was more or less established. Food and love, along with wine and joints. At Julia's house. Every night.

At times it did occur to Roger that this arrangement was unfair to Julia; he should take her out. God, the city was full of great restaurants, famous food. However, his divorce had made him more than a little edgy over money, and also, whenever he suggested to Julia that she might prefer going out, she protested that she loved cooking for him, loved the nest they had made of her house.

Roger tried to make up for these occasional twinges of guilt toward her by presents of wine and flowers, a lot of both, which Julia loved, she thanked and thanked him. Even, more practically, he brought her some good kitchen implements, a lemon zester, a decent potato masher. A set of knives.

And gradually they did begin to go out from time to time, mostly to neighborhood restaurants that Julia knew about.

A serious problem for Roger, though, as spring became summer and all this had been going on for a couple of months, was the fact that although he still loved Julia—madly, he really adored her—sometimes he just didn't want to drive to Twin Peaks that night. To see her. He would rather have been doing something else, even just seeing some guy from his office. Or doing nothing. Just for a change.

He managed to say a little of this to Julia. “Maybe we need a little time off from each other sometimes. You must have work, even old pals you want to see.” (It had been tacitly acknowledged, then laughingly admitted, that their two sets of friends would quite possibly not get along.) To Roger's relief Julia quite agreed. “I should spend more time with women I know,” she told him seriously. “That's good, your idea.” And so they began to take off a few nights from time to time. In their separate but innocent pursuits.

Those sixties years were hard on middle-aged men, though. Making this observation, Roger further thought that it was especially true in warm weather. Young girls were everywhere with dresses up to there, and the longest, thinnest legs, lightly tanned. And breasts: so many girls going braless. He saw the multiple, wonderfully various shapes of young breasts, everywhere.

Very distracting, even for a man seriously in love.

…

Julia rarely talked about her work to Roger; how could she? He didn't know or understand the first thing about higher mathematics. However, one day at work she called him in great excitement.

“I won this prize,” she told him. “It's really incredible. It's not just the money, although that's really nice. But this could lead to—oh, almost anything.”

“Baby, that's great. Super great. Listen, we really have to celebrate.”

“Wonderful. And I might do something really out of character, like buy a new dress.”

Let me choose it, Roger for an instant thought, but of course did not say to Julia.

During that day, which was fogbound and dark, windy, cold, the start of a true San Francisco summer, Roger remarked on and wondered at his own somewhat lowered spirits, which he did not believe attributable to the weather. But he was forced to recognize that they had a lot to do with the evening ahead.

Just what did he fear, he asked himself. That Julia would buy and wear a dress that was somehow wrong, unbecoming? He could not believe himself quite so superficial, and besides he and Julia together had discussed the fact that visual taste was not her strongest suit. She had a certain cavalier indifference to objects, including clothes. This was one of the things he loved in her, wasn't it?

The important fact about the evening was her award, Roger firmly told himself. Her voice had been so excited, warm and wonderful, true Julia. And “It could lead to almost anything,” she had said. Roger had no idea in a literal way just what she could have meant: money? prestige? further prizes? (Could he conceivably be jealous? threatened?)

Into his mind there floated a newspaper photo of a Nobel Prize recipient, in bed, in Stockholm. In fact, two people in two beds, a man and his wife. And surely the woman, who was very dark and attractive, was a mathematician? However, as Roger's memory cleared he recalled that the actual recipient of the prize was the husband, not his wife.

Ironies all around, not lost on Roger.

Instead of a dress Julia had bought a black silk shirt, heavy, rich-looking. Very tailored. Matching pants, tapered, narrow. Both perfectly fitted to her. To Roger she looked new and strange—in fact sensational. Even before their long ritual embrace in her hallway Roger cried out, “You're so beautiful, this is your look.” He breathed into her hair, “Oh, I love you!”

Julia laughed, in a mildly chiding way. “You mean I look a lot better than usual? I guess I do. Don't count on its being permanent, though,” and she laughed again.

All in all, it was one of their most successful evenings out, as Roger was always later to remember. Julia, happy and successful—and beautiful, she really was, in the shimmer of black silk, with her bright-red (generous, sexy) mouth. The scars were hardly visible. Judging her as objectively as he could, Roger saw what he had to recognize as style. Julia had hit on her own style; if she so chose she could go on, stylishly.

And Roger's fantasies about their life together began to expand, there in the excellently appointed, rather trendy new restaurant. With smart-looking Julia across from him. There was really no reason for them always to see each other in such cloistered, such entirely closed-in circumstances as had been
their habit, Roger thought. For a while, of course, they had simply not wanted any interference with their miraculous privacy. Their exclusive passion. However, couldn't they now, conceivably, have both? Time for love alone and still, occasionally, other people? Possibly even develop some mutual friends, a small social circle of their own?

This did not seem the moment, though, for such a suggestion. Julia, who of course was exceptionally bright, and whose tongue could be sharp, might easily have countered, “You mean, now that I'm so well dressed we can start going out?” Which, even as a semi-joke, would be unfortunate.

Instead he told her, “This afternoon I had a fantasy about you winning the Nobel Prize. We were in bed together in Stockholm.”

And Julia smiled, most beautifully. A successful happy woman, on the brink of her life.

Soon after that they went back to Julia's Twin Peaks aerie, and opened champagne and smoked dope and made love. Crazily. Fantastically. For hours.

Quite possibly it was their greatest night.

Why, then, when out of the blue a few days later (or, rather, the gray; it was still very cold and dark) Candida called, and in her old teasing voice, a little plaintive, saying she missed him, wanted to see him—why did Roger say, “Well, sure,” not mentioning Julia?

Ah, fortunate, clever young Candida. Even the weather for her especial benefit seemed to break that day. The wind died down, the fog lifted, and there was a clean blue day, perfect for lunch on the docks at San Rafael, an old haunt of theirs.

Perfect for Candida's very short yellow linen dress.

“You look like a butterfly,” Roger told her.

“Oh, you're always so mean to me, you never take me seriously.”

Roger laughed at her, he always did. “What do you want me to say, you look like a tennis pro?”

“Oh, you're quite horrible. I can't think why I called you.”

That was how they had always been together, very silly indeed, and somewhat sexy. And even while admitting to himself that Candida was silly, that together they made a fatuous dialogue, at the same time Roger thought, Well, why not? Do I have to be so intense and heavy all the time? Candida makes me feel young. My Candy.

As they left the table, Candida stood beside him for a moment, almost as tall as he, her lips just grazing his ear as she whispered (an old trick of hers but still rather sexy), “I suppose now you're going to whisk me off to some terrible motel.”

What else could he say except, “I suppose I am,” which is what he did say.

Making love to Candida (and the operative word was “to,” whereas with Julia he made love with) was a somewhat more demanding process than he had remembered. For her pleasure, certain gestures must be prolonged, prolonged—as, though her intentions were probably generous, she did rather little in return. (Unlike Julia, giving everything, every time.)

But for most of the afternoon with Candida he managed not to think of Julia at all.

In those years, along with new notions of styles in hair and dress, messages of love were emanating from the young, the hippies. Make love not war, and love is all we need, and why
don't we do it in the road? Or why not just make love with anyone, anywhere? Sexual freedom, and Roger, along with thousands of other older folk, thought the kids were obviously on to something, though of course they went too far. But people should make love more or less when they felt like it. Whenever, with whoever.

Naturally, Roger, on the whole a sensible person, would not have carried this message to some foolish extreme, nothing excessive like trying to make it with those really young girls, available though they all looked.

He did feel, though, that his continuing to see (to make love to, that is) both Julia and, on a far more occasional basis, Candida was culturally sanctioned, as it were.

It was even acknowledged between Roger and Candida that they both “saw” other people. Having more or less fallen in with the spirit of the times, or perhaps adapted it to her needs and/or convenience, Candida thought their “relationship” was “cool.” “Of course being with you is the greatest, Roger, but in another way so is an afternoon sometimes with some other guy. My tennis instructor. After all, we only get one ride on this merry-go-round. Only impossible Edwin wouldn't get it.” Edwin, husband of Candida, was ill-tempered, red-faced, and very rich.

At times, hours that he had to see as far-out flights of fantasy, Roger wished that he and Julia could have the same sort of free exchange, but of course that was crazy. Julia?
NEVER.

In fact, in those days Julia was very caught up in her antiwar activity: meetings with other pacifist scientists, meetings with women for peace. Meetings with people with whom she most definitely did not go to bed.

And actually Julia's activism was one more thing for Roger to admire in her (Roger was a non-activist liberal). To admire and love. He
loved
her.

…

These days, partly because of Julia's many meetings, Roger and Julia were seeing each other two or three times a week. And in some very subtle, complex way, the intensity between them had very slightly diminished. One might have thought (Roger might have thought) that seeing each other less would have an opposite effect, that when they did see each other, after small lapses of time, they would fall upon each other as ravenously as in the early stages of their romance.

Over the months that they had been together, Roger knew that he had, in a way, tended not quite to look at Julia; he had taken her warm, sometimes moody, often passionate presence for granted. But sometime in the balmy fall that succeeded cold August he began to notice certain changes in her. For one thing she had lost weight, her body was leaner—to Roger, even sexier. But she also seemed to smile less, her face in repose was often sad, anxious-looking. Maybe the weight loss had this effect, giving her a somewhat drawn look?

Or maybe she was sad about Vietnam? the bombing of Cambodia?

One October morning Julia telephoned him at the office, again with what she said was great good news. But Roger took note of the fact that her voice did not sound happy, really.

Anyway, “We'll have to celebrate,” he told her. “Even if you won't tell me yet what it is. Dinner out?”

For the moment he had forgotten that he was to have lunch with Candida, again in San Rafael. He thought of breaking the date, but then he further thought, Well, why? I can always
tell Julia I'm tired, have to get up early. Something. (Innate fastidiousness had so far prevented his making love to both Candida and Julia on the same day.)

He arrived at her door with flowers, a great burst of white chrysanthemums, his car had been full of their slightly acrid, fall smell. And there was Julia, again in her rich black silk. She looked terrific. How could he ever have thought her less than good-looking? (And how he wished, just then, that he had not spent the afternoon with Candida in their motel.)

“You look fantastic,” he told her after their kiss. “Tell me your news! Darling, you're always so reluctant—”

She smiled, but was it slightly wan, her smile?—the least shade guarded? “It's Berkeley,” she told him. “They want me there. More rank, more money. It's actually quite incredible—”

Involuntarily thinking, Good, a move to Berkeley, she can get a nicer place, I'll help her with it and we can see each other on weekends—thinking all that even as he kissed her, Roger heard himself saying, “Baby, that's fantastic.”