He turned and made his way into the bedroom, I now at this side. He was already in his pajamas, and so, after taking off his robe, he eased himself into the bed, all of this done without my assistance, but under my watchful eye.
My mind was still on Julian. “He was like Mephistopheles,” I said. “He took hell with him wherever he went.”
My father waved his hand by way of dismissing such literary notions. He had always been impatient with my bookish talk, bookish ways, bookish life, so different from the one he’d sought but never achieved.
“It’s a pity about Julian,” he said softly and sadly. “No wife. No children. A wasted life in some ways.” He shook his head at the hopeless extent of that waste. “Darkness was the only thing he knew.”
3
A man is made by the questions he asks, and I found myself increasingly questioning my father’s statement regarding Julian, that he had known only darkness. For I could remember my friend in the bright days of his youth, when he’d gone full speed at life. Like my father, he’d wished to change the world for the better. He’d known about history’s many horrors, of course, but he hadn’t focused on them. Life had seemed manageable to him then, its evils visible because they were so large: poverty, oppression, and the like. It was against these forces he would take up arms, a young Quixote. He’d been naive, of course, but that had made him genuine. He’d known that he was good, and this had been enough to make him happy.
When the best man you’d ever known, the one you’d loved the most, and of all the people you’d ever known, the one who’d had the greatest capacity for true achievement, when such a man later trudges to a pond, climbs into a boat, rows a hundred feet out into the water, rolls up his sleeves, and cuts his wrists, are you not called upon to ask what you might have said to him in that boat, how you might have saved him?
And if you do not ask this question, are you not, yourself, imperiled?
I would later consider the unsettling tremor I’d felt when I asked myself those very questions. It was as if I’d suddenly felt the bite of a blade, the warmth of my own blood now spilling down my arm.
Outside the building, the doorman was leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette. “Rain’s stopped,” he said.
I stepped from beneath the awning and looked into a quickly clearing sky. There were wisps of dispersing clouds, and here and there the flicker of a star, a rare sight in Manhattan.
“Yes, it’s quite nice now,” I said. “I think I’ll walk.”
“They’ve already warned me,” the doorman whispered with a sly wink and something vaguely sneering in his voice.
“Warned you?” I asked as if he’d just heard a sinister aside.
“About me smoking,” the doorman explained. “The board don’t like it when I smoke.”
“Oh,” I said.
He laughed. “But I do it out in the open, so the union says I can smoke if I want to.”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “Well, good night.”
I walked to Broadway, then turned south, a route I’d taken many times, so the sights of this section of the world’s longest street were familiar to me. And yet I felt that something had been minutely altered, and that this change had occurred in some part of me that I’d thought impenetrable since my wife’s death, a wound I’d covered with a thick scar tissue that nothing had pierced until now.
Clearly Julian’s death, the dread manner and heartbreaking loneliness of it, had opened me up both to questions and to memories, one of which came to me now.
We were in Greece, where Julian had come across the case of Antonis Daglis, the otherwise nondescript truck driver who had murdered several prostitutes. For Julian, such ordinary murderers were of no interest. Tracing their crimes, he said one day while we drank ouzo in an Athens taverna, was like following a shark through murky waters, dully recording that it ate this fish, then that one. It was evil he was after, I could tell, some core twist in the scheme of things.
In the end, Julian found nothing to write about in Greece, but while in the country, we wandered through various remote areas, notably the Mani. He was reading the great travel writer Patrick Fermor at the time, and one night, as we tented on a rocky cliff overlooking the Aegean, he told me about a funeral Fermor had attended in the same area. At the funeral, the dead man’s soul had been commended to the Virgin Mary in strict Christian fashion, but a coin had also been placed in his coffin as payment to Charon for ferrying the dead man’s soul across the Styx. To this incident Julian added a comment that now echoed through my mind: All excavations lead to hell.
Had Julian been clawing toward some fiery pit during those last days in the sunroom? I wondered.
This question, along with the memory that had just summoned it, added to the feeling of unease that was steadily gathering around me, and which I experienced as a shift in the axis of my life or, more precisely, as a faint, somewhat ghostly color added to a spectrum. It was as if Julian’s death now called my own life into question, threw it off balance, so that I had to confront the stark fact of how little I had known the man I thought I’d known the most.
On that thought, another memory came to me, this time of Julian and me walking in Grosvenor Square in London. Julian had suddenly stopped and pointed up ahead. “That’s where Adlai Stevenson died,” he said.
He went on to tell me that Stevenson had been strolling with an acquaintance at the time, feeling old, talking of the war. “How many secrets must have died with him,” Julian said.
Had secrets died with Julian, too?
I thought again of the agitation Loretta had noticed in him and that she’d previously described: Julian sleepless, pacing, a man who seemed not so much depressed as hounded. In every way, until that last moment, she told me, Julian had appeared less a man determined to die than one ceaselessly searching for a way to live.
I reached Lincoln Center a few minutes later and, still curiously unready to go directly to my apartment, sat down on the rim of the circular fountain and watched as the last of those bound for the symphony or the theater made their way across the plaza. It was here I’d met Julian a week after we’d graduated from college. He’d already sent in an application to work at the State Department, and I’d expected him to tell me a little more about the ground-level job he hoped to get, but instead he said, “I want to go somewhere, Philip. Out of the country. And not Europe. Someplace that feels different.”
“Where do you have in mind?”
Without the slightest hesitation, he said, “Your father suggested Argentina. He said I should see a country where the political situation is dangerous. Get a feel for what it’s like to live in a place where everything is at risk.”
I was, of course, aware that Argentina was still in the midst of very dark political repression, and for that reason, if for no other, it hadn’t been on my “must-see” list.
“I’m not sure going to Argentina is a good thing,” I said. “Or even a safe one.”
“Do you always want to play it safe, Philip?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Oh, come on,” Julian said. “You have a month before you start your job.”
I remained unconvinced.
“Philip, for God’s sake,” Julian said. “Don’t measure out your life in coffee spoons.”
His allusion to poor, pathetic J. Alfred Prufrock was clearly meant to shock me into acquiescing to his idea of an Argentine adventure, but now, when I recalled that moment, it was Julian’s energy and self-confidence rather than my hesitation that struck me, the sense that he could walk through a hail of bullets and emerge unscathed. He was rather like Aiden Pyle in The Quiet American, young and inexperienced in anything beyond the well-ordered life of a privileged American. Julian Wells, conqueror of worlds, shielded by his many gifts, destined for greatness. Like his country, invulnerable.