“I don’t know. Something special. There’s a vacuous reply for you.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “An intellectual like yourself. You should do better. Why don’t you like this, then?” She pointed at one painting, a seemingly rough sketch of a woman in a boat, the form of the woman blending into the shape of the water. She was pleased with it; she remained pleased with it despite him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
She grunted. “Go on. You’ll have to try harder than that.”
“You’ve looked at too many pictures, you know too much. You are too aware of what you’re doing and of the past. That’s what’s wrong with it.”
“Hard words,” she commented. “And being too aware of the past seems a strange criticism from a classicist.”
“True.” He thought, then smiled apologetically. “I don’t mean to criticize. I meant it as a compliment.”
“Really? Heaven help me if you decide to be rude.”
“I am never rude. What I mean is that you really are very good. And that is not simply because I adore you without reserve. Although it helps. But look: You have Matisse and Cézanne and a bit of Puvis there. A touch of Robert, perhaps, as well. I look at that picture and I can see what you’ve built it out of. That’s what’s wrong.”
“Derivative and second-rate, you mean?” She was not in the slightest bit offended; it was one of her best qualities and one Julien could never share.
“Not at all. I mean you are being too careful. That’s what I mean. This is a perfectly good picture. And if I didn’t know you I would be impressed and charmed. But I do know you.”
He thought some more, wondering whether he dared say precisely what he felt, for he knew he could never explain exactly why the idea came to him. “It’s the painting of a dutiful daughter,” he said eventually, looking at her cautiously to see her reaction. “You want to please. You are always aware of what the person looking at this picture will think of it. Because of that you’ve missed something important. Does that make sense?”
She thought, then nodded. “All right,” she said grudgingly and with just a touch of despair in her voice. “You win.”
Julien grunted. “Have another go, then. I shall come back and come back until you figure it out.”
“And you’ll know?”
“You’ll know. I will merely get the benefit of it.”
“What if I get it wrong?”
He shook his head and grinned. “Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”
THE CONVERSATION summed up much of his appeal for her. Alone of anybody she had ever met he allowed her room to breathe. He wanted nothing from her. Merely knowing that she lived was sufficient for him. He did not wish to live with her, marry her, did not become jealous or fretful for her. He did not watch her or live through her. Did not swamp her with attentions or drown her with excess adoration. Above all, he did not make things easy for her. All negatives, all things she was unused to. He admired what she did, but was brutally honest when asked his opinion. Where he found the resource for this neither she nor he knew; it was a far cry from the self-confident pretense he learned with many of the women he pursued over the years, or the detachment he formed for the world in general.
Both Bernard and Marcel—neither of them particularly acute in such matters—realized that Julien and Julia were deeply in love with each other. Julien was afraid that if they became lovers now, Julia would turn into another woman, one to be consumed and discarded, and so he held back for fear that showing his love would extinguish it. Julia, in contrast, was not yet sure enough of herself for the battle—with her work and her father—that would result. She knew that her irresolution would seem pathetic and childish to many, that a stronger person would dispatch the looming, overbearing presence of her father and demand the right to a life untrammeled by his needs. He was an impossible man, and placed her in an impossible position. For most of her life she had had no one but him, and she was afraid not so much of his hurt if she fell in love, but of what it would say about her. Her life had been utterly selfish, she knew; she had allowed no one in to disrupt it; was she now to hurt so desperately the one person who had always meant something to her? She had to put someone’s interests and needs above her own in order to remain human; and the only person she could do this for was her father.
So she was contradictory and difficult, with him and with Julien, hard to understand; often irritable, veering between affection and criticism, drawing close then pulling away again. She knew all the while that she did indeed love Julien, needed his existence in a way that she had never known with anyone else. When she was depressed or frustrated with her work, she thought of him, constantly concerned herself with where he was and what he was doing, felt incomplete without him, and anxious when he was there lest a mistake ruin everything. If he had only forced the issue that day in Palestine before she could consider all the complications, then, she sometimes told herself, all would have been well. She even felt slightly insulted by his rejection, but knew that such disdain was unjust. Julien could not make it so easy for her; he wanted her soul as well, and must bide his time until she was ready to give it.
So, instead of each other’s physical company, they had their letters, which crossed the country in a constant flow, month after month and year after year, continuing even when Julia went to Vietnam, then on to Japan for nearly two years to seek inspiration and escape there, or when Julien returned to Rome, something he did as often as possible. For much of the 1930s they were not even in the same country, but the letters continued nonetheless, creating something far stronger than mere physical closeness could ever approach. In between the letters, both burrowed down into their work to hide from the world, which was becoming ever more terrifying.
That there was going to be another war they both knew, as did everyone else; sometimes Julien was even sure there was going to be a civil war, with the streets of France again running with blood and echoing with screams of faction. Almost any little incident, it seemed, could set off a disaster, either in France or in Europe as a whole, but no one knew when it would actually happen. The threat contaminated everything they did and felt long before it actually erupted. Men like Marcel and Bernard took their sides and seemed to make it the more likely, sowing rancor and blame in advance for a defeat that, strangely, everyone knew would come this time. Even those like Marcel, who once lectured Julien on the extraordinary military achievement of France’s defenses, could talk in the next breath of what would happen when the war was over and the Germans had established their grip on the whole of Europe. And as the day grew ever nearer, and the continent sleepwalked its way into a conflict that threatened cataclysm on a scale no one could imagine, his opinions became the more extreme and the more vengeful.
Julien once pointed out the contradiction to him. “If the defenses are so good, why do you talk of defeat?”
“All the defenses in the world will be useless if we are led by fools. We’ve built ourselves a wall, but we are crumbling behind it. Our politicians are corrupt, money-grubbing rabble-rousers, obeying the orders of the moneylenders and the masons. Will you fight for them? Give your blood so they can continue to stuff their pockets with money? Sweep them away; then we can start again. Build something new.”
“You want to be beaten?” Julien asked.
“Of course not.”
And Julien returned to his books, turning in these years to the subject that had been in the back of his mind for so long: to describe the resilience of civilization, its enormous strength, the way that even when near death it could revive and regrow, bringing its benefits to mankind once more. It was a lyrical conception, his own defiance of the blackness of Marcel, or the gleeful cynicism of Bernard, who derived much humor in his newspaper articles from describing the confusion, incompetence, and corruption of politicians at work. He imagined civilization as something lying outside the individual, a spirit that only required a little care to survive. It consoled him; as it had sprung up again after the Romans, and again after the Black Death, so it would now, after the darkness to come. His great book on the history of Neoplatonism thus became his plaintive song in the falling light, and gradually he worked in more and more commentary on Manlius’s manuscript to illustrate the points he was making. He, too, expected defeat.