Lovely War(66)

“It wasn’t you,” she said. “You didn’t kill those poor soldiers any more than I did.”

How could he be plucked from the trenches and whisked to this warm Paris restaurant with the dearest, kindest girl close beside him, offering balm for his wounds?

“The world’s gone mad,” she said. “It’s as if the nations of Europe are . . . I don’t know . . . lions, or dragons, savage beasts with cruel intentions of their own. It’s not you, and it’s not me. It’s the dragon, locked in combat with the other dragons. And all we can do is watch, and try not to be stepped on or burned.”

“I’m not merely watching,” he said.

“This analogy is pretty shabby, come to think of it,” she admitted. “I was never good at metaphors in composition.” She tapped her chin. “You are the, um, you are one of the dragon’s claws. Which you have to be, or else they will throw you in jail for not being a claw. . . .” She sighed. “Maybe you’d have to be a fire-breathing nostril. I give up. But it’s still not your fault.”

“A nostril,” he said. “I’ve been called worse.”

“If you had to be a nostril,” she said, “I think a dragon’s would have a certain clout.”

“A certain snout?”

She made a face at him. “Did you know your jokes are terrible?”

He nodded. “That’s how I like them.”

She laughed. “Me too.”

Oh, but he wanted to hold this girl and never let go.

A couple caught James’s eye. They kissed in their booth as though they had the room to themselves. He gulped.

“You say what the chaplains say,” he said. “‘It’s not you. Don’t take it personally.’ You’d have to be a monster not to take it personally. But that’s what you become out there. A monster. Someone who laughs at dead bodies. Or you don’t survive.”

She took his face in her hands. He’d had a shave in her honor, and she’d been dying to feel his cheeks ever since she first saw him in the train station.

“Then be a monster,” she said. “Do you must to survive, so you can come back to me.”

He took her hands and kissed them. “Hazel Windicott,” he said, “if there’s anything left of me after the war, nothing would keep it from finding its way back to you.”

The words Hazel had wondered and fretted about fell down so naturally, she wondered what she’d been afraid of. They were true, and the truth should never make you afraid.

“You have to come back,” she said. “I love you, you know that?”

All the knots melted from James’s weary body and mind. “I do know that,” he said, marveling in the discovery. He did know. So this was how it felt, being loved.

As for himself, he’d known for a long time. “I love you too.”



* * *





There’s no telling what might’ve happened next if the waiter hadn’t appeared just then with two steaming plates of duck confit and potatoes. The first course. He had waited a moment, discreetly, sensing that important words were being spoken, but when a pause occurred, he seized it. If they have a deep understanding of love, the French have an even deeper understanding of food and when it is to be eaten. That is precisely when it’s ready and not a moment later.

James and Hazel, both stunned and bashful, welcomed the food as a way to busy themselves with something other than words, after the avalanche that had just landed upon them.

As for myself, well, I don’t mind telling you, I was a complete mess. I had to borrow a cloth napkin to dry my eyes. I knew from the start that these two belonged together. But that doesn’t make it any less wondrous when I’m proven right.

Let them start their dreadful wars, let destruction rain down, and let plague sweep through, but I will still be here, doing my work, holding humankind together with love like this.





DECEMBER 1942


     A Kiss Is Just a Kiss





“SO HELP ME,” thunders Ares, “if that boy doesn’t kiss that girl and soon, I’ll—”

“You’ll what, Ares?” asks Hades.

Ares fumes. “I’ll kiss her myself.”

Aphrodite begins to laugh. “Not for nothing am I the Goddess of Love,” she purrs. “I can make the God of War himself woozy for a girl he’s only heard about in a story.”

Apollo produces for himself a sumptuous piano, trains a light on its gleaming surface, and begins to play.

“You must remember this,” he sings. “A kiss is just a kiss. A sigh is just a sigh. . . .”

“Would you stop that noise?” Ares has never particularly appreciated music.

“Hephaestus’s net may hold you, Goddess, but your story holds us all captive,” says gallant Apollo. “I can understand Ares. Your Hazel does seem to cry out to be kissed. Metaphorically speaking.”

“What was that about a dragon?” asks Ares. “Was she calling me a dragon?”

“Never mind, Ares.” Aphrodite actually pats him on the head. “Just listen to the silly little love story.”





APHRODITE