Julie

After I left Edison, I was surprised to see Julie again. Eleanor Levine

I saw her in a bookstore in Jerusalem. She had that distinct blonde hair that struck my soul and made me pray to her as if she were an esteemed member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

We did not talk in the bookstore, which was located in downtown Jerusalem near a pizzeria that was recently bombed—construction parts lingering on the sidewalk—though we were in real time, not dream time, and I knew, even assuming she’d never take a flight over—there she was—staring in the space—examining me as she did the Hebrew, English and French books for sale.

Following a year in Jerusalem, I returned to Edison and saw her at the Cuban restaurant where she worked. My friend Lisa, who accompanied me, had never seen me so quiet and in servitude as when the waitress, who was Julie, came to our table.

“What would you like?” she asked quietly. It was not, at first, clear to her—who I was—until I asked what kind of Margaritas they had.

Her face went cold.

I was the girl who stalked her in the college library.

They didn’t call it stalking back then because John Hinckley Jr’s behavior had barely made it into our vocabulary.

It was more like a religious occupation in which I sat in the cubicle in the library at obscure hours of the night when she was there—about 10 pm—hoping romantic osmosis would occur—though this never happened. I mostly read and reread the same words on my page.

At the restaurant, as her face turned from happy/professional server to “what the fuck is she doing here?” I could not look at her. I ordered from the menu and was not surprised when she did not return with our items. Another waiter replaced her, and when I went to leave a tip, Lisa jealously insisted that I don’t leave money.

“But you don’t stiff a Goddess,” I told her. Lisa did not like to see money, which was otherwise not hers, spent on somebody else. Lisa was from a provincial town in the Garden State where Jersey Transit buses stopped only on the weekends.

Lisa has since blocked me on Facebook because I berated her once for not bringing money when she visited me in Manhattan. But alas, compared with Julie, Lisa was a nose-bleed seat at a Mets game, so I’m not distressed over her absence in my life.

I knew Julie and I would be apart, and when I moved back to Little Italy in Manhattan, in the same apartment I lived before, I didn’t envision she’d be across the hall, but there she was, by sheer coincidence. Her apartment and mailbox next to mine.

She went through the same heightened credit check as I did. We stood online in the middle of the night in an alleyway. Eventually, the woman approved both of us, but not at the same time.

Having her in my hallway, well, it was not something I wanted, because she might assume I rented there for a proper poaching position, which was not true. I had returned to this building after living there ten years ago, and it was a mere fluke that Julie and I, in this nightmare, were neighbors.

I saw her in the middle of the street, gave her my book, and said that I had written about her.

Julie turned me into a writer, lover, and alcoholic. Indeed, I downed Jack Daniels thinking about her—aspiring to be with her in bed, but it led me to the toilet on the weekend, where I vomited.

I don’t think she read the book I wrote about her. I’m not even sure I gave it to her. Though I think I did.

Every time I have an obsession, my mother diagnoses it as a “rhino,” because I sent Julie a stuffed rhino in the mail, which amused her, until she realized who sent it. And thereafter, whenever I fixated on a Beatrice-like babe with blonde hair and green eyes, Mom said, “Oh my—you’re having another rhino.”

I saw Julie again—in my apartment building—near the mailboxes, which I returned to.

She was friendlier than the time she saw me at the Cuban restaurant in Edison, NJ.

Julie told me, while opening the metal mailbox, which is how they made them then, that her friend Circe would visit.

I knew Circe from the days in college when they were best friends and after I had fallen, I mean really through the floor, and realized that Circe understood the pain I felt about Julie—and Circe said to me in the laundry room, “hello Anita,” like it was the first time someone understood the suicidal negotiations I had with myself and a nonexistent relationship with Julie.

Circe had been her roommate and the two spent hours together without words exchanged among other humans except themselves. One always thought they were lovers though they were outstandingly heterosexual citizens, according to gossip reports on our campus.

I even went to their dorm room once, knocked on the door, and knocked again, and luckily, no one answered, and I did not go to prison or get apprehended by campus security.

In a gym near our Little Italy apartments, Julie and her friend pick up a copy of my book.

When I see her again, at the gym, the one in Little Italy, not really wanting to, I walk away. I don’t want to acknowledge her.

I had heard, right after college, that she was in Edison, NJ, perpetually living in that town. She had married a Harvard professor and merged with him.

I try to snub her at the gym.

I go into the shower. I wash my hair. It is always important to use other people’s shampoo and soap if they are the only things in the shower.

I take a towel. Wipe myself. I go to the lockers, not sure if I am still paying the monthly membership fee, and there she is, with her friend, and says, smiling at me, “You look so refreshed.”

I disregard her. Get up from the wooden seat near my locker. I go back in the shower until they leave. I can’t comprehend why she is addressing me finally, though she peruses my name on the internet—looking for stories—to see if she appears as the protagonist.

I find her on Facebook as my dogs lick my titanium knees, which never break if you fall, and you feel their canine tongues but not as much as with regular knees.

At first, I am not sure she is who she says she is on Facebook because she is supposed to be someone’s Harvard mistress who topples over others on the precipice of idolatry. She has married a guy, people say, who had an affair with a famous male literary critic. When I ask her future husband, who is in my Vietnam class, before they are married, if he has slept with the iconic World War II author, his face falls off. He never speaks with me again, though we were never intimate.

On Facebook, I block Julie—to avoid any future felony charges—and discover that she is a regular mom with kindred spirits and connections to suburbia. Normal family life. Not a goddess stopping the wars as Helen of Troy did. She has gotten a graduate degree at a non-Ivy league university and married and puts pro-gay epithets on her Facebook page. Of course, this is an underlying message she is sending me. But no, she and Circe, the once rumored couple, are now married and in relationships with the cisgender men they call husband.

She is friends with Circe, who lives a conventional existence, but unlike Julie, who seems humbler—showing only forest pictures on her feed—Circe displays Europe on her wall.

I think about Julie and her equine-like existence, her perfect beauty, how all people are in love with her. How they still compliment her on her delicacy because she really does not look like she is fifty-three.

I let thoughts about her crawl over me, right through the AA meeting on Zoom as people celebrate their April anniversaries.

She was telling me how refreshed I looked.

That’s how all delusions begin.

They tell you how undimmed you look though you do not expect any comments at all or her presence and this makes you feel like there is a possibility that seduction will resume.

You will experience another “rhino,” as your mother called it.

You are even watching a Netflix series about a ridiculous woman who hunts a man and makes you contemplate the possibility that you have resumed reconnaissance but in truth, you don’t date women because invariably they haunt you. Just a word or two can become like a religious text in your brain that you will repeat as if it were a prayer permanently ingrained in your skull like a tattoo, but this one is comprised of bone.

You have declared yourself entirely celibate when it comes to chicks. Dating them is like taking shots of heroin on a fixed income and not knowing where the next dose will come from. You avoid poontang entirely.

Indeed, you spend time with elderly couples at brunch who come to your house and help you fix your expensive espresso machine.

You see yourself, however, during the AA meeting, peering back to Julie’s Facebook postings, looking for whatever scraps you might find.

Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg, you can block her and don’t know how to find Circe’s page again and are therefore unable to open that think tank of progressive destruction and fall through the hashish of craziness in which even dogs licking your titanium knees cannot save you from running into the quagmire of inverted thinking.

You recall the classes you took together, and that you sat cubicles away from her and Circe in the library, or how she said happy birthday to you one day and that was the best present of all. She is still demure and slightly perfect and will eternally remain a divinity who occasionally had a bad boyfriend and did cocaine but is not among the flowers you can pick. Still, your dog stares at you, wanting that last piece of ravioli on your plate, or at least to drink up the tomato sauce and you don’t rekindle your desires but instead take photos of him and exalt in the perfection of that relationship because Julie is a nightmare that will spin and spin until the record breaks and you are falling through a million wires in your brain, which would even freak out Hitler if he knew that nonreality you experience when kissing the wind.

Eleanor Levine

Eleanor Levine

Eleanor Levine

Eleanor Levine's writing has appeared in more than 200 publications, including The Hollins Critic, Gertrude, the Raleigh Review, the Notre Dame Review, Fiction, Faultline, and others. Her poetry collection, Waitress at the Red Moon Pizzeria, was published by Unsolicited Press (Portland, Oregon). Her short story collection, Kissing a Tree Surgeon, was published by Guernica Editions (Toronto, Ontario, Canada). Her novel, The Golden Kernel, was accepted by Main Street Rag Publishing Company (Edinboro, Pennsylvania).