Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  Falling to his knees and burying his face in her silky gown, Samson joined in with his deep baritone: “…the blossom trembles in the gentle breeze. So does my heart tremble, longing for your voice.…”

  Glancing down at Sandy, Jude saw that he was mouthing Delilah’s lines. And tears had flooded his eyes behind his octagonal glasses. Suddenly, Jude understood his fascination with opera. The plots often embodied this perennial dream of tenderness taming savagery. And even when deceit and blood lust won out, the murdered actors stood up afterward for their curtain calls. On the playground back home, the Commie Killers had tormented Sandy for preferring chess and opera to football and rock ‘n’ roll. He had endured it all without protest. But on stage at the opera, the Commie Killers were vanquished. She absently stroked his blond curls with her hand.

  Looking up, he reached for her hand and knitted his fingers with hers. A jolt shot up Jude’s arm, so powerful that her hand shook. Sandy’s sweetness moved her as no other man ever had. And because of it, Jude was beginning to want to give him everything. It wasn’t that she was looking for the intensity of her experience with Molly that night on the raft. Although it remained vivid in her memory, the way a flashbulb leaves its imprint on a piece of unexposed film, she had written it off to unstable adolescent hormones. All she wanted now was some cozy companionship and physical affection with someone she cared about.

  After the pagan temple had crashed down around everyone’s shoulders, the painted cardboard blocks swinging from invisible ropes inches above the singers’ heads, the curtain descended and the crowd erupted into bravos as though at a bullfight.

  On the walk back to the apartment, Jude and Sandy murmured a few appreciative words about the performance before falling silent. And unlike their usual silences, this one was uncomfortable. Something was waiting to be said, but neither was willing to take the risk of saying it.

  Entering the apartment, they found the living room empty of people. But some beer bottles, an ashtray full of cigarette butts, and a cardboard pizza box sat on the carpet by the armchairs. The odor of marijuana smoke and pizza filled the air. The only thing Jude really missed about her grandparents’ apartment was their French cook. In a matter of months, she’d moved from ham hocks to cassoulet to Chinese takeout, and she was suffering from gastronomic culture shock.

  Sandy and she walked down the shadowy hallway to their bedrooms. Outside Jude’s door, they paused. Jude tried to decide whether to invite him in. It should be simple, something both had no doubt done before with other people. Yet neither made a move. Not only had the hand-holding during Samson and Delilah not broken the ice, but it seemed as well to have introduced some new awkwardness that Jude couldn’t fathom. Finally, Sandy leaned down and pecked her cheek. “Sleep tight,” he said as he turned to walk to his own door, tennis shoes squeaking on the wood floor.

  Lying in bed, Jude could hear Mona next door, thrashing and gasping with her latest lover. Once they really got going, the bedsprings began to shriek like an entire pen of pigs being slaughtered. This often recurred sporadically throughout the night. Jude was awed by Mona’s stamina. In the morning, she sometimes ran into the men in the bathroom, standing bare-chested in unzipped jeans, gazing at themselves in the mirror, eyes fatigued, faces gray and haggard, as though trying to figure out what disaster had just befallen them. Mona didn’t usually appear until noon, wandering down the hall in a hot-pink chenille robe, lips chapped and swollen but smiling, mascara smudged around her eye sockets. Humming tunes like “The Impossible Dream,” “My Way,” and “I Gotta Be Me,” she mixed ghastly concoctions in the blender that involved raw eggs and brewer’s yeast, no doubt the source of her potency.

  Jude wrapped the pillow around her head, but she could still hear the bedsprings pounding like a printing press. She wondered whether she should just get up and go to Sandy in his bed. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t send her away. But they were both Southerners: He was the man; therefore, he was supposed to do the pursuing. Sliding a hand between her legs, she gripped it tightly with her thighs and directed all her mental energies toward him, willing him to appear by her bedside.

  The next thing she knew, it was morning and she was late for class. Jumping up and throwing on her jeans and turtleneck, she raced down the hallway and into the living room. Earl, who danced in chorus lines for Broadway shows, had one heel propped on the windowsill, head resting on his knee. Dressed in a sweat suit, he looked like a soft sculpture. “Morning, Earl,” she called as she hurried past. But he was so shy that there was no reply.

  In the kitchen, Sandy was sitting at the table with half a dozen cereal boxes before him. When he was a boy, his mother insisted on buying only one box at a time, finishing it before buying the next. Now that he was on his own, Sandy bought a dozen different brands at once and sampled several every morning. It seemed a harmless-enough form of rebellion, when his peers were dumping blood on draft records at recruitment centers all across town.

  He looked up at her and smiled. “Morning, Jude. Sleep well?”

  “Yes, thanks. And you?”

  Gazing at her with a perplexed frown, he said, “Not so great.”

  “No?”

  “No.” He lowered his eyes.

  “I’m late,” she said, grabbing a glass and pouring some orange juice.

  “There’s a good movie tonight at ten,” he called as she tossed down the juice and dashed out the door. “Don’t be late.”

  JUDE AND SANDY LAY on his bed drinking red wine, eating pretzels, and watching the movie. A man and a woman, married to other people, had met by chance in a train station and fallen in love. It was what Sandy and Simon called a “chick flick,” in contrast to “dick flicks,” which involved car chases, war, and violent crime.

  Jude could tell that Sandy wasn’t really paying attention, and neither was she. They had carefully avoided touching all evening. And they were now lying with the width of a sidewalk between them, arms crossed over their chests like funerary statues.

  Sandy set his empty glass and the wadded pretzel bag on the rug beside the mattress, so Jude put her glass down, too. Both stared straight ahead at the TV screen while the couple struggled endlessly with their guilt toward their spouses over their platonic love for each other.

  Sandy uncrossed his arms and stretched them awkwardly alongside his body, fists clenched, the muscles of his lower arms flexing and unflexing like a pulsing heart. As Jude watched from the corner of her eye, his hand unclenched, stirred, and crept a few inches into the no-man’s-land between them. So Jude uncrossed her arms, too, and placed them on the bed beside her.

  The couple had arranged to be alone together in a friend’s apartment to consummate their love. As they fell into each other’s arms, the friend arrived home early from work.

  Jude scratched her head, then let that hand fall a foot away from her side. Sandy put his hand to his mouth to cover a yawn and returned it to the mattress within inches of Jude’s hand.

  Anguished, the couple parted in the train station where they’d first met, the man en route to South Africa with his family so he and the woman need never encounter each other again. Sandy’s hand twitched where it lay, seeming to want to take Jude’s but not daring to. She had watched it so carefully that she was sure its pattern of branching veins, like a turquoise road map, was now etched indelibly into her gray matter.

  “Well,” murmured Sandy as the credits rolled, “they always say the only love that lasts is unrequited love.”

  “Who does?” asked Jude irritably. There was a time for caution and a time for getting the show on the road. What was he waiting for?

  The door flew open, and in strode Simon in his brown leather jacket and Greek fisherman’s cap. Sandy shoved his hand under his thigh, like a crab scuttling away from a squid.

  “Hope I’m not interrupting?” asked Simon, taking off his jacket and cap and dropping them on the floor.

  He studied the tableau vivant on the bed for a long moment. “Now that y
ou’re living here, Jude, we should fill you in on the drill: I read Sandy a bedtime story every night.”

  Crawling up the mattress, he settled himself between them. Then he extracted a newspaper clipping from his pocket and read about a Japanese fisherman who put his wife in a net and dragged her behind his boat as shark bait.

  Jude and Sandy smiled politely.

  Simon read a second clipping concerning an Australian cyclist who had been attacked by a 350-pound ostrich, which she had managed to strangle with her bare hands.

  Sandy lay there in silence while Jude tried to figure out what was going on.

  “I was riding the IRT at rush hour this afternoon,” Sandy said, “and this guy in a leather cap who was crushed up against me whispered in my ear, ‘Drop dead, faggot.’”

  “And what did you say?” asked Simon, studying him with interest.

  “Nothing.”

  “Why would he say that?” asked Jude. All her life, people had been calling poor Sandy a faggot. She’d spent a lot of time defending his honor in high school.

  Simon turned his stunning green eyes on Jude, saying, “Go on, mate. Tell her.”

  Sandy said nothing.

  Jude leaned forward to look at him. His face was the color of a cooked lobster.

  “I guess you don’t need to,” she said, rolling off the bed. “Sweet dreams, boys.” She closed the door behind her.

  Jude lay in bed, struggling to sleep so that she wouldn’t have to feel so stupid. So the rumors about Sandy in high school had been true. And she had been the only one naïve enough not to believe them. And he had played on her naïveté, urging her to move in, leading her to think that a romance was possible between them. But why? Probably so that he could have the cover of respectability.

  As she wept into her pillow in the dark, Mona’s bed began to squeak rhythmically. Mona started to gasp in spasms. It was like a jazz ensemble. Soon the man would add his grunts to the improvisation, and then Mona would alternate her gasps with shrieks and moans.

  Jude rolled over and pounded on the wall with her fist. “For God’s sake, shut up!” she screamed.

  The squeaking ceased abruptly and there was a long silence. Finally, it started up again, slowly and tentatively at first but rapidly gaining confidence and momentum. Jude decided to move back to her grandparents’ in the morning.

  JUDE WAS WRAPPING HER Atalanta flask in a sweatshirt when someone knocked at her door.

  “Come in,” she said glumly.

  The door opened, and Sandy stood there in his bleached overalls, face and neck bright red, bangs splayed out around his cowlick as though he’d been standing in the funnel of a tornado. “Jude, I guess we need to talk,” he said.

  “What’s there to say?” She placed the flask in her suitcase.

  “Well, that I’m sorry, for one thing.”

  She stopped packing to give him a look. “I thought we could tell each other anything. So why didn’t you tell me this?”

  “I guess I was afraid you’d be appalled. And I can see that I was right.”

  “I’m not exactly appalled.”

  “What are you, then?”

  “Confused, I suppose. What was that Dance of the Mating Hands all about?”

  He grimaced. “I guess I hoped something might work out between us.”

  “And where would that have left Simon?” she asked angrily.

  “All I know is what I felt. And feel. Life outside of Tidewater Estates can sometimes be complicated.”

  “Your life certainly seems to be,” snapped Jude. She turned her back on him to stare out the window at the Ferris wheel in the amusement park across the river. She’d miss this madcap view of roller coasters and sailing yachts and garish sunsets.

  “Please try to understand, Jude. Simon is my Molly. But that doesn’t prevent me from loving you as well.”

  “So who does that make me? Ace Kilgore?” As she turned back around to study his earnest scarlet face, she softened. What he’d said was true. A current of connection that was almost palpable flowed between them. She had felt this with no one else but Molly. If it wasn’t love, what was it? All the hours and days spent with Jerry and Bradley and a couple of others, in bed and out, talking and laughing and fooling around—that had been something else, often very pleasant, occasionally exciting, sometimes boring or annoying, but not love.

  “There are different kinds of love,” Sandy said, looking at the floor, “and different ways of expressing them. We can find a way, Jude. Please don’t go. You and I have never been normal. Why should we start now?”

  Jude smiled at his logic. Perhaps she could model herself after the Marschallin, who had vowed to love her count enough so that she could love even his love for someone else. It seemed a superhuman feat, but Jude knew from her years with Molly that real love involved more than just generating friction between various body parts, as though human beings were nothing more than cicadas droning in the waning summer dusk. And real love, if you found it, seemed the only thing that mattered. The rest was just passing the time until death claimed you.

  Removing the flask from her suitcase, she unwrapped it and returned it to its spot on her windowsill. “Okay,” she said.

  Sandy grinned.

  CHAPTER

  10

  ONE WALL OF THE PENTHOUSE was glass, and through it Jude could see the lights of lower Manhattan spread out below her like a carpet of glowworms. A Marlboro man, a state trooper, and a tutued ballerina with thick ankles were passing a joint beside tubs of blue-gray junipers on the balcony.

  The living room was packed. Sandy, wearing a white-net strapless gown with a hoop skirt, a black bouffant wig, and elbow-length gloves, was Scarlett O‘Hara. Simon, in a Confederate army uniform, with a sword in a silver scabbard and black boots to his knees, was Ashley Wilkes. They planned to trade costumes the next Halloween.

  Jude was wearing a swirling baby-blue chiffon Loretta Young hostess gown, a merry widow with Kotex stuffed into the too-ample cups, stiletto heels, rhinestone jewelry, white gloves, and a blond Dolly Parton wig. And she had on more makeup than an embalmed corpse. Wiggling her way to the doorway of the cleared-out dining room, she watched the dancers writhing shoulder-to-shoulder, drinks sloshing, heads ducking the swaying crystal chandelier, elbows pumping like pistons.

  Jude felt something cold and wet between her shoulder blades. A deep voice whispered in her ear, “I’d like to crawl up under that skirt, darling, and suck that stiff piece of meat between your legs.”

  Jude turned her head and met the glazed gray eyes of Mae West. They scrutinized hers, turning suddenly bewildered. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re not a man.”

  “Sorry,” said Jude.

  Removing his glass from between her shoulders, he flounced off with a toss of his blond fall.

  Jude felt guilty even being at the party, since she was straight. “Don’t worry,” Sandy had said as she made him up in the bathroom at home. “There are always a few hets at these things, trying to ‘pass.’ Besides, maybe you’ll meet a nice woman.” He grinned with his cherry red lips.

  “I’m afraid I’m not that kind of girl,” she said, carefully dotting a beauty spot on his cheek with her eyeliner.

  “And what kind of girl are you, my dear?” asked Simon, leaning in the bathroom doorway, twirling his waxed mustache tip like Simon Legree. (Jude had just read that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s model for Simon Legree had been a Huguenot. She was trying to decide whether to break the bad news to her grandmother.)

  “A fag hag, apparently,” said Jude, rubbing rouge into Sandy’s cheekbone.

  Her struggle to love Sandy enough to love even his love for Simon had consumed quite a few months. She had watched with misery as the two tumbled and tussled on Sandy’s bed, cuddling and cosseting each other. And she couldn’t help thinking that if only her anatomy had been male, she could have been in Simon’s place. She didn’t covet a penis per se, but she wouldn’t have minded having one in order to have access
to those who did covet them.

  Some nights after Jude had gone to bed, Simon and Sandy departed for their sublife of bars, bathhouses, piers on the Hudson, and seedy movie theaters. Occasionally, it involved costumes, such as Sandy’s yellow hard hat and grease monkey coveralls and Simon’s fringed chaps and leather vest. And it often involved drugs with nicknames Jude couldn’t keep straight, poppers and angel dust and black beauties, which they traded with their friends like marbles or baseball cards. Sometimes Jude heard them come crawling home in the dawn like mauled tomcats. This bad-boy act was a facet to Sandy that she’d never seen before. It seemed to clash with the daylight choirboy she knew so well.

  “So how’s it going, Jude?” yelled Sandy over the Jefferson Airplane, putting his arm around her and hauling her to his side so that his hoop skirt lurched upward, revealing lace garters and knobby knees.

  Arranging the blond corkscrew curls around her face, Jude said, “This guy in drag got annoyed with me because I’m not a man. I’m getting confused.” She was also getting drunk. The room was beginning to sway along with the dancers.

  As Sandy was swept away by a tide of revelers, Joan of Arc appeared before Jude, wearing chain mail, dark tights, and shiny metal shin guards. All Jude could see of the face behind the visored helmet were the eyes, which were lapis lazuli in the shadows, just like Molly’s. For a moment, she couldn’t remember if she was awake or asleep. Her heart lurched unsteadily.

  “Molly?” she said.

  “Excuse me?” said Joan of Arc.

  “Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

  “I am someone else,” she said, eyes crinkling with amusement.

  Jude laughed.

  As the stunning blue eyes probed hers, Jude felt her flesh prickle.

  “You make a beautiful woman,” murmured Joan of Arc, one hand holding a staff with an attached blue banner studded with white fleurs-de-lis.