by Lisa Alther
“I am a woman,” said Jude.
“Obviously. And a most attractive one, too.”
Joan was dragged off by a crowd of revelers pressing toward the dance floor, where the Jefferson Airplane were shouting, “Don’t you want somebody to love? Don’t you need somebody to love? Wouldn’t you love somebody to love? You’ve got to find somebody to love!…”
William, the host, loomed in front of Jude. He was dressed as a Roman senator, in a white toga with a wreath on his head. A labor lawyer by day, he was pale and pudgy, like a pregnant ghost. His lover, Sid, was dressed as a gladiator, in some crossed leather straps, sandals, and a pouch for his genitals. But since he was a stevedore, he had the build to carry it off.
“Having fun, my pet?” asked William, repositioning his wreath.
“It’s a wonderful party, William. Who’s the woman dressed as Joan of Arc, by the way?”
He wrinkled his shiny bulbous nose. “Her name is Anna Olsen. She’s a poet and a teacher. But forget about her, Jude. She’s bad news.”
“I wasn’t thinking of her like that.”
“No, certainly not,” said William sternly. “I forgot. Our divine Jude is most regrettably het-ero-sex-ual.” He enunciated each syllable with deep, mocking respect.
“Why is she bad news?” demanded Jude, smiling tolerantly.
William drifted away toward the plate-glass window like a blowfish in an overpopulated aquarium. Jude called after him, “William, why is she bad news?”
SANDY, SIMON, AND JUDE stumbled up the sidewalk, raincoats over their costumes. No taxi would stop for them because they looked both demented and drunk. So they were trudging north from the Village en route to Riverside Drive. Sandy and Jude had removed the spike heels from their blistered feet and were limping along in tattered stockings. Sandy’s skirt was dragging the dirty sidewalk like a flaccid peacock tail. Jude was walking in the middle, arms linked through theirs, still a bit shaken by mistaking Joan of Arc for Molly. Was Molly now going to start invading her waking hours as well?
“Sandy, you look like Scarlett in the turnip patch after the burning of Atlanta,” she observed.
“I know. And my hair—I can’t do a thing with it.” He yanked off his black wig and tossed it into a trash basket.
Giggling, they passed some young men who were standing by the entrance to the Port Authority. One in a leather cap and motorcycle boots called to Sandy, “Come over here, faggot. Give me a blow job, will you, darling?” His friends laughed and punched his tattooed biceps.
The man followed them up the sidewalk, stroking the crotch of his tight jeans and murmuring, “I got something here I could shove between those pretty red lips of yours.” His friends ambled along behind him, making obscene sucking sounds.
Jude tightened her grip on Simon’s trembling arm to prevent him from turning around and saying something that would get them all killed.
The men finally got bored and went away.
“I always get bussed at the bus,” Sandy said with a sigh.
“Very funny,” growled Simon.
“I suppose we asked for that,” said Sandy. “Swishing around the streets in these getups.”
“I thought this was the land of the free?” said Simon.
“Free if you’re normal. Perverts must pay. You know what? I’m pretty sure that’s the same guy who called me a faggot on the IRT the other day. They both had leather caps and blind right eyes.”
“Bloody hell,” said Simon.
A taxi finally stopped for them, and they rode back to the apartment in silence, Sandy’s net skirt filling the backseat like foam in a beer mug.
Outside Sandy’s room, Jude kissed them both on the cheek and headed down the hall.
“Jude,” called Sandy.
She stopped and looked back at him. His face was scarlet beneath his smudged makeup.
“We’d love for you to stay with us tonight if you want to.”
Simon nodded, hand absently stroking his filigreed sword handle.
Jude looked back and forth between them, Scarlett O‘Hara and Ashley Wilkes in the wake of Sherman’s March to the Sea. After the hatred she had just witnessed in the street, it would be reassuring to reassert the power of love.
“Uh, could you do that? I mean…I thought…aren’t you…”
“We have both been known to make exceptions for irresistibly lovely women,” murmured Simon, smiling gently beneath his drooping mustache, neon eyes glowing in the shadowy hallway.
Jude was astonished to find herself seriously considering the idea. She’d come a long way since the Virginia Club Colonial Cotillion.
“I’m afraid it would be too kinky for a simple Huguenot girl from Tennessee,” she finally concluded. “But thank you for the sweet invitation.”
“Just say the word if you change your mind,” said Sandy. He looked relieved.
“We would have fun,” Simon assured her.
Jude smiled. “I’ll let you know, boys.” Chiffon skirt swirling, she swept down the hallway, élan restored.
Lying in bed, she became intrigued by the mechanics of it all—how to keep track of two penises in various stages of tumescence. One was complicated enough. She would probably feel as frantic as someone in a straitjacket with a case of poison ivy. But it certainly seemed the most interesting way to resolve their triangle.
She fell asleep for a while. When she woke up, she found that she had in fact changed her mind. She got out of bed, slipped on her robe, and tiptoed down the hallway to Sandy’s door. Placing her ear against it, she heard nothing. Either they’d gone out or they were asleep. She had no idea what time it was. Maybe she could just crawl in between them and see what happened. After all, they had issued her a standing invitation.
Slowly she turned the handle and opened the door. Across the room, she saw them, naked in the moonlight through the window. Sandy was bent over, legs planted well apart, gripping the windowsill with his hands and his teeth. Simon, standing behind him, grasped Sandy’s hips with both hands. He was rocking back and forth against him, murmuring things Jude couldn’t distinguish, while Sandy gasped and moaned and gnawed the windowsill.
Seeing the light from the cracked door fall across Sandy’s back, Simon froze. He looked back at her—and it wasn’t Simon. For a moment, Jude thought it was the young man with the blind eye from the bus station. But then she wasn’t sure.
Sucking air through clenched teeth, Sandy snarled in a voice like the growl of a cornered beast, “Jesus Christ, Jude, get the fuck out of here!”
Backing into the hallway, Jude closed the door and leaned against the wall, mortified and afraid—and aroused. Shivering violently, she returned to her room and climbed back into bed, where she lay perfectly still, breathing heavily.
SANDY AND JUDE WERE STROLLING down Columbus Avenue inspecting the Roosevelt, where her father had been an intern. For several years, he had ridden the yelping ambulances into alleys where no one sane would venture on foot. The hospital was looking seedy, with newspapers and fast-food wrappers blown up in sodden heaps against the redbrick walls. Across Fifty-eighth Street was a Renaissance Revival apartment building from the turn of the century, with arched windows, and designs formed by blue-and-gold tiles inlaid among the red bricks. The windows were boarded up, and antiwar graffiti was spray-painted across the plywood—peace symbols and YANKS OUT OF NAM and MAKE LOVE NOT WAR. A sign on the door announced that the building was slated for demolition.
“My parents lived on the fifth floor of that building after they got married,” said Jude as a sharp wind off the Hudson came swirling down the street. She and Sandy were being very careful with each other this morning, keeping things light and polite, as though by not acknowledging the events of the previous night they’d dissolve.
“It’s sad to see a noble old place like that on its last legs,” said Sandy. “When you think about all the lives that were lived in there. The joy and the sorrow those walls must have absorbed.”
“My God,” said Jude, “I
just realized: I must have been conceived in there. When they headed south, my mother was pregnant with me.”
“Ha!” said Sandy. “So you’re actually a Yankee!”
“Thank God my Virginia grandmother isn’t around to hear this.”
“Imagine that,” said Sandy, wrapping his arms around himself for warmth. “You’ve returned to the site of your inception. Like a salmon swimming upstream to her primordial spawning grounds.”
“Let’s not get carried away,” suggested Jude. “Where do you think you were conceived?” They headed back uptown to meet Jude’s grandparents for brunch at Café des Artistes.
“Right there in Tidewater Estates, I imagine. On a Saturday morning in midwinter. Saturday mornings were the only time they ever did it, as far as I could tell. My father would hand me a bowl of Cheerios and lock me in the playroom with my erector set. They didn’t appear until lunchtime, and they remained in a haze of well-being for the rest of the weekend. I always waited until Saturday afternoon to ask for things they might object to.”
“But maybe they were on a vacation somewhere more exotic?”
“Not bloody likely. Even their vacations were humdrum. Gatlinburg or Ruby Falls or Rock City.”
“So where did all your evil genius come from?” asked Jude.
“Someone somewhere along the line must have cut loose with a hired hand.”
“By the way,” said Jude, unable to endure this charade any longer, “I’m sorry about last night.”
Sandy blushed violently. “I’m sorry I was…otherwise engaged. Please try me again sometime.”
Jude said nothing for a while. Finally, she replied, “I don’t think so, Sandy. You’re out of my league.”
“So I gather you’re shocked?”
“Who was he?”
“Who knows?”
“Where was Simon?”
“Who knows?”
“Do you really think this is wise?”
“Wisdom has nothing to do with it,” said Sandy curtly.
“Clearly.”
The truth was, Jude realized as Sandy opened the restaurant door for her, that she was afraid of him now, as though he were the carrier of some dark, brute force brought home from the docks, about which she knew little and wanted to know less. And the knowledge that a succession of strangers apparently wandered around their apartment in the middle of the night left her very uneasy. But it was, after all, Sandy’s apartment. And she was unable to deny that the sight of him and the stranger grappling in the moonlight had excited her.
“WE USED TO BRING your mother here for Sunday lunch,” Jude’s grandfather said to Jude as he trimmed the fat off his sirloin. “In the days before that dreadful word brunch was ever invented.”
Naked nymphets were cavorting on the walls all around them, behind forests of healthy indoor plants.
“I remember Jude’s mother pretty well,” said Sandy as he ripped apart a piece of baguette. “She used to give me a butterscotch candy whenever she saw me on the sidewalk in Tidewater Estates. So I started going over there all the time. She asked me to teach Jude to ride her new tricycle. Jude’s legs were so short that her feet kept slipping off and spinning the pedals. And she thought that was so neat that she couldn’t be bothered to try anything else.”
Everyone laughed.
“Once she caught on, though,” Sandy added, “she was a demon. She’d race down the block toward the highway before anyone realized she was gone. Her mother used to bribe me with candies to keep up with her.”
“And here I thought you just liked me,” said Jude. She hadn’t seen him in a jacket and tie since he was at Exeter. He looked deceptively respectable.
“I must have, because I kept at it even after your mother died.”
“Well, Jude tells us you are like a brother to her,” said Jude’s grandmother in her navy wool suit, Huguenot cross at her throat. “That makes you our grandson, and I want you to know that you will always be welcome in our home.”
“Thank you very much,” said Sandy. “I’m honored.”
Jude studied her honorary brother as he bewitched her grandparents. If only Sandy weren’t who he was, she and he would have made the perfect couple. But he was who he was, whoever that might be, and he would never be hers. The time had come to find a lover she could actually have, Jude had concluded, one who approximated the man she’d imagined Sandy to be. She’d been thinking about offering the position to Craig, a fellow Ph.D. candidate with whom she often discussed the Franco-Prussian War over cups of coffee at the West End Bar. Recently, he’d begun to touch her forearm as they talked and to press her knee with his beneath the table. He was too thin and he reeked of sandalwood incense, but otherwise he filled the bill.
“I remember the day Jude’s father came home from the war,” Sandy was saying.
Jude looked at her grandfather, who was listening to Sandy with attention. He seemed to have relaxed around the subject of Jude’s mother. Maybe hearing Jude and her grandmother discuss her so much had desensitized him.
“The whole town went down to the train station and waved little American flags on sticks. The high school band was playing this god-awful mess that was supposed to be ‘Stars and Stripes Forever.’ Jude’s mother was carrying Jude on her hip. Her father climbed off the train in his uniform, and I thought he was the most handsome man I’d ever seen. Jude, who hadn’t seen him since she was an infant, took one look at him, smiled coyly, reached out her arms, and cooed, ‘Daddy!’ And everybody laughed and cheered.”
Jude watched her grandparents smile sadly as the busboy removed their plates.
“He was always a fine-looking man,” agreed her grandfather.
Jude and her grandmother glanced at him, then at each other.
“Tall and lean and broad-shouldered,” continued her grandfather. “With that copper skin and those mink-brown eyes.”
Jude’s grandmother shot her an astonished smile.
“I imagine y‘all don’t remember meeting me at the funeral,” said Sandy, “but I remember you. Because you were the first Yankees I’d ever seen, and I was disappointed that you looked so normal.”
“What were you expecting?” asked Jude’s grandfather. “Horns and cloven feet?”
“Something like that,” said Sandy. “But the only sinister thing about you was the dead fox around your wife’s neck.”
“I remember that fox,” said Jude. “It had beady orange eyes.”
“But I’m not even a Yankee,” said her grandfather. “My family was in Alsace during your civil war.”
Sandy smiled. “To Southerners, every American who isn’t a Southerner is a Yankee.”
By the time Jude and Sandy left her grandparents beneath the Tiffany light above their doorway, Sandy had promised them a free box at the opera. Jude’s grandmother had written down his address so she could put him on the mailing list for the National Huguenot Society’s newsletter, and her grandfather had noted his phone number so he could call him for a game of squash at the New York Athletic Club.
“My God, what a love feast,” said Jude as they walked down 67th Street beneath the bare trees.
“Can I help it if I’m irresistible?” asked Sandy.
“Probably,” said Jude. “But don’t stop. It’s so charming. Wait just a minute—you don’t even know how to play squash.”
Sandy grinned. “No. But I like locker rooms.”
“With my grandfather?”
“He’s very attractive, with all that steel-gray hair and that gun-slinger jaw.”
“You’re sick,” said Jude.
“I thought you said I was charming?”
“You’re both. That’s what makes you so dangerous.” She was only half-kidding. How would she ever be able to integrate his daylight and moonlight selves?
“I like being perceived as dangerous,” he admitted. “I was always such a Boy Scout back home.”
“Well, you seem to be making up for lost time,” murmured Jude.
Sa
ndy glanced at her. “And you don’t like it?”
“Not much,” Jude replied hesitantly, appalled by the excitement she still felt when she pictured the faceless stranger thrusting into him.
“Well, let’s see if I can defend myself to you, Jude. For years and years, I tried to be a good boy. For instance, I never touched you, however much I might have wanted to. You would have been shocked, but I don’t think you’d have turned me down.”
Jude thought for a moment, then shook her head no. “Maybe I wish you had, Sandy,” she said, wondering if she had returned his love for her at that time whether his desire for men would have emerged nonetheless. Probably.
“Well, maybe I wish that, too. But I didn’t. Instead, I bottled up my libido for years and years. When I got to London and started going to gay bars, I met hundreds of former Eagle Scouts just like myself. And we gave each other what we’d been doing without for all those years. Without having to say I love you, or to ask each other to go steady, or even to know each other’s names. It was dangerous and mysterious and exciting. And it still is.”
Jude reached over for his hand. Knitting fingers, they walked along Broadway in silence. What would happen, Jude wondered, if they should ever both want each other at the same time?
“But surely this is something you understand, Jude?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, you were always a bit of a Girl Scout back home yourself. You must have had to confront your own shadow side by now—the part of you that longs for your dutiful everyday self to be obliterated by some all-consuming passion?”
Jude looked at him mutely, not knowing the answer to such an alarming question. Her everyday self had been obliterated only once—that night on the raft with Molly. And it had been overwhelming. But she didn’t expect it to happen ever again. And she couldn’t have said that she wanted it to.
LATER THAT WEEK AFTER a study session at the Columbia library, Jude and Craig ran the gauntlet of antiwar protesters who, waving Chippendale chair legs, defended the captured administration building. Back at Jude’s apartment, she sneaked him down the hallway and into her bedroom. The night that ensued was uninspired, since it was sparked by only lukewarm affection and respect. But Jude made as much noise as possible within the bounds of credibility, as retaliation against Mona and Sandy.