by Lisa Alther
“I don’t very well. We have some mutual friends—the men who gave that party.” She perched on the edge of the love seat.
“William and Sid?” Jude returned to her swivel chair.
Anna nodded.
“You have quite a memory,” said Jude. She herself did not, however, because something was nibbling away at the edge of her awareness, something disturbing William had said that she couldn’t quite recall.
“For memorable events, I do.” She unbuttoned her coat, revealing a large wool scarf in shades of blue and purple.
Jude looked at her with a half smile, having just remembered Anna’s telling her that night that she made a beautiful woman. She was quite the flirt. Too bad she was barking up a dead tree. “So what’s your book idea?”
Anna, a poet, taught creative-writing workshops in the city high schools. She was proposing an anthology of pieces by her students, who represented more than a dozen nationalities. She was intrigued by the ways in which they adapted their cultural inheritances to the American mainstream, or failed to. America wasn’t a melting pot, she maintained; it was a stockpot, full of intact lumps.
Jude nodded, hands clasped before her chin. It was what America was supposed to be all about—a haven for those who needed a fresh start, freed from ancient traditions and taboos, yet no doubt bearers of them nonetheless.
“I’ll talk to Simon,” said Jude, having difficulty removing her eyes from Anna’s, which were now turquoise in the zebra shafts of light through the slatted blinds, like deep seawater penetrated by sunbeams. “It sounds like an interesting idea. Leave me your number and I’ll give you a call.”
“I’ll call you,” Anna said quickly. “When would be good?”
“Early next week?”
After seeing Anna to the elevator by the reception desk, Jude returned to her office and sat back down at her desk, swiveling her chair around to watch the woman at her keyboard in the glass building across the street. When the blinds were up, they sometimes waved to each other like next-door neighbors. Jude admired her wardrobe—a seemingly endless parade of tailored suits and silk blouses such as Jude aspired to once she could afford them.
Simon had hired Jude as his assistant when she dropped out of Columbia. After Sandy’s death, everything seemed pointless, especially the study of history. She no longer wished to know about the idiotic atrocities committed by the human race since the dawn of time. So she’d been mindlessly typing and filing, fielding phone calls and visitors, and ransacking reviews for favorable quotes to use in ads. She planned to remain an assistant forever. But Anna’s book idea interested her.
She kept thinking about Anna’s eyes, how similar they were to Molly’s—the same shifting shades of blue, like a mood ring. The same way of narrowing with skepticism and sparkling with amusement. They were Molly’s eyes in a different face. Anna’s physique, however, was tall and slender.
Turning back to her desk, Jude typed a memo to Simon recommending Anna’s project. Clipping it to her outline and samples, she took the package next door and laid it on his black Formica tabletop, on which sat several dozen paperweights—a bronze penis with a happy-face head, an Empire State Building with a removable King Kong. Jude selected what Simon claimed was the varnished hoof of Secretariat to secure her memo. Also on the tabletop sat a photo of Sandy in a silver frame. He was smiling into the camera, wearing a white undershirt that displayed his well-cut biceps and pecs, a grassy Cape Cod dune looming behind him.
In the years since his death, Jude and Simon had both been on a tear. Simon roamed the streets at night with a switchblade at the ready in the pocket of his leather jacket, searching for the young thug with the blind eye he was convinced had killed Sandy. Despite the fact that Sandy’s missing wallet made robbery the apparent motive. Often he came home to their apartment bruised and bloodied from fights he’d picked with bewildered hoodlums. Periodically, Jude removed the switchblade from his pocket and threw it in a trash basket on her way to work. But he always bought another.
Jude herself had become a bedroom guerrilla, ambushing half a dozen young men, leading them on, then leaving them high and dry and humiliated, while they phoned and fumed and leapt from tall buildings. Occasionally, she and Simon sought relief from their fury in each other’s arms. But apart from the night of Sandy’s death, Simon made it clear that it was just a diversion. “Rearranging the hormones,” he called it. And in the morning, he was brisk and distant, as though they hadn’t been lying together panting like marathon runners a few hours earlier. Sometimes Jude wasn’t even sure if it had really happened or if she’d dreamed it. She had never told him about the intensity of the interchange between Sandy and herself, and she never would. Simon had referred a few times to “your little fling with Sandy.” It was clear that he needed to think of it as nothing more than what she and he experienced together—some warmth in the night with friendly flesh.
But Jude had recently become disgusted with herself as a conquistador. She’d realized that she was wounding innocent civilians in her war of attrition. And she sometimes longed for a comrade-in-arms with whom she could lay down her weapons and find peace. But at other times, she concluded that she was finished with love. It hurt too much. Since she seemed incapable of taking it lightly, her only recourse was to jettison it.
Dreams were currently her sole consolation. During the weeks of numb disbelief following Sandy’s death, Molly appeared for the first time since Jude had moved in with him.
“I told you he was going to hurt you,” she said, briskly dealing hands for Over the Moon on the pine needles that cushioned the floor of their cave in the Wildwoods.
“Bravo. Right again,” said Jude. “I thought I’d gotten rid of you.”
“Dream on. You’ll never get rid of me, sweetheart. So you might as well learn to listen to me.”
“I do listen to you, Molly. I just don’t always agree.” Jude swept her cards together, picked them up, and fanned them out.
Molly shrugged and threw down the jack of spades. “Falling in love with a fag was probably just your way of staying faithful to me.”
“Stop calling Sandy a fag,” snapped Jude, tossing down the ten of hearts.
Molly grinned. “Poor little Jude. Forever in love with phantoms.”
JUDE’S PHONE BUZZED. It was Simon, asking her to come next door. He was sitting behind his table in his striped dress shirt and Jackson Pollock tie, curly black hair pulled back into a ponytail, studying Jude’s memo with his limpid green eyes. “Since you like Anna’s idea so much, I think you should handle it.” He wound up a green plastic Tyrannosaurus rex and they watched it lumber across his desktop on duck feet, red eyes flashing. “It can be your first solo flight. We’ll do a small printing and see how it goes.”
“Fantastic,” said Jude from his doorway. “Thanks, Simon.”
Back at her desk, Jude felt frustrated that she couldn’t call Anna with the good news. Why had she been so weird about giving out her number?
JUDE MUNCHED A BREAD STICK while Anna fished the olive out of her second martini with her plastic swizzle stick. She was wearing a suit of very fine wool in a subtle plaid of mauve and forest green with some gold lines through it. Looped loosely around her throat was a scarf that repeated the mauve and gold in bold swirls.
“I can give you the names of some agents if you want,” said Jude like a policewoman reciting her rights to a detainee. The waiter, who wore a tux even though it was only lunchtime, set their chicken Marengo before them with a flourish, then poured Pouilly-Fuissé into their glasses.
The decor of the midtown restaurant, which Simon maintained was run by gangsters, centered around the apricot of the marble walls and floors. She and Anna were sitting side by side on a cushioned banquette, looking out across the nearly empty room. On their table was an exotic lily with a mauve and yellow center that harmonized with Anna’s suit. This was Jude’s first expense-account lunch, and she had decided that she didn’t want it to be her last.
“That
won’t be necessary,” said Anna. “I trust you to treat me fairly.”
“Thank you,” said Jude. “I’ll try not to betray your trust.” As she cut her chicken, she suddenly recalled what William had said—that Anna was bad news. She looked up from her plate. Anna met her gaze with smiling cool-blue eyes. She certainly didn’t look like bad news.
As they sipped their cappuccinos, Jude went over the various clauses in the contract. Afterward, on the sidewalk outside, while the irate drivers of a line of taxis honked and swore at a vacant double-parked delivery truck, Anna and Jude agreed to meet every other Wednesday afternoon after Anna’s writing workshop at Julia Richmond High School.
“SO HOW DID IT GO, JUDE?” called Simon as Jude passed his door.
She paused in his doorway. He was sprawled on his carpet in his sock feet, eating a sandwich. “A struggling writer could have eaten for a month on what that lunch cost,” she replied.
“True,” he said, looking up. “But think about it: A writer gets to sit home all day in Levis, telling himself amusing stories. Whereas we have to get dressed up, and ride the subway downtown, and hassle with printers and page proofs. We do all the dirty work, and they get interviewed by Dick Cavett. So we deserve a nice lunch from time to time.
Jude smiled. “Very feeble.”
“Struggle is good for writers,” insisted Simon. “If their lives are miserable, they have more of an incentive to create a fantasy world.”
Jude laughed.
“Anna is very attractive, isn’t she?”
“Is she? I didn’t notice.”
Simon smiled.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing,” he said, biting into his corned beef.
“William once told me she was bad news. Why, do you think?”
“William has very little use for women. Especially sexy ones.”
“You find Anna sexy?”
“Don’t you?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m not that kind of girl.”
“Neither am I,” said Simon, “but I know it when I see it.”
“I’M AFRAID IT’S TOO ABSTRACT,” Anna was saying about one student poem.
She and Jude were walking across Central Park to the West Side as the wan winter sun sank behind the luxury apartment buildings along Central Park West. The black tree branches were making curlicue patterns like wrought ironwork against the darkening sky. The paths were mostly deserted, except for a few solitary dog walkers hunched against the cold. But Jude was so engaged by the conversation that she wasn’t feeling the cold. “That may be the whole point,” she said. “He’s from Martinique. His culture is French, and French culture tends toward abstraction.”
“I think it’s just bad poetry,” said Anna, who was wearing a tall mink Cossack hat. Her glossy hair framed her face like the wing tips of a raven.
“Bad, good—those categories are culture-bound. Americans are practical people, so we prefer concreteness.”
“You’re no help.” Anna laughed, squeezing Jude’s upper arm with a gloved hand. “I thought you were supposed to give me some answers, not raise more questions.”
“But this one is crucial,” insisted Jude. “Do we include pieces we think are good or pieces that would be regarded as good within the students’ cultures of origin? And if the latter, how do we determine which those are? Because to do the former is a form of cultural imperialism.” The problems Anna’s project posed mirrored those within Jude’s own head, where the conflicting claims of a dozen different groups clamored for primacy—Yankee and southern, Baptist and Huguenot and Catholic, Dutch and Alsatian and French, Cherokee and Scottish and English. Sometimes she envied the simple ethnic clarity of the Hitler Youth.
Emerging from the park, they strolled down Jude’s grandparents’ block past the Café des Artistes. This part of New York had come to feel as familiar as Tidewater Estates to Jude by now. She had walked its sidewalks almost every day for six years—through dirty slush and sodden leaves, beneath trees feathered chartreuse with bursting buds, or bare and blasted by icy winds. She often dropped by to see her grandparents when they weren’t at the retirement house they’d bought on Captiva. Her friends and colleagues lived all around her.
Jude’s mother had once walked these sidewalks herself, ridden horses along the paths in the park, and posed for photographers on benches and street corners. She had fallen in love with Jude’s father in the cafés and restaurants and made love to him in his tiny apartment across from the Roosevelt. Jude could imagine her shock when she found herself stranded on that plateau in Tennessee, surrounded by mile after mile of forested mountain peaks and coves. By the time she was Jude’s age, she was buried in a grave of sticky red clay atop that same plateau. In some odd way, Jude felt she was living out the unfinished portion of her mother’s life, making the opposite choices—not marrying, not having a baby, not going back to the South, pursuing a career, sidestepping romantic commitments.
Upon reaching Broadway, Anna and Jude went into a diner that was tiled in black and white and trimmed with stainless steel. They perused the glass case that held the cakes and pies, then sat down at a table topped with black-flecked granite. After ordering tea and scones from a woman in a starched white cap that looked as though it belonged on a Victorian nurse, Anna pulled a piece of paper from her handbag and read the poem in question, which rhymed beauty with duty and truth with youth.
Jude buried her face in her hands. “I’m afraid you’re right. It’s just bad poetry.”
“But to him, it’s good. He’s very proud of it. I hate my job.”
“I hate mine, too. At the office, I read the manuscripts that come in unsolicited. The slush pile, it’s called. I know that each one is War and Peace to the person who wrote it. But many of them are frankly unreadable.”
“Maybe we should call this whole thing off,” said Anna. “Clearly we’re too tenderhearted.”
“Fine,” said Jude, “if you’d like to pay back your advance.”
“Oh, well, I guess I’m not that tenderhearted.”
As they parted on the sidewalk, Anna leaned forward to kiss Jude good-bye just as Jude extended her hand for a shake. Both stepped back. Then Jude leaned forward for a kiss, into Anna’s outstretched hand. Laughing, they came together for a hug. Then they held each other at arm’s length and exchanged a smile. Anna’s eyes were almost indigo in the rapidly descending dusk. Jude was surprised to discover that she and Anna were the same height, a rare event for someone as tall as she.
Jude watched Anna for a moment as she strode south in her long burgundy overcoat and mink Cossack hat, looking like a guard at the Kremlin. Then Jude turned around and headed uptown toward home.
This soon became a ritual. Anna came to Jude’s office building from Julia Richmond and waited in the lobby for Jude to descend with her usual satchel of manuscripts and galleys. They crossed the park, the air warming and softening with the arrival of spring. As the weeks passed, magnolia, crab apple, apple, and Japanese cherry trees, one after another, extruded their fragrant blossoms and then shed them on the pavement. While the two women walked, Anna recited in a mesmeric alto voice the poems she was considering for the book, and Jude commented on them. At the Broadway diner, they drank tea, ate pastries, and debated possible book titles involving melting pots and rainbows. Then they embraced gingerly and each headed home.
Although they discussed the book in all its aspects—content, format, jacket, title, publicity—they rarely discussed their personal lives. Jude had managed to piece together that Anna had grown up in Chicago with a Swedish Lutheran father and an Italian mother who was devoutly Catholic. Thus, she shared Jude’s cultural cacophony, which was probably why she was interested in editing such a book. She’d come to New York to do her doctorate in comparative literature at NYU, writing her dissertation on the French Symbolist poets. Now she taught workshops and wrote poetry. And she lived somewhere downtown. With whom, if anyone, Jude had no idea. There was no wedding band on her left hand.
And Jude had first encountered her in a roomful of homosexuals. Occasionally, Jude recalled William’s warning that Anna was bad news. But she had concluded that there was some private rancor between them. Once she knew Anna well enough, she’d ask her.
Simon was so impressed by the unprecedented diligence Jude was bringing to Anna’s book that he hired a new assistant and began giving Jude manuscripts of history books to edit. At first, she insisted that the deadly antics of the human race no longer interested her. But Simon doubled her salary and persuaded her to benefit the firm with her academic training.
One afternoon in early fall, shortly before the manuscript was scheduled to go to press, Jude and Anna sat sipping iced coffee in “their” café on Broadway. “I’ll miss these meetings, Jude,” said Anna. “They’ve been lots of fun.”
Jude stirred more sugar into her coffee in silence. It hadn’t really occurred to her that they wouldn’t go on seeing each other. In Tennessee, only death interrupted a relationship, if that. But it was true that she was Anna’s editor, not her friend. Once the book was finished, there would be no basis for further contact.
“Could we still meet for a walk now and then?” asked Anna. She seemed agitated.
“Definitely,” said Jude.
“Good. I wasn’t sure if this was just another book to you.” Anna broke their gaze to glance out the window at a young man passing by wearing a Comanche headdress and little else.
“I like you, Anna, as an author and as a person.”
Anna returned her eyes to Jude’s. “I like you, too. You know what intrigues me most about you?”
“What?” Jude realized this was the most intimate conversation they’d ever had.
“Your transparency. With you, what one sees is what one gets.”
Jude shrugged. “Isn’t that usually the case?”
Anna smiled sardonically. “In my experience, most people are a house of mirrors.”
As Jude walked uptown, she tried to decide whether it was a compliment to be called transparent. Its opposite, opaque, implied mystery and subtlety. Transparency suggested naïveté. Was it corny to be naive, or did it indicate authenticity and integrity?