Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  A couple of weeks later, Anna didn’t show up outside the entrance to Jude’s building at the usual hour. Jude paced the marble lobby for a long time before heading home, surprised to notice how disappointed she was.

  That night, she and Simon split some Chinese takeout in front of the electric heater in their dingy living room. After Sandy’s death, as normal attrition claimed their roommates, they hadn’t bothered to replace them, lacking the energy. Besides, they could afford not to have roommates now. So she and Simon lived alone in the echoing apartment with its constant reminders of Sandy. The same battered Danish-modern armchairs that had been there the day Jude first visited were still the only furniture in the living room. One night, Simon, in a seizure of grief, had started ripping the opera posters off the walls. Since he hadn’t completed the job, they were still hanging there in tattered strips that flapped in the breezes off the river.

  “One of these days we should fix this place up,” said Simon, opening a white cardboard container of moo goo gai pan. “Paint and paper it. Buy some new rugs and furniture. Now that we’re high-powered publishing executives.”

  “Good idea,” said Jude. “It does look like the day after Woodstock in here. By the way, do you have Anna Olsen’s phone number?”

  “I don’t really know her.” He paused with his chopsticks in midair, dribbling rice onto his plate. “I’ve just seen her a few times at William and Sid’s.”

  “Alone?”

  He grinned, green eyes flashing. “Sandy would be so proud.”

  “What?” she asked irritably.

  “What’s it to you, darling, whether she was alone or not?”

  “I need to reach her about her book, but for some reason, she’s never given me her number. That’s all, okay?”

  “Yes. Alone.” He was struggling not to smile. “All alone. Utterly alone. Gloriously alone.”

  Flouncing down the hallway to her bedroom to escape Simon’s lurid implications, Jude turned in at Sandy’s room, closing the door behind her. In the moonlight shining through the window, she surveyed the TV on which they’d watched so many chick flicks. And the phone on the rug that would never again ring for him. And the closet with its door ajar, in which a few deserted shirts swayed in the current of air under the door. And the stripped mattress on the floor, on which she and Sandy had experienced together something remarkable that still eluded her capacity for definition.

  Standing there on other nights, Jude had sometimes pretended that she could feel Sandy’s presence. But it wasn’t true. This was an empty room with dust balls in the corner. Molly occasionally turned up in her dreams. But Sandy had vanished without a trace, leaving behind only Simon’s and her memories of him, which they served up to each other from time to time like soggy leftovers from some distant bacchanal.

  Anna called Jude the next morning at work to apologize for standing her up and to say that she couldn’t see her until the following week.

  “But I have a new title idea and I need your opinion,” said Jude, doodling a mountain range across her notepad. Which, she abruptly realized, looked like the profile of a naked woman lying on her back, knees in the air.

  “Okay, shoot.”

  “But I have to show you some roughs for a new jacket, if you like the new title,” said Jude, suddenly desperate to see her, and startled by the desperation. “We don’t have much time. They were about to print the jacket when I stopped them.”

  “I’ll meet you at that café at seven.”

  When Anna appeared in the doorway in a belted khaki trench coat, she was wearing sunglasses, even though it was almost dusk. Sitting down, she removed the coat but not the glasses.

  “Greta Garbo, I presume,” said Jude, reaching for them. She wanted to see those eyes.

  Anna jerked her head aside. “I’m having trouble with my vision. My doctor told me to wear these.”

  Jude watched her own reflection in the dark lenses as she told Anna about her new Baptist-bred title, Precious in His Sight. Anna thought she preferred it to their previous choice. While studying the sketches for a new jacket, she swept off the glasses to see them better. One of her eyes, ringed with royal purple flesh, was thickly powdered and nearly swollen shut, as though she’d been stung by several bees. Realizing what she’d done, she touched it selfconsciously with her fingertips, explaining, “I ran into a cupboard door.”

  Jude studied her, saying nothing. “Is there some way I can help?” she finally asked.

  “You do help, Jude. Much more than you realize.”

  “I’d like to strangle whoever did this to you.” Jude reached across to touch the swelling with her fingertips.

  Anna laughed weakly, taking Jude’s hand in both hers and holding it on the tabletop. “You’d better not. He’s much bigger than you.”

  “Who is?”

  “My husband.”

  Jude looked at her. “I didn’t realize you were married.” She glanced down at Anna’s hand. It was still ringless.

  “It hasn’t been a real marriage for years. We just stay together for our children.” She squeezed Jude’s hand, then released it. Jude removed it to her lap. It lay there on her thigh, tingling.

  Jude’s head fell forward, so her chin rested on her chest. She gazed at her napoleon, which was oozing custard. “Children?” she murmured.

  “Two, a boy and a girl. They’re at prep school.”

  Jude looked up from her pastry to Anna’s face. That probably meant Anna was over forty. At least a dozen years between them. Practically a different generation. She studied Anna’s swollen eye. “Why do you stay with him if he treats you like this?”

  “He didn’t mean to.”

  “They never do,” said Jude. “But is that any excuse?”

  “He has many other nice qualities.”

  “I’m sure even Hitler had his moments,” replied Jude.

  “Besides, I provoked him. He gets very jealous. Yesterday, he got jealous over you, as a matter of fact. That’s why I stood you up.”

  “Over me? Why?”

  Anna lowered her head as though consulting her tea leaves for guidance. “Well,” she said slowly, “I guess he feels we spend a lot of time together. And maybe I’ve mentioned your name a few too many times.”

  “But is it a crime to have a new friend?”

  Anna looked up, eyes clouded with anxiety. “Not if she remains just a friend.”

  “So what’s the problem then?” Jude glanced nervously around the diner, all the occupants of which seemed to be eavesdropping on Anna and herself.

  Anna smiled brightly. “There is no problem.” She scribbled a number on her paper napkin and handed it to Jude. “It’s best to call me in late afternoon,” she said, “before Jim gets home.”

  As Jude walked north toward Riverside Drive, her brain was as chaotic as the stock exchange after the crash. She kept picturing Anna’s swollen face. She wanted to protect her from this man, whoever he was. But he was her husband. And he was jealous of Jude? Was this why William felt Anna was bad news? She was too passive to extract herself from an abusive marriage? But Jude had been seeing her for months, and this was the first time she’d noticed any bruises. Maybe it would be best just to back off and give it all a rest. But, oh God, those eyes that shifted like the waters of the sea, from cerulean to indigo to turquoise. Having watched them all these months, how could she give them up?

  When Jude woke up the next morning, she discovered a feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach. As she gazed past her Atalanta flask to the drifting gray waters of the Hudson, she remembered Anna’s bruised eye and her own wish to protect her. But Jude wasn’t a home-breaker. And Anna was her author. It was unprofessional to get involved in her private life. She would make a point of not phoning. And if Anna phoned her, she vowed to keep it brief and focused on the book, in compliance with her family motto: “When in doubt, get the hell out.”

  Simon appeared in her office doorway toward lunchtime that day, carrying a disheveled manusc
ript. “Here. A present.” Giving her his most winning smile, he plopped it on her desk.

  Picking up the first few pages, Jude skimmed them. It was a scholarly history of lesbianism from the Middle Ages to the present. Looking up, she said, “Please don’t do this to me, Simon.”

  “Do what?”

  “I’ve got too much on my plate right now as it is,” she temporized.

  “But you’re the only one who can edit it, Jude. You’re a history Ph.D. manqué. Besides, everyone else is about to go to St. Thomas for the sales conference.” He backed out of her office, grinning.

  That night, Jude sat by her phone for a long time, the new manuscript lying unread on her bed, inspecting the number Anna had scribbled on the paper napkin. It had four 4s in it. Four was Jude’s favorite number.

  Finally forcing herself to start the manuscript, she read into the night about women who lived alone being burned as witches. About women being tortured and hanged for dressing as men. About women being stoned for refusing to marry. About women killing their female lovers to prevent them from marrying men. The manuscript needed a lot of work. The stilted language made the horrors sound almost bland, and each page was half-filled with arcane footnotes. She scribbled suggestions to the author all over the pages.

  The next day at work, Jude jumped each time her phone rang. When she answered and discovered that it wasn’t Anna, she became irritated and snapped at whoever it was. And when she hung up, she wracked her brain for some detail about the anthology that required Anna’s opinion. She was worried about her. She wanted to be sure she was okay. But the manuscript was already at the printer’s and everything was regrettably under control. And besides, she had taken a vow to let Anna resolve her marital masochism alone.

  Jude walked home up Columbus Avenue, looking into shop windows, wondering whether she should buy a new fall outfit. Anna rarely wore the same clothes twice. Whereas Jude usually paid very little attention to her own appearance. But it might be nice to give Anna something fresh to look at when they next met.

  Beside a display window in which she’d been studying shoes, Jude spotted a doorway she’d never noticed before. It opened on a staircase that led, according to a small hand-printed sign, to: MADAME TOUSSAINT, VOODOO SPELLS AND TAROT READINGS. On a whim, Jude climbed the dirty linoleum-covered steps. At the first landing was a battered steel door with a buzzer beside it. A card underneath read: MADAME TOUSSAINT. Jude buzzed. The door buzzed back and Jude pushed it open.

  She was assaulted by the scent of patchouli oil. The walls and ceiling of the room were draped with gold-patterned Indian bedspreads that billowed like spinnakers in the draft from the door. Soft music sounding like reggae Gregorian chants floated down from two speakers near the ceiling. Large cushions covered in Prussian blue velvet lay on the floor around a brass tray on bamboo legs.

  The strands of colored beads in the far doorway parted, and the largest black woman Jude had ever seen squeezed through the door frame. She was wearing an African-print muumuu and matching pillbox headgear in shades of orange and brown. Extending her hand, she murmured, “Welcome. I am Madame Toussaint. How may I help you this afternoon?”

  Jude studied the face. The eyes were surrounded by so much flesh that they seemed to be squinting. Chins were stacked one atop another like the overlapping ranges of the Smokies. “I’d like a reading,” Jude said, astonished at herself.

  Madame Toussaint gestured to a cushion by the tray. Jude plopped down, sending up a cloud of dust. Madame Toussaint sank down on her cushion with a grace Jude would have thought impossible in someone so large. Watching Jude with her tiny bright eyes, she shuffled the cards, an ordinary deck with DELTA AIRLINES printed on their backs. Jude cut them. The woman dealt some out on the brass tray. Then she studied them for a long time, occasionally glancing at Jude, while voices from the speakers near the ceiling chanted softly about rivers flowing red with the blood of white oppressors.

  Finally, Madame Toussaint closed her eyes and started talking in a listless monotone. About money and success that were headed Jude’s way. About the spirits of departed loved ones who were whispering messages for Jude into Madame Toussaint’s ear. About a past life as a courtesan on Atlantis, where Jude had been faithless in love, for which she was now doing atonement. Jude listened with growing indignation. Clearly this was a scam.

  “A new love is moving toward you very fast,” Madame Toussaint intoned, rocking rhythmically with her eyes closed. “With someone older than yourself. Someone who is troubled. Someone you can help. Someone who will help you.”

  Jude had snapped to rigid attention.

  “This relationship will be deep and lasting and very important for both women,” continued Madame Toussaint.

  Jude shuddered. “Women?” she echoed faintly.

  Madame Toussaint nodded slowly, still rocking. “A water sign. A creative person. An artist of some sort.”

  Anna was a poet and a Pisces.

  Who was this storefront charlatan? Jude jumped up.

  Madame Toussaint opened her eyes and watched calmly as Jude fluttered around the room. After her panic had subsided a bit, Madame Toussaint murmured, “Twenty dollars, please.”

  Reaching into her shoulder bag, Jude thrust a bill at her and headed for the doorway.

  As Jude gripped the doorknob like an activated hand grenade, Madame Toussaint added for free, “There are worse things in this world than a woman who loves you.”

  Jude rushed out the door and down the steps. In the street, she discovered that she had a four-aspirin headache.

  SINCE SIMON AND ALL the top brass had departed for the sales conference in St. Thomas, Jude decided to stay at her apartment the next day so she could edit without interruption the manuscript on the history of lesbianism. She asked her assistant to forward her phone calls. Then she assembled the manuscript, some pencils, and a cup of coffee on the low table in the living room. She put some records on the turntable to drown out the din from Riverside Drive. Then she sat down and went to work on the turgid prose, crossing out and rewriting all morning long. She found a certain satisfaction in locating the nugget of meaning hidden in the dross of a paragraph and restating it in one succinct sentence.

  Also included with the text were some photographs of the handful of famous lesbians from the past who had managed not to be murdered or incarcerated in loony bins. One featured two women in Victorian gowns with pinched waists and bustles. They had their arms around each other and were gazing into each other’s eyes with unmasked adoration. As she studied them, Jude wondered if she and Molly had been lesbians. They had loved each other deeply, and both were female. They had explored each other’s bodies to a certain extent and had experienced some sort of orgasm together that night on the raft. But labeling their interaction so clinically robbed it of its wonder. In any case, Jude had been with half a dozen men since. So did that make her bisexual? But she had never loved a man and a woman both at once. And none of the men had engaged her as Molly had, not even Sandy. Although he might have if he’d lived. But she and Molly had shared years of peace and passion, whereas she and Sandy had just begun. Most people she knew didn’t fit into these pigeonholes anyway.

  Jude realized that the last song on the last record in the stack was repeating time after time. Sipping her cold coffee, she concentrated on the lyrics:

  Every night you sit and watch the TV screen,

  And the life you live is only in your dreams.

  But I think I know what it is on your mind.

  Yes, I think I know what you’re thinking ’bout all the time.

  You want to be loved.

  You want to know somebody somewhere cares….

  Lying back in her chair, she listened to these lines again and again, debating their accuracy vis-à-vis herself. She had been convinced that she didn’t want to be loved anymore.

  Abruptly, she recalled Anna’s remark that her husband didn’t mind if Anna had a new friend so long as “she remains just a friend.” J
ude realized she’d been deliberately obtuse during that conversation. Anna had raised a topic that they needed to deal with, yet Jude had sidestepped it. Sitting up, she switched off the record player, picked up the phone, and dialed Anna’s number.

  After a dozen rings, Jude hung up. Jumping up, she grabbed her jacket and left the apartment. Taking the bus through the park to the East Side, she walked downtown until she came to Julia Richmond High. Going into a coffee shop across the street, she sat at a table by the plate-glass window and ordered a grilled cheese sandwich. She didn’t even like grilled cheese sandwiches, but they were Anna’s favorite. As she chewed the greasy cardboard bread, she watched the school doorway. It wasn’t Anna’s usual day there, but who knew? In any case, Jude had no idea where downtown she lived, so this was her only chance of finding her.

  After waiting for an hour and a half, nursing a cup of coffee under the scowl of the gum-chewing waitress, Jude went out into the street. Striding to the park, she followed the route back to the West Side that she and Anna usually took, discussing with Anna in her head how they should defuse the attraction that was undeniably building between them.

  Upon reaching Columbus Avenue, Jude ducked into a bookshop. Going directly to the poetry section, she extracted from the shelves volumes by Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé. Anna had written her thesis on them, but Jude could remember very little from her poetry course at the Sorbonne. She wanted to reread them so she could discuss them intelligently with Anna. Their exchanges about literature and history were the most crucial part of their relationship. Maybe if they emphasized them more, the physical attraction would simply wither away from lack of encouragement.

  As she headed toward the cash register, she spotted a rack of magazines. On it sat a road atlas. Picking it up, she looked up Illinois. Locating the inset showing the streets of Chicago, she studied it closely. She’d never been to Chicago, so she tried to imagine the tall apartment buildings along Lake Michigan and the quaint ethnic neighborhoods inland that Anna had once described to her. This was Anna’s hometown. She wondered what street she had lived on, what games she and her friends had played, where she’d gone to school, whether she’d had a pet. She’d have to ask her when she next saw her. Which would be in eleven days now, she calculated on her fingers.