Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  “Simon wants us to make it an annual thing, with contests and awards and scholarships.”

  Anna smiled. “But that’s fabulous!”

  Jude went into the kitchen and returned with a chilled bottle of champagne. They toasted their new series.

  “But what does this have to do with our personal relationship?” asked Anna as she sipped her champagne, legs carefully crossed so that Jude could see her finely turned ankle, exquisitely fitting Italian shoe, and the seam up the back of her dark silk stocking that led into the shadowy realm between her legs. Jude’s fingers twitched, longing to straighten the seam.

  “Well, once the book came out, I was no longer your editor, so we were free to pursue whatever connection we wanted. But now I’m back to being your editor. And it would be unethical for me to have an affair with an author. Like a lawyer romancing a client.”

  “That’s too bad.” Anna sighed. “Because I’ve just written you an incredibly romantic poem. I guess I’ll have to read it to someone else.” She studied her carefully trimmed nails.

  “What’s it called?”

  “Leda and the Swan Song.”

  “All right, let’s hear it,” said Jude with a half smile.

  She removed a piece of paper from her handbag and began reading. The early stanzas acknowledged the chagrin of past loves lost. The middle ones dwelt on the delights of new love, despite an awareness that it must one day fade.

  In closing, Anna looked up right at Jude and recited from memory:

  I’ll touch you so gently tonight, my friend,

  That you’ll scarcely recall all that gall

  You’ll cry as before, but this time for joy,

  In the red through the window at dawn.

  Stay with me tonight.

  Hand me your pain.

  Look in my eyes.

  Let love live again.

  They sat there in silence, each stroking with her eyes the planes and hollows of the other’s face.

  Jude set her champagne glass on Simon’s antique oak end table. Leaning over, she placed a hand on either side of Anna’s head and looked into her eyes, which were flaring in the lamplight like cool, blue flames. After several prim kisses, their mouths opened, and the debate was concluded. They lay in each other’s arms for a long time as desire swept over them in waves, too weak from its pummeling to undertake anything more exotic. Out the window at the foot of the couch, the Ferris wheel across the Hudson was a spinning hoop of sparks.

  CHAPTER

  12

  AS THEY STROLLED UP BROADWAY, Anna was telling Jude about the son of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, Anatole, who had died of rheumatism at age eight after many months of horrible suffering. Stéphane had struggled to master his grief by writing poems about the experience.

  Anna began to recite in French some of the fragments he’d composed before admitting defeat: “‘What has sought refuge, your future in me, becomes my purity throughout life, which I shall not sully.’”

  Anna’s French was rhythmical and almost unaccented to Jude’s American ear. She wasn’t listening too closely for the meaning because the sound of the sorrowful words alone was so haunting.

  “ ‘We have learned through you a better part of ourselves, which often evades us,’” continued Anna, “ ‘but shall now reside within us…. ’”

  The closer they got to Jude’s apartment, the faster they walked, until they were nearly trotting, eager to fall onto Jude’s bed and feel the blood course through each other’s veins. Anna was the Florence Nightingale of sex. With her, Jude had been experiencing a passion she’d never guessed was possible—hours of long, slow arousal involving every limb, digit, fold, and recess of flesh, until each cell in both bodies was vibrating with a tension that screamed for release.

  With Sandy, there had been a searing incandescence from hard, silky, swollen flesh pounding like a pestle into her slippery secret passages. And a thundering through their flesh like the hooves of wild horses as they fought and bucked and reared and plunged. Whereas with Anna, there was rather the faint, salty scent of a sea marsh at dawn. And tongues that delicately teased and tested and tuned, sending ripples of desire radiating outward like dragonflies skimming the surface of a glassy pond. And moist velvet walls that opened and pulsed and clung like bivalves. And the sound of the surf swirling in tiny sucking whirlpools.

  It was the difference between galloping across a plain under a white-hot sun at high noon and diving deep beneath the sea. If the French were correct to call orgasm la petite mort, Sandy had provided death by auto-da-fé, and Anna, death by drowning. Either seemed worth planning the rest of your life around. But Jude’s single episodes with Molly and Sandy had sizzled her like stray bolts of lightning, whereas Anna seemed to be rewiring her circuits for an ongoing supply of high-voltage power. She was a high priestess of passion, approaching lovemaking as a ritual, one that had to be respected and revered, one that could be replicated indefinitely by observing the established rites.

  As in any religion, some of the regalia were flowers, candles, incense, and wine. Others were perfume, new sheets, massage oil, and assorted hors d’oeuvres on a tray by the bed. And she liked very slow music that sounded like the spheres revolving in outer space, and icicles shattering on lunar rocks, and winds howling across the tundra. Her variety of holy communion required that all the senses be activated and focused, then fused, and finally obliterated, before the dove of peace could make its descent.

  Jude wandered through her workdays in a haze of exhausted arousal, accomplishing almost nothing, waiting for the night. Fortunately, Simon was in a similar coma over Marvin, so he didn’t notice. Both mooned around the office, gazing out windows with dumb, dazed grins while their company’s sales figures plummeted to new lows. Their coworkers were humoring them, like the parents of children with chicken pox who wait for the fever to break and pray that their own immunity hasn’t worn off.

  The afternoon after her first session with Anna, Jude had found herself buying out the lingerie shop next door to her office building. Molly and Sandy would have preferred her to be a boy. But in a matter of hours, Anna had erased all that, leaving Jude grateful to be female, and the more female, the better. Anna liked to lie on Jude’s bed and watch her remove the silk camisoles and satin teddies—not like a strip show but like an actual flesh-and-blood woman undressing in the flickering shadows cast by the candle flames. She reminded Jude of herself as a little girl when she used to watch her mother dress for parties, worshiping at her altar in a hushed silence, intoxicated by her perfume, which mixed with a strange musky odor that seemed to emanate through her pores from somewhere deep inside her body. Now Jude understood what that exciting, frightening fragrance had been—the scent of a woman in love. It filled the room now when she and Anna were together and permeated the sheets where they had lain. One time, Anna left behind a cashmere sweater, which Jude had decided not to return. On the nights when they weren’t together, Jude buried her face in it while she slept, breathing in the blend of Anna’s Opium, her sweat, and that unmistakable scent that proved to Jude beyond any words or deeds that Anna desired her. If that scent should vanish, Jude knew it would be a warning that their passion was languishing.

  “ ‘The ultimate goal,’” recited Anna as the elevator ascended to Jude’s apartment, “‘was nothing but to leave life pure…. You accomplished this ahead of your time….’”

  Unable to wait any longer, Jude forced her knee between Anna’s knees and buried her face in Anna’s neck, breathing deeply of her Opium. With one hand, she pressed the red stop button.

  “Jude,” gasped Anna as Jude’s other hand slid up her thigh and beneath her skirt, “what if someone’s waiting for the elevator?”

  “Tough luck,” said Jude, watching Anna’s gorgeous blue eyes go bleary and flutter shut as her thighs parted and her head fell back against the wall. Jude’s role in Anna’s religion of love was that of the heretic who defied and flouted the creed. Like the good Catholic
girl she had once been, Anna was turned on by transgression.

  When they at last reached Jude’s floor, Anna was still breathing spasmodically as she straightened out her clothing. The door slid open. Simon and Marvin were standing there looking deeply annoyed. Simon glanced from Jude to Anna. “I think the girls have discovered your elevator stunt, Marvin.”

  “Aren’t these young studs remarkable?” Anna asked him smoothly, patting her black hair into place.

  Although he smiled, Jude suddenly suspected that Simon didn’t like Anna. She wasn’t sure why not. In the beginning, he had egged Jude on. Surely he wasn’t jealous, since he had a new love of his own?

  “TELL ME SOME MORE POEMS,” murmured Jude, lying amid her mangled sheets later that evening. Her entire body felt sated and fatigued, and her mind was glazed and dull, as though Anna’s Opium were ether.

  Anna began languidly to recite Baudelaire while Jude watched the waters of the Hudson reflect the flickering lights from the amusement park in wavering, golden party streamers. She recalled the similar safe feeling of lying on a mattress of pine needles in the cave back home, watching the sunset reflected in the river and listening to Molly describe their future cabin on the clifftop while dozing mourning doves cooed from their coves in the Wildwoods.

  As though echoing her thoughts, Anna murmured, “‘Mais le vert paradis des amours enfantines./ Les courses, les chansons, les baisers, les bouquets,/Les violons vibrant derrière les collines…’”

  “The green paradise of childhood love, the races, the songs, the kisses, the flowers, the violins trembling behind the hills.…” Anna’s and her raft was this bed, and the Hudson had replaced the Holston. But everything else was the same now as then. The long arc of lonely hours had finally come full circle, and Jude had recreated with Anna the happiness she had once known with Molly, a closeness and contentment she thought she’d lost forever. The green paradise of childhood love was alive again here in this New York City apartment.

  “You’re crying,” murmured Anna, pausing in mid-Baudelaire. “Why are you crying, my love?”

  Jude began to sob. She rolled over against Anna’s long, lean body and laid her head on her lovely breasts. When she finally calmed down enough to look up through puffy red eyes, she discovered that Anna was watching her, her blue eyes suffused with a tenderness Jude had never before experienced. She shut her own eyes and felt her heart ascend to her throat so that she almost choked from happiness.

  “So tell me, sweetheart,” said Anna, stroking Jude’s hair, “are you crying because you’re happy or because you’re sad?”

  “Both,” wailed Jude, starting to cry all over again.

  Sitting up to blot her eyes and blow her nose, she told Anna for the first time in any detail about Molly and Sandy and their deaths, about her own loneliness and grief and rage.

  After listening for a long time, Anna concluded, “So now, with me, you’ve been given another chance.”

  Jude started crying again. She felt as vulnerable as a hermit crab that had left behind its old shell but hadn’t yet located a new one.

  Anna pulled her back down alongside her own body and held her close, kneading the quivering muscles of her back. After a while, she began softly singing a lullaby of popular songs from her youth—“Sha Boom,” “Qué Sera Sera,” “Glow, Little Glowworm,” “Mr. Sandman,” “Three Coins in a Fountain,” “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes.”

  On and on she sang, each tune worse than the last, until Jude began to laugh, begging her to stop. “What was wrong with you teenagers in the fifties?” she demanded. “Those are the worst songs I’ve ever heard!”

  Anna shrugged. “We were romantics. ‘If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.’ You call that a love song?”

  JUDE WAS LYING ON the living room couch in her sock feet, reading a manuscript about the Knights Templars that Simon had just assigned her. The inquisitors sent by the Pope to examine the London Templars had just returned home to France in disgust, complaining that no one in England knew how to torture properly. Their recommendation was that the English Templars be shipped to France, where torture was state of the art. As usual, Jude was trying to figure out the difference between the torturers and the nontorturers.

  The doorbell buzzed. Jude wasn’t expecting anyone. Anna was at the opera with Jim, and Simon was on the prowl down in the Village, having thrown over poor, baffled Marvin. Every month or two, he was madly in love with some new man, whom he portrayed as perfect in every regard. A few weeks later, he had evolved a list of irremedial faults that required him to dump the man in question and plunge into a depression, swearing he would never love again. It was his version of graveyard love. No real person could ever measure up to the ideal of Sandy that he carried in his heart, flashing it like a silver sheriff’s star at anyone who got too close. Jude understood. It was easier to love the dead. They rarely talked back.

  Getting up, she padded to the door in her jeans and turtleneck. Through the peephole, she saw Anna in her sealskin coat, glossy dark hair framing her face.

  Opening the door, Jude asked with a delighted smile, “What are you doing here?”

  Anna pushed her into the entryway, slammed the door, grabbed her hand, and dragged her into the living room. “Quick!” she said. “I have to meet Jim at the opera in forty minutes.”

  Accepting the challenge, Jude removed Anna’s fur coat, silk dress, and elaborate undergarments like a sailor unrigging a luxury yacht. They rolled around the plum carpet like the Marx brothers in a car chase, Jude fully clothed. Afterward, Jude rerigged her and sent her out the door with something to think about if La Traviata turned boring.

  Plopping back down on the couch with a smile still on her face, Jude reflected that the only thing that bothered her about this delirious love was that Anna would never spend an entire night. She always rolled out of Jude’s arms at some point to throw on her clothes and race home to Jim. But when Jude had complained, Anna replied, “You don’t want to be married to me, Jude. Marriage kills off any tenderness you ever felt for someone. I’m older than you and I’ve had more experience, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.”

  There was plenty Jude had to take her word for, because Anna was running the show. Most days, she phoned Jude at the office whenever Jim wasn’t around. A few times a week, if she had several hours free, she proposed that they meet—for a walk, a meal, a museum, or a nap. Anna was determined that Jim know nothing of their liaison lest he destroy it, as she claimed he had others in her past. Since Jim kept a professor’s unpredictable hours, Jude never knew when Anna would phone, so she had rearranged her life to be eternally available. All she did now was work and wait for Anna. She made a point of rarely being far from a phone for which Anna had the number. And when she was with Anna, she often glanced at her watch to see how much time was left before Anna would go away and she’d have to start waiting again.

  Having this affair with Anna was like being an undercover agent. But sometimes she thought she wouldn’t want to bring it out into the open even if Anna would allow it. All their intrigue, some of it a bit exaggerated, was exciting. And because Anna always left her hungering for more, the yearning that Jude had learned as a child to label love was never quenched, so she never found out the answer to her original question of what might remain after satiation.

  When she wasn’t with Anna, however, Jude’s imagination sometimes went into overdrive. Did Anna still see the women she had loved before Jude? Did Jude measure up, or did Anna pretend that Jude was someone else while they were making love? She pictured Anna at the Oasis Bar in the Village, picking up attractive young dog trainers from New Jersey, taking them back to her house near Washington Square (which she had never let Jude visit). She imagined Anna doing to them all the lascivious things Jude knew she was capable of.

  But often when her thoughts took this gruesome turn, the doorbell would ring and Anna would be standing there with her arms full of lilacs. Or Jud
e’s phone would ring during an editorial meeting at work and Anna would be on the other end, impersonating an obscene phone caller with a thick Polish accent, describing in lurid detail all the things she planned to do to Jude if Jude could manage to escape to her apartment within the next hour. This had gone on for over two years now, and Jude’s only requirement was that it never end.

  Simon, however, seemed eager for it to end. He kept proposing business trips he maintained were essential for Jude’s career advancement. She always replied that she didn’t want to leave town. Finally, he insisted that she go with him to the Frankfurt Book Fair. “Ten thousand publishers from all over the world, Jude. It’s the most important publishing event of the year. You need to be there to make contacts for selling the foreign rights to your books. It’s not fair to your authors not to go.”

  “Thanks, but I have all the contacts I want,” she said from her desk chair as he lounged in her doorway at work.

  “You have contact with me and with Anna. That’s it. You’ll never become a world-class editor by lying in bed day after day with the same person.”

  “But I don’t want to be a world-class editor,” she replied. “All I want is to be Anna’s love slave.”

  Simon laughed, despite his disapproval. “Please say you’ll go with me to Germany for a week, Jude. If you do, I’ll send you and Anna to the National Conference for the Teachers of English in Boston next month. To promote Anna’s handbook.”

  Jude instantly accepted this bribe. Anna had done a workbook to help secondary school English teachers establish student-poetry contests and anthologies on a local level, as she had done in New York City. If they went to this conference, they could at last spend an entire night together. Two nights, in fact—in a strange hotel room with a king-size bed and room service.

  Jude sulked her way through the Frankfurt Book Fair, hanging around her company’s stand in the vast exposition hall while Simon met with a different publisher every half hour. In the evening, they went to elaborate cocktail parties and dinners with hosts of fascinating people, but Jude merely waited sullenly for the moment when she could rush back to her room at the Intercontinental and phone Anna in New York. Anna went to Jude’s apartment at the end of each afternoon to receive this call. If she didn’t answer, it meant she’d gotten tied up, and then they had to wait another twenty-four hours for their next hit of sweet nothings. After each call, Jude felt calmed and soothed, as though Anna’s voice had injected her with heroin.