Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  The only thing in Frankfurt that made any impression on Jude, other than the exorbitant price of phone calls to the United States, was a publisher from Paris named Jasmine, a friend of Simon’s since childhood, whose father had fought with his during the war. The three of them dined one night in a brasserie near the train station. Jasmine was one of those elegant women Jude used to spot in the streets of Paris, as petite as Jude’s mother, but with a presence as formidable as that of Charles de Gaulle. She was wearing huge, pale rose gem-stones at her ears and on one finger, as well as a beaten-silver Indian belt etched with intricate arabesques of fruit and flowers.

  Simon ordered the three of them a dark German beer he found superior. As they sipped it, Jasmine studied Jude so intently with her dark eyes that Jude felt like bacillus under a microscope. But her eyes weren’t critical, just curious.

  Simon and Jasmine exchanged news about their respective families. Then they traded tips about the books being hawked and hyped at the fair.

  “Tell Jasmine about your titles, Jude,” Simon instructed.

  Jude described Anna’s student-poetry anthologies and the new handbook. Jasmine seemed interested although dubious about whether such a self-help concept would float in France, given its centralized educational bureaucracy. Then Jude mentioned her history of the Knights Templars, due to appear the following spring, which seemed to leave Jasmine cold.

  “And I edited Forbidden Fruits,” continued Jude. “It’s a scholarly history of lesbianism from the Middle Ages to the present. It came out a year ago, to very good reviews. The paperback rights went for six figures, and so far we’ve sold rights to Holland, England, Sweden, and Germany.”

  Jasmine nodded, exhaling a stream of cigarette smoke. “Ah, yes. I have heard good things about it from our scout in New York.”

  She was still studying Jude carefully. Jude wondered whether she could read from her face that her only real interest in life was making love to another woman. If so, did this disgust her?

  “Would you be so kind as to send me a copy?” asked Jasmine. “Though I am not certain such a book would sell in France. We prefer not to categorize our romantic behavior quite so succinctly as the Anglo-Saxons.”

  Simon laughed and said, “But, Jasmine, many of the events in the book took place in Paris.”

  “But this is not our fault,” she replied. “Repressed Protestants from all over the world flock to Paris to enjoy our supposed sexual license. These are the people you read about, debauching themselves on the Left Bank. But there is no specific word in the French language that means ’to have sex. ‘We only ‘make love.’ And true Parisians are the most austere race you will ever encounter. The quality of an interaction is all that interests us, not frequency or quantity.”

  “Garbage!” snapped Simon.

  “But this is true,” insisted Jasmine. “Take those pastries as an example.”

  Simon and Jude looked at the plate of exquisite apricot and marzipan tarts that they’d both been devouring with their coffee. But Jasmine hadn’t taken even one. Simon guiltily held out the plate to her.

  “But this is my point,” she said, fending them off with one hand. “I have been enjoying their scent of apricot and almond, mixed with the odor of the coffee. Mixed also with your aftershave, Simon. And with Jude’s marvelous perfume. And with the tobacco of our cigarettes. I enjoy looking at them there, dark orange on the blue plate, topped with ivory slivers of almond. With that pot of yellow and orange narcissus behind them. I have eaten hundreds of similar tarts in my life, so I can taste in my mouth right now the contrast between the acid and the sugar. I feel on my tongue the stickiness of the fruit, the graininess of the marzipan, the crunch of the almonds beneath my teeth. So I have no need to eat one. The experience is complete as it stands.”

  “But, Jasmine, tarts are made to be eaten,” retorted Simon. “That’s their function.”

  “Be my guest,” said Jasmine. “But if you eat one, you have destroyed it. And since the hunger for sweetness always returns, why not stop short of destroying the tarts and learn to enjoy instead the hunger that they stimulate.”

  Simon and Jude looked at each other blankly.

  “You know something, Jasmine?” said Simon. “You’re a bleeding lunatic. I always suspected it, but now I know for sure.”

  She laughed, and then she and he exchanged some witty, sophisticated double-talk in which it was impossible for Jude to tell what either was actually saying. Suddenly, Jude found herself wondering if Jasmine didn’t perhaps share her taste for women. There had been a certain shrewd candor in her eyes as she so frankly inspected Jude—which you didn’t often find in women who were primarily interested in how they might be appearing to whatever men were in the immediate vicinity.

  For the first time since she’d gotten involved with Anna, Jude had actually listened to a conversation that didn’t directly concern Anna. Nor had she excused herself to go to the ladies’ room so she could close her eyes and picture Anna’s face and whisper her name. Nor had she once consulted her watch to discover when she could return to the hotel and phone Anna. Realizing this, she felt guilty, as though she’d been somehow unfaithful.

  As Jude and Simon strolled back to their hotel through the dark streets strewn with international publishers at play, Jude asked, “Is Jasmine a lesbian?”

  “I don’t really know. I’ve wondered the same thing. She has a husband somewhere, but I’ve never met him.”

  “As we know, that means nothing.”

  “I think the French are schizophrenic,” confided Simon. “They have a public self and a private self, and there’s often an unbreachable chasm between the two. They veil their private selves behind a persiflage of charm and theorizing. But once a Frenchman reveals himself to you, you have a friend for life. In contrast to an American, who’s your best friend after twenty minutes and then you never see him again.”

  “And what about the English?” asked Jude. She was intrigued by the ease with which Simon and his European colleagues spoke in terms of national characteristics.

  “We use our famous rapier wit to make sure that no one ever gets close enough to be a friend in the first place.”

  “But that’s not true,” said Jude with a laugh. “You’re a wonderful friend to me, Simon.”

  “But I emigrated, didn’t I?”

  JUDE WAS SITTING DOWN front in the ballroom of a hotel near the Boston Public Gardens, where Anna was delivering a pitch for her handbook to the assembled high school English teachers. She had warned Jude that she wasn’t going to look at her from the podium lest she smile or blush. Jude, however, was looking at Anna, who was wearing the same mauve and forest-green wool suit from their first lunch. And she was recalling the marvels that lay just beneath that fabric of fine wool. She pictured Anna naked on the carpet in their room earlier that morning, hips swiveling lubriciously against Jude’s thigh. And Anna sprawled in an armchair in the morning sun, robe fallen open, moaning softly like a purring cat, hands gripping Jude’s head, which was buried between her thighs. It amused Jude to think that many of the teachers who were listening so admiringly to Anna’s excellent presentation would be mortified to know how she’d passed the hour just prior to coming down here to speak to them on educating the youth of America. But how many among them, Jude wondered as she searched their attentive faces, wouldn’t be mortified?

  Jude’s company had a stand in the adjoining hall, along with eighty other publishers. Each featured titles of interest to high school English teachers. An editor from her firm’s textbook division was in charge of their display. Jude’s only responsibility, Simon had informed her with a tiny, indulgent smile at last week’s marketing meeting, was to keep Anna content. The promotion department had set up interviews for her after lunch and the next morning. Otherwise, they planned to remain in their room, working on Anna’s contentment, pausing only long enough to tip the waiters from room service.

  JUDE WOKE UP THAT NIGHT in the unfamiliar bed and reache
d over for Anna. But Anna’s side of the bed was cold and empty. She waited for her to return from the bathroom, but she didn’t. “Anna?” she called. There was no response.

  Sitting up, she switched on the light. The clock on the bedside table read 1:30 A.M. She climbed out of bed and padded into the bathroom. Still no Anna. Her plaid suit had vanished, but everything else remained. Jude paced the room, wondering what to do. She phoned the front desk, but the night clerk had seen no one matching Anna’s description. Finally, she started putting on her underwear.

  A key scratched around the lock. The door swung open and Anna walked in.

  “Where have you been?” asked Jude, sitting on the bedside with a stocking half on.

  Anna’s expression turned furtive. “I had to find a phone.”

  “How come?”

  “I told Jim I’d call.”

  “At one in the morning?”

  “He stays up late.”

  “But there’s a phone right here.” Jude frowned, wondering what Anna had to say to Jim that Jude couldn’t hear.

  “I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “I wish you had. I’ve been worried.”

  “I’m a big girl, Jude. I can take care of myself.” She sounded irritated.

  Anna undressed in silence. For a moment, Jude wondered whether she’d met some alluring English teacher as she autographed books after her talk and had gone to her room for an assignation. Then she dismissed this as too ridiculous, with herself right there, ready to satisfy Anna’s slightest whim. But maybe Anna missed the challenge of someone she wasn’t sure she could have.

  “Did you really have to call him right in the middle of our time alone together?” murmured Jude, sitting immobile on the bedside as she stared at the print on the wall of Paul Revere racing his horse across Concord Bridge.

  “He’s my husband, darling. He still has a few rights.”

  “Yes, but he has you to himself most of the time.”

  “If we’re going to start complaining about the ghosts of loves past, what about that wax museum you carry in your heart? Sandy and Molly and God knows how many others.”

  “You know perfectly well that my waxworks had a meltdown the night we first made love,” said Jude, smiling.

  Anna smiled back and said in a softer voice, “Once the children are in college, I’ll be all yours, my love.” She slid under the covers and reached for Jude. “You already have me in a way that Jim doesn’t,” she added as she unhooked Jude’s bra and slipped the straps off her arms. “I don’t make love with him anymore.”

  As she pulled Jude down beside her, Jude was swept with relief. She’d often wondered about this but had felt she couldn’t ask, since she was the new kid on Anna’s block. As Jude shuddered with desire and subsided into Anna’s embrace, she thought she smelled alcohol. But they had split a bottle of wine with dinner.

  AS ANNA DID HER FINAL magazine interview in their room the next morning, Jude went to the front desk to settle their account. On the invoice, she noticed a charge for half a dozen drinks in the Ironsides Lounge, where she and Anna had never set foot.

  “I’m afraid I’ve been charged for someone else’s drinks,” she told the cashier.

  He rifled through some slips and handed her a bill dated the previous day and signed by Anna. Shaken, Jude wrote her name on the credit-card slip. Anna must have gone to the lounge last night when Jude couldn’t find her. She had signed for six drinks, so someone else must have been with her. But who? And why had she lied about it?

  On the way back to the room, Jude tried to decide whether to confront Anna. Did she think Jude wouldn’t notice the extra drinks, or had she done it on purpose, as a declaration of independence here in Freedom City?

  The reporter had left, and Anna was packing for home. Jude didn’t want their last hours together to be spent arguing, so she decided to put her ugly suspicions on ice. She knew Anna loved her. What more did she need to know?

  As she packed, sick with misery that their time together was ending, and ending for her on a sour note, Jude had a sudden inspiration. “Listen, Anna,” she said urgently, “call Jim and tell him you have to stay for another night…to do some interviews in the morning. We’ll drive to the Cape. Stay at Simon’s house. Rent horses and ride them on the beach.”

  “It sounds wonderful,” she said as she closed and latched her suitcase, “but I’ve got to get back.”

  “Please, Anna. Who knows when we’ll have another night together?”

  Anna finally did as Jude asked, phoning Jim. Listening to her lie so smoothly to him about the importance of tomorrow’s fictitious interview, Jude felt suddenly uneasy. If Anna sometimes lied to her, she wouldn’t be able to tell the difference any more than Jim could right now.

  Later, they settled in at Simon’s glass-and-beam house among the dunes. Driving to Provincetown in their rented Cutlass, they bought jeans, sweatshirts, and tennis shoes. Then they went to a stable on the outskirts of town and hired two horses. The horses weren’t happy to have their fall vacation interrupted. They plodded resentfully among the grassy dunes toward the beach, snorting and shaking their heads time after time in protest. But once they reached the hard-packed sand by the sea, they caught some of Jude’s and Anna’s enthusiasm and began prancing through the foam along the water’s edge as though tiptoeing across hot coals.

  Jude slackened her reins and her horse took off, shooting down the beach like an arrow from a bow, careening through the surf, hooves hurling up a spray of salt water mixed with flying sand. For a moment, she worried that Anna might not be able to handle such speed, since she said she’d learned to ride in a ring at summer camp. But looking back, Jude saw her lying low along her horse’s arching neck, a grin on her face.

  When the horses finally gave out and slowed to a jouncing trot, Jude headed hers toward the dunes, Anna’s following. Sliding off the horses, the women looped their reins around a jagged branch of driftwood. Then they scrambled up a dune and sat down in the sand. As they surveyed the ocean, the horses stamped and whinnied below. On the horizon, several shiny black whales were surfacing and spouting with a sound like an erupting geyser, then diving beneath the waves again.

  ANNA AND JUDE WALKED into Simon’s kitchen. Anna had been silent and sullen on the ride home from the grocery store, shrugging off Jude’s attempts at conversation.

  “Is something wrong?” Jude finally asked as they set the bags on the counter.

  “I’m just tired,” said Anna in a lackluster voice. “All those dumb interviews. I’m not used to being with other people day and night.”

  “Why don’t you sit on the deck with a gin and tonic while I make supper?”

  “That would be marvelous. Do you mind?”

  “No, that’s why I offered. Simon told me that my assignment is to keep you content.”

  Anna smiled wearily. “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”

  As she peeled and deveined shrimp in the sink, Jude watched Anna lying in a deck chair, languidly squeezing the slice of lime into her drink. In repose, her face looked its age, as it never did in motion. Her jowls sagged slightly and her cheekbones were becoming more pronounced as the flesh began to fall. There were a couple of folds of loose skin at her throat and a network of fine wrinkles that stretched like a rigging from the outer corners of her eyes. Her ink-black hair had developed a few silver highlights. Recently, she’d had some hot flashes, and her menstrual periods had become as unpredictable as a two-year-old’s tantrums. Jude felt she was watching in Anna the unfolding of her own future. The baby fat of youth was being replaced by bones and wrinkles. This was the first time Jude had ever seen her so moody. Since they normally got together by appointment only, each made sure to be at her most charming. They saved their sulks for the lucky men they lived with.

  By the time Jude set their supper on the glass-topped table on the deck, Anna had downed three gin and tonics and seemed more cheery. She filled their glasses with Sancerre while Jude served rice
and topped it with the shrimp, which she’d sautéed with tomatoes, garlic, sherry, scallions, and parsley.

  “Where did you learn to cook so well?” asked Anna after sampling the dish.

  “If you can read, you can cook,” replied Jude.

  “That’s not true. I’m a terrible cook. And not from lack of reading. If it hadn’t been for Shake ’n Bake, my kids would have been regulars at the soup kitchen around the corner. When we live together, you do the cooking and I’ll shop and clean.”

  “It’s a deal,” said Jude. “Where shall we live—your place or mine?

  “How about Paris?”

  “God, I’d love to live with you in Paris, Anna.”

  “We will,” Anna assured her. “At least for a year. If professors can take sabbaticals, why can’t we? We’ll have an apartment in Montmartre, overlooking all of Paris. You’ll cook me perfect little meals like this one, and I’ll devote myself to your sexual fulfillment.”

  Jude smiled. “You’re on. Someday, though, I want to show you the Smokies.”

  “With pleasure. They sound spectacular.”

  “They are. Especially if you don’t have to live there.”

  “I thought that was your plan. To build a cabin and stay there forever with Saint Molly?”

  “Ah, Molly…That’s another story. If Molly had lived, you and I would never have met. There I’d be right now, in my Tennessee mountain home.”

  “Maybe you and I should build that cabin,” mused Anna.

  Jude grinned. “You’d better wait and see if you like the place first.”