Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  Jude passed Anna the salad and refilled their wineglasses, while the surf crashed and the breeze off the ocean toyed with their hair.

  “I wish we didn’t have to go back,” said Jude. “I wish we could stay right here like this forever.”

  “I doubt if you’d love me if you saw me all the time,” said Anna in a strange voice.

  “Of course I would.”

  “I can be very unpleasant. You have no idea.”

  “I doubt that,” said Jude.

  “Trust me on this, darling.”

  CHAPTER

  13

  STANDING BEFORE THE TEAL DOOR of Anna’s tiny town house in a cobblestoned mews near Washington Square, Jude seized Simon’s hand so that they would look the part of a young couple about town. She’d had to beg him to come along in the first place. Jim had finally figured out that Anna was having an affair. But he didn’t yet know with whom, so Anna wanted to cover her tracks. Simon was appalled by such intrigue, but Jude was prepared to do anything to placate Anna.

  Although placating her had become quite a challenge now that Jude was traveling so much. Simon had laid it on the line: He’d stuck his neck out for her by making her an editor when she had no experience. If she didn’t work out, it was his head that would roll. Therefore, she had to shake herself out of her stupor of lust and start doing her job. So Jude was now supposed to go each year not only to Frankfurt but also to the ABA, the MLA, and the AHA, depending on what books she had to promote. And twice a year, she went to Los Angeles to peddle film rights.

  The end result was that Jude was away from New York now as much as two months a year. And often on weekends, she went to Simon’s beach house on the Cape to help entertain authors or publishers from abroad. When she returned from these trips and weekends, Anna was usually sullen and withdrawn, like a child punishing a parent for an absence. This annoyed Jude, because before she started this regimen, Anna had sometimes allowed as much time as such a trip required to elapse between their encounters. It was as though she wanted Jude always on tap, even if she didn’t have time to see her.

  In any case, Anna was almost always tied up with Jim on weekends. She spent much of the summer with him and her children at their cottage on the Jersey shore, and at Christmas their whole family went skiing in Colorado. Was it possible to have an affair, Jude wondered, with someone you never saw? Or was that precisely why it had lasted so long? As though each relationship had a certain amount of capital you could draw on, and the less you withdrew, the longer it could endure.

  Once, when Jude tried to discuss all this, Anna broke down in tears on Jude’s couch, saying, “I feel as though you’re moving on, Jude. In the beginning, we were in this thing together. My anthology was the first book for both of us. But here I am, still teaching my workshops, while you fly around the world meeting exciting new people.”

  “No one will ever excite me as much as you do, Anna,” Jude replied, taking Anna’s hand in both hers.

  She laughed bitterly, extracting her hand. “But for how much longer? I’m turning into a boring old failure, but you’re a rising star.”

  Jude sat in silence, recalling various offers Anna had turned down that would have resulted by now in a flourishing career as an educational consultant. Jude had been forced to realize that Anna was actually a bit lazy. Her children were away at school. She had a housekeeper who cleaned and shopped and cooked. She taught two workshops a week and sometimes wrote poetry. What did she do all day? For a brief panicked moment, Jude wondered whether she had another lover. Or two.

  “I did it for you,” Jude maintained, realizing this wasn’t entirely true. She’d done it partly for Simon. “I thought you’d find me more interesting if I was successful. And the extra money I’m earning can finance our year in Paris. Or our cabin in the Smokies.”

  “Ah, Jude, my love,” she murmured, planting a kiss on her mouth. “My eternal touching innocent. You always believe what other people tell you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  ANNA OPENED HER DOOR. She was wearing gray-green silk hostess pajamas and dangling earrings of silver filigree, like tiny frosted spiderwebs. “How nice to see you both,” she said with her most charming smile. “Jim, these are my publishers. Simon and Jude, this is my husband, Jim.”

  Anna ran her arm through Jim’s as he shook hands with them both and murmured a welcome. He looked every inch the suave professor in his tweed jacket with suede elbow patches. His long salt-and-pepper sideburns matched his bushy eyebrows. Jude was shocked to realize that he was her father’s age. It was the same old story: He’d been Anna’s thesis adviser. They’d fallen in love over Mallarmé. He’d left his wife and children to marry her and produce a second batch of children. The passage of time having banked their fires, he now had affairs with students who seemed younger with each passing term.

  Fingering his lapel, Anna said anxiously, “Jim has a new jacket from Scotland. Isn’t it handsome? Doesn’t he look elegant?”

  Jude had never seen Anna so coy.

  As he turned to walk away, Jim said under his breath, “Screw you, Anna.”

  Acting as though she hadn’t heard, Anna ushered Jude and Simon into the living room, which was packed with drink-sipping, canapé-munching students and faculty. French doors opened onto an enclosed garden with ivy-drenched walls. The room itself was lined with books. Four plush sofas formed a conversation pit around a huge, square coffee table with an ivory marble top. After fixing a scotch for them both, Anna departed to pass hors d’oeuvres and introduce strangers. Across the room, Jim was holding forth on Rimbaud to a young woman in a miniskirt the size of a dish towel.

  Jude watched Simon study Anna in her clinging silk hostess pajamas. She was weaving a bit as she walked. Getting drunk at your own party seemed a bad idea, but the crowd looked so dreary that Jude was downing her drink too quickly, as well.

  “You don’t like her, do you?” she asked Simon.

  “I never said that.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  He hesitated, then drew a deep breath. “It’s not that I don’t like her, Jude. I just don’t think she’s right for you.”

  “Why not?” asked Jude. Because she had made Jude want to quit her job and spend all day in bed? “In the beginning, you were our biggest fan.”

  “I asked William about her awhile back. I wish I hadn’t, because I haven’t been able to decide whether to tell you what he said.”

  “What, for God’s sake?”

  “He said her husband has affairs with young women, so Anna does, too. She likes the stimulation of the chase.”

  “Don’t we all?”

  “Yes, we do. But it ends there for her. Once the woman is really hooked, Anna dumps her and rushes back home to Jim for solace. And he does the same. Apparently, they’ve both left corpses scattered all over town. It’s the glue that holds them together.”

  “Well, it’s not like that with us,” Jude snapped. “Anna loves me. She says she’s finally met her match. We’re both intelligent and well educated. We adore lovemaking. We have fun together when we go out. She and Jim aren’t lovers anymore, and they’re going to split once their children are out of school. And then she’ll move in with me or get a place nearby. We’re going to live in Paris for a while. Maybe build a cabin in the Smokies. You have to understand, Simon—I love Anna more than I’ve ever loved anyone else in my entire life.”

  He shook his head, awed to have triggered such a diatribe of devotion. “I hope you’re right, Jude. Please forgive me for meddling.”

  “Of course, I forgive you, Simon. It means you care about me.

  “I just don’t want to see you demolished again. Sometimes you don’t seem to know how to protect yourself.”

  “In this case I don’t need to protect myself.”

  As Simon wandered off in search of more scotch, Jude thought it over irritably and decided he was mistaken. Although their time together was more limited than in the beginning, sh
e and Anna still ate delicious meals together. They attended concerts and operas and painting exhibitions. At the movies, they sat there stroking each other’s palms with their fingertips and then rushed back home to Jude’s bed. They exchanged cards and flowers and candy. They saved up their brightest thoughts and funniest jokes. Jude continued to serve as Anna’s demon lover, making the rest of her dreary life bearable. And Anna remained Jude’s tour guide through the previously uncharted realms of her own passions.

  Whereas Anna and Jim got to argue over picking up the cleaning, the ring around the bathtub, and how much to tip the plumber.

  Given the scotch, Simon’s remarks, and jet lag, Jude realized she was feeling awful. She was just back from a week in London at a new biennial Feminist Book Fair. As it turned out, the event had had very little to do with books and a lot to do with feminism. Everywhere you looked, some outraged special-interest group was caucusing. The women of color were angry at the white women. The working-class women were angry at the middle-class women. The non-English-speaking women were angry at the Anglophones. The lesbians were angry at the heterosexuals. The heterosexuals were angry at the lesbians. And everybody was angry at men.

  The high point of the conference for Jude was her dinner with Jasmine at a carvery on the Strand that featured huge, dripping roasts of ham, beef, lamb, and pork upended on spikes, from which the waiters hacked slabs. A Baptist God might have created just such a place in the hereafter—as punishment for evil vegetarians. Jasmine, who turned out to be a food snob, insisted that the only way to avoid gastronomic catastrophe in England was to stick to such unadorned meat and potatoes.

  As they consumed enough animal flesh to have nourished a pride of lions for a week, they discussed the funnels of rage that were swirling like twisters through the conference hall. Jasmine described the rival feminist factions in Paris, one of which had bombed another’s printing press and hounded its leader into exile on the Canary Islands. She explained her theory of the dynamics of minority political movements, learned at her father’s knee during the French Resistance: External injustices generated anger. When it seemed impossible to right the wrongs, the stalled anger pooled within the oppressed group, causing it to split into warring factions, which then destroyed one another, completing the tyrant’s task for him. The only way to avoid this disintegration, Jasmine maintained, was to move beyond the anger, using it to fuel efforts to change specific conditions without allowing yourself to become attached to the results.

  Jude wandered up to Anna’s second floor, searching for a bathroom whose medicine chest might contain an aspirin. It was odd to be in the house where Anna had lived with Jim and their children for close to two decades. It was a warm and welcoming place, with lots of carpets, cushions, and curtains.

  Passing a door that was ajar, Jude glanced in. It was a bedroom. And kneeling on the carpet was Anna, with Jim standing over her.

  “…and I know I’m disgusting,” she was moaning. “And I know if I weren’t so disgusting, darling, you wouldn’t need to sleep with all these other women.” She embraced his knees. “I didn’t mean to drink so much this time, Jim.”

  Jim was gazing out the window into the bare branches of a scrawny maple tree in the garden, apparently uninterested.

  “Please forgive me,” begged Anna.

  Jim refused even to look at her.

  Anna reached up and began fumbling for his zipper. “I know what you like, darling, and I can do it better than any sophomore you will ever meet.”

  Still staring out the window, Jim grabbed her wrist. Gradually, he tightened his grip, until she was whimpering. He wrenched her arm sharply to one side so that she fell to the floor.

  She lay there crying and gasping, “You hate me, Jim. I know you hate me. I don’t blame you. I’m disgusting.”

  Jude stood there mortified, wanting to rush to the rescue but paralyzed by disbelief. Jim hauled Anna back up to her knees before him and began unbuckling his belt.

  Jude ran along the hallway and down the stairs. Grabbing coats from the closet, she dragged a startled Simon into the street.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, still carrying his sloshing plastic cup of scotch.

  “Nothing.”

  Simon raised his eyebrows. “Tell me, Jude. Let me help.”

  “You already have.”

  “…SO I WAS UPSTAIRS in the bathroom,” Anna was saying as she and Jude walked down the street from Jude’s office toward the park, “and when I came back down, you and Simon had vanished.”

  Jude said nothing. There was a bruise around Anna’s wrist like a wide purple shackle. It matched the dark circles under Jude’s eyes from her past two nights of insomnia. As she lay wide awake in the dark, she kept asking herself if it had been a setup. Not that Anna had planned for Jude to witness this exact scene with Jim, but that she had planned for something to happen to shake Jude up. But did she want to shake Jude up in order to end the relationship or in order to revitalize it? Whichever, she had certainly succeeded. Jude was a wreck.

  “Is something the matter?” asked Anna.

  After a long pause, Jude said, “I thought you didn’t make love with Jim anymore.”

  Anna looked suddenly secretive. “Why do you ask?”

  Drawing a deep breath, Jude described what she’d seen. The two stopped and faced one another in the middle of the sidewalk, so the other pedestrians had to detour irritably around them.

  “Well, I guess I was pretty drunk,” admitted Anna. “But what’s a blow job between friends?”

  Jude grimaced. Anna wasn’t usually so crude. She realized that the blow job wasn’t the entire issue. Taking Anna’s hand, she stroked the ugly bruise with her fingertips. “Anna, no one should treat you like that. You have to leave him. Or take him to a therapist. Or do something.”

  Jude was being forced to realize that Anna might be terminally passive. When they were first together, she had said she’d leave Jim when their children were in college. Now her timetable for departure required them to be out of college.

  Anna gave her a look. “How can I leave him when I have no money?”

  For the first time, it occurred to Jude that someone who taught a few workshops and wrote mostly unpublished poetry wasn’t self-supporting, even with the royalties from the anthologies. The odd blow job was probably a small price to pay for the clothes and restaurants and concert tickets Anna invested in with such insouciance.

  “Move in with Simon and me,” said Jude. “I’ll help you out. You can look for a job.”

  “Who’d want to hire a middle-aged mother who can’t type?” she asked. “What am I supposed to do? Wait on tables?”

  “Why not? It’s honest work. More honest than blow jobs for men you no longer love.”

  “So my hillbilly honey has finally reverted to type. Miss Southern Baptist has never done it with someone she didn’t love.”

  Jude had never heard this sarcastic tone of voice from Anna before. She was appalled. “Yes, of course I have, Anna. That’s not the point.”

  “The green paradise of childhood love, bullshit. It’s time you grew up, little girl.”

  “Anna, don’t.” Jude felt as though Anna had just socked her in the solar plexus.

  “Welcome to the black pit of adult lust, my darling.”

  Who was this woman? Jude wondered. Certainly not her tender lover of last week. Studying her contorted red face, Jude noticed that she was swaying as she stood there, like a skyscraper in an earthquake. She was drunk.

  A FEW NIGHTS LATER, Anna arrived at Jude’s apartment building in a taxi with a couple of cardboard boxes of belongings. She acted as though the ugly scene between them on the sidewalk hadn’t happened, so Jude did, too. But every cell in her body was hanging back, watching, fearing a reappearance of Anna’s evil twin. She’d been telling herself that if you opened the Pandora’s box of passions, they all came out, not just the pleasant ones. But an occasional moment of unpleasantness was worth all the happiness.

>   Jude stashed the boxes in Sandy’s old room, pending a discussion with Simon as to which free room could be Anna’s. Elated by this evidence of movement on Anna’s part, she let Anna lead her down the hallway to her own bedroom. In the full moon through the window, she began to remove Anna’s rayon jumpsuit. And she discovered a dark splotch across her hip and thigh.

  Turning on the lamp by the bed, Jude inspected the moist purple contusion with her fingertips.

  “I fell in the bathtub,” said Anna.

  “Please stay here tonight,” Jude replied. “Simon and I will go to your house tomorrow and get your stuff.”

  “I’ve decided to come live with you, Jude. But not tonight.”

  “When then?”

  “Tomorrow night,” she said, turning off the lamp and taking Jude’s hand. Sinking onto the mattress, she pulled Jude down beside her. Succumbing, against her better judgment, Jude maneuvered Anna onto her back and began to kiss her breast.

  “Bite it,” said Anna.

  “What?”

  “Bite my nipple. Hard.”

  Jude looked up at her.

  “Please.”

  “But I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Grabbing a handful of Jude’s hair, Anna wrenched her head back down to her breast. “I said bite it, goddamn it!”

  Seizing Anna’s bruised wrist, Jude struggled to free her hair. They wrestled ferociously across the mattress like jungle cats, straining and struggling, crashing against the wall. Anna finally let go of Jude’s hair. With her free hand, she reached over and grabbed the Atalanta flask from Jude’s windowsill. She hurled it across the room, where it fell to the floor and shattered into a dozen pieces.

  “Goddamn you to hell, Anna!” screamed Jude, a flash of fury scrambling her brain. She hauled back her fist to slug her. Then she froze with her hand in midair, teeth bared, muscles shaking and quivering. Anna cringed away and sank back down on the bed.

  Scalp throbbing, Jude leapt off the bed, careened across the room, and slammed her fist into the wall. Anna rolled over into a fetal position and began to rock back and forth, whimpering like a wounded animal.