Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  She remembered how she and Anna used to debate literature and philosophy and art in their early days together. Anna recited her poems and Jude made suggestions. Anna read the books Jude was editing and they discussed them. But now all they talked about was their next meal. It was as though the intensity of their physical exchanges had extinguished all their more subtle forms of intercourse. She vowed that when she got home she would once again initiate with Anna the kind of conversations she had just enjoyed in Adelaide. Maybe it wasn’t too late.

  When the plane finally landed in Los Angeles, Jude was disturbed to realize that she’d thought more about Jasmine as she hurtled across the Pacific than she had about Anna. But it was a new experience for her to be able not to think about Anna. For years, her first thought upon waking and her last before sleeping had been of Anna. And throughout each day, she had replayed every word that they had exchanged the previous day. Anna’s name had echoed continuously through her brain, like a Moslem on a pilgrimage to Mecca chanting, “La illaha ilia Allah.”

  Stumbling through the international arrival gate at JFK after thirty-two hours in transit, Jude was astonished to find Anna waiting for her. This was a first. All around them, reunited lovers, relatives, and friends were embracing, so Jude and Anna tried to parody the friendly welcoming hug of long-lost sisters.

  “Do you have any idea,” Anna whispered in her ear, “how much I want to bury my tongue deep inside you?”

  Jude stroked her cheek and gazed into her eyes, but she was thinking that the only thing she wanted deep inside her right then was some hot coffee.

  Anna grabbed her bag and led her to the exit door. They waited at the curb for a bus to town. A van from the Hilton pulled up. As Anna climbed aboard with the suitcase, Jude called, “Wait a minute, Anna. This isn’t us.”

  Gesturing frantically for her to get on, Anna whispered, “I’ve rented us a room for the day.”

  Jude smiled, but her heart sank. She was exhausted and she had a million things to do. Back at her office and apartment, a hundred phone messages and several days of mail awaited her.

  Anna had stopped off at the room on her way to the airport. It was as crammed with yellow tulips as a Dutch wake, and a bottle of sparkling cider was packed in melting ice in the sink. Anna phoned room service and ordered chicken salad and toast points.

  All Jude wanted was to sleep. Instead, she drank cider while Anna informed her that she was absolutely right: She used to have a drinking problem. But no longer. She’d sworn off alcohol for good.

  “What about the sores?” asked Jude as they sat at the linen-shrouded table rolled in by the waiter from room service. “Did you go to the doctor?”

  “He said it was an allergic reaction,” said Anna. “To some sleeping pills I was taking.”

  “And?” Jude eyed her suspiciously, having no idea anymore what was truth and what was fabrication.

  “And now that I’m not taking them, the sores will go away.”

  “That’s a relief,” said Jude, picking up a piece of toast and tackling the chicken salad, her sixth meal since Hawaii.

  “So did you sleep with her?”

  “With whom?”

  “With Jasmine.”

  “Of course not. Did you think I would?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you care?”

  “Very much. I’ve been miserable.”

  “So now you’re relieved?”

  “Temporarily.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Jude without enough forethought. “She’s married.”

  Anna regarded her ironically. “But that’s what turns you on, isn’t it? The primal triangle? Stealing Mommy from Daddy?”

  Jude paused with the toast point halfway to her mouth. “Is that how you see it?”

  “And once you succeed,” Anna continued blandly, “Mommy seems very boring.”

  Jude thought this over. “Maybe so,” she finally conceded, not even caring enough to argue. Though she actually thought that her waning interest in Anna had more to do with not knowing from one moment to the next whether she’d be dealing with a tender Madonna or an avenging destroyer. Loving Anna had become like trying to love Kali. Finally, you just gave up.

  Anna insisted that they take a bath together, slithering around on each other like minnows in a hatchery. Afterward, she dried Jude with a large, fluffy towel. Then she basted her like a turkey with lotion and massaged her on the bed until she was groaning with fatigue. Stripping off her own robe, Anna lay down beside her. Jude stroked her belly, which seemed even more puffy than before. “What did the doctor say about your bloating?”

  “It’s menopause,” she said. “Water retention. I’ve put myself on a diet and exercise plan to regain my girlish figure. In a couple of months, you won’t recognize me. I want it to be like it used to be for us, Jude.”

  “So do I.”

  Lying in the giant bed later that afternoon, nearly delirious with exhaustion, Anna asleep beside her, Jude recalled their first hotel room, at the conference in Boston several years earlier, and her own anxiety at waking up in the middle of the night and finding Anna gone. Something had happened between them since then. Who knew what. The worm had turned. The wind had shifted. Now it was Anna who waited for Jude, Anna who felt anxiety over being left behind.

  She had good reason to, Jude reluctantly acknowledged. Their luxurious afternoon in bed had felt to Jude like just another chore, one among many that had to be dealt with upon her return. To generate enough energy for lovemaking, so that they could get this reunion over with and go home, Jude had found herself visualizing that walk along the white sand with Jasmine and their talks that had stimulated so many exciting new ideas. There was a whole world out there, full of people Jude had never met, people with horrible problems that they didn’t expect Jude to solve.

  Holding the sleeping Anna in her arms, Jude was swept with sadness. Anna was right: Jude was moving on. She would have stayed put if she could have, but she was like a flailing swimmer being carried out to sea on a riptide. She had no plans to leave Anna, but emotionally she was already gone. She thought about Molly with new sympathy, because this time it was Jude who had stopped loving first and who would feel the guilt for the rest of her life. Her throat tight, she kissed Anna’s closed eyelids. Anna smiled in her sleep and snuggled closer.

  PART FOUR

  JUDE

  CHAPTER

  14

  BALANCING A GLASS OF CHAMPAGNE, Jude wandered across the closely cropped lawn of Jasmine’s seventeenth-century stone town house, wondering how it had escaped being torched during the Revolution. After winding along the tourist-crammed side streets near St. Germain des Prés, she had passed through black iron doors in a high stucco wall and discovered this lawn strewn with wrought-iron furniture and shaded by horse-chestnut trees full of ivory obelisks. Jasmine, who had a spiky new frosted waif hairdo, kissed her on both cheeks. Then she tucked her arm through Jude’s to conduct her to the champagne table, where she cast her adrift on a sea of bright Ungaro sails.

  Although Jude knew that she was presentable in her raw-silk trousers and coral linen blazer, she had always felt like Godzilla in Paris, possessing as she did the long, lean mountaineer build of her father and his father—in contrast to her urban mother, who had reportedly had wrists the size of a broomstick.

  Jasmine was talking to a young woman in a black silk jumpsuit who had draped a silver-studded black leather carbine belt diagonally across her chest. The woman was studying Jude’s breasts. Slowly, her kohl-ringed eyes rose up Jude’s chest. When their gazes met, the woman smiled faintly, as though to indicate anything was possible. Jude recognized le regard, the famous French technique for seducing one another and unnerving visitors. She smiled back, struggling to feel playful despite her chagrin at looming like Gulliver over everyone else on the lawn.

  The woman arrived by her side. “You are new here, yes?”

  Looking down from her heights, Jude nodded.

  “From A
merica?”

  The kohl was making the woman’s dark eyes look huge and appealing. “From New York.”

  “On holiday?”

  “No, I’m going to work for Jasmine.”

  “How fortunate for us.”

  Jude smiled. “Thank you. For me, too.”

  “I am Martine. I also work for Jasmine.”

  “Delighted to meet you. I’m Jude.”

  As Jude sipped her champagne, the woman continued her inspection of Jude. In Tennessee, people wooed with words. Strangers who looked too intently at someone they didn’t know were considered either rude or insane. But for the French, the eyes were the initial erogenous zone.

  Across the lawn, Jude spotted Jasmine by the champagne table, talking sotto voce with the young man Jude recognized from that night on Simon’s deck, when she had first offered Jude a job. Jasmine looked up, right at Jude, and seemed to give her a small nod, as though of encouragement. Was a flirtation with Martine the initiation rite that would usher Jude into Jasmine’s inner circle?

  Drawing a deep breath, Jude returned her attention to Martine. She hadn’t flirted in years. While Anna was alive, she lacked the interest. Now that Anna was dead, she lacked the energy. She wasn’t sure she remembered what to do anymore. With an uneasy sideways glance, she studied the small firm breasts that formed the valley down which Martine’s carbine belt meandered. She remembered lying with Anna while out the window the lights from Palisades Amusement Park wavered like party streamers on the drifting waters of the Hudson. She remembered cradling Anna’s beautiful breast in her palm, its nipple caressing her heart line….

  Abruptly, Jude understood that all she wanted at that moment was to go back to her new apartment on the butte of Montmartre, and watch through the curly iron grillwork as the sun set bloodred behind the parkland to the west, and review her final evening with Anna. Not even this attractive woman in her high-fashion carbine belt could erase that image of Anna in her hospital bed, hands bound with gauze so that she couldn’t scratch the scabs off her sores.

  “What is the matter?” demanded Jasmine as Jude bent over to peck her cheeks and murmur thanks for the party. “You don’t like Martine?”

  “I like her fine, but I don’t feel very well tonight.” Jude realized too late that she’d been rude to rush away like that, leaving Martine alone on the lawn in the dusk with swallows swooping through the shadows cast by the giant looming chestnut trees.

  “But you are perhaps lonely and would like a lovely companion?”

  “She is lovely, but I’m hung up on someone in New York.”

  “But you would nevertheless like a small adventure when you are away from home?”

  “I guess not.”

  Jasmine shook her head. “I will never understand Americans. But perhaps you will have dinner with me soon and explain yourself?”

  Searching for a taxi by the Seine, Jude reflected that if this was l‘amour, it bore little resemblance to what she knew of love. But then again, that wasn’t much.

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, as raindrops bounced off the cobblestones in Jasmine’s courtyard, Jude gazed up at the muscled granite torsos of two Greek gods who supported the front balcony on their shoulders. Across the balcony stretched arabesques of wrought iron indistinguishable from real vines, leaves, and grape clusters. She wondered who had first decided to try to make metal look like vines, and why.

  “Tonight is my night for recreation,” announced Jasmine as she hung Jude’s damp raincoat in the closet. “Everyone else is at my house in Picardy. So we can say and do whatever we like.”

  Jude glanced at her. She had expected a dinner party. But Jasmine was wearing casual trousers and a black T-shirt with shoulder pads, and there was no evidence of other guests. Jasmine steered her by the elbow into a high-ceilinged room filled with Louis-the-something settees and armchairs as maladapted to the human form as the wrought-iron furniture on her lawn the night of her garden party. Wine velvet drapes shut out the dripping twilight, and crusaders in tunics emblazoned with red Maltese crosses glared down from splendidly caparisoned horses in gilt frames on the walls. These crusaders in their fish-scale chain mail and steel skullcaps had Jasmine’s hooded eyelids and dark, intense gaze.

  Observing Jude’s interest, Jasmine nodded at one. “He fought with Simon de Montfort at Minerve in 1210. One hundred and forty Cathars were burned at the stake for heresy.”

  “Neat,” said Jude, noticing that the painted toenails in Jasmine’s open-toed, high-heeled mules matched the mauve on her eyelids.

  Jasmine inclined her head toward a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the coffee table. “And this is how your people pass their time, n’est-cepas?”

  Jude smiled. “Yes. How kind of you to help me feel at home.”

  She poured bourbon and Perrier into two tumblers, adding an ice cube to Jude’s. “I believe all Americans like ice?”

  Toasting Jude’s new job, they sipped the amber liquid. Jude could feel it creeping down her esophagus like a grass fire.

  “You are enjoying Paris?”

  “Yes, very much. It reminds me a bit of the American South, as a matter of fact.”

  “Oh? In what way?”

  “The overfeminized women. Scarlett O‘Hara must have been part French.” Jude laughed.

  “Why do you laugh?” Jasmine was smiling politely.

  “I had a grandmother who compared every foreign country she visited to Virginia. And I just realized I was doing the same.”

  “You find French women overfeminized?” Jasmine settled back against the wine brocade cushions.

  “Compared to American women. But your heritage is courtly love. Ours is survival on the frontier. Your ancestors were fighting boredom. Ours, extinction.”

  “You are still fighting extinction, no? With all your bombs and missiles.”

  “And you, boredom, with all your elaborations on daily necessity.

  Jasmine said nothing. For a moment, Jude wondered if she’d been rude without realizing it, or whether Jasmine was just reluctant to acknowledge that accessories could be optional. On the coffee table, she noticed a large silver bowl that contained packs of every conceivable brand of cigar and cigarette. “What was the heresy in Minerve?” she asked.

  “La liberté,” replied Jasmine. “They wanted to rule their own kingdom.”

  “We tried that in the South, too. It was a big mistake.”

  “Southerners should never cross swords with Northerners.”

  Jude smiled. “Sometimes you leave us no choice. Submit or die, so we march to our deaths, heads held high.”

  “Courageous, but not very smart.”

  “Southerners have never been noted for intelligence. We’re simple country people.”

  “Yes, as simple as a Moorish screen,” Jasmine observed with a wry smile. “Shall we move to the table?”

  Two places were set on a blue paisley cloth with enough crystal, silver, and burnt-sienna bone china for a complete trousseau. As Jasmine exited into the kitchen, Jude studied her fork handle, encrusted with the omnipresent vines and leaves. She didn’t recognize the pattern, despite having memorized all the most popular ones during Charm Class in junior high.

  Jude’s own pattern, which she’d selected at age six under the tutelage of her grandmother, was Francis I, which she’d loved because it had twenty-eight pieces of fruit on the knife handles. Every Christmas and birthday, she’d received pieces from her grandmother, who didn’t allow herself to die until Jude possessed twelve complete place settings. Inheriting her grandmother’s twelve settings, Jude then owned twenty-four. Molly’s pattern, forced on her by her mother in the face of her total indifference, had been Burgundy, which was similar to Francis I but without the fruit. After Molly’s death, her mother insisted Jude take Molly’s seven and a half settings as a memento. Jude’s thirty-one and a half place settings of unused flatware were now tarnishing in Simon’s attic on Cape Cod, waiting for her to hostess a banquet. Her father used to say that men strug
gled to pass on their genes, and women their silverware.

  Jasmine returned with two scalloped grapefruit shells mounded high with avocado slices, grapefruit sections, and prawns. She poured white wine into one set of glasses, Evian into another. Jude watched to see which fork she’d use before committing herself. Once upon a time, she’d known them all—the dinner fork, the salad fork, the shrimp fork, the ice cream fork, the lobster fork, the lemon fork, the olive fork, the half-olive fork, the pickle fork, the tomato fork.

  “This is marvelous,” said Jude, tasting a hint of garlic mayonnaise and feeling a stab of nostalgia for the French cook at her grandparents’ apartment when she first moved to New York. “I didn’t know you could cook.”

  “I have a wonderful woman from Corsica who left this meal for us. Tonight is her night off.”

  Removing the empty grapefruit shells, Jasmine returned with medallions of lamb in a plum sauce that matched her toenails, parsley-flecked new potatoes glistening with butter, and embryonic peas and carrots with a faint scent of mint. She poured some red wine from a bottle that had evidently been breathing on the mahogany Empire sideboard as they sipped their Jack Daniel’s.

  Raising her crystal goblet, Jasmine gazed into the wine, murmuring, “When one drinks wine in France, one engages all the senses.”

  Jude nodded politely.

  “First, we observe the deep burgundy blood of the grape.”

  Jude raised her glass and looked down into her grape blood.

  Chopping up a cherry Popsicle in a Dixie cup, Anna watching her from the blood-flecked sheets, the whites of her eyes a urine yellow, her lips gray and cracked.

  “Jude, I’m not afraid to die,” she said, “but I don’t want to die alone.”

  “I will he here,” Jude replied numbly. “Wait for me.” Looking up from the crushed Popsicle into Anna’s weary lapis lazuli eyes that used to dance and sparkle just like Molly’s.

  Putting her nose into her glass, Jasmine inhaled deeply and held it, as though smoking a joint. Then she exhaled. “Next, we allow the bouquet to ascend our nostrils, to the pleasure center of the brain.”