Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  Jude sniffed her wine obligingly, but her pleasure center was unfortunately sealed.

  Jasmine took a sip and swirled it around her mouth, studying Jude with her intense crusader eyes. She swallowed. “Then we taste the wine, which of course engages the taste buds. But also the sense of touch, as the wine caresses the tongue and the moist cavities of the mouth.”

  Meeting her gaze, Jude obediently sipped and rinsed as though at the dentist’s. But her senses were unengaged, and she intended to keep them that way.

  “Well,” said Jude, “that covers four out of five. And how about hearing?”

  Lowering her eyes, Jasmine said nothing for a while. “Hearing has been involved all along,” she finally replied. “You have been listening to my voice, no?”

  “Oh. Yes. Right you are.”

  Abruptly, Jasmine put down her glass and picked up a knife and fork. They ate in silence.

  “And how is your apartment?” Jasmine eventually asked.

  “It’s fine, thanks. I have a wonderful view of Paris. You’ll have to come see.”

  “I rarely go out. People come to me here.” She sounded annoyed. Jude felt anxiety prickle the hairs at the back of her neck. “And your work? Is everyone at the office helping you get started?”

  “Yes, everyone’s been wonderful.”

  “You know, if you are going to get along here, you should at least pretend to play.” She looked Jude in the eye, but with la réprimande, not le regard.

  “But if you pretend,” said Jude, “then you’re playing.” She toyed with her ivory knife rest. This was, after all, her new boss, and bosses had to be placated. But she’d spent her years in New York trying to learn to be straightforward. A challenge, since in the South directness had been second only to bad hair on the list of deadly sins.

  “Exactly.”

  “So don’t you all ever stop playing?”

  “What is the alternative? Boredom, followed by death.”

  “Childhood is for playing. Then life becomes serious.”

  “And did you play as a child? Ah, non. Children are earnest in all that they do. Only adults can really play, because we have learned that life is a game in any case. One that will soon be over.”

  “Well, I guess I’m not feeling very playful these days.” Jude laid her knife and fork parallel on her plate to indicate that she was finished. But did this gesture symbolize the same thing in France?

  “Ah, yes. You have said that you are—how do you say, carrying the torch? And this person in New York does not desire you?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “She was your lover?”

  “Yes.”

  “Someone new would perhaps help you to forget her.”

  “I don’t want to forget Anna.”

  Jasmine studied Jude, then said gently, “But she is dead. And you are not.”

  Jude looked down at the black geometric pattern across her burnt sienna plate.

  “Americans are so sincere.” Shaking her head, Jasmine passed Jude the cut-glass salad bowl. “It is touching.”

  “Well, as corny as it may sound, I’m afraid I can only make love to people I love,” Jude muttered, realizing as she served herself some romaine and chopped escarole that this wasn’t entirely true.

  Jasmine smiled. “But one can love for a single night, no? Or for a week. A love does not have to endure into the next century in order to be love.”

  “Children in the South play a kissing game called Five Minutes in Heaven. But once you become an adult, you’re supposed to graduate to what we call graveyard love.”

  “And this is what—your graveyard love?”

  “Graveyard love is a love that lasts until both people are dead and buried in the graveyard.”

  “Oh, I see. As in Shakespeare. ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’ ”

  Jude nodded, impressed that Jasmine should know the English classics in addition to her own.

  Jasmine shook her head. “And they say that Americans are not romantic.”

  “Who does?”

  “I believe Europeans think of Americans as Puritans. Practical and efficient. And somewhat naïve to believe that the world operates like that.

  “But graveyard love isn’t American; it’s southern. The South was settled by broken-down cavaliers, not religious fanatics. It’s the Citadel of the Lost Cause.”

  Jasmine carried out the salad plates, Jude’s mostly untouched. She returned with a marble slab holding several cheeses—cubes and wheels and wedges, dark orange, pale yellow, white coated with black pepper or flecked with blue-green. She might have poured another wine or two, but the grape blood was all as one to Jude by now.

  “General de Gaulle once asked how he could be expected to govern a nation that made three hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese,” said Jasmine.

  Jude smiled. “Yes, but they all begin with milk and end with mold. Just like people. So that simplifies things a bit.”

  Jasmine regarded Jude thoughtfully, opened her mouth, then closed it without saying anything.

  The meal concluded with balls of sherbet, passion fruit and citron, in scalloped silver bowls, accompanied by disks of fragile dark chocolate lace.

  They moved back to the living room for coffee. The thick, bitter espresso held out the promise of eventual sobriety, followed by terminal insomnia.

  “Would you like to smoke?” Jasmine nodded toward the bowl of cigarette packs.

  Jude extracted a Dunhill and lit up, sinking back into the cushions. Jasmine picked up an embossed leather album from the coffee table and showed Jude photos of her other houses—an ancient family château in Picardy, a modern glass-and-timber structure on Martinique. Clearly there would be many fringe benefits to Jude’s job. If she managed to keep it, given her reluctance to play. At the back of the album were photos of people—one of Jasmine as a teenager, attired in a riding habit, seated on a horse in the middle of a flying change.

  “Do you still ride?” asked Jude.

  “Not in years.”

  “I used to ride, too. But I never did dressage. In fact, we never used saddles. We just jumped on and took off.”

  Jasmine eyed her speculatively, a Hun at the city gates. While returning the album to the coffee table, she scooted closer on the couch, until her thigh barely touched Jude’s. A scent close to chrysanthemums mixed with coriander seemed to be emanating from her flesh, ascending Jude’s nostrils to waft around the barred portals of her pleasure center.

  Sitting by Anna’s bedside at the Roosevelt, dabbing with a cotton ball soaked in witch hazel at an oozing sore that wouldn’t clot. Anna’s seersucker robe had fallen open. The pale breast she had begged Jude to bite was lying there like a poached egg. A nurse entered and unpinned the urine-soaked diaper. The sad, gray, sour-smelling genitals, the matted pubic hair, the sagging belly whose unused muscles had turned to flab…

  Jude turned her head away from Jasmine to deflect the spicy scent. Jasmine murmured concern that she seemed chilled.

  Jude found herself rising to her feet. “I have to go now.” The part of her that had once leapt like a brazier with Anna was now frozen solid. Jasmine was right: Jude was chilled. Permanently.

  Jasmine looked startled. “But it is early.”

  “I’m really tired. Also a bit drunk.”

  “If you would like to stay,” she said, “my driver can take you back to Montmartre when he returns from Picardy later tonight.”

  “Thanks, but I’d better go home and sleep it off.”

  Jasmine shrugged, looking somewhat pleased. As she retrieved Jude’s coat from the closet, Jude suddenly understood that to refuse to play was to play. The only way not to play was to stay, thereby short-circuiting the game. But she didn’t love Jasmine. Besides, she was confused. She had thought it was Martine that Jasmine had lined up for her. Or were these overtones of seduction just hospitality as usual in Paris?

  “Jasmine?” she murmured. In New York, she could have as
ked someone outright what was going on. But with Jasmine, she always felt tongue-tied unless they were discussing abstractions.

  Jasmine looked at her. Her hooded eyes with their hint of mauve seemed to convey disappointment at Jude’s possible change of strategy. Would she have been able to believe that Jude had no strategy?

  “I just realized,” said Jude, “that in English the word love is close to live. Whereas in French, l‘amour is close to la mort. What do you think that means?”

  Jasmine studied Jude as she held out her coat.

  JUDE SAT BY HER OPEN DOORS watching the lights of Paris flicker and sweep and flare like heat lightning on a hot southern night. Some fans were conducting a séance in the shed in Jude’s courtyard, trying to summon the shade of Dalida, a famous French singer who had recently committed suicide in her house at the end of the block. Jude could see the flicker of candles and hear voices softly chanting Dalida’s greatest hits. Jude’s inebriation was turning into a migraine, one sensation Jasmine hadn’t included in her catalog of the delights of wine drinking in France.

  The phone rang. Picking it up, she heard Simon’s BBC voice from New York, where it was late afternoon. He was still at work. Jude pictured him with his long legs stretched out beneath his huge black Formica desk, hands toying with one of his bizarre paperweights.

  “So how’s it going over there, Jude?”

  “Not too bad, thank you. It’s fascinating trying to figure out the tastes of the French reading public. But socially, I’m a flop.”

  “I refuse to believe it.”

  “Alas, it’s true. They’re playing Hearts and I’m playing Old Maid.”

  “I think you should learn to play Hearts again.”

  “Five minutes in heaven and a lifetime of pain. No, thank you.”

  “I know how you feel, Jude. But it’s the only game in town.”

  “Some of us learn life’s little lessons.”

  “I do understand. Part of you died with Anna. But you have to plunge back into the swim.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re a V-eight engine who’s sparking on only two cylinders.”

  “You’re mixing your metaphors.”

  “Stop changing the subject.”

  “But I’m an editor, Simon. I’m paid to notice these things. Anyway, don’t worry. Jasmine is doing her best to provide me with romantic interludes.”

  “She’s just trying to help.”

  “You’ve discussed me with her? Is that why she invited me to Paris?”

  Simon hesitated. “We spoke about you at the ABA. I’m sorry if you feel betrayed. She cares about you. So do I. We hate seeing you so devastated.”

  “Simon, you’re such a busybody. Maybe I just need to lick my wounds alone in my lair.”

  “No, I’m with Jasmine on this one, Jude. The City of Light on midsummer night. What could be bad?”

  After hanging up, Jude sat counting the bridges over the Seine, along which cars were crawling like lightning bugs on parade. Was Simon right? When Sandy died, Simon lay sobbing in Jude’s arms all night long. For months afterward, he wandered New York like the soul of an unburied corpse, losing so much weight that he belted his jeans with an extension cord. Yet now, plump and jolly, he danced in Provincetown bars until dawn with handsome men, each younger and blonder than the last. He claimed he’d become a New Testament scholar, studying Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John at every opportunity.

  She switched on the television to a movie featuring two French journalists, a man and a woman, in Naples to cover the drug trial of a mafioso. While threats were made against their lives, they gave each other le regard in every bistro in town, even though they were married to each other’s cousins back in Paris. Every time one said, “This is impossible,” they fell into each other’s arms in a sixteenth-century pension and made mad passionate love while hit men lurked in the street below. But whenever one said, “I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you,” both leapt up, packed their bags, and raced out the door in opposite directions. In the end, the woman, a cool blonde who seemed the picture of wholesome propriety, turned out to be in league with the hit men. Dying from a gunshot wound as a result of her betrayal, the male reporter whispered to her with his last breath that he had never loved her so much as he did at that moment.

  As the credits rolled, Jude realized that there was much that she didn’t yet understand about her reading public.

  CHAPTER

  15

  RIBBONS OF SUNLIGHT were weaving through a grid of holes in the white domed ceiling. The round table was crammed with salads, charcuterie, cheeses, baguettes, and bottles of mineral water. Jude was studying Martine, who was insisting to their assembled coworkers that desire by definition implied lack and therefore to consummate it was to destroy it. So appealing when Jude first saw her crossing Jasmine’s lawn in her black silk jumpsuit and studded carbine belt, Martine was currently wearing a tiny navy-blue double-breasted pinstriped suit with a scarlet pocket handkerchief and wing-tip shoes.

  Cecile, the new editor, who wore red-framed eyeglasses with tinted lenses the size of teacups, replied to Martine that no one truly possessed another. Even the merging during lovemaking was temporary and illusory. The unattainable, of necessity, always remained unattainable. So long as a single breath was left in the body, one was doomed to a desire without fulfillment. Or at least that seemed to be her line. Jude’s grasp of French was modest even when someone wasn’t speaking as fast as a tobacco auctioneer and with an intensity appropriate to the final stages of labor.

  Martine curled her upper lip like Elvis Presley and called Cecile the French equivalent of scumbag of the Western world. If they’d been Southerners, Cecile would have pulled out a handgun and shot Martine at this point. Yet no one but Jude seemed alarmed, including Cecile herself. In fact, they all smiled faintly and ripped off chunks of baguette with renewed appetite, hurling crumbs around the room.

  Jude tried to think of something supportive of Cecile to say in her fumbling French, having no idea whether she agreed with her or not. But Cecile was a newcomer, and this episode from the Spanish Inquisition seemed an unacceptable welcome.

  Martine began talking about the role of the father in rupturing the mother-child fusion and his introduction of the child into the compensatory realm of the symbolic, in which fantasized images could substitute for the original lost love object. Although it sounded very much like the story of her own life, Jude realized that she had reached the outer limits of her French vocabulary. So she sat back and observed Martine’s body language, which involved a stabbing index finger, karate chops with the side of her hand, pursed lips, and elaborate shoulder shrugs.

  Simon had always presided over their work lunches in New York with his dry British wit, joking and gossiping and punning, humoring those gauche enough to argue until they stopped it. But the women in this office seemed to have elaborated argument into an art form. Jude was impressed, having herself been trained to be pleasant at any cost. “Smile, girls, smile!” Miss Melrose used to shriek, fluttering her Minnie Mouse eyelashes. “And if you don’t feel it, fake it. The only thing a southern woman must never fake is her pearls.”

  Martine was now slashing and lunging at Cecile like Cyrano de Bergerac over something to do with the role of the Other as a tool for honing self-definition. She seemed to feel that you knew who you were by identifying who you weren’t. Her dark eyes were blazing and her head was tossing like a horse on too tight a rein. She was gorgeous, even with a mouth like an Uzi. But she’d been avoiding Jude ever since Jude walked away from her on Jasmine’s lawn, leaving rooms when Jude entered and pretending not to see her when they passed in the corridor. Jude wondered if she was supposed to be feeling le manque, which in a normal French person would apparently engender le désir.

  Abruptly, the dispute concluded. Cecile and Martine appeared to have called a truce rather than reaching agreement. Cecile took a tiny mirror from her handbag and carefully applied enough
scarlet lipstick to frost a cake. Everyone else lit a cigarette and relaxed into her chair, as though after inspired lovemaking. Martine offered Cecile a Gauloise, gazing into her eyes over the lighter. Cecile was now one of the gang. Jude’s colleagues glanced at her, a deaf-mute cowboy Other with whom they were saddled because of some whim of Jasmine’s.

  “Alors, la premiere phase…” said Martine, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke. And everyone proceeded to deconstruct her argument with Cecile, like the instant replay of a football game.

  Stubbing out their cigarettes, they stood up, dusted baguette crumbs off their laps, and headed for their offices, crunching across the carpet of crumbs as though over a plague of locusts. Martine glanced behind her as she exited in her fetching suit. To be sure that Jude was noticing that she wasn’t noticing her? Jude did notice, but she found it irritating rather than alluring. Although she was beginning to wonder if the more unpleasant Martine was to her the more it meant that she liked her. Because the French seemed to thrive on contradiction. The oldest bridge in town was called the Pont Neuf.

  Entering her office, Jude looked out the window and down an alley to the tumbled stone ruins of the Roman baths, sacked and burned by the barbarians in the third century. History Ph.D. manquée that she was, this city enchanted her. It was a feuilleté of superimposed civilizations—Gallic, Roman, Hun, Norman, Frank. Since her job required her to develop an understanding of French culture so that she would know which books to choose for translation, she’d hung a map of Paris the size of a bedspread across one wall. Accustomed to the rectangular blocks of New York City, she initially found a round city disturbing. But in time, she realized that there were thirty-six gates around the circumference. She decided to slice the feuilleté, hiking from one gate to its opposite in eighteen diameters, reading her guidebook before whatever landmarks she encountered, stopping at cafés for coffee when she got tired. She’d done this twice already, marking her meandering routes on the giant map with a red felt-tip pen. Each trip requiring a full afternoon, she’d put herself on a regimen of one per week. As a grand finale, she planned to walk the circumference of the city, then the smaller circles within, where previous town walls had stood. In six months’ time, this map would resemble a giant red spiderweb.