Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  Upon hearing Jude’s plan, Jasmine had cocked her frosted head quizzically and said, “But this is insanity.” She was probably right, but at least it was well-organized insanity.

  Next door, Jude could hear Martine growling and snapping in a staccato phone conversation. Then a heavy object crashed against her wall. Jude got up and went to her doorway. Martine dashed out, slamming her door so hard that the entire wall shuddered.

  The woman across the hall, a pleasant copper-haired secretary named Giselle, was also standing in her doorway, watching Martine careen down the corridor and out the entrance in her pinstriped suit, screaming, “Merde!”

  Jude looked questioningly at Giselle.

  “Her lover left her last month,” Giselle explained. “Martine had a nervous breakdown and tried to kill herself. She is still very upset.”

  Jude returned to her desk feeling apologetic toward Martine. They had both just lost their lovers. No wonder their interactions with each other were so befuddled. She vowed to make more of an effort with her.

  Since much of Jude’s job involved reading manuscripts at her apartment or meeting with scouts and agents, she came and went as she pleased. As it was a beautiful sunny afternoon, she decided to undertake that week’s requisite trek across Paris. This fieldwork was, after all, an important part of her job. So she took the Métro to Porte de Charenton and walked over to Porte de Bercy. From there, she headed up the Seine in the direction of Porte de Champerret, past docks and cranes, with a forest of glass-and-steel high-rises on her right and a jammed highway on her left, a panorama decidedly different from the ancient ruined splendor most people thought of as Paris.

  As she walked, Jude pondered the notion of an encounter with the Other as a route to self-definition. It seemed pretty flimsy to know who you were only by knowing who you weren’t. What would you do if you were alone in a cave?

  Crossing the Pont Sully to Ile St. Louis, Jude strolled down a quiet street lined with elegant seventeenth-century stone town houses. Arriving at an ice cream parlor, she sat down in the sunshine at an outside table and ordered a dish of chocolate chip. As she waited, she read in her guidebook that this island had served as a medieval dueling field. And across the bridge in front of her was the house where Abélard had been castrated for love of Héloïse.

  While she ate her ice cream, Jude gazed at Notre Dame, which crouched before her like a giant horned insect with flying-buttress limbs and compound eyes of stained glass. She kept glancing back and forth between the barbed spires straining toward heaven and the grotesque stone gargoyles, half dog and half dragon, that vomited rainwater off the roofs.

  After paying her bill, Jude crossed the Pont St. Louis and wandered down the Quai aux Fleurs. As she passed the Tour de l‘Horloge, from which a bell signaling the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre had been rung, she paused to lean on the stone parapet of the Pont au Change, where hundreds of the butchered had been dumped into the Seine to drift downriver past the Louvre, trailing wakes of blood.

  Jude arrived at the park at the tip of Ile de la Cité. Caressing couples sprawled on the benches and reclined along the stones shelves that sloped down to the river. Sitting on a green slatted bench, she tilted her head back and closed her eyes, the sunshine warming her face. Thrushes were chattering among the bushes of red roses, which were filling the air with their cloying sweetness. On the far shore, two dreadlocked black men were playing reggae on steel drums, while a bateau mouche swarming with camera-clicking tourists plowed the gray waters and doused the torrid lovers lying along the banks. As Jude watched them, she realized that she’d never before felt so lonely as here in this city where she and Anna had planned to commence their life together.

  JUDE SANK DOWN in the chair by Anna’s bedside and took one of her twitching hands. Earlier that week, Anna had slipped into a coma. Dusk was descending beyond the bouquets along the window ledge. Anna’s room at the Roosevelt was on the fifth floor. Directly across the street was the condemned apartment building where Jude’s parents had lived during her father’s residency, its arched windows boarded up with warped plywood.

  Turning from the window, Jude studied Anna’s yellow face with its crescent eyebrows and cap of dark hair. She looked as though she was merely asleep and would wake up like Sleeping Beauty if Jude kissed her. Was Anna’s collapse actually her fault, Jude wondered, for having ceased to love her? Had she felt Jude’s withdrawal and gone on a terminal binge? But to be in such bad shape now, she must have been marinating herself for decades. All those nights when she had rolled out of Jude’s arms to go home to Jim, she had actually been going home to her only real love—Smirnoff. But why? What secret pain did she carry inside herself that had to be so brutally anesthetized? What ancient horror was she trying to externalize by remaining with a man who beat her up and by trying to provoke a woman who adored her into doing the same? Jude searched the waxen mask of Anna’s face as though it belonged to a stranger.

  The door opened and Jim walked in, followed by a middle-aged man and woman Jude had never seen before. The woman had Anna’s crescent eyebrows and raven hair. Jim, florid-faced and reeking of alcohol, looked at Jude with a flicker of recognition as she placed Anna’s hand on the bedside and stood up.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m Jude.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said without enthusiasm. He gestured to the couple. “Stanley and Muriel Rivers. From Chicago. Muriel is Anna’s sister.” To them, he said, “This is Anna’s editor.”

  Jude gazed at him coolly, wondering whether to wrangle with him over something that was drawing to a close in any case. “And her best friend,” she added, feeling childish. But what she wanted to say was, “Listen, asshole, I’ve experienced aspects to Anna that you don’t even know exist.”

  Grabbing her coat, she murmured, “I was just leaving.” She watched Jim closely as he moved to Anna’s bedside and looked down at her, swaying unsteadily. His salt-and-pepper hair was scrambled and his bushy sideburns needed a trim. She felt a certain reluctant kinship with him: Anna had been cheating on them both all these years, coupling with a lover with whose charms neither could ever have hoped to compete.

  Suddenly, Jim buried his face in his hands and started sobbing. Muriel raced to his side and put her arms around him. As Jude watched, she felt her hands clench into fists, eager to wrap themselves around his throat. Was he upset because now he had no punching bag? He could move right into the role of grieving widower, and no one but Jude would know what a farce it was.

  Out in the street, Jude stalked north up Broadway, gripped by rage—rage against Jim, but also rage against Anna and herself. Why had they lived a lie for so many years?

  Entering the diner where she and Anna used to discuss Anna’s anthology, she sat down at their usual granite-topped table by the window and ordered their usual Earl Gray tea. As she sipped it, she forced herself to confront the complications of what she’d imagined was her green paradise of childhood love revisited—the ways in which she’d blinded herself to Anna’s desperate situation. The warning signals she had missed or ignored. Anna’s complicity in Jim’s cruelty; his, in her drinking; Jude’s, in their ghastly marriage. Anna’s and Jude’s final months together had been like slicing open a fragrant pineapple from the tropics, only to find it dark brown and putrid at the core.

  The apartment was dark and empty when Jude reached home. Simon was at his house on the Cape with two Dutch publishers. After hanging up her coat, Jude sat down on the living room couch. She remembered lying on that couch with Anna the first night they ever kissed, after weeks of titillating indecision. Apparently, this was the price you paid for a clandestine affair. When it was over, there was no one to turn to in your grief, no one to burden with all your touching memories. Simon, William, Sid, and a few others were the only ones who knew about Anna and herself. Everyone else regarded Simon and her as a couple, since they lived together. And Jude had arranged her life to exclude other confidants. She worked and spent time with Anna. That was
all. She grabbed the phone.

  “You sound awful, Jude,” Aunt Audrey yelled while children fought in the background. “What’s wrong, honey?”

  “A friend of mine is very sick. Is my father there?”

  When she described Anna’s current condition, her father sighed and said, “I wish I could give you some hope, baby, but I can’t.”

  “So she’s dying?”

  “I’m afraid so. And it’s a horrible death. Especially for those who have to watch it.”

  Jude went completely numb. She felt no anger, no sadness, nothing at all.

  “You and Anna are very close, aren’t you?”

  “Very.” This was as near as she’d ever come to acknowledging the relationship to him. She wondered whether he got the picture. He’d met Anna only once, on a trip to New York to show Aunt Audrey and the children the sights. Jude had brought Anna to a chaotic family dinner at Mamma Leone’s. Her father and Anna had had a chance to exchange very few words as the baby bopped Danny on the head with an asparagus spear, but Jude noticed them glancing at each other throughout the meal. Afterward, Anna said that she’d been impressed by his combination of kindness and strength. Kind men were often weak and strong men cruel, she said, but he seemed to combine the best qualities of both sexes. “He’s what a man is supposed to be.” At the time, Jude hadn’t thought to wonder why, if Anna knew this, she stayed with a weak, cruel man.

  “She seems like a lovely person.”

  “She is. I love her, Dad.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said. “I’m sorry, baby. Life can be very unfair sometimes.”

  “Did I tell you she’s at the Roosevelt?”

  “No kidding.”

  “Her windows look out at the fifth floor of that apartment building where you and Mother used to live.”

  “My God,” he said. “It’s so strange, the way things recycle.”

  “Which apartment was yours?”

  There was a long pause, during which Jude wondered whether he was upset or simply unable to remember. “The fifth, sixth, and seventh windows from the left,” he replied in a strained voice. “Please give them my best regards.”

  A few nights later, Jude was sitting by Anna’s bedside holding her hand, which had been bound to a splint with gauze so that she couldn’t rip the scabs off her sores. The night nurse had apologetically explained that Anna was very willful about picking her scabs, even while unconscious, and that her wounds would barely clot now. Her sheets became blood-soaked and had to be changed constantly. Jude hated the idea of giving the already overextended nurses more work, but the splints appalled her and she was considering removing them. They reminded her of the metal mittens Victorian parents had put on their children’s hands to prevent them from masturbating.

  As she debated this issue, Jude studied Anna’s face, still remarkably beautiful despite the puffiness and the mustard tint to the skin. It was so familiar. Jude’s fingers and tongue must have stroked each ridge and hollow a thousand times.

  Her mind finally relinquished its ethical struggle over the splints. Gradually, it quieted and cleared—until it felt like a high mountain lake reflecting the sky. And in that moment, Jude sensed the presence of Anna, as though Anna’s heart had suddenly yawned open to receive her and enfold her in an embrace. And Jude knew in that instant that their love for each other hadn’t vanished after all. It had just transformed itself, like water evaporating into mist. Apparently, there were detours to union that bypassed the flesh.

  As this fugitive taste of connection faded, Jude sat there watching this woman she loved, this woman she now realized she would always love. But if Anna weren’t dying, would she have been able to feel this? Jude wondered. Before Anna’s collapse, they’d reached a dead end with each other. Was the essential ingredient for a graveyard love the grave?

  Later that evening, as Jude sat by Anna’s bedside marking a manuscript for the printers, she asked absently, “Would you like a Popsicle, my love?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Jude looked at her. Her eyes were closed. Her body was still. “Anna, can you hear me?”

  There was no response.

  “If you can hear me, move your hand.”

  Not a muscle moved, except for Anna’s mouth, which pursed to receive the Popsicle, like a newborn’s mouth searching for the nipple.

  “Anna,” said Jude, just in case, “I want you to know that our time together has been the happiest in my life. And although I don’t see right now how to go on without you, I don’t regret a moment of it.”

  Anna’s hand crept to her breast and used its splint to scrape off a scab. Blood welled up and ran like a freshet down her side, pooling inside her robe and soaking through to the clean white sheets.

  “Goddamn it, Anna, stop that!” screamed Jude, grabbing the hand. She burst into tears. “Please talk to me. For one last time before you go.”

  Anna’s eyes remained closed, her lips puckered for more Popsicle.

  Jude pictured Sandy, inert in his hospital bed, his teeth shattered. And Molly on her stretcher, head stitched like a softball, face the purple of a smashed plum. And herself at her mother’s bedside all those years ago, singing “Rise, Shine, Give God His Glory.” When her mother refused to wake up, Jude began yelling the lyrics right into her ear—until her father had to pick her up and carry her into the hallway as she still sobbed that stupid, hopeless hymn.

  CHAPTER

  16

  JASMINE’S OFFICE was furnished very differently from her antiques-crammed, crusader-haunted living quarters several blocks away. The house was dark and muffled, but the office featured gleaming chrome, black leather upholstery, and the latest in office equipment. Jude had been describing an American novel she thought Jasmine should buy, concerning a love affair between two nurses.

  “Ordinary women living ordinary lives, women who happen to love each other,” said Jude, semireclining before Jasmine’s desk in a designer dental chair.

  “But it is too long,” said Jasmine. “And it would increase a third in translation. And it is too boring—going to work, shopping, cooking dinner, helping children with schoolwork. Our readers are interested in the chase, not the collapse into tedium that follows.”

  “But that’s life.”

  “Your life perhaps. Because you do not know how to play.”

  Jude smiled. She hadn’t picked a book yet that appealed to Jasmine. She couldn’t imagine why Jasmine continued to pay her salary.

  Jasmine’s door hurtled open and a young man marched in without knocking. He had a handsome, pouty face with high cheekbones, a wide forehead, and a navy-blue five o’clock shadow.

  “Ah, Robert,” said Jasmine, half-rising, evidently taken aback.

  Robert glared at her, then at Jude. He was wearing baggy pleated trousers, a long-sleeved rayon shirt buttoned at the throat, and pointy-toed basket-weave shoes. Fag shoes, Simon would have called them. His black hair was spiky on top and long in back, and a tiny gold hoop was dangling from one earlobe. Without taking his dark, wounded eyes off Jasmine, he sank uninvited into a chrome-and-leather chair, hands resting on his knees.

  They sat in silence, Jude waiting for Jasmine to introduce her. He was young. Could he be her son? Jude had no idea how old Jasmine was or if she even had children. She had the beginnings of that parenthesis people got around their mouths as they approached fifty, which made their chins look hinged like Charlie McCarthy’s. But if she’d had a face-lift, this process would have been forestalled. Yet her body was as taut and shapely as a thirty-year-old’s.

  Robert was furious with Jasmine, his eyebrows meeting in the center in a deep frown. And it was clear that he didn’t care for Jude, either. What wasn’t clear was why not, since he’d never before laid eyes on her, so far as she knew.

  Maybe he was Jasmine’s lover. Despite Simon’s belief that she had a husband stashed away somewhere, Jude had concluded that Jasmine liked women, having mostly seen her surrounded by devoted female employees. Yet
if Jasmine had in fact come on to her that night when Jude dined with her—which she wouldn’t have sworn to—Jude had turned her down. She was no threat to Robert. So why was he glaring at her as though she’d opened the oven on his soufflé?

  “Do you work in publishing, too?” Jude finally asked him.

  “Don’t ask me what work I do. All Americans ask that.”

  “What should I ask instead?”

  He sighed. “Why not ask, for example, if I am sportif?”

  “Okay. Are you sportif, Robert?”

  Jasmine smiled.

  Robert spat air through loose lips. “I am not obliged to answer such a stupid question.”

  Jude shrugged. She had merely been trying to stave off homicide. She sat in silence, staring at a yellowed photo of a young man with Jasmine’s hooded eyelids that was in an antique silver frame on the bookshelf. Jasmine’s friends and colleagues displayed the most intriguing mix of impeccable manners and breathtaking rudeness. She wished she was back in New York playing “Indiana Jones and the Lost Temple of Atlantis” on her computer at work.

  Finally, Robert stood up and strode from the room without looking back.

  “So who’s Robert?” Jude asked.

  Jasmine waved her multiringed hand as though shooing an annoying fly. Once Jude had finally summoned the courage to ask her some personal questions, she had discovered that Jasmine never answered them, anyway.

  Jasmine resumed her discussion of why nurse novels wouldn’t sell in Paris. Jude was getting the impression that her readers regarded life as a cross between a Greek tragedy and a Harlequin romance—all storm and betrayal and suffering. Probably Jude would have, too, if she’d grown up in a country that had been invaded by marauders from every direction throughout recorded history, instead of one founded by madcap dreamers who believed you could pack up your sorrows and hop the next ship for the promised land.