Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  All of a sudden, Jude understood that she had been drawn to Paris in the first place in order to learn this art. But she’d been fighting it off, like a bat who prefers the dark to the light of day, insisting on doing everything in ways that were already familiar to her. Martine was right to have stood her up today. Jude was the neophyte here. It was up to her to figure out how to fit in. It wasn’t necessary that she understand what was going on in order to participate.

  As she turned the corner toward l’Opéra, Jude caught a glimpse of the white domes of Sacré Coeur floating above the dance halls and leather shops of Pigalle, shimmering in the afternoon heat like a mirage of the Holy City in a desert.

  THE NEXT MORNING, JUDE was awakened from a dreamless sleep by a cavalry of cooing pigeons charging across her skylight, their claws skittering down the glass. Daylight was pouring through her doors. Getting up, she threw them open. Swallows swooped and dipped in the fresh morning air all around her. The pewter rooftops of Paris, washed clean by a rainstorm in the night, were gleaming silver, rows of red-tile chimney flues stretching across them like crenellated ruins. Five women in flowing robes stood behind curly iron grilles at open doors on different floors across the courtyard, conjuring the golden ball of sun in the east like a coven of pagan priestesses.

  CHAPTER

  17

  JUDE WAS LYING NAKED on her living-room carpet in the sunlight streaming through the open doors. Propped up on cushions like a pasha, she was smoking a miniature Dutch cigar and drinking a foamy glass of Michelob. The phone rang, destroying her fantasy that she was on the beach at Cannes, about to be discovered by a major Hollywood director.

  It was Jasmine, inviting her to a strip club that night. Jude hesitated. A burlesque show seemed a questionable way for alleged feminists to spend their time. Once in New York with Sandy and Simon, she’d watched the disheartening bumping and grinding of gaunt heroin addicts, and she’d left feeling embarrassed and full of pity.

  “You must come,” said Jasmine. “It will amuse you.”

  Since she was Jude’s boss and both these sentences sounded like commands, Jude accepted. Besides, her current self-imposed assignment was simply to observe the Parisians at play, like a kitten learning from a cat how to lap milk. Out her doors, she could see two pigeons balancing on either end of a television antenna, carefully seesawing up and down. Even the pigeons here knew how to have fun.

  JUDE WAS STANDING on the sidewalk when Jasmine’s Citroën pulled up. Jasmine climbed out, resplendent in electric-blue silk that molded her admirable curves. Behind her exited a man with lots of silver hair and piercing umber eyes.

  “Jude, allow me to present my husband, Philippe,” said Jasmine. “Philippe, this is my remarkable young American editor.”

  “Enchanted,” he said, holding Jude’s outstretched hand in both of his. He was wearing a cream-colored double-breasted suit, with a tie and pocket handkerchief in shades of salmon and indigo.

  Jude was speechless at the appearance of yet another character from Jasmine’s personal soap opera. It was getting as complicated as “The Young and the Restless.” Martine and Robert had also just gotten out, both greeting her with all the enthusiasm of a woman discovering a run in her stockings. Martine was wearing a size six Hell’s Angels outfit—black leather miniskirt, net stockings and ankle boots with spike heels, and a miniature motorcycle jacket with so many snaps and zippers that a team of assistants would have been required to fasten them. Behind her stood a fair, slight young man with the face of an aging altar boy. His name turned out to be Jean-Claude.

  Since Martine had never mentioned their date manqué at Le Vrai Paris, Jude finally asked her one day at the office what had happened. She pursed her lips, shrugged, and said that she had run into a friend. They had stopped for an espresso. Then she found it was too late to meet Jude, so she went to visit someone else. She neither apologized nor suggested a new rendezvous, so Jude let it drop. If this was how things were done in Paris, she was now pledged to accept it without complaint. Though she couldn’t help but wonder if Martine had planned to stand her up from the start to teach Jude not to trifle with her. But Jude hadn’t been trifling. In fact, she’d been trying not to trifle. But maybe Martine liked trifling and had become alarmed when Jude wanted lunch as well.

  Nevertheless, Martine and Jude now comprised an efficient team for dealing with nuns, headmistresses, and teachers regarding their student-poetry anthology. Although as they strolled across town to these meetings, Jude couldn’t help but notice that she was the only woman in Paris whose arm Martine didn’t take as she walked. She had decided that Martine wasn’t avoiding and insulting her in order to provoke le désir. She simply didn’t like her.

  A tuxedoed maître d’, whose brilliantined hair was combed straight back off his forehead like a mobster’s, escorted them into a room with crimson wallpaper and carpeting. Jasmine alternated them boy-girl in the velvet seats circling the round table. Many others in the room appeared to be Japanese and American businessmen, with and without dates or spouses.

  The waiter brought champagne in a silver ice bucket and filled their glasses as they discussed Jude’s tan. Evidently, she wasn’t the first in Paris to discover the delights of sunbathing on her living-room floor. There was already a ground fog of cigarette smoke in the room, so they passed out Gitanes and lit up all around.

  The stage was flanked by statues of two giant female nudes. As the glittery sequined curtain between them rose, a dozen women appeared in Beefeater hats, garter belts and net stockings, black boots, and nothing else. They marched and saluted mechanically to the tune of “Rule Britannia.”

  From the corner of her eye, Jude watched Jasmine, with Philippe on one side and Robert on the other, as respectable-appearing as any fashionable Parisian matron. For all Jude knew, she was one. She looked amused as the women goose-stepped on their lovely long legs. Jude felt something, but it wasn’t amusement. For one thing, she wasn’t sure she enjoyed seeing other women objectified like this for the delectation of a roomful of horny businessmen.

  The Beefeaters exited and the curtain came down. When it lifted again, clouds of orange smoke were rising like mist from the stage floor. A woman in a plumed Athena helmet with narrow gold tubing around her neck and waist performed what looked like a sacred temple dance, her feet planted and knees flexed. Her upraised arms were squared at the elbows, and her torso was swaying and whipping, like a cypress in a hurricane, to jarring, clashing sitar music.

  The lights went out and when they came back on, there were four dancers in Athena helmets. Each time the stage darkened and the lights returned, there would be a different number of Athenas lashing and writhing in the swirling mists in their plumed gold helmets. Just as they began to seem interchangeable and eternal—the female essence embodied—the curtain came down.

  As it rose again, a bald man in camouflage gear with a huge beer belly marched out. He had rifles, machine guns, and pistols slung all over him. In an Indiana accent, he told a very boring battle story that involved artillery fire and fighter planes, which he imitated with his mouth. Everyone in the audience began to laugh uproariously at all this testosterone run amuck, startled by the contrast to the intoxicating sensuality of the Athenas.

  The curtain came crashing down like a guillotine blade on this overweight warrior. A few moments later, it lifted and a woman with a dark pony tail cascading over her shoulders was slithering like a python around a large, red, neon hoop, to the accompaniment of eerie harp music. Her pale body was bathed in swirling rainbow spotlights: long legs, finely muscled arms and shoulders, full, tight breasts, a narrow waist tapering into firm, boyish buttocks. The pulsing lights were making dizzy hallucinogenic patterns across her flesh as she wound in and out around the hoop and slowly splayed her perfect naked limbs in shifting geometric patterns across its disk.

  Jude watched, transfixed. This performance was probably politically reprehensible, but it was the most erotic thing she’d ever seen. For the
first time since her months of watching Anna decay in her hospital bed, Jude’s palms turned clammy. Here was a woman who could teach her how to enjoy life again.

  Through the shifting veils of cigarette smoke, Jude spotted Martine’s hand caressing Robert’s forearm. Her eyes shifted ever so slightly in Jude’s direction.

  Just as the entire audience was beginning to hyperventilate, the pony tailed woman vanished. And then the other women emerged from backstage, floating one by one across the stage on a conveyor belt. They wore headdresses with tresses of golden coins, and they were striking the poses of flexing Greek athletes.

  To the strains of a Chopin funeral march, six of the women strode off the belt and through a poison-green neon tube out front, which was bent into the shape of a large coffin. Forming three couples along the front lip of the stage, they performed stylized love play, never touching, hands molding and caressing the air beside a breast or a buttock, hips slowly swiveling closer and closer but never meeting.

  The conveyor belt continued to carry the other posing and preening women across the stage in front of the backdrop. And the neon coffin stood there changing colors, trying to assert its dominance. But it was unable to distract the audience’s attention from the magnificent women out front as three of them knelt before the dark pubic triangles of their partners. Each slid an arm between her partner’s legs to clasp a buttock and draw her closer. And the lights faded discreetly away.

  These young women were not sad sacks like the New York burlesque queens, Jude reflected. They were temple prostitutes, petulant goddesses, self-sufficient and aloof and unattainable. Like master electricians, they themselves were in charge of the currents of desire sweeping the audience, stepping up the voltage, then pulling the plug. The lesser mortals in the audience were here to worship their beauty, which was immortal, even if the bearers of it were not. And like true goddesses, they were mocking the audience for giving them the homage they demanded, an homage that would never be rewarded with anything more than amused scorn. This was a form of femininity Jude knew nothing about, one that must have prevailed when the race began, in the days when the female body was revered as the source of all life.

  She smiled, at last getting the sobering joke. The women were now back on stage in their Beefeater hats. The eyes of the woman with the dark ponytail seemed to meet Jude’s for a moment, before looking right through her. They fell into formation and tottered offstage like windup toys to a cacophony of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” “God Save the Queen,” and “The Marseillaise.” This was their final comment on male martiality, in pathetic bumbling contrast to their own insolent, indolent sensuality.

  Jude’s group drifted up the sidewalk toward the Champs Elysées. Jasmine was holding Martine’s arm, and Philippe was stroking John-Claude’s nearly beardless cheek as he whispered something in his ear. Robert ambled alongside Jude in silence, like a tamed bear. They sat down around a table on the terrace of a restaurant with a front-row view of the Arc de Triomphe. Philippe ordered more champagne and a platter of shellfish, which arrived packed in enough crushed ice to chill a corpse. They employed implements worthy of the Inquisition to drag the only half-dead sea creatures from their elaborate armor.

  As the others discussed the performance, Jude looked back and forth between Jasmine and Martine. Not only were they elegant and seductive; they were smart. Jude now understood that Paris was perhaps the last outpost of matriarchy on earth. Everywhere she went—the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries, the facade of the Hôtel de Ville, the Place de la Concorde, l‘Opera—there were statues of women, naked and robed, queens and goddesses, priestesses and saints. She thought about the Provençal courts of love in the twelfth century, where flocks of pages had devoted themselves to the grandes dames sans merci, and the Paris salons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which had destroyed careers and toppled governments. Where else in the world were women both outspokenly female and completely in charge?

  Tuning into the conversation, Jude discovered that Robert was accusing the strip club of nationalizing eroticism, domesticating it for consumption by tourists, like the Hawaiian hula.

  “And why not?” demanded Jean-Claude, who Jude had learned was a medical doctor just back from a famine relief project in the sub-Sahara. “If others are exotic to us, why should we resent being exotic to them? We are not, after all, the master race.”

  The point, according to Robert, was that the tourists weren’t being exposed to the real thing. Tonight’s show was like an innoculation against some deadly local plague. The tourists were being given a minute dose of eroticism in a safe setting by indifferent professionals. Afterward, they could go home to Iowa thinking they’d experienced all that Paris had to offer.

  Jude was discouraged to realize that she’d missed the point. But she was still wrapped in a haze of eroticism, and it didn’t feel like a minute dose. In fact, she couldn’t seem to get rid of the image of that woman with the ponytail splaying her perfect limbs across the neon disk in the swirls of rainbow light.

  Martine had been studying Robert speculatively. Finally, she said, “Yet you are not the first to have said this, Robert. Barthes calls such shows ‘the theater of fear.’ He says we display the evils of the flesh in order to exorcise them. Not for tourists, for ourselves. We wish to convert the female body into a household property/propriety.”

  Robert looked caught out, struggling with himself over whether it was less cool to have plagiarized from Barthes or to claim never to have read him.

  “I believe some of us did not find the performance unmoving,” said Jasmine. “Me, for example. And you, Jude. What did you think of it?”

  Jude struggled to translate her complicated thoughts into her rudimentary French. She ended up saying only that she had found it magnificent. She realized that she had no personality in French. No wonder Martine always acted so bored by her. She was, and who could blame her?

  Philippe observed with a smile that French men were good sports to put up with their peevish female consorts, who demanded deference as their right yet mocked their men’s little foibles mercilessly.

  Jean-Claude remarked sotto voce that perhaps that was why he saw so many men in wedding bands at Le Trap. Jude gathered Le Trap was a gay bar, and she was beginning to suspect from the way they looked at each other that Philippe and Jean-Claude were lovers.

  Jasmine said that unfortunately the cunning little foibles of the male were going to destroy life on this earth, or at least render it unbearable.

  With regard to male foibles, they began discussing whether passion and domestic affection were incompatible. They reminded Jude of dragonflies, alighting on a topic for a shimmering moment, then darting off to the next, so inexplicably that she could scarcely keep up, much less join in.

  “Within a marriage,” Philippe was saying with a wry smile at Jasmine, “lovemaking becomes an expectation and a duty. Once it is no longer a free choice, it ceases by definition to be passion. And you can be sure—”

  “So you are saying,” interrupted Martine, “that duty is rational and passion—”

  “Yet a slave might passionately—” interjected Robert.

  The three were now holding forth all at once, none listening to the others. In addition, they were speaking so fast and using so much slang that Jude couldn’t follow anyone. So she looked back and forth among them in the din. Philippe was Domestic Affection for Jasmine, but who was Passion? All perhaps. Probably not Jean-Claude, but who knew?

  Someone’s knee was pressing hers under the table. Whether deliberately or not, she couldn’t tell. She glanced at all the faces but uncovered no clues. She had no idea who was what to whom here.

  Suddenly, Robert was yelling at Martine that whatever controlled restricted. And whatever restricted was tyrannical. And whatever was tyrannical was fascist. That language itself controlled and restricted and therefore was fascist.

  “Ah non,” murmured Martine. “To label is to unmask, and to unmask is to alter.”


  “To label is to limit,” insisted Robert, “and to limit is to destroy.”

  Jude suddenly had the feeling neither cared all that much about labels. They had just picked opposite sides for the pleasure of the clash.

  “Done, if language is fascist,” replied Martine, blowing smoke in Robert’s face, “you, who talk so much and all the time, are fascist, n’est-ce pas?”

  Robert erupted into hysteria. Jude realized she was witnessing the famous furia francese, the French fury, the sudden frenzy that used to possess French warriors on medieval battlefields, terrifying their more laid-back Italian opponents. But Martine merely gazed at him with ennui. She would definitely have flunked Charm Class.

  Behind Martine’s auburn head loomed the Arc de Triomphe. Thirty years before, the aunts and mothers and grandmothers of Jude’s companions at this table, their men having been slaughtered on battlefields to the north, had silently lined this sidewalk to watch the precision rape of their beautiful city. The Nazis had tromped through the Arc de Triomphe with their rifles and jeeps and tanks and horses in a shimmering haze of dust and exhaust fumes. But then, with small daily humiliations, the women of Paris had made the Germans regret that they’d ever left Prussia.

  Jean-Claude had somehow managed to capture the floor, regardless of his faint voice. He was summarizing Stendhal’s discourse on the different types of love and the different stages of each type. His comments had something or other to do with the relevance or irrelevance of labels in the face of a lived passion.

  As Mark Twain once said about Americans and the weather, Parisians talked endlessly about l‘amour. But did anyone ever do anything about it? Jude wondered. Because it was this relentless intercourse of ideas within their quicksilver minds that seemed to give them pleasure. And after all, only people with a profound aversion to bodily fluids could have invented the bidet.