Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  As she strode down the street toward the Champs Elysées, she began to swagger. It was restful no longer to be groped by men’s eyes and to relax the radar that informed her of who was in her vicinity and whether anything about him suggested potential rapine. As she passed a woman in a miniskirt, she glanced at her legs, then ran her eyes up her torso to her face. The woman’s eyes met hers for a moment, then flicked disdainfully away like a tango dancer’s chin. Jude grinned. No wonder men didn’t want to give up their erotic prerogatives.

  The maître d’ at the club also called her monsieur as he seated her on a banquette near the stage and brought her a scotch. But when the Beefeaters came out, Olivia wasn’t among them. As Jude disconsolately watched the other women strut their stuff, she wondered whether Olivia had gone on holiday. Where would such a gorgeous creature go? Greece, Jude concluded, so that she could cavort with all the other goddesses.

  MARTINE AND JUDE WERE SITTING in the conference room reviewing submissions for their anthology. Jude was struggling to say that although the New York City students had sometimes lacked a grasp of English grammar and syntax, their poems had displayed energy and invention. Whereas the French students had so far written poems that were technically perfect but full of images and insights as uninspired as if they’d been selected from a prix fixe menu. She was finding it difficult to be tactful in a language not her own. At some point, she realized that she’d been calling Martine tu.

  Martine replied that they needed to draw up some guidelines for the teachers to assist them in encouraging their students to depart from the norms. She had a look of distaste on her face, and she was pointedly calling Jude vous. Jude realized that no one in all of Paris called her tu yet. She was still their resident Other. Yet she was intrigued to have inspired such contempt in Martine. She didn’t understand why. Trying to make friends with her had been like trying to cozy up to a barracuda. Writing it off as a lost cause, Jude retreated to vous with an apologetic shrug.

  The door opened and Jasmine walked in. She sat down at the round table and began questioning them about how many pages the anthology would be and when they expected to have a finished manuscript.

  As Jasmine’s and Martine’s voices droned on and on, Jude found herself picturing Olivia naked beside her on cushions on her living-room carpet, sunbathing in the rays coming through the open door while swallows swooped past outside.

  “Jude, can you tell us some more about this?” asked Jasmine.

  Jude started. “I’m sorry. I missed the question.”

  “I was telling Martine about your handbook for the schools,” said Jasmine, studying her quizzically.

  “Oh, right.” She began to describe how the handbook could help local schools set up their own programs and contests.

  The door opened again, and Giselle arrived, clutching half a dozen lunchtime baguettes like a bat boy. She was followed by Cecile, Robert, and several others.

  While everyone else passed food and poured mineral water, Jasmine turned to Jude and said, “This new short haircut of yours is most attractive.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Is something the matter? You do not seem well.”

  “I’m just tired. I was up late last night.”

  “Ah,” said Jasmine, eying her speculatively, “you have a new friend to keep you awake?”

  “No, not really.” Keeping secrets was no way to fuel an evolving friendship, but Jude had no wish to tell Jasmine about Olivia or about her return alone to the strip club. Besides, what was there to tell?

  “What a pity,” said Jasmine with a smile. “But in that case, perhaps you would care to come to my house in Picardy this weekend? You could get some rest. I would provide you with a large curtained bedstead from the seventeenth century. Covered with fresh linen sheets and a fluffy duvet of goose down. I would fill your room with flowers from my garden and feed you pâté and champagne on a tray by your bedside.”

  As she talked, she was giving Jude le regard. Jude felt herself sinking into Jasmine’s invitation as though into the goose-down duvet. But she wasn’t sure exactly what she was being invited to do. Jasmine made even the most normal everyday activity sound like an episode from the Kama Sutra. Although she couldn’t have said for sure if that was Jasmine’s intent. In any case, she realized that she didn’t want to leave Paris and the possibility of finally finding Olivia. All she really wanted out of life anymore was to be lying in Olivia’s embrace on Ile St. Louis.

  “It sounds marvelous, and I’d love to some other time,” Jude replied. “But I’m afraid I’m tied up this weekend.”

  Jasmine studied her, trying to divine from her face what her engagement might be, but Jude struggled to offer no clues.

  After Jasmine departed, Jude excused herself from the lunchtime seminar and returned to her office. Plopping down in her desk chair, she gazed up at the map of Paris spread across her wall. The red meanderings of her routes across Paris were beginning to weave themselves into a tangled web. Picking up the phone, she dialed Simon in New York.

  It was early morning there, and Simon sounded bleary when he asked, “So how’s New York’s most tenacious graveyard lover today?”

  “It’s no laughing matter, Simon. I’ve done it again.”

  “Fallen in love?”

  “I think so.”

  “Bloody hell, Jude, I can’t leave you alone for a minute.”

  “Mock me all you like, Simon, but tell me what to do.”

  “Relax. Enjoy it. You’re in Paris. Tell me about her.”

  “She has dark hair and blue eyes.”

  “Surprise, surprise. What does she do for work?”

  “She’s a dancer.”

  “Ballet?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Ballroom?”

  “Burlesque.”

  Simon chuckled. “I see. Rough trade. So you’ve finally decided to take a walk on the wild side?”

  “I didn’t decide anything. These matters aren’t rational.”

  “Not for you, that’s for sure. Her age?”

  “Young.”

  “Does she love you back, or is it another of your lost causes?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You haven’t asked her?”

  “I’ve never talked to her. I saw her dancing in a strip show. And then I saw her again at a lesbian bar. And she kissed me once on the bridge to Ile St. Louis when I was following her home.”

  There was a long silence. “Good Lord, Jude,” said Simon. “Get a grip.”

  “I’m trying to. That’s why I called you.”

  “Track her down. Get to know her. Immerse yourself in her annoying little habits. Watch her pick her teeth and chew her nails.”

  “I can’t find her. I’m not even sure I didn’t make her up.”

  “Jude, why don’t you ask Jasmine for some time off? Come back to New York and see your friends. I think you must be alone too much over there. This sounds serious.”

  “Maybe I will, but first I have to find her,” she said vaguely. “If she exists.”

  “Okay, but if you don’t find her, don’t panic. Call me up. I’ll fly right over. Don’t brood alone in stoic silence. And remember that there are many people here across the sea who adore and admire you.”

  After thanking Simon and bidding him good-bye, Jude hung up and left the office, marching directly to Ile St. Louis, determined to stage a showdown. Since it was afternoon, the night code was off at Olivia’s building. So she buzzed herself in and crossed the mosaic courtyard. She climbed the iron staircases and walked the hallways on all five floors, studying each door. But she could detect no clue as to which might be Olivia’s.

  Verging on despair, Jude returned to the street and began to wander across the bridge toward Montmartre. People kept passing her, carrying their baguettes for dinner, waving and stroking them like giant phalluses. Pausing at the spot where Olivia had kissed her, if she had, Jude gazed down into the water as it swirled around the pilings. She
wondered if she was losing her mind—or had already lost it.

  Glancing back at Olivia’s building, Jude saw her coming out the huge maroon door. She was dressed in a short skirt and a tank top, and she was carrying some books. Spinning around, Jude dashed back across the bridge. As Olivia crossed to the Left Bank and wound through the crowded side streets, Jude ran after her, trying to catch up. But Olivia was moving as fast as the shadow of a bird in flight.

  Finally, in the doorway of an ancient Sorbonne lecture hall, Olivia paused and turned. Looking right at Jude, she smiled. Then she vanished into the building.

  Enchanted finally to see her again, Jude decided that she had to speak with her. She couldn’t sleep, and when she did, she dreamed of Olivia. Her clothes were hanging off her, limp as sails in the Sargasso Sea. She couldn’t concentrate enough to read manuscripts for work. She couldn’t follow the discussions at editorial meetings. Maybe if she could talk with Olivia, the spell would be broken. Maybe she’d tell Jude she was a disgusting pervert. Anything would be better than the past several weeks of living with her absence.

  As Jude sat at a café sipping a crème and watching the door to the lecture hall, she mapped out their life together. Evidently, Olivia was a student when she wasn’t busy driving other people crazy. Jude would support her while she finished school, so she could quit the club. She had seemed so vulnerable up there all alone on the stage in the swirling rainbow spotlights. Jude wanted to protect her. She didn’t like the idea of all those revolting businessmen watching her dance naked. Besides, it was dangerous. What if one of them started stalking her?

  They could have an apartment in Paris for Olivia and another in New York for Jude. Maybe Olivia would like Tennessee. They could build the cabin overlooking the Smokies that she’d planned with Molly and Anna. Olivia was young, so hopefully she didn’t have a lot of baggage like husbands and children. Jude looked forward to being with someone long enough to grow thoroughly bored by her. She’d enjoy watching her hair go gray and her face crease and her perfect breasts sag. They’d take care of each other when they got sick, and Olivia could hold Jude’s hand as she died, as Jude had Anna’s.

  Other students were exiting from the lecture hall, but not Olivia. Jude paid her bill and walked to the doorway. She asked a young man what the course was, and he said Anglo-American Philosophy. So Olivia was apparently a philosopher. She’d have a professor’s schedule, and they’d be able to travel in the summers and at Christmas.

  Olivia still hadn’t emerged. Jude walked into the musty old building and poked her head into the lecture hall. It was empty, apart from some wads of paper on the floor by the lectern. Olivia must have slipped out a side door. Jude was getting irritated. Here she was planning their future, yet Olivia seemed to be evading her. The only way out of this endless nightmare seemed to be to plunge into it ever more deeply. So she returned to Ile St. Louis and stationed herself by the wall in front of Olivia’s building. She would stay there for as long as it took to confront her.

  For a while, she studied the wrought-iron grilles across all the windows on Olivia’s block, wondering whether the bars on French jails were similarly patterned. Like snowflakes, no two designs were the same. Then she started thinking about this stale analogy. Presumably, no one had ever seen every snowflake that ever existed, so how did scientists know that no two were alike? She was willing to bet that some were.

  She looked down and discovered a woman with a green Michelin guide standing before her. The woman asked in a French even worse than her own if she knew which building had been Camille Claudel’s studio.

  “I’m sorry,” said Jude. “I don’t actually know.”

  “I think it must be the one with the maroon door,” she mused. “She went insane in there after Rodin rejected her.”

  “No kidding,” said Jude uneasily.

  After a couple of hours, her feet were hurting. She sank down to the sidewalk and sat with her back against the stone wall, studying the downspout on Olivia’s building. It was gilded to resemble fish scales. At the bottom was the fish’s head, with round eyes and a gaping mouth through which the rainwater from the roof would pour. Jude wondered why Olivia lived in such a fancy building. Maybe her father was a diplomat who didn’t realize how his daughter earned her pocket money when he was on assignment abroad. Or maybe she was an au pair for a wealthy family by day and a goddess by night.

  As the sunset faded into dusk, Jude began to feel chilled, so she buttoned the jacket of her cotton suit and turned up the collar. Then she reviewed her entire history with Olivia, from the moment she first saw her in the neon hoop at the strip club until she vanished that afternoon into the Sorbonne lecture hall: the glances they’d exchanged, her dreams, their dance at the Marrakesh, their flight to Ile St. Louis through the moonlight, Olivia’s fingertips caressing her cheek on the Pont Marie, her tongue stroking Jude’s lip.

  At last, Jude unraveled what had happened: Olivia had revealed herself just enough for Jude to become intrigued. Then she had removed herself so that Jude would feel the lack of her. This lack was now generating Jude’s crazed desire, just as Martine had insisted during that first lunch at the office.

  A woman began to scream through an open window on the top floor of Olivia’s building. The hair on the back of Jude’s neck bristled. Someone was being attacked. Could it be Olivia? As the screaming increased in intensity, Jude jumped up, trying desperately to think what the Paris equivalent of 911 might be. She glanced up and down the street for someone who would know what to do, but the sidewalks were empty.

  But then the screams modulated into a strangulated tattoo of oui’s. “Oui…oui…oui…oui…” Like the fifth little piggy who couldn’t find her way home. Only l‘amour this time, Jude realized, not la mort. She sank back down on the sidewalk.

  “Merde, ça we fait mal…,” moaned the woman from on high. “Plus. Plus. Plus. Oui, plus…”

  Jude leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes while the woman gasped, “In the name of God, don’t stop yet, you filthy swine!

  Jude drew a deep breath and tried to think about something else—the number of bateaux mouches that must pass that spot every day, for example. As she performed calculations in her head, the woman emitted several high-pitched shrieks, like a buzzard swooping down on a field mouse. Then she fell silent. Jude was pretty sure she’d faked her orgasm. Her own armpits were clammy.

  Extending her trousered legs across the sidewalk, Jude studied her high-fashion cowboy boots with the filigreed silver toe guards. What was she doing sprawled on a Parisian sidewalk outside the apartment of an exotic dancer she’d never met? She had finally fallen into the pit. She now understood the fascination for Molly and Sandy and Anna of people who made them suffer. It was the promise of extinguishing your lonely separate self in a power you had defined as greater than your own. It was graveyard love run amok.

  Her head began to nod. Finally, her chin fell forward and settled on her chest. As darkness descended, she slept.

  When she next opened her eyes, the sky overhead was black, with a faint golden tint from the city lights. And Olivia was passing beneath the stone lion head and into her building, ponytail swishing. But Jude was so shocked by the sight of her that she couldn’t utter a sound.

  Crazed with frustration, she continued lying against the wall and tried to figure out what to do next. The night code would be on, so she couldn’t get in. Besides, she still didn’t know which apartment was Olivia’s. She noticed a round object on the sidewalk beside her hand. Reaching out, she touched it gingerly. It was smooth. Examining it with her fingertips, she realized that it was an apple. When she picked it up and studied it in the glow from the streetlight at the corner, she discovered that it was a perfect yellow Delicious apple. She sniffed it. What if it was poisoned like Snow White’s? She thought for a moment about the rolling golden balls on her smashed Atalanta flask.

  But Olivia must have left it, she realized with a stab of delight. She must have s
quatted down and placed it gently on the sidewalk right beside Jude’s hand. Suddenly overcome with hunger and thirst, she bit into it. The juice ran all over her hand and down her chin.

  As she lay there devouring the apple, a light came on behind the sheer curtains over the glass doors of a third-floor apartment facing the river. While Jude watched, the silhouette of a naked woman appeared behind the curtains. Slowly, she began to undulate to unheard music, hands caressing breasts and thighs, ponytail swirling and lashing.

  The roaring of ocean breakers filled Jude’s head, and a softness fluttered through her veins like the velvet wings of a thousand moths in flight. Tossing the apple core over the wall behind her, Jude wrapped her arms across her chest, gasping and shivering. The light went off and the building plunged back into darkness.

  Jude lay motionless against the wall all night long, awake but stunned. A stray cat stopped by to rub up against her, purring. It smelled of spoiled fish. Occasional solitary cars passed by on hissing tires on the Right Bank. The silver Seine slapped the stone banks below like laundry snapping on a line.

  As birds began to chirp in the chestnuts along the river, Jude managed to stand up in the rosy dawn and go in search of coffee. Finding a café in the Latin Quarter that was just opening, she went to the ladies’ room to wash her face and hands. Looking into the mirror, she studied her own eyes, mahogany like her father’s, dim with fatigue and ringed with mauve. This couldn’t go on. Soon the police would arrive to cart her off to an asylum, as they had Camille Claudel. Maybe she’d better take Simon’s advice and return to New York.