Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  But after drinking a crème and eating a tartine at a table in the café, she began to feel calmer. So she bought a couple more buttered tartines and returned with them to Ile St. Louis, where she leaned in Olivia’s doorway. Eventually, a man with a briefcase emerged, and she ducked through the door before it sucked shut. She climbed the iron staircase to the third floor. Calculating that the window where the silhouette had appeared was in the far-right apartment, Jude rang the bell, palms clammy, heart pounding.

  Since no one came, she rang again.

  Olivia opened the door on the third ring, wearing a royal purple chenille robe, ponytail undone so that her dark hair hung around her face like a mantilla. “Oui?” she said in a sleepy voice.

  “I’ve brought you some breakfast.” Jude pointed at the bag of tartines. “We need to talk.”

  “Excuse me, madame, but who are you?”

  Shaken, Jude said, “You know who I am, Olivia. My name’s Jude.”

  “No, I do not know who you are.” She began to close the door.

  “But you’ve seen me a dozen times,” pleaded Jude.

  “I am sorry, but you are mistaken.”

  Jude looked at her helplessly. “Well then, please excuse me, madame.” She turned to leave, completely numb in order to stave off an eventual collapse into utter chagrin and despair.

  “All right. Yes,” she said as Jude started down the hallway. “Now I remember you. What is it that you want?”

  Jude turned back around, hopeful, relieved, and angry. “What do you want?”

  “But I want nothing,” she said with a laugh. “I am not the one who is ringing a stranger’s doorbell at dawn.”

  Jude stared at her, beginning to dislike her, afraid that it would show and that Olivia would slam the door in her face. “Then why did you want me to follow you home that night from Marrakesh? Why did you kiss me on the Pont Marie? Why did you leave me that apple last night? Why did you dance for me at your window?”

  “I do not know what you are talking about. This is very annoying.”

  “You’re damn right it is!” Jude hurled the tartines at her feet and stomped off down the corridor.

  “Wait,” she called.

  Jude stopped, head lowered like a charging bull’s, not turning around. It was awful, but at least it was over. She didn’t even want to think about the price she would have to pay for the folly of letting herself love another phantom.

  “Come back.”

  Jude hesitated, consulting her family motto: “When in doubt, get the hell out.”

  “S’il te plaît,” she said softly.

  This was the first person in Paris to call Jude tu. If only she had understood that the pathway to endearment here was paved with anger, she could have saved herself a lot of fake smiles. She returned to Olivia, who was looking down at the bag of tartines. Bending over, Jude picked it up and handed it to her.

  “Come in,” she said, standing aside.

  They went down a narrow hallway to a small kitchen that reeked of stale cat food. Jude sat down at a square wooden table. They exchanged remarks concerning the strength of the coffee and Jude’s wish for milk and sugar.

  “So what’s this all about?” Jude finally asked.

  “What is what all about?” Olivia poured coffee and hot milk into two giant cups and placed the tattered tartines on a plate.

  “Well, your performance last night by the window, for example?”

  “It is whatever you care to make of it.”

  Jude finally understood why so many French men had gone on the Crusades—to get away from French women.

  “So it was totally without meaning for you?”

  “A brief fantasy between two people is pleasant, is it not?”

  Jude looked at her while the words brief and fantasy sank in. But she was relieved finally to have Olivia take some responsibility for this disaster. “Perhaps,” she said. “If both people know it’s a fantasy. If not, someone gets hurt.”

  “People must watch out for their own hearts in these matters, no?

  “In America, when we love someone, we try to watch out for their hearts as well as our own.”

  For a long moment, Olivia studied Jude, as though she were an exotic pinned butterfly struggling not to succumb to formaldehyde. “So you have come to love me,” she said matter-of-factly, as though discussing the price of mangoes in the market.

  “Oh, I suppose so. Yes.” Jude finally understood the rules of this game: The one who fell in love first lost. She had lost. She’d thought that the goal was to get past the game to the substance. She now realized that the game was all there was. There was nothing beyond. Only a new game with someone else. Paris was one vast Disneyland of Desire.

  “But this is madness. You do not even know me.”

  “If I knew you, I might not even like you.” Jude laughed loudly, like the lunatic she had become.

  Olivia’s eyes widened with alarm. She put her hand on Jude’s forearm and scooted closer, apparently intrigued by the danger Jude suddenly represented. Jude smiled at this notion of herself as a barbarian at the gate. Olivia didn’t realize that she was dealing with Cherry Ames, rural nurse, helper and healer.

  “You know, Olivia,” said Jude in a low voice, “you could have made my life much easier if you’d just left me alone.”

  Olivia blinked, looking baffled. “But why would I wish to make your life easy?”

  “I suppose that is awfully unsophisticated of me.”

  “But now you are being sarcastic, and this is not nice.” Standing up, she took Jude’s hand and pulled her to her feet. She led her down the hallway and into a bedroom strewn with clothing. Glass doors with sheer curtains looked out on the Seine.

  Settling herself against her pillows, she held out her arms so that her robe parted. “Come,” she said softly.

  Jude stood there looking at Olivia’s perfect body in the morning sun, at her shiny, dark hair fanned out across the white pillow. “Shouldn’t we get to know each other a bit first?”

  “What better way?” asked Olivia, smiling.

  Jude reminded herself of her pledge not to insist on always doing things her own way. Olivia was offering her magnificent body, but Jude wanted to chat first about her inner child? With trembling hands, she removed her own clothing as gracefully as possible and then joined Olivia on the bed, feeling like one of the Seven Dwarfs approaching Snow White.

  AS SLIM FINGERS OF SUNSHINE pushed their way through the folds of the curtains across Olivia’s glass doors, she gazed into Jude’s eyes and moaned and murmured at all the appropriate spots. And she employed her various body parts with an admirable technical efficiency. But Jude quickly understood that her heart and her soul were elsewhere, well protected by her exquisitely arranged flesh. For Olivia, this was just another performance.

  Lying there afterward with Olivia’s shiny hair swirled across her chest like a swath of new-mown hay, Jude reminded herself that the first time with a new person was sometimes awkward. It took a while to learn someone else’s rhythms. Besides, Olivia was young. Jude would enjoy awakening her to the pleasures available through the sense of touch, as Anna had her. There was no rush.

  “And now you must go so that I can sleep,” Olivia said amiably. “Because I must work late tonight.”

  Jude looked down into her eyes, a bleary turquoise in the sunlight, with tiny translucent rings of butterscotch around the pupils, just like Molly’s. “When can I come back?”

  “But this is what you came for, is it not?” She seemed perplexed. “And now you have learned that it is no more remarkable with me than with anyone else.”

  “Well, I agree that it wasn’t that exciting,” said Jude. “But never mind. We can work on it.”

  Olivia propped herself up on one elbow to look at Jude, eyes amused and bemused. “Why would one wish to work on something that is meant to be play?”

  “Well, to make it more satisfying for both of us.”

  “But I am satisfied,�
�� she said. “I see that you are not. Mais ce n’est pas grave. It is always disappointing, is it not, compared to what one dreams will be possible?”

  Jude didn’t agree. “In any case, this isn’t what I came for,” she said, feeling she was swimming out of her depth. “I came to tell you that I love you.”

  “Oh, yes. I forgot. You believe that you love me.”

  “No, I know that I love you.” But as Simon had predicted, the better she knew Olivia, the less lovable she seemed.

  “If one loves, one wishes to please the beloved, n’est-ce pas?” Olivia asked, drawing on her skills as a philosophy student.

  Jude could see this one coming. She braced herself.

  “So my wish is that you will go away now and enjoy your life and remember that you passed a pleasant hour one summer morning on Ile St. Louis with a woman who found you ravishing in every way.”

  This was the most charming brush-off Jude had ever heard of. Smiling doggedly, she stood up and began pulling on her underwear. “I should never have come.”

  Olivia pursed her lips and shrugged. “Ce n’est rien.”

  To you it is nothing, thought Jude as she stepped into her trousers and pulled on her silk T-shirt. To me, it is everything. But that’s not your problem.

  Olivia got up and pulled on her robe. Jude shrugged on her suit jacket and followed her down the hallway.

  “I am sorry if I have disappointed you,” she murmured as Jude walked past her out the door. “I meant only to please. But you must understand that you are not the first to have trailed me around Paris like a hungry ghost.”

  As Jude passed under the stone lion head above the doorway and out into the street, she reflected that cats at play probably didn’t know how their claws felt to mice. She walked out onto the Pont Marie and stared down into the Seine for a long time. She wondered whether to jump. She would not be the first to die for the love of a beautiful dancer—although she might be the first woman. Feminism was truly a wonderful thing. She decided not to jump. It would be just her luck to land in a bateau mouche full of Baptist Youth from Tennessee. Besides, Simon would never forgive her for such a lapse into cliché.

  She spun around and headed south, dazed like the sole survivor of a plane crash. As she skirted the Luxembourg Gardens, she tried to figure out how to get through the rest of her life now that all pleasure and purpose had gone out of it yet again, like a leaky beach ball. Olivia was very skilled at her craft, tossing out the bait, jerking the line when Jude struck so that the hook would lodge firmly, and then reeling her in. But why? Did she enjoy watching another creature flopping and gasping on dry land, with no idea how to return to the water?

  Heading south down the Avenue du Général Leclerc, Jude spotted the entrance to the Catacombs. The labyrinth of ancient stone quarries stretched beneath her feet for nearly two hundred miles. In the eighteenth century, 6 million skeletons from crowded Parisian cemeteries had been transferred down there for storage.

  After paying her entry fee, Jude descended the winding stone steps to a dim, damp corridor well below the sewers and the Métro. A message carved into the stone lintel read: “Stop! This is the empire of death.” Jude kept going.

  The passageway within was lined on either side with bones, stacked so that the ball ends protruded to form a textured wall. At chest height ran a row of skulls, lined up as neatly as coconuts at a greengrocer’s. Sometimes a pillar of skulls also ran vertically from ceiling to floor, forming crosses.

  Jude strolled for what felt like miles down the shadowy gravel pathway with no one else around, water dripping from the ceiling. Here and there, barred side tunnels headed off into the blackness. This place had been the headquarters of the Resistance during World War II. In Roman times, early Christians had held services down here. Smugglers had stashed contraband and criminals had hidden out from prosecution.

  Carved into a stone by a doorway, Jude spotted a verse from Lamartine that Anna had once recited as they crossed Central Park:

  Into the ocean sinks the plaintive wave.

  Onto the winds, the fugitive leaf.

  Dawn Jades into evening,

  And man into death.

  Just beyond were skeletons from the Innocents Cemetery, where the Huguenots fished out of the Seine had been buried. Jude stopped to contemplate the stained ivory femurs and tibias of her ancient cousins. But there was nothing so unusual about their plight. Every group had its victims and its executioners.

  Glancing around to be sure she was unobserved, she climbed a gate and wedged her body between the top bar and the stone ceiling. Dropping to the ground on the other side, she stood there for a moment. Once she set out, she wouldn’t be able to find her way back. She’d read about men who had wandered into these tunnels and been found as skeletons centuries later.

  Steadying herself with her hands against the damp carved walls of rock, she scrambled in her cowboy boots up the rubble and set out down the side passage. She walked and walked, lighting her way with the tiny flashlight on her key ring, randomly choosing one fork or another at junctures, until she had lost all sense of direction. She remembered reading about a man who had gotten lost down here and stumbled across a room piled high with cat heads and no bodies. The restaurant in the street directly overhead served as its specialty an incomparable rabbit stew.

  After what seemed like hours, short of breath and calves aching, she ran headlong into a wall. Feeling all around herself with her hands, she discovered that she was in a more or less round chamber, from which there was no exit except the narrow chute by which she had just arrived.

  She cleared away enough stones to make room for herself on the floor. Then she plopped down and tried to figure out what she was doing pitching camp in the empire of death. But why not? Cruelty was the law of the land above her head. Love was the only antidote, yet its pursuit led merely to more pain. Life was a boxed canyon with nowhere left to turn.

  Using her pocketbook for a pillow, she stretched out on the floor and wrapped her suit jacket around herself. Surrounded by six million skeletons of people who had already made their final voyage, she tried to imagine what it was going to be like to die. Anna could have told her. But if Anna were still alive, she wouldn’t have known, and Jude wouldn’t have been lost in the catacombs in the first place.

  ANNA’S CHILDREN, HOME from their colleges because things were looking so bad, finally departed. They had been sitting beside Anna’s bed in the Roosevelt all evening, wearing jeans and rugby shirts and acting sullen.

  Then one of Anna’s students arrived with a flute and a music stand to play “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” for Anna. The off-pitch warble filled the room like a robin being tortured. Jude watched Anna struggle to raise her splinted hands to cover her ears. Jude gently maneuvered the student out the door.

  In the silence that followed, Jude took one of Anna’s hands in hers. Undoing the tape, she unwound the gauze until the splint beneath it fell to the floor. Then she moved to the other side of the bed and did the same thing to the other hand. She watched Anna’s fingers as they stirred to life and flexed slightly. She usually undid Anna’s hands until a nurse noticed and made her bind them up again. Anna liked to move her fingers, and Jude liked to feel their warmth when she held them and to rub them with lotion, and to clip and file the nails.

  She picked up the cup of crushed Popsicle and held out a spoonful to Anna just as Anna smacked her lips to signal that she wanted some. The moments of almost uncanny closeness that Jude had begun to experience with her had become more and more frequent, until now they constituted a steady state. By some instinct, Jude knew when and where to scratch her, when she wanted a Popsicle. They had finally achieved that perfect harmony possible for a couple only when one of them is in a coma.

  Jude was surprised to hear herself begin to enunciate in a low, even voice a poem Anna used to recite when they walked along through the swirling apple blossoms in Central Park:

  They are not long, the weeping and the lau
ghter,

  Love and desire and hate:

  I think they have no portion in us after

  We pass the gate.

  They are not long, the days of wine and roses.

  Out of a misty dream

  Our path emerges for a little while, then closes,

  Within a dream.

  Afterward, Jude sat very still, timing her breathing to Anna’s, as she used to during lovemaking. And in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice, she found herself saying, “All right, I guess it’s time now, Anna? Time for you to go. Go ahead. It’s all right. I can take care of myself. Jim can take care of himself. Your students can take care of themselves. Your children can take care of themselves. We’re all fine. Just go. Don’t be afraid. Everything is going to be all right.” For several minutes, she repeated these phrases, understanding that Anna needed to let go of her now but that she needed Jude’s help in order to do so. A sob caught in her throat as she chanted the necessary phrases like a litany.

  But then she jumped up abruptly, as though attacked by a swarm of bees. And all of a sudden, she was absolutely furious. She didn’t want to be in this dreary hospital room any longer, watching bouquets from Anna’s students wilt and shrivel and be replaced, watching the body she had loved rot. She had been here for days. Weeks. Months. Other women her age were out dancing and singing and making love. Damn it, why couldn’t Anna just go ahead and die and get it over with?

  Striding to the far corner, Jude threw herself down in a lounge chair. She lay back and closed her eyes, breathing unevenly.

  She looked around for Molly, but Molly had deserted her years ago. So she jumped on her horse and galloped alone along the beach, salt spray drenching her shirt, hooves pounding beneath her like pistons. She slid off the heaving horse by a dune and watched the turquoise waves arc and tumble, advancing and receding, crashing and hissing, leaving lips of foam flecked with shells like tiny broken teeth.

  Jude opened her eyes and watched the white sheet over Anna’s chest rise and fall time after time, the bellows that was stoking her flame.

  And then she realized that the sheet was still. Getting up, she walked over to the bed. Anna wasn’t breathing anymore. Jude reached down and took one of her hands in both her own and stared at her composed yellow face with disbelief.