Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  Finally, she managed to whisper, “Godspeed, Anna.”

  Anna drew a deep, rattling breath, leaning forward, almost sitting up, vacant lapis eyes wide open, seeming to stare at something across the room. Then she exhaled, eyes fluttering shut, and sank back into her pillows.

  Jude shuddered violently, as though Anna’s soul had just passed right through her own body, the force of its transit carrying her along halfway to the brink of death.

  Then Jude felt elation surge up from the pit of her stomach and spread throughout her body. And she was flooded with the sudden conviction that Anna had just cast aside her scab-pocked body like a withered husk and moved on.

  Jude stood there holding Anna’s hand for a long time as it began to cool and stiffen, unable to make the least effort to comprehend what had been there in her body, which Jude had known so well, that now was absent. And where it had gone.

  JUDE TOUCHED THE FLOOR of hewn stone with her fingertips. It was pitch-black. There was no sound except for some water dripping from the ceiling and her own heartbeat pounding in her ears. She was in the empire of death, surrounded by those who knew the answers to these questions. She had come here like a homing pigeon. Once the 6 million skeletons surrounding her had all loved and suffered in the streets above her head. Now they were here below, neatly stacked domes and cylinders of calcium, finally at rest.

  Jude realized that the only thing she wanted from life anymore was to leave it. It was a Saturday, and Monday was a holiday, so no one would miss her at work until Tuesday. She tried to figure out whether the ticket takers kept track of their visitors. If one fewer emerged at closing time, would they come looking for her? If so, she needed to be dead already. She had a bottle of aspirin in her pocketbook for menstrual cramps. A sorority sister at Vanderbilt had killed herself with a bottle of Bayer aspirin.

  As she planned her death, she began to feel sleepy. Deciding that she wanted to be well rested and wide awake when she made her final journey, she let herself doze for one last time, lulled by the scurrying of rats’ feet like soft whispers in the velvet darkness. The dreaded empire of death was actually a peaceful place. It was in the streets up above that pain roamed and horror reigned.

  Jude’s mother, Molly, Sandy, Anna, and her Tennessee grandparents were planting daylilies all over the ridge where Molly and she had planned to build their cabin. The green river valley below meandered toward the misty mountains. Mockingbirds were calling from the Wildwoods, which were decked out with redbud and dogwood blossoms in shades of pink and crimson and purple and white. Jude dug all afternoon in the steaming soil under a hot spring sun.

  When they had finished, the others came over, hands caked with dirt.

  Anna, whole and well again, said, “Jude, we are happy here, and we want you to be happy there.”

  The others nodded.

  “How can I be happy apart from all of you?” asked Jude.

  “You have to try,” said Molly.

  “It’s too soon for you, Jude,” said Sandy with his sweet smile.

  “Virginians never kill themselves,” said her grandmother.

  “Darling,” said her mother, “once you can love without needing an object, then you are love. And you will rush to unite with love and will leave behind that strange place, so beautiful but so marred by hate.”

  “We are always with you, Jude,” said her grandfather, gesturing to the others. “A cloud of witnesses watching over you.”

  One by one, they dissolved, becoming the sunlight playing on the ripples in the river, and the breeze that rustled the blossoms in the Wildwoods, and the mist that drifted down the coves and veiled the high mountain peaks and knobs.

  JUDE COULDN’T REMEMBER where she was. Someplace as dark and silent as a tomb, except for a steady dripping sound. Then she remembered that she was supposed to kill herself now with her bottle of Bayer. But now it suddenly seemed like a really dumb idea.

  She sat up. She had a headache. She had no idea whether it was day or night, or how long she’d slept. She stood up, feeling dizzy and steadying herself with a hand against the wall. She grabbed her handbag from the floor. The leather strap had been gnawed through. Clutching it, she headed down the tunnel in what she thought was the direction from which she’d come, flashing the light on her key chain now and then, trying to make the battery last. It seemed unlikely that she’d find her way back. Probably she’d wander beneath the streets of Paris until her strength gave out. Then she’d sit down somewhere and await death by starvation and ravening rats. If she was ever found, no one would know that it had been a suicide by default.

  After what seemed like several hours of doomed, dogged plodding, she was astonished to detect a faint light ahead. Soon she heard the hollow echoing voice of a French child telling his mother that dead people were boring.

  Reaching the main corridor, she climbed back over the grating, ignoring some startled German tourists. As she ascended the long, winding staircase to the street, she was pleased to find herself still alive. Death would come soon enough. One day, this baffling life of hers would simply peel away like a bad sunburn.

  She walked out the door into the amber dusk. Asking the date of a barman at a café, she learned she’d been underground for two days. From the way he looked at her, or rather tried to avoid looking at her, she realized that she was a fright in her rumpled suit and chalk-caked boots.

  Getting off the Métro at Place des Abbesses, she wandered down the shopping street, dazzled like Rip van Winkle by the foodstuffs spilling from the shops—grotesque spiny creatures from the sea, slabs of shimmering neon fish, pungent cheeses in all shapes and shades, pastries oozing fruit or dribbled with chocolate or smothered in whipped cream, chickens swiveling on spits, walls of wine for every occasion, exotic fruits and vegetables from the former colonies, which she squeezed and poked as though she knew what she was doing. Suddenly, she was ravenous.

  Back at her apartment, she ran a bath, pouring in some raspberry bubble bath Jasmine had given her that she’d never opened. Shedding her disgusting clothes, she studied herself in the bathroom mirror. Although she admittedly looked better with her clothes on, she wasn’t so bad without them. She subsided into the foam.

  Dressed in fresh jeans and a T-shirt, she set a place for herself on the table by the glass doors, complete with a single coral rose in a bud vase, a cloth mat and napkin, and a candle in a holder. In the kitchen, she alternated firm white rounds of mozzarella with thick, juicy slices of tomato on a bed of crisp romaine, then sprinkled it all with chopped basil and olive oil. She dismembered the herbed chicken, still warm from the shop spit. And she cut up a crusty demibaguette, putting the pieces in a woven basket. She set all this on a wooden tray, along with a wineglass and a chilled bottle of Sancerre, and carried them to the table.

  As she sipped the wine, cold and sharp on her stale tongue, she watched the huge orange sun sink behind the Bois de Boulogne, turning the Eiffel Tower and the Panthéon and the Arc de Triomphe and the Invalides into dark silhouettes on the horizon, fronted by the black arabesques of her wrought-iron railing. Dipping a piece of baguette into the olive oil and the juice from the tomato, she tried to figure out what had come over her two days earlier when she’d been prepared to give up all this splendor in order to die in a stone cell surrounded by rats and bones.

  CHAPTER

  19

  ON HER WAY TO WORK the next morning, Jude took her usual detour across Ile St. Louis. Standing on the sidewalk in front of Olivia’s building, she was surprised to find that everything looked just as it had for the past several weeks, oblivious to her transfiguration in the Catacombs—the maroon door with the lion-head lintel, the elaborate wrought-iron grilles at the windows, the gilded fish-scale downspout, the stone wall above the Seine, the relentless bateaux mouches plowing the silver waters, the thrushes singing in the chestnut trees by the river, the tourists clutching their guidebooks and searching for Camille Claudel’s studio.

  Jude allowed her eyes to
shift to the third floor. The glass doors in Olivia’s bedroom were slightly parted. The sheer curtains were stirring in the breeze, fluttering like a ghost. Olivia was probably right there behind them, asleep in her bed after a late night at the strip club.

  Every cell in Jude’s body screamed out for another try. The night code would be off by now. She could enter the maroon door and climb the steps, ring Olivia’s buzzer. Who knew, maybe Olivia would be pleased to see her.

  Using all the strength at her disposal, Jude turned away from the building and forced herself to plod, one step at a time, toward her office.

  As she left Olivia behind, dozing in the sunlight like a lazy lioness, she sent her a mental apology. Olivia had engineered a light and charming flirtation, designed to disarm Jude’s absurd passion for her in a fashion that would have left Jude’s ego intact. If only she could have accepted it in that spirit, both would have gone through the rest of their lives harboring a sweet memory. Instead, Jude had insisted on turning it into Romeo and Juliet, crawling into her earthen vault and petitioning Death as her witness. As she trudged up the steps to her office, she realized that she was nothing but an uptight Anglo-Saxon asshole.

  Giselle was sitting at her desk as Jude walked past. “Bonjour, Jude,” she called.

  Jude backed up and paused in her doorway. “Bonjour, Giselle,” she replied. “How are you?”

  “Fine, thank you. How was your weekend?”

  Jude smiled wryly. “Fine, thank you.”

  “Did you go away?”

  “Sort of,” said Jude.

  Giselle looked at her quizzically, her copper-colored pre-Raphaelite hair framing her face.

  “Not really. I just did some tourist stuff. The Catacombs.”

  Giselle grimaced. “Not so nice, eh?”

  “I kind of liked it,” said Jude. “But I wouldn’t want to live there.”

  Giselle laughed.

  Jude spent the morning at her desk extracting, adapting, and translating a series of exercises from Anna’s workbook designed to help writing students find their own voices. She and Martine had decided to give them to the schools in hopes of stimulating some more original poems. She remembered when she and Anna had invented the exercises. It had been a happy time, love and work merging seamlessly. The sad thing about happiness was that while you were in it, you believed it would last forever, so you appreciated it less than you might if you realized what a rare and precious gift it was.

  Jude laid down her pen and leaned forward, resting her forehead on her desk. She had just understood where she had gone wrong with Olivia. She had been captivated by Olivia’s physical beauty. She had woven a fantasy around that rather than trying to get past it to the beauty of Olivia’s soul. No wonder Olivia had felt insulted and vengeful.

  Jude reached out for the phone. Then she remembered that she still didn’t know Olivia’s last name or number. Grabbing a fresh sheet of paper, she picked up her pen and began a letter of explanation and regret to Olivia. But right in the middle of assuming the blame for everything that had gone on between them, she paused. How could anyone get past Olivia’s physical beauty to her spiritual beauty when she wouldn’t even sit down and talk to you like a normal person? Besides, Olivia flaunted her wretched body like a baker his cream cakes. Jude ripped up her letter and let the pieces flutter into the trash can like a flock of dying moths.

  Realizing that lunch hour was already under way, Jude stood up and walked down the hallway to the conference room. Half a dozen of her coworkers were sitting beneath the shifting ribbons of sunlight, sipping Evian and nibbling roast chicken. Jude nodded to everyone, sat down, ripped off a hunk of baguette, and picked up a chicken leg.

  Tuning into the debate du jour, she discovered that it concerned the question of whether the modern world was sexually repressed or sexually obsessed. Cecile’s team was maintaining that capitalists had seized control of sexuality via repressive laws and religion in order to divert libido into production. Martine’s team was insisting that, to the contrary, contemporary societies provoked preoccupation with sexuality to drug their citizens into submission—like giving alcohol to Native Americans or heroin to ghetto blacks to prevent them from rioting in the streets.

  “But at least we are agreed, are we not,” inquired Cecile, removing her large red-framed glasses to peer around the table like a NATO commander, “that any discourse on the deployment of sexuality must privilege the issue of power?”

  Martine thought for a moment, inspected her teammates, then nodded reluctantly. She was a woman who hated agreement.

  Jude had finally figured out that the route to conversational brilliance here was to take an assumption, such as that sex shows were sexy, and contradict it. So, launching her first plunge into the waters of lunchtime controversy, she suggested haltingly that Americans were often more interested in the pleasurable sensations their bodies experienced during lovemaking than in power manipulations.

  Everyone looked at her as though she were a kindergarten pupil in a graduate seminar.

  “But of course Americans do not understand eroticism,” said Martine. “That is why it is impossible to be attracted to them. They are too obvious.” She bit off the ball end of a chicken bone and sucked at the marrow. Most of the others nodded agreement.

  So she hadn’t been attracted to Jude? Or was this just another come-on? Suddenly, Jude was fed up with Martine’s bad manners. She had lacked the courage to open herself up to Jude. She had insisted on remaining safe behind her kinky games. She had no idea who Jude really was. Yet just like Martine herself, Jude had earned her spurs in the rodeo of l‘amour. She had won several purple hearts on the killing fields of love. She had crawled on her belly through the trenches of despair. She had faced down death in the foxholes of failed affection. She had stripped off her armor to parade unafraid on the battlements of passion. She deserved honor and respect from her fellow combatants, not contempt.

  Jude felt her own recessive French genes rear up and triumph over Charm Class, yielding a sudden fit of furia francese. In her stumbling French, she told her colleagues that most ancient civilizations such as India and China and Persia had an ars erotica that instructed people, not in how to dominate each other, but in how to cooperate to achieve mutual pleasure. That these pleasures were carefully classified, not as forbidden or permitted, but in terms of quality, intensity, duration, and spiritual significance. That forcing children, as they themselves had been forced, to confess their sexual desires as “sins” and thus teaching them to despise their bodies, was a recent local disease. That they used their endless boring debates on sex and the sexes as foreplay, like debauchees trying to flog a response from senses blocked by misuse or shame. But that elsewhere in the world people possessed ample erotic energy as a natural endowment, which they could call on as they wished without a need for tiresome gimmicks. That some people approached sex as a normal human appetite, not as a sinister plot designed to deprive them of la liberté. That no self-respecting American would want to attract them in any case because they were too weird, and because they ate octopus and tripe. That the world was old and France was young. That the world was large and France was small. That life outside their sacred hexagon was not necessarily as they saw it. That they should stop deconstructing everyone and everything else and deconstruct themselves.

  Remorselessly, Jude vented her months of frustration with Martine and Olivia, heaping one generalization atop another, just as she had watched them do all these weeks, until she had constructed a magnificent sand castle in thin air—one that began to crumble as she realized that she’d just lost her job. Normally, someone would have interrupted her diatribe and saved her from such total self-demolition, but they must have been so astonished to hear her speak, and so ferociously at that, that everyone had remained silent.

  There was a long pause, during which everyone blinked several times. Then Cecile reached over to offer Jude a Gitane, an invitation to join her platoon. Jude declined it.

&n
bsp; Giselle thrust her baguette at Jude like a fencing foil so she could rip off a hunk if she wanted—which she didn’t.

  Gazing at Jude with new interest, Martine murmured, “Mais tu as bien parlé.

  But Jude didn’t care if it turned Martine on to be treated as contemptuously as she treated everyone else. Drawing on Gary Cooper in High Noon for inspiration, she stood up, squared her shoulders, gazed out the window into the midday sun, and marched out the door in her silver-toed cowboy boots.

  Upon reaching the street, Jude had no idea what to do next. All she really wanted was to return to Ile St. Louis. And to kneel before Olivia on the pavement and beg for another chance to behave more lightheartedly. Voluntarily giving up a graveyard love while the other person still walked the earth was unheard of. Yet Jude knew that was what she had to do now if she wanted to avoid another weekend in the Catacombs.

  She dodged through the ambling crowds until she reached the Luxembourg Gardens, where she strolled along the paths of pale dirt, raked into patterns overnight, past orderly ranks of marigolds, geraniums, and artemesia that stood at attention like troops on parade. Past palms and oleanders and orange trees growing in square green boxes. Past ivy trained to hang in symmetrical swags. She came to a cage containing hundreds of espaliered fruit trees, twisted and bound like heretics on the rack into the shape of minorahs, with white paper bags over their nubile fruits.

  Through some lime trees, planted in rows, their tops sheared into rectangles, Jude spotted a bronze lion with a dead ostrich at her feet. And just beyond was an eight-point buck with his doe and fawn, frozen as though by a stun gun while sniffing the morning air.

  Jude descended some steps guarded by two lions that had been turned to stone in midstalk. And in the center of a lawn that was clipped as closely as a putting green, poised on a high stone catafalque, stood Artemis, a quiver of arrows on her back and a young stag leaping by her side. She, too, was frozen in midstride in her flowing tunic, so that she had to stand there eternally in the summer sun and winter winds. A dozen queens of France, several resembling transvestites in their elaborate robes and crowns, gazed down at Artemis from the encircling terrace through pitiless stone eyes.