The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Walking home past the jammed skating rink, her grandmother’s gloved hand holding her arm, Jude said, “By the way, Grandma, I’ve been thinking maybe it’s time for me to move out.”

  Her grandmother looked up at her quickly. “I hope you’re not unhappy with us, my dear.”

  “Not at all. You’ve been wonderful to me. But I guess I’d like my own place. After all, I’m twenty-four years old.”

  They walked on in silence alongside the Sheep Meadow, the huge apartment buildings of Central Park West stacked before them like a child’s blocks under the sullen winter sky.

  “I know it must have been lonely for you. Your grandfather and I aren’t very much fun.”

  Jude smiled. “I feel very comfortable with you, Grandma. But I’m afraid I haven’t really gotten to know Grandpa yet.”

  All she’d succeeded in eliciting from him were the facts: His father and four brothers had fled Alsace in 1870 to avoid fighting in the German army against the French. Having owned a gristmill in a country town, they opened another mill when they reached upstate New York. Jude’s grandfather had parlayed his boyhood experience with the grain trade into a successful career on the commodities exchange.

  “Well,” said her grandmother as they passed some horse-drawn carriages waiting in front of the Tavern on the Green, “you may not realize it, but you remind us of your mother. Your grandfather was devastated when she moved south with your father. Frankly, I think he was half in love with her himself. He avoids you because it’s painful for him to remember her. I’m very sorry. I know that you need to hear whatever he could tell you about her right now. But he just can’t do it. I’m sure it would be wonderful for him if he could. It has been for me.”

  “Why do I remind him of her?” Jude asked. “Do I look like her?”

  “You’re taller, of course, but your faces are similar. Though you have your father’s eyes. Her eyes were blue. I’d say you’re a blend of the two.”

  Jude smiled. Her father had always denied any resemblance. “Why doesn’t Grandpa like my father?”

  Her face clouded. “It’s not that he doesn’t like him. We just didn’t consider him appropriate for your mother.”

  “Why not?”

  She laughed uneasily. “Well, let’s just say that we were snobs. Your father was from Appalachia. He was part Cherokee. We wished him well, but we didn’t want him in our family. I’m ashamed to admit that your grandfather used to refer to him as ‘the hillbilly. ’”

  Jude smiled, thinking about the reality of her father’s life—his mother’s huge white house and voyages around the world, his medical degree from Cornell. L’il Abner he was not.

  “Also, your father was absolutely relentless in his pursuit of your mother, practically camping out on our doorstep and trailing her around the city whenever she went out. Your grandfather felt that he didn’t leave your mother any choice in the matter. After she married him, your grandfather wouldn’t have anything to do with her, although I continued to see her while they were still living in New York and to write her in Tennessee.

  “But once you were born, your grandfather agreed to visit on our way to Florida. When your father went to France during the war, your grandfather invited your mother to move back home with you until his return. But your mother refused, which estranged them once again. And then she died, and it was too late for another reconciliation. It’s a sad and silly story. We were wrong. After all, we had struggled similarly with our own parents because I was Protestant and your grandfather was Catholic. Every generation seems to fight its own battles and then lapse into complacent bigotry.” She sighed. “By the way, have you talked to your father about living alone?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of living alone. There’s an extra room in my friend Sandy’s apartment. It’s closer to Columbia, too.”

  “You want to live with a man?” Her hand tightened on Jude’s arm.

  “It’s one of those huge old places on Riverside Drive. He has four other roommates. One is a woman. Dad says since it’s Sandy, it’s okay. I’ve known him since we were babies. He’s like my brother.”

  For the past several months, she’d seen a lot of Sandy. There seemed nothing they couldn’t say to each other. Often they lay like a long-married couple on his mattress on the floor, watching old movies on television in their sock feet. Or else he studied opera scores while she marked up her history texts with yellow Magic Marker. Occasionally, they fell asleep side by side, but Jude always had to dash out into the night to take a taxi back to her grandparents so they wouldn’t worry. If her room was just down the hall, life would be much simpler.

  As Jude hung their coats in the hall closet, her grandmother said, “Before you leave, though, Jude, I want to give you something.” She vanished into the dining room, returning with a flask about a foot high that had lion-head handles. On it was painted a scene in misty blues and golds of Atalanta, the unvanquished, stooping to pick up a golden ball just dropped by her competitor Melanion. He was sprinting past her, backed by trees and mountains. A hovering cherub, holding the victor’s laurel wreath, appeared to be trying to persuade Atalanta not to be duped by these silly golden balls into losing her first race.

  “I gave this to your mother,” her grandmother said, handing it carefully to Jude, “but she never liked it. She didn’t even take it to Tennessee. It was made by one of our Huguenot ancestors in Nevers, just before they fled France at the end of the seventeenth century. It’s almost a museum piece, so take good care of it. It was given to me by my grandmother. It seems to be true that interest in these things alternates generations.”

  “I love it, Grandma. Thank you.”

  “Thank you, as I said, my dear, for being interested. I had thought my poor Huguenots would end with me and be forgotten. The dead depend on the living to carry on their memory.”

  “So I gather,” said Jude a bit grimly.

  Her grandfather came out of his study and looked down from the balcony. “What’s going on?”

  “Jude is leaving us, I’m afraid, dear.”

  “So soon? Where to?” Jude was pleased to note that he sounded distressed.

  “To a room in her friend Sandy’s apartment.”

  “Ah, a young man. Then I know there is nothing I can say to persuade her to stay.”

  “No.”

  Jude felt strange being discussed in the third person, as though she’d already left. “But I’ll be only twenty blocks away, Grandpa. I’ll stop by all the time. You’ll never get rid of me.” She felt guilty, however, as though she’d relentlessly extracted from them what she needed and was now moving on.

  “I hope not,” her grandfather replied in a fatigued voice. He turned around and shuffled back toward his study, shoulders bowed, an unhappy old man who had never recovered from losing the daughter he’d loved too much. This was the dark side to graveyard love. The Marschallin might be right after all: Maybe the proper conduct of life required the ability to let go of love when the time came.

  JUDE SAT IN HER CHAIR behind the curtains, watching Samson, draped in chains, strangle a snotty Philistine prince in front of a pagan temple while a golden idol spewed flames in the background. As Delilah awaited Samson in her bedchamber, Jude sneaked over to Sandy at his switchboard, resting her hand on his shoulder while he turned the pages of his score and spoke quietly into his mouthpiece.

  Samson finally arrived, wearing a leather tunic that revealed his hairy barrel chest and tree-trunk legs.

  Delilah began weaving around him in a transparent peignoir, singing in French, “…my heart opens to your voice as a flower to the dawn…. Respond to my tenderness; fill me with ecstasy….”

  Falling to his knees and burying his face in her silky gown, Samson joined in with his deep baritone: “…the blossom trembles in the gentle breeze. So does my heart tremble, longing for your voice.…”

  Glancing down at Sandy, Jude saw that he was mouthing Delilah’s lines. And tears had flooded his eyes behind his octagonal gl
asses. Suddenly, Jude understood his fascination with opera. The plots often embodied this perennial dream of tenderness taming savagery. And even when deceit and blood lust won out, the murdered actors stood up afterward for their curtain calls. On the playground back home, the Commie Killers had tormented Sandy for preferring chess and opera to football and rock ‘n’ roll. He had endured it all without protest. But on stage at the opera, the Commie Killers were vanquished. She absently stroked his blond curls with her hand.

  Looking up, he reached for her hand and knitted his fingers with hers. A jolt shot up Jude’s arm, so powerful that her hand shook. Sandy’s sweetness moved her as no other man ever had. And because of it, Jude was beginning to want to give him everything. It wasn’t that she was looking for the intensity of her experience with Molly that night on the raft. Although it remained vivid in her memory, the way a flashbulb leaves its imprint on a piece of unexposed film, she had written it off to unstable adolescent hormones. All she wanted now was some cozy companionship and physical affection with someone she cared about.

  After the pagan temple had crashed down around everyone’s shoulders, the painted cardboard blocks swinging from invisible ropes inches above the singers’ heads, the curtain descended and the crowd erupted into bravos as though at a bullfight.

  On the walk back to the apartment, Jude and Sandy murmured a few appreciative words about the performance before falling silent. And unlike their usual silences, this one was uncomfortable. Something was waiting to be said, but neither was willing to take the risk of saying it.

  Entering the apartment, they found the living room empty of people. But some beer bottles, an ashtray full of cigarette butts, and a cardboard pizza box sat on the carpet by the armchairs. The odor of marijuana smoke and pizza filled the air. The only thing Jude really missed about her grandparents’ apartment was their French cook. In a matter of months, she’d moved from ham hocks to cassoulet to Chinese takeout, and she was suffering from gastronomic culture shock.

  Sandy and she walked down the shadowy hallway to their bedrooms. Outside Jude’s door, they paused. Jude tried to decide whether to invite him in. It should be simple, something both had no doubt done before with other people. Yet neither made a move. Not only had the hand-holding during Samson and Delilah not broken the ice, but it seemed as well to have introduced some new awkwardness that Jude couldn’t fathom. Finally, Sandy leaned down and pecked her cheek. “Sleep tight,” he said as he turned to walk to his own door, tennis shoes squeaking on the wood floor.

  Lying in bed, Jude could hear Mona next door, thrashing and gasping with her latest lover. Once they really got going, the bed-springs began to shriek like an entire pen of pigs being slaughtered. This often recurred sporadically throughout the night. Jude was awed by Mona’s stamina. In the morning, she sometimes ran into the men in the bathroom, standing bare-chested in unzipped jeans, gazing at themselves in the mirror, eyes fatigued, faces gray and haggard, as though trying to figure out what disaster had just befallen them. Mona didn’t usually appear until noon, wandering down the hall in a hot-pink chenille robe, lips chapped and swollen but smiling, mascara smudged around her eye sockets. Humming tunes like “The Impossible Dream,” “My Way,” and “I Gotta Be Me,” she mixed ghastly concoctions in the blender that involved raw eggs and brewer’s yeast, no doubt the source of her potency.

  Jude wrapped the pillow around her head, but she could still hear the bedsprings pounding like a printing press. She wondered whether she should just get up and go to Sandy in his bed. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t send her away. But they were both Southerners: He was the man; therefore, he was supposed to do the pursuing. Sliding a hand between her legs, she gripped it tightly with her thighs and directed all her mental energies toward him, willing him to appear by her bedside.

  The next thing she knew, it was morning and she was late for class. Jumping up and throwing on her jeans and turtleneck, she raced down the hallway and into the living room. Earl, who danced in chorus lines for Broadway shows, had one heel propped on the windowsill, head resting on his knee. Dressed in a sweat suit, he looked like a soft sculpture. “Morning, Earl,” she called as she hurried past. But he was so shy that there was no reply.

  In the kitchen, Sandy was sitting at the table with half a dozen cereal boxes before him. When he was a boy, his mother insisted on buying only one box at a time, finishing it before buying the next. Now that he was on his own, Sandy bought a dozen different brands at once and sampled several every morning. It seemed a harmless-enough form of rebellion, when his peers were dumping blood on draft records at recruitment centers all across town.

  He looked up at her and smiled. “Morning, Jude. Sleep well?”

  “Yes, thanks. And you?”

  Gazing at her with a perplexed frown, he said, “Not so great.”

  “No?”

  “No.” He lowered his eyes.

  “I’m late,” she said, grabbing a glass and pouring some orange juice.

  “There’s a good movie tonight at ten,” he called as she tossed down the juice and dashed out the door. “Don’t be late.”

  JUDE AND SANDY LAY on his bed drinking red wine, eating pretzels, and watching the movie. A man and a woman, married to other people, had met by chance in a train station and fallen in love. It was what Sandy and Simon called a “chick flick,” in contrast to “dick flicks,” which involved car chases, war, and violent crime.

  Jude could tell that Sandy wasn’t really paying attention, and neither was she. They had carefully avoided touching all evening. And they were now lying with the width of a sidewalk between them, arms crossed over their chests like funerary statues.

  Sandy set his empty glass and the wadded pretzel bag on the rug beside the mattress, so Jude put her glass down, too. Both stared straight ahead at the TV screen while the couple struggled endlessly with their guilt toward their spouses over their platonic love for each other.

  Sandy uncrossed his arms and stretched them awkwardly alongside his body, fists clenched, the muscles of his lower arms flexing and unflexing like a pulsing heart. As Jude watched from the corner of her eye, his hand unclenched, stirred, and crept a few inches into the no-man’s-land between them. So Jude uncrossed her arms, too, and placed them on the bed beside her.

  The couple had arranged to be alone together in a friend’s apartment to consummate their love. As they fell into each other’s arms, the friend arrived home early from work.

  Jude scratched her head, then let that hand fall a foot away from her side. Sandy put his hand to his mouth to cover a yawn and returned it to the mattress within inches of Jude’s hand.

  Anguished, the couple parted in the train station where they’d first met, the man en route to South Africa with his family so he and the woman need never encounter each other again. Sandy’s hand twitched where it lay, seeming to want to take Jude’s but not daring to. She had watched it so carefully that she was sure its pattern of branching veins, like a turquoise road map, was now etched indelibly into her gray matter.

  “Well,” murmured Sandy as the credits rolled, “they always say the only love that lasts is unrequited love.”

  “Who does?” asked Jude irritably. There was a time for caution and a time for getting the show on the road. What was he waiting for?

  The door flew open, and in strode Simon in his brown leather jacket and Greek fisherman’s cap. Sandy shoved his hand under his thigh, like a crab scuttling away from a squid.

  “Hope I’m not interrupting?” asked Simon, taking off his jacket and cap and dropping them on the floor.

  He studied the tableau vivant on the bed for a long moment. “Now that you’re living here, Jude, we should fill you in on the drill: I read Sandy a bedtime story every night.”

  Crawling up the mattress, he settled himself between them. Then he extracted a newspaper clipping from his pocket and read about a Japanese fisherman who put his wife in a net and dragged her behind his boat as shark bait.

  Jud
e and Sandy smiled politely.

  Simon read a second clipping concerning an Australian cyclist who had been attacked by a 350-pound ostrich, which she had managed to strangle with her bare hands.

  Sandy lay there in silence while Jude tried to figure out what was going on.

  “I was riding the IRT at rush hour this afternoon,” Sandy said, “and this guy in a leather cap who was crushed up against me whispered in my ear, ‘Drop dead, faggot.’”

  “And what did you say?” asked Simon, studying him with interest.

  “Nothing.”

  “Why would he say that?” asked Jude. All her life, people had been calling poor Sandy a faggot. She’d spent a lot of time defending his honor in high school.

  Simon turned his stunning green eyes on Jude, saying, “Go on, mate. Tell her.”

  Sandy said nothing.

  Jude leaned forward to look at him. His face was the color of a cooked lobster.

  “I guess you don’t need to,” she said, rolling off the bed. “Sweet dreams, boys.” She closed the door behind her.

  Jude lay in bed, struggling to sleep so that she wouldn’t have to feel so stupid. So the rumors about Sandy in high school had been true. And she had been the only one naïve enough not to believe them. And he had played on her naïveté, urging her to move in, leading her to think that a romance was possible between them. But why? Probably so that he could have the cover of respectability.

  As she wept into her pillow in the dark, Mona’s bed began to squeak rhythmically. Mona started to gasp in spasms. It was like a jazz ensemble. Soon the man would add his grunts to the improvisation, and then Mona would alternate her gasps with shrieks and moans.