The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Jude rolled over and pounded on the wall with her fist. “For God’s sake, shut up!” she screamed.

  The squeaking ceased abruptly and there was a long silence. Finally, it started up again, slowly and tentatively at first but rapidly gaining confidence and momentum. Jude decided to move back to her grandparents’ in the morning.

  JUDE WAS WRAPPING HER Atalanta flask in a sweatshirt when someone knocked at her door.

  “Come in,” she said glumly.

  The door opened, and Sandy stood there in his bleached overalls, face and neck bright red, bangs splayed out around his cowlick as though he’d been standing in the funnel of a tornado. “Jude, I guess we need to talk,” he said.

  “What’s there to say?” She placed the flask in her suitcase.

  “Well, that I’m sorry, for one thing.”

  She stopped packing to give him a look. “I thought we could tell each other anything. So why didn’t you tell me this?”

  “I guess I was afraid you’d be appalled. And I can see that I was right.”

  “I’m not exactly appalled.”

  “What are you, then?”

  “Confused, I suppose. What was that Dance of the Mating Hands all about?”

  He grimaced. “I guess I hoped something might work out between us.”

  “And where would that have left Simon?” she asked angrily.

  “All I know is what I felt. And feel. Life outside of Tidewater Estates can sometimes be complicated.”

  “Your life certainly seems to be,” snapped Jude. She turned her back on him to stare out the window at the Ferris wheel in the amusement park across the river. She’d miss this madcap view of roller coasters and sailing yachts and garish sunsets.

  “Please try to understand, Jude. Simon is my Molly. But that doesn’t prevent me from loving you as well.”

  “So who does that make me? Ace Kilgore?” As she turned back around to study his earnest scarlet face, she softened. What he’d said was true. A current of connection that was almost palpable flowed between them. She had felt this with no one else but Molly. If it wasn’t love, what was it? All the hours and days spent with Jerry and Bradley and a couple of others, in bed and out, talking and laughing and fooling around—that had been something else, often very pleasant, occasionally exciting, sometimes boring or annoying, but not love.

  “There are different kinds of love,” Sandy said, looking at the floor, “and different ways of expressing them. We can find a way, Jude. Please don’t go. You and I have never been normal. Why should we start now?”

  Jude smiled at his logic. Perhaps she could model herself after the Marschallin, who had vowed to love her count enough so that she could love even his love for someone else. It seemed a superhuman feat, but Jude knew from her years with Molly that real love involved more than just generating friction between various body parts, as though human beings were nothing more than cicadas droning in the waning summer dusk. And real love, if you found it, seemed the only thing that mattered. The rest was just passing the time until death claimed you.

  Removing the flask from her suitcase, she unwrapped it and returned it to its spot on her windowsill. “Okay,” she said.

  Sandy grinned.

  CHAPTER>

  10

  ONE WALL OF THE PENTHOUSE was glass, and through it Jude could see the lights of lower Manhattan spread out below her like a carpet of glowworms. A Marlboro man, a state trooper, and a tutued ballerina with thick ankles were passing a joint beside tubs of blue-gray junipers on the balcony.

  The living room was packed. Sandy, wearing a white-net strapless gown with a hoop skirt, a black bouffant wig, and elbow-length gloves, was Scarlett O‘Hara. Simon, in a Confederate army uniform, with a sword in a silver scabbard and black boots to his knees, was Ashley Wilkes. They planned to trade costumes the next Halloween.

  Jude was wearing a swirling baby-blue chiffon Loretta Young hostess gown, a merry widow with Kotex stuffed into the too-ample cups, stiletto heels, rhinestone jewelry, white gloves, and a blond Dolly Parton wig. And she had on more makeup than an embalmed corpse. Wiggling her way to the doorway of the cleared-out dining room, she watched the dancers writhing shoulder-to-shoulder, drinks sloshing, heads ducking the swaying crystal chandelier, elbows pumping like pistons.

  Jude felt something cold and wet between her shoulder blades. A deep voice whispered in her ear, “I’d like to crawl up under that skirt, darling, and suck that stiff piece of meat between your legs.”

  Jude turned her head and met the glazed gray eyes of Mae West. They scrutinized hers, turning suddenly bewildered. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re not a man.”

  “Sorry,” said Jude.

  Removing his glass from between her shoulders, he flounced off with a toss of his blond fall.

  Jude felt guilty even being at the party, since she was straight. “Don’t worry,” Sandy had said as she made him up in the bathroom at home. “There are always a few hets at these things, trying to ‘pass.’ Besides, maybe you’ll meet a nice woman.” He grinned with his cherry red lips.

  “I’m afraid I’m not that kind of girl,” she said, carefully dotting a beauty spot on his cheek with her eyeliner.

  “And what kind of girl are you, my dear?” asked Simon, leaning in the bathroom doorway, twirling his waxed mustache tip like Simon Legree. (Jude had just read that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s model for Simon Legree had been a Huguenot. She was trying to decide whether to break the bad news to her grandmother.)

  “A fag hag, apparently,” said Jude, rubbing rouge into Sandy’s cheekbone.

  Her struggle to love Sandy enough to love even his love for Simon had consumed quite a few months. She had watched with misery as the two tumbled and tussled on Sandy’s bed, cuddling and cosseting each other. And she couldn’t help thinking that if only her anatomy had been male, she could have been in Simon’s place. She didn’t covet a penis per se, but she wouldn’t have minded having one in order to have access to those who did covet them.

  Some nights after Jude had gone to bed, Simon and Sandy departed for their sublife of bars, bathhouses, piers on the Hudson, and seedy movie theaters. Occasionally, it involved costumes, such as Sandy’s yellow hard hat and grease monkey coveralls and Simon’s fringed chaps and leather vest. And it often involved drugs with nicknames Jude couldn’t keep straight, poppers and angel dust and black beauties, which they traded with their friends like marbles or baseball cards. Sometimes Jude heard them come crawling home in the dawn like mauled tomcats. This bad-boy act was a facet to Sandy that she’d never seen before. It seemed to clash with the daylight choirboy she knew so well.

  “So how’s it going, Jude?” yelled Sandy over the Jefferson Airplane, putting his arm around her and hauling her to his side so that his hoop skirt lurched upward, revealing lace garters and knobby knees.

  Arranging the blond corkscrew curls around her face, Jude said, “This guy in drag got annoyed with me because I’m not a man. I’m getting confused.” She was also getting drunk. The room was beginning to sway along with the dancers.

  As Sandy was swept away by a tide of revelers, Joan of Arc appeared before Jude, wearing chain mail, dark tights, and shiny metal shin guards. All Jude could see of the face behind the visored helmet were the eyes, which were lapis lazuli in the shadows, just like Molly’s. For a moment, she couldn’t remember if she was awake or asleep. Her heart lurched unsteadily.

  “Molly?” she said.

  “Excuse me?” said Joan of Arc.

  “Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

  “I am someone else,” she said, eyes crinkling with amusement.

  Jude laughed.

  As the stunning blue eyes probed hers, Jude felt her flesh prickle.

  “You make a beautiful woman,” murmured Joan of Arc, one hand holding a staff with an attached blue banner studded with white fleurs-de-lis.

  “I am a woman,” said Jude.

  “Obviously. And a most attractive one, too.�
��

  Joan was dragged off by a crowd of revelers pressing toward the dance floor, where the Jefferson Airplane were shouting, “Don’t you want somebody to love? Don’t you need somebody to love? Wouldn’t you love somebody to love? You’ve got to find somebody to love!…”

  William, the host, loomed in front of Jude. He was dressed as a Roman senator, in a white toga with a wreath on his head. A labor lawyer by day, he was pale and pudgy, like a pregnant ghost. His lover, Sid, was dressed as a gladiator, in some crossed leather straps, sandals, and a pouch for his genitals. But since he was a stevedore, he had the build to carry it off.

  “Having fun, my pet?” asked William, repositioning his wreath.

  “It’s a wonderful party, William. Who’s the woman dressed as Joan of Arc, by the way?”

  He wrinkled his shiny bulbous nose. “Her name is Anna Olsen. She’s a poet and a teacher. But forget about her, Jude. She’s bad news.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of her like that.”

  “No, certainly not,” said William sternly. “I forgot. Our divine Jude is most regrettably het-ero-sex-ual.” He enunciated each syllable with deep, mocking respect.

  “Why is she bad news?” demanded Jude, smiling tolerantly.

  William drifted away toward the plate-glass window like a blowfish in an overpopulated aquarium. Jude called after him, “William, why is she bad news?”

  SANDY, SIMON, AND JUDE stumbled up the sidewalk, raincoats over their costumes. No taxi would stop for them because they looked both demented and drunk. So they were trudging north from the Village en route to Riverside Drive. Sandy and Jude had removed the spike heels from their blistered feet and were limping along in tattered stockings. Sandy’s skirt was dragging the dirty sidewalk like a flaccid peacock tail. Jude was walking in the middle, arms linked through theirs, still a bit shaken by mistaking Joan of Arc for Molly. Was Molly now going to start invading her waking hours as well?

  “Sandy, you look like Scarlett in the turnip patch after the burning of Atlanta,” she observed.

  “I know. And my hair—I can’t do a thing with it.” He yanked off his black wig and tossed it into a trash basket.

  Giggling, they passed some young men who were standing by the entrance to the Port Authority. One in a leather cap and motorcycle boots called to Sandy, “Come over here, faggot. Give me a blow job, will you, darling?” His friends laughed and punched his tattooed biceps.

  The man followed them up the sidewalk, stroking the crotch of his tight jeans and murmuring, “I got something here I could shove between those pretty red lips of yours.” His friends ambled along behind him, making obscene sucking sounds.

  Jude tightened her grip on Simon’s trembling arm to prevent him from turning around and saying something that would get them all killed.

  The men finally got bored and went away.

  “I always get bussed at the bus,” Sandy said with a sigh.

  “Very funny,” growled Simon.

  “I suppose we asked for that,” said Sandy. “Swishing around the streets in these getups.”

  “I thought this was the land of the free?” said Simon.

  “Free if you’re normal. Perverts must pay. You know what? I’m pretty sure that’s the same guy who called me a faggot on the IRT the other day. They both had leather caps and blind right eyes.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Simon.

  A taxi finally stopped for them, and they rode back to the apartment in silence, Sandy’s net skirt filling the backseat like foam in a beer mug.

  Outside Sandy’s room, Jude kissed them both on the cheek and headed down the hall.

  “Jude,” called Sandy.

  She stopped and looked back at him. His face was scarlet beneath his smudged makeup.

  “We’d love for you to stay with us tonight if you want to.”

  Simon nodded, hand absently stroking his filigreed sword handle.

  Jude looked back and forth between them, Scarlett O‘Hara and Ashley Wilkes in the wake of Sherman’s March to the Sea. After the hatred she had just witnessed in the street, it would be reassuring to reassert the power of love.

  “Uh, could you do that? I mean…I thought…aren’t you…”

  “We have both been known to make exceptions for irresistibly lovely women,” murmured Simon, smiling gently beneath his drooping mustache, neon eyes glowing in the shadowy hallway.

  Jude was astonished to find herself seriously considering the idea. She’d come a long way since the Virginia Club Colonial Cotillion.

  “I’m afraid it would be too kinky for a simple Huguenot girl from Tennessee,” she finally concluded. “But thank you for the sweet invitation.”

  “Just say the word if you change your mind,” said Sandy. He looked relieved.

  “We would have fun,” Simon assured her.

  Jude smiled. “I’ll let you know, boys.” Chiffon skirt swirling, she swept down the hallway, élan restored.

  Lying in bed, she became intrigued by the mechanics of it all—how to keep track of two penises in various stages of tumescence. One was complicated enough. She would probably feel as frantic as someone in a straitjacket with a case of poison ivy. But it certainly seemed the most interesting way to resolve their triangle.

  She fell asleep for a while. When she woke up, she found that she had in fact changed her mind. She got out of bed, slipped on her robe, and tiptoed down the hallway to Sandy’s door. Placing her ear against it, she heard nothing. Either they’d gone out or they were asleep. She had no idea what time it was. Maybe she could just crawl in between them and see what happened. After all, they had issued her a standing invitation.

  Slowly she turned the handle and opened the door. Across the room, she saw them, naked in the moonlight through the window. Sandy was bent over, legs planted well apart, gripping the windowsill with his hands and his teeth. Simon, standing behind him, grasped Sandy’s hips with both hands. He was rocking back and forth against him, murmuring things Jude couldn’t distinguish, while Sandy gasped and moaned and gnawed the windowsill.

  Seeing the light from the cracked door fall across Sandy’s back, Simon froze. He looked back at her—and it wasn’t Simon. For a moment, Jude thought it was the young man with the blind eye from the bus station. But then she wasn’t sure.

  Sucking air through clenched teeth, Sandy snarled in a voice like the growl of a cornered beast, “Jesus Christ, Jude, get the fuck out of here!”

  Backing into the hallway, Jude closed the door and leaned against the wall, mortified and afraid—and aroused. Shivering violently, she returned to her room and climbed back into bed, where she lay perfectly still, breathing heavily.

  SANDY AND JUDE WERE STROLLING down Columbus Avenue inspecting the Roosevelt, where her father had been an intern. For several years, he had ridden the yelping ambulances into alleys where no one sane would venture on foot. The hospital was looking seedy, with newspapers and fast-food wrappers blown up in sodden heaps against the redbrick walls. Across Fifty-eighth Street was a Renaissance Revival apartment building from the turn of the century, with arched windows, and designs formed by blue-and-gold tiles inlaid among the red bricks. The windows were boarded up, and antiwar graffiti was spray-painted across the plywood—peace symbols and YANKS OUT OF NAM and MAKE LOVE NOT WAR. A sign on the door announced that the building was slated for demolition.

  “My parents lived on the fifth floor of that building after they got married,” said Jude as a sharp wind off the Hudson came swirling down the street. She and Sandy were being very careful with each other this morning, keeping things light and polite, as though by not acknowledging the events of the previous night they’d dissolve.

  “It’s sad to see a noble old place like that on its last legs,” said Sandy. “When you think about all the lives that were lived in there. The joy and the sorrow those walls must have absorbed.”

  “My God,” said Jude, “I just realized: I must have been conceived in there. When they headed south, my mother was pregn
ant with me.”

  “Ha!” said Sandy. “So you’re actually a Yankee!”

  “Thank God my Virginia grandmother isn’t around to hear this.”

  “Imagine that,” said Sandy, wrapping his arms around himself for warmth. “You’ve returned to the site of your inception. Like a salmon swimming upstream to her primordial spawning grounds.”

  “Let’s not get carried away,” suggested Jude. “Where do you think you were conceived?” They headed back uptown to meet Jude’s grandparents for brunch at Café des Artistes.

  “Right there in Tidewater Estates, I imagine. On a Saturday morning in midwinter. Saturday mornings were the only time they ever did it, as far as I could tell. My father would hand me a bowl of Cheerios and lock me in the playroom with my erector set. They didn’t appear until lunchtime, and they remained in a haze of well-being for the rest of the weekend. I always waited until Saturday afternoon to ask for things they might object to.”

  “But maybe they were on a vacation somewhere more exotic?”

  “Not bloody likely. Even their vacations were humdrum. Gatlinburg or Ruby Falls or Rock City.”

  “So where did all your evil genius come from?” asked Jude.

  “Someone somewhere along the line must have cut loose with a hired hand.”

  “By the way,” said Jude, unable to endure this charade any longer, “I’m sorry about last night.”

  Sandy blushed violently. “I’m sorry I was…otherwise engaged. Please try me again sometime.”

  Jude said nothing for a while. Finally, she replied, “I don’t think so, Sandy. You’re out of my league.”

  “So I gather you’re shocked?”

  “Who was he?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Where was Simon?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Do you really think this is wise?”

  “Wisdom has nothing to do with it,” said Sandy curtly.

  “Clearly.”

  The truth was, Jude realized as Sandy opened the restaurant door for her, that she was afraid of him now, as though he were the carrier of some dark, brute force brought home from the docks, about which she knew little and wanted to know less. And the knowledge that a succession of strangers apparently wandered around their apartment in the middle of the night left her very uneasy. But it was, after all, Sandy’s apartment. And she was unable to deny that the sight of him and the stranger grappling in the moonlight had excited her.