by Lisa Alther
“WE USED TO BRING your mother here for Sunday lunch,” Jude’s grandfather said to Jude as he trimmed the fat off his sirloin. “In the days before that dreadful word brunch was ever invented.”
Naked nymphets were cavorting on the walls all around them, behind forests of healthy indoor plants.
“I remember Jude’s mother pretty well,” said Sandy as he ripped apart a piece of baguette. “She used to give me a butterscotch candy whenever she saw me on the sidewalk in Tidewater Estates. So I started going over there all the time. She asked me to teach Jude to ride her new tricycle. Jude’s legs were so short that her feet kept slipping off and spinning the pedals. And she thought that was so neat that she couldn’t be bothered to try anything else.”
Everyone laughed.
“Once she caught on, though,” Sandy added, “she was a demon. She’d race down the block toward the highway before anyone realized she was gone. Her mother used to bribe me with candies to keep up with her.”
“And here I thought you just liked me,” said Jude. She hadn’t seen him in a jacket and tie since he was at Exeter. He looked deceptively respectable.
“I must have, because I kept at it even after your mother died.”
“Well, Jude tells us you are like a brother to her,” said Jude’s grandmother in her navy wool suit, Huguenot cross at her throat. “That makes you our grandson, and I want you to know that you will always be welcome in our home.”
“Thank you very much,” said Sandy. “I’m honored.”
Jude studied her honorary brother as he bewitched her grandparents. If only Sandy weren’t who he was, she and he would have made the perfect couple. But he was who he was, whoever that might be, and he would never be hers. The time had come to find a lover she could actually have, Jude had concluded, one who approximated the man she’d imagined Sandy to be. She’d been thinking about offering the position to Craig, a fellow Ph.D. candidate with whom she often discussed the Franco-Prussian War over cups of coffee at the West End Bar. Recently, he’d begun to touch her forearm as they talked and to press her knee with his beneath the table. He was too thin and he reeked of sandalwood incense, but otherwise he filled the bill.
“I remember the day Jude’s father came home from the war,” Sandy was saying.
Jude looked at her grandfather, who was listening to Sandy with attention. He seemed to have relaxed around the subject of Jude’s mother. Maybe hearing Jude and her grandmother discuss her so much had desensitized him.
“The whole town went down to the train station and waved little American flags on sticks. The high school band was playing this god-awful mess that was supposed to be ‘Stars and Stripes Forever.’ Jude’s mother was carrying Jude on her hip. Her father climbed off the train in his uniform, and I thought he was the most handsome man I’d ever seen. Jude, who hadn’t seen him since she was an infant, took one look at him, smiled coyly, reached out her arms, and cooed, ‘Daddy!’ And everybody laughed and cheered.”
Jude watched her grandparents smile sadly as the busboy removed their plates.
“He was always a fine-looking man,” agreed her grandfather.
Jude and her grandmother glanced at him, then at each other.
“Tall and lean and broad-shouldered,” continued her grandfather. “With that copper skin and those mink-brown eyes.”
Jude’s grandmother shot her an astonished smile.
“I imagine y‘all don’t remember meeting me at the funeral,” said Sandy, “but I remember you. Because you were the first Yankees I’d ever seen, and I was disappointed that you looked so normal.”
“What were you expecting?” asked Jude’s grandfather. “Horns and cloven feet?”
“Something like that,” said Sandy. “But the only sinister thing about you was the dead fox around your wife’s neck.”
“I remember that fox,” said Jude. “It had beady orange eyes.”
“But I’m not even a Yankee,” said her grandfather. “My family was in Alsace during your civil war.”
Sandy smiled. “To Southerners, every American who isn’t a Southerner is a Yankee.”
By the time Jude and Sandy left her grandparents beneath the Tiffany light above their doorway, Sandy had promised them a free box at the opera. Jude’s grandmother had written down his address so she could put him on the mailing list for the National Huguenot Society’s newsletter, and her grandfather had noted his phone number so he could call him for a game of squash at the New York Athletic Club.
“My God, what a love feast,” said Jude as they walked down 67th Street beneath the bare trees.
“Can I help it if I’m irresistible?” asked Sandy.
“Probably,” said Jude. “But don’t stop. It’s so charming. Wait just a minute—you don’t even know how to play squash.”
Sandy grinned. “No. But I like locker rooms.”
“With my grandfather?”
“He’s very attractive, with all that steel-gray hair and that gun-slinger jaw.”
“You’re sick,” said Jude.
“I thought you said I was charming?”
“You’re both. That’s what makes you so dangerous.” She was only half-kidding. How would she ever be able to integrate his daylight and moonlight selves?
“I like being perceived as dangerous,” he admitted. “I was always such a Boy Scout back home.”
“Well, you seem to be making up for lost time,” murmured Jude.
Sandy glanced at her. “And you don’t like it?”
“Not much,” Jude replied hesitantly, appalled by the excitement she still felt when she pictured the faceless stranger thrusting into him.
“Well, let’s see if I can defend myself to you, Jude. For years and years, I tried to be a good boy. For instance, I never touched you, however much I might have wanted to. You would have been shocked, but I don’t think you’d have turned me down.”
Jude thought for a moment, then shook her head no. “Maybe I wish you had, Sandy,” she said, wondering if she had returned his love for her at that time whether his desire for men would have emerged nonetheless. Probably.
“Well, maybe I wish that, too. But I didn’t. Instead, I bottled up my libido for years and years. When I got to London and started going to gay bars, I met hundreds of former Eagle Scouts just like myself. And we gave each other what we’d been doing without for all those years. Without having to say I love you, or to ask each other to go steady, or even to know each other’s names. It was dangerous and mysterious and exciting. And it still is.”
Jude reached over for his hand. Knitting fingers, they walked along Broadway in silence. What would happen, Jude wondered, if they should ever both want each other at the same time?
“But surely this is something you understand, Jude?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, you were always a bit of a Girl Scout back home yourself. You must have had to confront your own shadow side by now—the part of you that longs for your dutiful everyday self to be obliterated by some all-consuming passion?”
Jude looked at him mutely, not knowing the answer to such an alarming question. Her everyday self had been obliterated only once—that night on the raft with Molly. And it had been overwhelming. But she didn’t expect it to happen ever again. And she couldn’t have said that she wanted it to.
LATER THAT WEEK AFTER a study session at the Columbia library, Jude and Craig ran the gauntlet of antiwar protesters who, waving Chippendale chair legs, defended the captured administration building. Back at Jude’s apartment, she sneaked him down the hallway and into her bedroom. The night that ensued was uninspired, since it was sparked by only lukewarm affection and respect. But Jude made as much noise as possible within the bounds of credibility, as retaliation against Mona and Sandy.
In the sunny kitchen the next morning, Sandy’s face was grim. He practically bumped chests with Craig, like rival seals. Taking the hint, Craig departed quickly.
“You could have at least been civi
l,” Jude said to Sandy after letting Craig out the door.
“I don’t have to be civil to any old scum you happen to drag in off the street,” he snapped, grabbing several cereal boxes from the shelf.
“What about the scum you drag home? Besides, Craig’s not scum. He’s very sweet and bright.” She hacked off a slice of bread and thrust it into the toaster.
“What would your father say?” He grabbed a bowl and slammed it down on the table.
Jude laughed incredulously. “Sandy, snap out of it.”
“Out of what?”
“I think you’re jealous.” She studied him with gratified amusement.
“Oh, sure. Right. A gay man jealous of a straight woman.”
“What’s your problem then?” The toast popped up. She buttered it and spread it with raspberry jam.
He said nothing for a long time, pouring and mixing several cereals, hurling flakes around the room. Then he smiled sheepishly. “My problem is that I’m jealous.”
“There. That’s better,” said Jude, patting his shoulder.
“Don’t ever do that to me again,” he said, looking up at her through bloodshot eyes.
“I’ll do whatever I please.” She headed out the door, carrying her toast.
“Yes, I know,” he said, sadly munching his flakes. “You always have.”
SIMON AND JUDE WERE SITTING propped up on Sandy’s bed splitting a pepperoni pizza from a cardboard box and drinking V-8 juice. They’d tried to wait for Sandy, but hunger had won out. Scattered across the spread were pages from a manuscript Simon was editing on the Freedom Riders, mixed up with a rough draft of Jude’s dissertation proposal. She’d decided to write about the perennial French phenomenon of a small group that defined itself as the “saving remnant,” which everyone else then tried to murder as painfully as possible, using as case studies the Cathars, the Huguenots, the Jacobins, and the Resistance. Her delighted grandmother had been stuffing information down her throat like a mother bird feeding worms to her fledgling.
She had just interviewed a French friend of her grandfather’s, who had fought with the Resistance after a Jewish shopkeeper in his village in the Alps had been crucified upside down by the SS, his mouth packed with cow manure. The man described partisans from his village mining a tunnel through the mountains with explosives to slow down the German advance. The plot was betrayed by a local farmer, and all the conspirators who were caught were forced to march into the tunnel themselves, where they were buried alive by their own trap.
As usual, Jude was actually trying to figure out the difference between people like Ace Kilgore, whose goal in life was to harm and destroy, and those like her father and grandfather and Sandy, who tried instead to defend and heal. She had concluded that it had something to do with Ace’s eyes, two dead, black holes that neither reflected light from without nor projected it from within. Since he himself was cut off from the light, he was wounded and vengeful and determined to spread his contagion of rage, like some kind of spiritual rabies. It gratified him to plunge others into darkness, to prove that it was more powerful than the light that had shunned him.
But the real mystery was why ordinary people like Jerry Crawford and the Panther Twins had followed him into this void. Once while they were dating, she’d asked Jerry what he saw in Ace. He replied, “He’s so strong. He’s not afraid of anything.” But Jude had come to suspect since that Ace was actually afraid of everything. His was the fake strength that reverted to violence under pressure.
Meanwhile, she had been delivering a discourse to an uninterested Simon on V-8 juice—why it had tasted awful to her as a child but was now delicious. Simon kept interrupting to discuss Marmite on toast. The evening news was playing on the television at the foot of the bed, the commentary a soft murmur as an American soldier incinerated a peasant hut with a flamethrower.
The phone rang. Groping for it on the floor, Simon picked up the receiver, listened, then said in his most winning voice, “Speak -ing!”
Holding out the receiver, he studied it and shrugged. “Funny. He hung up.”
“Who was it?” asked Jude.
“Some guy asking to speak to the lady of the house.”
As Jude laughed, Sandy walked through the door from the hallway, looking grim.
“Hard day at the office, dear?” called Simon from the bed.
“Hard day in the subway,” he said.
“What happened?” asked Jude, alarmed by his voice, which sounded numb.
“It’s not important.”
“You can’t come in here looking and sounding like Marilyn Monroe after her suicide and not tell us why,” said Simon. He bounced off the bed and padded in his sweat socks over to Sandy. As Simon put his arms around him, Sandy started to cry angrily. Simon led him to the bed, and they sat down on the edge.
“Sorry,” said Sandy, blotting his tears on the sleeve of his work shirt.
“What’s wrong, love?” asked Simon, stroking the red-blond hair out of Sandy’s eyes.
“When I got off the IRT just now, that same guy who harassed us at the Port Authority last Halloween, the one with the leather cap and the blind eye, was getting off with three of his friends. We were alone in the tunnel to the stairway, and he said, ‘Well, well, if it isn’t our friendly neighborhood homo searching for an asshole to fuck.’ I turned around and gave him a look, and he said, ‘And he isn’t going to find one, either, because he’s so fuckin’ ugly.’ And one of the others said, ‘Maybe we should just put him out of his fuckin’ fairy misery and kick his fuckin’ faggot brains in.’ I’d been working backstage all day during the dress rehearsal for Aida, and I was so tired and so scared that I just opened my mouth and hit a high C. It bounced back and forth off those tile walls. They looked at me as though I was a crackpot and ran up the steps as fast as they could.”
Sandy smiled weakly, waiting for them to laugh, but they didn’t. “I just feel so helpless.”
“Bloody hell, Sandy, please be careful,” said Simon.
“What can I do?” he asked softly.
“What about telling the police?” asked Jude. Her eyes strayed to his windowsill, on which she could see the indentations of his teeth. Could a taste for danger, like a pact with Satan, actually attract it in ways you hadn’t bargained on? She wanted to protect him as he had her, but how?
The two men laughed bitterly.
“They probably are the police,” said Sandy.
“Walk,” said Jude. “Take a bus. A taxi even. It’s cheaper than a funeral.”
“SO THE COPS TRIED to herd them into a paddy wagon,” Sid was saying to the dozen people sitting around the cluttered dining table in Sandy’s apartment, “and they refused. Those motherfucking queens staged a riot like those fascist pigs had never dreamed of in their worst nightmares. Bopping them with their handbags. Stabbing them with their nails. Stomping them with their spike heels. Falsetto screams. And then a bunch of dykes and motorcycle dudes joined in, throwing bottles and swinging bike chains and hefting tire irons. And soon the whole damn block was in chaos. So the cops shoved their badass nightsticks back into their holsters and split.”
Everyone erupted into cheers, except Mona, who looked deeply bored to be in a roomful of men who never looked twice at her.
“Out of the closets and into the streets!” yelled Simon, standing up and raising his beer bottle in a toast.
Jude clicked her wineglass against Sandy’s. He was smiling ironically at Simon’s sudden ascent to the barricades.
“No more Mr. Nice Guy!” cried Earl, which was practically the first thing Jude had ever heard him say.
“Oh, gracious, watch out, homophobes!” said William. “Earl is on a rampage!”
Earl leapt up from his chair and began to whirl around the room in his sweatpants in a graceful frenzy, like something out of Le Sacre du Printemps.
Sandy handed Jude the joint that was circling the table. She drew on it and passed it to Tony in his pirate head scarf. Exhaling, she whispere
d to Sandy, “I don’t know why I bother. This stuff has never worked for me.”
Getting up, Sandy stood behind Jude and began to massage her scalp as they watched Earl’s war dance, which the others were accompanying by clashing together their dirty cutlery. Tony was striking the empty and half-empty wine bottles with his knife, creating a discordant melody. Eventually, like the Pied Piper, Earl led everyone but Sandy and Jude in a bunny-hopping conga line out the door, en route to the carnival that had filled the Village streets ever since the riot.
Jude, meanwhile, was going out of her mind as Sandy continued to knead her scalp and her neck. Her only wish was that he never stop. He began to run his fingers around the folds of her ears and in and out of the passageways. Abruptly, she turned her head to one side and sucked his index finger into her mouth. He drew a sharp breath.
Jude pushed up from her chair. She turned and they faced each other, startled and afraid. They moved into each other’s arms like horseshoe magnets. Their mouths joined.
Eventually, Jude turned her head aside to gasp, “We’d better wait for Simon.”
“I don’t want to wait anymore, Jude,” Sandy said. “I’ve been waiting for you since I was a boy.”
Jude just stood there, paralyzed by the ethics of the situation, feeling Sandy’s erection against her abdomen.
“Please, Jude. Just once and never again. It will get it out of our systems.”
“Or infect us like a wasting disease.” Her breathing was turning jagged.
Smiling down at her whimsically, he said, “You always did think too much, brainchild.”
At the sound of Molly’s nickname for her, pronounced in the identical soft mountain drawl, she let him lead her down the hallway to his room.
“I WAS WRONG,” she murmured to Sandy later as they lay among the tangled clothing that littered his bed and carpet. A breeze through the open window was drying their sweat and chilling them.