The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  “What about?” He reached for her shirt and draped it languidly over her chest and abdomen.

  “I’m crazy about you as a bad boy.”

  He smiled lazily as a boat horn blared on the river. “In matters such as these, there’s no bad or good. Only love and the courage to live it. Or not.”

  “DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT, JUDE. It’s cool,” said Simon the next evening as they sat in the breeze wafting through Sandy’s window, sharing a joint and watching pleasure craft glide down the Hudson in the twilight. “Just as long as I get equal time one of these days.”

  “It could happen,” she said, studying her friendly rival with his dark curls and his Fu Manchu mustache. Since the stated goal of their generation was to “smash monogamy,” he had no choice but to appear blasé. But he seemed really not to mind. Yet if he knew what had gone on between Sandy and herself the previous evening, he would have minded a great deal. It hadn’t been that conditioned reflex you could have alone or with anyone else, of spasming muscles pumping blood through swollen tissue. It had been another order of experience altogether, parallel to that night with Molly on the raft, but even more moving, if that was possible, because they had both been wide awake and unafraid and unashamed. Afterward, they had cried—from astonishment to have shared such an unlooked-for moment. From sorrow that it was over and might never recur. What she couldn’t tell Simon was that she now had no wish to give him equal time or even to share Sandy with him anymore. The only person she wanted was Sandy, as soon as possible, as often as possible, for as long as possible.

  Even so, she wished she hadn’t drunk all that wine and smoked all that dope, so she could have avoided such delirium. Because she and Sandy and Simon were now headed down some gloomy labyrinth in which at least one of them would lose the way. Probably herself, since, as Clementine used to say, leopards didn’t change their spots. Especially if they were happy leopards. Why hadn’t she left well enough alone?

  Sandy looked as tense and miserable as Jude felt when he arrived in the doorway and spotted her and Simon sitting together by the window. From a car radio in the street below, Janis Joplin was begging someone to take, and break, a piece of her heart.

  Simon looked up at Sandy through shrewd green eyes. “Don’t worry, mate. I know you love her. I love her, too. These things happen. They’ll happen again. Maybe for me next time, if I get lucky.”

  “It’s not that,” said Sandy, walking in and sitting down on his mattress. He propped his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands.

  “What’s wrong, Sandy?” demanded Simon.

  Sandy drew a deep breath, then exhaled. “I was standing on the subway platform just now. It was rush hour, so it was really crowded. That guy with the blind eye turned up right beside me. As he pushed past me, he snarled, ‘Out of my way, queer boy.’

  “I don’t know what came over me, but all of a sudden I just couldn’t take it anymore. So I said in a really loud voice, ‘This man is a fascist!’ I stood on tiptoe and pointed him out as he dodged through the crowd, trying to get away. ‘He follows me around threatening me and calling me names!’ I yelled.

  “Most of the people ignored me, but a few looked at me sympathetically or studied him as he fought his way to the exit. On the steps, he turned around and looked at me as though I were a cockroach he was about to squash.”

  WHEN SANDY DIDN’T COME HOME from work the next night, Simon phoned all the hospitals in the city, finally locating him in intensive care at the Roosevelt. Someone had found him unconscious in an alley near the Port Authority.

  Jude walked into his hospital room. He was tucked tightly into a narrow white bed, his face black and purple, tubes snaking from his nostril and hand. As he gasped for air, she noticed that several of his teeth were missing.

  Sitting down beside him, she laid her head on his bedside and closed her eyes. People in serious accidents reported having their lives flash before their eyes. But at that moment, Jude experienced just such a retrospective of Sandy’s life. Like a slide show, she saw him as a fair-haired little boy in socks and sandals. She saw him in his tree house, writing his novel, his cowlicked hair scrambled like a rat’s nest. And playing chess by the brick wall on the playground at school. And throwing passes to her halfway down the football field as boys twice his size closed in on him. Sandy in a tweed jacket chattering charmingly to her grandparents, and sitting at his switchboard at the opera, overseeing dozens of workers and technicians. Sandy lying beneath her, eyes closed, languorous smile playing across his lips, hands stroking her buttocks as she braced her fists against the wall and moved up and down on him, slowly, slowly, trembling and sweating, struggling to make a finite moment last forever.

  She could feel him ebbing away. She reached over and grabbed his hand to try to make him stay, but it was limp and dry and cold.

  The next night while Jude ate a grim and silent dinner with Sandy’s parents, who had just arrived from Tennessee, Sandy died from a blood clot to his brain while Simon dozed in the chair by his bed.

  When Jude and Simon reached home after midnight, Simon followed her to her room. “Please may I stay with you tonight?” he asked.

  They lay in each other’s arms on her bed. Periodically, Simon cried while Jude stroked his back and blotted his tears with the sheet. She knew this drill by heart. First came the numbness, the way the stump of a newly severed limb didn’t bleed. Then the fury, when you lashed out at anyone who got in your way. And finally the memories that wouldn’t quit. But maybe expecting the joy of communion without the pain of its loss was like wanting to eat candy without getting cavities.

  Toward dawn, Simon said in a hoarse voice, “You were the last person he made love to. I turned him down the other night. I guess I was punishing him for you. I said it was okay. But it wasn’t. His tricks were one thing. Sexual encounters with men he’d never see again. But he really loved you. Eventually, he’d have left me for you.”

  “No, Simon. It was nothing. We were drunk. Stoned. It should never have happened. I’m sorry it did,” she lied.

  “Don’t apologize. It was inevitable. He loved you, Jude, all his life.”

  “But not as much as he did you. You were the soul mate he’d always wanted and never found.”

  Their mouths abruptly undertook an urgent exploration of each other’s faces and necks. Jude could taste the salt of Simon’s tears. As he entered her, their bodies shuddered, fumbled for a rhythm, and finally moved together. And since each was fantasizing that the other was Sandy, for a moment it seemed he really was there, hovering over them, blessing their clumsy union with his whimsical smile.

  PART THREE

  ANNA

  CHAPTER

  11

  A WOMAN IN A LONG, burgundy wool overcoat stood in the doorway of Jude’s office, smiling and frowning, both at once. Jude smiled back from her cluttered desk. She felt she should know the woman but was unable to place her. She sported a glossy, dark, flapper hairdo and mauve lipstick.

  The woman snapped her fingers. “Dolly Parton!”

  Jude smiled politely, “Excuse me?”

  “That Halloween party a few years ago. You were Dolly Parton. And I was Joan of Arc.”

  The eyes. Now Jude remembered the eyes, which had been shadowed by the visor of her helmet as she stood before Jude in her chain mail and shin guards. At the moment, the eyes were sapphire blue against cheeks flushed from the cold, and they were framed by dark crescent eyebrows and long lashes.

  “I’m Anna Olsen. Simon sent me. I just ran into him on his way out. He said maybe you’d have a minute to listen to my book idea.”

  “Come in,” said Jude, standing up to clear a stack of manuscripts and page proofs off her tweed love seat. “How do you know Simon?”

  “I don’t very well. We have some mutual friends—the men who gave that party.” She perched on the edge of the love seat.

  “William and Sid?” Jude returned to her swivel chair.

  Anna nodded.
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br />   “You have quite a memory,” said Jude. She herself did not, however, because something was nibbling away at the edge of her awareness, something disturbing William had said that she couldn’t quite recall.

  “For memorable events, I do.” She unbuttoned her coat, revealing a large wool scarf in shades of blue and purple.

  Jude looked at her with a half smile, having just remembered Anna’s telling her that night that she made a beautiful woman. She was quite the flirt. Too bad she was barking up a dead tree. “So what’s your book idea?”

  Anna, a poet, taught creative-writing workshops in the city high schools. She was proposing an anthology of pieces by her students, who represented more than a dozen nationalities. She was intrigued by the ways in which they adapted their cultural inheritances to the American mainstream, or failed to. America wasn’t a melting pot, she maintained; it was a stockpot, full of intact lumps.

  Jude nodded, hands clasped before her chin. It was what America was supposed to be all about—a haven for those who needed a fresh start, freed from ancient traditions and taboos, yet no doubt bearers of them nonetheless.

  “I’ll talk to Simon,” said Jude, having difficulty removing her eyes from Anna’s, which were now turquoise in the zebra shafts of light through the slatted blinds, like deep seawater penetrated by sunbeams. “It sounds like an interesting idea. Leave me your number and I’ll give you a call.”

  “I’ll call you,” Anna said quickly. “When would be good?”

  “Early next week?”

  After seeing Anna to the elevator by the reception desk, Jude returned to her office and sat back down at her desk, swiveling her chair around to watch the woman at her keyboard in the glass building across the street. When the blinds were up, they sometimes waved to each other like next-door neighbors. Jude admired her wardrobe—a seemingly endless parade of tailored suits and silk blouses such as Jude aspired to once she could afford them.

  Simon had hired Jude as his assistant when she dropped out of Columbia. After Sandy’s death, everything seemed pointless, especially the study of history. She no longer wished to know about the idiotic atrocities committed by the human race since the dawn of time. So she’d been mindlessly typing and filing, fielding phone calls and visitors, and ransacking reviews for favorable quotes to use in ads. She planned to remain an assistant forever. But Anna’s book idea interested her.

  She kept thinking about Anna’s eyes, how similar they were to Molly’s—the same shifting shades of blue, like a mood ring. The same way of narrowing with skepticism and sparkling with amusement. They were Molly’s eyes in a different face. Anna’s physique, however, was tall and slender.

  Turning back to her desk, Jude typed a memo to Simon recommending Anna’s project. Clipping it to her outline and samples, she took the package next door and laid it on his black Formica tabletop, on which sat several dozen paperweights—a bronze penis with a happy-face head, an Empire State Building with a removable King Kong. Jude selected what Simon claimed was the varnished hoof of Secretariat to secure her memo. Also on the tabletop sat a photo of Sandy in a silver frame. He was smiling into the camera, wearing a white undershirt that displayed his well-cut biceps and pecs, a grassy Cape Cod dune looming behind him.

  In the years since his death, Jude and Simon had both been on a tear. Simon roamed the streets at night with a switchblade at the ready in the pocket of his leather jacket, searching for the young thug with the blind eye he was convinced had killed Sandy. Despite the fact that Sandy’s missing wallet made robbery the apparent motive. Often he came home to their apartment bruised and bloodied from fights he’d picked with bewildered hoodlums. Periodically, Jude removed the switchblade from his pocket and threw it in a trash basket on her way to work. But he always bought another.

  Jude herself had become a bedroom guerrilla, ambushing half a dozen young men, leading them on, then leaving them high and dry and humiliated, while they phoned and fumed and leapt from tall buildings. Occasionally, she and Simon sought relief from their fury in each other’s arms. But apart from the night of Sandy’s death, Simon made it clear that it was just a diversion. “Rearranging the hormones,” he called it. And in the morning, he was brisk and distant, as though they hadn’t been lying together panting like marathon runners a few hours earlier. Sometimes Jude wasn’t even sure if it had really happened or if she’d dreamed it. She had never told him about the intensity of the interchange between Sandy and herself, and she never would. Simon had referred a few times to “your little fling with Sandy.” It was clear that he needed to think of it as nothing more than what she and he experienced together—some warmth in the night with friendly flesh.

  But Jude had recently become disgusted with herself as a conquistador. She’d realized that she was wounding innocent civilians in her war of attrition. And she sometimes longed for a comrade-in-arms with whom she could lay down her weapons and find peace. But at other times, she concluded that she was finished with love. It hurt too much. Since she seemed incapable of taking it lightly, her only recourse was to jettison it.

  Dreams were currently her sole consolation. During the weeks of numb disbelief following Sandy’s death, Molly appeared for the first time since Jude had moved in with him.

  “I told you he was going to hurt you,” she said, briskly dealing hands for Over the Moon on the pine needles that cushioned the floor of their cave in the Wildwoods.

  “Bravo. Right again,” said Jude. “I thought I’d gotten rid of you.”

  “Dream on. You’ll never get rid of me, sweetheart. So you might as well learn to listen to me.”

  “I do listen to you, Molly. I just don’t always agree.” Jude swept her cards together, picked them up, and fanned them out.

  Molly shrugged and threw down the jack of spades. “Falling in love with a fag was probably just your way of staying faithful to me.”

  “Stop calling Sandy a fag,” snapped Jude, tossing down the ten of hearts.

  Molly grinned. “Poor little Jude. Forever in love with phantoms.”

  JUDE’S PHONE BUZZED. It was Simon, asking her to come next door. He was sitting behind his table in his striped dress shirt and Jackson Pollock tie, curly black hair pulled back into a ponytail, studying Jude’s memo with his limpid green eyes. “Since you like Anna’s idea so much, I think you should handle it.” He wound up a green plastic Tyrannosaurus rex and they watched it lumber across his desktop on duck feet, red eyes flashing. “It can be your first solo flight. We’ll do a small printing and see how it goes.”

  “Fantastic,” said Jude from his doorway. “Thanks, Simon.”

  Back at her desk, Jude felt frustrated that she couldn’t call Anna with the good news. Why had she been so weird about giving out her number?

  JUDE MUNCHED A BREAD STICK while Anna fished the olive out of her second martini with her plastic swizzle stick. She was wearing a suit of very fine wool in a subtle plaid of mauve and forest green with some gold lines through it. Looped loosely around her throat was a scarf that repeated the mauve and gold in bold swirls.

  “I can give you the names of some agents if you want,” said Jude like a policewoman reciting her rights to a detainee. The waiter, who wore a tux even though it was only lunchtime, set their chicken Marengo before them with a flourish, then poured Pouilly-Fuissé into their glasses.

  The decor of the midtown restaurant, which Simon maintained was run by gangsters, centered around the apricot of the marble walls and floors. She and Anna were sitting side by side on a cushioned banquette, looking out across the nearly empty room. On their table was an exotic lily with a mauve and yellow center that harmonized with Anna’s suit. This was Jude’s first expense-account lunch, and she had decided that she didn’t want it to be her last.

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Anna. “I trust you to treat me fairly.”

  “Thank you,” said Jude. “I’ll try not to betray your trust.” As she cut her chicken, she suddenly recalled what William had said—that Anna
was bad news. She looked up from her plate. Anna met her gaze with smiling cool-blue eyes. She certainly didn’t look like bad news.

  As they sipped their cappuccinos, Jude went over the various clauses in the contract. Afterward, on the sidewalk outside, while the irate drivers of a line of taxis honked and swore at a vacant double-parked delivery truck, Anna and Jude agreed to meet every other Wednesday afternoon after Anna’s writing workshop at Julia Richmond High School.

  “SO HOW DID IT GO, JUDE?” called Simon as Jude passed his door.

  She paused in his doorway. He was sprawled on his carpet in his sock feet, eating a sandwich. “A struggling writer could have eaten for a month on what that lunch cost,” she replied.

  “True,” he said, looking up. “But think about it: A writer gets to sit home all day in Levis, telling himself amusing stories. Whereas we have to get dressed up, and ride the subway downtown, and hassle with printers and page proofs. We do all the dirty work, and they get interviewed by Dick Cavett. So we deserve a nice lunch from time to time.

  Jude smiled. “Very feeble.”

  “Struggle is good for writers,” insisted Simon. “If their lives are miserable, they have more of an incentive to create a fantasy world.”

  Jude laughed.

  “Anna is very attractive, isn’t she?”

  “Is she? I didn’t notice.”

  Simon smiled.

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing,” he said, biting into his corned beef.

  “William once told me she was bad news. Why, do you think?”

  “William has very little use for women. Especially sexy ones.”

  “You find Anna sexy?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m not that kind of girl.”

  “Neither am I,” said Simon, “but I know it when I see it.”