by Lisa Alther
“I’M AFRAID IT’S TOO ABSTRACT,” Anna was saying about one student poem.
She and Jude were walking across Central Park to the West Side as the wan winter sun sank behind the luxury apartment buildings along Central Park West. The black tree branches were making curlicue patterns like wrought ironwork against the darkening sky. The paths were mostly deserted, except for a few solitary dog walkers hunched against the cold. But Jude was so engaged by the conversation that she wasn’t feeling the cold. “That may be the whole point,” she said. “He’s from Martinique. His culture is French, and French culture tends toward abstraction.”
“I think it’s just bad poetry,” said Anna, who was wearing a tall mink Cossack hat. Her glossy hair framed her face like the wing tips of a raven.
“Bad, good—those categories are culture-bound. Americans are practical people, so we prefer concreteness.”
“You’re no help.” Anna laughed, squeezing Jude’s upper arm with a gloved hand. “I thought you were supposed to give me some answers, not raise more questions.”
“But this one is crucial,” insisted Jude. “Do we include pieces we think are good or pieces that would be regarded as good within the students’ cultures of origin? And if the latter, how do we determine which those are? Because to do the former is a form of cultural imperialism.” The problems Anna’s project posed mirrored those within Jude’s own head, where the conflicting claims of a dozen different groups clamored for primacy—Yankee and southern, Baptist and Huguenot and Catholic, Dutch and Alsatian and French, Cherokee and Scottish and English. Sometimes she envied the simple ethnic clarity of the Hitler Youth.
Emerging from the park, they strolled down Jude’s grandparents’ block past the Café des Artistes. This part of New York had come to feel as familiar as Tidewater Estates to Jude by now. She had walked its sidewalks almost every day for six years—through dirty slush and sodden leaves, beneath trees feathered chartreuse with bursting buds, or bare and blasted by icy winds. She often dropped by to see her grandparents when they weren’t at the retirement house they’d bought on Captiva. Her friends and colleagues lived all around her.
Jude’s mother had once walked these sidewalks herself, ridden horses along the paths in the park, and posed for photographers on benches and street corners. She had fallen in love with Jude’s father in the cafés and restaurants and made love to him in his tiny apartment across from the Roosevelt. Jude could imagine her shock when she found herself stranded on that plateau in Tennessee, surrounded by mile after mile of forested mountain peaks and coves. By the time she was Jude’s age, she was buried in a grave of sticky red clay atop that same plateau. In some odd way, Jude felt she was living out the unfinished portion of her mother’s life, making the opposite choices—not marrying, not having a baby, not going back to the South, pursuing a career, sidestepping romantic commitments.
Upon reaching Broadway, Anna and Jude went into a diner that was tiled in black and white and trimmed with stainless steel. They perused the glass case that held the cakes and pies, then sat down at a table topped with black-flecked granite. After ordering tea and scones from a woman in a starched white cap that looked as though it belonged on a Victorian nurse, Anna pulled a piece of paper from her handbag and read the poem in question, which rhymed beauty with duty and truth with youth.
Jude buried her face in her hands. “I’m afraid you’re right. It’s just bad poetry.”
“But to him, it’s good. He’s very proud of it. I hate my job.”
“I hate mine, too. At the office, I read the manuscripts that come in unsolicited. The slush pile, it’s called. I know that each one is War and Peace to the person who wrote it. But many of them are frankly unreadable.”
“Maybe we should call this whole thing off,” said Anna. “Clearly we’re too tenderhearted.”
“Fine,” said Jude, “if you’d like to pay back your advance.”
“Oh, well, I guess I’m not that tenderhearted.”
As they parted on the sidewalk, Anna leaned forward to kiss Jude good-bye just as Jude extended her hand for a shake. Both stepped back. Then Jude leaned forward for a kiss, into Anna’s outstretched hand. Laughing, they came together for a hug. Then they held each other at arm’s length and exchanged a smile. Anna’s eyes were almost indigo in the rapidly descending dusk. Jude was surprised to discover that she and Anna were the same height, a rare event for someone as tall as she.
Jude watched Anna for a moment as she strode south in her long burgundy overcoat and mink Cossack hat, looking like a guard at the Kremlin. Then Jude turned around and headed uptown toward home.
This soon became a ritual. Anna came to Jude’s office building from Julia Richmond and waited in the lobby for Jude to descend with her usual satchel of manuscripts and galleys. They crossed the park, the air warming and softening with the arrival of spring. As the weeks passed, magnolia, crab apple, apple, and Japanese cherry trees, one after another, extruded their fragrant blossoms and then shed them on the pavement. While the two women walked, Anna recited in a mesmeric alto voice the poems she was considering for the book, and Jude commented on them. At the Broadway diner, they drank tea, ate pastries, and debated possible book titles involving melting pots and rainbows. Then they embraced gingerly and each headed home.
Although they discussed the book in all its aspects—content, format, jacket, title, publicity—they rarely discussed their personal lives. Jude had managed to piece together that Anna had grown up in Chicago with a Swedish Lutheran father and an Italian mother who was devoutly Catholic. Thus, she shared Jude’s cultural cacophony, which was probably why she was interested in editing such a book. She’d come to New York to do her doctorate in comparative literature at NYU, writing her dissertation on the French Symbolist poets. Now she taught workshops and wrote poetry. And she lived somewhere downtown. With whom, if anyone, Jude had no idea. There was no wedding band on her left hand. And Jude had first encountered her in a roomful of homosexuals. Occasionally, Jude recalled William’s warning that Anna was bad news. But she had concluded that there was some private rancor between them. Once she knew Anna well enough, she’d ask her.
Simon was so impressed by the unprecedented diligence Jude was bringing to Anna’s book that he hired a new assistant and began giving Jude manuscripts of history books to edit. At first, she insisted that the deadly antics of the human race no longer interested her. But Simon doubled her salary and persuaded her to benefit the firm with her academic training.
One afternoon in early fall, shortly before the manuscript was scheduled to go to press, Jude and Anna sat sipping iced coffee in “their” café on Broadway. “I’ll miss these meetings, Jude,” said Anna. “They’ve been lots of fun.”
Jude stirred more sugar into her coffee in silence. It hadn’t really occurred to her that they wouldn’t go on seeing each other. In Tennessee, only death interrupted a relationship, if that. But it was true that she was Anna’s editor, not her friend. Once the book was finished, there would be no basis for further contact.
“Could we still meet for a walk now and then?” asked Anna. She seemed agitated.
“Definitely,” said Jude.
“Good. I wasn’t sure if this was just another book to you.” Anna broke their gaze to glance out the window at a young man passing by wearing a Comanche headdress and little else.
“I like you, Anna, as an author and as a person.”
Anna returned her eyes to Jude’s. “I like you, too. You know what intrigues me most about you?”
“What?” Jude realized this was the most intimate conversation they’d ever had.
“Your transparency. With you, what one sees is what one gets.”
Jude shrugged. “Isn’t that usually the case?”
Anna smiled sardonically. “In my experience, most people are a house of mirrors.”
As Jude walked uptown, she tried to decide whether it was a compliment to be called transparent. Its opposite, opaque, implied mystery a
nd subtlety. Transparency suggested naïveté. Was it corny to be naive, or did it indicate authenticity and integrity?
A couple of weeks later, Anna didn’t show up outside the entrance to Jude’s building at the usual hour. Jude paced the marble lobby for a long time before heading home, surprised to notice how disappointed she was.
That night, she and Simon split some Chinese takeout in front of the electric heater in their dingy living room. After Sandy’s death, as normal attrition claimed their roommates, they hadn’t bothered to replace them, lacking the energy. Besides, they could afford not to have roommates now. So she and Simon lived alone in the echoing apartment with its constant reminders of Sandy. The same battered Danish-modern armchairs that had been there the day Jude first visited were still the only furniture in the living room. One night, Simon, in a seizure of grief, had started ripping the opera posters off the walls. Since he hadn’t completed the job, they were still hanging there in tattered strips that flapped in the breezes off the river.
“One of these days we should fix this place up,” said Simon, opening a white cardboard container of moo goo gai pan. “Paint and paper it. Buy some new rugs and furniture. Now that we’re high-powered publishing executives.”
“Good idea,” said Jude. “It does look like the day after Woodstock in here. By the way, do you have Anna Olsen’s phone number?”
“I don’t really know her.” He paused with his chopsticks in midair, dribbling rice onto his plate. “I’ve just seen her a few times at William and Sid’s.”
“Alone?”
He grinned, green eyes flashing. “Sandy would be so proud.”
“What?” she asked irritably.
“What’s it to you, darling, whether she was alone or not?”
“I need to reach her about her book, but for some reason, she’s never given me her number. That’s all, okay?”
“Yes. Alone.” He was struggling not to smile. “All alone. Utterly alone. Gloriously alone.”
Flouncing down the hallway to her bedroom to escape Simon’s lurid implications, Jude turned in at Sandy’s room, closing the door behind her. In the moonlight shining through the window, she surveyed the TV on which they’d watched so many chick flicks. And the phone on the rug that would never again ring for him. And the closet with its door ajar, in which a few deserted shirts swayed in the current of air under the door. And the stripped mattress on the floor, on which she and Sandy had experienced together something remarkable that still eluded her capacity for definition.
Standing there on other nights, Jude had sometimes pretended that she could feel Sandy’s presence. But it wasn’t true. This was an empty room with dust balls in the corner. Molly occasionally turned up in her dreams. But Sandy had vanished without a trace, leaving behind only Simon’s and her memories of him, which they served up to each other from time to time like soggy leftovers from some distant bacchanal.
Anna called Jude the next morning at work to apologize for standing her up and to say that she couldn’t see her until the following week.
“But I have a new title idea and I need your opinion,” said Jude, doodling a mountain range across her notepad. Which, she abruptly realized, looked like the profile of a naked woman lying on her back, knees in the air.
“Okay, shoot.”
“But I have to show you some roughs for a new jacket, if you like the new title,” said Jude, suddenly desperate to see her, and startled by the desperation. “We don’t have much time. They were about to print the jacket when I stopped them.”
“I’ll meet you at that café at seven.”
When Anna appeared in the doorway in a belted khaki trench coat, she was wearing sunglasses, even though it was almost dusk. Sitting down, she removed the coat but not the glasses.
“Greta Garbo, I presume,” said Jude, reaching for them. She wanted to see those eyes.
Anna jerked her head aside. “I’m having trouble with my vision. My doctor told me to wear these.”
Jude watched her own reflection in the dark lenses as she told Anna about her new Baptist-bred title, Precious in His Sight. Anna thought she preferred it to their previous choice. While studying the sketches for a new jacket, she swept off the glasses to see them better. One of her eyes, ringed with royal purple flesh, was thickly powdered and nearly swollen shut, as though she’d been stung by several bees. Realizing what she’d done, she touched it self-consciously with her fingertips, explaining, “I ran into a cupboard door.”
Jude studied her, saying nothing. “Is there some way I can help?” she finally asked.
“You do help, Jude. Much more than you realize.”
“I’d like to strangle whoever did this to you.” Jude reached across to touch the swelling with her fingertips.
Anna laughed weakly, taking Jude’s hand in both hers and holding it on the tabletop. “You’d better not. He’s much bigger than you.”
“Who is?”
“My husband.”
Jude looked at her. “I didn’t realize you were married.” She glanced down at Anna’s hand. It was still ringless.
“It hasn’t been a real marriage for years. We just stay together for our children.” She squeezed Jude’s hand, then released it. Jude removed it to her lap. It lay there on her thigh, tingling.
Jude’s head fell forward, so her chin rested on her chest. She gazed at her napoleon, which was oozing custard. “Children?” she murmured.
“Two, a boy and a girl. They’re at prep school.”
Jude looked up from her pastry to Anna’s face. That probably meant Anna was over forty. At least a dozen years between them. Practically a different generation. She studied Anna’s swollen eye. “Why do you stay with him if he treats you like this?”
“He didn’t mean to.”
“They never do,” said Jude. “But is that any excuse?”
“He has many other nice qualities.”
“I’m sure even Hitler had his moments,” replied Jude.
“Besides, I provoked him. He gets very jealous. Yesterday, he got jealous over you, as a matter of fact. That’s why I stood you up.”
“Over me? Why?”
Anna lowered her head as though consulting her tea leaves for guidance. “Well,” she said slowly, “I guess he feels we spend a lot of time together. And maybe I’ve mentioned your name a few too many times.”
“But is it a crime to have a new friend?”
Anna looked up, eyes clouded with anxiety. “Not if she remains just a friend.”
“So what’s the problem then?” Jude glanced nervously around the diner, all the occupants of which seemed to be eavesdropping on Anna and herself.
Anna smiled brightly. “There is no problem.” She scribbled a number on her paper napkin and handed it to Jude. “It’s best to call me in late afternoon,” she said, “before Jim gets home.”
As Jude walked north toward Riverside Drive, her brain was as chaotic as the stock exchange after the crash. She kept picturing Anna’s swollen face. She wanted to protect her from this man, whoever he was. But he was her husband. And he was jealous of Jude? Was this why William felt Anna was bad news? She was too passive to extract herself from an abusive marriage? But Jude had been seeing her for months, and this was the first time she’d noticed any bruises. Maybe it would be best just to back off and give it all a rest. But, oh God, those eyes that shifted like the waters of the sea, from cerulean to indigo to turquoise. Having watched them all these months, how could she give them up?
When Jude woke up the next morning, she discovered a feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach. As she gazed past her Atalanta flask to the drifting gray waters of the Hudson, she remembered Anna’s bruised eye and her own wish to protect her. But Jude wasn’t a home-breaker. And Anna was her author. It was unprofessional to get involved in her private life. She would make a point of not phoning. And if Anna phoned her, she vowed to keep it brief and focused on the book, in compliance with her family motto: “When in doubt, get the hell
out.”
Simon appeared in her office doorway toward lunchtime that day, carrying a disheveled manuscript. “Here. A present.” Giving her his most winning smile, he plopped it on her desk.
Picking up the first few pages, Jude skimmed them. It was a scholarly history of lesbianism from the Middle Ages to the present. Looking up, she said, “Please don’t do this to me, Simon.”
“Do what?”
“I’ve got too much on my plate right now as it is,” she temporized.
“But you’re the only one who can edit it, Jude. You’re a history Ph.D. manqué. Besides, everyone else is about to go to St. Thomas for the sales conference.” He backed out of her office, grinning.
That night, Jude sat by her phone for a long time, the new manuscript lying unread on her bed, inspecting the number Anna had scribbled on the paper napkin. It had four 4s in it. Four was Jude’s favorite number.
Finally forcing herself to start the manuscript, she read into the night about women who lived alone being burned as witches. About women being tortured and hanged for dressing as men. About women being stoned for refusing to marry. About women killing their female lovers to prevent them from marrying men. The manuscript needed a lot of work. The stilted language made the horrors sound almost bland, and each page was half-filled with arcane footnotes. She scribbled suggestions to the author all over the pages.
The next day at work, Jude jumped each time her phone rang. When she answered and discovered that it wasn’t Anna, she became irritated and snapped at whoever it was. And when she hung up, she wracked her brain for some detail about the anthology that required Anna’s opinion. She was worried about her. She wanted to be sure she was okay. But the manuscript was already at the printer’s and everything was regrettably under control. And besides, she had taken a vow to let Anna resolve her marital masochism alone.
Jude walked home up Columbus Avenue, looking into shop windows, wondering whether she should buy a new fall outfit. Anna rarely wore the same clothes twice. Whereas Jude usually paid very little attention to her own appearance. But it might be nice to give Anna something fresh to look at when they next met.