The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Beside a display window in which she’d been studying shoes, Jude spotted a doorway she’d never noticed before. It opened on a staircase that led, according to a small hand-printed sign, to: MADAME TOUSSAINT, VOODOO SPELLS AND TAROT READINGS. On a whim, Jude climbed the dirty linoleum-covered steps. At the first landing was a battered steel door with a buzzer beside it. A card underneath read: MADAME TOUSSAINT. Jude buzzed. The door buzzed back and Jude pushed it open.

  She was assaulted by the scent of patchouli oil. The walls and ceiling of the room were draped with gold-patterned Indian bedspreads that billowed like spinnakers in the draft from the door. Soft music sounding like reggae Gregorian chants floated down from two speakers near the ceiling. Large cushions covered in Prussian blue velvet lay on the floor around a brass tray on bamboo legs.

  The strands of colored beads in the far doorway parted, and the largest black woman Jude had ever seen squeezed through the door frame. She was wearing an African-print muumuu and matching pillbox headgear in shades of orange and brown. Extending her hand, she murmured, “Welcome. I am Madame Toussaint. How may I help you this afternoon?”

  Jude studied the face. The eyes were surrounded by so much flesh that they seemed to be squinting. Chins were stacked one atop another like the overlapping ranges of the Smokies. “I’d like a reading,” Jude said, astonished at herself.

  Madame Toussaint gestured to a cushion by the tray. Jude plopped down, sending up a cloud of dust. Madame Toussaint sank down on her cushion with a grace Jude would have thought impossible in someone so large. Watching Jude with her tiny bright eyes, she shuffled the cards, an ordinary deck with DELTA AIRLINES printed on their backs. Jude cut them. The woman dealt some out on the brass tray. Then she studied them for a long time, occasionally glancing at Jude, while voices from the speakers near the ceiling chanted softly about rivers flowing red with the blood of white oppressors.

  Finally, Madame Toussaint closed her eyes and started talking in a listless monotone. About money and success that were headed Jude’s way. About the spirits of departed loved ones who were whispering messages for Jude into Madame Toussaint’s ear. About a past life as a courtesan on Atlantis, where Jude had been faithless in love, for which she was now doing atonement. Jude listened with growing indignation. Clearly this was a scam.

  “A new love is moving toward you very fast,” Madame Toussaint intoned, rocking rhythmically with her eyes closed. “With someone older than yourself. Someone who is troubled. Someone you can help. Someone who will help you.”

  Jude had snapped to rigid attention.

  “This relationship will be deep and lasting and very important for both women,” continued Madame Toussaint.

  Jude shuddered. “Women?” she echoed faintly.

  Madame Toussaint nodded slowly, still rocking. “A water sign. A creative person. An artist of some sort.”

  Anna was a poet and a Pisces.

  Who was this storefront charlatan? Jude jumped up.

  Madame Toussaint opened her eyes and watched calmly as Jude fluttered around the room. After her panic had subsided a bit, Madame Toussaint murmured, “Twenty dollars, please.”

  Reaching into her shoulder bag, Jude thrust a bill at her and headed for the doorway.

  As Jude gripped the doorknob like an activated hand grenade, Madame Toussaint added for free, “There are worse things in this world than a woman who loves you.”

  Jude rushed out the door and down the steps. In the street, she discovered that she had a four-aspirin headache.

  SINCE SIMON AND ALL the top brass had departed for the sales conference in St. Thomas, Jude decided to stay at her apartment the next day so she could edit without interruption the manuscript on the history of lesbianism. She asked her assistant to forward her phone calls. Then she assembled the manuscript, some pencils, and a cup of coffee on the low table in the living room. She put some records on the turntable to drown out the din from Riverside Drive. Then she sat down and went to work on the turgid prose, crossing out and rewriting all morning long. She found a certain satisfaction in locating the nugget of meaning hidden in the dross of a paragraph and restating it in one succinct sentence.

  Also included with the text were some photographs of the handful of famous lesbians from the past who had managed not to be murdered or incarcerated in loony bins. One featured two women in Victorian gowns with pinched waists and bustles. They had their arms around each other and were gazing into each other’s eyes with unmasked adoration. As she studied them, Jude wondered if she and Molly had been lesbians. They had loved each other deeply, and both were female. They had explored each other’s bodies to a certain extent and had experienced some sort of orgasm together that night on the raft. But labeling their interaction so clinically robbed it of its wonder. In any case, Jude had been with half a dozen men since. So did that make her bisexual? But she had never loved a man and a woman both at once. And none of the men had engaged her as Molly had, not even Sandy. Although he might have if he’d lived. But she and Molly had shared years of peace and passion, whereas she and Sandy had just begun. Most people she knew didn’t fit into these pigeonholes anyway.

  Jude realized that the last song on the last record in the stack was repeating time after time. Sipping her cold coffee, she concentrated on the lyrics:

  Every night you sit and watch the TV screen,

  And the life you live is only in your dreams.

  But I think I know what it is on your mind.

  Yes, I think I know what you’re thinking ’bout all the time.

  You want to be loved.

  You want to know somebody somewhere cares….

  Lying back in her chair, she listened to these lines again and again, debating their accuracy vis-à-vis herself. She had been convinced that she didn’t want to be loved anymore.

  Abruptly, she recalled Anna’s remark that her husband didn’t mind if Anna had a new friend so long as “she remains just a friend.” Jude realized she’d been deliberately obtuse during that conversation. Anna had raised a topic that they needed to deal with, yet Jude had sidestepped it. Sitting up, she switched off the record player, picked up the phone, and dialed Anna’s number.

  After a dozen rings, Jude hung up. Jumping up, she grabbed her jacket and left the apartment. Taking the bus through the park to the East Side, she walked downtown until she came to Julia Richmond High. Going into a coffee shop across the street, she sat at a table by the plate-glass window and ordered a grilled cheese sandwich. She didn’t even like grilled cheese sandwiches, but they were Anna’s favorite. As she chewed the greasy cardboard bread, she watched the school doorway. It wasn’t Anna’s usual day there, but who knew? In any case, Jude had no idea where downtown she lived, so this was her only chance of finding her.

  After waiting for an hour and a half, nursing a cup of coffee under the scowl of the gum-chewing waitress, Jude went out into the street. Striding to the park, she followed the route back to the West Side that she and Anna usually took, discussing with Anna in her head how they should defuse the attraction that was undeniably building between them.

  Upon reaching Columbus Avenue, Jude ducked into a bookshop. Going directly to the poetry section, she extracted from the shelves volumes by Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé. Anna had written her thesis on them, but Jude could remember very little from her poetry course at the Sorbonne. She wanted to reread them so she could discuss them intelligently with Anna. Their exchanges about literature and history were the most crucial part of their relationship. Maybe if they emphasized them more, the physical attraction would simply wither away from lack of encouragement.

  As she headed toward the cash register, she spotted a rack of magazines. On it sat a road atlas. Picking it up, she looked up Illinois. Locating the inset showing the streets of Chicago, she studied it closely. She’d never been to Chicago, so she tried to imagine the tall apartment buildings along Lake Michigan and the quaint ethnic neighborhoods inland that Anna had once described to her. Th
is was Anna’s hometown. She wondered what street she had lived on, what games she and her friends had played, where she’d gone to school, whether she’d had a pet. She’d have to ask her when she next saw her. Which would be in eleven days now, she calculated on her fingers.

  Returning the atlas to its shelf, Jude noticed a stack of Vogues. Grabbing one, she added it to her pile of poetry books, hoping it might give her some ideas for the new outfit she wanted to assemble in time for this next meeting with Anna.

  En route to her apartment, Jude turned in at her local liquor store and bought a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. This was the wine Anna had suggested for the chicken Marengo at their first lunch together. Jude recalled that she herself had drunk only one glass, trying to keep her wits about her for the discussion of the book contract. Anna had polished off the rest of the bottle alone. Jude admired her gusto. She ate pastries and grilled cheese sandwiches and washed them down with wine or beer or Irish coffee. Jude wondered whether she might have a thyroid condition, because she stayed so slim.

  Plopping down in the armchair before the coffee table, the manuscript lying in stacks all across the carpet, Jude opened the wine and poured herself a glass. Sipping it, she read Baudelaire out loud, despairing over her French accent, which had gone to hell in her years since Paris.

  When the bottle was half empty, Jude came to a poem entitled “Femmes Damnées.” “Have we then committed such a strange act?” Hippolyta demanded of her lover, Delphine. “Explain if you can my turmoil and my terror. I shiver with fear when you call me ‘my angel.’ But I feel my mouth drawn to yours.”

  Jude paused to finish the wine in her glass and refill it. “Far from the living, condemned wanderers, prowl through the wastelands like wolves,” suggested Baudelaire to the distressed women. “Fashion your own destiny, muddled souls. And flee the divine spark that you carry within you.”

  Drawing a deep breath, Jude let the book fall into her lap. She couldn’t detect within herself the shame she was apparently supposed to feel over her love for Molly. She personally had no problem with prowling wastelands like a wolf. She liked wastelands. After all, she’d grown up in one. She’d also grown up regarding herself as a wolf child on the fringes of the forest, longing for her wilderness home. Sometimes her thimbleful of Cherokee blood came in handy.

  Heart thudding, she grabbed the phone off the floor and dialed Anna, sitting there in terror as the phone rang time after time.

  “Hello?” said a pleasant male voice.

  “Is Anna there?”

  “Who is this?” The voice had turned gruff and suspicious.

  Jude hesitated, wondering whether she should just hang up. “Allison,” she ad-libbed.

  “Allison who?”

  “Allison Marks.”

  “I guess we haven’t met.”

  “I work with Anna at Julia Richmond.”

  “Well, she isn’t here right now. Shall I have her call you back?”

  “Never mind. It’s not urgent. I’ll see her next week at school.”

  Jude slammed down the receiver and lay back in her chair, rattled to have made first contact with the enemy, annoyed to have resorted to a pseudonym. She reached over and turned on the record player to the song from that morning. Time after time, she listened to the soppy lines, heart beginning to feel like a piece of wrung-out laundry: “You want to be loved. You want to know somebody somewhere cares.…” Reaching for the bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, she guzzled the remaining two inches, while the frenzied singer wailed about wanting to know that somebody somewhere cares.

  WHEN JUDE WOKE UP toward noon the next day, she found herself sprawled in the armchair in the living room, her manuscript scattered all around the room. She felt as though someone had buried a hatchet in her forehead, and her mouth tasted as though she’d gargled with old zinnia water. Standing up, she felt nauseous. Not having eaten anything since the grilled cheese sandwich, she went into the kitchen, picked the mold off some stale bread, and toasted the slices. After three cups of black coffee and two aspirin, she showered and changed her clothes. Then she returned to the living room and tackled the manuscript anew, struggling all afternoon to pare down the footnotes that threatened like a cancer to eclipse the text.

  As the sun sank behind the high-rises of Fort Lee, Jude took a tea break. Picking up Vogue, she carefully studied the latest fashions draped on the contorted frames of the mutant models. Then she came to the horoscopes. Hers read: “Planetary forces are conspiring right now, Arians, to shake up the stability you’ve so painstakingly constructed for yourself. The more you fight your need for transformation, the stronger it will grow, like the monster in a fairy tale. So accept the inevitable, and be grateful for the new wisdom it will bring you.

  Frowning, she read Anna’s forecast: “New seas await you, Pisces. If you plunge in, you will locate the treasures of the deep. But if you wish safety, then remain on the shore.”

  Jude let the magazine flutter to the carpet like a shot duck. Leaning her head against the chair back, she speculated on whether Anna wanted treasures or safety. And if she should decide to plunge in, would she change her mind and climb back out again as Molly had done, leaving Jude to flounder alone?

  Jude realized she was starving and there was nothing in the kitchen, so she threw on her blazer and headed out the door. When she reached Broadway, she bought a hot dog from a street vendor. Leaving a Hansel and Gretel trail of oozing mustard and catsup, she headed south. With all these planetary forces ganging up on them, maybe she’d run into Anna if she wandered around the Village.

  Stalking the four miles in record time, Jude paced the narrow, winding streets one after another, watching brave women holding hands, watching women alone as they eyed her eying them. But always she was on the lookout for Anna’s tall, slender frame and her glossy black cap of hair.

  Passing a movie theater, she noticed a placard planted on the sidewalk out front, bearing an enlarged review from the Times. She discovered that the movie inside, called Dark Desire, concerned a love affair between two women. The review was a rave, and a show was about to start.

  Sitting in the dark with her head in her hands, Jude tried to get a grip. She didn’t believe in planetary forces or hypothyroidal psychics or astrological mumbo jumbo. She didn’t even believe in love anymore, and certainly not love with a married mother. So what was happening to her?

  The plot concerned a university teacher named Deirdre who was in love with a younger student named Karen. Flattered, Karen also fell in love with her. Unfortunately, Karen was married and had three children. After about two minutes of excitement and happiness, the problems began. Karen’s children failed at school, and cried themselves to sleep at night, and were rejected by their playmates, and became pyromaniacs and shoplifters. Karen’s husband, Jason, a prince among men, who did the dishes after meals and took his own clothes to the cleaners, demanded a divorce. He remarried an adorable doormat who was a gourmet cook and who liked to fall to her knees and give him blow jobs whenever he walked through the door. They sued Karen for custody of the basket-case children. Karen, meanwhile, had had to drop out of college to support herself as a laundromat attendant. Deirdre, weary of hanging around all the time with a grumpy laundromat attendant, deserted her for a woman in silver full leathers who raced a Harley around London for an express message service. In the end, Karen hanged herself in Deirdre’s bedroom, above the bed on which they’d first so blissfully made love.

  Stumbling out into the street, Jude wandered along it searching for a taxi, profoundly demoralized to see the direction in which she and Anna were headed if they didn’t do something fast. Maybe she should ask Simon for a transfer to the London office? She could vanish without leaving a forwarding address. In the short run, they’d suffer, but they’d be spared even greater future suffering.

  Looking up, Jude saw flashing above her head like a UFO some neon palm trees and the words: THE OASIS. The sign hung above the doorway into a bar. Through the front window, she s
potted a mural that featured camels and sand dunes and shapely veiled figures with clay jugs on their heads. The room was packed with women. Two were kissing on the mouth in a corner.

  What the hell, decided Jude, if the gods needed for her to be a lesbian, at least let it be with a woman who wasn’t someone else’s wife. She marched through the door like John Wayne into a saloon infested with desperadoes. All across the room, heads turned to inspect her. Bellying up to the bar, she ordered a glass of white wine, feeling her stomach turn queasy in protest. After a few sips, she summoned the courage to glance around at the other women. The one standing beside her met her gaze with a smile. She had a lean face with high cheekbones and a pointed chin. Tiny silver Scottie dogs hung like Monopoly pieces from her earlobes.

  “I like your jacket,” she said, nodding at Jude’s blazer, a loose-weave plaid in shades of gray and blue.

  “Thanks,” said Jude. She sipped her wine, elbow propped casually on the bar. “Do you come here often?”

  “Every now and then. And you?”

  “From time to time.”

  “I think it’s really the nicest women’s club in New York. It’s cozy. More like a neighborhood pub. Less like a meat market.”

  Jude nodded as though she, too, were a jaded habituée of the lesbian meat markets of New York. They sipped their drinks. The other woman was drinking scotch. Her flannel shirt was a Macdonald plaid.

  “Would you like to sit down?” asked the woman. “I see a table over there in the corner.”

  They sat. The woman introduced herself, explaining that her nickname was Scottie because she raised Scotties in Bayonne, New Jersey. Each bought the other a drink. A couple of times, they gyrated to the throbbing disco music. The second time, they stayed on the floor for a slow dance. Scottie was as tall as Anna, and their bodies fit together well as they swayed to the languid beat, each with an upper thigh stroking the other’s pubic area.