The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  When they sat back down, Scottie said, “Jude, there’s something I want to ask you.” She looked off across the room. “I hope I’m not out of line.”

  “Go ahead,” said Jude, heart beating fast. This was it. It wasn’t love, but it would take her mind off Anna and safeguard Anna’s marriage.

  “No, never mind,” said Scottie, suddenly embarrassed.

  “Please. I want you to.”

  “I can’t,” mumbled Scottie.

  “But that’s why I’m here.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Okay. Here goes.” Scottie took a deep breath. “I was wondering if you’d be willing to make a donation to my fund for breeding my championship bitch to last year’s Best in Show at Westminster?”

  Sighing with relief, Jude handed her a twenty and headed home.

  SIMON RETURNED FROM ST. THOMAS the next afternoon with a stunning tan, a new straw hat, and a planter’s punch hangover. “You look like shit,” he informed her when he found her guzzling Pouilly-Fuissé in the living room while an hysteric on the record player shrieked about wanting to be loved. A manuscript was strewn around the floor. “What’s wrong?”

  “This damn book you assigned me,” she snarled. “It’s a fucking mess.”

  “Sorry I asked,” he said, heading down the hallway with his suitcase. “I need a nap.”

  After a few minutes, Jude trailed him to his room. He’d lowered the shades, dropped his Hawaiian shirt on the floor, and crawled under the covers. Jude stepped out of her jeans, threw off her T-shirt, and climbed in beside him. His back was turned, but she could tell by his breathing that he was only pretending to be asleep. “Pretty please, Simon?”

  “I’m sorry, Jude, but I’m hung over.”

  She reached across his back and began to touch him in ways he usually found irresistible. “I’ve got a headache,” he whimpered like a frigid wife.

  “Look, we both know you use me shamelessly whenever you don’t have the time or energy to find a man. So now it’s my turn.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes,” she said, gratified to have produced a halfhearted hard-on.

  He rolled on top of her without enthusiasm. “I’m not the one you should be fucking.”

  “Just shut up,” she snapped, a hand on each of his hips, pulling him into herself.

  When he finally collapsed in a sweaty heap, she moaned, “God, Simon, don’t stop yet.”

  “Get a goddamn dildo,” he snarled. As he rolled off her, he said, “Call the woman, Jude.”

  “Who?”

  “For God’s sake, stop acting like you’ve never been around the block!”

  “What if her husband answers?”

  “Tell him you’re in love with his wife.”

  “I’m not in love with her,” Jude insisted.

  “Tell him you want to rip off all her clothes and do unspeakable things to her body.”

  “You’re no help.”

  “God helps those who help themselves.”

  “Obviously I’m no lesbian,” she said reasonably. “Considering what I’ve just been doing with you.”

  “Give me a break. Go see a therapist. I need to sleep.”

  Jude jumped up, grabbed her clothes, and stalked back to her own room. Sitting down on her bed, shivering from the chill, she picked up the receiver and dialed the first five digits of Anna’s number, finger lingering hopefully over her lucky 4s. Then she slammed it down and returned naked to the living room to polish off the Pouilly-Fuissé.

  AS JUDE WALKED INTO her office the next morning, the phone on her desk was ringing. She lunged for it as though for the brass ring on a merry-go-round.

  “All right, I give up,” said Anna’s alto voice. “You win. When can I see you?”

  “How about right now?” asked Jude, elated, watching her resolutions for a sane and happy life fly out the window.

  “This is not a good idea,” said Jude as they strolled through Central Park, a warm breeze swirling cherry blossoms all around them like fluffy pink eiderdown.

  “I agree,” said Anna.

  “I don’t want this in my life,” said Jude, feeling happier than she had in years.

  “Nor do I. So how do we stop it?”

  They halted and turned to face each other. Jude studied Anna’s eye. The swelling had subsided and her bruise was fading to the turquoise of her irises. “Tell me about your husband,” she requested. “That might help.”

  Anna put her arm around Jude, and they resumed walking. “We have so little time,” she said, “and I don’t want to spend it talking about him. Or my children. They have nothing to do with you and me. They’re my responsibility, and I’ll deal with them. But you’re my escape from all that. I don’t need to be your lover, but I want you as my friend.”

  “You already have my friendship. You know that.”

  “And the other?” she asked without looking at Jude.

  Jude hesitated, struggling. “I love you, Anna. But not like that.” She remembered Molly’s saying these same words to her.

  Anna’s face fell. “Well, never mind,” she said. “The one who is able to set limits loves less. But I accept that. I just want to spend time with you, Jude, in whatever way is possible.”

  “Maybe the one who sets limits loves more,” said Jude. “Maybe she doesn’t want to endanger something that has become absolutely vital to her happiness.”

  Anna’s smile was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. “Why would developing a new facet to our relationship doom it? It could very well deepen it.”

  Jude remained silent. She had just understood that because of her losses, she had learned to equate love with longing. But what if the longing should cease and the love should bring fulfillment instead?

  JUDE PROWLED HER LIVING ROOM, which she and Simon had refurbished with ivory grass cloth on the walls, tweed sofas and armchairs, and thick plum-colored wall-to-wall carpeting. Having so carefully preserved all traces of Sandy, Simon now wanted them completely obliterated. Manic from a new love affair of his own, he had also bought a house on Cape Cod, where he was spending the weekend with a lawyer named Marvin, who was as brunette as Sandy had been blond.

  Anna was supposed to be arriving at any moment to discuss yet again why their love had to remain platonic. This had been going on for several weeks, to Simon’s sardonic amusement. He referred to their maneuverings as the Dyke Dramarama. But for him, sex was about as complicated as blowing his nose—and about as meaningful.

  There were, after all, many issues to consider: Anna’s husband and children. The age difference. The fact that Anna could lose her teaching job. The fact that they could both be murdered in the street, as Sandy had been, as women had been throughout history. And Jude had additional fears she hadn’t yet voiced. Anna had acknowledged being with other women. Would she be disappointed by Jude’s inexperience? Hopefully Anna could lead, but could Jude follow? Most of all, though, Jude was terrified. Her mother, Molly, and Sandy had died. What if loving Anna meant losing her as well?

  Anna walked in and kissed the air beside Jude’s cheek. Jude helped her out of her new royal-purple silk windbreaker and hung it in the closet. Both had been investing small fortunes in new clothes and personal grooming, providing each other with a kind of visual potlach.

  Sinking into Simon’s new couch in a tight skirt that rode halfway up her thighs, Anna said, “So, Jude, what compelling new reason do you have tonight for why we should keep our hands to ourselves?”

  She sounded irritated. In the beginning, Jude’s compunctions had touched her, but she seemed to be getting fed up. At their most recent session at the café on Broadway, Jude had explained that she was determined to make this startling new love of theirs last, even if preserving it required them to renounce it. Anna had studied her with disbelief before standing up and marching out the door. But she returned a few minutes later to inform Jude that she was seriously psychotic.

  Jude sank
down beside her on the new couch and handed her a piece of paper listing the sales figures for Precious in His Sight.

  “Very nice,” said Anna, handing it back. “But so what?”

  “Simon wants us to make it an annual thing, with contests and awards and scholarships.”

  Anna smiled. “But that’s fabulous!”

  Jude went into the kitchen and returned with a chilled bottle of champagne. They toasted their new series.

  “But what does this have to do with our personal relationship?” asked Anna as she sipped her champagne, legs carefully crossed so that Jude could see her finely turned ankle, exquisitely fitting Italian shoe, and the seam up the back of her dark silk stocking that led into the shadowy realm between her legs. Jude’s fingers twitched, longing to straighten the seam.

  “Well, once the book came out, I was no longer your editor, so we were free to pursue whatever connection we wanted. But now I’m back to being your editor. And it would be unethical for me to have an affair with an author. Like a lawyer romancing a client.”

  “That’s too bad.” Anna sighed. “Because I’ve just written you an incredibly romantic poem. I guess I’ll have to read it to someone else.” She studied her carefully trimmed nails.

  “What’s it called?”

  “Leda and the Swan Song.”

  “All right, let’s hear it,” said Jude with a half smile.

  She removed a piece of paper from her handbag and began reading. The early stanzas acknowledged the chagrin of past loves lost. The middle ones dwelt on the delights of new love, despite an awareness that it must one day fade.

  In closing, Anna looked up right at Jude and recited from memory:

  I’ll touch you so gently tonight, my friend,

  That you’ll scarcely recall all that gall

  You’ll cry as before, but this time for joy,

  In the red through the window at dawn.

  Stay with me tonight.

  Hand me your pain.

  Look in my eyes.

  Let love live again.

  They sat there in silence, each stroking with her eyes the planes and hollows of the other’s face.

  Jude set her champagne glass on Simon’s antique oak end table. Leaning over, she placed a hand on either side of Anna’s head and looked into her eyes, which were flaring in the lamplight like cool, blue flames. After several prim kisses, their mouths opened, and the debate was concluded. They lay in each other’s arms for a long time as desire swept over them in waves, too weak from its pummeling to undertake anything more exotic. Out the window at the foot of the couch, the Ferris wheel across the Hudson was a spinning hoop of sparks.

  CHAPTER

  12

  AS THEY STROLLED UP BROADWAY, Anna was telling Jude about the son of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, Anatole, who had died of rheumatism at age eight after many months of horrible suffering. Stéphane had struggled to master his grief by writing poems about the experience.

  Anna began to recite in French some of the fragments he’d composed before admitting defeat: “‘What has sought refuge, your future in me, becomes my purity throughout life, which I shall not sully.’”

  Anna’s French was rhythmical and almost unaccented to Jude’s American ear. She wasn’t listening too closely for the meaning because the sound of the sorrowful words alone was so haunting.

  “ ‘We have learned through you a better part of ourselves, which often evades us,’” continued Anna, “ ‘but shall now reside within us…. ’”

  The closer they got to Jude’s apartment, the faster they walked, until they were nearly trotting, eager to fall onto Jude’s bed and feel the blood course through each other’s veins. Anna was the Florence Nightingale of sex. With her, Jude had been experiencing a passion she’d never guessed was possible—hours of long, slow arousal involving every limb, digit, fold, and recess of flesh, until each cell in both bodies was vibrating with a tension that screamed for release.

  With Sandy, there had been a searing incandescence from hard, silky, swollen flesh pounding like a pestle into her slippery secret passages. And a thundering through their flesh like the hooves of wild horses as they fought and bucked and reared and plunged. Whereas with Anna, there was rather the faint, salty scent of a sea marsh at dawn. And tongues that delicately teased and tested and tuned, sending ripples of desire radiating outward like dragonflies skimming the surface of a glassy pond. And moist velvet walls that opened and pulsed and clung like bivalves. And the sound of the surf swirling in tiny sucking whirlpools.

  It was the difference between galloping across a plain under a white-hot sun at high noon and diving deep beneath the sea. If the French were correct to call orgasm la petite mort, Sandy had provided death by auto-da-fé, and Anna, death by drowning. Either seemed worth planning the rest of your life around. But Jude’s single episodes with Molly and Sandy had sizzled her like stray bolts of lightning, whereas Anna seemed to be rewiring her circuits for an ongoing supply of high-voltage power. She was a high priestess of passion, approaching lovemaking as a ritual, one that had to be respected and revered, one that could be replicated indefinitely by observing the established rites.

  As in any religion, some of the regalia were flowers, candles, incense, and wine. Others were perfume, new sheets, massage oil, and assorted hors d’oeuvres on a tray by the bed. And she liked very slow music that sounded like the spheres revolving in outer space, and icicles shattering on lunar rocks, and winds howling across the tundra. Her variety of holy communion required that all the senses be activated and focused, then fused, and finally obliterated, before the dove of peace could make its descent.

  Jude wandered through her workdays in a haze of exhausted arousal, accomplishing almost nothing, waiting for the night. Fortunately, Simon was in a similar coma over Marvin, so he didn’t notice. Both mooned around the office, gazing out windows with dumb, dazed grins while their company’s sales figures plummeted to new lows. Their coworkers were humoring them, like the parents of children with chicken pox who wait for the fever to break and pray that their own immunity hasn’t worn off.

  The afternoon after her first session with Anna, Jude had found herself buying out the lingerie shop next door to her office building. Molly and Sandy would have preferred her to be a boy. But in a matter of hours, Anna had erased all that, leaving Jude grateful to be female, and the more female, the better. Anna liked to lie on Jude’s bed and watch her remove the silk camisoles and satin teddies—not like a strip show but like an actual flesh-and-blood woman undressing in the flickering shadows cast by the candle flames. She reminded Jude of herself as a little girl when she used to watch her mother dress for parties, worshiping at her altar in a hushed silence, intoxicated by her perfume, which mixed with a strange musky odor that seemed to emanate through her pores from somewhere deep inside her body. Now Jude understood what that exciting, frightening fragrance had been—the scent of a woman in love. It filled the room now when she and Anna were together and permeated the sheets where they had lain. One time, Anna left behind a cashmere sweater, which Jude had decided not to return. On the nights when they weren’t together, Jude buried her face in it while she slept, breathing in the blend of Anna’s Opium, her sweat, and that unmistakable scent that proved to Jude beyond any words or deeds that Anna desired her. If that scent should vanish, Jude knew it would be a warning that their passion was languishing.

  “ ‘The ultimate goal,’” recited Anna as the elevator ascended to Jude’s apartment, “‘was nothing but to leave life pure…. You accomplished this ahead of your time….’”

  Unable to wait any longer, Jude forced her knee between Anna’s knees and buried her face in Anna’s neck, breathing deeply of her Opium. With one hand, she pressed the red stop button.

  “Jude,” gasped Anna as Jude’s other hand slid up her thigh and beneath her skirt, “what if someone’s waiting for the elevator?”

  “Tough luck,” said Jude, watching Anna’s gorgeous blue eyes go bleary a
nd flutter shut as her thighs parted and her head fell back against the wall. Jude’s role in Anna’s religion of love was that of the heretic who defied and flouted the creed. Like the good Catholic girl she had once been, Anna was turned on by transgression.

  When they at last reached Jude’s floor, Anna was still breathing spasmodically as she straightened out her clothing. The door slid open. Simon and Marvin were standing there looking deeply annoyed. Simon glanced from Jude to Anna. “I think the girls have discovered your elevator stunt, Marvin.”

  “Aren’t these young studs remarkable?” Anna asked him smoothly, patting her black hair into place.

  Although he smiled, Jude suddenly suspected that Simon didn’t like Anna. She wasn’t sure why not. In the beginning, he had egged Jude on. Surely he wasn’t jealous, since he had a new love of his own?

  “TELL ME SOME MORE POEMS,” murmured Jude, lying amid her mangled sheets later that evening. Her entire body felt sated and fatigued, and her mind was glazed and dull, as though Anna’s Opium were ether.

  Anna began languidly to recite Baudelaire while Jude watched the waters of the Hudson reflect the flickering lights from the amusement park in wavering, golden party streamers. She recalled the similar safe feeling of lying on a mattress of pine needles in the cave back home, watching the sunset reflected in the river and listening to Molly describe their future cabin on the clifftop while dozing mourning doves cooed from their coves in the Wildwoods.

  As though echoing her thoughts, Anna murmured, “‘Mais le vert paradis des amours enfantines./ Les courses, les chansons, les baisers, les bouquets,/Les violons vibrant derrière les collines…’”

  “The green paradise of childhood love, the races, the songs, the kisses, the flowers, the violins trembling behind the hills.…” Anna’s and her raft was this bed, and the Hudson had replaced the Holston. But everything else was the same now as then. The long arc of lonely hours had finally come full circle, and Jude had recreated with Anna the happiness she had once known with Molly, a closeness and contentment she thought she’d lost forever. The green paradise of childhood love was alive again here in this New York City apartment.