by Lisa Alther
“You’re crying,” murmured Anna, pausing in mid-Baudelaire. “Why are you crying, my love?”
Jude began to sob. She rolled over against Anna’s long, lean body and laid her head on her lovely breasts. When she finally calmed down enough to look up through puffy red eyes, she discovered that Anna was watching her, her blue eyes suffused with a tenderness Jude had never before experienced. She shut her own eyes and felt her heart ascend to her throat so that she almost choked from happiness.
“So tell me, sweetheart,” said Anna, stroking Jude’s hair, “are you crying because you’re happy or because you’re sad?”
“Both,” wailed Jude, starting to cry all over again.
Sitting up to blot her eyes and blow her nose, she told Anna for the first time in any detail about Molly and Sandy and their deaths, about her own loneliness and grief and rage.
After listening for a long time, Anna concluded, “So now, with me, you’ve been given another chance.”
Jude started crying again. She felt as vulnerable as a hermit crab that had left behind its old shell but hadn’t yet located a new one.
Anna pulled her back down alongside her own body and held her close, kneading the quivering muscles of her back. After a while, she began softly singing a lullaby of popular songs from her youth—“Sha Boom,” “Qué Sera Sera,” “Glow, Little Glowworm,” “Mr. Sandman,” “Three Coins in a Fountain,” “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes.”
On and on she sang, each tune worse than the last, until Jude began to laugh, begging her to stop. “What was wrong with you teenagers in the fifties?” she demanded. “Those are the worst songs I’ve ever heard!”
Anna shrugged. “We were romantics. ‘If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.’ You call that a love song?”
JUDE WAS LYING ON the living room couch in her sock feet, reading a manuscript about the Knights Templars that Simon had just assigned her. The inquisitors sent by the Pope to examine the London Templars had just returned home to France in disgust, complaining that no one in England knew how to torture properly. Their recommendation was that the English Templars be shipped to France, where torture was state of the art. As usual, Jude was trying to figure out the difference between the torturers and the nontorturers.
The doorbell buzzed. Jude wasn’t expecting anyone. Anna was at the opera with Jim, and Simon was on the prowl down in the Village, having thrown over poor, baffled Marvin. Every month or two, he was madly in love with some new man, whom he portrayed as perfect in every regard. A few weeks later, he had evolved a list of irremedial faults that required him to dump the man in question and plunge into a depression, swearing he would never love again. It was his version of graveyard love. No real person could ever measure up to the ideal of Sandy that he carried in his heart, flashing it like a silver sheriff’s star at anyone who got too close. Jude understood. It was easier to love the dead. They rarely talked back.
Getting up, she padded to the door in her jeans and turtleneck. Through the peephole, she saw Anna in her sealskin coat, glossy dark hair framing her face.
Opening the door, Jude asked with a delighted smile, “What are you doing here?”
Anna pushed her into the entryway, slammed the door, grabbed her hand, and dragged her into the living room. “Quick!” she said. “I have to meet Jim at the opera in forty minutes.”
Accepting the challenge, Jude removed Anna’s fur coat, silk dress, and elaborate undergarments like a sailor unrigging a luxury yacht. They rolled around the plum carpet like the Marx brothers in a car chase, Jude fully clothed. Afterward, Jude rerigged her and sent her out the door with something to think about if La Traviata turned boring.
Plopping back down on the couch with a smile still on her face, Jude reflected that the only thing that bothered her about this delirious love was that Anna would never spend an entire night. She always rolled out of Jude’s arms at some point to throw on her clothes and race home to Jim. But when Jude had complained, Anna replied, “You don’t want to be married to me, Jude. Marriage kills off any tenderness you ever felt for someone. I’m older than you and I’ve had more experience, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.”
There was plenty Jude had to take her word for, because Anna was running the show. Most days, she phoned Jude at the office whenever Jim wasn’t around. A few times a week, if she had several hours free, she proposed that they meet—for a walk, a meal, a museum, or a nap. Anna was determined that Jim know nothing of their liaison lest he destroy it, as she claimed he had others in her past. Since Jim kept a professor’s unpredictable hours, Jude never knew when Anna would phone, so she had rearranged her life to be eternally available. All she did now was work and wait for Anna. She made a point of rarely being far from a phone for which Anna had the number. And when she was with Anna, she often glanced at her watch to see how much time was left before Anna would go away and she’d have to start waiting again.
Having this affair with Anna was like being an undercover agent. But sometimes she thought she wouldn’t want to bring it out into the open even if Anna would allow it. All their intrigue, some of it a bit exaggerated, was exciting. And because Anna always left her hungering for more, the yearning that Jude had learned as a child to label love was never quenched, so she never found out the answer to her original question of what might remain after satiation.
When she wasn’t with Anna, however, Jude’s imagination sometimes went into overdrive. Did Anna still see the women she had loved before Jude? Did Jude measure up, or did Anna pretend that Jude was someone else while they were making love? She pictured Anna at the Oasis Bar in the Village, picking up attractive young dog trainers from New Jersey, taking them back to her house near Washington Square (which she had never let Jude visit). She imagined Anna doing to them all the lascivious things Jude knew she was capable of.
But often when her thoughts took this gruesome turn, the doorbell would ring and Anna would be standing there with her arms full of lilacs. Or Jude’s phone would ring during an editorial meeting at work and Anna would be on the other end, impersonating an obscene phone caller with a thick Polish accent, describing in lurid detail all the things she planned to do to Jude if Jude could manage to escape to her apartment within the next hour. This had gone on for over two years now, and Jude’s only requirement was that it never end.
Simon, however, seemed eager for it to end. He kept proposing business trips he maintained were essential for Jude’s career advancement. She always replied that she didn’t want to leave town. Finally, he insisted that she go with him to the Frankfurt Book Fair. “Ten thousand publishers from all over the world, Jude. It’s the most important publishing event of the year. You need to be there to make contacts for selling the foreign rights to your books. It’s not fair to your authors not to go.”
“Thanks, but I have all the contacts I want,” she said from her desk chair as he lounged in her doorway at work.
“You have contact with me and with Anna. That’s it. You’ll never become a world-class editor by lying in bed day after day with the same person.”
“But I don’t want to be a world-class editor,” she replied. “All I want is to be Anna’s love slave.”
Simon laughed, despite his disapproval. “Please say you’ll go with me to Germany for a week, Jude. If you do, I’ll send you and Anna to the National Conference for the Teachers of English in Boston next month. To promote Anna’s handbook.”
Jude instantly accepted this bribe. Anna had done a workbook to help secondary school English teachers establish student-poetry contests and anthologies on a local level, as she had done in New York City. If they went to this conference, they could at last spend an entire night together. Two nights, in fact—in a strange hotel room with a king-size bed and room service.
Jude sulked her way through the Frankfurt Book Fair, hanging around her company’s stand in the vast exposition hall while Simon met with a different publisher every half hour. I
n the evening, they went to elaborate cocktail parties and dinners with hosts of fascinating people, but Jude merely waited sullenly for the moment when she could rush back to her room at the Intercontinental and phone Anna in New York. Anna went to Jude’s apartment at the end of each afternoon to receive this call. If she didn’t answer, it meant she’d gotten tied up, and then they had to wait another twenty-four hours for their next hit of sweet nothings. After each call, Jude felt calmed and soothed, as though Anna’s voice had injected her with heroin.
The only thing in Frankfurt that made any impression on Jude, other than the exorbitant price of phone calls to the United States, was a publisher from Paris named Jasmine, a friend of Simon’s since childhood, whose father had fought with his during the war. The three of them dined one night in a brasserie near the train station. Jasmine was one of those elegant women Jude used to spot in the streets of Paris, as petite as Jude’s mother, but with a presence as formidable as that of Charles de Gaulle. She was wearing huge, pale rose gem-stones at her ears and on one finger, as well as a beaten-silver Indian belt etched with intricate arabesques of fruit and flowers.
Simon ordered the three of them a dark German beer he found superior. As they sipped it, Jasmine studied Jude so intently with her dark eyes that Jude felt like bacillus under a microscope. But her eyes weren’t critical, just curious.
Simon and Jasmine exchanged news about their respective families. Then they traded tips about the books being hawked and hyped at the fair.
“Tell Jasmine about your titles, Jude,” Simon instructed.
Jude described Anna’s student-poetry anthologies and the new handbook. Jasmine seemed interested although dubious about whether such a self-help concept would float in France, given its centralized educational bureaucracy. Then Jude mentioned her history of the Knights Templars, due to appear the following spring, which seemed to leave Jasmine cold.
“And I edited Forbidden Fruits,” continued Jude. “It’s a scholarly history of lesbianism from the Middle Ages to the present. It came out a year ago, to very good reviews. The paperback rights went for six figures, and so far we’ve sold rights to Holland, England, Sweden, and Germany.”
Jasmine nodded, exhaling a stream of cigarette smoke. “Ah, yes. I have heard good things about it from our scout in New York.”
She was still studying Jude carefully. Jude wondered whether she could read from her face that her only real interest in life was making love to another woman. If so, did this disgust her?
“Would you be so kind as to send me a copy?” asked Jasmine. “Though I am not certain such a book would sell in France. We prefer not to categorize our romantic behavior quite so succinctly as the Anglo-Saxons.”
Simon laughed and said, “But, Jasmine, many of the events in the book took place in Paris.”
“But this is not our fault,” she replied. “Repressed Protestants from all over the world flock to Paris to enjoy our supposed sexual license. These are the people you read about, debauching themselves on the Left Bank. But there is no specific word in the French language that means ’to have sex. ‘We only ‘make love.’ And true Parisians are the most austere race you will ever encounter. The quality of an interaction is all that interests us, not frequency or quantity.”
“Garbage!” snapped Simon.
“But this is true,” insisted Jasmine. “Take those pastries as an example.”
Simon and Jude looked at the plate of exquisite apricot and marzipan tarts that they’d both been devouring with their coffee. But Jasmine hadn’t taken even one. Simon guiltily held out the plate to her.
“But this is my point,” she said, fending them off with one hand. “I have been enjoying their scent of apricot and almond, mixed with the odor of the coffee. Mixed also with your aftershave, Simon. And with Jude’s marvelous perfume. And with the tobacco of our cigarettes. I enjoy looking at them there, dark orange on the blue plate, topped with ivory slivers of almond. With that pot of yellow and orange narcissus behind them. I have eaten hundreds of similar tarts in my life, so I can taste in my mouth right now the contrast between the acid and the sugar. I feel on my tongue the stickiness of the fruit, the graininess of the marzipan, the crunch of the almonds beneath my teeth. So I have no need to eat one. The experience is complete as it stands.”
“But, Jasmine, tarts are made to be eaten,” retorted Simon. “That’s their function.”
“Be my guest,” said Jasmine. “But if you eat one, you have destroyed it. And since the hunger for sweetness always returns, why not stop short of destroying the tarts and learn to enjoy instead the hunger that they stimulate.”
Simon and Jude looked at each other blankly.
“You know something, Jasmine?” said Simon. “You’re a bleeding lunatic. I always suspected it, but now I know for sure.”
She laughed, and then she and he exchanged some witty, sophisticated double-talk in which it was impossible for Jude to tell what either was actually saying. Suddenly, Jude found herself wondering if Jasmine didn’t perhaps share her taste for women. There had been a certain shrewd candor in her eyes as she so frankly inspected Jude—which you didn’t often find in women who were primarily interested in how they might be appearing to whatever men were in the immediate vicinity.
For the first time since she’d gotten involved with Anna, Jude had actually listened to a conversation that didn’t directly concern Anna. Nor had she excused herself to go to the ladies’ room so she could close her eyes and picture Anna’s face and whisper her name. Nor had she once consulted her watch to discover when she could return to the hotel and phone Anna. Realizing this, she felt guilty, as though she’d been somehow unfaithful.
As Jude and Simon strolled back to their hotel through the dark streets strewn with international publishers at play, Jude asked, “Is Jasmine a lesbian?”
“I don’t really know. I’ve wondered the same thing. She has a husband somewhere, but I’ve never met him.”
“As we know, that means nothing.”
“I think the French are schizophrenic,” confided Simon. “They have a public self and a private self, and there’s often an unbreachable chasm between the two. They veil their private selves behind a persiflage of charm and theorizing. But once a Frenchman reveals himself to you, you have a friend for life. In contrast to an American, who’s your best friend after twenty minutes and then you never see him again.”
“And what about the English?” asked Jude. She was intrigued by the ease with which Simon and his European colleagues spoke in terms of national characteristics.
“We use our famous rapier wit to make sure that no one ever gets close enough to be a friend in the first place.”
“But that’s not true,” said Jude with a laugh. “You’re a wonderful friend to me, Simon.”
“But I emigrated, didn’t I?”
JUDE WAS SITTING DOWN front in the ballroom of a hotel near the Boston Public Gardens, where Anna was delivering a pitch for her handbook to the assembled high school English teachers. She had warned Jude that she wasn’t going to look at her from the podium lest she smile or blush. Jude, however, was looking at Anna, who was wearing the same mauve and forest-green wool suit from their first lunch. And she was recalling the marvels that lay just beneath that fabric of fine wool. She pictured Anna naked on the carpet in their room earlier that morning, hips swiveling lubriciously against Jude’s thigh. And Anna sprawled in an armchair in the morning sun, robe fallen open, moaning softly like a purring cat, hands gripping Jude’s head, which was buried between her thighs. It amused Jude to think that many of the teachers who were listening so admiringly to Anna’s excellent presentation would be mortified to know how she’d passed the hour just prior to coming down here to speak to them on educating the youth of America. But how many among them, Jude wondered as she searched their attentive faces, wouldn’t be mortified?
Jude’s company had a stand in the adjoining hall, along with eighty other publishers. Each featured titles of inter
est to high school English teachers. An editor from her firm’s textbook division was in charge of their display. Jude’s only responsibility, Simon had informed her with a tiny, indulgent smile at last week’s marketing meeting, was to keep Anna content. The promotion department had set up interviews for her after lunch and the next morning. Otherwise, they planned to remain in their room, working on Anna’s contentment, pausing only long enough to tip the waiters from room service.
JUDE WOKE UP THAT NIGHT in the unfamiliar bed and reached over for Anna. But Anna’s side of the bed was cold and empty. She waited for her to return from the bathroom, but she didn’t. “Anna?” she called. There was no response.
Sitting up, she switched on the light. The clock on the bedside table read 1:30 A.M. She climbed out of bed and padded into the bathroom. Still no Anna. Her plaid suit had vanished, but everything else remained. Jude paced the room, wondering what to do. She phoned the front desk, but the night clerk had seen no one matching Anna’s description. Finally, she started putting on her underwear.
A key scratched around the lock. The door swung open and Anna walked in.
“Where have you been?” asked Jude, sitting on the bedside with a stocking half on.
Anna’s expression turned furtive. “I had to find a phone.”
“How come?”
“I told Jim I’d call.”
“At one in the morning?”
“He stays up late.”
“But there’s a phone right here.” Jude frowned, wondering what Anna had to say to Jim that Jude couldn’t hear.
“I didn’t want to wake you.”
“I wish you had. I’ve been worried.”
“I’m a big girl, Jude. I can take care of myself.” She sounded irritated.
Anna undressed in silence. For a moment, Jude wondered whether she’d met some alluring English teacher as she autographed books after her talk and had gone to her room for an assignation. Then she dismissed this as too ridiculous, with herself right there, ready to satisfy Anna’s slightest whim. But maybe Anna missed the challenge of someone she wasn’t sure she could have.