by Lisa Alther
“Did you really have to call him right in the middle of our time alone together?” murmured Jude, sitting immobile on the bedside as she stared at the print on the wall of Paul Revere racing his horse across Concord Bridge.
“He’s my husband, darling. He still has a few rights.”
“Yes, but he has you to himself most of the time.”
“If we’re going to start complaining about the ghosts of loves past, what about that wax museum you carry in your heart? Sandy and Molly and God knows how many others.”
“You know perfectly well that my waxworks had a meltdown the night we first made love,” said Jude, smiling.
Anna smiled back and said in a softer voice, “Once the children are in college, I’ll be all yours, my love.” She slid under the covers and reached for Jude. “You already have me in a way that Jim doesn’t,” she added as she unhooked Jude’s bra and slipped the straps off her arms. “I don’t make love with him anymore.”
As she pulled Jude down beside her, Jude was swept with relief. She’d often wondered about this but had felt she couldn’t ask, since she was the new kid on Anna’s block. As Jude shuddered with desire and subsided into Anna’s embrace, she thought she smelled alcohol. But they had split a bottle of wine with dinner.
AS ANNA DID HER FINAL magazine interview in their room the next morning, Jude went to the front desk to settle their account. On the invoice, she noticed a charge for half a dozen drinks in the Ironsides Lounge, where she and Anna had never set foot.
“I’m afraid I’ve been charged for someone else’s drinks,” she told the cashier.
He rifled through some slips and handed her a bill dated the previous day and signed by Anna. Shaken, Jude wrote her name on the credit-card slip. Anna must have gone to the lounge last night when Jude couldn’t find her. She had signed for six drinks, so someone else must have been with her. But who? And why had she lied about it?
On the way back to the room, Jude tried to decide whether to confront Anna. Did she think Jude wouldn’t notice the extra drinks, or had she done it on purpose, as a declaration of independence here in Freedom City?
The reporter had left, and Anna was packing for home. Jude didn’t want their last hours together to be spent arguing, so she decided to put her ugly suspicions on ice. She knew Anna loved her. What more did she need to know?
As she packed, sick with misery that their time together was ending, and ending for her on a sour note, Jude had a sudden inspiration. “Listen, Anna,” she said urgently, “call Jim and tell him you have to stay for another night…to do some interviews in the morning. We’ll drive to the Cape. Stay at Simon’s house. Rent horses and ride them on the beach.”
“It sounds wonderful,” she said as she closed and latched her suitcase, “but I’ve got to get back.”
“Please, Anna. Who knows when we’ll have another night together?”
Anna finally did as Jude asked, phoning Jim. Listening to her lie so smoothly to him about the importance of tomorrow’s fictitious interview, Jude felt suddenly uneasy. If Anna sometimes lied to her, she wouldn’t be able to tell the difference any more than Jim could right now.
Later, they settled in at Simon’s glass-and-beam house among the dunes. Driving to Provincetown in their rented Cutlass, they bought jeans, sweatshirts, and tennis shoes. Then they went to a stable on the outskirts of town and hired two horses. The horses weren’t happy to have their fall vacation interrupted. They plodded resentfully among the grassy dunes toward the beach, snorting and shaking their heads time after time in protest. But once they reached the hard-packed sand by the sea, they caught some of Jude’s and Anna’s enthusiasm and began prancing through the foam along the water’s edge as though tiptoeing across hot coals.
Jude slackened her reins and her horse took off, shooting down the beach like an arrow from a bow, careening through the surf, hooves hurling up a spray of salt water mixed with flying sand. For a moment, she worried that Anna might not be able to handle such speed, since she said she’d learned to ride in a ring at summer camp. But looking back, Jude saw her lying low along her horse’s arching neck, a grin on her face.
When the horses finally gave out and slowed to a jouncing trot, Jude headed hers toward the dunes, Anna’s following. Sliding off the horses, the women looped their reins around a jagged branch of driftwood. Then they scrambled up a dune and sat down in the sand. As they surveyed the ocean, the horses stamped and whinnied below. On the horizon, several shiny black whales were surfacing and spouting with a sound like an erupting geyser, then diving beneath the waves again.
ANNA AND JUDE WALKED into Simon’s kitchen. Anna had been silent and sullen on the ride home from the grocery store, shrugging off Jude’s attempts at conversation.
“Is something wrong?” Jude finally asked as they set the bags on the counter.
“I’m just tired,” said Anna in a lackluster voice. “All those dumb interviews. I’m not used to being with other people day and night.”
“Why don’t you sit on the deck with a gin and tonic while I make supper?”
“That would be marvelous. Do you mind?”
“No, that’s why I offered. Simon told me that my assignment is to keep you content.”
Anna smiled wearily. “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”
As she peeled and deveined shrimp in the sink, Jude watched Anna lying in a deck chair, languidly squeezing the slice of lime into her drink. In repose, her face looked its age, as it never did in motion. Her jowls sagged slightly and her cheekbones were becoming more pronounced as the flesh began to fall. There were a couple of folds of loose skin at her throat and a network of fine wrinkles that stretched like a rigging from the outer corners of her eyes. Her ink-black hair had developed a few silver highlights. Recently, she’d had some hot flashes, and her menstrual periods had become as unpredictable as a two-year-old’s tantrums. Jude felt she was watching in Anna the unfolding of her own future. The baby fat of youth was being replaced by bones and wrinkles. This was the first time Jude had ever seen her so moody. Since they normally got together by appointment only, each made sure to be at her most charming. They saved their sulks for the lucky men they lived with.
By the time Jude set their supper on the glass-topped table on the deck, Anna had downed three gin and tonics and seemed more cheery. She filled their glasses with Sancerre while Jude served rice and topped it with the shrimp, which she’d sautéed with tomatoes, garlic, sherry, scallions, and parsley.
“Where did you learn to cook so well?” asked Anna after sampling the dish.
“If you can read, you can cook,” replied Jude.
“That’s not true. I’m a terrible cook. And not from lack of reading. If it hadn’t been for Shake ’n Bake, my kids would have been regulars at the soup kitchen around the corner. When we live together, you do the cooking and I’ll shop and clean.”
“It’s a deal,” said Jude. “Where shall we live—your place or mine?
“How about Paris?”
“God, I’d love to live with you in Paris, Anna.”
“We will,” Anna assured her. “At least for a year. If professors can take sabbaticals, why can’t we? We’ll have an apartment in Montmartre, overlooking all of Paris. You’ll cook me perfect little meals like this one, and I’ll devote myself to your sexual fulfillment.”
Jude smiled. “You’re on. Someday, though, I want to show you the Smokies.”
“With pleasure. They sound spectacular.”
“They are. Especially if you don’t have to live there.”
“I thought that was your plan. To build a cabin and stay there forever with Saint Molly?”
“Ah, Molly…That’s another story. If Molly had lived, you and I would never have met. There I’d be right now, in my Tennessee mountain home.”
“Maybe you and I should build that cabin,” mused Anna.
Jude grinned. “You’d better wait and see if you like the place first.”
Jude pass
ed Anna the salad and refilled their wineglasses, while the surf crashed and the breeze off the ocean toyed with their hair.
“I wish we didn’t have to go back,” said Jude. “I wish we could stay right here like this forever.”
“I doubt if you’d love me if you saw me all the time,” said Anna in a strange voice.
“Of course I would.”
“I can be very unpleasant. You have no idea.”
“I doubt that,” said Jude.
“Trust me on this, darling.”
CHAPTER
13
STANDING BEFORE THE TEAL DOOR of Anna’s tiny town house in a cobblestoned mews near Washington Square, Jude seized Simon’s hand so that they would look the part of a young couple about town. She’d had to beg him to come along in the first place. Jim had finally figured out that Anna was having an affair. But he didn’t yet know with whom, so Anna wanted to cover her tracks. Simon was appalled by such intrigue, but Jude was prepared to do anything to placate Anna.
Although placating her had become quite a challenge now that Jude was traveling so much. Simon had laid it on the line: He’d stuck his neck out for her by making her an editor when she had no experience. If she didn’t work out, it was his head that would roll. Therefore, she had to shake herself out of her stupor of lust and start doing her job. So Jude was now supposed to go each year not only to Frankfurt but also to the ABA, the MLA, and the AHA, depending on what books she had to promote. And twice a year, she went to Los Angeles to peddle film rights.
The end result was that Jude was away from New York now as much as two months a year. And often on weekends, she went to Simon’s beach house on the Cape to help entertain authors or publishers from abroad. When she returned from these trips and weekends, Anna was usually sullen and withdrawn, like a child punishing a parent for an absence. This annoyed Jude, because before she started this regimen, Anna had sometimes allowed as much time as such a trip required to elapse between their encounters. It was as though she wanted Jude always on tap, even if she didn’t have time to see her.
In any case, Anna was almost always tied up with Jim on weekends. She spent much of the summer with him and her children at their cottage on the Jersey shore, and at Christmas their whole family went skiing in Colorado. Was it possible to have an affair, Jude wondered, with someone you never saw? Or was that precisely why it had lasted so long? As though each relationship had a certain amount of capital you could draw on, and the less you withdrew, the longer it could endure.
Once, when Jude tried to discuss all this, Anna broke down in tears on Jude’s couch, saying, “I feel as though you’re moving on, Jude. In the beginning, we were in this thing together. My anthology was the first book for both of us. But here I am, still teaching my workshops, while you fly around the world meeting exciting new people.”
“No one will ever excite me as much as you do, Anna,” Jude replied, taking Anna’s hand in both hers.
She laughed bitterly, extracting her hand. “But for how much longer? I’m turning into a boring old failure, but you’re a rising star.”
Jude sat in silence, recalling various offers Anna had turned down that would have resulted by now in a flourishing career as an educational consultant. Jude had been forced to realize that Anna was actually a bit lazy. Her children were away at school. She had a housekeeper who cleaned and shopped and cooked. She taught two workshops a week and sometimes wrote poetry. What did she do all day? For a brief panicked moment, Jude wondered whether she had another lover. Or two.
“I did it for you,” Jude maintained, realizing this wasn’t entirely true. She’d done it partly for Simon. “I thought you’d find me more interesting if I was successful. And the extra money I’m earning can finance our year in Paris. Or our cabin in the Smokies.”
“Ah, Jude, my love,” she murmured, planting a kiss on her mouth. “My eternal touching innocent. You always believe what other people tell you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
ANNA OPENED HER DOOR. She was wearing gray-green silk hostess pajamas and dangling earrings of silver filigree, like tiny frosted spiderwebs. “How nice to see you both,” she said with her most charming smile. “Jim, these are my publishers. Simon and Jude, this is my husband, Jim.”
Anna ran her arm through Jim’s as he shook hands with them both and murmured a welcome. He looked every inch the suave professor in his tweed jacket with suede elbow patches. His long salt-and-pepper sideburns matched his bushy eyebrows. Jude was shocked to realize that he was her father’s age. It was the same old story: He’d been Anna’s thesis adviser. They’d fallen in love over Mallarmé. He’d left his wife and children to marry her and produce a second batch of children. The passage of time having banked their fires, he now had affairs with students who seemed younger with each passing term.
Fingering his lapel, Anna said anxiously, “Jim has a new jacket from Scotland. Isn’t it handsome? Doesn’t he look elegant?”
Jude had never seen Anna so coy.
As he turned to walk away, Jim said under his breath, “Screw you, Anna.”
Acting as though she hadn’t heard, Anna ushered Jude and Simon into the living room, which was packed with drink-sipping, canapé-munching students and faculty. French doors opened onto an enclosed garden with ivy-drenched walls. The room itself was lined with books. Four plush sofas formed a conversation pit around a huge, square coffee table with an ivory marble top. After fixing a scotch for them both, Anna departed to pass hors d’oeuvres and introduce strangers. Across the room, Jim was holding forth on Rimbaud to a young woman in a miniskirt the size of a dish towel.
Jude watched Simon study Anna in her clinging silk hostess pajamas. She was weaving a bit as she walked. Getting drunk at your own party seemed a bad idea, but the crowd looked so dreary that Jude was downing her drink too quickly, as well.
“You don’t like her, do you?” she asked Simon.
“I never said that.”
“You don’t need to.”
He hesitated, then drew a deep breath. “It’s not that I don’t like her, Jude. I just don’t think she’s right for you.”
“Why not?” asked Jude. Because she had made Jude want to quit her job and spend all day in bed? “In the beginning, you were our biggest fan.”
“I asked William about her awhile back. I wish I hadn’t, because I haven’t been able to decide whether to tell you what he said.”
“What, for God’s sake?”
“He said her husband has affairs with young women, so Anna does, too. She likes the stimulation of the chase.”
“Don’t we all?”
“Yes, we do. But it ends there for her. Once the woman is really hooked, Anna dumps her and rushes back home to Jim for solace. And he does the same. Apparently, they’ve both left corpses scattered all over town. It’s the glue that holds them together.”
“Well, it’s not like that with us,” Jude snapped. “Anna loves me. She says she’s finally met her match. We’re both intelligent and well educated. We adore lovemaking. We have fun together when we go out. She and Jim aren’t lovers anymore, and they’re going to split once their children are out of school. And then she’ll move in with me or get a place nearby. We’re going to live in Paris for a while. Maybe build a cabin in the Smokies. You have to understand, Simon—I love Anna more than I’ve ever loved anyone else in my entire life.”
He shook his head, awed to have triggered such a diatribe of devotion. “I hope you’re right, Jude. Please forgive me for meddling.”
“Of course, I forgive you, Simon. It means you care about me.
“I just don’t want to see you demolished again. Sometimes you don’t seem to know how to protect yourself.”
“In this case I don’t need to protect myself.”
As Simon wandered off in search of more scotch, Jude thought it over irritably and decided he was mistaken. Although their time together was more limited than in the beginning, she and Anna still ate deliciou
s meals together. They attended concerts and operas and painting exhibitions. At the movies, they sat there stroking each other’s palms with their fingertips and then rushed back home to Jude’s bed. They exchanged cards and flowers and candy. They saved up their brightest thoughts and funniest jokes. Jude continued to serve as Anna’s demon lover, making the rest of her dreary life bearable. And Anna remained Jude’s tour guide through the previously uncharted realms of her own passions.
Whereas Anna and Jim got to argue over picking up the cleaning, the ring around the bathtub, and how much to tip the plumber.
Given the scotch, Simon’s remarks, and jet lag, Jude realized she was feeling awful. She was just back from a week in London at a new biennial Feminist Book Fair. As it turned out, the event had had very little to do with books and a lot to do with feminism. Everywhere you looked, some outraged special-interest group was caucusing. The women of color were angry at the white women. The working-class women were angry at the middle-class women. The non-English-speaking women were angry at the Anglophones. The lesbians were angry at the heterosexuals. The heterosexuals were angry at the lesbians. And everybody was angry at men.
The high point of the conference for Jude was her dinner with Jasmine at a carvery on the Strand that featured huge, dripping roasts of ham, beef, lamb, and pork upended on spikes, from which the waiters hacked slabs. A Baptist God might have created just such a place in the hereafter—as punishment for evil vegetarians. Jasmine, who turned out to be a food snob, insisted that the only way to avoid gastronomic catastrophe in England was to stick to such unadorned meat and potatoes.
As they consumed enough animal flesh to have nourished a pride of lions for a week, they discussed the funnels of rage that were swirling like twisters through the conference hall. Jasmine described the rival feminist factions in Paris, one of which had bombed another’s printing press and hounded its leader into exile on the Canary Islands. She explained her theory of the dynamics of minority political movements, learned at her father’s knee during the French Resistance: External injustices generated anger. When it seemed impossible to right the wrongs, the stalled anger pooled within the oppressed group, causing it to split into warring factions, which then destroyed one another, completing the tyrant’s task for him. The only way to avoid this disintegration, Jasmine maintained, was to move beyond the anger, using it to fuel efforts to change specific conditions without allowing yourself to become attached to the results.