The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Jude wandered up to Anna’s second floor, searching for a bathroom whose medicine chest might contain an aspirin. It was odd to be in the house where Anna had lived with Jim and their children for close to two decades. It was a warm and welcoming place, with lots of carpets, cushions, and curtains.

  Passing a door that was ajar, Jude glanced in. It was a bedroom. And kneeling on the carpet was Anna, with Jim standing over her.

  “…and I know I’m disgusting,” she was moaning. “And I know if I weren’t so disgusting, darling, you wouldn’t need to sleep with all these other women.” She embraced his knees. “I didn’t mean to drink so much this time, Jim.”

  Jim was gazing out the window into the bare branches of a scrawny maple tree in the garden, apparently uninterested.

  “Please forgive me,” begged Anna.

  Jim refused even to look at her.

  Anna reached up and began fumbling for his zipper. “I know what you like, darling, and I can do it better than any sophomore you will ever meet.”

  Still staring out the window, Jim grabbed her wrist. Gradually, he tightened his grip, until she was whimpering. He wrenched her arm sharply to one side so that she fell to the floor.

  She lay there crying and gasping, “You hate me, Jim. I know you hate me. I don’t blame you. I’m disgusting.”

  Jude stood there mortified, wanting to rush to the rescue but paralyzed by disbelief. Jim hauled Anna back up to her knees before him and began unbuckling his belt.

  Jude ran along the hallway and down the stairs. Grabbing coats from the closet, she dragged a startled Simon into the street.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, still carrying his sloshing plastic cup of scotch.

  “Nothing.”

  Simon raised his eyebrows. “Tell me, Jude. Let me help.”

  “You already have.”

  “…SO I WAS UPSTAIRS in the bathroom,” Anna was saying as she and Jude walked down the street from Jude’s office toward the park, “and when I came back down, you and Simon had vanished.”

  Jude said nothing. There was a bruise around Anna’s wrist like a wide purple shackle. It matched the dark circles under Jude’s eyes from her past two nights of insomnia. As she lay wide awake in the dark, she kept asking herself if it had been a setup. Not that Anna had planned for Jude to witness this exact scene with Jim, but that she had planned for something to happen to shake Jude up. But did she want to shake Jude up in order to end the relationship or in order to revitalize it? Whichever, she had certainly succeeded. Jude was a wreck.

  “Is something the matter?” asked Anna.

  After a long pause, Jude said, “I thought you didn’t make love with Jim anymore.”

  Anna looked suddenly secretive. “Why do you ask?”

  Drawing a deep breath, Jude described what she’d seen. The two stopped and faced one another in the middle of the sidewalk, so the other pedestrians had to detour irritably around them.

  “Well, I guess I was pretty drunk,” admitted Anna. “But what’s a blow job between friends?”

  Jude grimaced. Anna wasn’t usually so crude. She realized that the blow job wasn’t the entire issue. Taking Anna’s hand, she stroked the ugly bruise with her fingertips. “Anna, no one should treat you like that. You have to leave him. Or take him to a therapist. Or do something.”

  Jude was being forced to realize that Anna might be terminally passive. When they were first together, she had said she’d leave Jim when their children were in college. Now her timetable for departure required them to be out of college.

  Anna gave her a look. “How can I leave him when I have no money?”

  For the first time, it occurred to Jude that someone who taught a few workshops and wrote mostly unpublished poetry wasn’t self-supporting, even with the royalties from the anthologies. The odd blow job was probably a small price to pay for the clothes and restaurants and concert tickets Anna invested in with such insouciance.

  “Move in with Simon and me,” said Jude. “I’ll help you out. You can look for a job.”

  “Who’d want to hire a middle-aged mother who can’t type?” she asked. “What am I supposed to do? Wait on tables?”

  “Why not? It’s honest work. More honest than blow jobs for men you no longer love.”

  “So my hillbilly honey has finally reverted to type. Miss Southern Baptist has never done it with someone she didn’t love.”

  Jude had never heard this sarcastic tone of voice from Anna before. She was appalled. “Yes, of course I have, Anna. That’s not the point.”

  “The green paradise of childhood love, bullshit. It’s time you grew up, little girl.”

  “Anna, don’t.” Jude felt as though Anna had just socked her in the solar plexus.

  “Welcome to the black pit of adult lust, my darling.”

  Who was this woman? Jude wondered. Certainly not her tender lover of last week. Studying her contorted red face, Jude noticed that she was swaying as she stood there, like a skyscraper in an earthquake. She was drunk.

  A FEW NIGHTS LATER, Anna arrived at Jude’s apartment building in a taxi with a couple of cardboard boxes of belongings. She acted as though the ugly scene between them on the sidewalk hadn’t happened, so Jude did, too. But every cell in her body was hanging back, watching, fearing a reappearance of Anna’s evil twin. She’d been telling herself that if you opened the Pandora’s box of passions, they all came out, not just the pleasant ones. But an occasional moment of unpleasantness was worth all the happiness.

  Jude stashed the boxes in Sandy’s old room, pending a discussion with Simon as to which free room could be Anna’s. Elated by this evidence of movement on Anna’s part, she let Anna lead her down the hallway to her own bedroom. In the full moon through the window, she began to remove Anna’s rayon jumpsuit. And she discovered a dark splotch across her hip and thigh.

  Turning on the lamp by the bed, Jude inspected the moist purple contusion with her fingertips.

  “I fell in the bathtub,” said Anna.

  “Please stay here tonight,” Jude replied. “Simon and I will go to your house tomorrow and get your stuff.”

  “I’ve decided to come live with you, Jude. But not tonight.”

  “When then?”

  “Tomorrow night,” she said, turning off the lamp and taking Jude’s hand. Sinking onto the mattress, she pulled Jude down beside her. Succumbing, against her better judgment, Jude maneuvered Anna onto her back and began to kiss her breast.

  “Bite it,” said Anna.

  “What?”

  “Bite my nipple. Hard.”

  Jude looked up at her.

  “Please.”

  “But I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Grabbing a handful of Jude’s hair, Anna wrenched her head back down to her breast. “I said bite it, goddamn it!”

  Seizing Anna’s bruised wrist, Jude struggled to free her hair. They wrestled ferociously across the mattress like jungle cats, straining and struggling, crashing against the wall. Anna finally let go of Jude’s hair. With her free hand, she reached over and grabbed the Atalanta flask from Jude’s windowsill. She hurled it across the room, where it fell to the floor and shattered into a dozen pieces.

  “Goddamn you to hell, Anna!” screamed Jude, a flash of fury scrambling her brain. She hauled back her fist to slug her. Then she froze with her hand in midair, teeth bared, muscles shaking and quivering. Anna cringed away and sank back down on the bed.

  Scalp throbbing, Jude leapt off the bed, careened across the room, and slammed her fist into the wall. Anna rolled over into a fetal position and began to rock back and forth, whimpering like a wounded animal.

  Eyeing the shards of her cherished flask, Jude sat back down on the bedside, breathing heavily. She began to pat Anna’s back, trying to calm her as she would have a spooked horse. “I’m sorry, Anna,” she murmured. “I didn’t mean to yell at you.” Leaning over to kiss her shoulder, she discovered that Anna was gnawing her own knee.

  “Anna, do
n’t.”

  Anna looked up, eyes wild. She’d chewed through her skin, like a frenzied vampire queen, and her mouth and knee were dripping blood in the moonlight.

  “You’ve got to get some help,” Jude finally said. “Something’s gone wrong.”

  “Mind your own damn business,” muttered Anna, rolling off the bed.

  “It is my business. Because I love you.”

  “If you really loved me,” said Anna as she fastened her bra and stepped into her jumpsuit, “you’d do what I ask. You don’t love me. You love your idea of me. You’ve assigned me a role in this lesbian ‘Little House on the Prairie’ that goes on inside your head. But it’s got nothing to do with what I might want or need. You keep telling me how marvelous I am, but you don’t know the first thing about me.

  Jude sat in a stunned silence. Could this be true?

  Upon reaching the door, Anna turned to say, “Well, we can’t sink much lower than this. So I’m going to do you a favor, Jude, and not see you anymore. Please don’t try to get in touch with me.”

  Jude looked up at her incredulously. “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.” Anna walked out.

  Sitting on the edge of her bed, rubbing her bruised hand, Jude relived that endless moment when her fist had been cocked to beat the shit out of Anna. For the first time in her life, she understood the phrase to see red. She had seen red, bloodred. And she had nearly reproduced this vision in red by battering Anna to bits right there on the white sheets. She could feel even now the visceral satisfaction it would have brought her to bury her fists time after time in Anna’s cowering flesh. Anna was right: Jude couldn’t sink much lower than this. After a lifetime of deploring it in others, she had caught a glimpse of her own capacity for violence and of the intoxicating erotic charge it could carry.

  As she squatted down and collected the shards of her grandmother’s flask, Jude realized that Anna was right not to stay with someone who had come within a hairsbreadth of beating her up. Yet her departure was actually a sexist act, since she’d stayed for years with a man who beat her up. Picturing Anna’s mouth dripping blood in the moonlight, Jude felt a certain reluctant comprehension of Jim’s behavior. Yes, he sometimes injured her. But apparently if someone else wouldn’t do it for her, she’d do it herself. Dazed, Jude tried to analyze the steps by which she’d started out trying not to hurt Anna, only to end up wanting to kill her.

  Jude remembered Anna’s telling her in the beginning that most people were a house of mirrors. If she’d paid attention then, she could have spared herself a lot of agony. But now she was lost inside the fun house.

  Before descending into an exhausted sleep, she vowed to cut her losses. She’d obey Anna and not contact her. If Anna needed someone to punish her for their bouts of illicit pleasure, like the flagellation of depraved medieval monks, it wasn’t going to be Jude. Jim could do it.

  For the next few days, Jude wandered around the office in a haze of misery, unable to eat or sleep. Several times, she caught Simon watching her with concern. Finally, she went into his office to announce, “You were right about Anna.”

  He looked up from a pile of papers. “What’s happened?”

  “She’s dumped me without a backward glance.”

  He grimaced. “I’m sorry. If it’s any help, I love you.”

  “It helps. But not much.”

  He smiled sadly.

  “Simon,” ventured Jude, “when you and Sandy used to go down to the docks in your chaps—what was that all about?”

  He gave her a look. “What do you think it was all about? Lust.”

  “Weren’t you afraid?”

  “My dear child, that’s the whole point. The terror of the chase. The wild beast that may rip you to shreds once you corner him.”

  “Well, in the end, that may be what turns Anna on—pain and fear.”

  Simon raised his eyebrows. “The difference is that no one on the docks pretends it has anything to do with love.”

  “I wonder if there’s a workshop I could take to win her back. ‘Hurt Your Way to Happiness.’ If only I could behave as badly as her husband, she might leave him to be with me.”

  Simon didn’t smile.

  “Yes, I know you tried to warn me,” she said. “So did William.”

  Upon leaving her office that afternoon, Jude decided to stop by Madame Toussaint’s for a sixty-thousand-mile checkup. After all, she had helped lure Jude into this quagmire with Anna in the first place. Maybe she could advise her on how to climb back out again, or at least tell her what was in store for her around the next bend in this enchanting cosmic tunnel of love.

  But when she reached the block where Madame Toussaint’s lair had been, she couldn’t find it. She couldn’t even find the doorway or the staircase, much less the little hand-printed sign. She searched up and down five blocks in either direction, along both sides of the street. Then she went into several shops to inquire about a large tarot-reading psychic. But no one had ever heard of Madame Toussaint.

  THAT NIGHT, JUDE DISCOVERED that her index finger had a life of its own. Like Lassie to the rescue, it dialed Anna’s number, despite feeble protests from her benumbed brain.

  Anna answered.

  “It’s Jude. I have to talk to you.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t right now. Jim’s here.” Her voice was calm and pleasant.

  “When then?”

  “Soon. Don’t be so impatient, my darling,” she murmured. “We’ll have the rest of our lives together in our cabin in the mountains.”

  Jude held the receiver away from her ear to stare at it. Had she gotten a wrong number?

  Jim shouted in the background, “Did you hear me, bitch?”

  “Got to go,” Anna whispered. “He’s angry.”

  “Get the fuck over here!” he yelled.

  “Anna, I’m coming to get you right now,” said Jude. “Be ready.”

  “No, Jude, don’t.…” Her phone clicked off.

  Jude dashed from her building and grabbed a cab to the Village. Instructing the driver to wait at the end of the mews, she ran to Anna’s house. When she pounded on the front door, no one came. Trying the handle, she found it unlocked. She pushed the door open and raced in. Like a bloodhound on the trail of an escaped convict, she scurried around the living room and kitchen.

  Anna and Jim were sitting on a black leather couch in the den at the back of the house, watching the local news on a television set built into a wall of wooden shelves and cabinets, which were crammed with stereo equipment, books, and objets d‘art. Both were holding lowball glasses full of ice cubes and a milky liquid. Anna, who was wearing a scarlet caftan, looked up at Jude through barely focused blue eyes. Her sleek hair stood on end at the crown, like a kiwi bird’s head feathers. Jim had risen unsteadily to his feet, his flushed face webbed with broken veins.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

  “Don’t you remember Jude from our party last month, dear?” asked Anna, the perfect hostess. “She’s my editor.”

  “What the fuck are you doing in my house?”

  Jude tried to decide. “I’ve come to take Anna back to my apartment.”

  “What are you—a nut or something?”

  “I’ve seen her bruises, Jim. I know you beat her up. And it’s going to stop.”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  “It’s my business because I love Anna,” Jude was alarmed to hear herself confess.

  Anna dropped her glass, spilling her drink all down the front of her caftan.

  “Get out of my house,” Jim said calmly, face turning purple.

  “Not without Anna. Come on, Anna.”

  Anna just looked at her with bleary distress, making no move to rise. Jim headed around the corner of the couch toward Jude.

  “I’m calling the police,” said Jude as she edged toward the doorway.

  “Call whomever you like,” said Jim, fists clenching. “This is my house and my wife. And you’re
trespassing on private property.”

  In the taxi on the way home, Jude felt like a fool. Anna had made no move on her own behalf or in support of Jude. Jude had felt as helpless as she must have as a toddler, trying to rescue her mother from the stranger in the army uniform who everyone claimed was her father. As she had the afternoon she tried to persuade Molly not to go on the Baptist retreat with Ace Kilgore. As she had the night she saw Sandy coupling with the stranger in the moonlight. Why was she always drawn to people who wanted to slow-dance with danger? She was like a moth who flitted around a candle flame while her fellow moths immolated themselves in it.

  But danger you could find anywhere. It was kindness when she came across it that lured her like a flame. She remembered standing in her grandfather’s backyard as a toddler, holding a large rock above her head, about to drop it on a toad just to see what would happen. As she let it fall, her grandfather appeared from nowhere and caught it in midair. He squatted down and picked up the toad, whose throat was pulsing repulsively. It sat on his palm, ugly eyes bulging.

  “Jude,” said her grandfather, stroking the horrible warty back with his fingertip, “our job is to protect and provide for other creatures. That’s the minimum requirement for being human. It’s what the word love means. Many people behave like rabid dogs, but that’s no reason to join them.”

  CROSSING THE MARBLE LOBBY of her office building the next afternoon, Jude spotted Anna waiting for her by the door for their usual Wednesday stroll. Baffled, Jude kissed her cheek. As she backed away, she noticed that the whites around Anna’s cornflower blue irises were faintly tinged with yellow. There was also a sore on her neck, which she’d powdered and tried to conceal with a dashing white aviator scarf.