by Lisa Alther
Abruptly, Jude understood that all she wanted at that moment was to go back to her new apartment on the butte of Montmartre, and watch through the curly iron grillwork as the sun set bloodred behind the parkland to the west, and review her final evening with Anna. Not even this attractive woman in her high-fashion carbine belt could erase that image of Anna in her hospital bed, hands bound with gauze so that she couldn’t scratch the scabs off her sores.
“What is the matter?” demanded Jasmine as Jude bent over to peck her cheeks and murmur thanks for the party. “You don’t like Martine?”
“I like her fine, but I don’t feel very well tonight.” Jude realized too late that she’d been rude to rush away like that, leaving Martine alone on the lawn in the dusk with swallows swooping through the shadows cast by the giant looming chestnut trees.
“But you are perhaps lonely and would like a lovely companion?”
“She is lovely, but I’m hung up on someone in New York.”
“But you would nevertheless like a small adventure when you are away from home?”
“I guess not.”
Jasmine shook her head. “I will never understand Americans. But perhaps you will have dinner with me soon and explain yourself?”
Searching for a taxi by the Seine, Jude reflected that if this was l‘amour, it bore little resemblance to what she knew of love. But then again, that wasn’t much.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, as raindrops bounced off the cobblestones in Jasmine’s courtyard, Jude gazed up at the muscled granite torsos of two Greek gods who supported the front balcony on their shoulders. Across the balcony stretched arabesques of wrought iron indistinguishable from real vines, leaves, and grape clusters. She wondered who had first decided to try to make metal look like vines, and why.
“Tonight is my night for recreation,” announced Jasmine as she hung Jude’s damp raincoat in the closet. “Everyone else is at my house in Picardy. So we can say and do whatever we like.”
Jude glanced at her. She had expected a dinner party. But Jasmine was wearing casual trousers and a black T-shirt with shoulder pads, and there was no evidence of other guests. Jasmine steered her by the elbow into a high-ceilinged room filled with Louis-the-something settees and armchairs as maladapted to the human form as the wrought-iron furniture on her lawn the night of her garden party. Wine velvet drapes shut out the dripping twilight, and crusaders in tunics emblazoned with red Maltese crosses glared down from splendidly caparisoned horses in gilt frames on the walls. These crusaders in their fish-scale chain mail and steel skullcaps had Jasmine’s hooded eyelids and dark, intense gaze.
Observing Jude’s interest, Jasmine nodded at one. “He fought with Simon de Montfort at Minerve in 1210. One hundred and forty Cathars were burned at the stake for heresy.”
“Neat,” said Jude, noticing that the painted toenails in Jasmine’s open-toed, high-heeled mules matched the mauve on her eyelids.
Jasmine inclined her head toward a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the coffee table. “And this is how your people pass their time, n’est-cepas?”
Jude smiled. “Yes. How kind of you to help me feel at home.”
She poured bourbon and Perrier into two tumblers, adding an ice cube to Jude’s. “I believe all Americans like ice?”
Toasting Jude’s new job, they sipped the amber liquid. Jude could feel it creeping down her esophagus like a grass fire.
“You are enjoying Paris?”
“Yes, very much. It reminds me a bit of the American South, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh? In what way?”
“The overfeminized women. Scarlett O‘Hara must have been part French.” Jude laughed.
“Why do you laugh?” Jasmine was smiling politely.
“I had a grandmother who compared every foreign country she visited to Virginia. And I just realized I was doing the same.”
“You find French women overfeminized?” Jasmine settled back against the wine brocade cushions.
“Compared to American women. But your heritage is courtly love. Ours is survival on the frontier. Your ancestors were fighting boredom. Ours, extinction.”
“You are still fighting extinction, no? With all your bombs and missiles.”
“And you, boredom, with all your elaborations on daily necessity.
Jasmine said nothing. For a moment, Jude wondered if she’d been rude without realizing it, or whether Jasmine was just reluctant to acknowledge that accessories could be optional. On the coffee table, she noticed a large silver bowl that contained packs of every conceivable brand of cigar and cigarette. “What was the heresy in Minerve?” she asked.
“La liberté,” replied Jasmine. “They wanted to rule their own kingdom.”
“We tried that in the South, too. It was a big mistake.”
“Southerners should never cross swords with Northerners.”
Jude smiled. “Sometimes you leave us no choice. Submit or die, so we march to our deaths, heads held high.”
“Courageous, but not very smart.”
“Southerners have never been noted for intelligence. We’re simple country people.”
“Yes, as simple as a Moorish screen,” Jasmine observed with a wry smile. “Shall we move to the table?”
Two places were set on a blue paisley cloth with enough crystal, silver, and burnt-sienna bone china for a complete trousseau. As Jasmine exited into the kitchen, Jude studied her fork handle, encrusted with the omnipresent vines and leaves. She didn’t recognize the pattern, despite having memorized all the most popular ones during Charm Class in junior high.
Jude’s own pattern, which she’d selected at age six under the tutelage of her grandmother, was Francis I, which she’d loved because it had twenty-eight pieces of fruit on the knife handles. Every Christmas and birthday, she’d received pieces from her grandmother, who didn’t allow herself to die until Jude possessed twelve complete place settings. Inheriting her grandmother’s twelve settings, Jude then owned twenty-four. Molly’s pattern, forced on her by her mother in the face of her total indifference, had been Burgundy, which was similar to Francis I but without the fruit. After Molly’s death, her mother insisted Jude take Molly’s seven and a half settings as a memento. Jude’s thirty-one and a half place settings of unused flatware were now tarnishing in Simon’s attic on Cape Cod, waiting for her to hostess a banquet. Her father used to say that men struggled to pass on their genes, and women their silverware.
Jasmine returned with two scalloped grapefruit shells mounded high with avocado slices, grapefruit sections, and prawns. She poured white wine into one set of glasses, Evian into another. Jude watched to see which fork she’d use before committing herself. Once upon a time, she’d known them all—the dinner fork, the salad fork, the shrimp fork, the ice cream fork, the lobster fork, the lemon fork, the olive fork, the half-olive fork, the pickle fork, the tomato fork.
“This is marvelous,” said Jude, tasting a hint of garlic mayonnaise and feeling a stab of nostalgia for the French cook at her grandparents’ apartment when she first moved to New York. “I didn’t know you could cook.”
“I have a wonderful woman from Corsica who left this meal for us. Tonight is her night off.”
Removing the empty grapefruit shells, Jasmine returned with medallions of lamb in a plum sauce that matched her toenails, parsley-flecked new potatoes glistening with butter, and embryonic peas and carrots with a faint scent of mint. She poured some red wine from a bottle that had evidently been breathing on the mahogany Empire sideboard as they sipped their Jack Daniel’s.
Raising her crystal goblet, Jasmine gazed into the wine, murmuring, “When one drinks wine in France, one engages all the senses.”
Jude nodded politely.
“First, we observe the deep burgundy blood of the grape.”
Jude raised her glass and looked down into her grape blood.
Chopping up a cherry Popsicle in a Dixie cup, Anna watching her from the blood-flecked sheets, the whites of her eyes a urine yellow
, her lips gray and cracked.
“Jude, I’m not afraid to die,” she said, “but I don’t want to die alone.”
“I will he here,” Jude replied numbly. “Wait for me.” Looking up from the crushed Popsicle into Anna’s weary lapis lazuli eyes that used to dance and sparkle just like Molly’s.
Putting her nose into her glass, Jasmine inhaled deeply and held it, as though smoking a joint. Then she exhaled. “Next, we allow the bouquet to ascend our nostrils, to the pleasure center of the brain.”
Jude sniffed her wine obligingly, but her pleasure center was unfortunately sealed.
Jasmine took a sip and swirled it around her mouth, studying Jude with her intense crusader eyes. She swallowed. “Then we taste the wine, which of course engages the taste buds. But also the sense of touch, as the wine caresses the tongue and the moist cavities of the mouth.”
Meeting her gaze, Jude obediently sipped and rinsed as though at the dentist’s. But her senses were unengaged, and she intended to keep them that way.
“Well,” said Jude, “that covers four out of five. And how about hearing?”
Lowering her eyes, Jasmine said nothing for a while. “Hearing has been involved all along,” she finally replied. “You have been listening to my voice, no?”
“Oh. Yes. Right you are.”
Abruptly, Jasmine put down her glass and picked up a knife and fork. They ate in silence.
“And how is your apartment?” Jasmine eventually asked.
“It’s fine, thanks. I have a wonderful view of Paris. You’ll have to come see.”
“I rarely go out. People come to me here.” She sounded annoyed. Jude felt anxiety prickle the hairs at the back of her neck. “And your work? Is everyone at the office helping you get started?”
“Yes, everyone’s been wonderful.”
“You know, if you are going to get along here, you should at least pretend to play.” She looked Jude in the eye, but with la réprimande, not le regard.
“But if you pretend,” said Jude, “then you’re playing.” She toyed with her ivory knife rest. This was, after all, her new boss, and bosses had to be placated. But she’d spent her years in New York trying to learn to be straightforward. A challenge, since in the South directness had been second only to bad hair on the list of deadly sins.
“Exactly.”
“So don’t you all ever stop playing?”
“What is the alternative? Boredom, followed by death.”
“Childhood is for playing. Then life becomes serious.”
“And did you play as a child? Ah, non. Children are earnest in all that they do. Only adults can really play, because we have learned that life is a game in any case. One that will soon be over.”
“Well, I guess I’m not feeling very playful these days.” Jude laid her knife and fork parallel on her plate to indicate that she was finished. But did this gesture symbolize the same thing in France?
“Ah, yes. You have said that you are—how do you say, carrying the torch? And this person in New York does not desire you?”
“She’s dead.”
“She was your lover?”
“Yes.”
“Someone new would perhaps help you to forget her.”
“I don’t want to forget Anna.”
Jasmine studied Jude, then said gently, “But she is dead. And you are not.”
Jude looked down at the black geometric pattern across her burnt sienna plate.
“Americans are so sincere.” Shaking her head, Jasmine passed Jude the cut-glass salad bowl. “It is touching.”
“Well, as corny as it may sound, I’m afraid I can only make love to people I love,” Jude muttered, realizing as she served herself some romaine and chopped escarole that this wasn’t entirely true.
Jasmine smiled. “But one can love for a single night, no? Or for a week. A love does not have to endure into the next century in order to be love.”
“Children in the South play a kissing game called Five Minutes in Heaven. But once you become an adult, you’re supposed to graduate to what we call graveyard love.”
“And this is what—your graveyard love?”
“Graveyard love is a love that lasts until both people are dead and buried in the graveyard.”
“Oh, I see. As in Shakespeare. ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’ ”
Jude nodded, impressed that Jasmine should know the English classics in addition to her own.
Jasmine shook her head. “And they say that Americans are not romantic.”
“Who does?”
“I believe Europeans think of Americans as Puritans. Practical and efficient. And somewhat naïve to believe that the world operates like that.
“But graveyard love isn’t American; it’s southern. The South was settled by broken-down cavaliers, not religious fanatics. It’s the Citadel of the Lost Cause.”
Jasmine carried out the salad plates, Jude’s mostly untouched. She returned with a marble slab holding several cheeses—cubes and wheels and wedges, dark orange, pale yellow, white coated with black pepper or flecked with blue-green. She might have poured another wine or two, but the grape blood was all as one to Jude by now.
“General de Gaulle once asked how he could be expected to govern a nation that made three hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese,” said Jasmine.
Jude smiled. “Yes, but they all begin with milk and end with mold. Just like people. So that simplifies things a bit.”
Jasmine regarded Jude thoughtfully, opened her mouth, then closed it without saying anything.
The meal concluded with balls of sherbet, passion fruit and citron, in scalloped silver bowls, accompanied by disks of fragile dark chocolate lace.
They moved back to the living room for coffee. The thick, bitter espresso held out the promise of eventual sobriety, followed by terminal insomnia.
“Would you like to smoke?” Jasmine nodded toward the bowl of cigarette packs.
Jude extracted a Dunhill and lit up, sinking back into the cushions. Jasmine picked up an embossed leather album from the coffee table and showed Jude photos of her other houses—an ancient family château in Picardy, a modern glass-and-timber structure on Martinique. Clearly there would be many fringe benefits to Jude’s job. If she managed to keep it, given her reluctance to play. At the back of the album were photos of people—one of Jasmine as a teenager, attired in a riding habit, seated on a horse in the middle of a flying change.
“Do you still ride?” asked Jude.
“Not in years.”
“I used to ride, too. But I never did dressage. In fact, we never used saddles. We just jumped on and took off.”
Jasmine eyed her speculatively, a Hun at the city gates. While returning the album to the coffee table, she scooted closer on the couch, until her thigh barely touched Jude’s. A scent close to chrysanthemums mixed with coriander seemed to be emanating from her flesh, ascending Jude’s nostrils to waft around the barred portals of her pleasure center.
Sitting by Anna’s bedside at the Roosevelt, dabbing with a cotton ball soaked in witch hazel at an oozing sore that wouldn’t clot. Anna’s seersucker robe had fallen open. The pale breast she had begged Jude to bite was lying there like a poached egg. A nurse entered and unpinned the urine-soaked diaper. The sad, gray, sour-smelling genitals, the matted pubic hair, the sagging belly whose unused muscles had turned to flab…
Jude turned her head away from Jasmine to deflect the spicy scent. Jasmine murmured concern that she seemed chilled.
Jude found herself rising to her feet. “I have to go now.” The part of her that had once leapt like a brazier with Anna was now frozen solid. Jasmine was right: Jude was chilled. Permanently.
Jasmine looked startled. “But it is early.”
“I’m really tired. Also a bit drunk.”
“If you would like to stay,” she said, “my driver can take you back to Montmartre when he returns from Picardy later tonight.”
“Thanks
, but I’d better go home and sleep it off.”
Jasmine shrugged, looking somewhat pleased. As she retrieved Jude’s coat from the closet, Jude suddenly understood that to refuse to play was to play. The only way not to play was to stay, thereby short-circuiting the game. But she didn’t love Jasmine. Besides, she was confused. She had thought it was Martine that Jasmine had lined up for her. Or were these overtones of seduction just hospitality as usual in Paris?
“Jasmine?” she murmured. In New York, she could have asked someone outright what was going on. But with Jasmine, she always felt tongue-tied unless they were discussing abstractions.
Jasmine looked at her. Her hooded eyes with their hint of mauve seemed to convey disappointment at Jude’s possible change of strategy. Would she have been able to believe that Jude had no strategy?
“I just realized,” said Jude, “that in English the word love is close to live. Whereas in French, l‘amour is close to la mort. What do you think that means?”
Jasmine studied Jude as she held out her coat.
JUDE SAT BY HER OPEN DOORS watching the lights of Paris flicker and sweep and flare like heat lightning on a hot southern night. Some fans were conducting a séance in the shed in Jude’s courtyard, trying to summon the shade of Dalida, a famous French singer who had recently committed suicide in her house at the end of the block. Jude could see the flicker of candles and hear voices softly chanting Dalida’s greatest hits. Jude’s inebriation was turning into a migraine, one sensation Jasmine hadn’t included in her catalog of the delights of wine drinking in France.
The phone rang. Picking it up, she heard Simon’s BBC voice from New York, where it was late afternoon. He was still at work. Jude pictured him with his long legs stretched out beneath his huge black Formica desk, hands toying with one of his bizarre paperweights.
“So how’s it going over there, Jude?”
“Not too bad, thank you. It’s fascinating trying to figure out the tastes of the French reading public. But socially, I’m a flop.”
“I refuse to believe it.”
“Alas, it’s true. They’re playing Hearts and I’m playing Old Maid.”