The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  “I think you should learn to play Hearts again.”

  “Five minutes in heaven and a lifetime of pain. No, thank you.”

  “I know how you feel, Jude. But it’s the only game in town.”

  “Some of us learn life’s little lessons.”

  “I do understand. Part of you died with Anna. But you have to plunge back into the swim.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re a V-eight engine who’s sparking on only two cylinders.”

  “You’re mixing your metaphors.”

  “Stop changing the subject.”

  “But I’m an editor, Simon. I’m paid to notice these things. Anyway, don’t worry. Jasmine is doing her best to provide me with romantic interludes.”

  “She’s just trying to help.”

  “You’ve discussed me with her? Is that why she invited me to Paris?”

  Simon hesitated. “We spoke about you at the ABA. I’m sorry if you feel betrayed. She cares about you. So do I. We hate seeing you so devastated.”

  “Simon, you’re such a busybody. Maybe I just need to lick my wounds alone in my lair.”

  “No, I’m with Jasmine on this one, Jude. The City of Light on midsummer night. What could be bad?”

  After hanging up, Jude sat counting the bridges over the Seine, along which cars were crawling like lightning bugs on parade. Was Simon right? When Sandy died, Simon lay sobbing in Jude’s arms all night long. For months afterward, he wandered New York like the soul of an unburied corpse, losing so much weight that he belted his jeans with an extension cord. Yet now, plump and jolly, he danced in Provincetown bars until dawn with handsome men, each younger and blonder than the last. He claimed he’d become a New Testament scholar, studying Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John at every opportunity.

  She switched on the television to a movie featuring two French journalists, a man and a woman, in Naples to cover the drug trial of a mafioso. While threats were made against their lives, they gave each other le regard in every bistro in town, even though they were married to each other’s cousins back in Paris. Every time one said, “This is impossible,” they fell into each other’s arms in a sixteenth-century pension and made mad passionate love while hit men lurked in the street below. But whenever one said, “I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you,” both leapt up, packed their bags, and raced out the door in opposite directions. In the end, the woman, a cool blonde who seemed the picture of wholesome propriety, turned out to be in league with the hit men. Dying from a gunshot wound as a result of her betrayal, the male reporter whispered to her with his last breath that he had never loved her so much as he did at that moment.

  As the credits rolled, Jude realized that there was much that she didn’t yet understand about her reading public.

  CHAPTER

  15

  RIBBONS OF SUNLIGHT were weaving through a grid of holes in the white domed ceiling. The round table was crammed with salads, charcuterie, cheeses, baguettes, and bottles of mineral water. Jude was studying Martine, who was insisting to their assembled co-workers that desire by definition implied lack and therefore to consummate it was to destroy it. So appealing when Jude first saw her crossing Jasmine’s lawn in her black silk jumpsuit and studded carbine belt, Martine was currently wearing a tiny navy-blue double-breasted pinstriped suit with a scarlet pocket handkerchief and wing-tip shoes.

  Cecile, the new editor, who wore red-framed eyeglasses with tinted lenses the size of teacups, replied to Martine that no one truly possessed another. Even the merging during lovemaking was temporary and illusory. The unattainable, of necessity, always remained unattainable. So long as a single breath was left in the body, one was doomed to a desire without fulfillment. Or at least that seemed to be her line. Jude’s grasp of French was modest even when someone wasn’t speaking as fast as a tobacco auctioneer and with an intensity appropriate to the final stages of labor.

  Martine curled her upper lip like Elvis Presley and called Cecile the French equivalent of scumbag of the Western world. If they’d been Southerners, Cecile would have pulled out a handgun and shot Martine at this point. Yet no one but Jude seemed alarmed, including Cecile herself. In fact, they all smiled faintly and ripped off chunks of baguette with renewed appetite, hurling crumbs around the room.

  Jude tried to think of something supportive of Cecile to say in her fumbling French, having no idea whether she agreed with her or not. But Cecile was a newcomer, and this episode from the Spanish Inquisition seemed an unacceptable welcome.

  Martine began talking about the role of the father in rupturing the mother-child fusion and his introduction of the child into the compensatory realm of the symbolic, in which fantasized images could substitute for the original lost love object. Although it sounded very much like the story of her own life, Jude realized that she had reached the outer limits of her French vocabulary. So she sat back and observed Martine’s body language, which involved a stabbing index finger, karate chops with the side of her hand, pursed lips, and elaborate shoulder shrugs.

  Simon had always presided over their work lunches in New York with his dry British wit, joking and gossiping and punning, humoring those gauche enough to argue until they stopped it. But the women in this office seemed to have elaborated argument into an art form. Jude was impressed, having herself been trained to be pleasant at any cost. “Smile, girls, smile!” Miss Melrose used to shriek, fluttering her Minnie Mouse eyelashes. “And if you don’t feel it, fake it. The only thing a southern woman must never fake is her pearls.”

  Martine was now slashing and lunging at Cecile like Cyrano de Bergerac over something to do with the role of the Other as a tool for honing self-definition. She seemed to feel that you knew who you were by identifying who you weren’t. Her dark eyes were blazing and her head was tossing like a horse on too tight a rein. She was gorgeous, even with a mouth like an Uzi. But she’d been avoiding Jude ever since Jude walked away from her on Jasmine’s lawn, leaving rooms when Jude entered and pretending not to see her when they passed in the corridor. Jude wondered if she was supposed to be feeling le manque, which in a normal French person would apparently engender le désir.

  Abruptly, the dispute concluded. Cecile and Martine appeared to have called a truce rather than reaching agreement. Cecile took a tiny mirror from her handbag and carefully applied enough scarlet lipstick to frost a cake. Everyone else lit a cigarette and relaxed into her chair, as though after inspired lovemaking. Martine offered Cecile a Gauloise, gazing into her eyes over the lighter. Cecile was now one of the gang. Jude’s colleagues glanced at her, a deaf-mute cowboy Other with whom they were saddled because of some whim of Jasmine’s.

  “Alors, la premiere phase…” said Martine, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke. And everyone proceeded to deconstruct her argument with Cecile, like the instant replay of a football game.

  Stubbing out their cigarettes, they stood up, dusted baguette crumbs off their laps, and headed for their offices, crunching across the carpet of crumbs as though over a plague of locusts. Martine glanced behind her as she exited in her fetching suit. To be sure that Jude was noticing that she wasn’t noticing her? Jude did notice, but she found it irritating rather than alluring. Although she was beginning to wonder if the more unpleasant Martine was to her the more it meant that she liked her. Because the French seemed to thrive on contradiction. The oldest bridge in town was called the Pont Neuf.

  Entering her office, Jude looked out the window and down an alley to the tumbled stone ruins of the Roman baths, sacked and burned by the barbarians in the third century. History Ph.D. manquée that she was, this city enchanted her. It was a feuilleté of superimposed civilizations—Gallic, Roman, Hun, Norman, Frank. Since her job required her to develop an understanding of French culture so that she would know which books to choose for translation, she’d hung a map of Paris the size of a bedspread across one wall. Accustomed to the rectangular blocks of New York City, she initially found a round city disturbing. But in ti
me, she realized that there were thirty-six gates around the circumference. She decided to slice the feuilleté, hiking from one gate to its opposite in eighteen diameters, reading her guidebook before whatever landmarks she encountered, stopping at cafés for coffee when she got tired. She’d done this twice already, marking her meandering routes on the giant map with a red felt-tip pen. Each trip requiring a full afternoon, she’d put herself on a regimen of one per week. As a grand finale, she planned to walk the circumference of the city, then the smaller circles within, where previous town walls had stood. In six months’ time, this map would resemble a giant red spiderweb.

  Upon hearing Jude’s plan, Jasmine had cocked her frosted head quizzically and said, “But this is insanity.” She was probably right, but at least it was well-organized insanity.

  Next door, Jude could hear Martine growling and snapping in a staccato phone conversation. Then a heavy object crashed against her wall. Jude got up and went to her doorway. Martine dashed out, slamming her door so hard that the entire wall shuddered.

  The woman across the hall, a pleasant copper-haired secretary named Giselle, was also standing in her doorway, watching Martine careen down the corridor and out the entrance in her pinstriped suit, screaming, “Merde!”

  Jude looked questioningly at Giselle.

  “Her lover left her last month,” Giselle explained. “Martine had a nervous breakdown and tried to kill herself. She is still very upset.”

  Jude returned to her desk feeling apologetic toward Martine. They had both just lost their lovers. No wonder their interactions with each other were so befuddled. She vowed to make more of an effort with her.

  Since much of Jude’s job involved reading manuscripts at her apartment or meeting with scouts and agents, she came and went as she pleased. As it was a beautiful sunny afternoon, she decided to undertake that week’s requisite trek across Paris. This fieldwork was, after all, an important part of her job. So she took the Métro to Porte de Charenton and walked over to Porte de Bercy. From there, she headed up the Seine in the direction of Porte de Champerret, past docks and cranes, with a forest of glass-and-steel high-rises on her right and a jammed highway on her left, a panorama decidedly different from the ancient ruined splendor most people thought of as Paris.

  As she walked, Jude pondered the notion of an encounter with the Other as a route to self-definition. It seemed pretty flimsy to know who you were only by knowing who you weren’t. What would you do if you were alone in a cave?

  Crossing the Pont Sully to Ile St. Louis, Jude strolled down a quiet street lined with elegant seventeenth-century stone town houses. Arriving at an ice cream parlor, she sat down in the sunshine at an outside table and ordered a dish of chocolate chip. As she waited, she read in her guidebook that this island had served as a medieval dueling field. And across the bridge in front of her was the house where Abélard had been castrated for love of Héloïse.

  While she ate her ice cream, Jude gazed at Notre Dame, which crouched before her like a giant horned insect with flying-buttress limbs and compound eyes of stained glass. She kept glancing back and forth between the barbed spires straining toward heaven and the grotesque stone gargoyles, half dog and half dragon, that vomited rainwater off the roofs.

  After paying her bill, Jude crossed the Pont St. Louis and wandered down the Quai aux Fleurs. As she passed the Tour de l‘Horloge, from which a bell signaling the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre had been rung, she paused to lean on the stone parapet of the Pont au Change, where hundreds of the butchered had been dumped into the Seine to drift downriver past the Louvre, trailing wakes of blood.

  Jude arrived at the park at the tip of Ile de la Cité. Caressing couples sprawled on the benches and reclined along the stones shelves that sloped down to the river. Sitting on a green slatted bench, she tilted her head back and closed her eyes, the sunshine warming her face. Thrushes were chattering among the bushes of red roses, which were filling the air with their cloying sweetness. On the far shore, two dreadlocked black men were playing reggae on steel drums, while a bateau mouche swarming with camera-clicking tourists plowed the gray waters and doused the torrid lovers lying along the banks. As Jude watched them, she realized that she’d never before felt so lonely as here in this city where she and Anna had planned to commence their life together.

  JUDE SANK DOWN in the chair by Anna’s bedside and took one of her twitching hands. Earlier that week, Anna had slipped into a coma. Dusk was descending beyond the bouquets along the window ledge. Anna’s room at the Roosevelt was on the fifth floor. Directly across the street was the condemned apartment building where Jude’s parents had lived during her father’s residency, its arched windows boarded up with warped plywood.

  Turning from the window, Jude studied Anna’s yellow face with its crescent eyebrows and cap of dark hair. She looked as though she was merely asleep and would wake up like Sleeping Beauty if Jude kissed her. Was Anna’s collapse actually her fault, Jude wondered, for having ceased to love her? Had she felt Jude’s withdrawal and gone on a terminal binge? But to be in such bad shape now, she must have been marinating herself for decades. All those nights when she had rolled out of Jude’s arms to go home to Jim, she had actually been going home to her only real love—Smirnoff. But why? What secret pain did she carry inside herself that had to be so brutally anesthetized? What ancient horror was she trying to externalize by remaining with a man who beat her up and by trying to provoke a woman who adored her into doing the same? Jude searched the waxen mask of Anna’s face as though it belonged to a stranger.

  The door opened and Jim walked in, followed by a middle-aged man and woman Jude had never seen before. The woman had Anna’s crescent eyebrows and raven hair. Jim, florid-faced and reeking of alcohol, looked at Jude with a flicker of recognition as she placed Anna’s hand on the bedside and stood up.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m Jude.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said without enthusiasm. He gestured to the couple. “Stanley and Muriel Rivers. From Chicago. Muriel is Anna’s sister.” To them, he said, “This is Anna’s editor.”

  Jude gazed at him coolly, wondering whether to wrangle with him over something that was drawing to a close in any case. “And her best friend,” she added, feeling childish. But what she wanted to say was, “Listen, asshole, I’ve experienced aspects to Anna that you don’t even know exist.”

  Grabbing her coat, she murmured, “I was just leaving.” She watched Jim closely as he moved to Anna’s bedside and looked down at her, swaying unsteadily. His salt-and-pepper hair was scrambled and his bushy sideburns needed a trim. She felt a certain reluctant kinship with him: Anna had been cheating on them both all these years, coupling with a lover with whose charms neither could ever have hoped to compete.

  Suddenly, Jim buried his face in his hands and started sobbing. Muriel raced to his side and put her arms around him. As Jude watched, she felt her hands clench into fists, eager to wrap themselves around his throat. Was he upset because now he had no punching bag? He could move right into the role of grieving widower, and no one but Jude would know what a farce it was.

  Out in the street, Jude stalked north up Broadway, gripped by rage—rage against Jim, but also rage against Anna and herself. Why had they lived a lie for so many years?

  Entering the diner where she and Anna used to discuss Anna’s anthology, she sat down at their usual granite-topped table by the window and ordered their usual Earl Gray tea. As she sipped it, she forced herself to confront the complications of what she’d imagined was her green paradise of childhood love revisited—the ways in which she’d blinded herself to Anna’s desperate situation. The warning signals she had missed or ignored. Anna’s complicity in Jim’s cruelty; his, in her drinking; Jude’s, in their ghastly marriage. Anna’s and Jude’s final months together had been like slicing open a fragrant pineapple from the tropics, only to find it dark brown and putrid at the core.

  The apartment was dark and empty when Jude reached home. Simon w
as at his house on the Cape with two Dutch publishers. After hanging up her coat, Jude sat down on the living room couch. She remembered lying on that couch with Anna the first night they ever kissed, after weeks of titillating indecision. Apparently, this was the price you paid for a clandestine affair. When it was over, there was no one to turn to in your grief, no one to burden with all your touching memories. Simon, William, Sid, and a few others were the only ones who knew about Anna and herself. Everyone else regarded Simon and her as a couple, since they lived together. And Jude had arranged her life to exclude other confidants. She worked and spent time with Anna. That was all. She grabbed the phone.

  “You sound awful, Jude,” Aunt Audrey yelled while children fought in the background. “What’s wrong, honey?”

  “A friend of mine is very sick. Is my father there?”

  When she described Anna’s current condition, her father sighed and said, “I wish I could give you some hope, baby, but I can’t.”

  “So she’s dying?”

  “I’m afraid so. And it’s a horrible death. Especially for those who have to watch it.”

  Jude went completely numb. She felt no anger, no sadness, nothing at all.

  “You and Anna are very close, aren’t you?”

  “Very.” This was as near as she’d ever come to acknowledging the relationship to him. She wondered whether he got the picture. He’d met Anna only once, on a trip to New York to show Aunt Audrey and the children the sights. Jude had brought Anna to a chaotic family dinner at Mamma Leone’s. Her father and Anna had had a chance to exchange very few words as the baby bopped Danny on the head with an asparagus spear, but Jude noticed them glancing at each other throughout the meal. Afterward, Anna said that she’d been impressed by his combination of kindness and strength. Kind men were often weak and strong men cruel, she said, but he seemed to combine the best qualities of both sexes. “He’s what a man is supposed to be.” At the time, Jude hadn’t thought to wonder why, if Anna knew this, she stayed with a weak, cruel man.