The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  “She seems like a lovely person.”

  “She is. I love her, Dad.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said. “I’m sorry, baby. Life can be very unfair sometimes.”

  “Did I tell you she’s at the Roosevelt?”

  “No kidding.”

  “Her windows look out at the fifth floor of that apartment building where you and Mother used to live.”

  “My God,” he said. “It’s so strange, the way things recycle.”

  “Which apartment was yours?”

  There was a long pause, during which Jude wondered whether he was upset or simply unable to remember. “The fifth, sixth, and seventh windows from the left,” he replied in a strained voice. “Please give them my best regards.”

  A few nights later, Jude was sitting by Anna’s bedside holding her hand, which had been bound to a splint with gauze so that she couldn’t rip the scabs off her sores. The night nurse had apologetically explained that Anna was very willful about picking her scabs, even while unconscious, and that her wounds would barely clot now. Her sheets became blood-soaked and had to be changed constantly. Jude hated the idea of giving the already overextended nurses more work, but the splints appalled her and she was considering removing them. They reminded her of the metal mittens Victorian parents had put on their children’s hands to prevent them from masturbating.

  As she debated this issue, Jude studied Anna’s face, still remarkably beautiful despite the puffiness and the mustard tint to the skin. It was so familiar. Jude’s fingers and tongue must have stroked each ridge and hollow a thousand times.

  Her mind finally relinquished its ethical struggle over the splints. Gradually, it quieted and cleared—until it felt like a high mountain lake reflecting the sky. And in that moment, Jude sensed the presence of Anna, as though Anna’s heart had suddenly yawned open to receive her and enfold her in an embrace. And Jude knew in that instant that their love for each other hadn’t vanished after all. It had just transformed itself, like water evaporating into mist. Apparently, there were detours to union that bypassed the flesh.

  As this fugitive taste of connection faded, Jude sat there watching this woman she loved, this woman she now realized she would always love. But if Anna weren’t dying, would she have been able to feel this? Jude wondered. Before Anna’s collapse, they’d reached a dead end with each other. Was the essential ingredient for a graveyard love the grave?

  Later that evening, as Jude sat by Anna’s bedside marking a manuscript for the printers, she asked absently, “Would you like a Popsicle, my love?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Jude looked at her. Her eyes were closed. Her body was still. “Anna, can you hear me?”

  There was no response.

  “If you can hear me, move your hand.”

  Not a muscle moved, except for Anna’s mouth, which pursed to receive the Popsicle, like a newborn’s mouth searching for the nipple.

  “Anna,” said Jude, just in case, “I want you to know that our time together has been the happiest in my life. And although I don’t see right now how to go on without you, I don’t regret a moment of it.”

  Anna’s hand crept to her breast and used its splint to scrape off a scab. Blood welled up and ran like a freshet down her side, pooling inside her robe and soaking through to the clean white sheets.

  “Goddamn it, Anna, stop that!” screamed Jude, grabbing the hand. She burst into tears. “Please talk to me. For one last time before you go.”

  Anna’s eyes remained closed, her lips puckered for more Popsicle.

  Jude pictured Sandy, inert in his hospital bed, his teeth shattered. And Molly on her stretcher, head stitched like a softball, face the purple of a smashed plum. And herself at her mother’s bedside all those years ago, singing “Rise, Shine, Give God His Glory.” When her mother refused to wake up, Jude began yelling the lyrics right into her ear—until her father had to pick her up and carry her into the hallway as she still sobbed that stupid, hopeless hymn.

  CHAPTER

  16

  JASMINE’S OFFICE was furnished very differently from her antiques-crammed, crusader-haunted living quarters several blocks away. The house was dark and muffled, but the office featured gleaming chrome, black leather upholstery, and the latest in office equipment. Jude had been describing an American novel she thought Jasmine should buy, concerning a love affair between two nurses.

  “Ordinary women living ordinary lives, women who happen to love each other,” said Jude, semireclining before Jasmine’s desk in a designer dental chair.

  “But it is too long,” said Jasmine. “And it would increase a third in translation. And it is too boring—going to work, shopping, cooking dinner, helping children with schoolwork. Our readers are interested in the chase, not the collapse into tedium that follows.”

  “But that’s life.”

  “Your life perhaps. Because you do not know how to play.”

  Jude smiled. She hadn’t picked a book yet that appealed to Jasmine. She couldn’t imagine why Jasmine continued to pay her salary.

  Jasmine’s door hurtled open and a young man marched in without knocking. He had a handsome, pouty face with high cheekbones, a wide forehead, and a navy-blue five o’clock shadow.

  “Ah, Robert,” said Jasmine, half-rising, evidently taken aback.

  Robert glared at her, then at Jude. He was wearing baggy pleated trousers, a long-sleeved rayon shirt buttoned at the throat, and pointy-toed basket-weave shoes. Fag shoes, Simon would have called them. His black hair was spiky on top and long in back, and a tiny gold hoop was dangling from one earlobe. Without taking his dark, wounded eyes off Jasmine, he sank uninvited into a chrome-and-leather chair, hands resting on his knees.

  They sat in silence, Jude waiting for Jasmine to introduce her. He was young. Could he be her son? Jude had no idea how old Jasmine was or if she even had children. She had the beginnings of that parenthesis people got around their mouths as they approached fifty, which made their chins look hinged like Charlie McCarthy’s. But if she’d had a face-lift, this process would have been forestalled. Yet her body was as taut and shapely as a thirty-year-old’s.

  Robert was furious with Jasmine, his eyebrows meeting in the center in a deep frown. And it was clear that he didn’t care for Jude, either. What wasn’t clear was why not, since he’d never before laid eyes on her, so far as she knew.

  Maybe he was Jasmine’s lover. Despite Simon’s belief that she had a husband stashed away somewhere, Jude had concluded that Jasmine liked women, having mostly seen her surrounded by devoted female employees. Yet if Jasmine had in fact come on to her that night when Jude dined with her—which she wouldn’t have sworn to—Jude had turned her down. She was no threat to Robert. So why was he glaring at her as though she’d opened the oven on his soufflé?

  “Do you work in publishing, too?” Jude finally asked him.

  “Don’t ask me what work I do. All Americans ask that.”

  “What should I ask instead?”

  He sighed. “Why not ask, for example, if I am sportif?”

  “Okay. Are you sportif, Robert?”

  Jasmine smiled.

  Robert spat air through loose lips. “I am not obliged to answer such a stupid question.”

  Jude shrugged. She had merely been trying to stave off homicide. She sat in silence, staring at a yellowed photo of a young man with Jasmine’s hooded eyelids that was in an antique silver frame on the bookshelf. Jasmine’s friends and colleagues displayed the most intriguing mix of impeccable manners and breathtaking rudeness. She wished she was back in New York playing “Indiana Jones and the Lost Temple of Atlantis” on her computer at work.

  Finally, Robert stood up and strode from the room without looking back.

  “So who’s Robert?” Jude asked.

  Jasmine waved her multiringed hand as though shooing an annoying fly. Once Jude had finally summoned the courage to ask her some personal questions, she had discovered that Jasmine never answered them,
anyway.

  Jasmine resumed her discussion of why nurse novels wouldn’t sell in Paris. Jude was getting the impression that her readers regarded life as a cross between a Greek tragedy and a Harlequin romance—all storm and betrayal and suffering. Probably Jude would have, too, if she’d grown up in a country that had been invaded by marauders from every direction throughout recorded history, instead of one founded by madcap dreamers who believed you could pack up your sorrows and hop the next ship for the promised land.

  Her eyes kept returning to the photo on Jasmine’s desk. The young man looked a lot like Jasmine.

  “My brother,” she said, noticing that Jude wasn’t paying attention to her discourse on the limitations of realism in fiction.

  “You look very much alike.”

  “So I’m told. But he is dead now. Tortured and shot by the Germans. He was a messenger for the Resistance. Fifteen years old. I was ten. I thought I would die, too, because I adored him so much. But I didn’t.”

  Jude looked at her with new interest. This might be the first real thing Jasmine had ever said to her. She seemed embarrassed, exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke like an octopus spewing ink in a predator’s face.

  Quickly, Jasmine asked about Anna’s poetry anthologies. She had decided to try one for French schoolgirls, feeling they might take themselves more seriously as writers if they received that kind of confirmation at an age before hormones fogged their brains. Jude agreed to organize one but expressed doubt about whether her French was up to the job of dealing with the schools.

  “Martine can help you.”

  Jude nodded cautiously.

  “It will give you a chance to get to know her,” she said, looking at Jude from beneath her hooded eyelids. “She is a marvelous lover.”

  “I’m sure she is,” muttered Jude, wondering how Jasmine knew this. “But I’m not really interested in a new lover right now.”

  “What are you interested in?” asked Jasmine irritably, a repeatedly thwarted Aphrodite.

  “My job. Paris. The French.”

  “If you wish to understand the French, you must take a French lover. It would expand your vocabulary as well.”

  Jude laughed. “You make it sound like a self-improvement course.”

  “It would be, I assure you.”

  The door opened again, and Martine walked in carrying a shopping bag that was almost dragging the floor. Her shiny, chin-length auburn hair was parted in the middle and layered at the nape of her neck. Her huge dark eyes, like licorice throat lozenges, were ringed with kohl, giving her a bruised urchin look. Beneath her navy-blue silk suit, she wore an ivory silk blouse, which was unbuttoned to reveal a lacy camisole.

  It was a Saturday, so Jude was wearing blue jeans, a Big Apple T-shirt, and cowboy boots with silver toe guards. She hadn’t expected anyone to be at the office when she stopped by to leave off some memos en route to a hike across Paris. Already weary of the daily fashion parade at the office, whose corridors functioned like a couturier’s runway, she cherished her collapse into dishabille on weekends.

  “Ah, Martine,” said Jasmine. “We were just speaking of you.”

  Martine nodded to Jude, but her eyes never left Jasmine’s.

  “Did you know that Martine also writes poetry?” Jasmine asked Jude.

  Jude shook her head no.

  “Martine, get your last book off my shelf and sign it for Jude.”

  Martine did so. Then she handed Jude the book, still not looking at her. Flipping it open, Jude read an obscure inscription about secrets between them that awaited revelation.

  “Merci beaucoup,” she said to Martine, who nodded, still looking at Jasmine.

  “So what have you bought?” Jasmine asked her.

  “A skirt,” she replied in a small voice. “And a blazer. A dress and some boots.”

  “Very good. But you must try them on for us.”

  Martine disappeared into the next room.

  “She is a very gifted poet,” said Jasmine.

  “I look forward to reading her book,” said Jude, in fact dreading it because all poetry reminded her of Anna.

  “They are love poems. To her last lover, who has now left her.”

  Jasmine gave Jude a look loaded with meaning. But what meaning? She wished Jasmine would just back off and let her pick her own poison. She couldn’t love on command.

  Martine reappeared in a mauve chiffon skirt, the silk blouse, and the camisole. Watching her, Jude wondered how she’d tried to kill herself. There were no scars on her wrists or rope burns at her throat. Pills probably. Someone as fastidious as Martine wouldn’t use anything so messy as a gun or a knife. Jude was impressed by the purity of her response to lost love.

  Jasmine was studying Martine’s flawless physique. “Yes, lovely. But the blouse—no. Take it off.”

  Martine unbuttoned the silk shirt and let it waft to the floor like an apple blossom on a spring zephyr. She stood there in the camisole, her shoulders and upper chest goose-bumped, whether from cold or excitement Jude couldn’t have said.

  “And now the blazer,” said Jasmine in a low voice.

  Martine picked up the cream-colored cashmere blazer and slipped it on over the camisole.

  “No,” announced Jasmine. “Absolument pas. Not with the camisole. Take it off.”

  Martine removed the jacket and folded it carefully across the back of a chair. Then she shrugged off the camisole, revealing high, firm breasts with small, stiffening nipples. Putting the jacket back on, she buttoned it, leaving a pale canyon of flesh down the middle of her torso, breasts rising up on either side like rounded mesas.

  “Magnificent,” murmured Jasmine, eyes locked with Martine’s. “But now try the dress.”

  Martine glided into the next room. While they watched, she let her skirt drop slowly to the floor. Then she bent over to remove the boots from their box, and Jude glimpsed in the grid of shadows cast by the blinds smooth black-silk bikini briefs, a garter belt, and black-stockinged legs in high-heeled pumps.

  Martine kicked off her shoes and drew on the boots, which had spike heels and rose up above her knees. After letting the black knit dress fall down over her admirable lingerie, she walked toward Jude and Jasmine, a slit up the front of the ankle-length skirt displaying and then concealing the high black boots and dark-stockinged thighs.

  Jude realized that Jasmine was now watching her. Evidently, the next move in this game was up to her, but she didn’t know what it was supposed to be. Martine still hadn’t looked her way. She continued to gaze at Jasmine. She seemed afraid. Jasmine had been exercising some sort of dressage on her, and on Jude—spurring their desire, then reining it in. Should she leave? Jude wondered. Were Martine and Jasmine lovers? If so, what did Jasmine want Jude’s role to be? What did Martine want? She recalled Jasmine’s attitude toward the apricot tarts in Frankfurt. Was Martine the dessert du jour that one savored without touching? Jude was a guest wandering in this foreign land. She wanted to do the appropriate thing, but what was it?

  “Where did you buy them?” Jude finally asked.

  There was a long silence.

  “It is not important,” murmured Martine, finally looking at Jude, irritated.

  Jasmine sighed like a teacher with a slow pupil.

  Jude recalled that she was an orphan raised by wolves. Her family coat-of-arms read: “When in doubt, get the hell out.” She struggled up from her chrome-and-leather reclining chair.

  “I’d better get going,” said Jude, pulling on her Levi’s jacket. “Miles to go before I sleep and all that.”

  Jasmine smiled, perhaps challenged by Jude’s seeming indifference. Maybe she imagined that Jude was finally learning to play. But all Jude really knew how to do when faced with a situation that smacked of sadism was to flee, as her forebears had. One day, maybe she’d stick around to explore her own capacity for the dark, but at the moment all she wanted was a cheeseburger.

  As the Métro clattered toward Porte des Lilas, Jude contemp
lated the concept of lovemaking as blood sport. Anna and she had approached it as a mystic rite. They had ascended from this vale of tears for hours at a time. The stimulation of the hunt, or spiritual transfiguration—which was its proper goal?

  At the far end of the car, Jude heard a man singing an interesting jazz version of “Desperado” in a Georgia accent, accompanied by a guitar and harmonica. Leaning forward, she saw that the ponytailed young man wore a Stetson and cowboy boots. His harmonica was fastened to a frame around his neck so that he could alternate between it and his voice. As he strolled up the aisle collecting change, she handed him some centimes. The car pulled into a station and the door hissed open.

  “Have un bon weekend, y’all,” he called to the passengers as he stepped onto the platform. Noticing Jude’s silver toe guards, he pointed to them, then gave her a thumbs-up signal. Two southern cowboys riding the Paris range. Jude smiled at him as the door slid shut and the car whisked her out of his life, presumably forever.

  Getting out at Porte des Lilas, Jude walked west until she came to a Burger King disguised as a bistro. Inside, she ordered a Whopper with cheese, fries, and a Coke, sop to her sudden homesickness. When the man behind the counter handed her the tray, he said, “Bon appetit, madame!”

  As she munched her greasy fries under the awning along the pavement, Jude pictured Martine in her camisole, flesh riddled with goose bumps, eyes riveted on Jasmine’s. What had that been all about, anyway? Martine had been trying to please Jasmine, who was her boss and maybe her lover. Jude had been trying to keep her job and be a polite guest. But what had Jasmine been doing? She appeared to be teasing Jude—or testing her. Did she want to help Jude and Martine in their grief or merely manipulate them for her own inscrutable purposes? Or was it all a friendly romp, intended to welcome the new kid to the neighborhood? She realized she was bowling out of her league with these complicated women.

  Back in Montmartre, Jude went into her neighborhood patisserie to buy herself a reward for the completion of walk number four.