The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  These young women were not sad sacks like the New York burlesque queens, Jude reflected. They were temple prostitutes, petulant goddesses, self-sufficient and aloof and unattainable. Like master electricians, they themselves were in charge of the currents of desire sweeping the audience, stepping up the voltage, then pulling the plug. The lesser mortals in the audience were here to worship their beauty, which was immortal, even if the bearers of it were not. And like true goddesses, they were mocking the audience for giving them the homage they demanded, an homage that would never be rewarded with anything more than amused scorn. This was a form of femininity Jude knew nothing about, one that must have prevailed when the race began, in the days when the female body was revered as the source of all life.

  She smiled, at last getting the sobering joke. The women were now back on stage in their Beefeater hats. The eyes of the woman with the dark ponytail seemed to meet Jude’s for a moment, before looking right through her. They fell into formation and tottered offstage like windup toys to a cacophony of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” “God Save the Queen,” and “The Marseillaise.” This was their final comment on male martiality, in pathetic bumbling contrast to their own insolent, indolent sensuality.

  Jude’s group drifted up the sidewalk toward the Champs Elysées. Jasmine was holding Martine’s arm, and Philippe was stroking John-Claude’s nearly beardless cheek as he whispered something in his ear. Robert ambled alongside Jude in silence, like a tamed bear. They sat down around a table on the terrace of a restaurant with a front-row view of the Arc de Triomphe. Philippe ordered more champagne and a platter of shellfish, which arrived packed in enough crushed ice to chill a corpse. They employed implements worthy of the Inquisition to drag the only half-dead sea creatures from their elaborate armor.

  As the others discussed the performance, Jude looked back and forth between Jasmine and Martine. Not only were they elegant and seductive; they were smart. Jude now understood that Paris was perhaps the last outpost of matriarchy on earth. Everywhere she went—the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries, the facade of the Hôtel de Ville, the Place de la Concorde, l‘Opera—there were statues of women, naked and robed, queens and goddesses, priestesses and saints. She thought about the Provençal courts of love in the twelfth century, where flocks of pages had devoted themselves to the grandes dames sans merci, and the Paris salons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which had destroyed careers and toppled governments. Where else in the world were women both outspokenly female and completely in charge?

  Tuning into the conversation, Jude discovered that Robert was accusing the strip club of nationalizing eroticism, domesticating it for consumption by tourists, like the Hawaiian hula.

  “And why not?” demanded Jean-Claude, who Jude had learned was a medical doctor just back from a famine relief project in the sub-Sahara. “If others are exotic to us, why should we resent being exotic to them? We are not, after all, the master race.”

  The point, according to Robert, was that the tourists weren’t being exposed to the real thing. Tonight’s show was like an innoculation against some deadly local plague. The tourists were being given a minute dose of eroticism in a safe setting by indifferent professionals. Afterward, they could go home to Iowa thinking they’d experienced all that Paris had to offer.

  Jude was discouraged to realize that she’d missed the point. But she was still wrapped in a haze of eroticism, and it didn’t feel like a minute dose. In fact, she couldn’t seem to get rid of the image of that woman with the ponytail splaying her perfect limbs across the neon disk in the swirls of rainbow light.

  Martine had been studying Robert speculatively. Finally, she said, “Yet you are not the first to have said this, Robert. Barthes calls such shows ‘the theater of fear.’ He says we display the evils of the flesh in order to exorcise them. Not for tourists, for ourselves. We wish to convert the female body into a household property/propriety.”

  Robert looked caught out, struggling with himself over whether it was less cool to have plagiarized from Barthes or to claim never to have read him.

  “I believe some of us did not find the performance unmoving,” said Jasmine. “Me, for example. And you, Jude. What did you think of it?”

  Jude struggled to translate her complicated thoughts into her rudimentary French. She ended up saying only that she had found it magnificent. She realized that she had no personality in French. No wonder Martine always acted so bored by her. She was, and who could blame her?

  Philippe observed with a smile that French men were good sports to put up with their peevish female consorts, who demanded deference as their right yet mocked their men’s little foibles mercilessly.

  Jean-Claude remarked sotto voce that perhaps that was why he saw so many men in wedding bands at Le Trap. Jude gathered Le Trap was a gay bar, and she was beginning to suspect from the way they looked at each other that Philippe and Jean-Claude were lovers.

  Jasmine said that unfortunately the cunning little foibles of the male were going to destroy life on this earth, or at least render it unbearable.

  With regard to male foibles, they began discussing whether passion and domestic affection were incompatible. They reminded Jude of dragonflies, alighting on a topic for a shimmering moment, then darting off to the next, so inexplicably that she could scarcely keep up, much less join in.

  “Within a marriage,” Philippe was saying with a wry smile at Jasmine, “lovemaking becomes an expectation and a duty. Once it is no longer a free choice, it ceases by definition to be passion. And you can be sure—”

  “So you are saying,” interrupted Martine, “that duty is rational and passion—”

  “Yet a slave might passionately—” interjected Robert.

  The three were now holding forth all at once, none listening to the others. In addition, they were speaking so fast and using so much slang that Jude couldn’t follow anyone. So she looked back and forth among them in the din. Philippe was Domestic Affection for Jasmine, but who was Passion? All perhaps. Probably not Jean-Claude, but who knew?

  Someone’s knee was pressing hers under the table. Whether deliberately or not, she couldn’t tell. She glanced at all the faces but uncovered no clues. She had no idea who was what to whom here.

  Suddenly, Robert was yelling at Martine that whatever controlled restricted. And whatever restricted was tyrannical. And whatever was tyrannical was fascist. That language itself controlled and restricted and therefore was fascist.

  “Ah non,” murmured Martine. “To label is to unmask, and to unmask is to alter.”

  “To label is to limit,” insisted Robert, “and to limit is to destroy.”

  Jude suddenly had the feeling neither cared all that much about labels. They had just picked opposite sides for the pleasure of the clash.

  “Done, if language is fascist,” replied Martine, blowing smoke in Robert’s face, “you, who talk so much and all the time, are fascist, n’est-ce pas?”

  Robert erupted into hysteria. Jude realized she was witnessing the famous furia francese, the French fury, the sudden frenzy that used to possess French warriors on medieval battlefields, terrifying their more laid-back Italian opponents. But Martine merely gazed at him with ennui. She would definitely have flunked Charm Class.

  Behind Martine’s auburn head loomed the Arc de Triomphe. Thirty years before, the aunts and mothers and grandmothers of Jude’s companions at this table, their men having been slaughtered on battlefields to the north, had silently lined this sidewalk to watch the precision rape of their beautiful city. The Nazis had tromped through the Arc de Triomphe with their rifles and jeeps and tanks and horses in a shimmering haze of dust and exhaust fumes. But then, with small daily humiliations, the women of Paris had made the Germans regret that they’d ever left Prussia.

  Jean-Claude had somehow managed to capture the floor, regardless of his faint voice. He was summarizing Stendhal’s discourse on the different types of love and the different stages of each type. His comments h
ad something or other to do with the relevance or irrelevance of labels in the face of a lived passion.

  As Mark Twain once said about Americans and the weather, Parisians talked endlessly about l‘amour. But did anyone ever do anything about it? Jude wondered. Because it was this relentless intercourse of ideas within their quicksilver minds that seemed to give them pleasure. And after all, only people with a profound aversion to bodily fluids could have invented the bidet.

  As though reading Jude’s mind, Jasmine explained to her, “Everyone in Paris talks about love, but only two hundred people actually do it.”

  “The rest of us prefer to watch,” said Philippe.

  Everyone laughed.

  The others decided to go to some private club to continue their discussions. Jude declined because she was exhausted from concentrating so hard to follow the conversation. They offered to drive her home, but she said she’d walk. When Jasmine looked alarmed for her, Jude promised to take a taxi. But she felt so safe in Paris after New York City that she foolishly went on foot wherever and whenever she pleased. The others embraced her and made kind comments about enjoying the evening.

  As she walked down the Champs Elysées toward the granite obelisk at the Place de la Concorde, Jude felt happy. Her apprenticeship was apparently working. The group she’d just left seemed to like her—apart from Martine, who didn’t like anyone. And Jude liked them. In fact, Jasmine and she were well on their way to a serious friendship. Her games had sometimes seemed malign to Jude in the beginning, but she now understood that they were the French version of a Maori welcome, intended to help newcomers feel included. And Jude finally did. There was no longer any doubt in her mind that the French were the world’s most charming and interesting citizens, from whom she had a great deal to learn.

  Jude’s senses were wide open from taking in the beauty of the women onstage. And from the sonorous flow of her companions’ voices, punctuated by Robert’s furia francese like a trumpet solo in a Baroque concerto. From the prickly feeling of champagne bubbles on her tongue, the salty taste of the creatures fresh from the sea, and the swirling scent of tobacco mixed with perfume.

  So stimulated did she feel, with the warm night breeze off the Seine ruffling her hair like caressing fingers, that she walked to a women’s club in the Marais called Marrakesh, which someone at work had once mentioned. The outside room contained a massive oak bar surrounded with high stools. As she perched on one and sipped a kir royale, she could see an inner room for dancing, which was ringed with low tables and easy chairs. Sinuously bulging marble columns held up the ceiling.

  Jude moved from the bar to the dance area and watched the room fill up with women, mostly young and casually dressed, although there were a few fifties-style butches in men’s suits and ties and a couple of transvestites in blond wigs, black leather shorts, and garters. There were also a few men lurking in the shadows, watching the women with the glassy eyes of prizefighters who’d just been knocked out but hadn’t yet fallen.

  Eventually, the dancing began, to music that was a blend of New Age synthesizer and classical guitar, along with what sounded like a team of crickets shoveling coal in the background. It didn’t seem to matter if you had a partner, because most dancers were just swaying to the music and watching themselves in the mirrored walls as the strobe lights pulsed.

  As Jude began to notice that she had drunk too much, the pony-tailed woman from the strip club walked in with several other women. Jude scarcely recognized her with her clothes on, but the ponytail was unmistakable, with large spit curls below her ears, like Hasidic peisim. She wore cordovan boots to her knees, tight, faded jeans, and a white T-shirt with some kind of bone carving on a cord around her neck. She and her friends sat down two tables away and ordered drinks. As they lit Marlboros, Jude strained to hear their voices in the breaks between the songs. But all she could catch was a word with a lot of vowel sounds, which appeared to be the ponytailed woman’s name: o-eee-ah.

  After a while, one woman seized Ponytail by the hand and dragged her to the dance floor. The two writhed back and forth in perfect synchronicity, eyes closed, only inches between them. Jude wondered why she knew how to dance so well. Maybe she was a ballet dancer waiting for a break, supporting herself by her job at the club. But she wasn’t gaunt enough for ballet.

  Jude sat there watching admiringly as women of all sizes and shapes and colorings laughed and talked and danced and flirted. Sometime soon, once she had completed her novitiate in the convent of pleasure, she hoped to be able to join them. After several songs, Ponytail and her group got up and left. Shortly afterward, Jude did, too.

  That night, Jude dreamed about the woman. She was just standing there in her jeans and T-shirt, looking at Jude and saying nothing. Then she was gone. Jude woke up bemused not to see her standing by the bed, so real had she seemed. She looked at the clock. It was only 3 A.M., so she turned over and went back to sleep.

  A few evenings later, as she walked home from work, Jude decided to celebrate the return of her appetite for life with an early dinner at a restaurant near the Porte St. Denis, to which her Guide to Gay Paree had given three stars. Apart from the huge fourteenth-century stone portals from an early town wall that blocked traffic in the middle of the street, the area was dominated by luggage stores. A prostitute stood on the corner near the alley where the restaurant was located.

  Inside were only a dozen tables. Grouped around two were several more prostitutes, one dressed in leather. Another wore a feather boa and a black ribbon around her neck with a crucifix dangling from it. They were chatting and laughing and eating a lot, apparently stoking up for a long night. A couple of other women in street clothes sat with them. One, Jude realized, had long black hair sweeping down from a ponytail atop her head.

  Jude sat down. A pleasant woman in black leather trousers came over to describe the menu and take her order. As she sipped Sancerre and tried not to stare at the group in the corner, she wondered whether her own features were becoming as familiar to Ponytail as hers were to Jude—the long, narrow nose with a slight hook where it joined her brow, pale eyes that narrowed when she smiled, high cheekbones that were flushed even without makeup. Jude kept hearing that word with all the vowels—o-eee-ah.

  When the hookers got up to hit the streets, so did the woman. As she reached the door, Jude heard someone call her Olivia. So at least that mystery was solved. Before exiting, Olivia turned her head Jude’s way. As their glances met, Jude thought she noticed a flicker of recognition in the woman’s blue-gray eyes. And then she was gone.

  Having lost her appetite at the sight of those eyes, Jude rearranged the food on her plate, hiding a duck leg under a lettuce leaf. She tried to figure out if Olivia was a prostitute. But the others were in costume, whereas she was wearing just jeans and a T-shirt. But maybe that was her costume.

  After paying her bill, Jude walked down the alley and turned into the street. Although she looked around for Olivia or her friends, she saw no one familiar. For a moment, she considered going back to the strip club alone, just so she could watch Olivia again. But it was too early, and Jude wasn’t dressed up enough. Besides, she couldn’t see going by herself and being pointed out by the waiters as a lecherous lesbian, and she didn’t know any men to invite as her cover.

  In any case, she could feel an obscure longing starting to stir, and she didn’t want to encourage it. She planned to give herself a break and take life lightly from here on out.

  For the next couple of weeks, she read through a stack of English and American novels and wrote reports for Jasmine. She sent postcards to two dozen friends in New York. She planned visits to publishers in London, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen. She organized a new address book, eliminating many Tennessee and New York City entries and adding some French ones. She also pruned her large pile of business cards, many of which she had no memory of receiving, though no doubt she’d promised letters and lunch dates. Life was like a motel, and your job was just to change the sheets and get
ready for the next guest.

  THE MORNING OF HER FLIGHT to London, in the taxi north through Paris toward the périphérique, Jude was startled to find herself scrutinizing each woman they passed for a black ponytail. Even though she hadn’t seen Olivia since that night at the restaurant, she realized that she had been halfway looking for her whenever she had turned a corner. Not to be able to do this for three days in London seemed suddenly unbearable. As they approached Charles de Gaulle airport, her agitation increased.

  At the departure terminal, marchers were circling, wearing signs saying that Air France mechanics were on strike. Relieved, Jude told the driver to take her back to Montmartre. As they retraced their route, Jude took a good, long look at her cacophony of emotions, and she was appalled. Was she becoming infatuated with a woman she’d never even met?

  That night, she dreamed again of Olivia standing before her in blue jeans. Slowly, she smiled. Then she said in French, “If you love me, you must tell me so. Do not be afraid, because I love you, too.”

  Waking up the next morning, Jude recalled the dream. It was the first time she’d ever dreamed in French. What did it mean? Or was it just her solitary brain slipping its gears? It would be absurd to say that she loved a woman she’d seen only three times from across the room. Besides, she was finished with all that nonsense. She didn’t want anything heavy anymore—just some good times and some tenderness.

  LATE THAT NIGHT, JUDE sat at a corner table in Marrakesh, smoking a Dunhill and nursing a kir. The thrill of spending her evenings watching the Eiffel Tower until its spotlights switched off at midnight was beginning to pale. She wanted someone to watch it with her. It was past time to emerge from her widowhood. So far, she had exchanged le regard with three candidates, but none had clicked.

  Stubbing out her cigarette, she glanced toward the doorway. And there was Olivia, alone, dressed in black stretch pants and a baggy blue sweater. As she searched the room for her friends, her face fell slightly. She sat down at a table and ordered a drink, which she sipped slowly, trying to make it last.