by Lisa Alther
Once the dance floor was full, Olivia got up and moved to the center, nodding to a couple of women who called her name as she passed. Wrapping her arms around herself, she closed her eyes and swayed to the music like an underwater plant. As the tempo picked up, she ran her palms down her torso and writhed gently to the beat.
Jude considered and dismissed the idea of going out on the floor and dancing beside her. The Hully Gully she had mastered. Her Boogaloo was passable. But this New Age trance dancing escaped her.
After studying the dancers for a long time, though, Jude got up and began to copy their languid movements. Slowly, she wended her way through the swaying, twisting torsos until she reached Olivia.
Dancing beside her, Jude pretended not to notice her. Finally, she allowed herself to glance at Olivia, only to find Olivia watching her with sulky blue eyes. They held each other’s gaze for nearly a minute. Then Olivia nodded once, slowly, as though coming to a decision.
They swiveled around to face each other. Eyes locked, they moved back and forth in unison, a pair of mating cobras. Then, with a contemptuous toss of her ponytail, Olivia walked away.
Mortified, Jude kept dancing, not knowing what else to do. Olivia reached across her table for her cigarettes and headed for the door. At the door, she stopped and looked back, right at Jude. For a moment, Jude couldn’t breathe. Olivia inclined her head toward the street ever so slightly. Jude smiled, trying to stay calm.
Olivia smiled back. Jude started through the crowd, moving toward the door. Olivia smiled more broadly, turned, and headed for the street. Jude followed, heart pounding like Japanese drums.
Outside, Jude stood alone in the dark street, with Olivia nowhere in sight, feeling ridiculous. But then she spotted her under a streetlight at the corner, looking back for Jude.
As Jude walked toward her, Olivia turned down the cross street. When Jude reached the corner, she turned, too. And there was Olivia, waiting halfway down the block. Jude began to trot to catch up, but Olivia started running, too, ponytail lashing side to side. The full moon was bathing the narrow streets in yellow, and the buildings were casting dark shadows as though at high noon. Olivia darted in and out of the shadows like a ghost.
Running out of breath, Jude slowed down, suspecting that she was making a fool of herself by chasing this young woman through the nighttime streets of Paris. In any case, Olivia had outrun her, and now she didn’t see her. She glanced up and down the street several times, but Olivia didn’t reappear.
Dejected, Jude walked toward the river to find a taxi back to Montmartre. It was probably just as well.
But there by the Pont Marie stood Olivia, hand resting on the stone parapet, watching for Jude, smiling in the moonlight.
Jude caught up with her. Before she could think what to say, Olivia put an index finger to her lips and shook her head. Then she reached out and stroked Jude’s flushed cheek with her fingertips. Jude shuddered. Their lips touched and Olivia’s tongue caressed Jude’s lower lip.
As Jude gasped, Olivia whirled around and dashed across the bridge to Ile St. Louis, the silver Seine licking the pilings below. Turning down a tree-lined street, she paused in the doorway of a building with a huge, stone lion head above the lintel. Punching in the night code, she shoved open the heavy maroon door and entered. When Jude reached the door, breathless, it slammed shut in her face.
Bewildered, Jude crossed the street, leaned against the wall above the Seine, and looked up. It was very late, and the entire building was dark. No lights went on anywhere to indicate the location of Olivia’s apartment. She began to wonder whether she’d hallucinated the whole thing. A firm grasp on reality had never been her forte. She touched the spot on her lip that Olivia’s tongue had caressed. It was still tingling.
The Métro had stopped running, but Jude walked until she found a taxi by the Louvre. The driver, a woman, was wearing a gold silk shirt with lots of Afghan jewelry at her ears, throat, and wrists. She turned to look at Jude in the light from the dashboard. Her skin was olive, eyes and eyebrows dark, teeth a flashing white as she told Jude that the street she’d named didn’t exist.
Jude insisted it did.
She snarled that she’d been driving a taxi in Paris for five years and had never heard of it. Therefore, it didn’t exist.
“But your singer Dalida lived at the end of it. She committed suicide there.”
“This is impossible,” she said. “How could Dalida have committed suicide on a street that doesn’t exist?”
“Look, I live there myself. I know it exists. Please just look it up in your street guide.”
She shrugged in the shadows. “Why should I look it up when I already know it isn’t there?”
Jude was beginning to wonder whether she had passed through a black hole when she entered Marrakesh that night and had emerged in a parallel universe. Finally, she persuaded the woman to drive her to Place des Abbesses.
After crossing the square by the Bateau Lavoir, Jude was delighted to discover that her street was still there, dozing in the moonlight. She concluded that her driver was probably accustomed to driving men who gave her large tips just for the pleasure of her profile during the ride. She hadn’t wanted to waste her time on a woman, especially one who was bewitched.
CHAPTER
18
JUDE BEGAN TO LIVE FOR THE DARK. Leaving the office at the end of each day, she returned to her apartment, where she bathed, dressed, made herself up, and sat at her glass doors, welcoming the descent of dusk over the city. She passed the time trying to figure out which building among the thousands spread out below her was Olivia’s. She could see Notre Dame. Olivia’s street was somewhere to the east. Once it was late enough, she went to Marrakesh and sat at her corner table. But for the first two weeks, Olivia failed to arrive.
On the fifteenth night, Jude walked from Marrakesh to Ile St. Louis along the route they had followed in the moonlight. As a half-moon rose over her shoulder, she stood by the wall above the Seine, gazing at Olivia’s darkened building. Every few minutes, a bateau mouche went by, illuminating her in its spotlights. But she outlasted them all, leaning against the wall until the moon peaked and began its trajectory toward dawn.
Then she hiked back to Montmartre, slept for a few hours, and went to the office, where a lunchtime debate was underway over whether the loss of Alsace-Lorraine during the Franco-Prussian War had incited French enthusiasm for a colonial empire. As she listened in the shifting ribbons of light from the pierced dome overhead, she found herself nodding off, chin on her chest.
When she awoke, she slipped from her chair and out the door. Back in her office, she grabbed the phone directory. But then she realized that she didn’t know Olivia’s last name. So she dialed the strip club and asked the woman who answered for Olivia’s home number, explaining that she was a friend from America. The woman asked if Jude was her friend, why didn’t she know her phone number? As Jude sat in silence trying to think of an answer to this trick question, the woman hung up.
Each night for the next week, Jude stood by the wall above the Seine as the moon waned, waiting for Olivia to come home. But she never did. On the seventh night, it finally occurred to her that maybe Olivia stayed at a lover’s. Was one of the women she’d seen her with at the bar or the restaurant her lover? For a moment, she was limp with jealousy. Steadying herself with one hand against the rough stone wall, she tried to talk herself out of this, since she’d never even officially met the woman.
Looking down at the water, which was paved with sheets of silver light reflected from the streetlamps, she tried to figure out why she always ended up on the banks of some river—the Holston, the Hudson, now the Seine—obsessed with someone who had vanished.
The next night, she wandered through the alleys around the strip club with a handful of lavender tulips, in the company of several other flower-clutching perverts, searching for the stage entrance. After an hour stationed before a steel door they had decided was the one, they watched i
t swing open. As they held their collective breath, a white poodle pranced out, lifted his leg, and peed against the wall. His owner, who looked like Peter Lorre, leered at them from the doorway.
Finally, Jude decided to go back to the club as a paying customer so that she could at least see Olivia onstage again. Shopkeepers sometimes called her monsieur because of her jeans and boots and androgynous build and because many French men were themselves androgynous. So Jude went to the hairdresser’s and got a spiky punk clip. Experimenting with her eyeliner pencil, she gave herself a fairly convincing five o’clock shadow. She bound her breasts with an elastic bandage. Then she put on a black T-shirt, a black silk blazer, jeans, and her cowboy boots. Just to check, she stopped in at several shops en route to the club. And for once she was pleased when everyone called her monsieur.
As she strode down the street toward the Champs Elysées, she began to swagger. It was restful no longer to be groped by men’s eyes and to relax the radar that informed her of who was in her vicinity and whether anything about him suggested potential rapine. As she passed a woman in a miniskirt, she glanced at her legs, then ran her eyes up her torso to her face. The woman’s eyes met hers for a moment, then flicked disdainfully away like a tango dancer’s chin. Jude grinned. No wonder men didn’t want to give up their erotic prerogatives.
The maître d’ at the club also called her monsieur as he seated her on a banquette near the stage and brought her a scotch. But when the Beefeaters came out, Olivia wasn’t among them. As Jude disconsolately watched the other women strut their stuff, she wondered whether Olivia had gone on holiday. Where would such a gorgeous creature go? Greece, Jude concluded, so that she could cavort with all the other goddesses.
MARTINE AND JUDE WERE SITTING in the conference room reviewing submissions for their anthology. Jude was struggling to say that although the New York City students had sometimes lacked a grasp of English grammar and syntax, their poems had displayed energy and invention. Whereas the French students had so far written poems that were technically perfect but full of images and insights as uninspired as if they’d been selected from a prix fixe menu. She was finding it difficult to be tactful in a language not her own. At some point, she realized that she’d been calling Martine tu.
Martine replied that they needed to draw up some guidelines for the teachers to assist them in encouraging their students to depart from the norms. She had a look of distaste on her face, and she was pointedly calling Jude vous. Jude realized that no one in all of Paris called her tu yet. She was still their resident Other. Yet she was intrigued to have inspired such contempt in Martine. She didn’t understand why. Trying to make friends with her had been like trying to cozy up to a barracuda. Writing it off as a lost cause, Jude retreated to vous with an apologetic shrug.
The door opened and Jasmine walked in. She sat down at the round table and began questioning them about how many pages the anthology would be and when they expected to have a finished manuscript.
As Jasmine’s and Martine’s voices droned on and on, Jude found herself picturing Olivia naked beside her on cushions on her living-room carpet, sunbathing in the rays coming through the open door while swallows swooped past outside.
“Jude, can you tell us some more about this?” asked Jasmine.
Jude started. “I’m sorry. I missed the question.”
“I was telling Martine about your handbook for the schools,” said Jasmine, studying her quizzically.
“Oh, right.” She began to describe how the handbook could help local schools set up their own programs and contests.
The door opened again, and Giselle arrived, clutching half a dozen lunchtime baguettes like a bat boy. She was followed by Cecile, Robert, and several others.
While everyone else passed food and poured mineral water, Jasmine turned to Jude and said, “This new short haircut of yours is most attractive.”
“Thank you.”
“Is something the matter? You do not seem well.”
“I’m just tired. I was up late last night.”
“Ah,” said Jasmine, eying her speculatively, “you have a new friend to keep you awake?”
“No, not really.” Keeping secrets was no way to fuel an evolving friendship, but Jude had no wish to tell Jasmine about Olivia or about her return alone to the strip club. Besides, what was there to tell?
“What a pity,” said Jasmine with a smile. “But in that case, perhaps you would care to come to my house in Picardy this weekend? You could get some rest. I would provide you with a large curtained bedstead from the seventeenth century. Covered with fresh linen sheets and a fluffy duvet of goose down. I would fill your room with flowers from my garden and feed you pâté and champagne on a tray by your bedside.”
As she talked, she was giving Jude le regard. Jude felt herself sinking into Jasmine’s invitation as though into the goose-down duvet. But she wasn’t sure exactly what she was being invited to do. Jasmine made even the most normal everyday activity sound like an episode from the Kama Sutra. Although she couldn’t have said for sure if that was Jasmine’s intent. In any case, she realized that she didn’t want to leave Paris and the possibility of finally finding Olivia. All she really wanted out of life anymore was to be lying in Olivia’s embrace on Ile St. Louis.
“It sounds marvelous, and I’d love to some other time,” Jude replied. “But I’m afraid I’m tied up this weekend.”
Jasmine studied her, trying to divine from her face what her engagement might be, but Jude struggled to offer no clues.
After Jasmine departed, Jude excused herself from the lunchtime seminar and returned to her office. Plopping down in her desk chair, she gazed up at the map of Paris spread across her wall. The red meanderings of her routes across Paris were beginning to weave themselves into a tangled web. Picking up the phone, she dialed Simon in New York.
It was early morning there, and Simon sounded bleary when he asked, “So how’s New York’s most tenacious graveyard lover today?”
“It’s no laughing matter, Simon. I’ve done it again.”
“Fallen in love?”
“I think so.”
“Bloody hell, Jude, I can’t leave you alone for a minute.”
“Mock me all you like, Simon, but tell me what to do.”
“Relax. Enjoy it. You’re in Paris. Tell me about her.”
“She has dark hair and blue eyes.”
“Surprise, surprise. What does she do for work?”
“She’s a dancer.”
“Ballet?”
“Not exactly.”
“Ballroom?”
“Burlesque.”
Simon chuckled. “I see. Rough trade. So you’ve finally decided to take a walk on the wild side?”
“I didn’t decide anything. These matters aren’t rational.”
“Not for you, that’s for sure. Her age?”
“Young.”
“Does she love you back, or is it another of your lost causes?”
“I have no idea.”
“You haven’t asked her?”
“I’ve never talked to her. I saw her dancing in a strip show. And then I saw her again at a lesbian bar. And she kissed me once on the bridge to Ile St. Louis when I was following her home.”
There was a long silence. “Good Lord, Jude,” said Simon. “Get a grip.”
“I’m trying to. That’s why I called you.”
“Track her down. Get to know her. Immerse yourself in her annoying little habits. Watch her pick her teeth and chew her nails.”
“I can’t find her. I’m not even sure I didn’t make her up.”
“Jude, why don’t you ask Jasmine for some time off? Come back to New York and see your friends. I think you must be alone too much over there. This sounds serious.”
“Maybe I will, but first I have to find her,” she said vaguely. “If she exists.”
“Okay, but if you don’t find her, don’t panic. Call me up. I’ll fly right over. Don’t brood alone in stoic silenc
e. And remember that there are many people here across the sea who adore and admire you.”
After thanking Simon and bidding him good-bye, Jude hung up and left the office, marching directly to Ile St. Louis, determined to stage a showdown. Since it was afternoon, the night code was off at Olivia’s building. So she buzzed herself in and crossed the mosaic courtyard. She climbed the iron staircases and walked the hallways on all five floors, studying each door. But she could detect no clue as to which might be Olivia’s.
Verging on despair, Jude returned to the street and began to wander across the bridge toward Montmartre. People kept passing her, carrying their baguettes for dinner, waving and stroking them like giant phalluses. Pausing at the spot where Olivia had kissed her, if she had, Jude gazed down into the water as it swirled around the pilings. She wondered if she was losing her mind—or had already lost it.
Glancing back at Olivia’s building, Jude saw her coming out the huge maroon door. She was dressed in a short skirt and a tank top, and she was carrying some books. Spinning around, Jude dashed back across the bridge. As Olivia crossed to the Left Bank and wound through the crowded side streets, Jude ran after her, trying to catch up. But Olivia was moving as fast as the shadow of a bird in flight.
Finally, in the doorway of an ancient Sorbonne lecture hall, Olivia paused and turned. Looking right at Jude, she smiled. Then she vanished into the building.
Enchanted finally to see her again, Jude decided that she had to speak with her. She couldn’t sleep, and when she did, she dreamed of Olivia. Her clothes were hanging off her, limp as sails in the Sargasso Sea. She couldn’t concentrate enough to read manuscripts for work. She couldn’t follow the discussions at editorial meetings. Maybe if she could talk with Olivia, the spell would be broken. Maybe she’d tell Jude she was a disgusting pervert. Anything would be better than the past several weeks of living with her absence.
As Jude sat at a café sipping a crème and watching the door to the lecture hall, she mapped out their life together. Evidently, Olivia was a student when she wasn’t busy driving other people crazy. Jude would support her while she finished school, so she could quit the club. She had seemed so vulnerable up there all alone on the stage in the swirling rainbow spotlights. Jude wanted to protect her. She didn’t like the idea of all those revolting businessmen watching her dance naked. Besides, it was dangerous. What if one of them started stalking her?