The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  They could have an apartment in Paris for Olivia and another in New York for Jude. Maybe Olivia would like Tennessee. They could build the cabin overlooking the Smokies that she’d planned with Molly and Anna. Olivia was young, so hopefully she didn’t have a lot of baggage like husbands and children. Jude looked forward to being with someone long enough to grow thoroughly bored by her. She’d enjoy watching her hair go gray and her face crease and her perfect breasts sag. They’d take care of each other when they got sick, and Olivia could hold Jude’s hand as she died, as Jude had Anna’s.

  Other students were exiting from the lecture hall, but not Olivia. Jude paid her bill and walked to the doorway. She asked a young man what the course was, and he said Anglo-American Philosophy. So Olivia was apparently a philosopher. She’d have a professor’s schedule, and they’d be able to travel in the summers and at Christmas.

  Olivia still hadn’t emerged. Jude walked into the musty old building and poked her head into the lecture hall. It was empty, apart from some wads of paper on the floor by the lectern. Olivia must have slipped out a side door. Jude was getting irritated. Here she was planning their future, yet Olivia seemed to be evading her. The only way out of this endless nightmare seemed to be to plunge into it ever more deeply. So she returned to Ile St. Louis and stationed herself by the wall in front of Olivia’s building. She would stay there for as long as it took to confront her.

  For a while, she studied the wrought-iron grilles across all the windows on Olivia’s block, wondering whether the bars on French jails were similarly patterned. Like snowflakes, no two designs were the same. Then she started thinking about this stale analogy. Presumably, no one had ever seen every snowflake that ever existed, so how did scientists know that no two were alike? She was willing to bet that some were.

  She looked down and discovered a woman with a green Michelin guide standing before her. The woman asked in a French even worse than her own if she knew which building had been Camille Claudel’s studio.

  “I’m sorry,” said Jude. “I don’t actually know.”

  “I think it must be the one with the maroon door,” she mused. “She went insane in there after Rodin rejected her.”

  “No kidding,” said Jude uneasily.

  After a couple of hours, her feet were hurting. She sank down to the sidewalk and sat with her back against the stone wall, studying the downspout on Olivia’s building. It was gilded to resemble fish scales. At the bottom was the fish’s head, with round eyes and a gaping mouth through which the rainwater from the roof would pour. Jude wondered why Olivia lived in such a fancy building. Maybe her father was a diplomat who didn’t realize how his daughter earned her pocket money when he was on assignment abroad. Or maybe she was an au pair for a wealthy family by day and a goddess by night.

  As the sunset faded into dusk, Jude began to feel chilled, so she buttoned the jacket of her cotton suit and turned up the collar. Then she reviewed her entire history with Olivia, from the moment she first saw her in the neon hoop at the strip club until she vanished that afternoon into the Sorbonne lecture hall: the glances they’d exchanged, her dreams, their dance at the Marrakesh, their flight to Ile St. Louis through the moonlight, Olivia’s fingertips caressing her cheek on the Pont Marie, her tongue stroking Jude’s lip.

  At last, Jude unraveled what had happened: Olivia had revealed herself just enough for Jude to become intrigued. Then she had removed herself so that Jude would feel the lack of her. This lack was now generating Jude’s crazed desire, just as Martine had insisted during that first lunch at the office.

  A woman began to scream through an open window on the top floor of Olivia’s building. The hair on the back of Jude’s neck bristled. Someone was being attacked. Could it be Olivia? As the screaming increased in intensity, Jude jumped up, trying desperately to think what the Paris equivalent of 911 might be. She glanced up and down the street for someone who would know what to do, but the sidewalks were empty.

  But then the screams modulated into a strangulated tattoo of oui’s. “Oui…oui…oui…oui…” Like the fifth little piggy who couldn’t find her way home. Only l‘amour this time, Jude realized, not la mort. She sank back down on the sidewalk.

  “Merde, ça we fait mal…,” moaned the woman from on high. “Plus. Plus. Plus. Oui, plus…”

  Jude leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes while the woman gasped, “In the name of God, don’t stop yet, you filthy swine!

  Jude drew a deep breath and tried to think about something else—the number of bateaux mouches that must pass that spot every day, for example. As she performed calculations in her head, the woman emitted several high-pitched shrieks, like a buzzard swooping down on a field mouse. Then she fell silent. Jude was pretty sure she’d faked her orgasm. Her own armpits were clammy.

  Extending her trousered legs across the sidewalk, Jude studied her high-fashion cowboy boots with the filigreed silver toe guards. What was she doing sprawled on a Parisian sidewalk outside the apartment of an exotic dancer she’d never met? She had finally fallen into the pit. She now understood the fascination for Molly and Sandy and Anna of people who made them suffer. It was the promise of extinguishing your lonely separate self in a power you had defined as greater than your own. It was graveyard love run amok.

  Her head began to nod. Finally, her chin fell forward and settled on her chest. As darkness descended, she slept.

  When she next opened her eyes, the sky overhead was black, with a faint golden tint from the city lights. And Olivia was passing beneath the stone lion head and into her building, ponytail swishing. But Jude was so shocked by the sight of her that she couldn’t utter a sound.

  Crazed with frustration, she continued lying against the wall and tried to figure out what to do next. The night code would be on, so she couldn’t get in. Besides, she still didn’t know which apartment was Olivia’s. She noticed a round object on the sidewalk beside her hand. Reaching out, she touched it gingerly. It was smooth. Examining it with her fingertips, she realized that it was an apple. When she picked it up and studied it in the glow from the streetlight at the corner, she discovered that it was a perfect yellow Delicious apple. She sniffed it. What if it was poisoned like Snow White’s? She thought for a moment about the rolling golden balls on her smashed Atalanta flask.

  But Olivia must have left it, she realized with a stab of delight. She must have squatted down and placed it gently on the sidewalk right beside Jude’s hand. Suddenly overcome with hunger and thirst, she bit into it. The juice ran all over her hand and down her chin.

  As she lay there devouring the apple, a light came on behind the sheer curtains over the glass doors of a third-floor apartment facing the river. While Jude watched, the silhouette of a naked woman appeared behind the curtains. Slowly, she began to undulate to unheard music, hands caressing breasts and thighs, ponytail swirling and lashing.

  The roaring of ocean breakers filled Jude’s head, and a softness fluttered through her veins like the velvet wings of a thousand moths in flight. Tossing the apple core over the wall behind her, Jude wrapped her arms across her chest, gasping and shivering. The light went off and the building plunged back into darkness.

  Jude lay motionless against the wall all night long, awake but stunned. A stray cat stopped by to rub up against her, purring. It smelled of spoiled fish. Occasional solitary cars passed by on hissing tires on the Right Bank. The silver Seine slapped the stone banks below like laundry snapping on a line.

  As birds began to chirp in the chestnuts along the river, Jude managed to stand up in the rosy dawn and go in search of coffee. Finding a café in the Latin Quarter that was just opening, she went to the ladies’ room to wash her face and hands. Looking into the mirror, she studied her own eyes, mahogany like her father’s, dim with fatigue and ringed with mauve. This couldn’t go on. Soon the police would arrive to cart her off to an asylum, as they had Camille Claudel. Maybe she’d better take Simon’s advice and return to New York.

&nb
sp; But after drinking a crème and eating a tartine at a table in the café, she began to feel calmer. So she bought a couple more buttered tartines and returned with them to Ile St. Louis, where she leaned in Olivia’s doorway. Eventually, a man with a briefcase emerged, and she ducked through the door before it sucked shut. She climbed the iron staircase to the third floor. Calculating that the window where the silhouette had appeared was in the far-right apartment, Jude rang the bell, palms clammy, heart pounding.

  Since no one came, she rang again.

  Olivia opened the door on the third ring, wearing a royal purple chenille robe, ponytail undone so that her dark hair hung around her face like a mantilla. “Oui?” she said in a sleepy voice.

  “I’ve brought you some breakfast.” Jude pointed at the bag of tartines. “We need to talk.”

  “Excuse me, madame, but who are you?”

  Shaken, Jude said, “You know who I am, Olivia. My name’s Jude.”

  “No, I do not know who you are.” She began to close the door.

  “But you’ve seen me a dozen times,” pleaded Jude.

  “I am sorry, but you are mistaken.”

  Jude looked at her helplessly. “Well then, please excuse me, madame.” She turned to leave, completely numb in order to stave off an eventual collapse into utter chagrin and despair.

  “All right. Yes,” she said as Jude started down the hallway. “Now I remember you. What is it that you want?”

  Jude turned back around, hopeful, relieved, and angry. “What do you want?”

  “But I want nothing,” she said with a laugh. “I am not the one who is ringing a stranger’s doorbell at dawn.”

  Jude stared at her, beginning to dislike her, afraid that it would show and that Olivia would slam the door in her face. “Then why did you want me to follow you home that night from Marrakesh? Why did you kiss me on the Pont Marie? Why did you leave me that apple last night? Why did you dance for me at your window?”

  “I do not know what you are talking about. This is very annoying.”

  “You’re damn right it is!” Jude hurled the tartines at her feet and stomped off down the corridor.

  “Wait,” she called.

  Jude stopped, head lowered like a charging bull’s, not turning around. It was awful, but at least it was over. She didn’t even want to think about the price she would have to pay for the folly of letting herself love another phantom.

  “Come back.”

  Jude hesitated, consulting her family motto: “When in doubt, get the hell out.”

  “S’il te plaît,” she said softly.

  This was the first person in Paris to call Jude tu. If only she had understood that the pathway to endearment here was paved with anger, she could have saved herself a lot of fake smiles. She returned to Olivia, who was looking down at the bag of tartines. Bending over, Jude picked it up and handed it to her.

  “Come in,” she said, standing aside.

  They went down a narrow hallway to a small kitchen that reeked of stale cat food. Jude sat down at a square wooden table. They exchanged remarks concerning the strength of the coffee and Jude’s wish for milk and sugar.

  “So what’s this all about?” Jude finally asked.

  “What is what all about?” Olivia poured coffee and hot milk into two giant cups and placed the tattered tartines on a plate.

  “Well, your performance last night by the window, for example?”

  “It is whatever you care to make of it.”

  Jude finally understood why so many French men had gone on the Crusades—to get away from French women.

  “So it was totally without meaning for you?”

  “A brief fantasy between two people is pleasant, is it not?”

  Jude looked at her while the words brief and fantasy sank in. But she was relieved finally to have Olivia take some responsibility for this disaster. “Perhaps,” she said. “If both people know it’s a fantasy. If not, someone gets hurt.”

  “People must watch out for their own hearts in these matters, no?

  “In America, when we love someone, we try to watch out for their hearts as well as our own.”

  For a long moment, Olivia studied Jude, as though she were an exotic pinned butterfly struggling not to succumb to formaldehyde. “So you have come to love me,” she said matter-of-factly, as though discussing the price of mangoes in the market.

  “Oh, I suppose so. Yes.” Jude finally understood the rules of this game: The one who fell in love first lost. She had lost. She’d thought that the goal was to get past the game to the substance. She now realized that the game was all there was. There was nothing beyond. Only a new game with someone else. Paris was one vast Disneyland of Desire.

  “But this is madness. You do not even know me.”

  “If I knew you, I might not even like you.” Jude laughed loudly, like the lunatic she had become.

  Olivia’s eyes widened with alarm. She put her hand on Jude’s forearm and scooted closer, apparently intrigued by the danger Jude suddenly represented. Jude smiled at this notion of herself as a barbarian at the gate. Olivia didn’t realize that she was dealing with Cherry Ames, rural nurse, helper and healer.

  “You know, Olivia,” said Jude in a low voice, “you could have made my life much easier if you’d just left me alone.”

  Olivia blinked, looking baffled. “But why would I wish to make your life easy?”

  “I suppose that is awfully unsophisticated of me.”

  “But now you are being sarcastic, and this is not nice.” Standing up, she took Jude’s hand and pulled her to her feet. She led her down the hallway and into a bedroom strewn with clothing. Glass doors with sheer curtains looked out on the Seine.

  Settling herself against her pillows, she held out her arms so that her robe parted. “Come,” she said softly.

  Jude stood there looking at Olivia’s perfect body in the morning sun, at her shiny, dark hair fanned out across the white pillow. “Shouldn’t we get to know each other a bit first?”

  “What better way?” asked Olivia, smiling.

  Jude reminded herself of her pledge not to insist on always doing things her own way. Olivia was offering her magnificent body, but Jude wanted to chat first about her inner child? With trembling hands, she removed her own clothing as gracefully as possible and then joined Olivia on the bed, feeling like one of the Seven Dwarfs approaching Snow White.

  AS SLIM FINGERS OF SUNSHINE pushed their way through the folds of the curtains across Olivia’s glass doors, she gazed into Jude’s eyes and moaned and murmured at all the appropriate spots. And she employed her various body parts with an admirable technical efficiency. But Jude quickly understood that her heart and her soul were elsewhere, well protected by her exquisitely arranged flesh. For Olivia, this was just another performance.

  Lying there afterward with Olivia’s shiny hair swirled across her chest like a swath of new-mown hay, Jude reminded herself that the first time with a new person was sometimes awkward. It took a while to learn someone else’s rhythms. Besides, Olivia was young. Jude would enjoy awakening her to the pleasures available through the sense of touch, as Anna had her. There was no rush.

  “And now you must go so that I can sleep,” Olivia said amiably. “Because I must work late tonight.”

  Jude looked down into her eyes, a bleary turquoise in the sunlight, with tiny translucent rings of butterscotch around the pupils, just like Molly’s. “When can I come back?”

  “But this is what you came for, is it not?” She seemed perplexed. “And now you have learned that it is no more remarkable with me than with anyone else.”

  “Well, I agree that it wasn’t that exciting,” said Jude. “But never mind. We can work on it.”

  Olivia propped herself up on one elbow to look at Jude, eyes amused and bemused. “Why would one wish to work on something that is meant to be play?”

  “Well, to make it more satisfying for both of us.”

  “But I am satisfied,” she said. “
I see that you are not. Mais ce n’est pas grave. It is always disappointing, is it not, compared to what one dreams will be possible?”

  Jude didn’t agree. “In any case, this isn’t what I came for,” she said, feeling she was swimming out of her depth. “I came to tell you that I love you.”

  “Oh, yes. I forgot. You believe that you love me.”

  “No, I know that I love you.” But as Simon had predicted, the better she knew Olivia, the less lovable she seemed.

  “If one loves, one wishes to please the beloved, n’est-ce pas?” Olivia asked, drawing on her skills as a philosophy student.

  Jude could see this one coming. She braced herself.

  “So my wish is that you will go away now and enjoy your life and remember that you passed a pleasant hour one summer morning on Ile St. Louis with a woman who found you ravishing in every way.”

  This was the most charming brush-off Jude had ever heard of. Smiling doggedly, she stood up and began pulling on her underwear. “I should never have come.”

  Olivia pursed her lips and shrugged. “Ce n’est rien.”

  To you it is nothing, thought Jude as she stepped into her trousers and pulled on her silk T-shirt. To me, it is everything. But that’s not your problem.

  Olivia got up and pulled on her robe. Jude shrugged on her suit jacket and followed her down the hallway.

  “I am sorry if I have disappointed you,” she murmured as Jude walked past her out the door. “I meant only to please. But you must understand that you are not the first to have trailed me around Paris like a hungry ghost.”

  As Jude passed under the stone lion head above the doorway and out into the street, she reflected that cats at play probably didn’t know how their claws felt to mice. She walked out onto the Pont Marie and stared down into the Seine for a long time. She wondered whether to jump. She would not be the first to die for the love of a beautiful dancer—although she might be the first woman. Feminism was truly a wonderful thing. She decided not to jump. It would be just her luck to land in a bateau mouche full of Baptist Youth from Tennessee. Besides, Simon would never forgive her for such a lapse into cliché.