The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  She spun around and headed south, dazed like the sole survivor of a plane crash. As she skirted the Luxembourg Gardens, she tried to figure out how to get through the rest of her life now that all pleasure and purpose had gone out of it yet again, like a leaky beach ball. Olivia was very skilled at her craft, tossing out the bait, jerking the line when Jude struck so that the hook would lodge firmly, and then reeling her in. But why? Did she enjoy watching another creature flopping and gasping on dry land, with no idea how to return to the water?

  Heading south down the Avenue du Général Leclerc, Jude spotted the entrance to the Catacombs. The labyrinth of ancient stone quarries stretched beneath her feet for nearly two hundred miles. In the eighteenth century, 6 million skeletons from crowded Parisian cemeteries had been transferred down there for storage.

  After paying her entry fee, Jude descended the winding stone steps to a dim, damp corridor well below the sewers and the Métro. A message carved into the stone lintel read: “Stop! This is the empire of death.” Jude kept going.

  The passageway within was lined on either side with bones, stacked so that the ball ends protruded to form a textured wall. At chest height ran a row of skulls, lined up as neatly as coconuts at a greengrocer’s. Sometimes a pillar of skulls also ran vertically from ceiling to floor, forming crosses.

  Jude strolled for what felt like miles down the shadowy gravel pathway with no one else around, water dripping from the ceiling. Here and there, barred side tunnels headed off into the blackness. This place had been the headquarters of the Resistance during World War II. In Roman times, early Christians had held services down here. Smugglers had stashed contraband and criminals had hidden out from prosecution.

  Carved into a stone by a doorway, Jude spotted a verse from Lamartine that Anna had once recited as they crossed Central Park:

  Into the ocean sinks the plaintive wave.

  Onto the winds, the fugitive leaf.

  Dawn Jades into evening,

  And man into death.

  Just beyond were skeletons from the Innocents Cemetery, where the Huguenots fished out of the Seine had been buried. Jude stopped to contemplate the stained ivory femurs and tibias of her ancient cousins. But there was nothing so unusual about their plight. Every group had its victims and its executioners.

  Glancing around to be sure she was unobserved, she climbed a gate and wedged her body between the top bar and the stone ceiling. Dropping to the ground on the other side, she stood there for a moment. Once she set out, she wouldn’t be able to find her way back. She’d read about men who had wandered into these tunnels and been found as skeletons centuries later.

  Steadying herself with her hands against the damp carved walls of rock, she scrambled in her cowboy boots up the rubble and set out down the side passage. She walked and walked, lighting her way with the tiny flashlight on her key ring, randomly choosing one fork or another at junctures, until she had lost all sense of direction. She remembered reading about a man who had gotten lost down here and stumbled across a room piled high with cat heads and no bodies. The restaurant in the street directly overhead served as its specialty an incomparable rabbit stew.

  After what seemed like hours, short of breath and calves aching, she ran headlong into a wall. Feeling all around herself with her hands, she discovered that she was in a more or less round chamber, from which there was no exit except the narrow chute by which she had just arrived.

  She cleared away enough stones to make room for herself on the floor. Then she plopped down and tried to figure out what she was doing pitching camp in the empire of death. But why not? Cruelty was the law of the land above her head. Love was the only antidote, yet its pursuit led merely to more pain. Life was a boxed canyon with nowhere left to turn.

  Using her pocketbook for a pillow, she stretched out on the floor and wrapped her suit jacket around herself. Surrounded by six million skeletons of people who had already made their final voyage, she tried to imagine what it was going to be like to die. Anna could have told her. But if Anna were still alive, she wouldn’t have known, and Jude wouldn’t have been lost in the catacombs in the first place.

  ANNA’S CHILDREN, HOME from their colleges because things were looking so bad, finally departed. They had been sitting beside Anna’s bed in the Roosevelt all evening, wearing jeans and rugby shirts and acting sullen.

  Then one of Anna’s students arrived with a flute and a music stand to play “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” for Anna. The off-pitch warble filled the room like a robin being tortured. Jude watched Anna struggle to raise her splinted hands to cover her ears. Jude gently maneuvered the student out the door.

  In the silence that followed, Jude took one of Anna’s hands in hers. Undoing the tape, she unwound the gauze until the splint beneath it fell to the floor. Then she moved to the other side of the bed and did the same thing to the other hand. She watched Anna’s fingers as they stirred to life and flexed slightly. She usually undid Anna’s hands until a nurse noticed and made her bind them up again. Anna liked to move her fingers, and Jude liked to feel their warmth when she held them and to rub them with lotion, and to clip and file the nails.

  She picked up the cup of crushed Popsicle and held out a spoonful to Anna just as Anna smacked her lips to signal that she wanted some. The moments of almost uncanny closeness that Jude had begun to experience with her had become more and more frequent, until now they constituted a steady state. By some instinct, Jude knew when and where to scratch her, when she wanted a Popsicle. They had finally achieved that perfect harmony possible for a couple only when one of them is in a coma.

  Jude was surprised to hear herself begin to enunciate in a low, even voice a poem Anna used to recite when they walked along through the swirling apple blossoms in Central Park:

  They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,

  Love and desire and hate:

  I think they have no portion in us after

  We pass the gate.

  They are not long, the days of wine and roses.

  Out of a misty dream

  Our path emerges for a little while, then closes,

  Within a dream.

  Afterward, Jude sat very still, timing her breathing to Anna’s, as she used to during lovemaking. And in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice, she found herself saying, “All right, I guess it’s time now, Anna? Time for you to go. Go ahead. It’s all right. I can take care of myself. Jim can take care of himself. Your students can take care of themselves. Your children can take care of themselves. We’re all fine. Just go. Don’t be afraid. Everything is going to be all right.” For several minutes, she repeated these phrases, understanding that Anna needed to let go of her now but that she needed Jude’s help in order to do so. A sob caught in her throat as she chanted the necessary phrases like a litany.

  But then she jumped up abruptly, as though attacked by a swarm of bees. And all of a sudden, she was absolutely furious. She didn’t want to be in this dreary hospital room any longer, watching bouquets from Anna’s students wilt and shrivel and be replaced, watching the body she had loved rot. She had been here for days. Weeks. Months. Other women her age were out dancing and singing and making love. Damn it, why couldn’t Anna just go ahead and die and get it over with?

  Striding to the far corner, Jude threw herself down in a lounge chair. She lay back and closed her eyes, breathing unevenly.

  She looked around for Molly, but Molly had deserted her years ago. So she jumped on her horse and galloped alone along the beach, salt spray drenching her shirt, hooves pounding beneath her like pistons. She slid off the heaving horse by a dune and watched the turquoise waves arc and tumble, advancing and receding, crashing and hissing, leaving lips of foam flecked with shells like tiny broken teeth.

  Jude opened her eyes and watched the white sheet over Anna’s chest rise and fall time after time, the bellows that was stoking her flame.

  And then she realized that the sheet was still. Getting up, she walked over to the bed. A
nna wasn’t breathing anymore. Jude reached down and took one of her hands in both her own and stared at her composed yellow face with disbelief.

  Finally, she managed to whisper, “Godspeed, Anna.”

  Anna drew a deep, rattling breath, leaning forward, almost sitting up, vacant lapis eyes wide open, seeming to stare at something across the room. Then she exhaled, eyes fluttering shut, and sank back into her pillows.

  Jude shuddered violently, as though Anna’s soul had just passed right through her own body, the force of its transit carrying her along halfway to the brink of death.

  Then Jude felt elation surge up from the pit of her stomach and spread throughout her body. And she was flooded with the sudden conviction that Anna had just cast aside her scab-pocked body like a withered husk and moved on.

  Jude stood there holding Anna’s hand for a long time as it began to cool and stiffen, unable to make the least effort to comprehend what had been there in her body, which Jude had known so well, that now was absent. And where it had gone.

  JUDE TOUCHED THE FLOOR of hewn stone with her fingertips. It was pitch-black. There was no sound except for some water dripping from the ceiling and her own heartbeat pounding in her ears. She was in the empire of death, surrounded by those who knew the answers to these questions. She had come here like a homing pigeon. Once the 6 million skeletons surrounding her had all loved and suffered in the streets above her head. Now they were here below, neatly stacked domes and cylinders of calcium, finally at rest.

  Jude realized that the only thing she wanted from life anymore was to leave it. It was a Saturday, and Monday was a holiday, so no one would miss her at work until Tuesday. She tried to figure out whether the ticket takers kept track of their visitors. If one fewer emerged at closing time, would they come looking for her? If so, she needed to be dead already. She had a bottle of aspirin in her pocketbook for menstrual cramps. A sorority sister at Vanderbilt had killed herself with a bottle of Bayer aspirin.

  As she planned her death, she began to feel sleepy. Deciding that she wanted to be well rested and wide awake when she made her final journey, she let herself doze for one last time, lulled by the scurrying of rats’ feet like soft whispers in the velvet darkness. The dreaded empire of death was actually a peaceful place. It was in the streets up above that pain roamed and horror reigned.

  Jude’s mother, Molly, Sandy, Anna, and her Tennessee grandparents were planting daylilies all over the ridge where Molly and she had planned to build their cabin. The green river valley below meandered toward the misty mountains. Mockingbirds were calling from the Wildwoods, which were decked out with redbud and dogwood blossoms in shades of pink and crimson and purple and white. Jude dug all afternoon in the steaming soil under a hot spring sun.

  When they had finished, the others came over, hands caked with dirt.

  Anna, whole and well again, said, “Jude, we are happy here, and we want you to be happy there.”

  The others nodded.

  “How can I be happy apart from all of you?” asked Jude.

  “You have to try,” said Molly.

  “It’s too soon for you, Jude,” said Sandy with his sweet smile.

  “Virginians never kill themselves,” said her grandmother.

  “Darling,” said her mother, “once you can love without needing an object, then you are love. And you will rush to unite with love and will leave behind that strange place, so beautiful but so marred by hate.”

  “We are always with you, Jude,” said her grandfather, gesturing to the others. “A cloud of witnesses watching over you.”

  One by one, they dissolved, becoming the sunlight playing on the ripples in the river, and the breeze that rustled the blossoms in the Wildwoods, and the mist that drifted down the coves and veiled the high mountain peaks and knobs.

  JUDE COULDN’T REMEMBER where she was. Someplace as dark and silent as a tomb, except for a steady dripping sound. Then she remembered that she was supposed to kill herself now with her bottle of Bayer. But now it suddenly seemed like a really dumb idea.

  She sat up. She had a headache. She had no idea whether it was day or night, or how long she’d slept. She stood up, feeling dizzy and steadying herself with a hand against the wall. She grabbed her handbag from the floor. The leather strap had been gnawed through. Clutching it, she headed down the tunnel in what she thought was the direction from which she’d come, flashing the light on her key chain now and then, trying to make the battery last. It seemed unlikely that she’d find her way back. Probably she’d wander beneath the streets of Paris until her strength gave out. Then she’d sit down somewhere and await death by starvation and ravening rats. If she was ever found, no one would know that it had been a suicide by default.

  After what seemed like several hours of doomed, dogged plodding, she was astonished to detect a faint light ahead. Soon she heard the hollow echoing voice of a French child telling his mother that dead people were boring.

  Reaching the main corridor, she climbed back over the grating, ignoring some startled German tourists. As she ascended the long, winding staircase to the street, she was pleased to find herself still alive. Death would come soon enough. One day, this baffling life of hers would simply peel away like a bad sunburn.

  She walked out the door into the amber dusk. Asking the date of a barman at a café, she learned she’d been underground for two days. From the way he looked at her, or rather tried to avoid looking at her, she realized that she was a fright in her rumpled suit and chalk-caked boots.

  Getting off the Métro at Place des Abbesses, she wandered down the shopping street, dazzled like Rip van Winkle by the foodstuffs spilling from the shops—grotesque spiny creatures from the sea, slabs of shimmering neon fish, pungent cheeses in all shapes and shades, pastries oozing fruit or dribbled with chocolate or smothered in whipped cream, chickens swiveling on spits, walls of wine for every occasion, exotic fruits and vegetables from the former colonies, which she squeezed and poked as though she knew what she was doing. Suddenly, she was ravenous.

  Back at her apartment, she ran a bath, pouring in some raspberry bubble bath Jasmine had given her that she’d never opened. Shedding her disgusting clothes, she studied herself in the bathroom mirror. Although she admittedly looked better with her clothes on, she wasn’t so bad without them. She subsided into the foam.

  Dressed in fresh jeans and a T-shirt, she set a place for herself on the table by the glass doors, complete with a single coral rose in a bud vase, a cloth mat and napkin, and a candle in a holder. In the kitchen, she alternated firm white rounds of mozzarella with thick, juicy slices of tomato on a bed of crisp romaine, then sprinkled it all with chopped basil and olive oil. She dismembered the herbed chicken, still warm from the shop spit. And she cut up a crusty demibaguette, putting the pieces in a woven basket. She set all this on a wooden tray, along with a wineglass and a chilled bottle of Sancerre, and carried them to the table.

  As she sipped the wine, cold and sharp on her stale tongue, she watched the huge orange sun sink behind the Bois de Boulogne, turning the Eiffel Tower and the Panthéon and the Arc de Triomphe and the Invalides into dark silhouettes on the horizon, fronted by the black arabesques of her wrought-iron railing. Dipping a piece of baguette into the olive oil and the juice from the tomato, she tried to figure out what had come over her two days earlier when she’d been prepared to give up all this splendor in order to die in a stone cell surrounded by rats and bones.

  CHAPTER

  19

  ON HER WAY TO WORK the next morning, Jude took her usual detour across Ile St. Louis. Standing on the sidewalk in front of Olivia’s building, she was surprised to find that everything looked just as it had for the past several weeks, oblivious to her transfiguration in the Catacombs—the maroon door with the lion-head lintel, the elaborate wrought-iron grilles at the windows, the gilded fish-scale downspout, the stone wall above the Seine, the relentless bateaux mouches plowing the silver waters, the thrushes singing in the chestnut tre
es by the river, the tourists clutching their guidebooks and searching for Camille Claudel’s studio.

  Jude allowed her eyes to shift to the third floor. The glass doors in Olivia’s bedroom were slightly parted. The sheer curtains were stirring in the breeze, fluttering like a ghost. Olivia was probably right there behind them, asleep in her bed after a late night at the strip club.

  Every cell in Jude’s body screamed out for another try. The night code would be off by now. She could enter the maroon door and climb the steps, ring Olivia’s buzzer. Who knew, maybe Olivia would be pleased to see her.

  Using all the strength at her disposal, Jude turned away from the building and forced herself to plod, one step at a time, toward her office.

  As she left Olivia behind, dozing in the sunlight like a lazy lioness, she sent her a mental apology. Olivia had engineered a light and charming flirtation, designed to disarm Jude’s absurd passion for her in a fashion that would have left Jude’s ego intact. If only she could have accepted it in that spirit, both would have gone through the rest of their lives harboring a sweet memory. Instead, Jude had insisted on turning it into Romeo and Juliet, crawling into her earthen vault and petitioning Death as her witness. As she trudged up the steps to her office, she realized that she was nothing but an uptight Anglo-Saxon asshole.

  Giselle was sitting at her desk as Jude walked past. “Bonjour, Jude,” she called.