The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Jude backed up and paused in her doorway. “Bonjour, Giselle,” she replied. “How are you?”

  “Fine, thank you. How was your weekend?”

  Jude smiled wryly. “Fine, thank you.”

  “Did you go away?”

  “Sort of,” said Jude.

  Giselle looked at her quizzically, her copper-colored pre-Raphaelite hair framing her face.

  “Not really. I just did some tourist stuff. The Catacombs.”

  Giselle grimaced. “Not so nice, eh?”

  “I kind of liked it,” said Jude. “But I wouldn’t want to live there.”

  Giselle laughed.

  Jude spent the morning at her desk extracting, adapting, and translating a series of exercises from Anna’s workbook designed to help writing students find their own voices. She and Martine had decided to give them to the schools in hopes of stimulating some more original poems. She remembered when she and Anna had invented the exercises. It had been a happy time, love and work merging seamlessly. The sad thing about happiness was that while you were in it, you believed it would last forever, so you appreciated it less than you might if you realized what a rare and precious gift it was.

  Jude laid down her pen and leaned forward, resting her forehead on her desk. She had just understood where she had gone wrong with Olivia. She had been captivated by Olivia’s physical beauty. She had woven a fantasy around that rather than trying to get past it to the beauty of Olivia’s soul. No wonder Olivia had felt insulted and vengeful.

  Jude reached out for the phone. Then she remembered that she still didn’t know Olivia’s last name or number. Grabbing a fresh sheet of paper, she picked up her pen and began a letter of explanation and regret to Olivia. But right in the middle of assuming the blame for everything that had gone on between them, she paused. How could anyone get past Olivia’s physical beauty to her spiritual beauty when she wouldn’t even sit down and talk to you like a normal person? Besides, Olivia flaunted her wretched body like a baker his cream cakes. Jude ripped up her letter and let the pieces flutter into the trash can like a flock of dying moths.

  Realizing that lunch hour was already under way, Jude stood up and walked down the hallway to the conference room. Half a dozen of her coworkers were sitting beneath the shifting ribbons of sunlight, sipping Evian and nibbling roast chicken. Jude nodded to everyone, sat down, ripped off a hunk of baguette, and picked up a chicken leg.

  Tuning into the debate du jour, she discovered that it concerned the question of whether the modern world was sexually repressed or sexually obsessed. Cecile’s team was maintaining that capitalists had seized control of sexuality via repressive laws and religion in order to divert libido into production. Martine’s team was insisting that, to the contrary, contemporary societies provoked preoccupation with sexuality to drug their citizens into submission—like giving alcohol to Native Americans or heroin to ghetto blacks to prevent them from rioting in the streets.

  “But at least we are agreed, are we not,” inquired Cecile, removing her large red-framed glasses to peer around the table like a NATO commander, “that any discourse on the deployment of sexuality must privilege the issue of power?”

  Martine thought for a moment, inspected her teammates, then nodded reluctantly. She was a woman who hated agreement.

  Jude had finally figured out that the route to conversational brilliance here was to take an assumption, such as that sex shows were sexy, and contradict it. So, launching her first plunge into the waters of lunchtime controversy, she suggested haltingly that Americans were often more interested in the pleasurable sensations their bodies experienced during lovemaking than in power manipulations.

  Everyone looked at her as though she were a kindergarten pupil in a graduate seminar.

  “But of course Americans do not understand eroticism,” said Martine. “That is why it is impossible to be attracted to them. They are too obvious.” She bit off the ball end of a chicken bone and sucked at the marrow. Most of the others nodded agreement.

  So she hadn’t been attracted to Jude? Or was this just another come-on? Suddenly, Jude was fed up with Martine’s bad manners. She had lacked the courage to open herself up to Jude. She had insisted on remaining safe behind her kinky games. She had no idea who Jude really was. Yet just like Martine herself, Jude had earned her spurs in the rodeo of l‘amour. She had won several purple hearts on the killing fields of love. She had crawled on her belly through the trenches of despair. She had faced down death in the foxholes of failed affection. She had stripped off her armor to parade unafraid on the battlements of passion. She deserved honor and respect from her fellow combatants, not contempt.

  Jude felt her own recessive French genes rear up and triumph over Charm Class, yielding a sudden fit of furia francese. In her stumbling French, she told her colleagues that most ancient civilizations such as India and China and Persia had an ars erotica that instructed people, not in how to dominate each other, but in how to cooperate to achieve mutual pleasure. That these pleasures were carefully classified, not as forbidden or permitted, but in terms of quality, intensity, duration, and spiritual significance. That forcing children, as they themselves had been forced, to confess their sexual desires as “sins” and thus teaching them to despise their bodies, was a recent local disease. That they used their endless boring debates on sex and the sexes as foreplay, like debauchees trying to flog a response from senses blocked by misuse or shame. But that elsewhere in the world people possessed ample erotic energy as a natural endowment, which they could call on as they wished without a need for tiresome gimmicks. That some people approached sex as a normal human appetite, not as a sinister plot designed to deprive them of la liberté. That no self-respecting American would want to attract them in any case because they were too weird, and because they ate octopus and tripe. That the world was old and France was young. That the world was large and France was small. That life outside their sacred hexagon was not necessarily as they saw it. That they should stop deconstructing everyone and everything else and deconstruct themselves.

  Remorselessly, Jude vented her months of frustration with Martine and Olivia, heaping one generalization atop another, just as she had watched them do all these weeks, until she had constructed a magnificent sand castle in thin air—one that began to crumble as she realized that she’d just lost her job. Normally, someone would have interrupted her diatribe and saved her from such total self-demolition, but they must have been so astonished to hear her speak, and so ferociously at that, that everyone had remained silent.

  There was a long pause, during which everyone blinked several times. Then Cecile reached over to offer Jude a Gitane, an invitation to join her platoon. Jude declined it.

  Giselle thrust her baguette at Jude like a fencing foil so she could rip off a hunk if she wanted—which she didn’t.

  Gazing at Jude with new interest, Martine murmured, “Mais tu as bien parlé.

  But Jude didn’t care if it turned Martine on to be treated as contemptuously as she treated everyone else. Drawing on Gary Cooper in High Noon for inspiration, she stood up, squared her shoulders, gazed out the window into the midday sun, and marched out the door in her silver-toed cowboy boots.

  Upon reaching the street, Jude had no idea what to do next. All she really wanted was to return to Ile St. Louis. And to kneel before Olivia on the pavement and beg for another chance to behave more lightheartedly. Voluntarily giving up a graveyard love while the other person still walked the earth was unheard of. Yet Jude knew that was what she had to do now if she wanted to avoid another weekend in the Catacombs.

  She dodged through the ambling crowds until she reached the Luxembourg Gardens, where she strolled along the paths of pale dirt, raked into patterns overnight, past orderly ranks of marigolds, geraniums, and artemesia that stood at attention like troops on parade. Past palms and oleanders and orange trees growing in square green boxes. Past ivy trained to hang in symmetrical swags. She came to a cage containing hundreds of es
paliered fruit trees, twisted and bound like heretics on the rack into the shape of minorahs, with white paper bags over their nubile fruits.

  Through some lime trees, planted in rows, their tops sheared into rectangles, Jude spotted a bronze lion with a dead ostrich at her feet. And just beyond was an eight-point buck with his doe and fawn, frozen as though by a stun gun while sniffing the morning air.

  Jude descended some steps guarded by two lions that had been turned to stone in midstalk. And in the center of a lawn that was clipped as closely as a putting green, poised on a high stone catafalque, stood Artemis, a quiver of arrows on her back and a young stag leaping by her side. She, too, was frozen in midstride in her flowing tunic, so that she had to stand there eternally in the summer sun and winter winds. A dozen queens of France, several resembling transvestites in their elaborate robes and crowns, gazed down at Artemis from the encircling terrace through pitiless stone eyes.

  As Jude studied poor captive Artemis, goddess of the wild, a voice inside herself demanded, “What is a wolf child like you doing in this petrified forest ruled by a mob of icy granite drag queens?”

  Jude walked quickly to Jasmine’s house. Eying the stone gods supporting her balcony on their shoulders, she rang. The Portuguese bonne ushered Jude into the living room, where she perched on an uncomfortable Louis XVI armchair, beneath the dyspeptic gaze of Jasmine’s crusader forebears.

  When Jasmine finally appeared, wearing a black-satin robe patterned with magenta Art Nouveau lilies, Jude told her she was going back to New York.

  “But you have just arrived,” Jasmine said with a perplexed laugh. “We have been trying to help you feel welcome here. You do, I hope?”

  The bonne carried in a black lacquer tray on which sat a coffeepot and some cups and saucers.

  “You’ve been very kind.”

  “Then why do you wish to leave?” She set the cups on the saucers.

  “I’m not really much use to you, Jasmine. You haven’t published any of the books I’ve recommended.”

  “Mais, doucement, Jude. This will happen. You are learning. Life is long. Do not be so impatient.” She carefully pushed the plunger on the coffeepot to force the grounds to the bottom. Then she filled the cups and handed one to Jude.

  “And socially I’m as inept as a banjo picker in a string quartet.”

  “I warned you when you arrived, did I not, that you needed to learn to play?”

  “I’m afraid I’m a slow learner.”

  “Ah.” Jasmine nodded and fell silent, studying her long, mauve nails. Looking up, she said, “Simon phoned. He says you have fallen in love with someone rather inappropriate.”

  “Jesus Christ,” snapped Jude. “Who does he think he is—my father?”

  “He was very concerned about you.”

  “He’s one to talk,” muttered Jude. “His bed is as crowded as Jones Beach on the Fourth of July.”

  “He was worried that you might try to…harm yourself. I tried to phone you all weekend. I admit that I became worried myself.

  Jude said nothing as Jasmine watched her through narrowed eyes.

  “This inappropriate someone does not return your love?” she asked gently.

  Jude nodded no.

  “But you know that we at the office are all very fond of you?”

  “Not anymore,” said Jude, recalling her lunch time seizure of furia francese.

  Jasmine smiled. “Martine phoned just before you arrived. She said everyone was most impressed by what you said at lunch—not that they agree, naturellement.”

  “Naturellement pas.”

  “So why not stay? You will soon find another love. Martine, for example.”

  Jude gave her a look. “I don’t want another love. I want Olivia. But she doesn’t want me. So I have to go. If I stayed, it would be a constant battle not to bother her.”

  “Why must you be so stubborn in love?” asked Jasmine. “People come and people go. Only desire remains.”

  Jude did her imitation of an insouciant French shrug. “Maybe it’s because I’m an Aries. Look, Jasmine, the point is that this just isn’t my scene. Love as a martial art doesn’t do it for me.”

  Jasmine smiled. “Of course you must do as you think best,” she said. “But I, for one, do not wish to lose you. Our friendship is just beginning. And who knows where it will take us?” She gazed into Jude’s eyes.

  “Jasmine, just give it a rest.”

  “Well, I can see that you are determined to suffer,” she said, annoyed at Jude’s refusal to carry the beat.

  “I have a gift for it. I’ve done it all my life.”

  As Jude left, they kissed several times on alternate cheeks, like chickens pecking grain. They assured each other that they would write and phone and meet at book fairs just as before, but Jude wondered whether they really would. Sometimes absence made the heart grow fonder, but often what was out of sight was out of mind.

  At the travel agency down the street Jude asked a handsome young man in a navy-blue uniform for a plane ticket to New York.

  “But of course, madame,” he said with a dazzling smile. “A plane to New York. And when do you wish to go?”

  “I can go anytime. When are the flights?” She had offered to stay until Jasmine could find her replacement, but Jasmine said she’d invented the job for Jude and wouldn’t be looking for someone else. Martine could complete the poetry project alone.

  “Ah, but madame, there are flights from Paris to New York constantly. You have only to decide when you wish to go, and I will give you a ticket. Eh, voilà! You will be in New York City!”

  “Oh,” said Jude, brightening at the prospect of immediate escape. Soon she’d be on Simon’s deck on the Cape, watching the waves pound the sand. She could imagine his hilarity over her haunting by the wraith of Ile St. Louis. They would do what they’d done for each other so often—laugh the pain away. “In that case, I’d like to go tomorrow afternoon.”

  “So,” he said with his charming smile, “madame would like to go from Paris to New York tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Yes, exactly. Paris to New York. Tomorrow afternoon.” Suddenly, Jude was desperate to be back home, where she could cease to be the Other who had to be seduced and demolished lest she prove the bearer of new ways that might threaten to topple the old.

  “Ah, but madame, I am so terribly sorry,” he said with a delighted smile. “You cannot go from Paris to New York tomorrow afternoon, because there are no seats available until next Monday.”

  Jude burst out laughing.

  He looked at her, alarmed to be alone in his office with a crackpot. “Something is the matter?”

  “I’m almost sure you wouldn’t understand.”

  THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, JUDE looked out the plane window at the massed columns of clouds below, papillae in the gullet of the sky. She reclined in her seat as drinks, meals, headsets, blankets, pillows, and duty-free purchases appeared and disappeared for her seat-mate, a Vassar student returning from her junior year in Paris. Out of habit, Jude searched the wispy pillars of cloud for some trace of Molly or her mother, but she saw only a lacy pattern of ice crystals on the plane window.

  As the plane plunged through the billowing white canyons, Jude suddenly understood that although those she had loved were largely illusions of her own making, the love that she had felt for them was real. Graveyard love was the love itself, not the specters who inspired it. And it belonged to her. It was her. It was the only thing about her that would survive if the plane crashed at that very moment. She was nothing more than a spark who yearned for the flame. And the fact of the yearning was proof of the flame.

  As Jude watched her seatmate stand up and head down the aisle toward the toilet, she reflected that if Simon wouldn’t give her back her editorial job she could always find work writing lyrics for Barry Manilow. A stewardess paused in the aisle to lean an elbow against the back of the seat in front of Jude. She had a braided twist of dark hair. A gold-and-scarlet scarf at her th
roat coordinated with her lipstick.

  “But you have asked for nothing since we left Paris,” she said. “Is there anything at all that I can do for you?” She studied Jude closely with her deep blue eyes.

  Jude returned her gaze for a long moment. “Who knows?” she finally replied.

  The woman raised one dark crescent eyebrow. “Et pourquoi pas?” she murmured, the ghost of a smile playing around the corners of her lips.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am very grateful to my editor Carole DeSanti, my copy editor Carol Edwards, my publisher Elaine Koster, and my agent Gloria Loomis, for their invaluable assistance on this book. Many thanks also to my daughter Sara Alther, who, as she says, “has been in this writing thing with you from the beginning.” To Francoise Gilot, for guided tours of Paris and important insights into the creative process. To Jan Hokenson, for the use of her room with The View in Montmartre. To Carey Kaplan, for her gift for titles and her incisive critiques of more drafts than she probably cares to remember. To Max and Sissy Strauss, for furthering my opera education. To Jody Crosby, Sandra Norton, Andy Senesac, Christine Tissot, Vicky Wilson, and Evan Zimroth, for careful readings and useful suggestions.

  A Biography of Lisa Alther

  For novelist Lisa Alther, as for so many of her fellow Southerners, the past is ever present, particularly in places like Kingsport, Tennessee, the small town where she was born in 1944. One of five children, Alther grew up in a region known for its coal mining and factories, surrounded by a close-knit Appalachian community. Her father was a second-generation town doctor, and her mother was a former English teacher from upstate New York. Another strong presence in her upbringing was her paternal grandmother, the founder of the Virginia Club and a pillar of the Southern way of life. Lisa attended public schools in Kingsport, taking her place in the marching band after an unsuccessful brush with flag swinging, living the typical life of a 1950s teen.

  Alther left Tennessee to attend Wellesley College and moved to New York after graduation in 1966 to work in book publishing at Atheneum. During college she met a Cornell co-ed, Richard Alther, whom she later married. Their daughter, Sara, was born in 1968. The family moved to Vermont, where Richard pursued his painting. In the years that followed, Alther began writing journalism pieces, but inspired by the great Southern women writers and storytellers, she also worked on novels. After many rejections, her first novel, Kinflicks was published in 1976 to critical praise and became a bestseller.