Five Minutes in Heaven (30 page)

As she squatted down and collected the shards of her grandmother's flask, Jude realized that Anna was right not to stay with someone who had come within a hairsbreadth of beating her up. Yet her departure was actually a sexist act, since she'd stayed for years with a
man
who beat her up. Picturing Anna's mouth dripping blood in the moonlight, Jude felt a certain reluctant comprehension of Jim's behavior. Yes, he sometimes injured her. But apparently if someone else wouldn't do it for her, she'd do it herself. Dazed, Jude tried to analyze the steps by which she'd started out trying not to hurt Anna, only to end up wanting to kill her.

Jude remembered Anna's telling her in the beginning that most people were a house of mirrors. If she'd paid attention then, she could have spared herself a lot of agony. But now she was lost inside the fun house.

Before descending into an exhausted sleep, she vowed to cut her losses. She'd obey Anna and not contact her. If Anna needed someone to punish her for their bouts of illicit pleasure, like the flagellation of depraved medieval monks, it wasn't going to be Jude. Jim could do it.

For the next few days, Jude wandered around the office in a haze of misery, unable to eat or sleep. Several times, she caught Simon watching her with concern. Finally, she went into his office to announce, “You were right about Anna.”

He looked up from a pile of papers. “What's happened?”

“She's dumped me without a backward glance.”

He grimaced. “I'm sorry. If it's any help, I love you.”

“It helps. But not much.”

He smiled sadly.

“Simon,” ventured Jude, “when you and Sandy used to go down to the docks in your chaps—what was that all about?”

He gave her a look. “What do you think it was all about? Lust.”

“Weren't you afraid?”

“My dear child, that's the whole point. The terror of the chase. The wild beast that may rip you to shreds once you corner him.”

“Well, in the end, that may be what turns Anna on—pain and fear.”

Simon raised his eyebrows. “The difference is that no one on the docks pretends it has anything to do with love.”

“I wonder if there's a workshop I could take to win her back. ‘Hurt Your Way to Happiness.' If only I could behave as badly as her husband, she might leave him to be with me.”

Simon didn't smile.

“Yes, I know you tried to warn me,” she said. “So did William.”

Upon leaving her office that afternoon, Jude decided to stop by Madame Toussaint's for a sixty-thousand-mile checkup. After all, she had helped lure Jude into this quagmire with Anna in the first place. Maybe she could advise her on how to climb back out again, or at least tell her what was in store for her around the next bend in this enchanting cosmic tunnel of love.

But when she reached the block where Madame Toussaint's lair had been, she couldn't find it. She couldn't even find the doorway or the staircase, much less the little hand-printed sign. She searched up and down five blocks in either direction, along both sides of the street. Then she went into several shops to inquire about a large tarot-reading psychic. But no one had ever heard of Madame Toussaint.

T
HAT NIGHT,
J
UDE DISCOVERED
that her index finger had a life of its own. Like Lassie to the rescue, it dialed Anna's number, despite feeble protests from her benumbed brain.

Anna answered.

“It's Jude. I have to talk to you.”

“I'm afraid I can't right now. Jim's here.” Her voice was calm and pleasant.

“When then?”

“Soon. Don't be so impatient, my darling,” she murmured. “We'll have the rest of our lives together in our cabin in the mountains.”

Jude held the receiver away from her ear to stare at it. Had she gotten a wrong number?

Jim shouted in the background, “Did you hear me, bitch?”

“Got to go,” Anna whispered. “He's angry.”

“Get the fuck over here!” he yelled.

“Anna, I'm coming to get you right now,” said Jude. “Be ready.”

“No, Jude, don't.…” Her phone clicked off.

Jude dashed from her building and grabbed a cab to the Village. Instructing the driver to wait at the end of the mews, she ran to Anna's house. When she pounded on the front door, no one came. Trying the handle, she found it unlocked. She pushed the door open and raced in. Like a bloodhound on the trail of an escaped convict, she scurried around the living room and kitchen.

Anna and Jim were sitting on a black leather couch in the den at the back of the house, watching the local news on a television set built into a wall of wooden shelves and cabinets, which were crammed with stereo equipment, books, and objets d‘art. Both were holding lowball glasses full of ice cubes and a milky liquid. Anna, who was wearing a scarlet caftan, looked up at Jude through barely focused blue eyes. Her sleek hair stood on end at the crown, like a kiwi bird's head feathers. Jim had risen unsteadily to his feet, his flushed face webbed with broken veins.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked.

“Don't you remember Jude from our party last month, dear?” asked Anna, the perfect hostess. “She's my editor.”

“What the fuck are you doing in my house?”

Jude tried to decide. “I've come to take Anna back to my apartment.”

“What are you—a nut or something?”

“I've seen her bruises, Jim. I know you beat her up. And it's going to stop.”

“What business is it of yours?”

“It's my business because I love Anna,” Jude was alarmed to hear herself confess.

Anna dropped her glass, spilling her drink all down the front of her caftan.

“Get out of my house,” Jim said calmly, face turning purple.

“Not without Anna. Come on, Anna.”

Anna just looked at her with bleary distress, making no move to rise. Jim headed around the corner of the couch toward Jude.

“I'm calling the police,” said Jude as she edged toward the doorway.

“Call whomever you like,” said Jim, fists clenching. “This is my house and my wife. And you're trespassing on private property.”

In the taxi on the way home, Jude felt like a fool. Anna had made no move on her own behalf or in support of Jude. Jude had felt as helpless as she must have as a toddler, trying to rescue her mother from the stranger in the army uniform who everyone claimed was her father. As she had the afternoon she tried to persuade Molly not to go on the Baptist retreat with Ace Kilgore. As she had the night she saw Sandy coupling with the stranger in the moonlight. Why was she always drawn to people who wanted to slow-dance with danger? She was like a moth who flitted around a candle flame while her fellow moths immolated themselves in it.

But danger you could find anywhere. It was kindness when she came across it that lured her like a flame. She remembered standing in her grandfather's backyard as a toddler, holding a large rock above her head, about to drop it on a toad just to see what would happen. As she let it fall, her grandfather appeared from nowhere and caught it in midair. He squatted down and picked up the toad, whose throat was pulsing repulsively. It sat on his palm, ugly eyes bulging.

“Jude,” said her grandfather, stroking the horrible warty back with his fingertip, “our job is to protect and provide for other creatures. That's the minimum requirement for being human. It's what the word
love
means. Many people behave like rabid dogs, but that's no reason to join them.”

C
ROSSING THE MARBLE LOBBY
of her office building the next afternoon, Jude spotted Anna waiting for her by the door for their usual Wednesday stroll. Baffled, Jude kissed her cheek. As she backed away, she noticed that the whites around Anna's cornflower blue irises were faintly tinged with yellow. There was also a sore on her neck, which she'd powdered and tried to conceal with a dashing white aviator scarf.

“What's this?” asked Jude, touching the sore.

“A spider bite,” she said. Her lips were trembling.

All of a sudden, the pieces fell into place for Jude: She'd learned enough from her years with her father to recognize jaundice when she saw it. They walked toward the park in silence, Jude trying to figure out what to do with this new suspicion.

“Is everything okay?” asked Anna anxiously.

Jude looked at her with disbelief. Did she not even remember breaking up with Jude? Or Jude's failed rescue attempt the previous night?

“Anna,” she finally replied, “I don't know how to say this, but I'm worried about your drinking.”

Anna looked startled, then stealthy.

“I think you're overdoing it.”

“If you had a husband who slept with every coed in town, you'd probably overdo it, too. And children who flunk out of every college in the Northeast. And students who expect you to solve the ghastly problems of their decaying cultures and dysfunctional families. And a lover who thinks that life is an episode from ‘The Waltons.' Believe me, I have good reason to overdo it.”

“Who doesn't have reason?” snapped Jude. “Having reason is no reason.”

At Broadway, they headed uptown for Jude's apartment. And Jude was forced to confront the fact that she was as much of a masochist as Anna. Any healthy person would have sent Anna home to her own fate. But by now, Jude's fate seemed irretrievably merged with Anna's.

After making love as tenderly as in the beginning, they held each other and listened to thunder rolling in from the Poconos. Jude knew that no matter what was happening to them, she herself wouldn't be able to end it—even if that was what was best for them both. But it would mean more for her than just the death of their relationship. It would be the death of her dream that happiness with another person was possible in this life.

During their lovemaking, Jude had discovered more “spider bites” on Anna's arms and back, and her abdomen had seemed faintly distended. She made a mental note to phone her father and find out what this meant.

“Anna, I can't bear to lose you,” she murmured.

“You're not going to lose me, Jude. You know I love you. I'll never leave you.”

As Jude watched rainwater flow in torrents down the windowpanes, she tried to figure out which was the real Anna—the snarling beast who ripped apart her own flesh with her bared teeth, or the woman who lay beside her right now, stroking her hair and running her tongue around the folds of her ear and talking about the apartment they'd rent in Montmartre once she divorced Jim.

“You know I'm going to Australia for a few days on Friday?”

Anna sat up abruptly. “How could I know when you don't tell me;?”

“I did tell you, Anna. A couple of times.”

“No, you didn't,” she insisted.

“Well, maybe not,” said Jude, deciding it wasn't worth an argument. “But anyway, I am.”

“Why?”

“I have to speak on a panel about feminist editing.”

“Will that woman be there?”

“Which woman?”

“That French friend of Simon's.”

“Jasmine. Yes. She's one of the organizers.”

Anna said nothing for a long time. Jude began to feel guilty without having anything to feel guilty about.

“Please don't go,” Anna said.

“I'm sorry, my love, but I have to. They're counting on me. But I'll be back before you know I'm gone.”

“If you stay here, you could help me move some things into your apartment.”

Jude turned her head to look at her. Was this really true, or was it just a ploy?

“What if something terrible happens while you're gone?”

“Jesus, Anna, please don't do this to me,” Jude moaned. “You'll be fine for a few days. It'll give you time to see a doctor and find out about these sores. Then when I get back, we can move you into my apartment. Okay?”

“Okay,” she finally said.

“Promise me you'll see a doctor while I'm gone.”

␄I promise.”

J
UDE AND
J
ASMINE TOOK
a local bus to the seaside south of Adelaide as a remedy for their jet lag. As they strolled along the deserted white beach under a searing sun, they discussed ideas for the panel. Would women, free from the pressures of the marketplace, write differently from men? What were these pressures, and how did they distort women's writing? What role did fiction play in challenging or confirming the dominant stereotypes of women in Western culture? Was it possible to run a successful publishing house in a capitalist economy without a hierarchy among the employees and a star system among the authors?

As she and Jasmine wrangled over these issues and others, Jude felt herself becoming more energized than she'd been in months. The deadly struggles with Anna faded from her mind, and she felt her tensed muscles relax and her breath start to flow freely again. They sat down at a green metal table beneath some eucalyptus trees, alongside a roadhouse with a metal roof. As the sun sank into the ocean, they sipped Australian beer and discussed Simon's inability to find a love that lasted longer than three weeks.

“Yet three weeks of pleasure is not nothing,” said Jasmine.

Even on safari in the outback, she was impeccable, in spotless white cotton pedal pushers and a loose silk shirt in shades of orange and red that coordinated with the sunset. Under the open shirt, she was wearing a lacy white camisole, and she had a gold herringbone chain at her throat.

“No, but I think he longs for what he had with his friend Sandy. But he'll never find that again, because Sandy was a very unusual person.” Jude was studying the ash-gray bark of the trunk tree beside her, which was mottled with impetigolike patches of rust and black. They reminded her of Anna's scabs. She hoped Anna would go to the doctor as she had promised. But often these days, she seemed not to remember what she said from one moment to the next.