Five Minutes in Heaven (43 page)
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 isâmy 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 toâ¦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 lunchânot 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 oftenâlaugh 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.”
T
HE FOLLOWING
M
ONDAY,
J
UDE
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 throat 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.
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.
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.
Kinflicks
was the first of six bestselling novels: The others were
Original Sins
(1982),
Other Women
(1984),
Bedrock
(1990),
Birdman and the Dancer
(1993), and
Five Minutes in Heaven
(1995). Alther also taught Southern fiction at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont, and produced one work of nonfiction,
Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree
. For
Kinfolks
(2007), she researched her family's possible connection to the Melungeon people, a little-known population in eastern Tennessee and southern Virginia whose ethnic origins are unclear but may be traced to Portuguese, Spanish, or Turkish sailors who integrated with the Cherokee people in the seventeenth century.
Following her divorce, Alther remained in Vermont, where she has lived now for over thirty years. She has written novels set both in the South and in her adopted northern home, and takes inspiration from both her past and present neighbors and family. Her novels feature a comic wit that addresses human foibles as gracefully as her more serious prose tackles weightier topics such as racism, feminism, domestic abuse, politics, and sexuality. Her work aims “to portray the human reality behind the cultural stereotypes, particularly those regarding women.”
Alther divides her time between Vermont and New York City.
A baby Alther on July 23, 1945, sitting at the edge of Conesus Lake in New York.
Alther in 1948, at age four.
