Five Minutes in Heaven (36 page)

“Hi. It's Jude. From the office.”

“Oui?”
She sounded deeply uninterested.

“Uh, I wondered if you'd like to have lunch with me tomorrow.”

There was a long silence. Jude could hear some voices in the background. But if Martine was entertaining, would she have answered the phone?

“Pourquoi pas.”

“Great. When and where?”

She suggested a brasserie called Le Vrai Paris near her apartment south of the Luxembourg Gardens at about one o'clock.

“I'll look forward to it,” said Jude.

“Et moi, aussi. A très bientût.”

Her voice had warmed up as the conversation progressed, and by the end she had sounded downright pleased. Jude sat back in her chair, smiling thoughtfully. Lightning had begun to lash the monuments of Paris, and thunder was rumbling in the Bois de Vincennes. God moving furniture, Molly used to say. Jude felt happy for the first time in months. She would cook Martine nice meals and serve them on the table by the window, with the lights of Paris flickering below. She would cheer Martine up, help her feel alive and attractive again. And Martine could do the same for her.

J
UDE SAT IN
L
E
V
RAI
P
ARIS
watching people come and go. Martine was an hour and a half late. Jude had spilled kir on her white jeans, and her hair was kinking as last night's rain evaporated in the hot afternoon sun. She went to the bathroom and struggled hopelessly with her unwanted curls. Then she phoned Martine for the third time. But there was still no answer.

In an upstairs room, accordion renditions of French dance-hall tunes were pouring out the open windows into the street. After each number, people stamped and cheered, making Le Vrai Paris sound like a happening kind of place. But Jude had been there long enough to hear the songs recycle a couple of times and to realize that it was a tape.

Returning to her table, Jude ordered another kir from the burly barman and watched the TV above his head. A matador in Nîmes was plunging his sword into a bull's neck. The snorting bull sank slowly to his knees in the swirling Midi dust. An instant replay in slow motion showed the pass with the muleta that preceded the coup de grâce. Contorting his torso and gesturing with his arms, the commentator critiqued the angle of the matador's shoulder in relation to the horns.

The bull, soaked in blood and coated with flies, was dragged from the arena on a sledge pulled by horses. Then the next bull entered, outraged and defiant, immediately charging the waving red cape. Jude was rooting for the bull. But he was the only one in France not to realize that he didn't have a prayer. The picador leaned over from his horse to plunge his spike between the bull's shoulder blades. He worked the lance up and down like a lover.

Jude realized that not only was her hair a disaster; she'd also been stood up. But why? Paying her bill, she wandered out onto the sidewalk in her stained jeans. An American in a
DON'T FOLLOW ME
.
I‘M LOST
T-shirt collared Jude to ask the way to Notre Dame, which he pronounced like the American university.

Too distressed to deal with directions, she said,
“Je ne sais pas. Je suis Cherokee.”

He looked at her and crossed the street.

Jude went into a
tabac
on the next block and bought some Marlboro Lights. Leaning in a doorway in the sun, she lit a cigarette and wondered what to do next, taking the pulse of her emotions like a doctor by a deathbed. She didn't want to go back to her empty apartment. She hadn't felt its emptiness until last night, when she had allowed herself to imagine Martine there with her. Her overzealous imagination had deformed the reality of the situation. Martine was evidently like an overcooked meringue—luscious on the surface but hard as nails beneath.

Eventually, Jude noticed half a dozen coral roses thrust through a metal ring that hung from the stone molding beside the door. Above it was a plaque that read:
“Ici est tombé le 22 juillet 1943 Pierre Beaulieu, combattant pour la liberation de la France.”
The stone all around the doorway was chipped and pocked. A Resistance fighter had been gunned down where Jude was now standing. She imagined him dropping to his knees, riddled like a Gruyère with bullet holes, pavement and doorway splattered with blood….

Jude stamped out her cigarette. Since her calf muscles were aching badly from yesterday's crosstown trek, she couldn't undertake another. She decided to head home. Maybe stop off at a movie or phone Simon at his house on the Cape.

Wandering across the Seine toward Montmartre, she passed the spot where the grand master of the Knights Templars had been burned at the stake after seven years of torture. She followed the route alongside the river taken by the rubbish carts that had carried Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI to the guillotine. Then she crossed the Place de la Concorde, where the vast crowds had assembled to witness the beheadings.

Strolling along the boulevard past the Madeleine, she arrived at a café with a scarlet awning: L‘Elite. Pausing, she studied the customers sitting in bow-backed basket chairs at small, round tables along the pavement. They were surrounded by ancient killing fields. Yet there they sat, laughing and eating and drinking, smoking and flirting. Like Jasmine, they seemed to know how to enjoy life, despite its legacy of horror and its inevitable end.

All of a sudden, Jude understood that she had been drawn to Paris in the first place in order to learn this art. But she'd been fighting it off, like a bat who prefers the dark to the light of day, insisting on doing everything in ways that were already familiar to her. Martine was right to have stood her up today. Jude was the neophyte here. It was up to her to figure out how to fit in. It wasn't necessary that she understand what was going on in order to participate.

As she turned the corner toward l'Opéra, Jude caught a glimpse of the white domes of Sacré Coeur floating above the dance halls and leather shops of Pigalle, shimmering in the afternoon heat like a mirage of the Holy City in a desert.

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
J
UDE
was awakened from a dreamless sleep by a cavalry of cooing pigeons charging across her skylight, their claws skittering down the glass. Daylight was pouring through her doors. Getting up, she threw them open. Swallows swooped and dipped in the fresh morning air all around her. The pewter rooftops of Paris, washed clean by a rainstorm in the night, were gleaming silver, rows of red-tile chimney flues stretching across them like crenellated ruins. Five women in flowing robes stood behind curly iron grilles at open doors on different floors across the courtyard, conjuring the golden ball of sun in the east like a coven of pagan priestesses.

CHAPTER
17

J
UDE WAS LYING NAKED
on her living-room carpet in the sunlight streaming through the open doors. Propped up on cushions like a pasha, she was smoking a miniature Dutch cigar and drinking a foamy glass of Michelob. The phone rang, destroying her fantasy that she was on the beach at Cannes, about to be discovered by a major Hollywood director.

It was Jasmine, inviting her to a strip club that night. Jude hesitated. A burlesque show seemed a questionable way for alleged feminists to spend their time. Once in New York with Sandy and Simon, she'd watched the disheartening bumping and grinding of gaunt heroin addicts, and she'd left feeling embarrassed and full of pity.

“You must come,” said Jasmine. “It will amuse you.”

Since she was Jude's boss and both these sentences sounded like commands, Jude accepted. Besides, her current self-imposed assignment was simply to observe the Parisians at play, like a kitten learning from a cat how to lap milk. Out her doors, she could see two pigeons balancing on either end of a television antenna, carefully seesawing up and down. Even the pigeons here knew how to have fun.

J
UDE WAS STANDING
on the sidewalk when Jasmine's Citroën pulled up. Jasmine climbed out, resplendent in electric-blue silk that molded her admirable curves. Behind her exited a man with lots of silver hair and piercing umber eyes.

“Jude, allow me to present my husband, Philippe,” said Jasmine. “Philippe, this is my remarkable young American editor.”

“Enchanted,” he said, holding Jude's outstretched hand in both of his. He was wearing a cream-colored double-breasted suit, with a tie and pocket handkerchief in shades of salmon and indigo.

Jude was speechless at the appearance of yet another character from Jasmine's personal soap opera. It was getting as complicated as “The Young and the Restless.” Martine and Robert had also just gotten out, both greeting her with all the enthusiasm
of
a woman discovering a run in her stockings. Martine was wearing a size six Hell's Angels outfit—black leather miniskirt, net stockings and ankle boots with spike heels, and a miniature motorcycle jacket with so many snaps and zippers that a team of assistants would have been required to fasten them. Behind her stood a fair, slight young man with the face of an aging altar boy. His name turned out to be Jean-Claude.

Since Martine had never mentioned their date manqué at Le Vrai Paris, Jude finally asked her one day at the office what had happened. She pursed her lips, shrugged, and said that she had run into a friend. They had stopped for an espresso. Then she found it was too late to meet Jude, so she went to visit someone else. She neither apologized nor suggested a new rendezvous, so Jude let it drop. If this was how things were done in Paris, she was now pledged to accept it without complaint. Though she couldn't help but wonder if Martine had planned to stand her up from the start to teach Jude not to trifle with her. But Jude hadn't been trifling. In fact, she'd been trying not to trifle. But maybe Martine liked trifling and had become alarmed when Jude wanted lunch as well.

Nevertheless, Martine and Jude now comprised an efficient team for dealing with nuns, headmistresses, and teachers regarding their student-poetry anthology. Although as they strolled across town to these meetings, Jude couldn't help but notice that she was the only woman in Paris whose arm Martine didn't take as she walked. She had decided that Martine wasn't avoiding and insulting her in order to provoke
le désir.
She simply didn't like her.

A tuxedoed maître d', whose brilliantined hair was combed straight back off his forehead like a mobster's, escorted them into a room with crimson wallpaper and carpeting. Jasmine alternated them boy-girl in the velvet seats circling the round table. Many others in the room appeared to be Japanese and American businessmen, with and without dates or spouses.

The waiter brought champagne in a silver ice bucket and filled their glasses as they discussed Jude's tan. Evidently, she wasn't the first in Paris to discover the delights of sunbathing on her living-room floor. There was already a ground fog of cigarette smoke in the room, so they passed out Gitanes and lit up all around.

The stage was flanked by statues of two giant female nudes. As the glittery sequined curtain between them rose, a dozen women appeared in Beefeater hats, garter belts and net stockings, black boots, and nothing else. They marched and saluted mechanically to the tune of “Rule Britannia.”

From the corner of her eye, Jude watched Jasmine, with Philippe on one side and Robert on
the
other, as respectable-appearing as any fashionable Parisian matron. For all Jude knew, she was one. She looked amused as the women goose-stepped on their lovely long legs. Jude felt something, but it wasn't amusement. For one thing, she wasn't sure she enjoyed seeing other women objectified like this for the delectation of a roomful of horny businessmen.

The Beefeaters exited and the curtain came down. When it lifted again, clouds of orange smoke were rising like mist from the stage floor. A woman in a plumed Athena helmet with narrow gold tubing around her neck and waist performed what looked like a sacred temple dance, her feet planted and knees flexed. Her upraised arms were squared at the elbows, and her torso was swaying and whipping, like a cypress in a hurricane, to jarring, clashing sitar music.

The lights went out and when they came back on, there were four dancers in Athena helmets. Each time the stage darkened and the lights returned, there would be a different number of Athenas lashing and writhing in the swirling mists in their plumed gold helmets. Just as they began to seem interchangeable and eternal—the female essence embodied—the curtain came down.

As it rose again, a bald man in camouflage gear with a huge beer belly marched out. He had rifles, machine guns, and pistols slung all over him. In an Indiana accent, he told a very boring battle story that involved artillery fire and fighter planes, which he imitated with his mouth. Everyone in the audience began to laugh uproariously at all this testosterone run amuck, startled by the contrast to the intoxicating sensuality of the Athenas.

The curtain came crashing down like a guillotine blade on this overweight warrior. A few moments later, it lifted and a woman with a dark pony tail cascading over her shoulders was slithering like a python around a large, red, neon hoop, to the accompaniment of eerie harp music. Her pale body was bathed in swirling rainbow spotlights: long legs, finely muscled arms and shoulders, full, tight breasts, a narrow waist tapering into firm, boyish buttocks. The pulsing lights were making dizzy hallucinogenic patterns across her flesh as she wound in and out around the hoop and slowly splayed her perfect naked limbs in shifting geometric patterns across its disk.

Jude watched, transfixed. This performance was probably politically reprehensible, but it was the most erotic thing she'd ever seen. For the first time since her months of watching Anna decay in her hospital bed, Jude's palms turned clammy. Here was a woman who could teach her how to enjoy life again.

Through the shifting veils of cigarette smoke, Jude spotted Martine's hand caressing Robert's forearm. Her eyes shifted ever so slightly in Jude's direction.