The Book of Jonah (25 page)

If anything, she worked harder than she had before. She did all the assignments for her courses, did all the suggested readings on the syllabus, even did a few readings she figured could have been suggested. Sometimes she would go directly to the library from an afternoon class, take a seat in some windowless corner of the stacks, and break off her study only when a librarian told her the building was closing, and would emerge into a chilly, thinly starred New Haven night. Again, she lacked the passion for academics she'd once had—but her resolve had taken on bleak new strength.

And, soon after she arrived back on campus, Judith started to have a lot of sex. In the crudest terms: Grief made her horny. She observed to herself that, from a Darwinian perspective, it was a fairly useful adaptation. If she allowed a slightly less reductive view of the matter, though, she could admit that she was profoundly lonely; she could admit she didn't know how to feel good. Sex solved both these problems, if only briefly. When the boys knew who she was—or, more precisely, knew how her parents had died—they generally seemed afraid of her, too. But a lot of them didn't know, and there were a lot of boys. She found all she had to do was remain at a bar or a frat party long enough, and eventually one of them would present himself. She became like one of those fabled people who actually doesn't care where the group goes to dinner: Judith was up for anything. She had no inhibitions regarding positions or parts of her body; she got into bed with guys and their girlfriends; she had sex with two members of the lacrosse team at once; she was content tying or being tied up. She found the variety in bodies and in preferences that she discovered surprising, even intriguing. You could never predict quite how people would look without their clothes on: where the hair would cluster, where their stomachs would fold as they turned or sat up, the way a penis would look relative to the rest of a male body—how people would conduct themselves when there was another naked human being beside them, willing to engage with them in whatever. There was, she sometimes thought, an essential truth to all this—as though bodies provided the full and final revelation of a person.

For a semester she took up with the graduate teaching assistant in her Art of the Etruscans course; he introduced her to BDSM. She would come home from his apartment and gaze at herself in the full-length mirror on her door—would look at her pale white skin here bruised, there welted with bite marks, belt lashes—and would see herself as if from very far away, as though studying her naked body from the end of a tunnel. What, she would ask herself, was the truth that her own body revealed to her? And as she would maybe trace the circumference of an egg-sized contusion on her thigh, she would conclude that her body told her only what any body could tell anyone: that this was what she wanted.

There were some boys who, when they learned what had happened to her parents (she was never quick to volunteer the information, but neither did she hide it), would try to console her, heal her—save her. They would substitute for caresses a sort of ostensibly reassuring petting, they would offer to “talk about it”—ask her questions about her parents, her feelings—would urge her to see a psychologist. While she knew this was well intentioned, she always felt embarrassed for them, at the thinness of their words of comfort—and more, annoyed that they would not simply give her what she wanted from them. “That sounds so awful,” they would say. “I can't imagine it. Do you think you should talk to someone?”

And she would say what she always did when she was urged into the arms of psychotherapy: “What could they tell me about myself that I don't already know?” She knew she was drowning herself in self-degradation, in self-pity, in despair. But she believed she had finally found a state of mind equal to her voracious mental appetites.

*   *   *

She graduated Yale summa cum laude, with distinction in art history, and in three years, in fulfillment of the ancient plan. Milim, her parents, even Milim's teenage sister, attended Judith's commencement, insisted on taking her out to dinner that night—a kindness she finally decided not worth refusing. She would always remember the toast Milim's father—stooped, in his seventies—gave at this dinner. He spoke in Korean, Milim's mother whispering her translation in Judith's ear. “He is proud of you.…” she whispered. “He hopes you and Milim will always be great friends.… He knows your parents are proud of you, too.…”

After the meal, Milim's mother took a picture of the three young women, sitting side by side at the table. Judith was headed that fall to a PhD program at Princeton; Milim already had plans to attend medical school at Cornell after she graduated the next year. So the freshman roommates were ending up in something of the equivalent place—though it seemed to Judith you could tell just from looking at the photograph on the screen of Milim's mother's digital camera that their paths had been very different. Judith had wondered sometimes, in college, what others made of her—what they guessed about the girl going to and from the library at odd hours, or sitting mutely with her legs crossed on their roommate's bed the morning after; what they could tell of thoughts that tended to run far away from whomever she happened to be talking to, or fucking. This photograph, she believed, made it clear. While the smiles of Milim and her sister were bright, sincere, Judith's was distant, thin; she still wore the burgundy dress she'd had on under her graduation gown, its rich color accentuating the whiteness of her skin; her black hair was a dense mass above her forehead, her chin turned a bit away from Milim, making the mole by her left eye more prominent. It looked to Judith as if grief was written all over this strange, spectral face—as if it were the blackness itself of her hair and mole. Judith felt that anyone could see, just from the remoteness of her smile, that she had spent the ten minutes following the toast hiding in a bathroom stall and weeping, somehow gratefully. It had been two and a half years, and she could still feel the pain—could still see it in the picture—as though it were brand new: sharp, and undiminished.

Within three weeks of graduating Yale, she had moved to Princeton, started a summer research project for one of her professors. She'd chosen Princeton because of the reputation of its art history program, and because of the keenness with which the department had courted her. “Unlike many of your peers, you have an unusual capacity to critique art not in terms of what it aspires to be but rather in terms of what it is,” the chair of the department had written in her acceptance letter. Judith regarded this as an insightful and greatly flattering compliment. Princeton also appealed to her because at no time during the admissions process had anyone suggested she would be an especially welcome addition to the school on account of her connection to 9/11. (Harvard and Columbia and UChicago had not been similarly restrained.)

Her life at Princeton quickly became so similar to her life at Yale—her weeks filled with thick, unmarked stretches of classes, professors, slides, reading, research, frantic but numbed sex—that she would sometimes forget to notice the difference. She would be walking beneath an archway of pale stone into a courtyard, she would be scanning a line of books on a library shelf, searching for a title, she would be making her way across a messy living room toward a narrow bedroom or a futon—and find herself surprised when she recalled that she no longer lived in New Haven. It occurred to her that all that had changed for her in these three years were the names on the doorplates, the numbers before the course titles on her schedule, the shapes and contortions of the bodies.

She knew she ought to give some attention to building a life for herself outside a university. But nothing that life might include held any particular attraction. She was at graduate school because she had to be somewhere. And at least graduate school allowed her to still be considered brilliant and hardworking, as she was by all her new professors, just as she had been at Yale, and at Gustav's—as she knew she would be for as long as she remained in school.

She began research for a thesis on Gothic architectural motifs in contemporary art, and won a fellowship to spend the summer after her first year studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. She had first visited the city with her mother when she was nine, and in order to confront any painful associations with this—pull the Band-Aid off in one rip, as it were—she spent her first day in Paris retracing the route she and her mother had taken among the tourist attractions of the city: the Arc de Triomphe and the Pantheon; Sacré-Cœur and Sainte-Chapelle; the Louvre, the Pompidou, the Musée d'Orsay; the Eiffel Tower and the Jardin des Tuileries. She wept as she went—moved to tears at every turn, at every memory, just as she'd anticipated. But she found something hollow in the force of this crying: It surprised her that the tears were not more violent, the sorrow not more intense. She realized that for her there would be no ghosts, no visions; the absence of Hannah and David Bulbrook was uniform across the world. This thought was the one that made her cry the hardest—with the force she seemed to have been seeking.

Classes at the Sorbonne were conducted in French, the faculty were of a more demanding frame of mind than those in the United States—but if any of this added another degree of difficulty to the work, it was not a challenge Judith had much trouble meeting. She was fluent by now: fluent in French, fluent in academia. As an ancient professor who had been a personal acquaintance of Braque praised her before the entire class for a paper she'd written, she suddenly had an image of herself as a sort of roaming academic game hunter: going from continent to continent, crossing names off a collectively understood list. Perhaps she would get a postdoc at Oxford.

During her first month in Paris, Judith got to know a girl in her program named Claudette Laurent. She had blond hair, cut very short, a classically French nose—widening down its bridge, elegantly curved along the nostrils—large blue eyes, large breasts. She was gorgeous, as a matter of fact—reminded Judith of the truly beautiful Ashleys and Beths she'd gone to high school with. She and Claudette would walk down the street, and Judith could watch as each man turned from whatever he was doing to stare. Claudette acted oblivious to this. She was engaged to an older man, a philosophy professor in Lyon, with a daughter of his own not so much younger than Claudette. She became schoolgirl giggly in her descriptions of his handsomeness, his intelligence, his
talents au lit
. Judith met him only once: tall, salt-and-pepper beard, casually brilliant and casually arrogant in a distinctly French way. She had to admit—she understood the appeal.

Claudette seemed surprised to find in Judith an American so intelligent, so insightful about art. And she admitted she was intrigued by the religion of her new friend's birth, notwithstanding Judith's abandonment of it; Claudette said Judith was the first Jewish person she had ever had the chance to get to know. Judith found this somewhat astonishing—realized that, having spent the vast majority of her life in the American Northeast, she'd been deluded into thinking there were simply Jews everywhere. But this was not the case, of course—in Europe in particular.

For her part, Judith found something intriguing about Claudette, too—as did most people. In addition to being genuinely beautiful, she was genuinely intelligent, and it was as though no one could quite believe the genetic miracle the young woman represented. Judith sometimes thought of Claudette as a sort of rare and lovely exotic bird, and the reactions of others to her—her own reactions to her—were compelling in themselves. It was as if the combination of such physical beauty and such mental grace had the effect of altering the social gravity of everything around her: Husbands would break off mid-sentence the conversations they were having with their wives when she appeared at cocktail parties; the most austere and egotistical lecturers would not only deign to speak to her but would even attempt to charm her, to make her smile. And Judith herself—who had never been a very social person, in recent years even less so—felt undeniably drawn to her, to the point that she even noticed a certain warmth in her stomach when Claudette called her, or sat down beside her in class.

When they got to be better friends, Claudette invited Judith to the little country town where her parents lived, forty minutes outside Paris. Claudette led her up the dirt path from the road to the house, greeted her aged dog, Maxime, and Madame
et
Monsieur Laurent served them a five-hour-long lunch of duck cassoulet, ratatouille, fresh asparagus, local Merlot, cheese, and homemade bread. The Laurents were sweet, gray-haired people: Monsieur a schoolteacher, who complimented Judith continually on her accent, Madame a former stage actress—whose looks helped explain those of her
fille
.

During the train ride back to Paris from this lunch, Judith told Claudette for the first time about the death of her own parents. Claudette's eyes filled with sorrow—and, rubbing Judith's arm gently, she called her,
“Ma pauvre petite orpheline.”
It was in this moment that Judith decided to seduce her. She had been with women before, and she had understood that her fascination with Claudette edged into the sexual. Whose didn't? But in that moment of hollow comfort—strangely naïve, strangely condescending—she apprehended a desire that was driven by more than mere attraction.

It was shameful, it was grotesque—Judith knew this—but she used her suffering to seduce her. Claudette's downfall, Judith thought, was that, despite her rare brilliance, despite her rare beauty, she was, finally, too much a cliché: just another overintellectualized French girl, fascinated by a pain that was, in her own life, merely an abstraction.

One night in Claudette's apartment, after an evening of drinking wine with classmates in the 13th Arrondissement, another empty bottle of wine before them on the coffee table, Judith allowed herself to start crying. It was not hard: She only had to think of her parents—and of what she was about to do. But she couldn't help it. Her lust had become entangled with jealousy, with resentment—creating an urge that was too compelling to resist. As Claudette, crying herself now in sympathy, took Judith's hand, Judith started to stroke her blond hair, finding it had the ethereal softness she would have expected. Then she pulled Claudette's head down, found the opening of her mouth with her lips, pushed her hand between her thighs. Claudette pulled away a little—but just a little. The sex felt to Judith both like a triumph and a bottoming out of despair. She really couldn't tell the difference.