Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  In the sunny kitchen the next morning, Sandy’s face was grim. He practically bumped chests with Craig, like rival seals. Taking the hint, Craig departed quickly.

  “You could have at least been civil,” Jude said to Sandy after letting Craig out the door.

  “I don’t have to be civil to any old scum you happen to drag in off the street,” he snapped, grabbing several cereal boxes from the shelf.

  “What about the scum you drag home? Besides, Craig’s not scum. He’s very sweet and bright.” She hacked off a slice of bread and thrust it into the toaster.

  “What would your father say?” He grabbed a bowl and slammed it down on the table.

  Jude laughed incredulously. “Sandy, snap out of it.”

  “Out of what?”

  “I think you’re jealous.” She studied him with gratified amusement.

  “Oh, sure. Right. A gay man jealous of a straight woman.”

  “What’s your problem then?” The toast popped up. She buttered it and spread it with raspberry jam.

  He said nothing for a long time, pouring and mixing several cereals, hurling flakes around the room. Then he smiled sheepishly. “My problem is that I’m jealous.”

  “There. That’s better,” said Jude, patting his shoulder.

  “Don’t ever do that to me again,” he said, looking up at her through bloodshot eyes.

  “I’ll do whatever I please.” She headed out the door, carrying her toast.

  “Yes, I know,” he said, sadly munching his flakes. “You always have.”

  SIMON AND JUDE WERE SITTING propped up on Sandy’s bed splitting a pepperoni pizza from a cardboard box and drinking V-8 juice. They’d tried to wait for Sandy, but hunger had won out. Scattered across the spread were pages from a manuscript Simon was editing on the Freedom Riders, mixed up with a rough draft of Jude’s dissertation proposal. She’d decided to write about the perennial French phenomenon of a small group that defined itself as the “saving remnant,” which everyone else then tried to murder as painfully as possible, using as case studies the Cathars, the Huguenots, the Jacobins, and the Resistance. Her delighted grandmother had been stuffing information down her throat like a mother bird feeding worms to her fledgling.

  She had just interviewed a French friend of her grandfather’s, who had fought with the Resistance after a Jewish shopkeeper in his village in the Alps had been crucified upside down by the SS, his mouth packed with cow manure. The man described partisans from his village mining a tunnel through the mountains with explosives to slow down the German advance. The plot was betrayed by a local farmer, and all the conspirators who were caught were forced to march into the tunnel themselves, where they were buried alive by their own trap.

  As usual, Jude was actually trying to figure out the difference between people like Ace Kilgore, whose goal in life was to harm and destroy, and those like her father and grandfather and Sandy, who tried instead to defend and heal. She had concluded that it had something to do with Ace’s eyes, two dead, black holes that neither reflected light from without nor projected it from within. Since he himself was cut off from the light, he was wounded and vengeful and determined to spread his contagion of rage, like some kind of spiritual rabies. It gratified him to plunge others into darkness, to prove that it was more powerful than the light that had shunned him.

  But the real mystery was why ordinary people like Jerry Crawford and the Panther Twins had followed him into this void. Once while they were dating, she’d asked Jerry what he saw in Ace. He replied, “He’s so strong. He’s not afraid of anything.” But Jude had come to suspect since that Ace was actually afraid of everything. His was the fake strength that reverted to violence under pressure.

  Meanwhile, she had been delivering a discourse to an uninterested Simon on V-8 juice—why it had tasted awful to her as a child but was now delicious. Simon kept interrupting to discuss Marmite on toast. The evening news was playing on the television at the foot of the bed, the commentary a soft murmur as an American soldier incinerated a peasant hut with a flamethrower.

  The phone rang. Groping for it on the floor, Simon picked up the receiver, listened, then said in his most winning voice, “Speak -ing!”

  Holding out the receiver, he studied it and shrugged. “Funny. He hung up.”

  “Who was it?” asked Jude.

  “Some guy asking to speak to the lady of the house.”

  As Jude laughed, Sandy walked through the door from the hallway, looking grim.

  “Hard day at the office, dear?” called Simon from the bed.

  “Hard day in the subway,” he said.

  “What happened?” asked Jude, alarmed by his voice, which sounded numb.

  “It’s not important.”

  “You can’t come in here looking and sounding like Marilyn Monroe after her suicide and not tell us why,” said Simon. He bounced off the bed and padded in his sweat socks over to Sandy. As Simon put his arms around him, Sandy started to cry angrily. Simon led him to the bed, and they sat down on the edge.

  “Sorry,” said Sandy, blotting his tears on the sleeve of his work shirt.

  “What’s wrong, love?” asked Simon, stroking the red-blond hair out of Sandy’s eyes.

  “When I got off the IRT just now, that same guy who harassed us at the Port Authority last Halloween, the one with the leather cap and the blind eye, was getting off with three of his friends. We were alone in the tunnel to the stairway, and he said, ‘Well, well, if it isn’t our friendly neighborhood homo searching for an asshole to fuck.’ I turned around and gave him a look, and he said, ‘And he isn’t going to find one, either, because he’s so fuckin’ ugly.’ And one of the others said, ‘Maybe we should just put him out of his fuckin’ fairy misery and kick his fuckin’ faggot brains in.’ I’d been working backstage all day during the dress rehearsal for Aida, and I was so tired and so scared that I just opened my mouth and hit a high C. It bounced back and forth off those tile walls. They looked at me as though I was a crackpot and ran up the steps as fast as they could.”

  Sandy smiled weakly, waiting for them to laugh, but they didn’t. “I just feel so helpless.”

  “Bloody hell, Sandy, please be careful,” said Simon.

  “What can I do?” he asked softly.

  “What about telling the police?” asked Jude. Her eyes strayed to his windowsill, on which she could see the indentations of his teeth. Could a taste for danger, like a pact with Satan, actually attract it in ways you hadn’t bargained on? She wanted to protect him as he had her, but how?

  The two men laughed bitterly.

  “They probably are the police,” said Sandy.

  “Walk,” said Jude. “Take a bus. A taxi even. It’s cheaper than a funeral.”

  “SO THE COPS TRIED to herd them into a paddy wagon,” Sid was saying to the dozen people sitting around the cluttered dining table in Sandy’s apartment, “and they refused. Those motherfucking queens staged a riot like those fascist pigs had never dreamed of in their worst nightmares. Bopping them with their handbags. Stabbing them with their nails. Stomping them with their spike heels. Falsetto screams. And then a bunch of dykes and motorcycle dudes joined in, throwing bottles and swinging bike chains and hefting tire irons. And soon the whole damn block was in chaos. So the cops shoved their badass nightsticks back into their holsters and split.”

  Everyone erupted into cheers, except Mona, who looked deeply bored to be in a roomful of men who never looked twice at her.

  “Out of the closets and into the streets!” yelled Simon, standing up and raising his beer bottle in a toast.

  Jude clicked her wineglass against Sandy’s. He was smiling ironically at Simon’s sudden ascent to the barricades.

  “No more Mr. Nice Guy!” cried Earl, which was practically the first thing Jude had ever heard him say.

  “Oh, gracious, watch out, homophobes!” said William. “Earl is on a rampage!”

  Earl leapt up from his chair and began to whirl around the room in his
sweatpants in a graceful frenzy, like something out of Le Sacre du Printemps.

  Sandy handed Jude the joint that was circling the table. She drew on it and passed it to Tony in his pirate head scarf. Exhaling, she whispered to Sandy, “I don’t know why I bother. This stuff has never worked for me.”

  Getting up, Sandy stood behind Jude and began to massage her scalp as they watched Earl’s war dance, which the others were accompanying by clashing together their dirty cutlery. Tony was striking the empty and half-empty wine bottles with his knife, creating a discordant melody. Eventually, like the Pied Piper, Earl led everyone but Sandy and Jude in a bunny-hopping conga line out the door, en route to the carnival that had filled the Village streets ever since the riot.

  Jude, meanwhile, was going out of her mind as Sandy continued to knead her scalp and her neck. Her only wish was that he never stop. He began to run his fingers around the folds of her ears and in and out of the passageways. Abruptly, she turned her head to one side and sucked his index finger into her mouth. He drew a sharp breath.

  Jude pushed up from her chair. She turned and they faced each other, startled and afraid. They moved into each other’s arms like horseshoe magnets. Their mouths joined.

  Eventually, Jude turned her head aside to gasp, “We’d better wait for Simon.”

  “I don’t want to wait anymore, Jude,” Sandy said. “I’ve been waiting for you since I was a boy.”

  Jude just stood there, paralyzed by the ethics of the situation, feeling Sandy’s erection against her abdomen.

  “Please, Jude. Just once and never again. It will get it out of our systems.”

  “Or infect us like a wasting disease.” Her breathing was turning jagged.

  Smiling down at her whimsically, he said, “You always did think too much, brainchild.”

  At the sound of Molly’s nickname for her, pronounced in the identical soft mountain drawl, she let him lead her down the hallway to his room.

  “I WAS WRONG,” she murmured to Sandy later as they lay among the tangled clothing that littered his bed and carpet. A breeze through the open window was drying their sweat and chilling them.

  “What about?” He reached for her shirt and draped it languidly over her chest and abdomen.

  “I’m crazy about you as a bad boy.”

  He smiled lazily as a boat horn blared on the river. “In matters such as these, there’s no bad or good. Only love and the courage to live it. Or not.”

  “DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT, JUDE. It’s cool,” said Simon the next evening as they sat in the breeze wafting through Sandy’s window, sharing a joint and watching pleasure craft glide down the Hudson in the twilight. “Just as long as I get equal time one of these days.”

  “It could happen,” she said, studying her friendly rival with his dark curls and his Fu Manchu mustache. Since the stated goal of their generation was to “smash monogamy,” he had no choice but to appear blasé. But he seemed really not to mind. Yet if he knew what had gone on between Sandy and herself the previous evening, he would have minded a great deal. It hadn’t been that conditioned reflex you could have alone or with anyone else, of spasming muscles pumping blood through swollen tissue. It had been another order of experience altogether, parallel to that night with Molly on the raft, but even more moving, if that was possible, because they had both been wide awake and unafraid and unashamed. Afterward, they had cried—from astonishment to have shared such an unlooked-for moment. From sorrow that it was over and might never recur. What she couldn’t tell Simon was that she now had no wish to give him equal time or even to share Sandy with him anymore. The only person she wanted was Sandy, as soon as possible, as often as possible, for as long as possible.

  Even so, she wished she hadn’t drunk all that wine and smoked all that dope, so she could have avoided such delirium. Because she and Sandy and Simon were now headed down some gloomy labyrinth in which at least one of them would lose the way. Probably herself, since, as Clementine used to say, leopards didn’t change their spots. Especially if they were happy leopards. Why hadn’t she left well enough alone?

  Sandy looked as tense and miserable as Jude felt when he arrived in the doorway and spotted her and Simon sitting together by the window. From a car radio in the street below, Janis Joplin was begging someone to take, and break, a piece of her heart.

  Simon looked up at Sandy through shrewd green eyes. “Don’t worry, mate. I know you love her. I love her, too. These things happen. They’ll happen again. Maybe for me next time, if I get lucky.”

  “It’s not that,” said Sandy, walking in and sitting down on his mattress. He propped his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands.

  “What’s wrong, Sandy?” demanded Simon.

  Sandy drew a deep breath, then exhaled. “I was standing on the subway platform just now. It was rush hour, so it was really crowded. That guy with the blind eye turned up right beside me. As he pushed past me, he snarled, ‘Out of my way, queer boy.’

  “I don’t know what came over me, but all of a sudden I just couldn’t take it anymore. So I said in a really loud voice, ‘This man is a fascist!’ I stood on tiptoe and pointed him out as he dodged through the crowd, trying to get away. ‘He follows me around threatening me and calling me names!’ I yelled.

  “Most of the people ignored me, but a few looked at me sympathetically or studied him as he fought his way to the exit. On the steps, he turned around and looked at me as though I were a cockroach he was about to squash.”

  WHEN SANDY DIDN’T COME HOME from work the next night, Simon phoned all the hospitals in the city, finally locating him in intensive care at the Roosevelt. Someone had found him unconscious in an alley near the Port Authority.

  Jude walked into his hospital room. He was tucked tightly into a narrow white bed, his face black and purple, tubes snaking from his nostril and hand. As he gasped for air, she noticed that several of his teeth were missing.

  Sitting down beside him, she laid her head on his bedside and closed her eyes. People in serious accidents reported having their lives flash before their eyes. But at that moment, Jude experienced just such a retrospective of Sandy’s life. Like a slide show, she saw him as a fair-haired little boy in socks and sandals. She saw him in his tree house, writing his novel, his cowlicked hair scrambled like a rat’s nest. And playing chess by the brick wall on the playground at school. And throwing passes to her halfway down the football field as boys twice his size closed in on him. Sandy in a tweed jacket chattering charmingly to her grandparents, and sitting at his switchboard at the opera, overseeing dozens of workers and technicians. Sandy lying beneath her, eyes closed, languorous smile playing across his lips, hands stroking her buttocks as she braced her fists against the wall and moved up and down on him, slowly, slowly, trembling and sweating, struggling to make a finite moment last forever.

  She could feel him ebbing away. She reached over and grabbed his hand to try to make him stay, but it was limp and dry and cold.

  The next night while Jude ate a grim and silent dinner with Sandy’s parents, who had just arrived from Tennessee, Sandy died from a blood clot to his brain while Simon dozed in the chair by his bed.

  When Jude and Simon reached home after midnight, Simon followed her to her room. “Please may I stay with you tonight?” he asked.

  They lay in each other’s arms on her bed. Periodically, Simon cried while Jude stroked his back and blotted his tears with the sheet. She knew this drill by heart. First came the numbness, the way the stump of a newly severed limb didn’t bleed. Then the fury, when you lashed out at anyone who got in your way. And finally the memories that wouldn’t quit. But maybe expecting the joy of communion without the pain of its loss was like wanting to eat candy without getting cavities.

  Toward dawn, Simon said in a hoarse voice, “You were the last person he made love to. I turned him down the other night. I guess I was punishing him for you. I said it was okay. But it wasn’t. His tricks were one thing. Sexual encounters with
men he’d never see again. But he really loved you. Eventually, he’d have left me for you.”

  “No, Simon. It was nothing. We were drunk. Stoned. It should never have happened. I’m sorry it did,” she lied.

  “Don’t apologize. It was inevitable. He loved you, Jude, all his life.”

  “But not as much as he did you. You were the soul mate he’d always wanted and never found.”

  Their mouths abruptly undertook an urgent exploration of each other’s faces and necks. Jude could taste the salt of Simon’s tears. As he entered her, their bodies shuddered, fumbled for a rhythm, and finally moved together. And since each was fantasizing that the other was Sandy, for a moment it seemed he really was there, hovering over them, blessing their clumsy union with his whimsical smile.

  PART THREE

  ANNA

  CHAPTER

  11

  A WOMAN IN A LONG, burgundy wool overcoat stood in the doorway of Jude’s office, smiling and frowning, both at once. Jude smiled back from her cluttered desk. She felt she should know the woman but was unable to place her. She sported a glossy, dark, flapper hairdo and mauve lipstick.

  The woman snapped her fingers. “Dolly Parton!”

  Jude smiled politely, “Excuse me?”

  “That Halloween party a few years ago. You were Dolly Parton. And I was Joan of Arc.”

  The eyes. Now Jude remembered the eyes, which had been shadowed by the visor of her helmet as she stood before Jude in her chain mail and shin guards. At the moment, the eyes were sapphire blue against cheeks flushed from the cold, and they were framed by dark crescent eyebrows and long lashes.

  “I’m Anna Olsen. Simon sent me. I just ran into him on his way out. He said maybe you’d have a minute to listen to my book idea.”

  “Come in,” said Jude, standing up to clear a stack of manuscripts and page proofs off her tweed love seat. “How do you know Simon?”