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.
The affair lasted most of that summer. Despite the Parisian sophistication she displayed, Claudette turned out to be surprisingly immature emotionally. As Judith had learned well by now, though, you never knew who someone would be when their clothes came off. Claudette cried over her guilt at betraying her fiancé, cried over her confusion at being attracted to a woman. She threw tantrums, she refused to get out of bed, she drank wine by the bottle and then begged Judith to go down on her. But it all combined in a strangely lovelike symmetry with Judith’s resentment and self-loathing over what she was doing to Claudette. They found a sexually charged harmony in their shared misery: crying, fucking. And Judith could not deny an unmistakable feeling of justice—even of revenge—in seeing Claudette’s beautiful face either choked with sobs or twisted in orgasm, and knowing she was responsible. She was learning there were ever darker and more captivating shades at the bottom of herself.
She was shaken awake to her latest and most terrible theft of a yad only when Claudette started talking about confessing everything to her fiancé, about returning with Judith to America that fall. Judith realized then—far too late, as usual—that she was ruining this unexpectedly fragile girl’s life.
She told herself, with reassuring implausibility, that Claudette would be relieved to have the emotional mess of the affair concluded—and that a brief lesbian fling would fit seamlessly into the idyll that was the narrative of Claudette Laurent. Years later, Judith would think how she had underestimated Claudette: how, even then, she had thought of her as merely a cliché.
On the afternoon Judith had chosen to end things, Claudette was sitting at the table in the narrow kitchen of Judith’s rented flat, writing her parents a letter, longhand, as was her custom. This struck Judith as so insensitive, so needlessly cruel that, in retrospect, she was probably more abrupt than she ought to have been. Claudette had just signed her name in blue ink at the bottom of the lined piece of paper, when Judith said, in English, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
Claudette glanced up, looked at her coldly, answered, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I can’t be with you anymore. I don’t want to.”
Claudette put the pen down on the piece of paper. “Es-tu lassée, ma reine?”
“Non, j’étais lassée bien avant.” A tautness spread over Claudette’s face, like she might cry. Judith asked herself why she could not stop hurting this girl. “Je ne t’aime pas,” she said, trying to be quick, merciful—pulling off the Band-Aid in one rip.
But for all Judith’s brilliance, she found here, once again, that she had been born without anything like emotional intelligence. Claudette stood up, and Judith realized that the tautness she’d seen was not sadness but rather an emerging fury. “Quoi de plus normal de la part d’une pute juive comme toi?”
To Judith’s amazement, she discovered that even now she remained an innocent—a child. This was the first anti-Semitic remark anyone had ever made to her—and as an avowed atheist, she was stunned by how immediately humiliating these words were to her. She pulled her hand back as far as she could behind her shoulder and she slapped Claudette across the face. The sound had a cracklike sharpness that filled the kitchen; her palm stung.
For several seconds Claudette remained bent forward, rubbing her cheek, almost ponderously. For a moment Judith fe
lt victorious—a new, barbaric, singing form of victory she’d never known before—thinking of Hannah and David Bulbrook. And then she burst into tears, cried, “I’m so sorry, oh, God, Claudette, I’m so sorry.” She moved toward her, but as she did, Claudette took hold of the black square-edged bottle of balsamic vinegar that sat on the kitchen table. She intended only to throw it in Judith’s direction (or so she claimed later), but as she thrust her arm forward it crashed into Judith’s advancing nose—shattering both glass and bone in a racket of splintering and blood. And as Judith now crumpled over, pain spreading across her entire body from her nose downward, all she could think was, So this is what I wanted.
* * *
The doctor at the hospital Claudette took her to had a red-splotched, fleshy face, a palsy tremor in his right hand, unkempt shocks of gray hair poking from the sides of his head and from his ears. As Claudette rested her hand on Judith’s shin, he reset her nose, wrapping it in a great bandage and splint. She knew it was a clumsy job, and the shaking of his hand triggered constant little waves of agony. But she felt she deserved no better.
She and Claudette parted on the street outside the hospital, Judith’s face now partially wrapped in a bandage. “Sleep at my flat tonight,” Claudette said.
“No,” Judith said. “This was all a mistake.”
Claudette began to cry—hopeless, unrestrained tears. “Pourquoi tu m’as fait ça?”
It was, she thought, a fair question: Why had she done it? Reasons came tumbling to mind. She was lost, she was lonely; she was cruel, she was heartbroken. She had been brought up sheltered, coddled, had no capacity to deal with life when it was anything but kind and gentle—could not cope with death even years later. She had done it because she had wanted to ruin not Claudette’s life but rather her own—the life she might have had if her parents had not arranged their trip to visit her and then fly from Boston on the morning of September 11, 2001. The line between a Judith and a Claudette was that fine, that narrow, that absurdly drawn. How could she not wish to drag Claudette over to her side? She was addicted to suffering, she was bored; she had never grieved properly, or else she had never grieved at all. It was the twists in her DNA: who she was. For all these reasons she had done it, and for a thousand others—or for none of them. She didn’t know why, and she couldn’t explain it in English, let alone in French—why anything happened, why anyone did anything. “Le terrorisme,” Judith said.
She spent the rest of the late afternoon walking around the city, with no destination in mind—simply walked, a dull throb in her nose with each step she took. Eventually she crossed a bridge onto the Île de la Cité and stopped before Notre Dame, the sun setting by now—and sometimes when she would look out the window on one of the upper floors of the Colonel’s casino in Las Vegas, and watch the strip and its array of spectacles and the desert and mountains beyond slowly be coated in pinkish-red light, she would remember how the cathedral was as though painted in this same lovely pinkish color: the pair of towers and trio of portals, the rose window and profusion of carved figures—saints, sinners, kings, angels. The plaza before Notre Dame was surprisingly empty that day—the milling tourists with cameras slung across their chests, tour groups on the march, the odd devout Parisian, all gone to home or hotel for the evening.
A memory came to her mind—one that had eluded her during that first, emotionally indulgent day in the city. She remembered that, when she and her mother had visited Notre Dame thirteen years before, her mother had been so moved that she sat down on the gently sloped cobbles of this same plaza and wrote a poem. Later the poem was published in Harper’s, then reprinted in one of her mother’s books. But neither on that day, nor on any day that followed, even years later, could Judith remember the name of the poem, or whether she had ever read it. She did remember, though, how magical her mother had seemed in that moment: the master, the keeper of great secrets.
But now, standing before the cathedral, she knew there were no secrets—her mother was just another person who would die. There was no magic in the poem, or in the act of writing it, or in the cathedral itself—erected for worship of a God in whom she did not believe. Judith knew also that it was time to drop out of school. She had followed the faith of her parents as long as she could, long past the point of believing in it. She had kept to its rituals because they were the only ones she had. But it was a story she no longer recognized herself in: Judith Klein Bulbrook, and all her tremendous promise—all the great things she would accomplish in her life. In the end, Judith Klein Bulbrook had revealed herself to be something of a terrorist, too.
A nun appeared beside her—tiny, wizened—staring rapturously at the cathedral’s façade, her black wimple worn almost to the line of her eyes. Judith wondered if she had ever seen a nun who wasn’t old. Then a stiff wind picked up, and this pressed the bandage against Judith’s face so painfully she groaned, tucked her head against her shoulder. When the wind died down and she looked up, the nun was watching her with a small, sympathetic smile. “English?” the nun said.
“American,” Judith answered.
The nun nodded, as if this explained much. “We suffer so little for Him, who suffered so greatly for us,” the nun told her consolingly. Then the old woman toddled off.
Looking back at the face of the cathedral, the pink of the evening now darkening into a bluish red, Judith puzzled over this sentence—began applying some of her greatly lauded intellect to parse the words. By “we,” the woman likely meant humanity; but suffering, Judith had learned, was individual, and where it was collective, it was great, not little; and as for Him— She stopped herself. She turned from the cathedral and concluded the sentence was exactly what it sounded like: bullshit.
9. THEY TOOK UP JONAH AND CAST HIM FORTH INTO THE SEA
Jonah awoke on the floorboards of his apartment. He’d succeeded in getting drunk enough to fall asleep the night before—had methodically made his way through a bottle of Jack Daniel’s he’d bought on the way back from Zoey’s. His phone was ringing from somewhere among the cushions on the couch above him. He sensed, as he lifted his leaden and throbbing head, that it had been ringing for a long time. He reached up for it and studied it: Sylvia was calling him. The phone was unmerciful—to her, to him—in informing him precisely how many times she’d already called, and how many times Brett had called, and how many texts and emails they’d both sent. The gist of what he read was that he needed to be at the Corcoran offices at 9:00 A.M. The clock on the phone’s screen told him it was now 8:30. He looked over toward the windows. Bright canary yellow sunlight spilled in across the floorboards.
He staggered to his feet, went into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet so he would not have to look at himself in the mirror, turned on the sink. He was surprised at the minor cacophony the rushing water made in the small room, and he stood there for a few moments, listening to it vacantly. Then he leaned forward, put his lips to the cold stream, drank for a while, then splashed some of the water onto his face. If he’d hoped this would give him a modicum of clarity as to what he was supposed to do now, he was disappointed. He turned off the water and went into his bedroom, closed the door—wasn’t sure what he’d intended to do in there, and then just sat down on the floor.
The light in the room was a deep, murky blue coming in through the closed navy curtains. He couldn’t remember when he’d closed those curtains, when he’d last been in this room. He felt as if the rhythms of time that his life had previously followed, that most everyone’s followed—waking, working, sleeping—had been drowned out in some other, more domineering mode of time. He could no longer muster the anger, the self-pity, of the previous day, though. He understood that all he’d accomplished by swathing himself in these emotions was to humiliate himself, cheat on Sylvia again, and hurt the person he would have least wanted to hurt. But really, he asked himself—what else was there left for him to feel?
His closet door stood open, and before he could look away he saw in the full-len
gth mirror inside the reflection he’d had an instinct to avoid. His face in the mirror looked weary—aged. He still had on the suit Dolores had bought for him—most of it, anyway: The stain-dappled shirt was open to his belly button, the tie was missing, he wore only one shoe, while the other foot was bare. And he thought he could see in the slump of his shoulders, in the thick black-red bags beneath his eyes, in the dull, open-lipped inexpression of his mouth—see, as though it were as literal and permanent an aspect of his appearance as his nose—just how weighted down he felt: with exhaustion, with the physical toll of the endless drinking, the endless smoking, with the arguing and lying and bargaining that suddenly seemed like all he’d been doing for days. He closed his eyes, waited for sleep—but his phone was ringing again.
Of course it was Sylvia. But what could he tell her? That he couldn’t live with her on Bond Street because—Why? Because he’d been rendered metaphysically incapable? Because he just didn’t want to? He didn’t know that he didn’t want to. He only knew that his desires had become difficult to parse, had become fraught with all manner of risk and ambiguity. Perhaps this was the intent—the source—of the visions: his mind’s way of telling him that he didn’t know what he wanted. It wasn’t a very convincing rationalization, though—indeed, one of the less convincing ones he’d come up with. Didn’t his mind have more direct routes for delivering such basic information, ones that didn’t involve so much collateral damage to his life?
He’d been looking at the face of his iPhone as he had these thoughts, staring absently at the announcement of Sylvia’s Incoming Call—and when this announcement vanished, he found himself studying the screen more closely, peering into the device’s little pixilated world. It was so quaint, so tidy, so hopeful in its way: the time across the top in sturdy, soothing Helvetica, the pictogram icons for maps, for messages, for games—whatever you might need to get you through your day. This was, it occurred to him, another version of the puffy-clouded heaven with the rosy-cheeked angels that it gave people such comfort to see depicted—to believe in. This was the version that had given him comfort.
The Book of Jonah Page 20
