Archive of Our Own ^beta

“You have a number of messages.”

Judith Jones, editor extraordinaire, stood before the man, polished, properly erect and awaiting word from home base.

“Lucky me. How popular am I?” Judith Jones could flirt with the best of them and she was not beneath flirting with the hotel manager.

“They are all coming from the same person. Someone named Blanche.”

Ah, yes. There it was. The most exciting, terrifying and dreadful inevitability. The only person actually looking for Judith was the only woman Judith cared to be looked at by.

He handed over the stack of telegrams and messages; her mood changed immediately. She forced them back into the poor man’s hand.

“Read them to me. I can’t bare it.”

And so, he began. Blanche required everything from an update from the Sylvia Plath estate to an accounting of where Judith was and why she was not answering the phone.

Judith’s posture had stiffened, she put her hands out against the counter for support. With the mentioning of Blanche firing Judith’s own assistant, she could no longer do this dance. She took the messages back to tear them in half. With a faltering mask of indifference, she spoke: “I’ll be working in my room this evening and ordering in. No calls. Merci.”

As the hotel manager had finished reading the telegrams to her, each more clipped than the one before, she felt her usual stiff spine liquifying. Somewhere on this maddening, winding journey Judith noticed her anger was overtaking whatever heartfelt concern she once held for Blanche Knopf.

“It wasn’t his fault,” she muttered to herself as she made her way in the direction of the stairs. It rarely was the fault of strangers when Blanche-induced rage swallowed her up. “Who the hell sends telegrams anymore?”

The bar was open and though she had every intention of going to her room, ordering dinner and marking up a manuscript, after all those messages she had earned a drink. Or two.

Perhaps it was the time she had spent with Sartre that had her thinking of Updike. She would never in a million years tell J.P. that. But John once mentioned the traffic jams in people’s heads, something he wished to unlock. For her, the traffic jam was due to a single woman standing with a sign in the middle of a busy intersection and that sign, though clearly causing traffic to back up, did not say ‘stop.’ It said something far more dangerous. It said ‘go.’ Go do your job. Go to France. Go forward and forget about silly cookbooks. Go live your life. Go away from me. Thinking about the woman with that sign, Judith seethed. She was so taken by the anger that she could almost smell that woman’s particular brand of cigarettes.

She wandered into the dimly lit space and moved toward the bartender who was drying glasses while soft music filled the seemingly empty bar.

“I wondered when you might turn up,” the familiar voice made Judith drop her bag.

Her own voice took on a strange high pitch when she finally spoke. Her accent could occasionally be the least sophisticated thing about her. New Yorker at heart, in that small space in the ultra-sophisticated Paris, the accent stood out.

“Blanche, what are you doing here?” Judith felt her face warming. Her justified rage was boiling over.

“You weren’t responding to my messages.” Nobody did bitterness better than Blanche. Nobody avoided a simple question like she did, either.

Choosing not to approach the woman, Judith went instead to the bartender and asked for her drink—“make it a double”—threw it back and immediately gestured for another. He glanced briefly at the older woman who had arrived first and then back to Judith who shook her head. Which question she was answering didn’t matter. He poured her another shot and then wisely put the bottle away. Correcting her posture, she gracefully went to Blanche, glass in hand, and sat across from her at the secluded table.

“You didn’t tell me you had business in Paris,” she said while watching the casual yet uniquely aggressive flicking of the Zippo lighter in Blanche’s trained hand.

“Mmm…you told me your trip to Paris was for business and yet here you are in a hotel bar midday.”

Judith wanted to scream. Her anger was causing her heart rate to rise.

“I don’t need a babysitter.”

This made Blanche chuckle.

“You’re but a child in the city of light,” Blanche stopped fiddling with the lighter only to have a free hand to dab her wet eyes, “of course you do. I, however, am not here to babysit.”

“No?” Judith fumed. “Come to enjoy the city with Alfred?”

If Blanche was rattled, she didn’t show it. Judith, on the other hand, was out to wound.

“As much as you plan to enjoy it with—what’s his name again?—Evan.”

Standing from her seat, Judith grabbed her bag and glared at Blanche.

“I will be in my room if you decide a civil conversation that explains why you are really here is not beneath you.”

And with that Judith was gone.

Stubbing out her cigarette and waving over the bartender, Blanche stood.

“Madame?” he asked.

“Might you walk me to the elevator?” she placed a healthy tip in his hand. He nodded and held out his arm for her. “Thank you.”

“Your companion is a very beautiful woman,” he remarked.

With a subtle smile, Blanche nodded. “That she is”

He took her to the elevator door and stepped in to press the button of the floor she requested. After thanking him once again, she rummaged through her purse for the inconspicuous magnifying glass she had taken to carrying with her. She knew it would be needed when she arrived on the approaching floor. When the doors opened, Blanche was relieved to find there were only four doors to choose from and only two with the correct first digit. She traced the second digit with her finger, an action quite new to her. The first door was in fact the correct one. She knocked.

It really should have come with no surprise that the door would fly open and yet no verbal invitation would be offered. That did not stop someone like Blanche. Doors rarely stopped either woman.

She entered the room with a confidence that no woman with her deteriorating vision typically would. The world would move for Blanche Knopf.

All that stood before her was the one person she had learned to sense with as much accuracy as see.

“I’d offer you bourbon but I’m fresh out,” Judith was feeling feisty and her speech reflected that.

“No wonder the bartender cut you off,” Blanche was unmoved by Judith’s anger. In fact, she seemed to revel in it.

“Why are you here, Blanche?” Judith set her jaw and crossed her arms.

The withering silence that Blanche had perfected intimated most of the junior editors. Even as her assistant, it never had that effect on Judith. Judith was not afraid of Blanche. She could be infuriating, mesmerizing, intellectually challenging, obtuse even, but the intimidation Blanche utilized on so many was ineffective with Judith. The only fear Judith ever felt around Blanche had to do with her own reactions and whether she had any control over them.

“You don’t even like Paris,” Judith plowed through the silence.

“I don’t dislike Paris.”

“Not disliking a place and truly liking it are not the same, Blanche.”

“I will not play these circular word games!”

“Why are you here?”

“For heaven’s sake, would you stop asking me that?” Blanche’s tone was the sharp whisper that usually signaled that an argument was over. Judith was not constrained by such signals. Instead, taking Blanche by her thin, protruding shoulders, she forced eye contact. When dark eyes fluttered closed, Judith knew an answer would be forthcoming.

“The office is unbearable without you, my dear.”

And there it was. Judith felt the fear as distinctly as she felt the butterflies.

“Eventually you will have to tell Alfred,” Judith bit her lip. What she was talking about, she hoped would be clear—Blanche’s eyesight.

“You assume I haven’t,” Blanche raised an eyebrow.

“Alfred is not an observant man, Blanche. Certainly not when it comes to his own wife.”

The fear, brought on but what wasn’t being said, caused a slight shiver to carry up the length of her spine. Blanche, with her obscured vision, noticed. She stepped toward Judith and placed a thin hand at her elbow.

And the truth arrived on a breath: “I needed you.”

If she hadn’t been made totally breathless by the admission, Judith might have laughed at the absurdity of someone as formidable as Blanche needing anyone. However nice it felt to be needed in life, it was an otherworldly feeling to be needed by Blanche.

“Oh, Blanche,” she rested her forehead against the other woman’s before wrapping her in a warm embrace. “I didn’t abandon you.”

Despite knowing of Blanche’s eye condition, Judith was not privy to the list of others who knew. She assumed Alfred, though the man had made no accommodation for Blanche if he did. Whether he would force Blanche out was a question that kept Judith awake at night.

“You are the only one I can trust,” Blanche’s cheek had turned so that her lips caused reverberations against the shell of Judith’s ear. “With my work. With…well, with my…”

When the rest of the words didn’t come, Judith pulled back so that she might read them in Blanche’s expression. Her hands trailed down slender arms until they encircled wrists.

“With what?” she encouraged.

A slight glance toward the window and a clenching of each fist suggested Blanche would go to her grave with whatever it was she had considered saying. Judith prepared for her to excuse herself, never to explain her presence in that Paris hotel room. But something happened in the moment between Blanche’s eyelids closing and opening again. Judith denied her the chance to wiggle out of the conversation.

“Blanche…” she hummed as she released a wrist in order to place her hand over the pendant adorning Blanche’s chest. The older woman gasped at the gesture and followed with her own hand covering Judith’s. “Is it possible you trust me with more than your work?”

The way Judith spoke had a hint of teasing beneath as though prodding Blanche for the answer she already knew.

“My dear, you are so much more to me than a kindred spirit and equal intellect. So much more than the manuscripts you are now forced to read to me.”

“I have never been forced,” Judith smiled, flirting openly, “though if you would like to try, I wouldn’t put up a fight.”

This drew out a raspy chuckle.

“You have my heart, dear Judith,” Blanche’s smile turned serious. “You have had for years and you shall for as long as it continues to beat.”

Judith’s eyes had filled with tears and she found herself shaking her head for lack of words. Her free hand slipped into Blanche’s hair and she pulled her into a heated kiss. She was desperate to return the sentiment and could find no better way to do so than with her mouth.

Parting, Blanche sighed.

“I do need an update on the Plath estate,” her mouth curled at the corner which was now smudged with lipstick.

Judith let out a hearty laugh.

“Of course, Blanche,” she smiled. “I wouldn’t dream otherwise.”

“Walk me through it and then we can order dinner,” Blanche suggested.

“Will you eat?” Judith tilted her head, unconvinced.

“Salad.” Blanche clenched her jaw. “And while you indulge, I’ll give you my notes on that manuscript you have spread out all over your bed.”

Blushing, Judith nodded. Who was she to turn down Blanche Knopf?

-finis-