Pages for You

by Sylvia Brownrigg

  There was someone with her when she danced, though. When Flannery closed her eyes, lost her head to the drink and the music, there was one person she had in her mind, one person for whom she dipped and writhed, swayed and swung. When her hands shaped the air, it was that person’s form they were seeking.

  Then, one night, as one of her favorite songs throbbed to its close, Flannery suddenly opened her eyes, wide. Two in the morning, drunk and steamy, in a stranger’s friendly, frenzied apartment.

  And there she was.

  In front of her. As if Flannery had imagined her into life. As if her creative powers were, after all, that strong.

  “Hi, Flannery.”

  Anne’s face, in the low party light, seemed shockingly benign. Then again, Flannery was drunk.

  “Hi.”

  So she didn’t wear the leather jacket every single waking minute: here she was bare-shouldered, in a sleeveless white cotton vest. Black jeans. Simple. But her shoulders seemed so vulnerable, exposed, that Flannery had an odd gallant impulse. Surely they should be covered, those delicate shoulders, with a wrap or a coat. Even a protective arm. Anne seemed so small here.

  “Great party,” Flannery said, stupidly. But what else could she say?

  “Yeah. Do you know Cameron?” Anne gestured toward a blond, floppy-haired figure who was leaning lustfully into a short black man beside him.

  Flannery nodded, smiled, and shrugged in some vague combination that she hoped didn’t commit her one way or another. Actually, she had no idea whose party this was; she couldn’t even remember who had brought her here. Where had she put her drink? Down on some speaker somewhere?

  “You looked like you were getting into the music,” Anne said. Still smiling! What was the matter with her? “I didn’t mean to interrupt.” She glanced at the friend Flannery had been dancing with, who was now moving slinkily over to someone else.

  “No, no. I was—just getting ready to go, anyway. It’s late.” Flannery wiped the sweat from her face. She felt so tall, standing over Anne. It seemed all wrong.

  “You don’t have to leave just because I’m here.” The woman gazed at her with something more like the expected sarcasm. “I’m not grading you, you know.”

  “Yeah.” Flannery couldn’t figure out where to put her hands: she had nothing to hold on to. “Listen—do you want a drink? I’m going to get one. I’m dying of thirst.”

  Blurred moments later, Flannery was standing over a rickety kitchen table that had been flash-flooded with alcohol: an unruly mixture of rum, gin, and vodka and a variety of drifting, bubbly mixers. Dead half-limes and -lemons had washed up on the shore; some red plastic cups swam tipsily sideways in the current. Others were scattered upright on other surfaces, but they were all half-filled, or lipstick-stained, or choked with damp cigarette butts. None were clean. The scene was vomitous, generally, and Flannery could feel the dangerous rise in her throat of whatever her own poison had been—vodka and grapefruit juice, probably, which someone somewhere had told her was called a Salty Dog.

  She could leave now, before it came to staggering around looking for the bathroom. No. No. Flannery breathed. She moved over to the window. She wasn’t as bad as all that. If she could just pause here a minute; then she could come to terms, slowly, with her inability to find that wretchedly beautiful woman a drink. Or she could just sneak away altogether, to escape her shame.

  “I thought you might have gotten lost.”

  Here she was again! Jesus Christ. She had followed Flannery in here.

  “Or that you were planning to ditch me.” Anne’s voice was sly.

  “Oh no. Never! You know I’d never do that.” Flannery kept her cheek close to the pane to stay cool. What had she just said? “No. I was just stopping for a minute to get some air.”

  “Good idea. It’s so damned stuffy here. Let’s open the other one, too.”

  But the other window seemed stuck. The two women had to stand together and push to overcome its reluctance. Flannery could see the taut line of Anne’s forearm muscle as they tried to maneuver it.

  It gave, suddenly, so that Anne fell forward, fast, into the icy onrush of night. Flannery instinctively grabbed her shoulders to hold her back—the apartment was on the fourth floor—though there was no real danger of her falling through.

  They both drew away from the window then, back into the warmer party air. Each of them shivered with relief, and with cold. Anne looked at her with a smile of an unnamable kind on her moist lips.

  “Well, thank you, Flannery,” she said, in mock solemnness. She held her hand out for her hero to shake on. “You saved my life.”

  And then what?

  Flannery’s memory ended exactly there, and no amount of gray dining-hall coffee the next morning could bring any more back. “You saved my life,” Anne had said, ironically of course; maybe she’d even added “My hero!” to underline the joke. And then—what? Kissed her? Inconceivable. That, Flannery would have remembered. Lit a cigarette, shook her hand, said good night, sent Flannery on her way? Dully plausible. Or had she, rather, laughed savagely, hyenalike, knowing of Flannery’s impossible crush, which that hot-handed clasp of the shoulders made clumsily obvious?

  But maybe this crush wasn’t impossible. Maybe—God knows, it was hard to credit it—maybe it was possible, after all.

  Hadn’t she complimented Flannery on her dancing? Or had she? Maybe Flannery had made that up. Or, more likely, overinterpreted. Anne said something like Oh,go ahead, keep dancing, which Flannery had feverishly redrafted as My God, you enticing creature, you must dance for me and only for me.

  “Hey, Jansen.”

  It was a disheveled Nick, bearing a bowl of cereal. He had taken to calling her by her last name. Flannery couldn’t remember why anymore. This seemed to be what college was about—learning a vast amount, thus triggering an onset of chronic memory loss.

  “Hey.”

  “You look kind of wrecked. If you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Yeah.” Flannery drank some more dreg-heavy coffee. As if that would help. “Listen. Were you at that party last night? In that guy Cameron’s apartment?”

  “Was I there!” He laughed, before shoveling cereal into his mouth. He paused to chew milkily, and Flannery had to look away. Her nausea was returning. “You are wrecked. I’m the one who took you there. Remember?”

  “Oh yeah. Right.” She did, too. Sort of. She could imagine it, anyway. “So. Here’s my question. I didn’t do anything stupid, did I, before I left? That you saw?”

  “Jansen, Jansen, Jansen.” He shook his head sadly. Over a mouthful of Sugar Pops he seemed to consider tormenting her with a series of amusing lies about her embarrassing escapades, but decided benevolently against it. “No. Relax. All I saw was you dancing with some red-headed chick in a tank top, till God knows what hour.”

  “Dancing? With her?”

  “Yep.” He thought about it for a minute. And swallowed. “Yep. She was hot.”

  It seemed criminal to finally have the raw stuff of fantasy—dancing, with Anne, for pity’s sake!—and not be able to remember it. Flannery could not forgive herself. She felt sure that under hypnosis she would be able to retrieve the images. Were they close? What songs did they dance to? How did Anne move?

  Then again, Nick might have made that up.

  Or maybe just embellished, unaware of how critical accuracy was here. After all, he was probably drunk, too. Maybe she and Anne had one single dance together. That was probably it, and Flannery could just about re-create a montage of smiles and bare arms (she remembered with heartbreaking clarity the curve of Anne’s shoulders), some general moving around to something like music. Flannery remained completely blank, however, on what idiocies she might have uttered, what confessions freely given, what sloppy compliments slurred into that exquisite ear.

  It was impossible to go to class, obviously. How could Flannery be in the same room with her, not knowing what had gone on? When the Thursday of the lecture dawned,
Flannery was all set to skip it. Then she ran into Susan Kim, who reminded her that it was the last class before the Thanksgiving break, when Bradley would be talking about the extra reading they were supposed to do in preparation for their long-paper assignment. Flannery had to go. Why hadn’t she dropped the damn class? Who needed Criticism, anyway? She went so far as to place a desperate call to someone in Admin to find out if it was truly, absolutely, too late to drop the class now. She got an earful of accented attitude from a secretary (“That’s why we have deadlines,” as if she were stupid), which was enough—almost—to make Flannery break the phone, pack her bags, and head back West. Life was so peaceful there, by comparison.

  She went to class late. That was her compromise. In through a rear door, five minutes late, so that Anne would be safely sitting up front, her back to Flannery. For eighty tense minutes Flannery took jittery erratic notes, which she later found mostly unintelligible. Five minutes before the class ended, she packed away her notebook and got ready to go. Susan looked at her quizzically. The professor was just then reaching the heart of what he was hoping from them in their long papers (none of which he would ever read; that was the privilege of the teaching assistants). He listed important pitfalls for them to avoid, tips on how to find something original to say. Flannery missed all of it. To Susan she shrugged with a half-smile and mouthed, Doctor’s appointment. Susan nodded and went back to her own notes.

  Flannery left. So relieved not to have to see Anne that on her way out she slammed the door inadvertently. She could hear its loud, wooden reverberations echo through the Critical classroom as she made her lucky escape to the world outside.

  There was no question on Friday whether Flannery wanted any proximity to the rust-colored corner building where—she couldn’t make herself forget this—Anne held her afternoon office hours (3–5 p.m., Room 303). She didn’t. She didn’t want to be anywhere near there. She stopped at the post office, which was ghost-townishly deserted already, most students having left for their Thanksgiving vacation. Flannery had a pretty good haul: a Thanksgiving gift pack from her mother, two letters, and a heavy envelope sent via campus mail. Nick had recently discovered the cost-free joys of campus mail and had taken to sending Flannery ridiculous items, “just to keep them busy”—the freshmen face book, his winter hat, a packet of Alka-Seltzer Plus (“for effective relief of headache with upset stomach which may be due to excessive food or drink”—gone over in helpful yellow highlighter).

  Flannery bundled up her items and took them away to the bookstore/café where she intended to enjoy them slowly, with a cup of decent coffee, while not thinking about anybody’s office hours, or dance movements, or black leather jacket, or lack of black leather jacket. While not listening to the music playing in the background, which sounded uneasily familiar—a dance tune she thought might have been playing that night in Cameron’s apartment. Flannery worked to drive the music out of her head.

  Her friends’ letters were entertaining, filled with familiar accounts of parties, studies, sudden romances. The package from her mother was cute. A pretty scarf, some candy corn, of all things (oh: left over from her Halloween stash, it must have been), and a card that said brightly, “Can’t wait to see you at Christmas! Enjoy your Turkey Day, Honey.” Flannery had been invited, dutifully, to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner in New York by her invisible roommate, a pre-med who wore pink sweaters and with whom Flannery rarely spoke. Nick, too, had mentioned that his family would be on the Cape, and she’d be welcome to join them. (“They’re neurotic as hell, but the food’s good.” It was a time of charity toward others.) She had not yet decided what she was going to do.

  What had he sent her this time? Flannery opened the campus mail envelope. A book. Something kitsch, no doubt. Flannery turned it over, surprised. Poems! That seemed serious for Nick. By someone named Marilyn Hacker. Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons.

  Inside, a note:

  I brought this to give you in class today, but I didn’t see you. Beware delinquency!

  Something you said the other night made me think you’d enjoy these. A little extra reading for you over the break. Don’t worry—they won’t be on the final.

  Yours,

  Anne

  Before Flannery had a chance to take in the import of this note, someone sat down at her table. Loud, in a diminutive kind of way, and trailing cigarette smoke. Flannery’s cheeks were, she felt quite certain, cranberry red as she looked up.

  Into the bright, almond-eyed face of Susan Kim.

  She was laughing. “Oh my God!” she said, smoking, unjacketing, and rolling up her sleeves more or less all at once. “I am so in love with my TA, it’s not even funny.”

  Too many stimuli all at once. But Flannery did do one thing immediately, instinctively—she hid the book from Susan. Her eagerness to open and read it was so ferocious she had to sit on her hands.

  “Who?” she asked, with a casualness that she felt deserved a medal. “You mean—that woman—Anne?”

  Susan inhaled deeply, nodded, and exhaled politely to the side. “I get so hot and bothered around her. You know. That jacket! Those boots! I was just in there with her talking about the term paper.”

  That jacket, Flannery thought; yes. Those boots: I know them.

  “She said we should meet for a drink sometime.”

  “She did?” And did she dance with you? Did she give you some poems?

  “Yeah, but I don’t know. With your TA? Wouldn’t that be kind of weird? God, do you think she’s gay?”

  Flannery felt a thick choke of jealousy around her throat. She shrugged, then coughed, violently. “Maybe. You know, I—I wouldn’t know.”

  “Hey, are you okay? You look a little—” Susan saw the mail scattered like torn leaves before Flannery on the table, and concern crossed her kind face. “Did you just get some bad news or something?”

  “No.” Flannery cleared her throat, coughed again, took a sip of coffee. “Just come candy corn from my mother,” she croaked. “Do you want some?”

  “Sure. Thanks.” Susan put a cupped palm out for some fluorescent orange-and-yellow cones, popped a few into her mouth, then said somberly, “How was your doctor’s appointment?”

  “My what? Oh, okay. It turned out to be nothing. Listen”—Flannery saw the clock over the fiction section. It was just after five—“you know what? I’m sorry. I just realized, I’ve got to get going. I’m late for something.”

  Susan was a little hurt, Flannery could tell. She must think Flannery disliked her. Flannery tried to make up for her rudeness with a friendly, compensating gesture.

  “Here, have some more candy corn. It’s good for you.” She poured a generous portion out onto the table. “The Indians brought candy corn to the Pilgrims, you know. As a peace offering.” Susan did not look convinced. “And to help them get through the bitterly cold winters.”

  It turned out to be pretty difficult, simultaneously reading a volume of poetry and jogging two blocks and half a courtyard to the rust-colored building. The poems became word-blurs as her eyes watered with the cold, speedy air.

  Once inside, Flannery ran up two flights of broad marble stairs to the third floor, where she assumed Room 303 would be. (She’d had the number emblazoned on her memory since that first class handout.) But nothing at this university was ever so simple. The place was a maze. The third floor was occupied entirely by classrooms. She ran up another flight, dashed down a corridor, stalled out in a blind alley, retraced her steps, was about to bark with frustration, then half-skidded round a corner and there—thank God!—was Room 303.

  Without thinking about it she knocked loudly, her hand emphatic with urgency. What if Anne had gone?

  “Jesus Christ!” She saw now that though the door was closed, the light was on. The voice was startled and abrupt. “I hear you. Can you please wait outside till we’ve finished?”

  Flannery was silent. She realized—for some reason the possibility hadn’t occurred to her as she jogged—tha
t someone else was still in there with her.

  “Who is it?” Now irritated, exhausted. “My office hours ended ten minutes ago.” A pause, followed by laughter. Then, said more softly—intimately, it seemed to Flannery—“Maybe I scared them away. Oh well!”

  Flannery leaned against the wall, catching her breath. She heard a mumble of voices carry on their interrupted conversation.

  Quietly, quietly, Flannery pulled the book of poems out of the envelope again and thumbed through it. Furtively: as if it were a bomb-construction manual or an advance, sneak copy of the final. A line from an early poem caught her attention.

  I bet you blush all over when you come.

  Flannery closed her eyes and the book. Her legs were weak: it was a good thing the wall she was leaning against wasn’t.

  Maybe this was a bad idea. She could walk away; tiptoe back down the stairs and out of the maze. It would be as if she had never been there at all.

  The door opened and light spilled out, catching the sleeve of her jacket.

  “Oh God. Is someone still waiting there? You’d better send them in. Come in!”

  Brittle with impatience.

  At least—small mercies—Flannery did not know the shuffling male student who had had his turn before hers and who nodded to her, sympathetically, on his way out.

  She went in, closed the door.

  “Flannery!”

  “Hi.”

  She sat down, mostly because she had to, or her knees might give way. Anne’s face was flushed with surprise. That, at least, was gratifying.