“Even you, Flannery,” Anne said, and there was a keenness, an edge in her voice that gave the student hope suddenly. It was not the edge of instruction or sarcasm: it was an edge that might cut into some different heart altogether. Flannery heard it. She listened carefully.
“—If only you knew it.”
Not long after, they stopped at a dank vacant lot near Prince Street, where stalls clustered together selling scarves and T-shirts, earrings and incense.
“I want to buy you something,” Anne said. “I want to buy you a present.”
“For me?” Flannery said stupidly.
“Don’t blush, for God’s sake. You and your blushing—you’re like some Victorian maiden.”
It was more the tone Flannery was used to from her, but still there was an intimacy in it that caught at Flannery’s throat. She’d noticed her blushing! Wasn’t that a kind of compliment? And the word “maiden” hummed in her ears, thrilling her with its mysterious erotic import.
“Well, you act like some stern Victorian mistress. No wonder I blush.”
The boldness of the reply made Anne pause to look at her with a raised brow and a slight upturning of the pretty corners of her mouth.
“See? Now you’re blushing, too.”
“I am not.”
Anne found the stall she was looking for. Sunglasses, apparently. She looked at a selection of different styles, from sleazy drug dealer to minimal Lennon, retro cat’s-eyes or cool oval blue. Each kind she placed on Flannery’s head, then stood back from her, holding her shoulders, watching her intently. Scrutinizing. Assessing. Flannery would certainly have blushed under this attention ordinarily, but she was enjoying herself too much to now. Finally Anne chose a pair to her liking. She turned Flannery around to give her an instant’s reflection in one of the tiny mirrors, but it was clear there would be no debate about it, as Anne was already paying the Chinese man for them. In fact, as Flannery looked at herself in the mirror, she didn’t quite recognize herself. She liked that.
“Sunglasses? In autumn?” she said, starting to fold them up and put them in her pocket as they walked away.
“Keep them on! Christ. That’s the whole point.” Anne tapped her lightly. Affectionately, it seemed to Flannery. “Your eyes keep wandering around wildly, as if you were from some tiny one-horse town and had never been to a city before. You’ll be safer if you keep them on. Then no one will know how young and innocent you are.”
“Oh.” It was an insult, obviously, but Flannery smiled anyway. She felt sharp in her new shades. Anne had chosen for her a slickly chic look.
“No one, that is, except me.”
To be in this city alongside this woman was an airy exhilaration for Flannery. It was like flying. It was the story you tell your wakeful self before sleep, sure it will never take on the full, lit shape of reality.
In her sunglasses Flannery could look around her with impunity at the diverse, infinite faces; at the blurred jostlings and fast-chattering hawkers and random, optimistic runners; at the rampant signs and signals that competed boisterously against the fundamental drabbery of the city’s miles of stone. None of it bore any relation to the collective life in the cities she knew at home. She was here without reference. Often she did not understand what she was looking at. There were pages and pages of books that had turned this city into dazzling fiction, some Flannery had read and many more that she would read through her future. But for now, open and ignorant, she let Anne be the author of what she saw, and the muse for what she would later re-create.
Anne knew the city the way you do a lover, and she had a lover’s indulgence, a way of seeing charm and fancy where there was ostensibly none. As they walked, she pointed out buildings to Flannery that had a history public (“Auden used to live on this street, and he’d go buy the newspaper in his slippers”) or private (“I was once kissed goodbye on that corner by a friend who died the following week, in an accident”). Anne showed her sudden surprising gardens and the great shape of the grid, recited the many names of innumerable foods. When Anne learned that Flannery did not know what a knish was, she took Flannery east and easter to Yonah Schimmel’s Bakery so Flannery could sample a spinach-heavy treat and absorb a crucial fact about how the city tasted. “It’s something you have to know,” she told Flannery, and “It’s okay—you can take off your sunglasses now, to eat.”
It was hard, as the hours and light eventually faded, and this wandering dream day passed, for Flannery to know whether she was seeing New York or seeing Anne; whether she was hearing New York’s busy commentary or just listening to Anne’s. The voice that had serenaded her through the turbulent displaced weeks at college was now walking beside her, shaping the air in her ear, coming resonantly from a nearby body that Flannery wanted to hold. Had been longing to hold. Had written about longing for . . . Those bold words that had acted as a spell, as she’d hoped, to bring the two of them together.
It was a miracle. How was it possible? And more to the point, when would this amiable preamble end?
Dark fell, early, and brought with it a quiet offset by the luminous neon and the city’s waking up for its most famous hours. As New York grew louder, the two grew quieter; the conversation changed and lost something of its earlier energy.
They ate dinner in a Japanese restaurant near Astor Place, where Flannery had the best of both worlds: declining, herself, to have sushi, knowing perfectly well she’d dribble rice and raw fish all down her if she did; but given the rare chance to watch Anne as she placed slithery eel delicately into her mouth and fed herself morsel after morsel of skin-pink ginger. They drank sake and ate eagerly, but the speech between them was uneven.
Ordinary biography did not move Anne, and she seemed happy to let silences break over them like waves. She was scarcely interested in where Flannery was from, or what it was like, or how foreign she felt here, or what that was like. She had obviously not taken in whether Flannery had siblings. (She didn’t.) She made one or two references to her own sister, Patricia, who was married and lived in Texas. When Flannery ventured, “What part of New York are you from?”—as if she would have understood the answer, anyway—Anne said in a bored tone,
“I’m not from New York. I’m from Detroit.”
“Really?” It was so different from what Flannery had imagined, from the way Anne moved through these streets. Flannery thought Anne must have known them since girlhood. She was sure they’d wrapped themselves around their Anne for years. Now she understood that Anne’s adoration was that of the adopted daughter rather than the natural offspring. “So—” Flannery started, eager to know everything. What was Detroit like? How and when had she left it? What—where was Detroit, anyway? (Other than in Michigan.) And how had it colored her?
“So.” Anne repeated it as a challenge, a taunt almost. She had a steel in her that suddenly appeared at times, closing all the doors, shutting everything down, forbidding absolutely any further questions. It was like a high-tech Bond trick, a foreign locking mechanism: it became abruptly impossible to find anything like an opening.
“Do you miss it?” Flannery asked, thinking how much she missed her own home.
“Almost never.”
That was the end of that, quite clearly.
Possibly one day Flannery would learn a little about the “almost.” In the meantime, the easiest subject for them to circle back to was reading.
They walked along the street, separate in the numbing November cold, and Flannery sensed that the fire between them—she was sure she’d felt it, once, that she had not invented it—was all but out.
“Where are you staying?”
It was not a question Flannery had fixed an answer to. Not that she’d assumed . . . She hadn’t, exactly. It was just that her planning mind had given out past the point where she found the café on MacDougal; if she could just find the café, she thought, the rest—whatever rest there might be—would take care of itself.
“Well, I—I could go to Mary-Jo’s. She sai
d I’d be welcome. Or—I can always just take the train back tonight. There’s probably one back, still.”
“The last one’s in about half an hour,” Anne said crisply.
Flannery shrugged. For the first time, perhaps, since arriving in New York. But suddenly she was tired. “That’s probably what I should do.” Her voice was flat. “Take the last train.”
They walked in silence. Not an especially companionable one. Flannery was moping; Anne, evidently, was thinking.
“I’d invite you to stay where I am,” she said with a trace of apology, “at my friend Jennifer’s. But it’s such a poky little apartment. It’s just a one-bedroom. With a futon.” She slicked her hair back behind her ear. “Though Jennifer did tell me the place has a Murphy bed, too. I’ve never actually tried it.”
“What’s a Murphy bed?”
“What is one?” Anne’s tongue was still sharp, though she tried to blunt it somewhat. “You know, you’re cute, Flannery—you really don’t know a damn thing.”
Flannery took hold of Anne’s arm then, to slow her down. She was walking so fast! “You’ve got to stop saying that.” She had Anne’s attention now. “I know all kinds of things. I know how to survive dorm life, though it’s totally degrading. I know how to take the train to New York. And I know how to wait at the train station for someone who’s going to New York, so I can give them something I want them to have.”
It was the first time either of them had mentioned what Flannery had written. Pages for You. Remember?
It broke through whatever carapace had formed over the baffling object of Flannery’s desire. “You’re right,” Anne said. Quietly. “You do know things. I’m sorry, I’m being a shrew.”
They were walking down University Place now, and reached Tenth Street. Anne steered them around the corner, down half a block, then stopped. She blew on her bare hands, glanced up at a dim apartment building, kept her eyes away from Flannery’s.
“Well, this is it.”
Flannery was bewildered. This was what? Goodbye—just like that? Wasn’t Anne even going to help her get a cab? Before she could question her, Anne carried on.
“Do you want to come up?” she asked, in an oddly humble voice that just about made Flannery melt right there on the sidewalk. “You can see what a Murphy bed is. It’s something every girl, sometime in her life, should find out.”
It was the flutter-doubt that gave Flannery assurance. As they shed the night’s cold, standing in the stuffy intimacy of the elevator, Flannery saw Anne’s slight frame shiver—from some hesitation, some internal query. Sensing it, Flannery suddenly knew.
This night is mine. She is giving it to me.
This beautiful confidence kept the young woman cheerful as the older one fumbled with the lock and issued coughed apologies for the paper-strewn disarray of the apartment (but they were formal, not genuine, Flannery thought, and she could see signs, too, of an order in the narrow room, a just in case, for company, clearing). Flannery watched Anne’s hands fly about the room untamed, gesturing at Jennifer’s Frida Kahlo postcards, her shrine to Marlene Dietrich, the “view” that could be seen, if you twisted yourself around by the window, of Wall Street (but showing this required Anne to lead Flannery over to that end where the futon lay and perform an awkward dance step around an object that said loudly, Bed. Bed. BED). Tucked rustily into the wall behind a flamboyant Indonesian print, Anne said easily, on surer ground here, was the Murphy bed. This was a less fraught demonstration, as it implied their sleeping separately, so Anne could show Flannery the lethal-appearing spring mechanism, make an unavoidable joke about the prospect of its giving way, mid-sleep, to snap the sleeper wallward. She patted the traplike item almost affectionately, as if it were a pet.
“Now you know. A Murphy bed. That’s how it works.”
Then she stood, still jacketed, arms folded, her eyes green as motel-sign neon. Vacancy or no vacancy? Flannery wondered, though she was pretty sure she knew.
“Anne,” she said softly. Naming her, she thought, might steady her. Flannery felt protective. “Thank you. For letting me stay.” She let the love leak into her voice, hoping it wouldn’t frighten her.
“Well. Thank you,” Anne replied, with an angled smile directed somewhere at the ceiling, “for writing that poem.”
An awkwardness threatened to yawn between them.
“I wouldn’t mind—”
“Do you want—”
They both stuttered, stopped, laughed a little at the broken ice.
“—something to drink?”
So they moved to the safer-seeming kitchen, where they sat down at the round table and talked to each other in fond voices, the scattered chat of new friends; while the air around them wondered if they’d soon be more.
There, across the Formica surface, their hands met, Flannery’s right to Anne’s left: the bodies’ first admission that they wanted each other. It was not planned or spoken. It was Flannery seeing those finely shaped, shy fingers, and there is that strange way hands are alive, and animal, separately expressive from the rest of the self. It is no surprise that hands create the characters of the puppeteer, or that movies have imagined them moving independently, spiderlike, around a room. Flannery saw this lovely creature and greeted it with her own, stroking it, covering it, and then, finally, holding it in a half-clasp. A declaration. I am here. We have touched.
Anne was quiet. Looking down. Her eyes would not find Flannery’s, but her hand held hers, too, returned the embrace with its own strength, so that Flannery knew that Anne was with her, though she was sheltering in some wordless privacy.
Flannery allowed the hands and silence to continue as long as she humanly could, until her nervous heart was stretched taut, too taut to breathe.
“Anne?” she said finally.
The question was everything. It was, in fact, the only question.
To Flannery’s surprise, when Anne looked up at last to answer it, her eyes seemed darker. With lust, and with something else, too—like grief. Or doubt. She didn’t say anything, but she nodded.
Flannery took that as her yes. It was her thumb she moved across Anne’s mouth then. Slowly. Following the curve of her lips up to that sweet peak, and back down the gentle slope of the other side. Flannery knew that she knew this mouth already, had lived with its shape and its sounds in her imagination, but she had not yet felt it. Her blunt thumb made this first intimate acquaintance.
“You have the most beautiful mouth,” Flannery said to Anne. And then she did what she had been wanting to do her entire life.
She kissed her.
You see, it didn’t have to be in the dark, after all.
It could start in the light. There would be hours of darkness later, sure, when in the moon-cast blue they’d wander over and over this new terrain, learning the lay of the land as much by touch as by sight. There would be that long nighttime, enjoying the obscurity of being in each other’s arms. But here was the revelation: it could start in the light. Those uncounted hours alone in her sleepless room had taught Flannery something, after all. That, in love, she could face illumination.
They kissed in the lit kitchen first, because that’s where they’d come modestly, just to talk, to sip some small, late tea together. Not alcohol: they had both decided not to drink. They knew they wanted wakefulness, even if neither might have admitted that she knew what for.
The kitchen can in its way be the place for kisses. It is the heart of a home. (Even of a cramped and somewhat neglected fourth-floor apartment.) Flannery did not yet know Anne cooked, but she could see that Anne’s body was looser in here than when they’d moved around the bedroom. She seemed to feel freer in this room with the food. The kitchen is, after all, the place of heat and eating; the place of treats for the palate; the place a person comes to first thing in the morning, to read, and wake up, and taste the day.
It was the night they tasted. And each other. Starting slow, and slowly faster, their mouths met: first polite and refined;
then affectionate, curious; and finally, as their tongues wandered and hungered, their mouths became wide and their desires wider, and they began to find each other with an urgency that brought to mind the word “devouring.” Hands moved through hair coppery and fair, and gradually their bodies drew closer, a chair was moved, the table pushed back. Yet still there was a kind of demureness, almost, a riding sidesaddle, with their legs adjacent, until finally Flannery just climbed off her own chair and straddled Anne on hers, leaning into her, gripping her with her thighs and feeling through their two pairs of jeans the heat now, and wetness.
They kissed like that, through clothes and shudderings, in a light bright enough to capture the startled lust on each other’s faces, to watch each other grow mussed and wild, and finally to see, clearly, that they were going to have to go somewhere else, away from the kitchen, where their skins could touch.
PART TWO
It was a lake-blue sky through the window, filled only with the low sound of lovebirds.
Sweet husky calls, a cooing almost, a pleasure-chuckle, some creatures’ shared mutual delight. And it wasn’t their sounds now. (It might have been, earlier: it would be again, later.) Flannery watched the empty, colored air through the rectangular pane and savored this sung-over spell by herself, the figure lying next to her still heavy with sleep, now quiet, her gifts dormant, her sweet mouth slightly open, exhaling dreams. Flannery watched this sky alone for a minute, seeing for the first time how the world changed after a passionate night. The light, the taste on the tongue, the speed of her mind: all different.
Pages for You Page 6