She was not now and would never again be the same Flannery. These unearthly noises from overhead seemed themselves a kind of rechristening, a way of calling her by another name. She was changed, and they told her so.
“I used to think it was the neighbors,” said a sleepy voice near her. Flannery shivered in her new skin with surprise. It was the voice of her lover.
“You’re awake.” Flannery felt suddenly a vast and overwhelming shyness—a panic almost, that she was here, exposed, with this woman she hardly knew, with a woman whose delicious body she had explored, certainly, thrillingly, in the dark, but whom she hardly knew. She was here half-naked with a stranger, Flannery was, with this woman, with a woman.
“I thought it was a couple I sometimes see in the elevator when I stay here,” Anne went on. “My friend Jennifer calls them the Same Family, because they always wear the same clothes as each other, and they have the same glasses and get similar haircuts. A man and a woman—it’s a little strange.”
She seemed so awake, though her cheeks were pillow-crumpled and her hair all over. But she told this story as though they were old friends, and Flannery, who had been so startled by the wakened sight of Anne, moved closer now, to listen.
“I always thought that sound was them making love in the morning, every morning, it seemed, with these same cries. I thought, How like the Same Family, to have the same love cries as each other. It’s perverse. Finally I mentioned it to Jennifer—just the other night, when she called, to see how everything was going. I said, ‘Doesn’t that couple upstairs drive you crazy—every morning, with their passion sound track? Like they’re trying to let everyone in the building know, We’re having sex, folks, and we’re loving it!’ ”
Flannery listened to Anne in wonder. A storyteller! She was a storyteller, too, after all.
“And?” Flannery leaned in closer, to follow the narrative thread. “What did she say—your friend Jennifer?”
Anne’s eyes woke up with the joke of her mistake. “She told me it’s not the Same Family at all.” She laughed. “I felt so stupid. It’s the pigeons.”
They spent hours, or maybe it was days, in and out of each other’s grasps and embraces. Waves would crest, and break, and crest again. Urgencies yielded to the slower breaths of satisfaction, as sticky hands stroked or petted, after: the “There, there” and “How was that?” of the relishing lover. Early on—after they had left the kitchen for their first encounter with the futon they’d come to know so intimately—Flannery had whispered, “I’ve never done this before,” and Anne had whispered back (a hot temptation in Flannery’s ear), “You’ll be fine: I bet you’re a fast learner.” It gave Flannery the confidence to believe it was true. As it proved to be. And there were sweet 2 or 3 a.m. encouragements: “Are you sure this is your first time? Well, kid—you’re a natural.”
They certainly built up an appetite. Noonish the day after their first night, Flannery announced, “I have to eat something soon or I may faint.” “I know. I think we’ve burned through all that Japanese food.” Reluctantly they rediscovered the art of dressing themselves and, more entertainingly, each other: slow blue-jeaned zips up to a fastening waist button, the neat fondle of jacket snaps. They found the street, which seemed a loud and lopsided place, but fortunately contained a breakfast and hamburger joint where they could stock up on protein. They watched each other eat with belated bashfulness, finding in the act an echo of what they’d just been up to. “Maybe we should get a few things to go, too” was Flannery’s practical suggestion, but the minute she said it she blushed at the implication. “Good idea,” answered Anne, licking her lips—whether with lust or to free a bit of ketchup, it was hard to tell. They staggered back to the apartment under the weight of juices, sandwiches, and a few other essentials from the Korean grocery. “I feel like we’re going camping.” “I know. Do you think we should buy a flashlight? And a box of matches?”
Upstairs again, they’d lounge, then lunge. They rested. They rolled; rocked; wrangled. They arm-wrestled in the kitchen for a while, in a lull. Flannery was stronger than Anne, but only just, and she admired the tautness of Anne’s forearms. (She remembered them from that party night by the window.) “Do you work out?” Flannery asked. “No,” Anne told her. “It’s all the theory I read. Keeps me in shape.”
They kitchen-kissed again, then rewarmed the bedroom. Once, sitting up, Flannery gave a startled look at the other wall. “It’s eerie,” she said. “I feel like there’s someone else here, watching us.”
“Who, Jennifer? Don’t worry about her. She’s in Toronto arguing with her family. She won’t be back till Saturday. Besides—she’d approve.”
“Not Jennifer.” Flannery looked doubtful. “I think it must be . . . Murphy.”
“Murphy?” Anne pointed at the bed glued discreetly to the wall. It did have an unobtrusive, eavesdropping look about it. “What, you think Murphy’s kind of a voyeur—‘Two women together, how sexy,’ that kind of thing?”
“Not only that”—Flannery gave a cartoonish wink—“I think he wants a piece of the action.”
“You know what? I think you’re right.” Anne narrowed her eyes lasciviously. “And why shouldn’t he get some?”
So they unfolded Murphy and had a threesome.
If doubt had smoldered in Anne at first, the sex extinguished it. So Flannery had to assume, since she could recognize the tremble of hesitation in a person, as she had in Anne earlier that first night. (Her shudder in the elevator.) As their love wore on and they wore themselves into it, however, it became clear that any hanging back on Anne’s part was over.
But what had been her hesitation’s source? Flannery guessed there might be someone else, or the ghost of someone. In such a vibrant life how could there not be? Alive or not (that kisser on the street corner?), present or past (Jennifer, formerly?), Flannery could only wonder. A possibility Flannery glanced at, then turned away from, was a moral qualm about palming a student—might not Anne worry over the propriety, or even advisability, of it? (Flannery was certainly not going to raise that question herself.) Finally, she thought it might be Anne’s own newness around another woman, but from how she talked and moved, from brief mentions and quick jokes, that was evidently not the issue.
Then again, maybe Anne’s worry had been cruder. Perhaps she had not seen ahead of time, as prescient Flannery had, how synchronized these two might be. She might not have devoted as many dimmed evenings to its imaginings as had Flannery. How could Anne know how this lanky girl might appear, stripped of notebooks and knapsacks and the other protective garb of student-hood? Flannery reminded herself that previously she’d been a shy stutterer in Anne’s presence, a drunken near-escapee from a party an uncool White Russian sipper—a twitchy chipmunk, in short, overeager in offering treats and dates to her beloved. Don’t forget you were her pupil once, even if for one session only: back-of-the-class Jansen, doodling inattentively, not answering the questions. After all, you’re a kid. Naïve; inexperienced. How attractive is that? Maybe Anne had been expecting fumblery and awkward edges, the embarrassing wince of misplaced digits, those painful touristic questions: “Which way do you . . . ?” “Here? Is this good?” “What? Did you say faster?”
And maybe, in that scenario, her doubt was just doused by the floodwaters of girlish excitement they produced between them. Her questions were silenced by their pleasure calls, and the smoothness and fluidity of their limbs together calmed her.
Lying flat, looking at the ceiling, Flannery felt free to talk. This was something else Anne had unlocked in her: her unsuspected wish and ability to speak.
“I never knew this before. I never knew this was possible before.” On this she pressed the nearest patch of Anne that was to hand—her warm thigh.
“Did the boys leave you cold?”
“No. Not cold, exactly. Lukewarm, maybe. I liked boys. I just never thought . . .” Flannery’s sentence wandered off, unfinished. “How about you?”
“What?”
/>
“You and the boys?”
“Boys? I’ve had a few.” Flannery heard a laugh that came from somewhere else—another city. Another story. “Then again, too few to mention.”
“That’s not true. You’ve had more than a few.”
Anne pulled away at that. “Why do you say that? How do you know?”
“I just do. I can tell.” She did not even bother to argue it. When Flannery spoke in that tone, occasionally (perhaps she’d start using it more now), you could hear the adult in her; the one who was aware of her own intelligence and trusted it. There was no room for contradiction. “But you don’t care to mention it.”
The ceiling watched the naked girls impassively.
“Well.” Finally. In a deliberately casual drawl: “I’m sure you’ve had a few, too. Even if they left you lukewarm.”
“No. I told you.” Flannery rolled over now to kiss Anne’s shoulder. “You’re my first.”
“Your first of this gender, I thought you meant.”
“Nope. My first of any gender, of any kind.”
“My God.” Anne gave a small, alarmed laugh. “That’s such a responsibility! I had no idea.”
“It certainly is.” Flannery demanded an embrace from her deflowerer, and got one. She looked at her sternly. “I hope you take it very, very seriously.”
“From now on”—Anne cleared her throat—“I certainly will.”
So people showered together! That was what went on. Who knew? Flannery, for one, had never foreseen such a thing.
The shower was such a personal space, not somehow unlike the womb, or the confessional. A space not imagined for two. First, because it was a part of that shrine to hygiene, the bathroom—the room where all your unmentionable questions could be asked (“Have I got—?” “Is that a—?” “Where’s my—?”) and sometimes, in a good light, answered. The room where you did what you could to follow dutifully the rules: floss your teeth, wipe the right way, rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Like most rooms the bathroom contained a unique catalogue of your complex self, the bathroom cabinet, in the same way that the kitchen described you by the contents of your refrigerator, and your living room by the books on your shelves.
Flannery was still recovering from the riotous lack of privacy of the dorm’s group bathroom, where you were rarely alone and had to pretend, through regretful, gritted teeth, that the experience was just like camp, which could be fun. Couldn’t it? Performing your ablutions together with other people, chatting over the toothbrushes, sharing conditioner across the shower divider. Like camp, or the gym, a place Flannery had just started going to swim, where even the body-shy have to shed their inhibitions and learn to wash themselves freely in the bright glare of the public.
But showering with. Showering with a lover. What a strange sensation, another of the seemingly unending dimensions of romantic life Flannery had not encountered, even in her hardworking fantasy. Soaping up a lover’s body: developing the same fond ease with it you have with your own, with the difference that you love that other body without reservation but are bound to have some quibbles and complaints about the one you were born with. Rubbing the bar under her arms and then over them, across her sleek-boned back and shoulders, working up a slippery lather with your active hands. Taking turns, for fairness, under the hot center of the water stream. Shampooing her hair, massaging the gel into that firm head with your warm fingers.
Rinse and repeat.
Flannery loved it. Luxuriated in it. Was baptized, blinking, by the sheer splashing soap and water of it. Hard not to wonder, as she perpetually did: Why wasn’t I told of this before? Why did they keep from me the key fact that this bliss is possible?
And, at the same superstitious time: is this bliss really possible?
Is it?
And then there was sleep.
It was not something Flannery had ever spent time imagining: that privatest part of a night spent with someone else. The soft tangle of another body to accompany you as you made your bold and dogged way through your dreams. Surely that was the most secluded, most interior thing, actually, more than this flailing new ecstasy of juices and explorations, all these calls of the wild? Flannery had gotten used to the idea that another person—this cherishment, Anne—had seen her naked, continued to see her bare and to know her, breasts and knees and back and warts and all. The modest, never-skirted, one-piece-rather-than-bikini, turning-her-back-to-the-other-girls-while-she-changed Flannery had gotten used to flaunting it (sometimes) in front of her luscious and appreciative lover.
But sleeping: that was a new intimacy altogether, and one Flannery often could not believe she shared. It was a secret, wasn’t it? Sleeping? What a person looked like when they couldn’t help it; what that defenselessness might suggest; what revelations might be conveyed by that loosened, floppy shape, in the unintended words or murmurs of the dreamer? Flannery did feel, in her gut, that any discoveries one person made about the other while she slept were unfair. It was like cheating on a test. (She’d always been struck by the song about a woman who learns of her lover’s infidelities from the endearments he speaks in his sleep.) Flannery felt that who you were when you were out and off the record was nobody’s business but your own. She could never believe people allowed themselves to sleep in public, in class or at the library—those sprawled, flattened figures scattered everywhere like battle corpses, collapsed in damp and possibly drooling heaps across their books. Exposed!
To sleep with Anne was, for Flannery, an ultimate trust. It was the handing over, the giving in. It was more than the keys to the realm: it was the realm, the realm of the deepest self, and if Flannery was willing to go there in Anne’s company, she must be willing to go anywhere with her. Albuquerque, for example, or Paris, or the dark heart of the Everglades.
Their first nights together, Flannery made sure she stayed up past Anne, till she heard her lover’s breathing slow and thicken, and she willed herself to wake up earlier. That was how she stayed safe. But, cumulatively, the fewer hours’ rest made her tired, and several days along she stayed up late past Anne, only to wake in the morning to find Anne’s cat face watching her. Watching her while she slept.
Flannery sat up, startled.
“What? What are you looking at?”
“You. Sleeping.”
“Why—” Flannery started to panic. “Why—? What’s the—?” before she felt the love break over her like a wave.
“Hush.” Anne kissed her. “You’re beautiful when you’re asleep,” she said. “Beautiful.”
And Flannery believed her.
Two days into all this love, her muscles sorely stretched, her body shocked and soaking, though somehow, impossibly, wanting more—
Flannery went to Thanksgiving.
She had to. There was only so much rudeness she could allow herself, and Mary-Beth—Mary-Jo—had been good enough to invite her. (Anne planned to make a private pumpkin pie for herself and work.) Reluctantly Flannery left behind the thankful gift, her new discovery, and cleared her head for New York company.
They were so nice, and it was such a large, luxurious apartment—it was hard not to notice the difference from the cramped theorist’s quarters. All the people had wide smiles and big handshakes, and Flannery could not remember a single name. She was underdressed, she realized immediately, since everyone else looked formal and aristocratic, as if they spent quite a lot of time drinking martinis and eating roasted cashews. Flannery had worn what her mother might charitably have called “slacks” (“Don’t worry, honey, those slacks look nice on you”), but the truth was, they were pants, and the other women there were in skirts and dresses. This made Flannery feel immediately visible as a woman being sexually awakened by ANOTHER WOMAN—that nasal misfit: a lesbian—but if the word was printed on her forehead, everyone was too polite to mention it. They were all polite altogether: no one stared at her pants, or her short unvarnished nails, or her slush-covered boots (girls wore heels, she learned by example); no one acted
horrified when she confessed that she was Undeclared in her major. Mary-Jo had the whole college experience wired, quite clearly, and Flannery could see why. She was following in the footsteps not just of Dr. Dad, a warm, broadcaster-voiced man in orthopedics, but also of Dr. Mom, who was an oncologist—a word that stuck uneasily in the back of Flannery’s throat because she couldn’t remember what it meant, and it seemed embarrassing to ask.
Public radio; New York City politics; favorite stuffing recipes; the year that Mary-Jo made the pumpkin pie with salt instead of sugar; the president of their university, who according to Dr. Dad was a terrifically funny guy, but who’d have thought he’d nail that job? Such was the talk of the feast as turkey, cranberry sauce, and the other ritual trappings were generously doled out. Flannery spent some time next to a bony woman in red who accepted a sparse plate of turkey (no skin) and just green vegetables, then told Flannery all about her fresh divorce and her daughter, who was spending this holiday with her boyfriend, and how much she missed her.
By nine, stuffed and suffocating, Flannery felt she could decently leave. They asked her to stay, of course, so she had to say, “Oh, I’d love to, thank you, but I’d better get back. I have a lot of work to do.” “But, Flannery”—this was Dr. Dad—“are you sure the trains run this late? On Thanksgiving?” “I think I can just make the last one. It goes in about half an hour.” Oh, yes. What a New Yorker Flannery pretended to be: as if she knew the timetable by heart. They tried a few more murmuring protests, but Flannery could see they were relieved, too. The woman in red could clearly hardly wait for her to leave, so she could update Mary-Jo’s mother on the divorce news.
Mary-Jo’s father came down with her after the goodbyes, to help her hail a cab. They waited in the cold for a minute. The streets were peaceful in the overfed aftermath of the holiday.
Pages for You Page 7