Pages for You

by Sylvia Brownrigg

  “And your first thought was ‘Who is this intriguing, daring woman coming in and finding such a unique item on the menu?’”

  “My first thought was ‘Who’s come in here at this hour with a kid?’ But I looked around and there was no kid. And then—all in a flash—I realized you were the kid.”

  “And you immediately developed this Pygmalion fixation in which you thought, ‘I shall take this unformed girl under my wing and teach her not to order jelly omelettes. I shall educate her.’”

  “I looked over at the placer of this order and I thought, ‘Hmm. She’s cute. Why is she staring at me?’”

  “Well,” said Flannery—mostly fake-sulkily, but part of her pout was real—“I was busy falling in love at first sight. So I had to stare. That’s what you do when you’re falling in love at first sight. You go into soft focus, and romantic music starts playing in the background.”

  “Ah, so that’s what that music was.”

  “But, no. See, you didn’t hear the music. You were not experiencing love at first sight. You were concentrating too hard on your damn book.” Flannery tapped Anne lightly on the cheek. Playful—a love slap. “What book was it, anyway? I’ve always wanted to ask you. I assumed it had to be something significant, like the book with all the answers to the world, or the Kama Sutra, or something.”

  “It was probably Bradley’s book. His first class was later that morning and I was not especially prepared.”

  “Aha! So you do remember it. It was a significant encounter.”

  “Of course it was. This cute chick was watching me like a hawk as I drank my coffee. I was always going to notice that.”

  “Love at first sight. That’s what I was going through.”

  “Lust at first sight. That’s what I was going through.”

  Flannery sighed. “You know what?” she said. “That’s good enough for me.”

  Sometimes, in the cooler periods, when they gave their physical love a brief vacation and settled into conversation, Flannery did not feel younger than Anne. She felt older, even, and an anchor, definitely: she could tell that was what Anne needed—someone to hold her down, to give her ballast. Anne was not floaty or dreamy—that was Flannery, who could spend an hour staring at the windowed sky when she should be reading and, when asked what she was up to, had to answer, “Nothing. Thinking.” But Anne was fundamentally unattached. It worried Flannery; not for herself, but for Anne. It made her want to hold Anne close, and also just to stay still for her, so that she’d know she could come back to Flannery and find that Flannery was still there.

  Anne wouldn’t tell her. She wouldn’t tell her what it was. “I get depressed sometimes,” she’d said. “That’s all.” “So do I,” Flannery said. “Once, when—” “Yes, well, I guess everyone does.” Flannery agreed.—Yes, of course other people, too, but that wasn’t what mattered to her. What mattered to her was Anne. If she waited, and was quiet, Anne might finally speak.

  Anne did speak. She told Flannery a few distant stories of an earlier life—“when I was someone else,” back in Michigan. Stories of her ferocious grandfather, a failed composer, and how he’d demanded from her years of arduous pretense that she might one day be a pianist. Her sister Patricia’s assigned vocation was dance—years of ballet lessons. Neither had stuck with it; the instant the grandfather died, they’d abandoned all trappings of these phantom careers. “Do you still play?” Flannery had asked when she heard the story.

  “Almost never.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “‘Hmmm’—what?” Anne demanded. Spiky. “What?”

  “Nothing, sweetheart. Just that you will again sometime, I bet. Somewhere else. Sometime—else.” Flannery said it with a sureness that made Anne seem young, and quiet, and a little rebellious.

  “Yes. That’s what—” she started. Then stopped.

  That long dash, that hesitation: it came up at other times, too. Flannery heard it, but did not draw attention to it. She was aware of this space that Anne carefully sidestepped, and the more Anne didn’t say, the more sense Flannery had of the contours of her silence: the shape of what she kept unsaid. Flannery felt old, knowing that this unspoken place was in Anne and that it remained untouched by Flannery. She knew she’d never get at it. Either because no one ever would; or because someone else already had.

  “I love you,” Anne told her somberly. “You’re such a good soul, Flannery. I’m lucky. I’m lucky . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

  Flannery loved to hear it, but she felt old knowing more than Anne knew.

  “I could lie in your arms for years,” Anne said to Flannery. But, privately, Flannery suspected she wouldn’t.

  It was when Anne spoke of her travels that Flannery felt young. Anne had already had so many adventures, and by comparison Flannery had had none. (A week in England with her mother when she was a sulky teenager and a drugged weekend in Santa Cruz with other high-school renegades hardly counted.) Anne had driven across the country through Louisiana and Texas and Arizona, all places that were mere resonant names for Flannery, not genuine geographies. Anne had been to Berlin for the film festival on a junket with a journalist friend, and from there had taken a train to Warsaw, “just to see it.” (Her father’s family was Polish—another provocative fact she left unadorned by detail or explanation.) She had bussed around Mexico in the dust, seeing ancient buildings and tiny villages with someone she knew who was doing fieldwork there. The companions on these enterprises were shadowy figures, and Flannery could not tell from Anne’s few clues whether they were friends or “friends.” She did not ask.

  The country Anne had visited most, though, and the one Flannery most wanted, was France. Paris, mostly. (Anne’s mother’s city, Flannery noted, but did not say.) Anne had spent so much time in Paris that she forgot what people who haven’t might not know about it: the meaning of “Left Bank” and “Right Bank,” for instance, or what “in the Fifth” might refer to. “That’s an empty signifier,” Flannery might have said in parody of their former shared Criticism, but she didn’t want to admit her ignorance. She was jealous. The other places Anne had been to, Flannery was satisfied to give her; Anne deserved them, and Flannery felt generous about them. (It was the same as with a love’s past lovers: there are the ones you indulge and can hear tales of, and the ones who get under the skin, for some reason, that you might have to shoot on meeting.) Flannery could get to those places herself, later. There was, as Anne sometimes gently—was it condescendingly?—reminded her, plenty of time.

  But Paris she wanted. Flannery wanted it now. She couldn’t wait. Couldn’t they go together? Couldn’t they? Over spring break?

  “Not in the spring,” Anne said. “Not then. In the summer, maybe.”

  Paris in the summer? Flannery’s blood and imagination quickened. She was already there. She threw all caution—the caution that might have asked how likely this plan might really be, what with the high cost and complex logistics—into the wintered air and prepared, in her fanciful, romantic head, for summer in Paris. With her Anne.

  “You know what I’d like?”

  It took Anne’s voice some time to penetrate Flannery’s busy excitement. Finally: “What?”

  “To go somewhere I’ve never been before, with you. Somewhere crazy and exotic—somewhere full of people not like anyone here.”

  “Like where?” Flannery liked the sound of this.

  “Like Florida.”

  “Florida?” The word was almost offensive to Flannery’s western ears. Florida! Wasn’t it just a cheap, plastic version of the real thing—California?

  “Florida,” Anne repeated. “In the spring.”

  That settled it. That’s where they’d go.

  Anne was not, on the pretty face of it, a kind person. She was too edged for that. Unlike Flannery, whose smile warmed and reassured people, letting them know she was sweetly harmless—an impression, Anne remarked, that was altogether misleading—Anne’s countenance kept people on their guard.
Her intense attractiveness was forbidding, even as it compelled and beckoned. People simultaneously wanted and feared her. Flannery saw it all the time, and remembered it from her earlier quaking self.

  Flannery now had privileged information, of course, about the alluring, elusive scholar. Flannery knew her secrets and frailties, at least a few of them. She knew where the scars were, and how Anne slept (on her side, an arm usually flung up, protectively), and what she looked like when she was less than put together. (Ravishing, still. Always ravishing.) She knew the scent Anne wore and her favorite foods (she was partial to gingerbread) and the color of her underclothes (white; you wouldn’t think so). And Flannery knew something else, too, a truth she held close to her like a jewel, where others couldn’t see it or try to take it from her. It was, perhaps—this truth—the heart of what Flannery had discovered about her.

  Anne was kind.

  She covered Flannery in kindnesses all over, as if they were kisses. For long, slow minutes she’d knead Flannery’s overstudied shoulders. She made a warming morning bowl of oatmeal with toasted walnuts and plump raisins—good for the brain, she claimed. She’d find books from friends she knew Flannery had searched for fruitlessly at the library, or track down a troublesome reference that had gnawed at Flannery’s mind for days. When Flannery spoke of her cold feet, Anne bought her beautifully soft wool socks, and when Flannery mentioned her hands were chapped by winter air, Anne produced a soothing aromatic lotion. She did not ask for an audience for these kindnesses; she just generously performed them.

  And that wasn’t everything. Best of all, Anne read to her.

  First things first: when these treats began, it was Marilyn Hacker’s poems Flannery had to hear Anne read. Soon after their meeting in New York, back in the primeval dawn of this epic passion, Flannery had questioned her former TA about the gift.

  “What were you doing?” As they lay sprawled, she pulled on Anne’s hair, half-playfully, half-painfully. “Giving me that book?”

  “It’s obvious what I was doing.” Anne let her head be tugged in punishment. “I was corrupting a minor. Ow! Okay. That’s enough.”

  “I should sue you for sexual harassment.”

  “I hope you won’t.”

  “And then you’d be convicted, of course, because I’d break down in court, thus earning the pitying sympathy of everyone on the jury—”

  “‘J’accuse!’ you’d say, pointing at me, in a cute French accent that would only help your case—”

  “And they’d think how sad it was that this sweet, innocent girl—”

  “With a filthy imagination, who was actually a nymphomaniac—”

  “Yeah, but they’d never believe that. Anyway, stop interrupting, you’re the defendant. —That this sweet, innocent girl, a westerner from a one-horse town, who didn’t know anything from anything and actually had to be bought a pair of sunglasses to disguise her wide-eyed, fresh-faced virginity—”

  Anne rolled her eyes.

  “—was seduced! By this wily older woman. Who had in fact bought the sunglasses in a premeditated move, yes!, so that she could smuggle this minor up to the evil lair she had carefully prepared, where unbeknownst to an indifferent outside world, this young maiden was—how shall we put it delicately—”

  “ ‘Plucked’ or ‘deflowered’ would be consistent with your rhetoric at this point.”

  “Exactly. Where she was plucked.” Flannery finally stopped pulling Anne’s hair and stroked it instead. “Plucked! Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case.”

  She was flushed, triumphant with the victory of her oration. “I should be a lawyer,” she said.

  “You should be a writer.” Anne tugged Flannery’s fair hair in return. “That vivid fantasy life of yours. It was you who seduced me, missy, as I recall. And I’ve got a memory for such details.”

  “Hmmm. So you say.” Flannery flopped back, head on pillow. She grimaced, as if in sorrowful regret. “But it’s your word against mine, sweetheart. Whose do you think they’re more likely to trust?”

  Anne’s punishment, the court decided, meeting in closed session in Anne’s bedroom, was to perform one hundred hours of community service. The community in question was Flannery The service—“Don’t be obscene!” scolded Flannery when Anne made a lewd expression—was to read.

  “Read? I do that anyway. I’ll already have completed my sentence, retroactively. I’m out! I’m free.”

  “Not reading to yourself. Reading out loud. To the community. That’s the service.”

  It was one Anne was happy to provide. In the same way that she collected admiring glances from the world, a knowing diva gathering deserved bouquets, so also did Anne gather compliments for her voice. She anticipated the liquid pleasure brought on by the sound of it. She knew it melted people. Flannery had noticed, the single morning she’d sat as a student in Anne’s class (when, in furious mortification, she had pretended not to be listening), the strategic dip to a lower, slower register, in a moment when Anne needed to capture her students’ undivided attention. The sultry tone—redolent of a steamy bathhouse, hot with pungent flowers and oiled muscles and slippery ministrations—made slaves of its listeners. She captivated them. She roped them in.

  And it was Flannery’s kingliest privilege to have this voice all to herself. Mine! she sometimes murmured in astonishment. She’s mine.

  These deeply pleasurable command reading performances gradually shifted, figuratively. From Anne the fallen prisoner doing penance, to Anne the subject performing her duty to liege nobility; and from there, in an apt turning of the tables, to Anne the star actress rehearsing her lines for her besotted director. By then, as March approached, suggesting the possibility of spring, Anne had traveled through Sexton and Bishop on to Dylan Thomas and Eliot, and was taking a vacation in prose narrative by request. Cortázar and Kincaid, for old times’ sake, and Grace Paley, because she was irresistible, and, inevitably, O’Connor: Flannery had to know how that great writer sounded in the voice of the woman who had discovered her namesake.

  Once, as a surprise, Anne announced she wanted to read to Flannery from a new author, a young talent who she was sure would one day make a mark on the world. Flannery was too distracted to see it coming. When she heard that honeyed voice pronounce the familiar lines

  I’d like to pay your palms

  the same favor that you pay these pages

  she howled in agony and pelted her reader with a hail of pillows. The actress, deterred by the assault, had to stop, but not before telling her audience, laughingly,

  “You’ll see! One day they’ll all be reading her. One day”—she dodged the pillows and ran from the room, warning on her way out—“you’ll look back on this performance as a moment in history!”

  “So what’s this one?” Anne challenged.

  Flannery kissed Anne, searchingly, on lips that beckoned with a decorative, delicate purplish red. Not so bright as to be teenagerish and gaudy, but not so dark as to belong to a rich woman’s wife or a model.

  “What’s your guess?” Anne asked. “What does the color look like to you?” They were playing a makeup game, an attempt to educate Flannery in the feminine arts, in which she was mournfully untrained.

  “Mmmm.” Flannery kissed her again, as if she could determine the answer by feel. “Raspberry Sherbet?”

  “God, no!” Anne pulled away in distaste. “That’s so trashy. My lipsticks never have names like that.”

  “Okay. Wait. Something rosy? Rose Garden? Rose Treat?”

  “Better. That’s close. Rose Beautiful.”

  “Beautiful. Well. That goes without saying. Are they all called beautiful?”

  Anne disappeared into the bathroom and came back wearing a subtle plum. The color for a night at the theater or a chic Japanese restaurant.

  “Dusk Delight? Luscious Lavender? No—Lavender Menace.”

  “You’ll never get a job doing this. Even with all your verbal skills. Mauve Amour.”

  �
��I’d have a better chance if I’d ever worn the stuff myself. You have to bear in mind, I’m a novice—I mean, I don’t even know which aisle of the drugstore it is.”

  “I know. It’s sweet: you’re a cosmetics virgin. Another way I’m deflowering you. Here”—Anne disappeared into the bathroom again—“I’m going to find some to put on you.”

  “That’s a little perverse, isn’t it?” Flannery called. “You know who would be into that? Murphy. Our old friend Murphy, in New York. I think Murphy would enjoy this.”

  Anne came back. She insisted that Flannery close her eyes. Flannery felt the breath of her lover, and her concentration. At the smooth, cool, not quite sensual marking of her lips she immediately started laughing.

  “Stop! Or it will smear.”

  “I can’t help it, it tickles.”

  Flannery kept her mouth as still as she could while her makeup artist finished, then got up to look at herself in the mirror. Her face looked completely different. Unrecognizable. She looked a decade older, for one thing; no longer a child. This was someone who had had experiences in the world, and who knew where she was going.

  “Go ahead!” Anne laughed. “Guess the color.”

  “My God. What have you done to me?” Her mouth was a vivid, femme-fatale red.

  “Guess. One word. An adjective. Sounds like—”

  “‘Whorish’? ‘Obscene’?”

  “Outrageous.”

  “Outrageous. They’re right.” Still, Flannery couldn’t quite leave her reflection alone. It fascinated her. “Your turn,” she said vaguely, waving Anne back to the bathroom. What would someone be like, who wore this color lipstick?

  “Last one,” Anne said. “My lips are worn out.”

  She went into the bathroom and emerged a few minutes later, her own lips a dark red—darker than Flannery’s, but as much of a bold statement. The look was so striking it diverted Flannery finally from the distraction of her new personality.