“Whoo, baby!” Flannery catcalled.
“No. It’s not called Whoo, Baby.”
“Well, it should be. We’d make a good pair.”
“This one is something more literary. I thought you might like that.”
“Literary? What—Red Badge of Courage?”
“No.”
“The Fire Next Time?”
“Oh! Great guess. Close. Frenchier.”
“Oooh-la-la?”
“Bad guess. Le Rouge et le Noir.”
“God, that is literary. You must be a classy broad.”
“I am. And my makeup is classy, too.”
“Of course it is,” said Outrageous, coming over to meet her. “It’s very classy. I like that in a broad.” She pulled Le Rouge et le Noir down with her onto the bed. “Now come here, chérie, where I can kiss it all off you.”
They played each other their signature tunes. Each had favorites to warble to the other—precious lyrics from songwriters’ ballads or classic rock numbers, catchy riffs from current hits that prompted private dancing, or string quartets to bring on more interior reflection. They played them in and out of love and work together, combining and refining their musical libraries until it was hard to remember what they’d listened to before they knew each other.
From Anne, Flannery learned jazz.
It was not an idiom she had picked up before: it existed, a whole country, just outside the places she could find her way around in. Flannery was sure that all the best and smartest people liked jazz—the guitarist she’d once had a crush on; her close high-school friend, a proud aficionado; Nick—so she tried now to adjust her own ear to its rhythms and suggestions.
Anne played her Monk. She played Flannery many people, brass players or pianists, new ensembles or old masters, but it was Monk that took. When Flannery heard Blue Monk, she understood something of the form’s wit and artistry. She began to get it. It helped that she could listen to him while watching what he did to Anne. When Monk was on—when Anne was cooking, often, because she cooked best to song, and sang best while cooking—Anne was freed and transformed. He loosened her and provoked her. He met her spirit somewhere Flannery had never encountered it, and they spoke to each other there, privately, trading jokes and concerns. It was hard, in a strange way, not to be jealous.
One night, late February and sleeting, not long before spring break, Flannery waited outside the door to Anne’s apartment before going in. She held her precious set of keys, to her haven here, in her hand.
She heard Anne’s voice inside, and music and laughter. It sounded like a party. Flannery wondered if she’d forgotten some social event. Was Anne having friends over to dinner? Was it a night Flannery was meant to stay back in the dorm?
She knocked lightly and a hectic voice called out, “Come in!” so she did, braced for company and rowdiness.
Inside was Anne at the stove, cheeks pinkish with wine or dancing. The lights were soft. The music was loud. Anne did not stop what she was doing, so Flannery watched her a moment. She was moving—not dancing, exactly; something more like her body’s rising to meet the cadences. Swimming, or flying. It was Monk. Anne’s eyes were closed as she listened, swayed, lost herself to the sensation. Flannery could see the fact all over Anne, in her dreamy hands and smiling mouth, in the ease and desire of her empty arms: she was in love with Thelonius Monk. And—this was harder to know, but it nipped at Flannery suddenly, a bitter suspicion—he reminded her of someone else she loved, too.
It wasn’t Flannery.
PART THREE
In Florida, it went wrong. Something started to fade. Flannery did not fade, but Anne did.
Florida had always felt wrong to Flannery, even before it assaulted her skin and scared her witless. The place was Anne’s determined choice, based, as Flannery slowly realized, on a downward mobility of taste: she sought the kitsch and tacky, the anti-university, while Flannery was on the escalator going the other way—up, hopefully, toward Baudelaire and risotto and airplane travel to any place that was not America.
For Flannery this state had always seemed gaudy and improbable, a place where Walt Disney had felt hyperbolic enough to build a World rather than just a Land. (Flannery had vacationed in his Land when she was a child, with her mother, and knew its rides, songs, and foods as the best and original.) Anne said she wanted to see the Everglades, a tempting word but one that brought to Flannery’s mind images of shady, well-tended golf courses or hushed, tidy cemeteries. She had no idea what the “Everglades” were. To Flannery Florida was orange juice, launch-pads for space trips, and old people, and whatever might be meant by the slippery name Miami.
Miami was not even on their menu. Anne planned the locations and days, the entire itinerary. Passive Flannery followed, dreaming wistfully of Paris. Paris was where they should have been. It had the language, the taste for their passion. In Paris they could have savored foods Flannery found vile in English, and Anne would have taught Flannery a few French phrases (beyond chérie and amour), delighting over the sound of them on Flannery’s lips. The city’s light would have silvered them. One woman would have bought the other one des fleurs. They would have gone to an evening concert in a cathedral, where the orchestra’s harmonies reaching to the domed stone ceiling would have made Flannery think she had heard the music of the spheres. And Flannery would have written something beautiful, afterward; she was sure of it. She would have made that overloved and overwritten-about city hers, and theirs.
Flannery remained certain, even once she became older and smarter and pessimism ran through her veins, that their story would have gone differently if they had traveled to Paris instead.
They took the train down. Anne’s idea: it was cheaper than flying, though it would take them over twenty-four hours to get there. Initially Flannery was itchy and squeamish at the idea of those long Amtrak hours, but as Anne pointed out, it gave them “more bang for their buck,” more states per dollar. “Think of all the places we’ll go through on our way to Tampa,” Anne said to her, but Flannery could not think of them beforehand; her geography was not good enough. If Anne had told her the journey would route them through Louisiana and Kentucky, Flannery would have believed her.
It did not, but it did take them through Washington, D.C., where they had several hours’ layover, enough time to leave the station and take in the highly organized grandeur of the nation’s segregated capital. Flannery knew of her own state’s racial iniquities—the more so since enrolling in a self-improving course on the Ethnic and Labor History of the West—but she had never seen the divide made so visible. It gave her a shocked inkling of how the country’s race disease might look south of Mason-Dixon. (Not that she could have located the Mason-Dixon line, either.) Back on the train south, Flannery listened to a jovial black conductor speaking in two distinct registers: polite and joky to white passengers, warmly intimate with African Americans. These were new tones to her.
One of Flannery’s favorite discoveries occurred in the dining car. Grits, a mythic-sounding food, turned out to be a gummy hot cereal served in a Styrofoam dish. Anne frequently fled their seats to smoke in the card-playing car, as she called it, but the thick choke of air there was too much for Flannery. She’d rather sit at her foldable table, flipping back and forth anxiously between the unlikelihood of free will (Mortal Questions: Intro to Philosophy) and the early slaughter of the natives by all the gold-rush forty-niners she had been schooled to revere.
Out the humidity-streaked window, damp new lands unspooled, frame by frame. The women moved through the Carolinas in the middle of the night and woke to a sun-kissed Georgia. It was warm and beautiful and foreign, busy with unknown demons, and Flannery felt uneasiness, like an insect, crawling all over her.
The state’s first act was to sear Flannery’s flesh. They had scarcely arrived, had had time only to stumble, dazed, from the train and out into the morning light of Tampa, collect their rental car, and hit the road for as long as it took to get to a decent
beach. Twenty minutes. It was too early to find what they really needed—a bed and a shower—so they took what was available in the interim. Water. Sand. Sun.
Flannery had never been a sun-worshipper, or a beach babe. She had the body but not the mind for it. Crucially, she had the wrong skin. It was the least western thing about her: her pallor, which gave her a shy unwillingness to throw her body into the elements. Clothed, she could go anywhere—rock, creek, forest, hillside—but unclothed, she quailed. Fear pricked her skin with rash memories and burn worry.
After a brief beachside amble, taking in soft drinks and T-shirts and the buying of a pumpkin-orange beach ball to play with (ironically, of course), the girls sunbathed together. Flannery’s long shape covering a vast blue towel with a shark pictured on it, Anne on a paper-thin spread that read THE SUNSHINE STATE, like the license plates.
Anne, in spite of her own redheaded coloring, lay down with a sigh of satisfaction that seemed almost orgasmic. She threw open her arms and heart to the heat. “Thank God,” she kept saying. “We’re out of that fucking train. Out of that fucking winter. Out of that fucking university.” Already “university” had a strange sound in her mouth, as if she were eating a pickle: the word puckered and crinkled, and Flannery did not understand the source of her vinegar. There was a hovering in Anne’s thought that Flannery had not identified, a flicker that hazeled Anne’s green eyes and diverted her fonder attentions. Why “fucking” university? What was so wrong about the place that had, after all, brought them together? It might be full of pompous rigidities, as they both agreed, and it might be a self-important place, grandiose, intolerant of outsiders; but it was theirs, too. Their own private school for scandal, as the joke had gone.
“New Mexico,” Anne said into the stern light overhead, “would not have those fucking winters.” New Mexico had begun to make awkward appearances in the sentences between them, a guest Flannery had not welcomed.
“They get snow in New Mexico, too,” she said. “In the winter.”
“Really?” Anne turned skeptical blue shades in her direction, as if Flannery were a precocious student. “How do you know that?”
Flannery kicked her, drawing a loud “Ouch!” from THE SUNSHINE STATE. They were both restless from the airless train hours and needed the wrestling match they would fall into later at their terrible motel. “Because I’m not a complete idiot,” Flannery told her. “I do know some things.” She lay back on the sand, placing a hand over her irritated eyes.
“Oh yes. So you keep saying.” Anne’s voice was smug and lazy in the moist heat, lulling Flannery into a near-doze. “So you keep telling me.” Anne sat up to cover her limbs and chest in a thin layer of sunblock; then neglected to pass the tube, after, to her forgetful, fair-skinned lover.
It was after the seafood, wrestling, and squabbling that the pain set in.
Travel can be so full of quibbles and snivelings, if two people don’t know or can’t agree on where they are going Flannery had not wanted this trip, anyway. The clarity of the fact emerged in the far-too-bright sunlight, which was, as she had always suspected, more garish and show-offy than the subtler sunlight she had grown up with; nor was it dignified by blue foothills or grander, more distant mountains. Here there was no land to take hold of beyond the relentless beach and its picture-perfect blue ocean, and no pair of sunglasses could fend off all the color and visual noise that besieged her. When Anne suggested in the afternoon that they drive south down the coast, to close in on the Everglades, Flannery balked.
“Not more time cooped up,” she said, in a voice perilously close to a whine. The poison snaking around her interior had not yet burst out into open crimson—Flannery had no idea how much damage she had done to herself—but sun-sickness soured her and made her an unruly child.
“What, you want to stay somewhere around here?” Anne waved a hand at beachfront hotels shaded in pastels and cocktails. “Too expensive, babe. We’re not this class of traveler—not after the car and the train tickets. Unless you’re planning to lease out your nubile body to some rich old golfers—?”
Flannery was not prepared to get any kind of joke. “Not here,” she sulked. “Some motel somewhere. I don’t care where. Just not more time cooped up. I can’t stand it.”
No answer. Flannery felt Anne’s coolness breeze over her, but in truth it was a relief after the enervating heat.
So they compromised, often the worst plan, and drove out of Tampa as far as Sarasota, where they found a motel off the highway. The town was the Home of the Ringling Museum of Art, a proud sign informed them, but by now such an idea could only depress them: they were past being able to enjoy the name’s carnival associations. They found a deserted restaurant, where they ate bad fried shrimp and ran out of subjects to talk about, then returned to their cheap room nauseous and grouchy. Across a scratchy bedspread they chose not to love but to wrestle, a little too sincerely. Already Flannery felt sore—Anne crowed over her victory, and claimed that Flannery was faking her pain, out of bad sportsmanship—but it was when she tried showering and the pellets of water felt like acid rain on her protesting skin that Flannery realized something bad had happened to her. She called out in agony, to an answering silence from the room. Anne seemed unable to greet the news of Flannery’s ailment with anything other than a bland “Oh, that’s too bad.”
Which led to Flannery’s spending a long, wide-eyed night on the other side of the bed from her tossing, fast-asleep lover. The feverish pain allowed Flannery to indulge the sensation that her case was terminal and she would be waking up dead. Even the light sheets seemed like enemies to Flannery as she shivered in her terrible sunburn, feeling the Florida sun break back out of her lobster-red body in vicious, hot waves, and hallucinating a dry voice that told her, already, it was time to go home.
Flannery woke in the tart dawn light that filtered through the salt-faded curtains. A dim claustrophobia hung in the air like a storm cloud. Anne was sitting by the dresser. Dressed.
“Isn’t it early, to be up and ready? Where are you going?” Flannery could not rub the sleep from her eyes: they hurt too much.
“I thought I might take a walk.”
“Oh.” She yawned. “God, this place reeks. It looks even worse in the daylight.”
“It’s a vile place. There are probably rats napping in the corner.” Anne lit up.
“Hey, do you mind”—Flannery said, without thinking about it—“not doing that in here? If you’re about to go out anyway—”
“Oh, fine.” Anne stubbed the cigarette out violently in the tin ashtray stamped with the motel logo, THE BEACHCOMBER. She stood to go out.
“Sorry, it’s just that—”
“Fine. I’m going.”
“All I meant was,” Flannery stumbled, “you’ve been smoking so much lately, and sometimes—”
“Oh, here we go.” Anne’s voice was caustic. “I should really cut down a little? I thought you thought my smoking was sexy. A great turn-on.”
“I do. It’s just—” Flannery was too hot to be able to think of the right way to put it.
“So sexy that you took it up, too, so you’d taste like me. That was so sweet.” How bitter she sounded!
“I did, I did.” A sting started at Flannery’s eyes. Don’t cry, for God’s sake, she instructed herself. That would humiliate them both. Instead, she breathed for a moment, to the extent it was possible. “I did, until you told me I looked stupid doing it.”
“Well.” Anne shrugged, as if she were not to blame for the remark. “You did.”
Then she grabbed her cigarettes and went out the cardboard-thin door. Leaving Flannery cool and burning, writhing in the discomfort of her blistering skin.
What was the matter?
What hand had come down to block the light between them, and what relation did it have to the words “University of New Mexico”? Anne was awaiting final word about the job there, and Flannery understood that the uncertainty gnawed at her. She had flown out to Albuque
rque in late February to perform her “dance of the seven veils” for the full complement of hirers and would-be colleagues: guest-lecturing, meeting students and other faculty. (It had been a mournful four-day absence but one that allowed Flannery to catch up on Physics for Poets—her science credit—at last.) The signs from that outing were good. “They loved me; they ate me up” was Anne’s optimistic view, borne out by a faculty member who called to tell Anne, off the record, that they wanted her for the job. The committee just had to move through its slow bureaucracy.
So that was all good news. Wasn’t it? Not for Flannery, for whom Anne’s distance next year in New Mexico was a heart wreck waiting to happen. But for Anne it was good news. So why was she so testy? “I’m sure you’ve got the job,” Flannery had said to her in mid-Virginia on the train down, to which Anne had snapped, “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
As Anne walked that morning, wherever she might be, the heat kept up its attack on Flannery inside, making her want to sink into the cool softness of a soak in cold lotion or soothe herself by bathing in aloe. She lay spread out flat, limbs flying across the motel bed, hoping the shadowed fetid air was taking from her, slowly, some of the trapped sun. She was thirsty all the time and drank often from a plastic cup of foul-tasting water.
Maybe, her burned brain reasoned, this was how it went between people: silences, sulks, mysteries. The down times, about which there were fewer poems and rock songs. It could not all be love in the afternoon and passion at night, gifts given, notes written, meals fed to each other. Poetry read out loud over sheets still damp from earlier wordless activities. Slow dances while cooking, lingering kisses to Monk. It can’t all be like that, Flannery. There had to be the pulling of ugly faces and sudden mutual waves of distaste, annoyance passed back and forth, one to the other, like a hot potato.
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