And how easy it was to leave this life, after all—this life that could feel so present and permanent that departing from it must seem to require a tear into a different dimension. There the bunch of them were, young hopefuls, decorating their annually purged dorm rooms with postcards and prints and favorite photographs of friends, filling them with hot pots and dried flowers, throw rugs and stereos. Houseplants, a lamp, maybe some furniture brought up by encouraging parents. They nested there like miniature grownups. As if this provisional student life—with its brushfire friendships and drink-addled intimacies, its gorging on knowledge and blind sexual indulgences—could possibly last. As if it were a home, of any kind at all: someplace to gather one’s sense of self. Flannery had never felt for a minute that these months of shared living took place on anything other than quicksand, and it had given this whole year (these scant seven or eight months, into which an aging decade or so had been condensed) a sliding, wavery feel. She came from earthquake country and knew the dangers of building on landfill. That was, it seemed to Flannery, the best description of this willed group project of freshman year: construction on landfill. A collective confusion of impressions and tendencies, mostly castoffs with a few keepers. What was there to count on in any of it? What structure would remain, founded on that?
Susan Kim had become a real friend. Flannery felt it in her gut. The sharp, funny smoker had proved as good at Mortal Questions as she had been at Criticism, and always came up with an appealingly different angle. “Who do you save?” she asked early on when they encountered the utilitarian dilemma posed by the people starving on the lifeboat. “That’s not the issue here. The point is, call your lawyer and talk about the boat company’s liability. Get the class-action suit rolling. Then we’ll talk about saving.”
Flannery and Susan had talked about living together next year in their own apartment off-campus, “away from the rat pack.” How much more human they could feel there. They would have great parties. And privacy. Flannery imagined shipping more of her books out here so it felt something like home. The two would cook, and talk at all hours, and one late night, Flannery might tell Susan, finally, the story of what had happened with Anne. Remember those times you ran into us in the Yankee Doodle?
She had thought Anne would be her anchor. She had thought—well, she hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking, in truth, she had just loved, fallen, jumped—but she had come to think, or at least hope, that Anne might stay fast for her. Improbable though it was. That Anne might continue to be there: there, where Flannery wanted her.
She would not be, though. This much Flannery had understood: Anne would be somewhere else.
And Flannery had to find out, now, where that else was, and what was in it.
There was an abrupt surreality to leaving campus this way, while everyone else played and studied, making ready for another onslaught of finals. Flannery felt removed from the others, like an ill person heading off to hospital for a mysteriously serious operation, or an astronaut going on a mission into another atmosphere, leaving the earthlings behind in their mundane toil. (Some of which toil she had to take with her: Flannery wanted good grades as much as anyone.) Her impending departure gave the spring light a vividness as she walked around the campus, and made the old buildings now seem radiantly edged. She thought she must have a luminous difference about her, though she had told no one of her trip and it was unlikely that anyone would much notice her absence. Her roommate, Mary-Jo, had registered that Flannery often did not sleep in the dorm room, but she was far too discreet—or, more likely, indifferent—to ask her about it.
Feeling important, nervous, and possibly underpacked (she knew they had winters in New Mexico only because a high-school friend had gone skiing there; otherwise, the place was a blank to her), wondering which response her cinematic action would inspire—a soft-lit, romantic “It’s you, babe,” or comic revulsion: “What—you? Here? Why?”; eighteen years old and poised on that particular knife’s edge between lucidity and blindness—Flannery got herself to the airport. She was ticketed and checked in, scanned and waved through, and she duly lounged, then boarded. Once she was inside the plane and strapping herself in, a calm settled over her as it became clear that she could not back out of this. Flannery Jansen, a quiet, writerly mouse from a one-horse town, was heading to New Mexico, for love. This would become part of her own story, however the narrative went on, ending or continuing: there would always be this episode in it. With Anne or without her, Flannery would make something of this adventure. Did I ever tell you, she would one night say to somebody, about the time I flew to New Mexico, to see the woman I loved?
As the plane took off, Flannery felt a surge of airborne optimism. It took her a moment to locate its source (other than the sheer rush of the pressure change). She was heading West. It was just that. The inarguable rightness of leaving East for West: always the better direction to travel in.
Gaining hope as the plane gained height, Flannery found herself leaving behind the lead-footed anxieties and realities that had fought with the swooping romance of this plan from the start. A low, taunting voice had ongoingly warned her: Anne has never seemed like someone who loves surprises. She likes to be aware of what’s ahead of her. And she may, simply, not want you there. This scheme may backfire, in the worst way.
As they reached their cruising altitude, with the mortal world tinied beneath them, Flannery decided to believe otherwise. Everything that rises must converge, she reassured herself. It would be all right. Anne would be startled then excited to see her, won over by the sweet folly of Flannery flying to join her. Flannery would surprise her in the hotel lobby, they would go up to her hotel room . . . Here she lost a few minutes, her head turned to the small envelope of plane window, while coarse thoughts warmed her thighs and quickened her breathing. Yes, well. That part was bound to be fine. And then, you see, they could go out and celebrate. Of course! They could celebrate Anne’s getting the job, and Flannery could prove how bighearted and open-armed she was, joyful for Anne about this opportunity, which would incidentally take her two thousand miles away.
Flannery felt punchy. This was not a heaviness, this trip. This was a lightness, a giddiness. She persuaded herself into the mood. Peanuts? the flight attendant offered. Sure! A cocktail? Why not? How about another? So the cocktails weren’t complimentary, as a Coke would have been. So what? She was rich now—rich on credit. Borrowing beyond your means—that’s what credit card companies loved you best for. They rewarded you handsomely, jacking up your limit, for performing precisely this kind of gallant, priceless gesture, which would send you spiraling into further debt. But she was not going to worry about that now. She was eighteen, for God’s sake: an age when you’re supposed to have some fun.
The flight attendant was nice enough, but succeeded in dissuading Flannery from a third drink. You don’t know the whole story, lady, Flannery wanted to tell her. This is the woman who sexually awakened me that we’re talking about here. How could I not do this for her? How could I not fly out here, to keep her?
By this time she was tipsy, as the plane itself seemed to be, as it juddered into its Albuquerque landing.
Flannery could not believe the ubiquity of tacos. They were practically the first thing she saw, a stall selling them, when she walked a bit unsteadily off the passageway into the tidy peach-and-teal interior of the Albuquerque airport. No, it wasn’t an airport: it was a Sunport, with Native American symbols painted on its walls to prove it. The woman at the car rental desk, learning she was new to the state, asked Flannery if she knew the difference between red and green chiles. “A lot of visitors think the red’s hotter, but it isn’t: the green’s hotter. Keep that in mind when you’re ordering.” Flannery thanked her for the information, and for the keys to the compact.
She loved the West.
She was foreign here, doubtless—why didn’t she know Spanish? Why hadn’t she been fed it since childhood, as any westerner should be?—but not so permanently foreign as
she felt on the East Coast. This place she could learn; there were others here like her. She recognized as like her own the longer vowels and unsheltered faces. They walked slower, as she did. Flannery doubted she’d ever fit in in New York, or Massachusetts, or her blighted university state, which was supposed to be rural and beautiful in parts, a notion Flannery didn’t for one minute believe. If Anne had been offered a place to teach in New York next year, it might have been different; they would have been close, a train ride away, and Flannery might have had the continuing chance to follow that city in her lover’s footsteps. Without Anne, Flannery couldn’t imagine she would ever wear the changing air there as her own, or make the right jokes, or care about their baseball teams, or get the hang of the subway.
But the indifferent fact was that Flannery, Anneless, would learn New York anyway. Years later Flannery was to outgrow the need to wear sunglasses in New York City for her protection. She gazed up at the starry ceiling of Grand Central as at the face of an old friend, and it cast its astronomical light over her tolerantly. She finally learned which way was uptown and which downtown if she was walking in the Village along Broadway. (She would be a junior in college before she realized Wall Street was not uptown; after that, people’s directions made much more sense to her.) One day—this is the kind of thing life turns up for a person—she might even walk those streets with another friend who was new to them and allow herself to perform, as if she were a drag artist, the ill-fitting role of guide to that city. She! Flannery! “This is New York City; these are its buildings and cafés; these are its famous corners; this is why.”
Such lines are memorable, and we learn to repeat them.
People had affinities for places, as they did for one another. Flannery, for instance, had never shared a humor or rhythm with her western friend Cheryl, but she had with Susan and, yes, with Nick. Here, under this broad spring sun, Flannery knew she had arrived in a state she could live in. Albuquerque had sky light and land shapes—the ragged sobriety of the Sandia Mountains, the dun-colored bed of the mesa—that stirred her already, and she had not even left the lot of the Sunport.
What of Anne and her affinities? Flannery knew nothing of Anne’s home. She considered the fact as she drove down the open, sun-spread road, breathing dry air through the rolled-down window. For once, she thought of Anne’s silence as her own sadness rather than as a withholding that made Flannery feel greedy. (“Stop grabbing, for God’s sake,” Anne had said to her the first night in Florida, over an unpleasant dinner. Before they’d wrestled.) Anne had fled the place that had shaped her language and sensibility in ways Flannery would never know, unless she happened to go to Detroit to see for herself. And Anne did not wish to speak of it. That home stayed where she had left it—behind—and she had no intention of bringing it to life in stories or references. Flannery had asked what Anne would do if a teaching job came up in Michigan. “Ignore it,” Anne told her. “I’d rather waitress.” Love makes people narcissists: this, too, Flannery now saw. Anne’s silence about where she came from was not to spite Flannery, which had been her self-centered conviction; it was to spite Detroit, for whatever insults and injuries it had inflicted on Anne’s beautiful head.
So. New Mexico. What would black-jacketed Anne look like in this rugged place? The setting did not seem right for her, certainly not the way New York did. Oh, Flannery could imagine Anne venturing into the wilderness, driving to Santa Fe and Taos as the airline magazine had suggested, exploring pueblos and tiny churches and the great formations of rock and desert that would forever mimic the visions of Georgia O’Keeffe. Flannery remembered Anne’s rich, dusty stories of her Mexican travels and knew that she could love it, this dry heat and stark beauty. But living here? That elegant figure driving by the strip malls Flannery kept passing en route to downtown? It was hard to picture. It was one of those narrative details that jarred, as if it should be edited out.
But as Flannery pulled into the hotel’s lot, considering the improbability of Anne’s landing here, she accepted this as another encounter with one of the world’s fundamentals: that life patterns zigzag in randomness, when opportunities catch spark and personalities chance to connect. Often as not, a person’s efforts to take the rationally chosen path are thwarted. An obvious New Yorker cannot find employment in New York and is removed to a different imaginative territory altogether, which offers other possibilities. On a Monday someone might read your job application, or request for clemency, or novel in verse—and the light would be right and the spirit optimistic, and you’d learn in a week that you were to be hired, or forgiven, or published. Yes, you! On a Tuesday the coffee would not taste as good, the weather was ominous, and the doors would close, gently but firmly: Thank you for applying, but . . . We have considered your request, and regret that . . . A number of us very much enjoyed your work; however, in the end I’m afraid . . . One geography vanishes, and with it an alternative future.
New Mexico. Here it was. And here was Flannery, in the place that had chosen Anne.
The problem with being young and making dramatic gestures—though the problem can also afflict dramatically gesturing older people—is that you may run into logistical difficulties that undercut the clean arc of your plan. The gears stick. The machinery clogs and stalls. If you manage it smoothly, your timing works perfectly, the encounter falls as it’s meant to and has the upshot you’re hoping for, and you do not have to spend, for example, several long hours in a canned-air-filled motel room, flipping impatiently from one cable channel to another, wondering when you will find Anne.
Somewhere in her optimistic head Flannery had perhaps figured that New Mexico would not just welcome westerner Flannery with open arms, but that it would announce to her, helpfully, how to locate her lover, so they could get going on their happy surprise reunion. Wouldn’t it be obvious, from the Sunport, how Flannery was to find her?
It was not obvious. Flannery had arrived equipped with one piece of information—the name of Anne’s hotel—but it was not enough to effect the rest. Flannery asked at the reception desk, her heartbeat a loud percussion to the question, whether Anne Arden was staying there. The answer was yes, but she was not there now, at two in the afternoon. An hour’s waiting in the lobby made Flannery wearier and sweatier, and eventually brought on the revelation that it would not be good to reunite in this state, when she was all wrinkled and travel worn. Unlike Anne, her prettiness was not the foolproof kind that could withstand dry air and tiredness without showing it. She needed to shower. Right. She should therefore—what? Rent her own room at the hotel? Wouldn’t that be the suave thing?
Flannery asked about their rates. As nonchalant as she tried to be, even her extravagant self quailed at the figure. It was an impossible amount a night, half as much as the flight had been. For the privilege of a shower! She could not bring herself to pay it. A further hour into waiting, Flannery climbed back into her rental car and drove back toward the airport, having been told by a supercilious clerk that that was a likely place to find a cheaper room. (She had asked specifically for that—“someplace cheaper”—having not yet become versed in phrases like “a lower rate” or “a more economical option” and other polite euphemisms for a cash-strapped person’s alternatives.)
Which was how she came to be in the El Dorado motel late that afternoon, where she showered in a narrow, thin-walled cabinet and then lay down, flipping between talk shows, music videos, and news to distract her from the new, slow drone of dread within her—and calling the hotel every half hour, trying to find Anne.
The hotel receptionist got tired of hearing from Flannery and she did not hesitate to make that clear.
“I’m sorry, she hasn’t come in yet,” she said the fourth time Flannery called, her high note of service-job sorriness cracking to reveal the sour undertone of What are you, some kind of stalker? “Can I leave a message for her to call you?” She had asked this before. This time Flannery finally said, in an effort to enlist some sympathy, “No, see—it’s a
surprise. I want to surprise her. It’s—it’s her birthday,” she added, on a whim.
“Oh,” said the receptionist coolly. The birthday did not mollify her. Flannery thanked her, hung up, then swore at the woman’s rudeness. The West might not, after all, be filled exclusively with the world’s friendly and benign.
Eventually Flannery dozed. She was hungry but wanted to wait to eat with Anne: that was part of the plan, part of the way it was supposed to work. At last, faint with growing doubt and hunger, she managed to get through to a different hotel receptionist, for whom the question of the whereabouts of Anne Arden was a new and interesting challenge.
“She’s not in her room,” the receptionist said. “But can you hold for a moment?” Flannery held, as a talking head on the television mutely narrated a litany of new wars and murders. “Miss?” The voice came back cheerfully. “Yes, Ms. Arden is here at the hotel. She has a dinner reservation in the restaurant. Would you like me to tell her you’re on the phone?”
“Oh! No. Thanks. No—thanks. I’ll just meet her there. It’s her birthday, you see—Thank you. Thanks—” Flannery staggered and stuttered. The receptionist, thanked more in five minutes than she would be for the rest of the evening, hung up to attend to other travelers’ needs, while Flannery went into a small frenzy of anticipation in the worn, drab interior of her El Dorado.
Then again, why would she be?
Alone, that is.
Pages for You Page 15