Copyright © 2017 by Sylvia Brownrigg
First Counterpoint hardcover edition: July 2017
First published 2017 by Picador
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.
eISBN 978-1-61902-981-1
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
for a friend who died
and for a friend who breathes
1
There was no fall in California, and this had forever been a problem for Flannery. September was hardly a marker of anything, it just ran doggedly on from August and erupted erratically into stifling heatwaves that, when she was a child, people would call Indian summers. (Words were less worried over, then.) The Bay Area’s climate baffled even its natives by running cold then hot then cold again; not fickle like a lover so much as grandly indifferent to
people’s comfort or convenience. Fleece-thick fog gave way at random hours to a sudden burning sun, and winterish layers had to be shed for bare skin to better tolerate the abrupt new warmth.
You might get used to it, but Flannery Jansen never had. She had grown up along the chaparral-covered and forested peninsula of the San Francisco Bay, so had a girlhood to adjust herself before she headed eastwards for university and adulthood. Now thirty-eight years old and the mother of a young child, Flannery had moved back to San Francisco, where the morning cold still bit her bones and she missed the sultry evenings of the east.
She should have acquired a feel for this weather and its patterns; an ease with its ambiguities, an indulgent shrug toward the sibling rivalry between fog and sun. Somehow, though, other difficulties distracted her, and Flannery found herself wrong-footed every summer and into autumn. Six years earlier she had been heavily pregnant in this season, and she had a weighty memory of waddling around in a sweat brought on by the October surprise of a ninety-degree day. Wearing black, and melting.
She had known a different cityscape once. Streets with leaf-shedding trees, faux-gothic buildings, celebrated libraries, and scholars of a hundred stripes and stars. A geography she associated with the opening of her mind and body, and the much philosophized problem between the two. A college campus where broad old elms and maples burst into color (not flames, or tears) every fall, showering Flannery and her fellows with beauty, and promises of the harsh but stimulating winter to come.
Flannery had loved that place, and she had especially loved the autumns there. It was a climate that communicated with her northern European blood and reminded the ancestors nestled within her of their dark, dense breads, their stark churches, their impending snowfalls. Since then fall rituals, even simple ones, the kind you keep without recourse to calendars, trusting the clock within, seemed sacred to Flannery – from the buying of new notebooks and pens for the start of school, to the putting away of summer’s vacation gear, and the sobriety of starting to learn again.
One September morning, Flannery left her home on Ashbury, a sloped, once hippied street in San Francisco. The fog clung cold, like an unshakeable regret, and Flannery found yet again that she had miscalculated. Rushing out the door to get her daughter to school, Flannery had donned only a light cotton top, leaving her chilled and exposed. She dropped off Willa – who waved back at her, happy and jacketed, from the sidewalk, because somehow as a mother you are smarter about your child’s clothing than you are about your own – then drove to a nearby coffee shop to warm up. Flannery took her laptop in to revivify herself with more caffeine, and the morning’s first hit of email.
As rituals go, opening email wasn’t much, but waiting for Flannery in the unfathomable pixels of her machine was a message
from someone at that distant university, on the other side of the country, in New Haven. Yale. The same one she had attended as an undergraduate.
The note was an invitation. And Flannery, who had become heavy-blooded with an unnamed despondency these recent years, felt for the first time in a long while the quickening of her pulse, and a looking forward to something, a possibility in the future.
2
Dear Ms. Jansen
– the email began in its bland, black on gray tones.
It was the kind of missive you should read walking slowly up from the mailbox to your home (if your home weren’t so fraught), shaking the letter free from its envelope, which drifted down to the stone steps without your even noticing. The city’s distinctive mist would lend its drama to the occasion as you inhaled sharply, aware that your life was about to take an important turn.
Instead, here was Flannery at the bustling brown coffee shop with the punning name (Bean There, Done That, though it could as easily have been Common Grounds, or Café Olé), where entitled customers broadcast their coffee requests with precise specifications, and selected the worthiest scone from a windowed display of candidates. Seated at a counter, a suited professional spoke angrily into her cell phone, castigating someone about the delay in her insurance reimbursements; at a table near Flannery a young white man sat, styled in the studied casual of tech workers, his hands folded in the supplicant position, as he awaited an older Indian man for what looked like a job interview.
I’m writing from the Alumni Association. Recently we’ve been organizing more events on campus focused on women graduates, to inspire current students. I apologize for the late notice here but we have been putting together a three-day conference in October (19–21) called ‘Women Write the World’ and we are hoping you might be able to join us. Professor Margaret Carter of the English Department will be chairing the conference. We’ve got a great line-up of participants already, including . . .
A woman in her twenties who had recently had a hot flush of success with a sexually adventurous novel set in Thailand. (Li Mayer.) The well-heeled Bostonian who produced exquisite sentences and had won honors and plaudits. (Bishop. Flannery had worked hard not to envy her.) A television comedy writer (Chatterjee); the nation’s Poet Laureate (Jefferson); one brainy journalist who had produced the definitive work on Stalin’s gulags, and another who wrote a weekly political column for the New York Times. (Kessler, Green.) Yes, yes, yes. Flannery knew this roster, the gist if not every particular. It had been that kind of university. The great and the good attended it — winners of races, climbers of ladders, tappers up against the glass ceiling. Yes, those too. Women undergraduates had been permitted through Yale’s gates since 1969, though still struggled to have the faculty representation and fat slices of power that the institution’s men had. Hence, of course, this conference. Here we are: us girls! See how we’ve done!
Such politics were not central to Flannery these days. As an agitating twenty-something she had carried placards along the National Mall, protesting about women’s rights and freedom of choice, but lately the collective she poured her time into was made up of just three — and was mixed, in age and gender. From where she sat now, in Bean There, Done That, Flannery saw her younger activist self through a backward telescope, tiny and out of sca
le. The idea of appearing professionally, in a guise other than as the driver attached to her daughter or a softening embellishment to her husband, appealed to Flannery, and she was flattered to be asked, but her first reaction on reading the dates and location focused on logistics: how could she get there? Who would look after Willa? And what kind of resistance should Flannery expect from Charles to the prospect of her flying across the country for a gathering called Women Write the World? (‘Do they?’ she could imagine her husband challenging, with mock solemnity. ‘It’s a big world. That’s a lot to write.’)
Such were the dreary cogs that started turning in her mind, before another item stopped all the machinery cold. Then warm.
At the last name she saw on the list.
Moderating the proceedings . . .
There followed a name so vibrant to Flannery that it appeared to pulse in some foreign color on her screen, pomegranate red or a sleek jade green, not the black on gray of the others.
Professor Anne Arden.
A woman she once knew.
3
A hand touched her elbow. Flannery startled.
‘Hi!’
A short, busty figure whose shape was mauvely emphasized by clingy yoga clothes, her hair pulled back in a neon hair tie and her skin simultaneously freckled and tan, stood next to Flannery, panting slightly, though in an amiable way.
‘Flannery, right? How are you?’ She gestured to her own shoulder. ‘It’s Wendy — from the moms’ group.’ She grinned in encouragement, then added forgivingly, ‘It’s been a couple of years.’
‘Oh, right!’ Flannery returned the smile and pulled her laptop screen half down, modestly, as if it were a revealing garment, then tried to wipe from her face the heat brought on by Anne Arden’s name. ‘Gosh. How are you? How’s –’ Flannery felt a surge of satisfaction that she could retrieve the child’s name, though she wasn’t sure she could have picked him out of a toddler line-up — ‘Eli?’
‘He’s terrific. We’re at the Franklin School now, and we’re really loving it.’
‘That’s great.’
‘Yeah. Where are you?’
‘We’re at Alpine.’ It was like the we of pregnancy: collective pronouns were how you referred to familial situations. Parenting, Flannery learned early, was spoken of as a team sport.
‘How do you like Alpine? We looked at it for Eli.’
‘Did you? It’s a nice school. You know . . .’ Flannery nodded. Willa’s education was a matter of essential interest to Flannery, whose love for her daughter was fierce and sustaining and for whom she would have lain down under a train, if it would help her, or married a man she shouldn’t have, or attended a weekly ‘moms’ group’ meeting in the early years. Still, she seemed suddenly empty of scholastic adjectives. ‘They’re good people.’
‘We were a little worried.’ Wendy winced awkwardly. ‘That it might not be academic enough.’
As if to make up for this remark, Wendy launched into an ostensibly modest account of an elaborate art project her first grader was hard at work on, which she eye-rollingly called crazy ambitious — that kind of maternal boast masquerading as complaint Flannery recognized. The assignment had something to do with Frida Kahlo, and self-portraits that included the children and their favorite animal. ‘Of course, Eli had to choose his tree frog, which is cute but incredibly hard to draw . . .’
Flannery yawned.
Widely, inadvertently. It was a genuine yawn, not staged, but the rudeness of it disturbed her and she immediately shook her head and laugh-apologized. ‘I’m so sorry!’ she said, making a vague excusatory gesture at the laptop, as if her boredom were due to the computer. Through no fault of the friendly Wendy, Flannery had found instantly exhausting this exchange about their children and their schools and their teachers and their classes. All Flannery wanted to do that minute was travel her willing memory back to the territory of her own former school, former teacher, former class. She wanted to focus on the invitation to visit her old university, and the chance to meet Professor Arden.
Her Anne.
‘Gosh, I didn’t mean to interrupt your work.’ Wendy’s smile was a little thinner, as she cast a slightly jealous glance at the machine. Flannery doubted whether Wendy had much idea of Flannery’s work, as one of the dislocating elements of the moms’ group had always been that its members were stripped of their previous clothing as lawyers, educators, designers, writers. They were all just moms. That Flannery had authored two books was of less import to her fellow moms than the fact that at the age of three Willa had liked to eat olives and mushrooms, which was thought to be extraordinary and precocious.
‘No, not at all,’ Flannery lied, but she did lift the laptop lid back up purposefully. Then, in that way of confessions made impulsively to near strangers, Flannery added, ‘I’ve just been asked to go to a writers’ conference on the East Coast next month. It would be really good to go, but I’m trying to figure out if I can manage it. You know. Spousal relations. Childcare . . .’
‘Getting away is hard, isn’t it?’ Wendy sympathized, and Flannery glimpsed the possibility that this well-adjusted-seeming mother might have yearnings and frustrations of her own.
‘It is,’ Flannery agreed. ‘Getting away is hard.’
4
Charles would object.
Flannery saw this from the first moment in Bean There, Done That, the knowledge hitting her almost simultaneously to her reading the email invitation.
Flannery’s husband — and that too seemed an improbable word to attach to herself, ‘husband’, something Flannery Jansen had never expected to have, or to hold — was an artist. Charles Marshall. His work was widely known, out in the world and close to home, too, where an installation of his enlivened a recently revamped terminal at the San Francisco airport. Charles Marshall (never Charlie or Chuck, unless you wanted to irritate him) was a big man: big appetites, and the girth that went with them; big creations, and big emotions, not all of them positive. When tall, broad, goateed Charles was in a benevolent mood, he was loud, funny, warm, and generous, a showman, a storyteller, a circus master. When he was angry, the windows rattled and the lights flickered, and small animals retreated to their warrens until the rage had spent itself, and the city’s workers had cleared the debris from the streets.
Charles Marshall did not, Flannery knew, think of himself as a man who would object to his wife’s traveling to the East Coast for a writers’ conference. An all women writers’ conference. Certainly not. How could he mind? He was an artist too, and progressive, a good husband and a doting father who would delight in having a few days on his own to take care of his sweet little muffin, his six-year-old daughter. He was not any sort of ogre. He was a good-natured, cooperative, supportive man.
‘That’s a bad time for me.’ Charles shook his head, though his words were somewhat garbled by a mouthful of spanakopita. Flannery had decided to run the travel idea by Charles right away, and, as a mood enhancer, she had cooked something interesting. Occasionally, Flannery took to kitchen consolations. Making spanakopita was a kind of inside joke (for a party of one), having had the Greek salad days of her college years so vividly in mind since that morning cafe correspondence. Willa asked for more water as she tried to make the fork do its work on the salty feta and filo dough. Charles swallowed, then repeated more clearly, ‘October’s going to be a bad time.’
More than usual? Flannery wondered, as she got up to refill her daughter’s water glass. Charles could sit still through half a dozen such requests without apparently hearing them. ‘Why?’ Flannery asked levelly.
‘One.’ Charles stuck a blunt thumb up in front of him, like a maverick politician. ‘I’ve got to finish that piece that’s going to Detroit. They want it by Thanksgiving, and the woman I’m dealing with there is a pain in the ass. Two.’ Up went the index finger, and he tilted his hand, making an L. ‘That kid Lowell, Michae
l’s son, is coming to start “helping” me in the studio in a few weeks, but you know what that means, there are bound to be fuck-ups at the beginning. He’ll probably set the place on fire or gouge someone’s eye out. Three . . .’
But Flannery chose not to look at her husband’s middle finger as it prepared to help him enumerate a third difficulty. Instead, she half turned in her chair to face her daughter across the table, and smiled with a seizure of love into that dear, concentrating, squirrel-cheeked face.
5
Flannery was thirty when she met Charles Marshall at an opening in San Francisco. It was a milling around, wine-drinking, opinion-scattering affair set on several floors of Geary Street galleries — neon acrylic smears hanging in one room, surreal porcelain masks displayed in another — that her roommate had taken Flannery to in order to force her out of a motionless glummery.
‘Come on, Jansen.’ Susan Kim had known Flannery since they were in their late, matriculating teens, and had been drawn to each other because they both sensed something tough and fibrous in the other under the mass of freshman mush. ‘We’ve got to get you out of here.’
Flannery had gone so far already, these recent years; she was not sure she could go a single step further.
She had left home at seventeen, flown over many flyover states to attend a famous and foreign university. Once there, she had waded far and wide and deep into love. (The furthest she had ever gone. Her Anne.) After graduating, she had gotten a job in publishing and moved to New York, in order to prove to a woman she was no longer even in touch with that she could take on that never-sleeping city. A couple of years later she made the decision to adventure across Mexico for a year with a girlfriend, a trip which culminated in an encounter with a garrulous, ageing American hippie in San Miguel de Allende who happened to be Flannery’s father Len, a parent she had never previously met. She had returned to New York and, at twenty-five, gone so far as to do what she had always meant to do: write. She produced a wry, racy memoir of the girls’ circuitous odyssey and that fraught paternal meeting. A Visit to Don Lennart, a book of wit and raunch and many-pixeled vividness, spent months on the bestseller list and handed Flannery her quarter hour of fame. Under duress, she had pushed herself to appear on television and radio to talk about herself and her story, a degree of exposure that Flannery had foolishly not anticipated, and which led to a strange interior dislocation. She began to find herself hard to find. Still in motion, Flannery carried on to write a second book, because everyone told her to while she was still hot — as if her name were a potato, or a pizza — but this second was a novel with subdued characters set in a remote and not quite real California, pulled from some mournful place within her and in which she deliberately chose to avoid any autobiographical elements. After Flannery finally clawed her way back from the dark dream of its composition she learned that the book had gone largely unread, consigned to the death heap of fictions deemed to be quiet. By this point fairly unmoored, Flannery went a little crazy and cheated on her girlfriend Adele, who had been her companion in Mexico and had anyway never recovered from the shock of being turned into a character in her lover’s pages. Flannery drifted into the deserved, expected, but nonetheless distressing breaking apart of that relationship. She had finally, in a combination of resignation and surrender, retreated to San Francisco to recover, the best part of which was that she could live again with her old college roommate Susan Kim, who now worked at a boutique fashion designer’s and was as stylish, smart and impatient as she had always been.
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