‘I can’t move a millimeter. I’m exhausted,’ Flannery protested from the chic second-hand daybed by the window. ‘Wake me up when it’s time to vote for the president.’ But Susan, undeterred, dragged her out anyway, with the authority of a decade-old friendship and to thwart Flannery’s desire to stay in watching an entire season of a television show about the mob. Susan made Flannery dress, and dress presentably. ‘You’re getting some oxygen. Like it or not, lady.’
And there, under gallery lighting, in a room with stark, gorgeous desert photographs Flannery mistakenly thought were his, she met the artist Charles Marshall, a large and charismatic man, who with his stories and attention took her far away from herself — which was precisely where Flannery Jansen wanted to be.
6
Charles charmed her, compelled her, pursued her.
His beard was a deep animal brown that matched his warm dark eyes, and his laugh was like a punctuating blast from the orchestra’s brass section. He found Flannery amusing, and himself too, as he unspooled practiced, theatrical tales of his exotic life in a world Flannery knew little of — galleries, studios, commissions. The humor in his stories came from his sharp eye for surreal detail (‘So we open this gargantuan box and under a thousand peppermint-green Styrofoam popcorn nuggets find this exquisite little eagle skull, the size of a walnut’) and neat way of puncturing inflated egos, if not always his own (‘So the guy’s standing there holding his champagne flute talking about the St. Kitt’s wedding he went to and flinging names down, all the pop stars and moguls who were there. It was like celebrity confetti, you couldn’t even see the ground around him for all the names he’d dropped’). Flannery could sense the energy and wit in Charles’s art mirrored in these performances. The scale on which Charles Marshall created, along with the sheer dimensions of his success — in the nineties he was the American Pavilion’s featured artist at the Venice Biennale — reassured Flannery. He was large enough to shelter her after her own overexposure (her skin still felt pink and peeling from the experience with A Visit to Don Lennart, as if she’d been irradiated by all the attention) and more than that, to dwarf with his notoriety the very brief period of hers.
‘Flannery Jansen?’ Charles Marshall laughed, shaking her hand, engulfing hers with his supple and substantial paw. ‘The author of the book about Mexico?’
She nodded, oddly surprised that this man knew of it. Hadn’t she seen gossip page pictures of him with an indie film star on his arm? And maybe years before that, when she was still in college, a reference somewhere to his lavish wedding to an East Coast heiress?
‘Sex in the saguaro patch. Right?’
Flannery nodded again with a practiced smile. The saguaro patch always came up. ‘The single best-known thing about me,’ she said with mock ruefulness, pushing her sandy hair behind her ear. ‘It’s like my signature tune, that scene — it follows me wherever I go.’
‘But you knew it would. Right?’ The man had not quite let go of Flannery’s hand. ‘Two girls going at it, fueled by tequila — a great steamy scene, and cactus spines to be extracted afterwards, bringing it back to comedy. Come on! It had everything.’
Flannery agreed obligingly, and then Charles issued his brief brass laughter and she, disarmed, found herself joining him. She had had this scene quoted back to her a hundred times, yet somehow in his telling it seemed comical to her again, and better than that — forgivable.
They were standing close enough by then that Flannery could smell him, and something stirred in her. Charles Marshall had the scent of real stuff about him — oil, paint, wood, steel — unlike all the writers she knew who gave off the air of nothing more substantive than neurosis, perhaps the lingering aura of a struggle with language. She was tired of writers, herself included. They did not build. They needed no muscles. Their hands were scrawny, and lacked strength.
Lust traveled between Charles and Flannery in the gallery. It was dense enough that you could almost touch it, and Flannery, young though she still could be, was old enough to recognize that they both intended to satisfy their desire.
7
This affair was not, if you had been reading Flannery’s life closely, a complete surprise.
As she had recognized in the early days of her adulthood, not long before she introduced Adele to her dear, puzzled mother (who did not want to be negative, she just wanted to understand), Flannery had known attractions to men as well as to women. Flannery had gone to bed with a few, even. The tall and rangy contractor guy. That notorious poet. Ill-advisedly, her publicist on the paperback of Don Lennart. She could be drawn to men; she had just never been drawn in by a man.
Charles Marshall drew Flannery into him, and he did not let go. He almost smothered her, with his size and his personality and his disproportionate gifts. He showered her with offerings, flowers and jewelry and clothing and, even more persuasively for Flannery, small Charles Marshall originals: a tiny ingenious bicycle built of beat-up ballpoint pen casings and two old typewriter ribbon wheels, with a banner that said love story across its handlebars; a headband of interwoven shot silk and oxidized silver with a card attached that said to my Beauty.
Strangely, Flannery found that she did not mind being smothered, and she did not object to the inundation of splendid gifts. (‘The guy’s a genius,’ said Susan Kim, somewhat awed. ‘I may have to steal some of his designs for my boss.’) After the artificial public self Flannery had had to create for the promotion of her memoir, it was a relief to disappear into the encompassing embrace of Charles Marshall. (‘Charles Marshall, honey?’ her mother said, when Flannery eventually confided in her. ‘The Charles Marshall?’) Truly grateful, Flannery reciprocated in the way she was best able to at that time: she gave up every inch of her lithe body to him, handing over to Charles all the pleasure he had the hunger and the energy to take.
The lust between them was intense and mutual and all but unquenchable, for a time. Charles was the opposite of all that Flannery had wanted before and perhaps that mirrored inversion generated some of the heat of the attraction, like a magnifying glass focusing solar rays. The man was large, a heavy breather, a snorer, a guffawer. Previously Flannery had loved the petite, the tactful and the elegant — her first great love having embodied those qualities most purely — though anyone Flannery loved had also to have a straight spine, and a strong nerve. When Charles and Flannery made love, the man announced himself like an important guest at a party when on the threshold of climax, and Flannery came to relish those announcements.
There was conversational texture between them, too, their talk a colorful thread along which were strung bright beaded nights of sex. It was when Charles started to share stories of his early New York years, before his success, his scrappy early marriage long before the heiress (‘my very first wife,’ he called the New Yorker jokingly; ‘we were kids, we were pups, we scratched and bit each other because we didn’t know any better’) that Flannery started to feel the shape of the man beside her, and a tenderness toward him surfaced, which only enhanced her attraction. Flannery noticed, with the surprise you have at finding a new wrinkle or mole on your body, the desire within herself to protect the great Charles Marshall. How crazy was that? That she, Flannery Jansen, author of one hit book and one not, believed she might somehow tend to this famous man who commanded steel and aluminum, men and machines, art critics and dealers? That she did, as a matter of fact, want that job?
People experiment in romance in so many ways. They need to leave themselves behind, or complement themselves, finding substance in the areas where they feel empty. They risk similarity, or difference. They find their twin, or their opposite. They seek loves of different ages or creeds, nationality or skin hue, to rub up against the expectations of their family or culture or simply to create roughness and traction in their own interior. Montagues want Capulets, Janes their Rochesters. Flannery Jansen might once have made sweaty, urgent love under a saguaro cactus
with a willowy Nordic girl named Adele, who was frequently mistaken for her sister, but at thirty she was in a rolling, rollicking affair with the heavy, hearty artist Charles Marshall.
Opposites attract? Yes, Charles was Flannery’s opposite. A man with arresting charms and pungent faults, loud virtues and quiet failings, just like anyone else; but also, point by point, a person like a study in everything Flannery, in her native self, preferred not to be. On she went, though, taking and acing it, the Charles Marshall course. Swallowing new knowledge. Earning an A.
8
The knife-edges of sexuality.
Separations fine and sharp between the two sides.
Flannery was thinking about the issue as she walked up from the arts college on Dolores Street where she taught part-time, to the house Charles owned in the Haight, where she was spending more and more evenings, and mornings, and portions of the day. It was a steep climb, then a cresting of the hill and a saunter back down near Buena Vista Park. There was plenty of opportunity for vertigo.
She imagined an interlocutor, an interviewer, quizzing her.
Off one edge of the blade: your newfound passion for a man requires suppressing your previous yearnings for a woman. Are you in denial? What about Anne, or Adele?
Off the other edge: your engagements with lesbian lovers did always mean not acknowledging your equally real heterosexual feelings. Were you in denial? (Adele had been wary of that drift in Flannery; at points in their travels Flannery had flirted with men with a little too much intention, and Adele had nipped at her afterwards, in jealousy.)
Bisexuality, though — as a word or a label, as a principle, as anything other than a simple, ubiquitous, under-spoken truth about the human heart — satisfied nobody. To Flannery it had always sounded like a science project, and not the prize-winning kind. It confused people. You were better off disavowing it, just as retaliatory parents sometimes disavowed their gay children, or gay friends coolly shook their heads over one of their own who stepped out with the opposite sex. (Hasbian!) To describe yourself that way made you seem shifty and indecisive, like an independent voter. Pick a party! Pick a side! Come on, your allegiance matters.
Flannery’s heart was pounding at this point in her walk, as she neared the top of Seventeenth Street, and the city was spreading out behind her. If she turned around, she could see the Castro melting into the Mission District, whose taquerías and mercados were losing ground to tech-influenced joints like single-drip coffee purveyors and chic design shops. Past the Mission, looking east, there were still the shipyards, and beyond them the gray and mobile Bay, flecked with vessels.
And what about the guys?
Flannery breathed. Panted, a little. (Really, she ought to be fitter than this.)
What, specifically, about this particular guy, the one she had met?
Was Charles the kind of straight man who hankered after watching two women make love, perhaps so he could enter the fray at some point and helpfully assist — a Penthouse letters type? Adele had been certain, rightly or wrongly, that there were plenty of those. Or did Charles nurture an ambition to conquer and convert a nice lesbian, like missionaries in African nations hoping to bring Christ’s blessings to the uninitiated? Or was Charles rather — this had to be a possibility — simply a confident person, at home in his ample masculine self, who accepted the complexities of sexuality and was as content to hear about Sapphic love as any other kind?
Flannery was thinking of a conversation the two of them had had the night before, at a bar at the edge of the Castro District, near her apartment. Several gay men drank together, generally muscled and tattooed, while two women leaned toward one another heatedly over bottles of Dos Equis. Charles and Flannery noticed the women at the same time, and each took a sip from their own brews.
‘Do you miss . . . that?’ Charles asked unexpectedly, tilting his chin in the direction of the women’s table.
Flannery blinked. That? Having a drink with a girl, or trading jokes with her? Making love to a girl? What precisely was Charles asking? Flannery took a pull of her beer, pondering possible answers, but was relieved of the need to try any of them.
‘I mean . . .’ Charles continued. ‘I get it. You know?’ He looked serious, and sympathetic, so Flannery nodded apprehensively. Then a light flickered in Charles’s eyes. ‘You may not realize this, but . . . I was a lesbian once, too.’
This Flannery had not expected. She laughed with relief. ‘You know,’ she parried, ‘that doesn’t surprise me.’
‘You felt the vibe, right?’
‘I totally did.’
‘I figured.’ Charles nodded.
‘Besides,’ Flannery shrugged. ‘All the best people were.’
‘Apparently!’
‘Though . . .’ Flannery pushed it further. ‘That thinking seems, you know, binary. Straight, gay. Like you have to be one or the other.’
‘Ah hah. Kind of virgin/whore, you mean?’
‘Well, I didn’t really mean that! But . . . sure.’ Flannery was enjoying this. ‘Right. Are you a prude, or just cautious? In touch with your desire, or a nymphomaniac?’
‘Easy . . .’ Charles ventured, with a satyr’s grin. ‘Or hard?’
‘Dry or wet?’
‘Top or bottom?’
‘They want you to choose one,’ Flannery said, a little drunkenly, and with a hint of melancholy. She could not have said who they were. ‘You have to choose.’
It wasn’t conventional foreplay, but it got the two of them pretty worked up. They drained their beers and then Charles drove them back up to his house, where they fully explored together the possibilities of the heterosexual option.
9
There was a perfectly pleasing place this exciting outlier relationship might have taken in the unfolding narrative of Flannery’s life: a round roll of adventure, a brush with art celebrity, a sexual exploration; a lush indulgence of gifts and pleasure and bodies and surprise. From there you would have expected its slowing, and then its probable ceasing, as the personality differences finally made themselves felt.
Charles was older than Flannery by fifteen years, but there was an exoticism in that too. Flannery felt at sea but not unpleasantly so, as if she were on a cruise ship filled with people of some remote English-speaking nationality. Scots, perhaps, or Australians. Charles could enthral a table with the stories he told in his jovial baritone, while Flannery’s stories flowed through her fingertips, and on the whole she mumbled. When she joined Charles with his studio assistants out at a favored Italian joint, she was most comfortable listening to the men laugh; when the gathering was around his own oversized table she found herself doing what women do, assembling and serving the food. It gave her a way not to have to talk or perform. Charles’s eye for colors and dimensions meant he was great to see the world with, like a chatty camera — ‘Look at the way that woman in line is holding her dog, like it’s a sweater she’s pulling close, to stay warm’ — while Flannery was more of an old-fashioned solvent, taking weeks or months to develop what she had observed. Charles marked his environment, mobilizing people and materials to change the landscape, while all Flannery commanded were the creatures of her own imagination, and she sometimes felt her feet left a faint tread.
It was several months after their autumn meeting at the gallery night, and Flannery had decided simply to enjoy herself. Why not? She did not have to overthink everything. She could simply follow this dalliance to its end. Until then she was a tourist of a foreign lifestyle: fancy restaurants, art openings, heterosexuality. So this is how they live! It transpired that a man and a woman on the street together were invisible to the world, and for Flannery, who had always hated to be watched or even noticed as two women together tended to be (the familiar stranger’s double-take: Which one is the . . . oh, they both are!), this was an unexpected reprieve. She felt as though she had been permitted into one of tho
se country clubs she had previously considered snooty and boring, but it had turned out to be good fun (they had an air hockey table!) and have great facilities (so many clean towels, and fantastic water pressure in the showers!). This straightness made her feel older. At last she was introduced to the way Regular People coupled. Partnered. Made love. This club had existed for millennia, and finally she was, temporarily at least, a member. As long as she could leave again after, all would — probably — be well.
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