Then she got pregnant.
Late January, a chill San Francisco winter, all light grays and subdued browns, even the Golden Gate Bridge dulled down to a flat, parochial orange — and inside Charles’s house on Ashbury Street in San Francisco, and within his black modernist bathroom, the plastic stick showed two hot pink, unexpected lines.
This happened with straight sex. Flannery had heard of it. Novels, romances, salacious newspaper articles, movies — they all mentioned this. It was a plot device, a soap opera staple, a career changer or reputation smircher; a punishment, or a miracle, or a reward. Women got pregnant after having sex with men, sometimes.
Right.
Once, after she and Adele broke up, Flannery had briefly dated an amusing buck-toothed English woman, who used the phrase about someone, ‘She fell pregnant.’ At the time, Flannery, who loved to hold strange expressions in her fingers like samples of exotic fabric, to test their weave and their texture, commented on the comedy of the words, as she saw them — as if pregnancy were an affliction, like an illness, that you picked up by accident. As if it sent you off in some sort of swoon.
Now, suddenly, fearfully, Flannery was not laughing.
She had fallen.
10
How could Flannery be so smart, and simultaneously so stupid?
It was one of her own enduring questions about her character, from the time she was a bright kid in her fifth-grade class and the teacher’s pet, yet wrote a sarcastic note about an assignment that got her sent to the principal’s office (could she not have foreseen that the joke would misfire?), to her failure to predict, on the elaborately planned Mexico trip, just how rattled and wild it would make her to meet, at last, her father.
What had she imagined — a quick coffee then she and Adele would be on their way? Why would Flannery go to the extensive trouble of finding her unknown father in the first place if she didn’t think it would rearrange her interior, as it did? Yet as the two women got ready to encounter Len Jansen at the bohemian hotel bar he had suggested, Adele fretted over what they should wear, and whether they should act like friends or lovers, to which questions Flannery replied with uncharacteristic hardness, ‘What does it matter? The guy will be too stoned to notice, probably. And we won’t stay long.’ Even Flannery could hear how unFlanneryish her voice was, saying that, and she was wrong and wrong, as it turned out. The meeting might not have been a tear-jerker of reconciliation or redemption between father and daughter — Flannery was pretty sure her father understood the relationship between her and Adele, but it seemed not to fluster him — yet there was a connection between this man and herself that Flannery had not conceived of ahead of time. In their physical appearance, yes, but also in some of the turns of their thinking, unnerving enough for her that hours into the surprising conversation of that first meeting, Flannery offered up an abrupt excuse to leave. Soon after that she hit the tequila, and from there the sex by the saguaro story more or less wrote itself.
Flannery was wise yet foolish. She knew so much, and so little. ‘The eternal sophomore,’ she called herself in A Visit to Don Lennart, a book she wrote in part to understand this very contradiction.
Flannery knew she was smart. Others did too, though not instantly, which gave the discovery an element of surprise when they came upon it, like a hit of salt in a caramel dessert. Flannery was soft-voiced in conversation and not inclined to show off, yet she was not timid about making a reference or an analogy that would catch her listener’s attention. At the publishing house where she worked after college, her boss, a brisk sardonic New Yorker with limited patience, once skimmed skeptically through some catalogue copy Flannery had handed her. Gradually Eleanor’s frown eased, and her eyebrows raised. ‘You wrote these?’ she asked, as if speaking to a child prodigy. ‘With the slant quote from Leonard Cohen? That little quip about mood rings? Nice work, Flannery.’ Flannery had pinkened with pleasure. ‘You play the sleepy Westerner well, but you’ve got a brain in there, haven’t you?’
Sometimes. And yet: her stupidity, leaning at times into an ‘accidental heartlessness’ (her own phrase, again). Just as she had settled into her position at the publishing house, Flannery blindly trampled on a friendly colleague’s territory by sleeping with the philandering poet the woman edited, offending the editor to the point where Flannery wondered if she ought to leave, and started to plan her Mexican adventure. Or it could be a more basic cluelessness, shown by the number of times (two) that Flannery forged a brilliant route for Adele and her to take through a strange and possibly dangerous territory, only for her to get pickpocketed later in some obvious, open market square in Guadalajara.
The ways Flannery saw and didn’t see; looked ahead, yet was blindsided by what came at her.
That was the only way to explain how she could have let herself get pregnant.
It was a teenager’s error. Made her feel seventeen again. Had she really thought she had matured?
There was a morning, once, soon after she arrived at Yale, when Flannery traveled what felt like a great distance from the campus (about two blocks) to find breakfast away from the many freshman eyes in the dining hall. She went into a spare, tiny diner called The Yankee Doodle and ordered from its grease-smeared menu a ‘jelly omelette’. It seemed part of being in the new place — sampling the local cuisine. These crazy people from Connecticut made jelly omelettes! Why not try one?
The waitress raised a brow and smirked at the order. Flannery had misstepped. And indeed the plate that arrived, a yellow-brown slab of egg oozing sickly purple, was both ridiculous and disgusting. Had Flannery been older, she might have framed the mistake for herself forgivingly — Oh well. I’m learning! — but at seventeen she could only dissolve in embarrassment, particularly because the whole fiasco was observed, emerald-eyedly, by an auburn-haired woman who sat a few tables away, drinking coffee and reading.
The bad breakfast at The Yankee Doodle turned into a story of Flannery’s. That act of idiocy got someone’s attention, and the moment Flannery saw that beautiful reader, she was smitten. She learned that the woman was a graduate student named Anne Arden, and one day a few months later, they would start to discover everything important about each other, relish every taste and surface, savor all art and intelligence together. In the headiness of that pleasure, the jelly omelette tale became a joke and a fondness, a necessary first story in the two women’s eventual heated courtship.
So there was that kind of mistake you could make in your life. The silver-lined cloud. The paint spill that tips the canvas into masterpiece. The wrong number you dial, which connects you with a person who becomes one of your most significant.
11
Was this pregnancy like that — a wrong number? Was Flannery at thirty-one going to start a nine-month journey to meet someone she had occasionally imagined — a pen-pal, a character — but did not yet know?
Or was this pregnancy the other kind of mistake — the dead-end error that had neither excuse nor benefit, was nothing but a blot, a crash, a rending? Was Flannery about to be torn up?
‘It’s not a great time for this,’ Charles had nakedly said, lying back in bed one cold morning after a shot of slippery, eager intercourse followed by a hit of the blackest coffee. The drama of the situation had ignited lust in them both, but it subsided, once spent, into a chilly realism. They had known each other four months. It was not long enough to have learned how the other handled surprise, or crisis, or responsibility.
Charles frowned as he looked up at the high ceiling of his bedroom, and his goatee frowned along with him. His New York dealer had just finalized the date of a show in the spring of the following year, and his professional mind was racing along its track toward that goal: timetable, works, contacts, ambitions. Flannery’s professional mind was a disused carriage on a side track, waiting.
A yellow-gray light stole weakly in through the broad sash windows, a bashful ghost. Th
ough not icy, San Francisco could nonetheless be bleak in January.
Flannery lay alongside Charles, moving her hand across his broad, silver-tufted torso. Stroking a wiry chest was an exotic sensation to her still; sometimes it felt like one of the most different sensual pleasures of touching a man rather than a woman. She watched the face of this person she had opened herself to again and again, a man she had allowed to come inside her body and change her life — if she chose to pursue that change. She would be altered, certainly, even if she didn’t. Either way, Charles had, in the way peculiar to that sexual act, taken possession of Flannery’s body. Her physical self would never be hers in the same way again.
Four months! Flannery could not believe her stupidity, nor his, at having so mangled the handling of birth control. Shouldn’t he have been adept at that kind of thing? Charles professed to have been out of practice using condoms, having mostly had partners who were on the pill, and certainly Flannery could claim no expertise, but the bungling was, like the sex itself, their shared endeavor. There was a riot of confusion, yearning, and fear within Flannery, along with an incipient sickness that gave Charles’s bedroom a nauseating tilt. The cruise ship image came to her mind again, though this time she thought more clearly: I might just want to get off, next time we dock, and get back to land.
Flannery palmed Charles’s massive shoulder, pale as Venetian marble and as sturdy. She loved the sheer heft of Charles’s muscles. He could lift a lot, and it showed. If she were ever trapped under a crashed car, Flannery sometimes thought, or in a collapsed building after the next big earthquake, Charles would be able to extricate her. There was a comfort in that. As she touched him, Flannery was thinking, wondering, picturing. She wanted this man who had so marked her to say the right thing to her now. She was not sure what that might be, in these compromising circumstances, but like a voice in tune she would know it when she heard it.
Charles blinked his deep coffee-brown eyes and turned back to Flannery. ‘My Beauty,’ he called her, and sometimes ‘Venus on the half shell’ and, as of a few days ago, ‘Lady Madonna’. She could see a new light in his eyes, and it scared and excited her, both.
‘Listen, Beauty,’ he said, easing himself into Flannery’s caressing hand, ‘if you want to build this person, if you want to sculpt a human being, whoever it turns out to be –’ and his voice was low and nearly breaking, far deeper than his customary register of joke and bluster — ‘I want to be right there with you, Flannery Jansen, for the unveiling.’
He kissed her tenderly. Flannery closed her eyes. Tears collected at their corners, as some wordless image moved through her mind of Lenny, that hippie in Mexico she had to travel thousands of miles to meet, in her twenties. This father-to-be was right here. She was in his arms. He was saying he’d stay there.
Flannery opened her eyes and looked at her giant lover, half walrus, half genius, who had with her complicity brought the two of them to this precipitous edge together. It wasn’t the metaphor for parenthood Flannery would have chosen — child as art piece — but what mattered was that Charles was, in his way, giving her a yes. He had said the right thing. Flannery kissed him back, and pulled him closer to her with a short-sighted and old-fashioned passion, along with the even more old-fashioned belief that it would somehow all work out fine.
12
They married, too.
Why not? Flannery was dizzy, excited, seized with a sense that she could change everything about herself in some mad, blurred tumble of adventure. It was like being at some noisy party in an unknown part of town. Do I want another glass? Of course I want another glass! (Wait, where are we again? Do we have a way to get home?)
She moved in with Charles, into the smart, Fauvishly shaded Victorian a few blocks up from the famed intersection of Haight and Ashbury, where hippies and itinerants still slouched toward Bethlehem, just as they had when Didion interviewed them forty years before. At the art college where she had been teaching, Flannery was so unable to discuss maternity leave with her boss that she simply told him she was going to finish the semester and then needed to ‘take time off for some other projects’. She told her mother about the marriage (‘Charles Marshall, honey? The Charles Marshall?’), though left the baby news for a later, rainy day. Flannery’s mother was one of the three people who came to witness what Charles enjoyed calling the couple’s ‘shotgun wedding’ at the San Francisco City Hall on Valentine’s morning. Laura Jansen wore a lilac dress and carried a colorful bouquet of gerbera daisies, as if she were Flannery’s flower girl. The other two in attendance were Charles’s best friends, an architect and his pianist wife, who brought leis to put around the couple’s necks after the ceremony. Flannery stood in the grand, gold-domed building where Dan White shot and killed Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk, a gory fact she could not for some reason get out of her head as she took the vows and promised to do all the things you were supposed to do for your spouse. Check, check, check. I will, I do, I promise. (Where had the murders taken place, actually? Who first found the bodies?) The efficient Chinese American officiant was doing a steady business in marriages that day. ‘People like to choose the fourteenth,’ he told them, with a mild, bureaucratic smile. ‘Helps husbands have an easy date to remember, so their wives don’t get mad at them.’ He winked.
This was the life Flannery was entering: the one where people made jokes that might have seemed fresh in the nineteen fifties, about absent-minded husbands and their nagging wives. The ball and chain. Take my wife . . . please!
The experience was like one of those episodic, night-long dreams. It was strange and at points surreal, drawing promiscuously on history and fantasy and odd juxtapositions, yet it had its own internal logic. Flannery was nauseous, she was pregnant, she was married, and she lived in a house — with her husband. She had become a wife and, if all went well, she would, in October, become a mother.
She found herself wondering in quiet moments, on a sloped street, in a slanting light, when she would finally wake up, and how she would feel when she did.
13
When she looked back on this period later, Flannery would have difficulty distinguishing between the intense nausea of her pregnancy (constant vomiting, in no way restricted to mornings and often at the most insalubrious places — a Safeway parking lot, a museum bathroom) and the dizzying extremity of her leap of faith into the arms and home of Charles Marshall.
Flannery had studied the concept of the leap of faith at college one semester, during a late adolescent foray into existential philosophy. She had been trying to regain her balance after being abandoned by Anne, and delving into explorations of being and nothingness seemed the right way to go about it. Flannery sat listening to a professor who was the spitting image of Leo Tolstoy and as irascible, who spoke chiefly to himself, it seemed, or to the imagined spirit of Søren Kierkegaard, about the paradox of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, by God’s outlandish request; the way Abraham could simultaneously be convinced he would slit his son’s throat, and at the same time entrust to God that at the last instant there would be some catch and he would not have to, after all. Sitting in her self-pitying sophomore slump on a shapeless plastic chair under unflattering fluorescent lighting, Flannery was never entirely sure she got it, but Tolstoy gave her a good grade for the final paper she wrangled for him, so he must have thought she did. Throughout her life Flannery would find that in writing she had occasional access to wisdom or perceptions that eluded her when she spoke aloud. Or acted.
‘Do you worry, though?’ Flannery asked Charles one evening at their local Thai garden. They had learned a few hours earlier that the genetic testing had all looked normal, and Flannery was carrying a girl. She had been surprised by Charles’s ostentatious relief at the news. ‘I mean,’ she tried to explain, to translate the roil of thoughts in her mind to an actual question, ‘about all the sacrifice?’
Charles frowned. ‘Of what?’
>
‘You know . . . time. Freedom.’ Flannery waved a forkful of green mango in the general direction of all they might be giving up. ‘Independence.’ Charles seemed baffled by the question. At the time Flannery found this endearing, a sign of her husband’s intention to throw himself wholeheartedly into fatherhood, but later she would come to wonder whether it was simply based on assumptions they did not discuss.
‘Nah.’ He shook his head.
‘Our ability to work. Having to take care of the baby all the time.’
‘Art versus parenthood? It’s a cliché, we don’t need to fall into that.’ He slid several morsels of chicken satay off their skewers. ‘We can do this differently.’
Flannery admired his certainty. That was very Charles: sure of himself and his ability to organize the world around him in the way he wanted. She had always responded to people, men or women, who had clarity and edge. She appreciated the ability to be definite, something she often lacked. Such characters aided Flannery in her own efforts to focus the large areas of her internal blur.
‘Great,’ she affirmed, hoping the tasty curries and rice would not make the return journey back up her throat within the hour. ‘I like your confidence. We’ll do this differently. That’s good! Let’s do that, then.’
Flannery decided to have faith. It was a leap, yes. But really, she had already taken it.
14
For a time, they homesteaded.
Charles fed her, hunted and gathered for her. He provided warm, filling meals that pushed Flannery’s belly further and further out. He developed a network of takeout joints from which he collected multiple boxes, and even cooked a few meals himself, eighties-inflected dishes (beef stroganoff, chicken Marbella) that earned Flannery’s briefly sated gratitude.
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