He massaged her feet, was nice about the ugly clothes, and made sure she drank a lot of water, while he knocked back a near cellar’s worth of his own preferred Cabernet. This was Charles at his best, this slow-motion lope to their child’s arrival. That the man admired himself for doing these uxorious tasks was inseparable from his actually doing them. Flannery did not mind being Charles’s gentle, flattering mirror because she did feel cared for, and that fed something that yawned within her. There was no sign that this man would be down in Mexico getting stoned at the time of his daughter’s birth, and for that Flannery was deeply, yearningly grateful. ‘I feel like I’m in Little House on the Prairie, or The Waltons,’ she told Adele on the phone one day when Charles was at the studio. ‘I should be out collecting eggs from the henhouse.’ She and her former co-traveler, who lived in Chicago, had a friendly telephone relationship now.
Adele was quiet for a minute, then said, ‘Well, you always said you used to love those shows.’
‘They’re so cheesy,’ Flannery agreed. ‘But I really did.’
For Flannery, the house was expansive after the years of apartment living, and gradually she came to feel it was less of a movie set and more her actual home. On the main floor, raised above the sloping ground level, was a broad bay window that looked out over the row of painted Victorians facing, and in the window was a long, electric-blue couch that became one of her favorite comforts.
‘My first wife, Miriam, wanted us to have a baby,’ Charles informed Flannery one sleepy May afternoon, when they lounged together on that couch. ‘We were way too young. It would have been a disaster.’ Flannery’s legs stretched across Charles’s lap, her puffy feet encased by his ample hands. ‘Then there was this very athletic woman I dated, Rebecca. She wanted to us to have a kid together, too — I’ve told you about her?’
Flannery shook her head. And you don’t have to now, she added silently, but she had learned the futility of trying to stop Charles when he had a story to tell. He fondled his beard affectionately as he recalled these waystations in his life, temporarily pausing in his attentions toward Flannery’s swollen ankles.
‘She was an amazon, black hair, very into yoga, before anyone else had heard of yoga except for hippies. I mean, before there were spandex outlets on every corner. Bec was amazingly flexible.’ The memory caused Charles to pause. ‘Anyway. She thought she was pregnant briefly, then miscarried. She bled, heavily. It was alarming.’ Flannery felt a sharp pang of sympathy for this remote, unknown woman who had lost her potential child. ‘And after that she went into this crazy pregnancy overdrive — she had to get pregnant, we had to have a kid together, it was a sign from the universe . . .’ He shook his head, and sighed. ‘I wouldn’t do it. Not like that, under that kind of pressure. It was the wrong time.’ Flannery marveled at how certain he had been, and how the cold clarity of his thinking had not, she guessed, felt to him like coldness.
‘Not until you, Beauty,’ Charles said. His brown intelligent eyes returned to her. He had made their own story one of predestination, inevitability; which made it very close to being, actually, planned. It was up to Flannery to hold on to the small kernel of truth that it had not been. ‘And the Peppercorn, of course,’ the future father added, touching Flannery’s swelling belly. ‘Peppercorn’ had been Charles’s name for the creature growing within Flannery since she had early on found a chart that illustrated fetal growth by food items: peppercorn at week five, blueberry at seven, kumquat at ten. At week twelve, Flannery encouraged Charles to change his nickname to Passion Fruit, but it hadn’t caught on. ‘I was waiting for the two of you.’
‘We’re flattered,’ Charles’s third wife joked, placing her hands over the bump, too. She was still astonished by what was happening beneath it. ‘Flattered.’
At the word flattered a flirtatious joke Flannery and Anne used to share surfaced suddenly in Flannery’s memory. ‘Flannery will get you nowhere’, Anne used to say to her with mock sternness, standing half clothed, her deep red hair giving the white walls a fiery glow, as if the apartment were a den of delicious iniquity; Anne said the phrase with a slight admonishing shake of the head when she felt their affair was taking too much valuable time away from her efforts to work on her doctoral thesis or prepare for the job market. ‘Oh, on the contrary,’ the eighteen-year-old Flannery would reply, with the verbal swagger love makes possible, ‘Flannery will get you everywhere.’
She smiled inadvertently at the recollection. Charles, caught up in his own reflections, did not notice, and Flannery chose not to share the memory with him. Past romances: was it always a good idea to discuss them? Not necessarily. Sometime Flannery might tell Charles about Anne (if he proved interested). But not now. For the moment that long-gone passion could stay deep within Flannery, not far from the little Passion Fruit herself — who jumped or kicked slightly just then, the first of many occasions on which the growing girl would seek to weigh in on her parents’ spoken and unspoken conversations.
15
Before the child’s arrival there was an eruption — not in itself significant, and certainly not as bad as others that followed, but it gave Flannery a preview of scenes that would one day mar her future, like ruptures in a canvas.
It was the day of Flannery’s last class. She bade farewell on a fog-shrouded morning to a group of mid-twenty-year-olds of varying talents, including the multiply pierced boy who had written a smutty but smart piece about a blond art teacher named Eudora, whom, Flannery realized only after she had graded and returned it, was probably based on herself. (Wise, yet foolish: there it was again.) Most of the young adults had shuffled out of class with muttered expressions of thanks, and Flannery was sitting at the formica desk gathering up her papers. She felt sick, as always, and fat, and brainless — she had been reading an early Iris Murdoch novel a colleague had pressed on her, which obscurely contributed to her sense of imprisonment. Had Flannery ever written, actually? Had there been any point to it, if she had?
A tall, freckled student with the awkward long neck of a giraffe approached her, his bulky gray backpack giving him an ominous stoop. Flannery looked up at him and felt a sentimental pang — her last student. Pregnancy made her sappy, all the time.
‘Hi, Ms. Jansen,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something? Before you go?’
Flannery hoped it was a simple question, answerable in a few minutes. She could stretch to so little at this point. She just wanted to lie down. ‘Sure,’ she encouraged him, faintly.
‘What’s it like to have a book on the bestseller list?’
‘What’s it like?’ The question disarmed her, though she knew that A Visit to Don Lennart was largely the reason people signed up for her class. She stared into the young man’s face. He had bright, eager eyes, a smattering of color on either cheek, rubbery lips slightly open with curiosity. He had written, she thought she recalled, an oddly affecting piece about a barber.
‘It’s . . .’ she started, her muddied mind searching for the right adjective, because she wanted neither to mislead nor condescend to her student. Surreal? (Too easy.) Fun? (Only somewhat true, and lazy.) Unexpected? (Accurate, but it didn’t tell you anything.) ‘It’s . . . um . . .’
A slap on the door. It swung wide open.
‘Flannery! There you are. Jesus. Come on, we’ve got to go.’
Flannery and the freckled student startled. ‘Sorry,’ Flannery said, her face flushing, but she stood up. Was this really happening in her classroom? Being ordered out like a dawdling child?
‘No problem,’ the boy shrugged. ‘I just –’
‘I need you to come now.’ Charles snatched Flannery’s jacket from the back of the chair, and made an impatient sweeping gesture to get his wife out of the room. ‘I’m not even legally parked. I don’t want those fuckers to give me a ticket.’
Charles glared at the young man, as if he represented the parking authority. Flannery apologi
zed again to her student but allowed herself to be ushered out so that as little as possible of this would be witnessed by someone else.
‘It’s disorienting,’ Flannery threw over her shoulder hurriedly. ‘In a word!’ She tried to laugh, as if this were a joke, but she was too embarrassed to look the kid in the face, and see whether he had heard her.
16
In the car, free from eyes — not that eyes bothered Charles much, anyway; when he wanted an audience he imagined everyone seeing him, and when he didn’t he believed he was invisible — Charles continued, his voice quavering with impatience. He was behind the wheel in congealing city traffic, and everyone was his enemy.
‘Jeffrey’s coming today. Remember? And Baer is out of town.’ Jeffrey was Charles’s New York dealer, Baer his studio assistant.
‘Okay . . .’ Flannery said slowly.
‘No. It’s not “okay” because he wants me to have come up with a line on my new work. I need you to help me with the language. You’re a writer.’
‘Well, I can do that, but I was teaching. You can’t just –’
‘Class was over. You were done. He’s coming today, Flannery.’
‘I understand. But –’
‘You don’t understand. You’re not listening to me.’ He shook his head in frustration. His teeth were gritted.
‘I am listening! I just –’
‘No. You’re not. Because if you were, you’d stop nitpicking here, and realize this is important.’
‘OK, sweetheart, but teaching is important too. It’s embarrassing –’
‘Oh, I embarrass you? Really?’ The contempt in Charles’s tone hung in the air like an industrial fume. Flannery’s heart was thudding now.
‘Please don’t raise your voice.’
‘I’m not raising my VOICE.’
‘You’re shouting.’
‘This is such bullshit!’ He slammed his hands down on the steering wheel, after a sudden jerking brake to avoid rear-ending the Prius in front of him. ‘I’m a man, Flannery. This is what we sound like.’
Flannery turned her head away from her husband then, and watched San Francisco’s dingy streets blur, through her wet eyes. She hated crying. It was so weak. She did not want Charles to see it (though of course she did, too).
The drive to Charles’s studio continued without further conversation. If Flannery expected a softening from Charles, she would be disappointed, though at least the object of his anger shifted, to the other jackass drivers, one slow dog-walking pedestrian in a crosswalk (Can you move along, Grandma?) and the traffic engineers of this stupid backward city.
Flannery made herself think of something else, clear this episode from her mind. She traveled back to her appearance on the TV morning show, when she was interviewed for Don Lennart. The interview had been a short, confusing badminton match between herself and the two hosts, a sparkly black woman and a powder-cheeked gray-haired white guy, each feeding her easy questions that she was supposed to bat back, entertainingly. In the segment’s last seconds, Flannery thought of a funny story she had forgotten to tell about Adele, one that cast her in a warm, heroic light, rather than as the comic sidekick.
‘That reminds me of a time right at the beginning of our trip,’ Flannery began, gathering the practiced sentence in her mind. In that infinitesimal pause, though, the mascaraed hostess talked over Flannery. The seconds drained away, her cheerful summary of Flannery’s book built inexorably to the commercial break, and eventually Flannery had to smile, purse her lips, and know that she had come to the end of her time on the air. Adele had been nice about it afterwards, said she had done great, but Flannery regretted not managing to get out that detail.
When they finally reached Charles’s studio, Charles frayed and damp with exasperation, they sat at his broad work table together, and Flannery calmly helped write a few good paragraphs that framed and contextualized Charles’s new work. She sculpted some language on his behalf.
There would be no apology for Charles’s outburst. Over time, Flannery eventually learned the pattern. Much later her husband might make some other compensatory gesture — that night, he picked up ice cream for her on the way home — and he would turn the story around, neatly, so that it was Flannery who had to be absolved.
‘Listen,’ Charles said understandingly, as he donned his gray silk pajamas. This was hours later, almost midnight, after Jeffrey’s visit to the studio, which had gone very well, and the dinner afterwards, from which Flannery had excused herself. She had been dozing already for an hour or two when Charles came in. ‘I realize the pregnancy makes you emotional. I get that.’
Flannery, lying plumply in bed, nodded, only half awake. She was a writer, yes, or had been once, and sometimes she could still be beautifully articulate.
Other times she simply could not find the right thing, or anything at all, to say.
17
With Willa was born light.
That was all Flannery saw in the first few minutes. She did not see or feel the infant, properly, before people masked like thieves whisked her away to be weighed and measured and deemed to have the appropriate biometrics to join the human race. For Flannery, of course, there was no question about her daughter’s perfection. How else could anyone account for all this light?
It was inside and outside of Flannery, both. The illumination. The point was, the source must have been Willa, and yet it was not as though that tiny baby, just emerged, was emitting bright beams of gratitude that she had escaped her dim cave and gotten her life rolling. (What she primarily emitted were the loud cat cries of any newborn’s arrival.) It seemed rather, to Flannery’s drugged mind — they had tanked her up with painkillers and then anesthetic, when it eventually transpired that the doctors had to slice Flannery open to get Willa out safely — as though on Willa’s joining everyone else in the room, all the darkness went out of the place, out of every corner, leaving only this light.
She could not speak this. She could not say anything at all. Flannery was simply mute and smiling and bewildered. She took in the sequence of events: Charles joking with the nurses, though his eyes blinked with tears; the extreme contrast between his hefty self and the scarcely substantial creature he was cradling, like an image from some cartoon, a bear with a diminutive kitten in its paws; the swaddling of Willa and some helpful nurse’s holding the child before the mother’s eyes. Look at her! Isn’t she beautiful? The images lodged deep within Flannery’s memory, concealed under other immediate realities, and they would stay there always. Her daughter’s arrival.
She had Willa now, and Willa had her, and Flannery’s heart was ripped open into a new, great, terrifying capacity for love. (And, simultaneously, grief, because for some old, indelible reason Flannery felt the fear right alongside the joy — they were inextricable.) She had never known she would be capable of this love, and the feeling left her absolutely exposed to the world and its elements, like driving down the freeway at a hundred miles an hour with the top down and the windows open. Anything could get in.
What shape her fears had, what could happen once you became a mother — all of that would come later. For that day, that timeless hour, Flannery simply allowed herself to bathe in Willa’s light.
18
Once, a long time before, Flannery had felt vulnerable in this way. She had loved deeply and she had lost, and though the experience broke and rearranged her (like a shattered and reset limb), it did not really surprise her. Woven deeply into this calm and melancholy woman was the conviction that all love ended in loss, that abandonment was the norm, that ecstasy was fleeting. It was the order of things.
A self-protective reflex came naturally to Flannery, and after Anne she always simply, somewhere in her, held back. It just made sense. Flannery could be, and was, kind and funny and attentive and hardworking and patient with those she loved; but she never offered that most private self to a
nother person again. It was not worth the risk. She had learned that once, right at the start of adulthood.
If you asked her, Flannery would never have said she was scarred by her relationship with Anne. On the contrary. She had grown, learned, thrived, reveled. She had been touched and moved, and she had touched and moved Anne, too. It was Flannery’s early life’s greatest, if mostly interior, adventure, and next to it the colorful, wild, extraordinary year in Mexico with Adele seemed a movie set, an epic, as opposed to the sharp, true lyric that had been Anne. Though at acute points of self-reflection, Flannery understood that her determination to find her father was triggered by the way loving Anne had opened and changed her.
Now, she was with Charles. Flannery loved her husband, relished him, yes, but she would not say (if anyone asked her; luckily, no one did) that she had fallen headlong for the complicated man. Her passion was not on that order. Americans tended to shake their heads over countries with traditions of arranged marriages but Flannery wondered, once inside one herself and trying to adjust to the odd, boxy shape of it, how different their Western ritual was, really. Weren’t all marriages arrangements? It was like trying to fit your body into a rectangular wooden drawer, as Flannery was told by one of her mother’s friends she could do with her newborn infant if she didn’t want to ‘throw away good money on bassinets and such’.
Flannery managed it — marriage, that is, not cost-cutting measures for Willa, who slept happily in her raised, padded bassinet for the first six weeks of her life — with a combination of effort and determination. At points, she liked to hope, with grace. Flannery cooked dinners and prepared breakfasts, she attended to laundry and wrote holiday cards to their friends and buyers, she sought and gave back rubs in front of the TV; she organized cans in the pantry and towels in the cupboard and baby bottles, sanitized in boiling water, on the counter. She was competent with the new range of tasks, and kept a cheerful face toward it all, animated as she was by the shock of new life. Of new love.
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