‘It’s over. I did it,’ Flannery said to Willa as she climbed out of her high heels with a groan of relief. She immediately took off her stockings, too, bunched them up and put them in her suitcase, hoping not to have to wear a pair for another six months. ‘God, sweetheart. You have no idea how exhausting these things are.’ She lay Willa down on a blue plastic changing mat across the crisp, white-sheeted queen bed, and cleaned her up, before fitting her into a daisy-decorated sleepsuit. Snap, snap, snap. How satisfying it was to dress an infant. She wished, not for the first time, she could wear sleepsuits every day, too. ‘You know some people, like your dad, love big fancy dinners. I never have. It’s a flaw, maybe, but –’ Flannery held her beautiful girl up high overhead; Willa squealed with delight — ‘I’d rather just have mashed sweet potatoes with you!’ She covered her in kisses, drawing delighted gurgles from the child, then placed her gently in the center of the bed while she got ready, too. Finally, to slow them both down, Flannery started singing a few not entirely appropriate songs — old favorites by Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen — as a kind of mournful lullaby. They were the only tunes Flannery had by heart.
Flannery flew back a few days early with Willa. She and Charles agreed it would be better, so that he could focus on his work connections and she could retreat to their child-friendly hearth on Ashbury Street. That Charles had a two-night stand after Flannery left, with a young nose-pierced video artist, a woman who had the wit (or lack of it) to pick up the hotel room phone and flute into it when Flannery called from San Francisco, was neither here nor there. Flannery was upset with Charles, but not that upset, and her internal shrug confirmed something Flannery had begun to suspect, that a drift had started to develop between her and Charles. Frankly, she was still so relieved to be back at home with Willa, away from that awful hotel and the foreign city it was a part of, that she could not bring herself to mind about his infidelity as much as she probably should have.
Flannery had not been back to New York since then.
23
Flannery had not completely lost sight of that auburn-haired beauty.
In previous eras a person might lose a love and then not know where she had gone or whether she were alive or dead — until a startling glimpse at a distant market place or town square, or singing hymns in church.
However, in the over-surveilled and close-circuited twenty-first century, former beloveds scarcely had room to vanish. It was easy to find people: their tracks were everywhere. Anne and Flannery, whose bond had been a thickly worded one, their short-lived love nest lined with books and papers, were both in professions that brought them in frequent contact with print.
Flannery knew she was going to be a writer long before Anne expressed skepticism that she could be. (‘Ah. You’re hoping to write?’ Anne had asked seventeen-year-old Flannery, to which Flannery had replied simply, ‘Not hoping to. I just do.’) As adults Anne and Flannery both were published, hired, connected to institutions. They were, as Californians put it, squarely on the grid.
Yet they had corresponded just twice, in twenty years.
When A Visit to Don Lennart was published, before the circus of appearances took over, Flannery received a postcard in an envelope. On one side, a Velásquez portrait of a plump, bearded man, The Buffoon Pablo de Valladolid; on the other, the familiar slanted hand. The envelope was addressed to Flannery, care of her publisher, and was sent from Anne’s university at the time, Emory. Flannery saw the envelope when it arrived in the tarnished brass mailbox in the East Village apartment she shared with Adele, and stood leaning against the scuffed wall on the ground floor, finding it hard, for a moment, to catch her breath.
Dear Flannery,
Might your Don look something like this absurd but oddly dignified Spanish gentleman? (I like your title’s nod to Sybille Bedford.) You always knew your stories would make their way into the world; and I learned early on that you were a person who could make her imaginings real. Congratulations on the publication of your book. I am pleased for the nation’s readers that they’re being given the chance to relish your voice at last, and have pages of yours to hold for themselves.
Anne
‘Pretentious,’ Adele judged tartly when Flannery showed the card to her. ‘Who does she think she is, God?’ (I might have made her think so, Flannery thought. It wasn’t her fault.) Adele had heard enough stories about the wonderful, remarkable Anne to last her a long while. Nonetheless, Adele’s judgement did not stop Flannery drafting dozens of replies to the postcard, in her head, on paper, on the computer. She pretzeled herself into knots one day at the Museum of Modern Art with the effort of selecting a postcard whose image would perfectly convey what she hoped to express (Cézanne landscape? Lovely, but bland. Warhol’s Marilyn? Trying too hard. Naked Picasso ladies? Suggestive, therefore tacky). The difficulty defeated Flannery, not least because she did not know what expression she was really after. No single image was ideal. No words worked, finally. All remained unsent.
A few years later, when Flannery had moved back to San Francisco, she heard from an old Yale friend that Anne had been hired, in a bit of university poaching, by NYU, and whisked away from Emory in Atlanta (along with, the friend helpfully added, her historian partner, Jasper Elliott). In the teacup of high-end academia, this had created a temporary storm. Still, Flannery knew New York was where Anne had always wanted and intended to be, and that the city deserved her. Taking a leaf from Anne’s book — Flannery had always been more likely in this relationship to imitate than initiate — she sent Anne a postcard, addressed from Flannery’s art college in San Francisco, to the department at NYU. Agonies again over an appropriate picture, but finally from a trip to LA she found a card of Diego Rivera’s Flower Carrier. With its dozen lilies and its faceless girl it was, Flannery hoped, not too devotional, but she made herself stop worrying and simply send it. Her words were sparse. It was more a gesture than an actual communication.
Dear Anne,
The city has you back. I’m happy for its university, and for you.
Unlike Anne, though, Flannery did stick her neck out. In writ-ing — where she had always located her greatest boldness.
She signed the card with —
Love.
24
Human history could not be written with some different lexicon. You could not search and replace one name for another, once powerful words had been coined. That currency lasted. The verb that described one person’s online interest in another person, whether motivated by nostalgia or fascination, lust or regret, sounded like the sound produced by Flannery’s own toddler. Google. To search on the Internet for information about a person, thing, or place. I google, you google, they google.
Flannery googled.
What had Anne Arden been up to?
Flannery did not use to google. She had, at least, taken a substantial break from it. This was before Willa was in preschool, during the moms’ group era. In early motherhood each phase seems of epoch-defining length: before they hold their head up, when you can still go out to restaurants because they are angelic and sleep all the time; when they start crawling, and you are imprisoned in your home trying desperately to ‘proof’ the place, as if your child were a criminal or a rodent, requiring lines of defense; and after they start walking and getting into real trouble, a good time to join the moms’ group so you have other people who understand the true proportions of these problems, which to the rest of the world seem trivial. Flannery could not understand how any parent had time to watch television, have a coherent thought, or go online. There were simply no available hours in her day. If ever there were, Flannery used them to talk to actual living people — her friends, her mother, Charles.
Now, though, that Willa was at the Blueberry Preschool (that had been Willa at week seven, according to the fruit growth chart), Flannery began to resume relations with her computer. She browsed material she could put together f
or a part-time job application. And she got back to googling.
Anne had won a teaching prize at Emory. There was a citation on the department website, and trampling through the online jungle further, Flannery came upon a picture of her, small and smiling, with the university’s dean. A modest, self-contained expression that compressed a little her musical, lovely mouth. The familiar high-edged cheekbones and Celtic elegance, even in miniature.
Going further back, Anne’s book, The Awakening of Influence, had been extensively reviewed when it was published in the mid-1990s. ‘Brilliant.’ ‘Challenging, thought-provoking, and meticulously argued.’ ‘Not only paradigm-shifting but perspective-altering; a crucial step forward in our understanding of modern American literature.’ ‘To call Professor Arden’s profound book a landmark in feminist scholarship is to risk limiting its audience, or overlooking the true achievement of her generous work, which is to expand our humanist understanding of American letters.’
Flannery felt a flush of pride. Her Anne! Though, of course, Anne had not been ‘hers’ in fifteen years or so, if she had ever been ‘hers’ at all. (They had laughed about Flannery containing Anne, but it was a spelling joke — it only worked on the page.) You did not own people. Marriage was one thing, and might not yet have escaped its association with leashes or shackles, but love was not possession. People were not each other’s property. That included children and their parents.
Nonetheless: her Anne! Had shifted paradigms, altered perspectives, expanded humanist understanding. Flannery was not surprised.
Then, deflatingly, a blog post. Flannery might have missed this item, and wished she had. But on looking up at the clock in her improvised office (a narrow room upstairs, formerly used for storage), Flannery calculated that she had ten more minutes before she had to leave to pick up Willa; just enough time to find it. Blogs and posts and tweets, people’s endless chatter-blurts about their meals, dogs, travels, interested her not at all. But googling was, as its name also suggested, not entirely unlike ogling; you looked, and then you could not look away. Some purple-haired graduate student in New York wrote an irreverent foodie blog she called Finger Lickin’ Good.
Went to dinner at the elegant Bleecker Street apartment of the Kate Hepburn/Spencer Tracy couple of academia, Anne Arden and Jasper Elliott. Or are they more Ullmann/Bergman? Taylor/Burton? No, I think I was right the first time. Arden, star author of The Awakening of Influence, is a beauty on the order of Hepburn, while Elliott, a whiz in French history, if not broken-nosed and pugnacious like Tracy, certainly adores Arden the way Spencer did Kate. The intellectual sparks flew between the pair even as they served an outstanding meal of lemon sole and dauphinoise potatoes, to a group that included—
That was enough. Flannery shut the laptop swiftly, before she could read the list of luminaries.
Jasper Elliott, again. Flannery had first met him in New Mexico — an ignominious occasion for Flannery, when Jasper got Anne back. He and Anne had been together for years by now. The golden couple.
The blog put an end to Flannery’s googling, at least on that subject. She kept future searches to facts she had forgotten (who starred in that cruise ship movie? What was the name of that Carson McCullers novel?), safety research on plastics or supermarket products, and reviews of schools to which she and Charles might, one liberating day, send Willa.
25
Willa grew. She moved more, spoke more, took up more space. It became clearer who she was: a person with a sense of humor, occasionally stubborn, impatient with kids who were fussy, as happy to play with girls as with boys. With each increment Flannery felt the joy of motherhood bite more sharply.
She had been awash with love and astonishment from the beginning, of course, but now, as her head slowly cleared, like the drawn-out morning after a raucous party, Flannery began to see how part of the great plan was the companionship your offspring gave you down the line. Willa’s sheer puppyish cuteness transformed into something more satisfying. An acerbic elderly neighbour of theirs, Martha, who had run the pet store on Haight Street for decades and was the kind of deadpan, raspy-voiced dame Flannery might weave into a story one day, visited the house when Willa was a month old, coming in with her fancy, moist-eyed spaniel. She joked, even as she awkwardly held Willa in her arms, that dogs were better value than children, never ungrateful, more easily trained. Charles laughed at this remark — he and Martha often enjoyed a sardonic banter together; she’d known him through a wife or two, sold him chow for an earlier one’s Siamese — and Flannery smiled, understanding that offense was Martha’s conversational goal. Nonetheless, the comment haunted Flannery in the first months, when her bone-tiredness and the one-sidedness of their arrangement, made more acute by a husband who looked on rather than dove in, sometimes piled high enough to flatten her.
From age three or so, Willa was simply very good company. She listened to her mother and responded to her, and the little girl came to read Flannery’s moods more accurately than Charles did. Mother and daughter were able to share jokes over someone they ran into or something they had read or watched together, that did not always need to be explained. They had shorthand, code.
Once, when Charles was on a trip to Frankfurt to tinker with a mobile outdoor sculpture of his that had some technical difficulties, Flannery suddenly decided to take a road trip with Willa. She did not have to sulk indoors like some frustrated housewife. She packed up an overnight bag for them both and drove south an hour to a beach she had loved and played on as a girl. Willa dozed in her car seat on the ride.
As Flannery parked by the rocky wall that bordered the sandy beach and turned off the engine, the scent and sound of surf came in through the open windows of the car, calming Flannery’s agitated spirit. She turned around to see her round-faced, sandy-haired girl blinking awake her hazel eyes, still half lost in dream. Flannery smiled, but didn’t speak. Willa, taking in the ocean view through the windshield, asked sleepily, ‘Are we in Hawaii?’
Flannery laughed. ‘No, sweetie, it’s still just California. Half Moon Bay,’ and it was just like Willa not to be embarrassed, but to join her mom and start laughing, too. ‘We would have had to get on a plane, for a kind of a lot of hours, to get to Hawaii,’ Flannery explained, then added, ‘You’d know we were in Hawaii if there were palm trees everywhere, and people were doing the hula.’ She then did an extremely poor hula dance in the driver’s seat of the car, with mimed ukulele music, making her daughter’s laugh turn into deeply contagious giggles.
After that, ‘Hawaii’ became a comic stand-in for any unexpected place they went to, whether it was the Sausalito house of a new preschool friend (‘I think this might be Hawaii,’ Flannery whispered as they went up the driveway of the luxurious coastal home) or Willa going with her parents to a grown-up event one night at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. (‘Mom,’ she whispered as they walked past Rodin’s Thinker on the way into the neoclassical building, ‘Is this Hawaii?’)
They each had ways of dealing with Charles’s demonstrative bluster and his excesses, and Flannery sometimes picked up strategies from her daughter. (Don’t interrupt him, just let him go on with his rants and they will end sooner.) Willa detailed to Flannery what she was building with her Legos and other plastic pieces, taking imaginative turns Flannery had to be at her sharpest to follow. At such moments Flannery was vulnerable to feeling the parental vanity Charles wasn’t too shy to express — ‘Chip off the old block!’ — but, more than anything, she simply felt light-headed with good fortune that she had been permitted, frankly through carelessness and naivety, to usher this interesting person into their home. For as long as making macaroni and cheese and French toast would keep her, Flannery would enjoy this fascinating, open-faced, funny roommate, and do what she could to make her accommodations comfortable, a place of peace.
26
Intelligent though she was, Flannery had never been that good at physics. She liked the idea of ph
ysics and wished she had been able, like some novelists she admired, to interweave string theory or subatomic particle structure into her stories. She couldn’t. Her mind tended to fold, like a poker player with a bad hand, when confronted with infinities, whether cosmic or cellular.
Still, she had questions. For example, was it a basic law that if a person expanded in a new way, another part of her must contract?
Did some equation explain that to the measurable extent a woman grew into being a mother, by that same degree she would diminish as a writer? For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction: was it one of those?
Was there room in one self for author, parent, lesbian, mistress, wife, companion, solitaire? Or was the self finally a fixed size, incapable of containing such multitudes? Didn’t Walt Whitman have a comment on the matter?
Was a person expansive, as the universe was said to be, or fixed, like a beaker only fillable to a certain point, before its liquid spilled?
On the ground, at eye level, without the benefit of either magnification or microscopy, what Flannery saw was this: at Charles’s studio or his work events, introduced as his wife, Flannery had little substance for other people. She had visibility — her outfits were important — but no dimension. At the moms’ group Flannery was, of course, seen in relation to Willa, admired for the girl’s adventurous diet or chided for not fastening in the car seat correctly. As a writer she was as vague and washed out as an old billboard being scrubbed off to make way for a shiny new ad. At best she was ‘the one who wrote that Mexico book — right?’
Pages for Her Page 6