Pages for Her

by Sylvia Brownrigg

  ‘We wanted you, sweetheart.’ Flannery spoke this limited, careful truth into the mirror, and the earnest acorn-shaped face reflected in it. She was slightly obscuring the timeline, but it was the best she could do. ‘Dad and I were eager to meet a person named Willa — and so we got married, in City Hall, under that big gold dome. And, you see, that led to us meeting you.’

  The response pleased Willa, appealing to her child’s innate solipsism as it did. She was central to the story, then. ‘How did you know I’d be called Willa?’ she asked, but a smile played about her face now, as she tapped into a telling she had heard often, comforting as a piece of toast with melted butter.

  For Flannery, too. ‘Because I had known for a very long time,’ she said, as one recites a fairy tale, or the lead in to a song, ‘ever since a friend introduced me to a beautiful story called The Song of the Lark by someone named Willa Cather, that one day I wanted to have a daughter.’ Flannery thought of the red-haired friend who had given her the novel. An unexpected emotion rose in her throat, and she gulped it down. ‘And when I did, I would name her Willa. And that daughter’ — she looked in the mirror again — ‘that was you.’

  39

  There was one last person who Flannery needed to inform about her journey.

  Flannery and Willa returned to their neighborhood for dinner at their favorite Build Your Own Pizza place on Haight Street. The first time Flannery took Willa there her daughter had been disappointed that the restaurant did not live up to its name. The restaurant had, she thought, promised exciting culinary construction projects. ‘You mean, it’s just like choosing toppings? That’s all it is?’ However, the six-year-old had reconciled herself to the place’s limited offerings, and settled in simply to enjoy the pizza.

  ‘So, sweetie, I’m going to go on a trip, in a little over a week,’ Flannery told her as they sipped from giant plastic cafeteria-style cups of water, sitting at a broad formica table, speckled like a hen. ‘For about five days. To the East Coast.’

  Willa stared at her. ‘Why?’

  ‘For a writers’ conference,’ Flannery answered. ‘A bunch of writers get together to talk, you know, to students. Compare notes.’

  Willa frowned. ‘Why couldn’t you do that here?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Flannery cleared her throat. ‘I do, actually. At the college.’ Again, looking at her daughter’s face, Flannery felt the importance of not being evasive. ‘There are some interesting people going. And some people I haven’t seen in a long time. Old . . . friends. A woman I once knew, named Anne. The one who gave me The Song of the Lark.’

  Willa sipped her water indifferently. Old friends of parents were of little import, unless they were right in front of you, offering presents or outings.

  ‘It was nice to be invited,’ Flannery added.

  ‘And will it just be me and Dad here?’

  ‘And Grandma. She’s going to stay at the house too in case Dad, you know . . .’ Flakes out. ‘Has to work a lot.’

  Willa sighed, just audibly, and Flannery, to silence the unspoken accusation of her maternal neglect, said defensively, ‘Honey, it’s not just Dad who has to travel for work. I have to go places for my writing, to promote my books.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? So people know about them.’ Flannery realized that since the passing, glamorous period of her writing life well predated Willa’s existence, this claim might sound fraudulent. ‘I used to have to do more of it, right after my books first came out.’ She tried not to think about how long it had been, and to distract them both, played her career ace. ‘I was on TV once, to talk about one of my books.’

  ‘You were? On TV?’

  Willa’s open-mouthed shock made her mother laugh. ‘Yeah, me! For my first book, A Visit to Don Lennart. A long time ago.’ So long. A different self.

  A new respect came into her daughter’s hazel eyes. Without question a television link was more enticing than anything printed between two hard covers.

  ‘What was it like?’ Willa asked. ‘Being on TV?’

  ‘You know, I was so nervous, the whole thing was kind of a blur. Everything went super-fast, everyone was pretty and shiny, there were a lot of lights — then it was over. And we were done.’

  ‘It sounds like the Giant Dipper.’ Willa named a rollercoaster at the beachside amusement park Flannery had taken her to the previous summer. Willa, just equal to the height requirement for the ride, emerged from the two-minute vertiginous experience pale and nauseated, saying clearly, I’m not doing that again till I turn ten.

  ‘It was very like the Giant Dipper,’ her mom agreed. ‘Almost exactly like that.’

  Willa’s pizza came then, descending like a cheesy UFO onto their table, and the child got to work dismantling what she had built and eating it, as they sat in a companionable silence for the rest of the meal. One of a thousand things Flannery loved about her daughter was that she knew how simply to be; she did not always have to talk.

  40

  Willa fell asleep early, out of tact or tiredness, and after she was safely under, Flannery called Adele. Occasionally, when she felt aswim, she had to hear her ex-girlfriend’s voice. That Adele had met Charles and Willa, even briefly, meant that she was somehow a bridge for Flannery, linking the person she had been in her twenties to . . . this person. Whoever Flannery was now.

  Within a year or two of their split, any hard feelings had washed away between the two women. Jealousy, betrayals, anguish, rage — it was all drawn back like a tide into the wider forgiving ocean, and only affection and familiarity remained. Charles and his ex-wives fell out of touch with apparent relief after their divorces, like actors turning their backs on a panned production, but for Flannery her ex was like a cousin, extended family.

  ‘So,’ Addie said, hearing the quaver in Flannery’s voice. ‘How’s life on the Prairie?’

  Delivered in Adele’s native Minnesotan accent, the reference made Flannery laugh. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied in a drawl. ‘It was kind of a tough summer.’

  ‘Drought? Fires? Pesky government ministers driving you from your land?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Just don’t let that adorable kid of yours fall down an abandoned mineshaft. That episode nearly killed me.’

  Flannery missed Adele. Her humor, especially. She knew they could never have stayed together, and not only for the obvious reason that both women eventually started sleeping with other people, in their flailing attempts to find an exit strategy after the book broke big and the balance that privacy ensures had permanently shifted. Flannery and Adele’s compatibilities were related to the period of their lives they shared — the adventurous but haphazard mid-twenties — and at heart they both knew that when they properly grew up, it would be into different kinds of adults. Adele was a lawyer, the practical, Super Bowl–watching type, who would play in a Sunday Ultimate Frisbee league and take biking vacations with her girlfriend; while Flannery, writer and ponderer, would have her head in an imagined cloudscape, while she hiked in the hills or wandered around an art museum, with . . . well, whoever she shacked up with, in the end.

  Once, during a long bus journey on the Mexico trip, the two women got into a lengthy faux-argument about kids versus dogs, and which were more essential for a happy life. Adele claimed that dogs were more loyal than children, who were ‘hardwired to turn thirteen and then hate and betray everything about you’. Flannery had riposted: ‘True, but dogs are not going to look after you in your old age, or make you cute cards on your birthday and Mother’s Day.’ They declared the debate a tie, then Flannery took some time to look out the window at the dry scrubby landscape and take a short nap. She could still remember Addie half whispering, an hour later, when she thought Flannery was asleep, ‘Ah, you’ll be a great mom one day, Flannery. I know it.’

  It took some imagination to see a maternal quality within
Flannery in those dusty Mexican days, and Flannery would always be grateful to Adele for her confidence. Certainly Flannery lacked that clarity herself. It wasn’t till the shock of the double pink lines in Charles’s black bathroom that Flannery understood that the stirrings within her were maternal (and came to recognize, like picking out a dimly lit face in a cave, that her shadow self had participated in the couple’s birth control error); and it was only when Willa the peppercorn started growing toward blueberry and then kumquat that Flannery began to read her own narrative differently. Perhaps the restlessness of her twenties had been less a deep search for her father, her younger self’s truth, than it was the force that propelled her, circuitously, toward becoming a mother. On the baby’s light-drenched arrival Flannery finally saw the mother within her, seated on the bench right next to the writer. She had been there all along.

  ‘Seriously. How’s that cute kid of yours?’ Adele asked, into a silence that had begun to yawn.

  ‘She’s great.’ If Flannery kept her sentences short, she would manage.

  ‘And Charles?’

  ‘Well. He’s . . .’ But it was too complicated to put into a late-night telephone call. ‘How about Jamie?’ Flannery’s voice was muffled. Addie’s partner was an airline pilot, which Flannery found impressive. Another person, like Charles, who commanded large machines. They had joked about that.

  ‘Flying high, expanding her carbon footprint.’ There was a pause. ‘So, Flan, what’s up? Why the call? Not that I don’t love to hear from you, but . . . you sound a little . . . stressed.’

  Flannery wanted to speak. She fully intended to. She had the phone pressed close to her ear. She had inhaled, prepared an opening sentence and everything.

  It was just that the moment she opened her mouth, her breath caught, and she knew that if anything came out, it might be frogs, or sobs, or something else inappropriate and embarrassing, and of no use to either one of them.

  ‘Flannery, sweetie?’ Adele said gently, dropping the irony. There was concern in her voice, which made it all the harder. ‘Are you still there?’

  It was a question without a straightforward answer.

  41

  Charles came home late and beery, but no longer angry. Beery she could manage. In fact, before she called Adele, Flannery had poured herself a fairly tall glass of wine. Like any couple, Charles and Flannery used alcohol as an irritation suppressant and a douser of bad memories, while knowing that the effects sometimes went the other way.

  How was it with Anne and Jasper? Flannery wondered. She stretched out on the electric-blue couch, pretending to watch an episode on her laptop of a new show everyone was talking about, but as the people on the small screen glared and argued and kissed and made up, thoughts of Flannery’s past rose to the roiled surface, stirred up in part by talking with Adele. The television characters did not have the power to speak more loudly than the dialogue in Flannery’s own mind.

  She remembered how Jasper had looked, pouring wine for Anne that night in the hotel restaurant, in Albuquerque. Flannery’s young yearning eyes might have been on Anne, at first, but when she saw the expression on her beloved’s face — such warm, humorous intimacy in her eyes — Flannery had to turn and take in the object of Anne’s affection, too.

  You can tell so much from so little. Even when you are eighteen and unschooled, you can. The man with the strong jaw and sly smile was not trying to impress Anne; he was simply happy, deeply happy, to be with her again. The ‘again’ was clear from their bodies, which did not carry the wariness of strangers, but rather the vibration of recognition — loose limbs, a known affinity. Anne’s small, manicured hand rested on the table, and Jasper’s rested loosely over it. The hands said everything.

  The front door opened, and allowed Charles back into his house.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey.’

  The simplest post-argument encounters were usually those that ignored what had happened. Certainly now, so soon before her East Coast escape, Flannery felt she could hold the day’s events in a small carry-on in her mind, and need not unpack it here, late, at night — with him. The artist, father, boss, shouter. Husband. Charles would not, Flannery knew from experience, apologize for how he had spoken to her, or for what he had said, and if she mentioned the episode, it would only make Charles angrier again. Apologies, even half insincere ones, require an awareness of the effect you have on another person, and Charles, though full of a sense of self, spared himself that awareness. Flannery’s outrage about this pattern was old and dried, a hard crusted layer over which regular life carried on. She poured her husband a small glass of scotch, brought it to him, and let him unspool. Charles would tell Flannery some complex, diverting story as a means of establishing quieter waters between them, evidently believing that was the way to make up for his earlier aggression. Flannery hardly had to respond, he simply needed her to sit and listen in a posture of sympathy. Her mind was free to wander its halls, listen to silent music.

  ‘It was like an epidemic of incompetence today. Baer totally fucked up the soldering he was supposed to do. I had to take it apart and redo the entire thing. In Detroit they’re pissing around with the transport of the piece, which is seriously threatening the timeline they’re harassing me about. Then little Joey thinks it would be awesome to play with the cutters and hack off a few fingers.’

  Charles sat in the vast leather armchair that was, by daylight, Willa’s life raft or hibernation den, depending on the game. He sipped his scotch.

  ‘It always happens: you try to do a friend of yours a favor. Sure, bring your son into the studio, he’s a smart kid, right? Not an idiot? No, no, he’s very responsible, he’ll be fine. He just wants to help if he can, he’s really grateful for the opportunity.’ Charles shook his head. ‘That’ll teach me to be a nice guy.’ He looked up and semi-focused on Flannery, his eyes somewhat malted over from the beer. ‘I did see someone lose two fingers once in a table saw, at a fabricator’s in New York. Well, I didn’t see it happen, but I saw the guy afterwards. Fucking gruesome. I had to make that kid understand.’ Charles carried on, convincing himself that he had saved Lowell from serious injury. ‘He thinks he’s hot shit because he used a lathe in shop class once.’

  Charles wiped his mouth. ‘And so after this bullshit day’ — Flannery guessed there had been another explosion or two — ‘I just threw in the towel, and took the two fuckwits out for Mission Chinese. They’d never been there, and the kung pao burrito blew their minds.’

  ‘Cool.’ In her imagination, Flannery walked by Anne and Jasper’s home — on Bleecker Street, hadn’t that blog said? So maybe a lovely old brownstone in the Village? Where the couple were seated quietly together, reading. Perhaps Jasper was massaging Anne’s feet absentmindedly, letting go only to turn the pages. Jasper asked Anne if she’d let him read aloud a sentence from his book, and she raised an eyebrow and nodded. He read the line, she smiled, then returned to her pages. They breathed in a syncopated rhythm. The room was hushed. Or was there music? Anne loved Monk and Coltrane, and Jasper had been, Flannery was fairly sure, the reason why. They both had on their palates the aftertaste of the meal they had made together, a Moroccan dish, preserved lemon and cardamom, spiced harissa.

  ‘So it’s going to be up to me to negotiate with the trucking company, because the people in Detroit can’t figure it out. It’s only their job, that is their job, but . . . whatever. I can’t trust Baer with it, Christ knows, because he’s got his head up his ass . . .’

  It was an idle gear turning over in Flannery’s literary imagination, the creation of the brownstone haven. Her own private version of a romance novel, and as soft-focused and indulgent. Some people escaped their lives by tracking Hollywood couples through their marriages, infidelities, divorces. Flannery had her fantasy of Jasper and Anne.

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ she invited her husband, the best and quickest way to stop the flow of his
complaints. She had heard enough, and knew the offer would get him to shake off these irritations about assistants and incompetents. It might return him to a better, more cheerful self.

  In her romance novel, the other couple made love on the couch. The two books fell gently to the floor as they reached for one another with hungry, knowing hands, while notes of jazz dreamily suffused the air, like the lingering aroma of cardamom.

  They could resume their reading in the morning. Now they had better things to do.

  42

  How many places can you be while having sex? The possibilities are as infinite as a distracted mind. You can be making childcare arrangements. Or mentally rescreening scenes from a film you watched a few nights before. You might be planning how to get from that hectic unpleasant airport in New York to the university, for the conference. Wondering whether you could leave luggage at the hotel before the room was ready. And. And. When might you see her? When?

  Charles moved on top of Flannery, thrusting himself into and out of her, and though he was single-minded, with a clearly formed goal, he was neither inconsiderate nor clumsy. He paid her the attentions that were due, out of courtesy, and a wish that she would have pleasure, but he was soon on his own trajectory. Flannery considered it her — what, job? Responsibility? — to help her husband get there. She had lost interest, for herself, in making the same journey. She remembered the waypoints, but did not miss them much. At thirty-eight, Flannery’s own sexual satisfaction was far down on the list of items she wanted or felt capable of getting. Willa’s well-being and happiness; space, if she could ever find it again, to tell her stories; good days’ teaching; companionship and conversation with friends. These might be attainable. Sex did not feature in her plans. Flannery thought of the first hothouse months with Charles and their frenetic couplings, or of that majestic, desolate stretch of the Mexican desert where she and Adele had enjoyed their legendarily erotic scene. Both seemed equally fantastic and unlikely to her now. Had Flannery ever actually been that bold? That wet?