Charles murmured a few endearments afterwards, told her she was beautiful, exhaled scotch and satisfaction into Flannery’s ear, then fell into a heavy sleep.
Flannery breathed.
Not in tandem with Charles, or with anyone. She lay awake for a while, jumpy. Sex with Charles tended now to leave her this way: restless, seeking some other form of fulfilment. That picture she had of Anne and Jasper’s languorous lovemaking on the couch still warmed her imagination, and Flannery found herself with the dangerous, prurient urge to browse.
She reached for her phone. Why not? Where was the harm? She googled Jasper Elliott, to see if his image, even if older, matched the one she had still in her mind. Perhaps she would find him, as if by telepathic magic, dozing away on a comfortable sofa, curled up fondly in the arms of his Anne. A cozy photoshoot for the New York Times.
Flannery already knew some recent items about Anne: she had published another book; authored introductions to a set of reprinted Cather novels; was listed as faculty on one of those alumni cruises around scenic European waterways (Italy and Croatia). But what about Jasper Elliott? How had he aged?
Flannery’s pale face was illuminated by the cell phone’s silvery green, as if by an underwater light. She sat up in bed next to the snoring bulk of Charles, and she tapped and scrolled. Ghost-hued, she furrowed her brow, as she read the fine print more closely.
Teaches at the École Normale, Paris.
Paris, that must be a commute for them — New York to Paris. Well, Flannery could imagine that, too, one great city twinned with another, each academic the master or mistress of the realm. Shall we meet in New York in October? Actually, love, it would be better if you came to Paris, this time. We can walk along the Seine together . . .
Lives with his wife and two sons.
The light flickered, or perhaps Flannery’s vision did. That could not be right. Wife and sons. How could that be? Wife and sons — in Paris?
No, not sons. There were never going to be children. Not for Anne. That had been a certainty pure, hard and clear as a diamond, right at the heart of her.
If there were sons, Flannery knew, then Jasper Elliott’s wife could not be Anne.
1
Americans Abroad.
They were too innocent, or not innocent enough. Falling in love, or recovering from heartbreak. They sought a cultured break from the moneyed jumble they had come from in New York or Boston, hoping to trade that in for the suaver soothe of European history and art. Television programs were made of such stories now — rich American Cora bailing out hapless Lord Grantham, while their mostly well-meaning servants served, and strove — but in a previous era these encounters and exchanges had been the stuff of novels.
And novels were the stuff of Anne Arden’s work.
Anne’s fingers paused on the laptop keys, touching them lightly. Ready to tap out the words of her next thought.
She sipped her coffee, and licked its bitter taste off her lips.
Anne was preparing a talk, but not for her usual New York University undergrads. This, the Stella Maris, was a floating classroom for an older set. When she looked out the window here, instead of the silvered icons of Wall Street or the squirrel colors, browns and grays, of Greenwich Village, which was the view from her desk at home on the twenty-seventh floor, Anne saw the shifting labradorite surface of the Adriatic.
The ship, an elegant vessel, sailed with stately grace toward Dubrovnik, its next port of call. By now, over halfway through the six-day voyage, Anne could anticipate its rhythms and noises the way she might a lover’s — the way of turning from side to side, the feel of a body subsiding into sleep. Though she hid her roots well and had erased any trace of the original Michigan in her accent, Anne had retained the Midwesterner’s wariness about the ocean and had not expected to enjoy this journey. Yet she was developing a fondness for the Stella Maris, and had almost gotten over her frank shock at the physical pleasure of being on board. It was as though at forty-eight Anne had been given chocolate to taste for the first time, or introduced to a new sensual experience. Now I understand what people have been talking about.
The phrase ‘super yacht’ might invoke images of playboy politicians or Russian oligarchs, but traveling with Anne on the Stella Maris was a more prosaic mix of faculty, crew and alumni passengers, primarily Americans. It was for the latter that Anne was shaping the talk she was to deliver the next day. She intended to share a scattering of European light from fictions of Edith Wharton and Henry James: American Italophiles who in life as well as art knew their way around the churches and gardens, the beckoning decadence and old-world charms of Rome and Florence — and Venice, the ultimate destination of the Stella Maris. Anne planned to draw on a lesser-known Wharton novel that included a cruise ship meeting and scenes on the Venice Lido, and James’s The Aspern Papers, with its avid scholar pursuing an old woman and her cache of invaluable letters from her long-ago lover. Romantic missives of younger selves from an early, life-shaping passion: it was good material.
Anne’s hands hovered over the keys as her memory briefly hovered, too, over her own earlier loves. Laptop dancing, Jasper had once called it as a joke, the tapping out of sentences by Anne’s lithe fingers. She was fast and dexterous, translating her thoughts onto the screen.
Americans Abroad. They had revelations while away from home. They found themselves, or lost themselves. Whichever was to be preferred.
Whichever made for the better story.
2
‘I’ve never cruised,’ Anne demurred during the previous December, when her friend Margaret Carter first suggested it. Margaret was calling Anne from Yale, where she taught and where Anne had received her doctorate, twenty years before. It was a place Anne nicknamed the Lock, out of an innate reluctance to show off its old New Haven name, one that brought Bushes to mind, and Clintons.
‘I wouldn’t know how,’ Anne added. ‘I don’t have the outfits — or the attitude.’
‘I thought that before I did it, too. You’ll adapt.’ Margaret, herself long married, was one of those friends who had been lately urging Anne to get out more. ‘Though I was on the North Sea when I cruised — hardly “sun-kissed”, as this one will be. It says so in the description.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Anyway, you can acquire both,’ Margaret encouraged her. ‘Attitude and outfits.’
‘Pale linen jackets? Chanel scarves?’
‘Exactly. You’ll look fabulous.’
Anne considered. She knew what Margaret was doing; Anne’s friends at NYU were attempting the same. Anne’s partner of a couple of decades, Jasper Elliott — Jazz, as he was to her — had left her the year before, and the hopeful helpers were lining up to try to fill the Jazz-shaped hole in Anne’s life with travel, activities, outings. Men.
Anne found that she did not necessarily want the time or space filled, however. The benevolent friends had it a bit wrong. Sometimes — not all the time, granted, but a good deal of the time — she was enjoying the newfound silence in her Bleecker Street apartment, and the hours alone led to new ideas. Solitude consoled. In its way.
‘Don’t you have to talk to people non-stop on these things? I’m not at my most sociable these days.’
‘You’ll have a nice cabin to retreat to.’
‘I don’t know. It all sounds a little . . .’ Anne sought the right word. ‘Nautical.’
Margaret laughed. ‘“A Voyage Around the Adriatic”? I’m not going to lie to you, Professor Arden. You’ll be on a ship.’
‘That’s my point.’
‘But ships are relaxing! Why do you think all the old folk do it?’
‘Perfect: A Voyage Around the Geriatric.’
‘Now, now, missy. We’re all getting there.’ Margaret was in her early fifties, and sometimes liked to play the head girl. Not many people attempted that with Anne, and she loved Margaret for it.
‘They won’t all be geriatric on this one. It’s rated as “moderately active” — there are walks around Byzantine churches, and old walled cities. Besides, you end in Venice. Or, as they call it, Serenissima.’
Anne snorted. Her laptop was open while she spoke on the phone, so she did a nanosecond of research. ‘Hmm. 2013 will be a year for the Biennale. Perhaps my sister could join me in Venice — she’ll need a vacation by then. She’s been looking after our unbeloved mother.’
Anne’s sister Patricia, who still lived near Detroit, had the stationary sibling’s task of tending the ageing parents, though now only their mother was left. Mild Frank Arden had died, bitten round the edges by Alzheimer’s, a few years earlier, of a massive stroke, leaving bad-tempered, dependent Irène, whose heart was failing too. They had been an unmoneyed pair, not people who took educational cruises around Europe.
‘Good idea.’ Margaret sounded satisfied. ‘Shall I tell Steven Marovic you’ll do it? He’s an interesting man, by the way. Was a politician in Croatia in his early life, before he became a historian. He’s probably buried a body or two.’
Anne was not fully listening; she was in a dark winter apartment in New York, imagining a hot, crowded August in Venice. By then, Jasper’s new twins would be a year old. (Not that Anne was tracking such things.) In their years together, he had been the couple’s assigned map-reader and logistics sorter. Where to stay, how to get there. Across the blank new sheets of Anne’s summers and breaks, Anne was learning to author her own holidays.
‘Thanks, Margaret. For thinking of me.’ People were trying to fix this for Anne. It was good of them. Even if it was unfixable. ‘Yes. Tell Steven I’ll do it.’
3
How had he loved Anne? He used to count the ways. For her to do it would have been vanity, and Anne loathed vanity — in part because she knew she had it, like a mercury trace, within her.
He loved her appearance. He called her exquisite, stunning, ravishing — Jasper was old school, in his chivalry and his vocabulary. He loved her body, showering it with praises and caresses. He invented nonsense names in French for his favorite parts of her, and tended them devotedly. When they were separated, he said, he felt the emptiness next to him as a concavity, and a moral hollow.
A cinephile, Jasper reached for leading lady comparisons. The names changed with the slant of Anne’s haircut, which film they had recently watched. Though he favored redheads like her. ‘What are you up to, Huppert?’ Coming up behind Anne as she worked at her desk, and planting a kiss on her inviting neck. Or: ‘You were doing your Sarandon, and he couldn’t resist you,’ humorously, after they went out for sushi with another couple and he saw Anne flirting, meaning no harm. In a somber period — Anne was susceptible to lightless stretches, a thick curtain falling across her mood — Jasper once compared her to Piaf.
He loved Anne’s capacity for truth. Not just the intellectual truth in her work, but emotional truth, without which the other would have been empty anyway.
‘Don’t lie to me,’ Jasper said very early on, in the first months they were together, when Anne was still a graduate student, he a new professor. ‘Lying erases the other, diminishes him. You don’t need to do it.’ His voice was gentle, not chiding, though pitched as instruction rather than request. ‘I can take the truth from you. It’s what I want.’
Anne came from a home where secrecy and evasion had worked better than openness, so it took her some time to understand something different. It was a geological act, to realign habits and self-protections she had learned from fraught years in her family. ‘Lying,’ she told Jasper, ‘was the best revenge, with my mother.’ But gradually, like a child learning to play an instrument, Anne found she could present Jasper with truths, even those she had expected would alarm him. Hidden pettinesses she felt were unworthy. (‘I’m afraid I often do judge people by their shoes.’) The times in her life she had injured others. (‘When I broke my mother’s beautiful china vase, not only did I deny doing it, but I allowed her to punish both of us, though Patricia had nothing to do with it. Of course, only I got the beating.’) Her ambition, a difficult admission. Yes, she was gratified when people knew her name and her work.
Jasper loved her anyway, he assured her, all the more for Anne’s honest accounts, even of what was not beautiful within her. He absorbed her stories, whether they took her to pain or pleasure. ‘It is all part of our knowing each other. I’m not frightened of who you were before we met, or who you might become. I hope you feel the same about me.’
A few years passed before Anne could receive this grace from Jasper, and return it. But she did, slowly, come to feel known, forgiven, and granted emotional shelter; and to feel the same way about Jasper. Anne respected the boy he had been, from a prominent Amherst family; admired the college student who studied for a year in Aix-en-Provence, which ignited his passion for France and the French; and had no reason to fear the man he would become, as he grew into his academic life with her.
Though that last, finally, proved a confidence misplaced.
4
Requited.
Unrequited.
‘Define your terms,’ Jasper said.
They were driving from Albuquerque toward Taos the first time they had this conversation, and they revisited the question across the years and geographies — in Atlanta, Paris, New York — unhappily. That first time, Jasper wore mirrored sunglasses as he drove the sports car he had rented for their trip, and though Anne was unsure whether or not this showing off was ironic, she was falling in love with him again, in any case.
‘Define them? You know what they mean.’ She had to speak loudly over the road noise. Anne loved arguing with Jasper, who was never offended or put off by her challenges. They could talk about anything. It was like exercise: essential. ‘Requited love is mutual. Unrequited isn’t. Heartbreak occurs when love is unrequited. These are in Love 101, these terms. You’ll find them on the handout.’
‘No. It’s a flawed glossary.’ Light poured over Jasper, over them both, the alabaster southwestern light that meant a sudden storm was an hour off, or less. ‘There is no such thing as unrequited love. It’s a logical impossibility.’
Anne lifted her own shades a moment to fix her eyes on him skeptically. ‘Explain.’
‘Certainly.’ He was enjoying himself. To be in love, he declared, was to create a beautiful system, a call and response, a treasuring and a being treasured. Mutuality was at the heart of it. The system did not work unless both people were in it: the gears otherwise did not move, the belt did not turn. ‘You can’t have a tennis match with just one person,’ was his concluding analogy. (Jasper watched hours of the sport, was an avid Agassi fan in that era.) ‘It’s not tennis. It’s just a person standing alone on a court, holding a racket.’
‘So how do you explain heartbreak?’ she asked. ‘Lovesickness? Poetry? Decades of sad country songs? The blues?’
‘Ah,’ he had said with relish, and the private smile he showed when Anne offered him a question he had hoped she would.
He had thought about this, of course. As a French historian, he had to know his way around the subject of love. The figures in his narratives struggled and succumbed, just as literary characters did. Napoleon and Josephine. Louis and Marie-Antoinette.
‘Because that sensation — that pain — does not come from love,’ Jazz said. Jasper’s hair, longish then, was blowing across his forehead from a partially opened window, giving him a wild look. ‘It’s wounded pride. Pride is a very sensitive organ, and it hurts like hell when it has taken a hit. The bruises last, and from them people write sad songs. And poems. The wailing of a battered ego.’
Anne considered this. ‘All right.’ There was a difficult issue between them to discuss, and they were heading right at it. Recalling his exhortations to seek the truth, she held course. ‘So for these past months, when we were not together, there was no moment of unrequited . . .
yearning?’
‘No. There couldn’t have been.’ Jasper spoke calmly, as if their having spent a year apart did not worry him. They had recently reunited, and Jasper exuded confidence. ‘Besides, the decision to split was mutual.’
‘True.’ Anne looked out at the scrub-scattered mesa for a few moments of recollection. Yes, it had been mutual. The two of them had hit edges and coldnesses in each other that could not, it seemed, be softened or warmed, and decided to uncouple. In that time they had each found romance elsewhere: Jasper had a fling with a voluptuous Italian chef (‘I don’t need the details,’ Anne had told him, firmly), while Anne, in the late stages of dissertation writing, fell into a hothouse swoon with a smart and pretty undergraduate.
They approached an exit for the sanctuary in Chimayo, a place famous for its solace. ‘I’m not saying we didn’t ache.’ As the car slowed, Jasper spoke in a quieter voice. He raised his mirrored shades to wipe away a grain of sand or salt, and for a moment Anne saw his azure, expressive eyes and knew that he could still feel that ache, however cavalier he appeared to be. ‘Though each of us did find another woman to comfort us.’ He gave a wry smile. Anne believed it was her Sapphic excursion that had stirred the embers of Jasper’s jealousy. As if he heard her thought, he added, ‘Then I decided it was time to try to set our beautiful system in motion, again.’ Jasper had worked, artfully and successfully, to draw Anne back to him. And here they were.
That pretty undergraduate. Anne sighed, with a sadness she chose not to translate. Flannery had come all the way to Albuquerque from New Haven, poor reckless thing, hoping to surprise Anne back into her arms. The thought of their painful encounter made Anne wince. Anne knew that Jasper would never concern himself with what that lovely young woman was like; how bright she was, how surprisingly fierce the spark within her; how passionate she had been.
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