‘I’m not sure my young friend would agree with your theory.’
‘Perhaps she wouldn’t. But when she’s older’ — Jasper had the victor’s magnanimity — ‘I expect she’ll come to see it.’
Jasper did not waver from this conception about the non-existence of unrequited love; while Anne was never sure he had convinced her, over their itinerant years, through the move to Atlanta together and later to New York, when NYU hired them both and the couple enjoyed a decade of delicious, conversational life on Bleecker Street, on the twenty-seventh floor. They swore no vows, but they kept their promises, and Jasper was right, it was a flowing, rhythmic system the two of them shared, a relationship others tended to idealize and envy.
Until it stopped.
Jasper sought something different, met someone else, moved somewhere new.
Anne had doubted Jasper’s picture from the safely distant belief that she would never have to explore the question from her own experience; she doubted it from excruciating proximity when he left her. By his definition, the man she had loved for a pair of decades, Anne could not call what she felt for him after that unrequited love. If it hurt to lose him (and yes, it shredded her, hurt like hell as he had said, it was agonizing), that was just the nerve endings of Anne’s pride made raw. Their system had simply ceased. The gears stuck. Jazz discovered in his fifties that he wanted a child, and Anne never did, nor would. Young, French Sophie would have to oblige him.
Yet Anne could not stand alone on the court.
Without Jasper, there was no game.
5
Anne sat with Steven Marovic at a sidewalk cafe on a stony, uneven avenue in Dubrovnik, a wave-inflected light scattered across their faces. Marovic, a bald, bespectacled man with the ambiguous, unscarred face of an operative and an accent inflected by tragedy, had just given a good talk about the famous forts of the beleaguered coastal city, its geologic layers of defense against a shifting set of enemies. It was a matted internecine history, and he was witty and incisive as he threaded through his lecture a few personal stories (his brief encounter, as a young man, with Tito; his uncle’s torture by the fascist Ustaše during the Second World War). Marovic held the alumni rapt. Anne’s subject apparently interested them less, at least the men. Literature was all very well — with its houses and marriages, affairs and inheritances — but history was real. Assassinations, wars, religious persecution. Walls, graves, ruins. What could be realer? Pages in a book?
The two of them sat companionably, sipping espressos, enjoying for a moment a break from their professional duties. A violin and cello duo began playing at a cleared area near their table, and Marovic’s face brightened.
‘Bach,’ he noted, then looked embarrassed, as if perhaps this were too obvious. He suddenly seized up with a shy silence. Anne could have that effect on people.
When someone made the flutter of their ruffling evident to Anne, her core tended to harden, and the scrim came down. It was like an involuntary climate change within her. She became still, cat-like, and her wide eyes gazed at the other as though at a different sort of creature, something small and furred that knew it was prey. She could not, quite, help it. Now that she was single, she should try to change this internal mechanism, but did not know how to.
Jasper had not quailed at this power of Anne’s, and for that she had adored him. He was the same size as Anne, as she saw from their first encounter. Not physically, of course; he was birch-tall and sturdy to Anne’s curved and petite, so she could lean against him in the moments she felt frail. Species-wise, though, she and Jasper were the same. Each knew the role of the mesmerizer. It was not a gimmick exactly, as it required the willed submission of the other, student or acolyte, colleague or lover, who gave themselves over by choice. Jasper and Anne’s particular alchemy came from the fact that when they met neither one lost their sense of self, or dissolved. There was no submission.
Anne remembered this as she watched Marovic, ostensibly gazing out at the musicians, absorbing Bach’s intricate tonal patterns. His strong head looked sculpted, with a few surprising juttings and indentations, as if made by an artist with an impressionist flair, and Anne saw how someone would find him attractive. (What had Margaret hinted at? Marital trouble, Anne recalled. It was why Steven was traveling wifeless.) She felt the confused heat from the man now and noted the sweat darkening under his arms. He would not hold Anne’s gaze, though she had seen his eyes darting to her shirt’s low opening.
Anne folded her arms across her chest and closed her eyes for a moment. She was not yet ready for that kind of attention. Not from him.
‘I was thinking of West’s line about Dubrovnik,’ she offered. ‘Calling it “a city on a coin”.’
‘West!’ Marovic appreciated the diversion. Perhaps he was self-conscious about the sweat, the suggestive heat, and sought escape from it. ‘She is essential, of course, though an apologist for the Serbs. I referred to her briefly.’
‘Yes — it was a good talk. I like the inscription on the fortress . . .’
‘“Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro.”’ He patted the back of his neck with a wrinkled handkerchief. ‘“Freedom is not sold for all the gold in the world.”’ The r in ‘world’ rolled in his throat, a hinted thunder.
‘That’s it.’ Anne smiled in acknowledgment. She kept herself still, uninviting, while wondering if Jasper mesmerized his new wife, or if they were equals as he and Anne had been.
‘Tell me more’ — Anne improvised, to draw her mind elsewhere, and Marovic’s too. She shivered slightly, in the Dalmatian sun — ‘about your heroic uncle.’
6
It was the last full day on board, and they were headed toward Ravenna. For her closing performance Anne had chosen a heather-gray tailored shirt that cast a cool light on her auburn hair, and a steel-blue pencil skirt: she wanted to look smart, in all senses.
Anne had never understood the stereotype about frumpy academics, men in leather-elbowed corduroy jackets or women in shapeless skirts and baggy sweaters. Jasper would not have let a corduroy jacket across the threshold of their apartment, and disdained in equal measure tennis shoes and the clunky brown boots favored by some of his colleagues. ‘Ron Edwards wears those,’ he said to Anne once, gesturing to a pair, when they were shopping in Soho. (Jasper had liked to shop for clothes with Anne, a fact that caused Margaret to protest, when Anne mentioned it, ‘Are we sure he’s a man?’)
‘It makes him look like some bleak character out of Beckett,’ Jasper continued. ‘Perhaps that is how he feels,’ Anne suggested mildly, and Jasper had had to agree that after Ron’s interminable tenure review, this was possible.
Anne had to stop thinking about Jasper. The sting might have dulled somewhat since he left two years before, yet the image of Jazz’s angled smile of greeting, wearing one of his striped shirts — magenta aligned with turquoise, or mauve with ochre — gave Anne a sudden grief-seizure, that phantom limb pain. Americans Abroad: just don’t mention the ones living in France with their new wives.
She stepped closer to the mirror above the walnut dresser and applied slate liner and smoky shadow around her gold-green eyes, a plum shaping on her lips.
The knock on the door came as Anne smoothed a last concealing fingertip over the grooves in her skin, where anger or laughter preferred to dwell. That her years showed had begun to bother Anne, but not as much as the fact that her face reminded her more and more of her mother’s. Irène Arden had died in June at the hospice, angry and unaccepting, attended by Catholic nurses, and though Anne remained certain she did not mourn her, embittered as their relationship had been, still she found her expressions now taking on the slant and accent of Irène’s. It made her feel haunted.
‘Yes.’ She pulled herself away from the mirror to break the spell. ‘Come in.’
At the door stood the pert German purser Charlotte. Trim and tidy in her dark uniform, she wore
her hair boyishly short, and a slight smirk that Anne read alternately as playful or impertinent. Charlotte had been flirting with Anne over these several days, in the galley outside the dining room or in a chat on one of the dapple-lit decks, and Anne, entertained, had flirted right back.
‘Good morning, professor.’ Even the salutation had a suggestive edge, though that might simply have been the slant of her Teutonic accent.
‘Good morning, Charlotte.’ A slight raise of her eyebrow. ‘Can I help you?’
Charlotte looked down.
‘Ah, no. I’m to help you.’ Her Bavarian cheeks had cherried a deeper red, bright against her black hair. ‘We’re to confirm where you’d like your luggage sent when we dock in Venice. You’re not staying on with the group . . . ?’
‘For the Venetian Postlude?’ Anne and Margaret had joked about the suggestive phrase, but she thought better of trying to translate that for Charlotte. ‘No. I’m going to stay for a few days at a flat in Cannaregio.’ There was a beat, to allow an instant of fantasy. ‘With my sister, who’s coming to join me.’
‘All right.’ Charlotte nodded properly. ‘If you give us the address, we can have a taxi waiting at the dock to help you there with your luggage.’
‘I’ll find it. It’s in my email.’ Anne collected her books and papers and placed them in a leather satchel, though she had only to travel half a ship length to deliver her talk. Still, the gathering was part of how she prepared. Anne felt calmer when organized. ‘And you?’ she asked. ‘Do you have any time off to enjoy Venice?’
‘Two nights. Then back to the Stella Maris, and we’ll retrace the journey in the other direction. With an English group — we’ll have to make sure we have enough beer on board.’
‘Our replacements.’ Anne empathized. ‘Like classes of students at the end of a semester: all those names and faces you’ve learned and then have to forget, to clear space for the next lot.’
‘Yes. Some quite happily forgotten.’ Charlotte allowed a subtle eye roll, and Anne laughed. There had been passengers who were demanding, or complaining, or both. There always were. Students, too. ‘But then there are some –’ the dashing German very nearly clicked her heels, as she took her leave of Anne, though her voice dropped suddenly, for emphasis — ‘we will remember.’
7
Anne stopped in to the ship’s ‘library’, an elegant, contained space where in spite of its name books were less in evidence than electronic devices, as passengers unfolded their laptops or unsleeved their tablets and reconnected with the worlds they pretended to have left behind. Escape the flurry of everyday life as you travel in luxurious comfort aboard our star of the sea, the brochure had encouraged, yet people did not really want to escape that flurry, in Anne’s experience. Wi-fi anxiety was cross-generational, and the people around Anne were nearly as wired as the twenty-year-olds at NYU. Few on the ship were taking time out on the canvas deckchairs to pen postcards, Anne noticed, though most did come to the library to check their email. The world of The Aspern Papers was more imaginable to these alumni, who must have distinct memories, at least, of correspondences that required ink and paper, and left behind tangible objects, cards and letters, in boxes stored in dusty attics.
Anne’s simple task was to find the address of the apartment she had rented for Tricia and herself; however, having opened her email, it was impossible for Anne not to notice a subject head on a note from Margaret. It wouldn’t hurt (Anne glanced at the laptop’s clock; she still had time) to read it.
From:Margaret Carter
Subject: Women Write The World
Hi there, dear A. Hope the sea breezes are relaxing you and you have discovered your inner sailor.
So that’s a good title, isn’t it? Women Write the World? But is the line descriptive or prescriptive? Perhaps you can help us decide! I’m sorry to interrupt your idyll, and I am eager to know whether Prof. Marovic has helped you find your sea legs, ahem. But more than that I’m trying to finalize the list of names for the conference we’re organizing in October. Could I possibly persuade you to moderate a panel, lending your elegant celebrity to the event? (Flattery will get you everywhere . . .)
So far we have some good people. Melissa Green of The Times and the Poet Laureate, our very own Lisa Sahel Jefferson. We need a few younger names on the roster, though, so this too doesn’t turn into a Journey Around the Geriatric. (Sorry, but hey, you started it.) Can you let me know a) if you’re in, as moderator, and b) if you can think of anyone under forty (no offense to all of us who are pushing fifty or in my case have ACTUALLY PASSED it) who would be good to invite? Thank you. Yours faithfully, forever in your debt, hoping you’ll have a limoncello for me, etc. . . .
M xox
Anne stared at the letter for a long moment, while her thoughts wandered over old territory. Flattery will get you everywhere. Writers under forty. Graduates of that university. Women.
She could think of one, yes. Possibly a flicker of the energy Charlotte had carried into Anne’s cabin brought this person to mind. Possibly the thought of her, recently, was less far away. A woman Anne once knew. Like a piece of polished sea glass, the name was there, surfacing above all the other students, the numberless undergraduates she had known. That memorable color catching her eye amidst the many bland grains of sand in her mind.
Flannery Jansen.
Surely it wouldn’t hurt to suggest her?
8
She was a fetching girl, and she had touched Anne in a place Anne had not been touched. Even by Jasper.
A bonnie lass. Anne liked ‘bonnie’ because it sounded sunny and golden as Flannery Jansen was, on the surface, and the word had a fairy tale, yesteryear resonance which matched the girl’s otherworldly quality.
Girl! She was not out of her teens, for God’s sake. Look at you, babe! Anne sometimes wanted to say when Flannery had been clever, but she came to see that that head-patting impulse had to be resisted. Because Flannery was smart, too; very smart. You did not want to underestimate her intelligence or her resilience. Both were deeper than they seemed on first appearance.
First appearance. Anne and Flannery met at a diner, a tiny, no-frills joint near the campus, since transformed into a print shop, though its perky name, The Yankee Doodle, lived on in T-shirts sold at the college bookstore. Strictly speaking, the two women saw each other there but did not meet. Anne had been reading, over a cup of coffee, a book required for the comp lit class for which she would be assistant teaching. Into the diner came a tall, fair student, half ducking as if to apologize for her height, a general air about her of having run away from home and being down to the last few dollars in her wallet. But beautiful. She looked around, bewildered — no make-up or adornment on, which made it easier to appreciate her smooth skin, the curved fall of her buttery hair, and the darting, unmistakable look of hunger she threw Anne’s way after she sat down. It was a diverting paradox: she was checking Anne out without realizing she was doing it. Staring at Anne, then turning away, blushing, unable to finish her breakfast. Anne had tossed a teasing joke her way, and the stranger had fled, like a frightened deer.
Anne had returned to her reading, her concentration altered.
She saw the stuttery, pretty girl a few days later in one of the sections she was teaching for the comp lit class. There she learned her improbable name: Flannery. That this apparently self-effacing person should be saddled with a name so ostentatious was amusing enough, but when it turned out that the young Flannery wanted to write, too, it was hard not to smile. Might this flaxen-haired Californian not have opted for something less loaded, career-wise, further from her nominal home — animal husbandry, say? Civil engineering? To their mutual relief, Flannery transferred out of Anne’s section, without which move none of the rest might have followed. Anne probably teased her about that move, too.
Anne had not been at her best at that time. She was trying to claw her way
out of graduate school, completing a doctoral thesis which she had been told was ‘potentially’ brilliant but required an undivided attention she did not have to give it. The split from Jasper had given relief and grief in equal measure: Anne had been finding Jasper overbearing, somehow too much to manage, but their separation nonetheless had left her brittle and unbending, like some soft confection that hardened in the air as it cooled. Anne had to hand only a small amount of patience and a vast sum of sarcasm.
But Flannery Jansen, that cute crushed-out freshman, developed an infatuation for Anne and was too inexperienced to hide it. Teacher-love, if not the oldest story in the book, was certainly one from a tattered, dog-eared edition, and Anne was familiar with its generic conventions. These crushes generally faded, if you left them alone, like an untended fruit that ripens then dies on the vine. Yet watching this young woman go through the motions — trying to hide, yet somehow often being in the same places Anne was, the all-night convenience store, the campus book shop, the library, of course, making a flicker of eye contact then looking, pinkened, away — stirred something in Anne, awakened a tenderness in her. As she finally prepared to leave Yale, she was moved by a naive and lovely newcomer who scarcely seemed to understand where she had landed. Both were outsiders to the place, though Anne had gone deep in the hiding of her roots. The two women were ships passing in the New Haven night. Anne Arden was almost gone, heading west to teach, and here was this eager young thing trying to blend in, not yet with success, to the bristling East Coast.
For a while, Anne’s feeling seemed big sisterish — Look at that poor kid! Someone needs to talk to her – but there came an evening, that fall, when Anne recognized that Flannery was an adult, not a child. At a raucous off-campus party, a mixture of grads and undergrads, Anne saw a lithe, tank-topped Flannery dancing, and the rhythms of Flannery’s hips and her long limbs entranced Anne, and opened her to a risky possibility.
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