The two women traded verse and wordplay, drinks and banter. Anne loaned her young friend a book of poetry. She was flirting, and did not pretend to herself she wasn’t, but neither did she expect it to lead anywhere other than perhaps to a brief, sweet fling.
Flannery kept deepening, though. She continued to get older, and bolder. She had the courage to bare herself to the core, make the ultimate offering. She wrote a poem for Anne, then waited in a dawn train station to give it to the object of her devotion, before Anne headed to New York City for Thanksgiving break. ‘Pages for You’. Remember?
When Anne read the poem, alone in a Metro-North carriage, she felt that steel clench of significance. Someone is giving you something, here. Pay attention. This young woman whom Anne hardly knew was willing to risk — embarrassment, revelation, mistake — in order to communicate to Anne that she loved her. And wanted her. There was no way to look at this offering and mock. Or turn away, even. By the time the train reached New York, Anne had determined to call Flannery (there were no cell phones; the world did not yet email) to invite the young woman to come to the city so they could meet.
Anne realized that ‘Pages for You’ could be thought of as an innocent’s error too, an adolescent overstepping. She wrote you a poem? Come on! But it wasn’t a mistake. This wise and sometimes still foolish young woman had done the right thing. Flannery’s intricate words were her own; and then Anne’s; and then theirs.
Anne told Jasper about Flannery, later. The women’s hot winter passion, their spring cooling, a March vacation to Florida that went pretty badly wrong, with storms and sunburn and blistered tempers. But Anne never mentioned the poem Flannery had written. She did not want to have to show it to Jasper. Not out of shame, or for that matter pride, but simply from a sense that the heart of what happened between the lovers was private, entirely, and should not be shared.
It was a gift, those months she had had with Flannery.
And they belonged just to the two of them.
9
‘When Americans went abroad in 1820 there was something romantic, almost heroic in it, as compared with the perpetual ferryings of the present hour, the hour at which photography and other conveniences have annihilated surprise.’
Anne wrote this sentence in her neat sloped hand across a whiteboard on which lingered the ghosts of consonant-thick Slavic names from Marovic’s lecture the day before. Now, as the Stella Maris crossed the Adriatic back to Italy, it was time for Anne and her Europhile Americans.
She stood, exercising her gift of stillness, while they gathered. There was an art to this too: to waiting. In order not to have to engage in chatter as they entered, Anne regarded the faux-yellowed maps that hung on the lounge’s tasteful ochre walls. The Mediterranean, the Baltic, the Adriatic. So many seas!
The passengers fluttered in and settled like birds — a parliament of owls, a scold of jays. There were some of each. Among the owls, a famous diminutive psychoanalyst and her besotted second husband, a pepper-bearded man who bore a more than passing resemblance to Sigmund Freud. (It was impossible not to notice.) They were a cultured pair and engaged readers, and Anne had written a portion of her lecture with them, particularly Barbara, in mind. Then there were the two women companions from Maine, one pulling a draped rose cardigan closer over her shoulders, the other holding underarm a half-written-over legal pad, as if on her way into a city council meeting. Settling in to two of the yellow leather chairs were the good-humored Knudsens (timber money; Anne recognized the name), a couple modest about their wealth and their learning, from whom Anne hoped still to keep the fact that she, too, was from Michigan.
Then, the jays. Entering theatrically with his cane, more prop than necessity, was a Tennesseean named Winter, a retired tobacco lawyer, whose egg-white hair was combed in even strips across his florid forehead and whose knowledge of antiquity came largely from the novels of Gore Vidal, to whom he was distantly related. Anne could have done without Winter’s joking interjections and wandering hand, which had a way of finding one’s forearm (and once, at a lunch table, her thigh) but preferred them to the abrasive voice of the implausibly dark-haired film executive from Los Angeles, whose wife had the distracted eye of an alcoholic, watching the clock for the next drinks hour as if waiting for a train. Last to arrive, walking slowly and with a slight limp to a chair near Anne, was an imposing Austrian woman in a previous century’s floral dress, her expression ever a mixture of haughty skepticism and intellectual curiosity.
It was a mostly energetic, outward-looking group, whose years of experience gave them peculiar advantages in a discussion of, say, the nature of envy, or regret. In classrooms at home, Anne was used to her students representing a place she had once been (young, striving, proving; confronting urgent dilemmas of the self ), rather than a place she might be going (older, having striven, having proved; confronting the prospect of death). Orphaned, Anne had no one standing between her and the grave now. She was turning fifty in a couple of years, a waypoint she dreaded — she had not needed Margaret’s joking reminder. An English colleague of Anne’s, an older man, once warned her, ‘Watch out for fifty. It does your head in.’ She could not shake that line from her mind.
It was time to start talking.
‘More than a hundred years before Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, people were already beginning to feel that the adventure of travel was over,’ Anne began, wondering who in the room might know what Instagram was. She turned back to the quotation on the board.
Henry James, The Aspern Papers. She paused, then added: 1887.
Chuckles bubbled up from Winter and the analysts. The Austrian looked grave. One of the Maine women jotted down the quotation and the date.
‘It wasn’t, of course, over,’ Anne said. Her lucid emerald gaze met that of her listeners. ‘The adventure of Venice — of discovery — was not over then, and it’s not over now.’
Professor Arden had their attention, and they were ready to believe her.
10
It was the farewell dinner aboard the Stella Maris. Laughter, conversation, and alcohol overflowed, a rivulet of flirtations and indiscretions. From shore, onlookers might watch the vessel alight, alive, and speculate about those who animated her. Anne was seated at the captain’s table, a phrase that brought to mind images of Bette Davis in Now, Voyager or some other forties film in black and white, though the captain himself, a chiseled Swede named Sven Magnusson, was nicely in color and right beside her. Marovic was on Anne’s other side, flushed and lively after a couple of potent cocktails, and patrician Winter a safe distance across, where his heavy paw had most likelihood of landing on Austrian Greta, who, now brightened with blue eyeshadow and some form of schnapps, looked like she might not mind.
Marovic had found a Californian lawyer and his wife, also of Croatian ancestry, with whom he was trading stories about foods and family members, striking the occasional tart note about his soon-to-be ex-wife. Over the earlier cocktails, Anne had heard more about the historian’s unfortunate, drawn-out divorce, details she did not feel obliged to track, though she felt empathy for Marovic on his effortful path toward liberation.
Magnusson was, by contrast, chivalrous on the subject of his wife in Gothenburg. A broad-faced, weather-tanned man with a kind mouth edged by a short silvered beard, the captain attracted Anne, his understated Scandinavian humor appealed to her, and though she believed the aquavit tint in his eyes had no real intent, she leaned in as he spoke to her of his many travels. He was telling her a well-practiced tale about a trip to Patagonia with a batch of American adventurers (‘So sure they knew everything — and that they were immortal!’), and she allowed herself a vivid moment to imagine his wide hands holding her in that mobile rhythm of the ship he knew and guided. A Voyage Around the Adriatic. Well, you had to be allowed such fantasies; wasn’t that what these journeys were for? The aquavit had loosened Anne, too.
All over the
ship the married passengers did carry on as flirtatious as, if not more so than, those who were single. There was something about marriage that pushed its inhabitants into a state of tense, never to be satisfied anticipation — a dog straining on the leash, the dish just out of reach.
Had Anne resisted marriage because her mother’s and father’s was so miserable, or was it her sister Patricia’s wedding when she was much too young that had put Anne off? Anne had been too embarrassed to bring Jasper to Detroit for the occasion, and was relieved that he had missed the flowers and dress-up and ornate rites of the Catholic mass, performed over a union it seemed likely would end in alcoholic divorce — as it did, a decade later. Perhaps, Anne considered recently, as she tried to reshape her understanding of her own decisions, it had been magical thinking on her part — her irrational hope of inoculating herself against heartbreak — but seeing these ‘train wrecks of marriages’ in her family made Anne determined not to have one herself. For his part, though in their first several years Jasper raised the question with Anne, he seemed to settle happily on this rebellion against his class and background, in the form of their undocumented partnership. ‘No papers,’ Jasper and Anne told each other solemnly. They were not hippies or free spirits, but felt they were acting with integrity. ‘No legalities. Just trust, and honesty — and love.’
So Anne and Jazz had not married, and Anne had not regretted it. They shared companionship, domesticity, sex, loyalty, encouragement, affection, forgiveness; but never marriage.
Nothing inoculated you, though. Nothing kept you safe from heartbreak. Anne looked around at the energetic exchanges on the Stella Maris and knew that some flirtations that night would damage marriages, and others would not. She smiled deafly at a joke delivered with great hilarity at the captain’s table. Anne had missed it.
Nothing, she now knew, made you immune.
11
Serenissima.
They sailed toward Venice. It was the sixth and ultimate day, and Anne was, the daily printed schedule informed her, at sea. ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ she muttered to the sheet, alone in her cabin. ‘No need to remind me.’ How pervasive nautical metaphors were in the language of adventure and return, security and its opposite: adrift, at sea, tossed on the waves; or anchored, ashore, safe harbor. Run aground. Sunk. Iceberg dead ahead.
Which was she, now? Forty-eight and parentless, mateless. Was Anne free, or unmoored?
She could not decide. It depended on the day. Anne could feel either.
She had been told — by the captain the night before, in a voice that might have been poetic or simply practical, Anne could not tell — that it was difficult at first to feel your legs firm on land again, even if you had been disembarking and going ashore during the journey. That, of course, was another part of the lure of the cruise: the lyrical, floating suspension away from reality, the willful turning away from the earth of every day. Anne was looking forward to having solid ground underfoot again; though rejoining the real world, somewhat less.
Which made Venice the right place to conclude her voyage, a city that was anyway half water, and half magic. In Venice, with her sister, Anne would reacquaint herself with the rhythms of regular life, though still in the heightened, near-imaginary environment of that city.
Having time to herself would be a relief. By now Anne had become wearied by shipboard existence, especially its social demands. She had predicted correctly that she would have little appetite for the Stella Maris’s many small talk exchanges, which moved inexorably toward questions about her romantic and family life. Having, and even avoiding, such conversations brought with it a particular emotional lag in Anne; and conferences produced this same sensation. She enjoyed dialogue on the page more than poorly scripted snippets traded in the bar areas of hotels — or ships. Margaret’s October gathering would require more of all that. It was the main reason Anne had not yet committed.
Venice, though. Serenissima. What ghost stories might it raise?
Anne and Jasper had traveled to Venice together. Of course — they had traveled widely. Some couples had children, or dogs; Anne and Jasper had geography. One sabbatical year they lived outside Nice while Jasper was finishing a book, and Anne too, months spent working and walking and cooking, the kind of life about which people wrote bestselling memoirs that became lush, touristic movies. From there the couple had taken a trip to Venice. They stayed in a charismatic, dilapidated hotel, looked at art, ate well, and gondolaed, even.
But a shadow traveled with them. A month earlier, in Nice, Anne had had an early, hygienic abortion, and Jasper planned the Venice trip as a healing distraction. In a shop that sold fashionable leather bags and belts Jasper found Anne a purse, but in discussing the purchase in Italian he misspoke so badly that all three of them — Anne, Jasper, and the angelic young man helping them — collapsed in bilingual laughter. Later, when a sudden acqua alta made San Marco an impassable lake, they had walked like circus performers along the rickety wooden platforms that appeared as if out of hidden cupboards, to ensure a dry crossing, but then Anne stepped deeply into the water anyway in order to help up a distressed child who had fallen. Anne’s chic shoes were ruined in the rescue, but the child was restored to her parents, who were a minute behind, and very appreciative of Anne’s assistance. Back at the hotel, Jasper had dried and warmed Anne’s feet and said she deserved a medal of valor for her effort.
Venice was just ground, Anne reminded herself. Nothing hallowed about it. You must simply go over it all again — the crooked pavements, the arched bridges, the flooding piazzas — and tread firmly over memories. If Anne only ever went places she had not once been to with Jazz, how narrow the brilliantly wide world would become.
In the future Anne might set foot in places she had never been to with him — Jaipur, or Melbourne. Johannesburg, where a friend of hers was working on a film project. First, though, the recanvassing of a place she had known. Tricia would be good and bracing company, as long as they were able to avoid argument, and could negotiate any posthumous parental matters that required sorting. From the outside, the holiday seemed a chance for the sisters to come together to lament their lost mother. Given their complicated feelings about Irène, however, it might turn into something else — for Tricia, Anne supposed, a chance to recuperate from the task of managing Irène’s final decline (and mention her irritation that Anne had not helped out more). On Anne’s part, the grief she had still to shed was for someone else.
Serenissima? Not yet. Anne lay down in her cabin at sea, wondering when she would get there.
12
The Stella Maris moved into the harbor, the famous cityscape gradually sketching itself in the passengers’ sightlines. The silver domes of the Salute, the ochre and terracotta and taupe of canalside palazzi, and the puddle colors of the canals themselves, navigated by striped and photo-ready gondoliers. The vaporetti, Venice’s water buses, lumbered from one stop to another like heavy carthorses, while darting speedboats, sleek thoroughbreds, overtook them easily. The perpetual ferryings of the present hour.
Most were out on deck with their cameras and their phones, ready to chronicle their arrival, though Anne held back. Her itch to be alone was by now unignorable, so, explaining to Marovic that she was not going on to the last, grand lunch, she went through several good-byes, simultaneously sincere and superficial. ‘Please do email me your article on Wharton, I’d love to read it’ (Barbara, the analyst); ‘I’ll send you pictures from Lecce’ (the Knudsen husband, who had a surprising eye in his photographs); ‘Now I’m determined to go home and read Mary McCarthy. I’d always avoided her before’ (a spry ninety-year-old whose eyes were a blue that rivaled that of the Murano glass the group had seen being blown in the famous factory). As for Marovic: he had given Anne a formal embrace, hangover-chastened, with kisses back and forth three times on her cheeks. He had heard from Professor Carter that she might be at Yale in October for a gathering, and perhaps
he would see her then? Anne smiled noncommittally.
As Anne watched the city draw nearer to them, she felt an eagerness to move through its streets for herself, having read and taught the city and handed out famous quotations about it. Venice, and clichés about Venice: could the two ever be disentangled?
It was the same with love, probably, Anne thought. Jasper might have said as much to her. Or grief. No point in trying to be original. She had read that somewhere; a line from an English book floated through her mind, Barnes quoting a friend of his who had said, about leaving his wife for a younger woman: ‘People tell me it’s a cliché. But it doesn’t feel like a cliché to me.’
That was the trick, perhaps, Anne thought as the ship slowed, close to the dock: to walk through these alleys and clichés with your head held high, as though no one had ever been there before you.
13
The apartment suited. It was modest, discreet, quiet. Not far from the madding crowds, since in August Venice was mad and crowded every inch of it, but, Anne judged, a good place for a private coffee in the morning and a respite from art and commerce in the later humid afternoons.
It was midday when Anne arrived, her gait still slightly uneven from her sandaled encounter with the odd solidity of land. She spoke her adequate Italian to the weather-beaten landlady, who avoided looking Anne in the eye, as if it were too much effort to read even one more tourist’s face. Anne heard how to use the windows and shutters, the broken tap and erratic plumbing. She accepted the keys — a heavy, dungeon-like set with the enchanted quality of so much in Venice — thanked the signora, and then the thick oak door closed with a portentous click.
Pages for Her Page 13