Pages for Her

by Sylvia Brownrigg

  So Anne heard of the spring crisis in the hospital, where their mother nearly died of pancreatic failure, and a long list of organs and scans and specialists and treatment, how when Irène woke after hours of intensive medical interventions to a Kuwaiti nurse in a hijab taking her blood pressure, she nearly spat with horror, even in her weakened state. How adamant she was that she be moved to the Catholic hospice, which took some effort on Tricia’s part but where, Irène told Tricia gratefully, it was an enormous relief to be tended to by Christians. Tricia chose not to question this notion, a good decision, Anne agreed. With the excuse that she couldn’t stand the overcooked food — ‘If they boiled the broccoli any longer it would turn into paste’ — Irène stopped eating.

  ‘Though honestly,’ Tricia said, cutting the heart out of a little artichoke, ‘I think she did it more to speed up the process. She was ready to go.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Well, she became semi-delirious. And weaker. And . . . sweet, believe it or not.’ Tricia looked sheepish to admit it, and laughed. ‘That’s how I figured we must be close to the end. She became affectionate.’

  ‘Did she ask to see . . . anyone?’ Anne hated herself for wondering, for giving Irène even this posthumous power, but she found she had to know.

  ‘She wanted Mitchell to come a lot. What a trooper that kid was, I was so proud of him. She didn’t understand why Dad wasn’t there; she was sort of insulted he didn’t stop by. I couldn’t bring myself to point out that he was dead.’

  There was a silence for a moment, then Tricia filled it with, ‘I told her you were in New York, and were trying to get to Detroit but might not be able to make it.’

  Was it a lie both ways — a lie to Irène, because of course Anne could have gotten there if she had wanted to; and a lie to Anne, or a half-truth, to suggest that Irène had even asked or cared about her older daughter then?

  Probably best not to ask.

  Anne cleared their plates away. ‘Carciofo — that’s artichoke in Italian.’ Anne scraped the leaves from Tricia’s plate onto her own. ‘I learned the word when Jazz dragged me to a soccer match in Rome once. At some point a player missed an easy goal, and these loutish guys behind us started yelling furiously at him. Jazz collapsed with laughter and finally told me what they were screaming, to the hated player down there: You’re not a man, you’re an artichoke!’

  Anne went out to the kitchen and returned with two cups of tea for them to enjoy under the low, light-polluted Venetian sky. Finally Tricia reached the end.

  ‘I was there, with her, holding her hand, for the death rattle. That’ — Tricia winced, shaking her head at the memory — ‘is an eerie sound.’

  ‘Is it a rattle, actually?’

  ‘It is. She was looking like a corpse already, so I thought, I’m not going to know when it happens, but earlier the nurse had laid out the stages. And then you hear it and . . . there’s no way not to recognize what’s going on. You feel it; you hear it; then the body in front of you is suddenly . . . empty.’

  Anne looked up into the night, but there were no stars there. Just a murky darkness. ‘Did you touch her?’ Anne asked curiously. ‘If you don’t mind –’

  ‘No, no.’ Tricia wiped a few tears from her eyes. ‘I don’t mind. Yes. I kissed her. It seemed like the right thing to do. Then I called in the nurses. They were ready, of course. So I left them to it.’

  There was a silence, as the sisters had their private thoughts.

  ‘Thank you,’ Anne said, gently.

  Tricia nodded, sniffed, brushed the tears off her cheek, folded her arms.

  ‘It was really hard not to drink that night. Mitchell was at his dad’s. I went to an AA meeting right away, straight from the hospice, then I drove all the way back across town, picked up Paul, and went to another one.’ She looked at Anne with her reddened eyes. ‘He was kind to me that night. That’s when I knew he was a good guy.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘Yeah. We’d only been dating about a month or so. You know, your new girlfriend’s mom dies . . . Some guys would have shrugged, or run away. Paul didn’t, though.’ Tricia’s face was soft in the eve-ning light, and as pretty as Anne had ever seen it: skin smooth, bitterness eased. ‘He got me through it.’

  Well, love did that, didn’t it? Made grief bearable. Rearranged your features. Gave you light. Without that light, any face — even one commonly considered beautiful — might just as well be a photograph, or a mask.

  30

  After all the talk of the day, wearied and reconciled, the sisters said good-night to each other. In bed, Anne tried to read, but mosquitoes bit her mind into inattention. The actual insects, whining in her ear, and bug-like thoughts that flew at her reading mind with high-pitched distraction, allowing her no peace.

  What was next?

  What was left?

  Work, of course. Anne needed to sink her teeth into something new. She had had scraps of ideas but she needed to assemble them, put them on her desk, and then like a chef looking at the morning’s basket from the farmer’s market, see what could be made from it all. She had to get out her paper and pen and start. Anne had never feared the blank page; she feared hardly anything, a quality that drew other people to her, she knew. She was unflinching. For the world’s many flinchers, this was attractive.

  Still, there was a jumpiness in her now, a restlessness. Where was her famous, enviable calm?

  The Internet doesn’t always invade. Sometimes we open our arms to it, as we might to a canny seducer. Anne reached over for her laptop, and lying back on her bed, opened it so that its back lay against her lightly sweating stomach, a cold metal pet.

  From:Margaret Carter

  Subject:Conference Update

  My dear Professor Arden. By now I trust you are living the autodidact’s dream, exploring The Encyclopedic Palace.

  You’re a genius. Flannery Jansen said yes, she’ll do it, and I think she has the sort of je ne sais quoi (read: appeal to the LGBT community) that helps jazz up our otherwise somewhat straight program. My habits have me leaning too obviously toward women who write for The Times, though as Eleanor says, Mom, didn’t you know that print is dead? Still I’m not disowning Eleanor just yet as she also gave me the bright idea of asking Catherine Li Mayer, a sexy author of a travelogue about Thailand, and she is in her TWENTIES so that does a beautiful thing to the mean age of our conference.

  So now I feel we have a good range: hefty political histories! Sexy bestsellers! Award-winning poetry! TELEVISION COMEDY WRITERS! How much more diversity can anyone want? The dean will be pleased, and we all want to please the dean.

  OK, I’ve had too much coffee, can you tell? Let’s just touch base when you’re back. But thanks again for the suggestion of Jansen. She hasn’t written anything for a while, it seems, and her second book, a novel, was kind of a non-performer, but the Mexico memoir is still very well known, girl discovering her father, scenes of girls having sex among the cacti, etc. I ought to read it probably, as a marital aid for Lloyd and me if nothing else.

  Basta! See you soon.

  xxM

  31

  Flannery Jansen.

  Anne had her own images in her night-mind, without requiring Google’s help. A lovely, blond-swept face, with the fresh-ness of a Scandinavian complexion, her amber eyes alight with absurdity as Anne taught her lipstick shade names in front of a bathroom mirror. ‘Mauve amour.’ Laughter. ‘OK, it’s your turn now: Rebellious.’ The kiss, their colorful reward.

  Bonnie girl. The affair’s ending had a sad inevitability, with her wrong-headed appearance in New Mexico — Don’t do it, someone should have told Flannery, but the person who was teaching her such things was exactly the person Flannery was flying to see. Before that end, though, had been the luscious, unforgettable middle: humor and raunch, flirtation and stories. There was a hunger between them
and not just a sexual one; they had grabbed at each other, at some spirit each one recognized in the other. Maybe Flannery had intuitively found and known that first. Found her way in, and showed them both.

  What could Google, with its literal, pixelated images, add to that truth?

  All right. Flannery had aged, she had married, here she was.

  Flannery Jansen and Charles Marshall at a gala event in San Francisco. An art opening. Some Silicon Valley mogul’s birthday party.

  The man was vast and self-satisfied, and seemed well matched to that work Anne remembered from the nineties Biennale. Handsome, if one went for a florid, Italianate, owner-of-the-vineyards sort of appearance.

  And Flannery?

  Recognizably the same woman. Girl, now all grown up. Anne could not suppress a smile, as if of greeting. Better groomed, twenty years on — the bestseller and its money, or marriage and her husband’s status, had seemingly gotten her to pay more attention to the cut and color of her clothes. How Anne remembered the sloppy, almost childish outfits the Californian had worn when they first met, as if she had just come off the playground; it was only when Anne ran into Flannery at that first party, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and black leggings, that she felt the pull of an adult lust. As they became closer that spring, Flannery’s fashion mutated into the half-mannish thrift-store aesthetic favored among her peers. If their relationship had lasted longer, Anne might have taught the younger woman a thing or two about ways to enhance her lovely shape. How to look after herself. How to know she was beautiful. Someone else must have done that in the interim. At the age of — what would she be now? Thirty-eight, thirty-nine? — Flannery had grown into a kind of grace. To judge from the two dimensions of her on the screen.

  Yet you could still see in the facial expressions a lack of desire for attention. The husband did not have that. It was clear from Marshall’s self-regarding grin that he knew about being photographed, and was all for it. In the images that surfaced before Anne, on her laptop, in her bed, Flannery Jansen (she was still Jansen, thank God) half-ducked her blond head, eyes dipped down, pretty mouth smiling, but sideways, somehow.

  Anne knew that look.

  She also remembered what that gorgeous person looked like, stripped of her shyness; not physically stripped, that is (though Anne had those scenes too, in a file at the back of her memory), but shedding her layers of self-protection to gaze directly at Anne, and even allow herself, sometimes, to be gazed upon, admired, the same way.

  So long ago, those hot afternoons and steamed-up nights. Anne had not expected to unlock those memories again.

  Anne’s fingers hovered over the keyboard, her head back on the pillow. She knew it was important not to succumb to a hurried correspondence one might later regret. Late nights were hazardous that way, even without alcohol to loosen inhibitions.

  Dear Flannery,

  — she began.

  A gondolier sang, rather badly, out in the night.

  Tourist chatter, English, floated up to her.

  The cursor blinked. Indifferent to her actions, its pulse awaited her decision, like a butler.

  Don’t write to her. What would you say? You will see each other soon enough. You can discover in October whether there is still any connection between you. No doubt Flannery has seen the names of those attending the conference. Who knows? Maybe she is hoping to see you, too.

  Anne closed her laptop. She placed it on the table beside the bed, turned out the light. Her dreams would, she supposed, be busy with outsized kestrels, a rain of coins, a strange wooden time machine.

  Serenissima. Tomorrow was their last day there, then she would journey back to New York, Trish to Detroit. You’re right, Anne reassured herself. Yes.

  You can wait.

  1

  ‘Red eye’ did not begin to cover it.

  Yes, Flannery’s eyes were red, and her skin gray, and her hair deadened by six hours of desiccating airplane air, but as she shuffled in the dawn’s early light to the baggage claim area she was hardly aware of her appearance. Mostly she was nauseous and scratchy-throated, and had a new dread that after all the trouble caused by this short trip she would end up condemned to her hotel room, fighting pneumonia. The dread coexisted with Flannery’s rocklike, throwback conviction that that was all she deserved, for leaving her little girl behind.

  She should not, the throwback voice chided, in one of those sing-song tones from fifties movies, that went along with floral printed dresses and buns in the oven, have left Willa alone with the child’s father (haphazard; erratic attention to detail) and grandmother (anxious, and vague about habits or schedules). Yet — the modern voice protested — surely she, Flannery, should be able to attend a short professional conference once in a year. She was a woman with a job and she needed to do it. Charles traveled all the time for his work without even blinking! It was only fair. It was her turn. Finally, in the middle of those two registers, the unaligned, purely maternal voice within Flannery, with no politics, only the animal drive to ensure her daughter’s well-being, stated, with the slightest tremor: Willa would be fine. Why shouldn’t the kid learn the different ways of Dad and Grandma? It would not kill her. Probably. And, as Nietzsche said first and self-help gurus had been repeating ever since: that which doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.

  Sure. Maybe Willa would be stronger by the time Flannery returned; maybe Flannery herself would be.

  She couldn’t, certainly, be in much worse shape than when, outside the airport, she boarded the grandly misnamed ‘limo’, a soulless van whose reek, of some industrial chemist’s idea of pine, nearly made her retch. She recalled the similar vehicle twenty years earlier: as imagined from California, the limo was surely going to be a fancy town car that would whisk Flannery from New York’s John F. Kennedy to Yale. In the event, she was disoriented by the shabby bustle of the airport, disappointed by the dented shuttle bus into which she had folded her long-limbed seventeen-year-old self for that first, epic journey — and surprised by urban, gray New Haven. At least by now, Flannery had few expectations, so she found a seat, leaned her head against a salt-and-grit-spattered window and, like a child, fell back to sleep the instant the wheels reached the highway and a steady speed.

  She dreamed scarcely and fitfully, snatches like the blurry home movies shown in art films to denote a more innocent past. (A noisy party; a train trip; a holiday gathering where she knew no one.) Flannery awoke with a start as the van was nosing up a street where once she had bought books and bagels. Discreetly, with her adult hand (thirty-eight, for heaven’s sake), she wiped nap drool from her mouth, then looked out the window purposefully, as if she knew precisely where she was going and why she was here.

  The leaves. The colors. They were nearly over, and fallen, but some of their fire still clung to a few brave branches. At the sight of them Flannery’s spirits rose, and she felt the stir of pleasure this season had always inspired in her, a vibration that had nearly the same pitch to it as love.

  2

  The van stopped at a couple of the residential colleges first. There were twelve of them, scattered across the dense Connecticut blocks; as freshmen you were assigned one on arrival and then were expected to remain loyal to it forever after. It had been, in Flannery’s experience, like being at a table with strangers at a large wedding — you just made conversation with your neighbors as well as you could. The van’s brief tour included the modernist outlier, a polygonal concrete creation that hardly featured in Flannery’s history; the green-shuttered Georgian revival that must have comforted old boys with dreams of plantation ownership, and where a sporty girl resided with whom Flannery had a jaunty, Diet Coke-fueled affair; and her own gothic-styled college, faux-Oxford and double-courtyarded, from which she had fled early on, playing out her loves and studies off campus. When the van pulled up at the familiar dark, heavy gates, a pretty mixed-raced Asian woman — hapa, Susan Kim would cal
l her — made her way to the sliding door. As she crab-walked by, she touched Flannery’s shoulder.

  ‘Flannery Jansen, right?’

  Oh, God. Had this woman seen Flannery drool? She wore immaculate crimson lipstick and a sleek black jacket. Flannery recognized her too, now that she was something more like awake. The author of the Thai sex adventure novel.

  ‘Yes, hi. Are you Catherine Li Mayer?’

  ‘Cathy.’

  ‘Good to meet you.’

  They shook hands, awkwardly, while the anoraked woman driver waited on the sidewalk with Li Mayer’s bag.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re part of the conference. I loved your book, I’d really like to talk to you about it.’

  Flannery felt, in relation to the crimson-lipped twenty-something, a grizzled elder statesman, dribbling food down her tie.

  ‘Oh, I am too,’ she smiled, wiping the invisible crumbs off her chest. ‘Glad, I mean. About the conference.’

  ‘You’re not staying here — at the college?’ the young woman pressed, as if perhaps Flannery were too addled to have noticed they had arrived.

  ‘No, no. I opted for a hotel.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s smart.’ Which Flannery took to mean how middle-aged of you, but then it seemed that this whole exchange was either some coded competitive session, which Flannery suspected she was losing, or it was simply a straightforward, friendly greeting, and what Flannery really needed was a strong cup of coffee, as soon as possible. ‘I got the note suggesting dorm accommodation and part of me shuddered, like, Oh my God, total PTSD! But I’m so cheap, I can never resist something offered for free. I’ll probably regret it.’

  Flannery grinned, unable to think of a witty reply. She hoped her expression was friendly rather than grotesque.

  ‘Well, I’ll see you later. You’re going to the lunch?’

  ‘Definitely.’ Flannery had hoped to avoid it. The first item on the agenda had, she recalled, been described as optional. ‘I’ll see you there!’ Flannery gave a little wave, as she realized with dismay that she now would have to go to the lunch, actually. She had thought she might just hole up in her hotel, and sleep. Or fret. Or daydream.