Pages for Her

by Sylvia Brownrigg

  Failing to control her hours and her days: well, Flannery had, of course, brought her problems with her. No number of air miles would change the person she was.

  ‘You’re staying at the Den?’ the driver asked in brusque Connecticutish, referring to the hotel. Flannery nodded.

  ‘Last stop,’ the driver said, superfluously, as Flannery was now the only passenger left in the pine-wracked van.

  3

  Hotels had many meanings.

  For some the word was simply synonymous with sex. Romance, or adultery. Or both.

  For people with children, as Flannery had learned first in New York, hotels were not havens so much as a set of obstacles to be navigated. When Willa was a bit older, a toddler, Flannery spent an easier weekend with her cousin at a ‘family-friendly’ inn in southern California, but they had ventured there without Charles, for whom staying in such a place would have seemed an admission of defeat. Charles never intended to let fatherhood dumb him down or expose him to environments he considered tasteless. The parent of Willa’s who would clock hours at the primary-colored playground, or a frantically loud plastic hell-chamber where kids had bouncy birthday parties — that was always going to be Flannery.

  The very fact of a hotel’s unfamiliarity usually made Willa uneasy. What Willa most wanted from more or less the minute their front door closed behind them was to get back home to her own bed, and the bath and toys that she knew. In spite, or perhaps because of, the uncertain currents in the air at home, Willa did not feel altogether safe leaving it.

  When Flannery traveled with Willa, feeling a close kinship with the girl’s emotional rhythms, she understood her child’s suspicion of unknown accommodations. By herself now, though, with her beloved daughter thousands of miles away, as Flannery stood at a reception desk, being treated with warm deference by a slender, smooth-faced young man eager to make her comfortable, she was reminded of something she had not experienced in years. A meaning hotels had for the solo traveler. Not romance. Not obstacles.

  Escape.

  ‘Thank you, Diego. That’s really kind.’

  The remarkably agreeable honey-eyed young man helping her had given Flannery the plastic key card to her room early, several hours before she had expected it.

  ‘Sure, Miss Jansen. It’s not a problem — I’m guessing you might like to relax after the long flight.’ Miss Jansen!

  ‘I am a little tired, it’s true.’

  ‘I bet.’ Diego’s smile was either suggestive or concerned, and when Flannery realized she could not tell which, she knew that an hour or two by herself was essential. That and more coffee. Flannery dispensed herself a large cup from a ready supply in the lobby, then rolled herself and her bag upstairs.

  The relief that greeted her at the door — a white, clean, spare, handsome, association-free room, comfortable, ample, and empty — was as pure as a tall glass of water after a hike through the desert. The click of the door shutting behind Flannery had such sweetness she nearly wept. She walked around the bed, giddy with joy, slipped off her travel sneakers and lay down, gently, on the pristine coverings. How could such pleasure be possible? Flannery exhaled a sigh of disbelief, and inhaled air that had no food or fight or family in it. Through the broad, generous windows Yale gave Flannery its modest skyline: the white, gold-dipped tower of the nearby college, the traceried masonry of the monolith from which the bells famously rang, the blunt gymnasium in the distance.

  She breathed.

  4

  Flannery had taken her own small piece away from here when she left, the way people ran off with mortar fragments after the Berlin Wall fell — that desire to keep a piece of the edifice that shaped your life, even if you were ambivalent about it. No one in Flannery’s family had any connection to the university, or considered it anything other than a place you heard about. A nonplussed ‘Oh, my!’ had been her mother’s response to the news of Flannery’s admission, as if Flannery had just announced her intention to learn sky-diving, or travel to Mombasa.

  Attending Yale had changed what was possible for Flannery. When younger, Flannery might have denied this, perhaps out of her own anxiety of influence. The place had not been directly responsible for her job in publishing, or for her trip to Mexico, or her ability to turn that tumultuous emotional adventure into an engaging narrative, a book that combusted into success. The university governed no part of Flannery’s life, and she was skeptical about its alumni campaigns and reunions. This bastion of power and privilege, as she had enjoyed calling it in her protesting young days, perpetuated structures of elitism and exclusion. Well, of course it did.

  Yet here was Flannery, returned, to match her own stone fragment with the buildings still standing, to understand how her piece fit into those storied structures, and what precisely she had taken away with her when she left. At thirty-eight, she was finally willing to acknowledge a debt to the place (distinct from the financial one, which Charles had discreetly helped her with, his other great generosity to Flannery, after Willa). These monuments, with their exhortations and expectations, had given Flannery, a raw, soft-skinned Westerner, the confidence and education to move out into her life.

  Why else had she come back now, but to avow publicly this gratitude to her alma mater?

  Oh, one other reason: because this university, across its streets and classrooms and library upon remarkable library, had changed her in one other profound way.

  It had given her Anne.

  5

  Anne tried to play that morning, but couldn’t.

  None of the pieces felt right, her fingers missed and fidgeted, and sitting still, something she normally managed so well, was not coming easily to her. She had to pace. It was not yet time for her train.

  When Anne was young, she had been driven to play the piano for hours by a vicariously ambitious grandfather, who succeeded in drumming the joy out of her playing, and much of the feeling, though he demanded Chopin from her, and got it. When she quit in high school her mother berated her, of course; but in New York, encouraged by Jasper, Anne had reclaimed her pleasure in the instrument, taking lessons from a lively Polish woman with bleached hair. On the occasions she and Jazz had argued, playing was often Anne’s route to self-calming, and from there to reconciliation with him.

  In reorganizing the apartment after Jasper left, Anne thought to move the piano from the living room to Jasper’s former study, to create a small music room. Together, she and the Polish teacher had rolled the upright in there, a satisfying exercise that proved to Anne that even significant physical tasks could be accomplished without him; but gradually Anne discovered that this only served to emphasize how solitary and closeted her playing was now, which lessened the consolation.

  She closed the lid over the keys.

  The study’s built-in shelves had been cleared of his French history, the Robert dictionary, framed photographs of Anne and Jasper, as well as the more recent shots of Jazz’s sister, and his niece and nephew. Anne had swiftly repopulated the bare shelves with objects of her own, to counter the yawning reminder that he had gone.

  She looked at the display she had made. Photographs: well, you had to have them. Otherwise your life looked hollow and lonely. She kept a few Jazz had taken of her, several cityscapes, Mitchell’s school snap from a few years earlier, and a recent one from Venice of Tricia out on that tiny balcony. Stones from beaches Anne had gone to, a few ash-colored pieces of sinuous driftwood. Sea glass, in a hexagonal porcelain dish. Then a new addition, an aesthetic anomaly but it lit something within Anne to see it: a shot glass with a grinning alligator and the word Everglades on it. From the hot, fraught trip she took there with Flannery. It was astonishing that this random object had survived twenty years of shifts and relocations. When she had found the kitsch piece in a box with some old photos she had been sorting through at the end of the summer, she rescued it and put it out on display.

&
nbsp; The two women had fought in Florida, smoked there, talked there, made love there. Gotten sandy and salty and sunburned and sulky there. Anne had never been back to that state, even in the years she had lived in Atlanta, and somehow she doubted she ever would, though the place had a kind of untamed heat in it, in Anne’s memories.

  Flannery had given the shot glass to Anne as a present, before they left on the train to go back to New Haven. ‘I thought about getting you one that said, “You’re either a gator — or you’re gator bait!”’ she told Anne during a mock solemn presentation at the Amtrak station. ‘But that seemed a little loaded.’

  6

  Now that she was all the way here, Flannery felt a strange shyness, and near reluctance, to see Anne. Need she go out after all? Couldn’t she just call in sick and hide out for three days in this heavenly room? She doubted that the women conferees really required her insights or anecdotes. It seemed to Flannery as though Cathy Li Mayer would be more than capable of speaking on her behalf. She was younger, chic-er, and certainly had superior lipstick.

  But what if Anne thought so, too?

  All right. Enough of that, Jansen. Pull yourself together.

  Flannery sat up on the absurdly comfortable bed and pulled out two poorly folded sheaves of paper from her backpack. She sighed.

  Schedule for Events October 19th–21st

  thursday

  12.30 p.m.Informal lunch, Regent Dining Hall, Regent College

  7 p.m.Readings at Hunter Hall: Ellen Kessler, Melissa Green, Andi Chatterjee

  Reception after, Greenwich Bar & Grill

  friday

  11 a.m.–12.30 p.m.

  Gender and Writing: Panel discussion, moderated by Professor Anne Arden, Adams Auditorium, Art Center

  2–5 p.m.Workshops led by participants, Peverill-Cooper Hall

  7 p.m.Dean’s Dinner, Sillitoe College

  saturday

  10 a.m.–12 noon

  Gender and Genre: Round table discussion and student Q & A, Adams Auditorium

  7 p.m.Remarks by Professor Arden, introducing readings by: Catherine Li Mayer, Lisa Sahel Jefferson, and Flannery Jansen

  It was an awful lot of reading, discussing, remarking. Flannery anticipated a collective attempt to establish cred, however defined — book sales, prizes won, TV appearances made — while also reaching a hand out to the students. That was why they were here, after all, to pull the kids up and along, too.

  Flannery felt a wave of exhaustion. She did plenty of helping along of a younger person back at home, and suddenly felt she had not an hour of energy left in her to encourage anyone else. Having secured leave, at last, from family life in order to work, Flannery found that what she wanted above all was to kick back and read, without interruption, without any obligation. An essay on bees. A short story by a dead Russian. Even the god-damned newspaper.

  However, her reading was not her own. It was an essential politeness to know the work of the other speakers going in; she knew how disconcerting it was to meet a fellow author at an event who clearly had no idea of who you were or what you had written. Flannery had the Li Mayer book in her bag, and had YouTubed her way into familiarity with Chatterjee’s comedy.

  Kessler she recalled as a curly-haired precocious classmate, editor of one of the university’s elite journals, who had matured into a sought-after commentator on Soviet injustices. Jefferson would always be associated with the recital of her poem at the presidential inauguration. (A wind tunnel of a day, but her delivery was forceful, and dignified — Flannery had watched a clip of that, too.) A few women on the original list had not come, and Flannery tried not to feel she had wasted time reading them, too.

  The work she knew best, as it happened, was The Awakening of Influence. Flannery had first read it just after she returned from Mexico, her mind still full of that adventure and the sounds of Spanish. Adele judged Anne Arden’s work to be show-offy and unintelligible, but Flannery, though not confident she understood every argument, scanned the book for genius and hidden messages, and believed she found both. It was a study of the ways American women writers influenced one another, a book in dialogue with, if not in defiance of, Harold Bloom. Flannery appreciated Anne’s unearthing of the ‘codes of communication’ between Cather and Chopin, Dickinson and Bishop; but what she felt above all was a wistful sensation that she was Anne’s eager student again, noting the authors Anne revered and her interpretations of their work. That Flannery felt some reflected glory in the book’s importance, a faint proprietary link to its brilliance, was, of course, absurd, and she never confessed those feelings to anyone. Still, it was no wonder Addie hated The Awakening of Influence.

  Flannery had already at that time begun to pen her own narrative, the story of Don Lennart, and through all that fevered writing — the pages just poured out of her, which gave them the momentum and intensity people responded to — she had one particular reader in mind. Flannery dedicated the memoir to her mother, who ‘gave me so much’. But her own coded communication was to Anne. I wrote this, hoping to get your attention. When Anne’s postcard duly came, those simple few lines in her slant hand, Flannery held the object close to her like a talisman, well aware of her foolish sentimentality but again feeling that, unspoken, it need do no harm.

  A low golden light, late autumn morning, came through the hotel’s plane glass window and hit Flannery’s bleary eyes. She really ought to read the Li Mayer book right now. Or Jefferson’s latest volume of verse. Or take on the history of the gulag. The gulag, for God’s sake.

  But wasn’t this hour hers?

  Wasn’t she a free agent?

  Flannery lay back on the beautiful white bed and reread Anne Arden instead.

  7

  Anne came into the living room, where the river glittered beyond the windows. There was a stillness that felt — she knew this was fanciful — like a calm before the storm.

  One more check of her appearance before she left. Anne stood in the garish light of her bathroom, assessing her face while thinking of the particular hazel eyes that would be on it. A short sharp line divided the space between her fine brows, a punctuation mark of concentration or concern (not all who knew Anne knew how she worried) and, at times, exasperation. Anne believed patience was overrated, as a virtue. Wasn’t it better to get things done, be efficient, state your point? Why was waiting for other people to make up their mind and come around so much better? That forehead line was no doubt darker, deeper than it had been twenty years earlier. Jasper’s leaving, her mother’s death; and a furrow brought on by thought, too. The Adriatic voyage had sparked ideas for a new work.

  Anne was packed and ready. She fastened her satchel with the books and papers she needed, but as she did so, one of the titles in the leather pouch caught her eye.

  Checking the kitchen clock, Anne could see she was right on the edge now of timing, between an earlier train or the one after. If she took the second train, she would not arrive until the afternoon.

  The lunch was optional. Margaret had written to say so.

  All attendees are created equal, but some are more equal than others. Don’t worry if you don’t want to come to the first meet and greet over sandwiches and germ-sprayed dining hall salad. You can just come in for the readings. If I don’t see you at lunch, why not come to my office around 4.30/5? The good news is I got you the sumptuous guest suite at Guilford. It’s the Ritz of college accommodations. You’re welcome!

  The meet and greet.

  Anne and Margaret had corresponded a few times about the conference. As one or two writers dropped out, Anne kept an eye out for one West Coast participant, who was still planning to attend.

  The clock’s hands moved, and Anne’s bag waited by the door, reticent but, pointedly, ready to go. The earlier train would leave without her from Grand Central if she sat down to read. She turned over the volume in her hand. ‘Ra
unchy, moving, unforgettable,’ said the New York Times, and Anne thought, I remember her that way, too. She sat down on the couch, and started reading.

  It was very good. Swift, funny, observant. Vibrant. Not perfect: Flannery’s youngness shone through, like skin through a gauzy blouse, at points of staged toughness or bravado. You could tell that a brittleness underlay the surface. This was clearer now, some years on. Making comedy out of your abandoning dad was an old trick; it worked well for the story but in the margins you could find tracings of Flannery’s distinctive sadness. The tequila tales masked it some, but only to a reader too casual to wonder why the tequila flowed so fast and so amusingly. As for the steamy scenes — they were strange for Anne to read, of course, bringing a flush to her thighs, a rapidness to her pulse. She had an unsettling recollection of Jasper, in their Atlanta home, holding the hardback and commenting dryly to Anne, ‘She writes well about sex, your former paramour.’

  Anne had rolled her eyes at the word paramour, but was gratified that Jasper had taken time to read the book.

  ‘The title’s a play on Sybille Bedford’s travel book about Mexico,’ she told him. ‘A Visit to Don Otavio. The whole memoir is in part a riff on Bedford.’

  ‘She’s one of your pets, isn’t she?’

  Anne frowned. ‘Flannery? Certainly not. She and I –’

  He laughed. ‘Sybille Bedford. Isn’t she one of your projects? Rescuing her?’

  Anne bristled at ‘rescue’, it sounded like something you would do for an abused chihuahua, but it was true that Bedford was a writer Anne had written about, and valued, and had tried to bring into the light.