Flannery had to eat. The hunger now was unignorable.
12
Anne stepped out to the curved sidewalk outside the station and slid into a lime-green cab. She could have told the taxi driver to take her to the college where she was staying, but she realized she had skipped lunch, and so gave him instead the name of a sloping side street, where there was one of those classic dives. It was a place with decades of names carved into its dark booth tables, perennially dim lighting, and the never-broken promise of warming, easy-to-eat food along with beer and coffee to fuel generations of gods and men (and eventually women) as they acquired their light and truth and valuable, sterling degrees. Anne never used to frequent the place much, preferring a lighter, jaunty spot patriotically called The Yankee Doodle, but the latter had long since closed.
It was the odd, dead time of day, three o’clock, a nether hour when the people who lingered were either time-muddled students working off the undergraduate jet lag of a late night, or paper writers sitting over a glowing laptop, backs hunched, eyes flitting back and forth across the screen, pausing just to sip the coffee.
But there was someone at a booth who did not belong in any of those categories.
An adult, not a student, and not a graduate student, you could tell from her lack of books. Nor, from her distracted air, a professor. Professors tended to look wary at popular food joints, as if every person in there was planning to sidle up to them to ask for an extension, or query a grade. This woman — blond, pretty, troubled, a coffee cup to one side of her — had a deep, abstracted gaze as she stared at the bench back opposite her, picking out some unseeable reality. Her left hand was holding and rubbing the wrist of her right, a fretful gesture. Anne responded to the contemplative expression. She knew that mouth, had once known it very well.
She had been Anne’s girl, for a spell, a long while ago. And she had always enjoyed long, quiet periods when she neither read nor wrote, but simply thought. Anne remembered that.
The solitary figure looked up, feeling eyes on her, and there was a silent, immeasurable piece of time during which the two women saw one another, not smiling and not breathing, stopped by the same sensation.
Recognition.
13
The moment of stillness passed.
Anne walked carefully, as if not to scare away a wild or imaginary creature, to the poorly lit table. As she drew near, though, she saw that Flannery was laughing, shaking her head. When her smile was genuine, her face had always become illuminated, like a saint’s. All that old worry, her rigid eagerness to please, softened in the warmer climate of her amusement.
‘Here?’ the all-grown-up Flannery said, raising her eyebrows, and she stood, taller than Anne remembered, to embrace Anne in greeting, kissing her on one cheek. She had a fruit scent of shampoo on her, and, underneath, the pulse of something else.
‘It had to be somewhere,’ Anne answered, and she held Flannery’s shoulder under her palm a moment. ‘Besides, the light in this place is flattering. You look wonderful, Flannery. And well.’
And the bonnie girl blushed at that, just as she would have in the past. She gestured to the bench across from her.
‘So do you, Professor Arden. You look great.’ She winced slightly, as if wishing she had found a better word.
‘Are you working? I don’t want to interrupt . . .’
‘No! Just hiding in my lair. Please. Make yourself at home.’
‘I’d like nothing better, but I’ve got to get some food in me. This conference will require strength.’
‘It already has.’
‘You went to the lunch? It was –’
‘Optional. I know. I should have opted out. The dining hall food was nausea-inducing, I couldn’t eat it. The minute I left I ended up coming here.’
‘Good call. But you met your fellows? Your fellow women, that is?’
‘Some. I wasn’t feeling that full of . . . fellowship, to be honest.’ Perhaps fearing she had said too much, Flannery added shyly, ‘But I like your friend.’
‘Margaret Carter?’
‘Yes. Though her name keeps making me think of the Magna Carta.’
‘Margaret’s a good thing.’
‘I thought so right away. I made a kind of disastrous entrance, but she made it seem . . .’
‘Unimportant.’
‘Right.’
‘Margaret is someone with a great ability to get to what’s important. She leaves all the chaff behind, instantly. She knows if someone is worth her while.’
They paused, and watched each other.
‘It’s very good to see you,’ Anne said.
‘Yes. Same.’ Flannery smiled again, but this time a Nordic sadness lay under her expression. It was hard to be sure in the gloom, but Anne thought there might be tears at the corners of Flannery’s hazel eyes. The younger woman seemed beyond speaking for a moment, but reached out and touched Anne’s arm. ‘Go get something to eat,’ she said, trying to collect herself. ‘My lair and I will stay right here, and wait.’
*
She had cleaned her mood away like an emptied plate by the time Anne returned. It may have taken some will: the light on Flannery’s face had just a shade of the artificial on it now, like an actor’s in a scene shot with spotlights, when the glow on the skin is cooler than that cast by daylight.
‘They’ve changed the name of this place,’ Flannery noted. ‘It used to be called Naples.’
‘Maybe they wanted something that sounded more American. Wall Street: that’s a sign of the times, I suppose.’
‘Well, they serve gluten-free pizza now, too. That doesn’t seem very Neapolitan.’
‘I was in that part of the world this summer,’ Anne ventured. ‘I had a dish called spaghetti alle vongole fujute — with escaped clams. The sauce had cherry tomatoes, garlic, parsley — but no clams. They had escaped, it seems.’
‘I like that. So you’re just supposed to think of the clams, wistfully.’
‘Right. The dish tastes better for imagining them there.’
There was a beat between them.
‘You were in Italy?’ Flannery asked politely.
‘And Croatia. And on the sea between the two.’ Anne described her journey aboard the Stella Maris, highlighting moments she thought might amuse Flannery. The glint-eyed Swedish captain and his taste for aquavit (‘Or,’ Flannery suggested slyly, ‘for what aquavit might permit’), severe Austrian Greta whose face melted into sentiment at the mention of her dachshund at home. Watching at a factory in Murano as ordinary-looking men, who might in another place be the cable guy or the trainer at the gym, shaped candy-colored delicacies from the molten glass. Swans, vases, globes of light.
Two decades before, Flannery would have hung on such stories, as on the promise of a life she wanted but feared she might never lead. Anne was the Experienced One, with Paris or New Orleans in her pocket, and Flannery was desperate to catch up, a yearning that gave Anne’s lighter tellings a weight they could not bear. Anne learned in their short time together to pare back her travelogues. She found the hunger on the girl’s face sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes simply irksome. Flannery’s unvarnished envy put Anne off her narrative stride.
Now, though, Flannery had clearly gotten to see the world for herself, or enough of it that she could listen to the stories as Anne intended them — not as showcases of a glamorous life but as character sketches, landscape studies. Verbal postcards. She had written only once to Flannery, over the years. Now that seemed an oversight; she could have been writing to her all along.
‘Did you go to the Biennale?’ Flannery looked down as she asked.
‘Yes, with my sister. It was remarkable — it covered so much ground. That is, acres, but also aesthetically, a mass of ideas and content.’
‘Kind of like an encyclopedia?’ Flannery asked, with a wry smile.<
br />
‘You could say that.’ Anne mirrored Flannery’s expression. ‘Yes.’
‘I’ve heard about the show.’ A decision seemed to flutter across Flannery’s face, and she chose not to continue with wherever that line of thought might lead. To Marshall, probably. ‘Still, not a bad junket for you. Nice work, if you can get it.’
‘It’s true. The Biennale was just vacation, but the cruise before it, though cruisey, was work. I had to give a few lectures.’
‘You had to sing for your supper,’ Flannery said.
‘For my gnocchi, yes. And my runaway clams.’
‘There’s more of that in this business than I used to realize. We have to perform, though as a reward we do get to visit glamorous conference rooms, or’ — Flannery gestured around the dark wooden booths — ‘famous Italianate eating establishments.’
‘Or lunches in dining halls.’
‘Exactly. That was my treat earlier — well, I already told you. Make your own burritos, and tableside speculation about this year’s Nobel prize.’
Anne shook her head. ‘It was good of you to go.’
‘Well, I only showed up for one reason.’
The seventeen-year-old Flannery might have spoken this suggestion indirectly, or at an angle. This one gazed right into Anne’s eyes as she spoke, and it was Anne, actually, warmed by the words, who found she had to look away.
14
Walking back collegewards they fell into a comfortable stride together.
‘I did have a nice talk with Lisa Jefferson at lunch,’ Flannery said, ‘about being Poet Laureate. What that even means, here.’
‘In Britain they have to turn out lyrics for royal weddings, or the birth of the young prince.’
‘Right, but what are the great American events, you know?’ Flannery laughed. ‘The Super Bowl? The election?’
‘That could be an excellent new genre: Super Bowl sonnets. Though she did write that poem for the inauguration.’
They talked about the presidential race for a few minutes, and the country’s alarming rightward tilt. ‘Actually,’ Flannery admitted, ‘I’m worried about having to talk politics with Melissa Green — she wrote a column a while ago in favor of Homeland Security surveillance that I found somewhat fascistic. I’m going to try not to say so.’
Flannery was aware that this aspect of herself, a smart newspaper reader with opinions, probably postdated the time she and Anne had known each other. Flannery had been embryonic then, or more to the point, so infatuated with Anne that political realities seemed distant and unimportant to her that winter and spring. It was after they split up that Flannery had become a rally-goer and a protest marcher with her college friends, tramping up the National Mall to make a case to an unlistening Congress about one injustice or another. She wondered if she was trying to signal this difference to Anne; if she was performing, to a degree, the role of more mature and sophisticated now than you might have expected. Couldn’t Flannery simply relax around Anne, not try to prove anything? They were both, she suspected, finding their feet. Two pairs of boots clipped along the stone paths, gradually falling in to a complementary rhythm.
Flannery’s phone buzzed. Her internal clock, set not just to California time but to the schedule of her daughter’s day, registered that Willa was still in school, so the message would not be her first dread (No one is here to collect your child), though there were always the other deeper ones (Willa fell off the monkey bars!). Apologizing to Anne, she removed the device to take a look.
Charles.
What are arrangements today — yr mom picking W up? Have to go to South SF to pick up slate, will take a few hrs.
‘Everything all right?’ Anne looked sideways, sensing some shift.
‘Pretty much.’ It was too soon for Flannery to want to mention, or describe, Charles to Anne, though avoiding talking about him was difficult too, like driving a large detour around an awkward roadblock. ‘It’s just . . . a message about my daughter.’
Anne abruptly stopped. They had reached the top of the steps that connected the two libraries — the buried undergraduate cave, and the great, cathedraled Sterling, home of ten thousand volumes. The two women stood near Lin’s elegant circular fountain, whose moving waters murmured assent — or question.
Anne faced Flannery. Her startling celadon eyes still made Flannery gasp.
‘You have a child?’ she asked, in a low voice that caught at Flannery.
‘I do, yes.’ Somehow Flannery had thought Anne might have known.
‘Sit down,’ Anne commanded her, gesturing to the graphite-colored stone around the fountain. ‘And tell me.’
15
So Flannery talked about Willa. Apprehensive, as she had never forgotten about Anne’s lack of interest in or desire for children; but also having wanted, since her daughter’s birth, one day to tell Anne of Willa’s existence.
She did not get very far. Immediately, at the name, Anne stopped her.
‘Willa? You called your child Willa?’
‘Yes.’ Flannery could not know whether Anne’s thoughts were moving over the same memory as hers — of Anne, at twenty-eight, bare-legged in her overheated apartment, lying on her back across a bed that had seen their recent entwinings, reading aloud a few paragraphs from The Song of the Lark. Flannery hardly knew who Willa Cather was — her high school English classes had failed to mention her — and understood that she must add the great Nebraskan’s pioneer novels to the stack of Books She Had to Read, not least because she was at the heart of Anne Arden’s dissertation, her future book. It was a good thing they broke up, Flannery used to kid herself, once the fissure in her pride had healed, so she could get started on all that reading. How otherwise would she have found the time?
‘Is it a family tradition?’ Anne asked, her center frown line deepened in bemused disbelief. ‘Naming children after American writers with odd prenames?’
‘Now it is, I guess. Two generations. My mother started it.’
‘You couldn’t have chosen Edith, or Kate, or . . . Emily?’
‘It had to be Willa.’ Flannery hesitated. ‘Honestly, it was the only name Charles and I could agree on. Otherwise she might have had to be Iris, after his aunt. And though I respect her, I wouldn’t have wanted Iris Murdoch on anyone’s mind.’
The fountain issued its watery purr into the pause between them.
‘And’ — Anne dipped her hand into the stream, tracing the numbers carved there with two cooled fingers — ‘what is she like — your Willa?’
Flannery reached instinctively for the phone in her pocket. That was how you shared information now, through the photo album you carried with you. Anne put a moistened hand onto Flannery’s arm — gently. ‘Show me pictures later. Tell me something, would you?’
‘Oh. OK.’ So, shyly, Flannery tried to locate one or two of her best anecdotes, words that might illustrate and animate Willa, transform the girl in Anne’s mind from whatever generic went along with the word ‘kid’ to a picture of an actual person. People who were uncomfortable around children, in Flannery’s experience, tended to think of them as a cluster of characteristics, generally inconvenient ones — noise, demands, messiness — rather than as human characters. Flannery had taken an ethics class in college that tackled the question of when personhood began — before birth, as anti-abortion advocates claimed? Or at birth? Or later? In her thirties, with a tiny self that grew and moved within her, Flannery had seen new depth in the question. A day after giving birth Flannery could, to her own astonishment, see a person there, a small Willa, in that loud bundle.
It was a curious experience, to describe one of your essential loves to the other — the two people for whom you would give up everything, if it would do them any good. You wanted them to feel close, even though you suspected they might never meet. Perhaps this was how travelers felt in a previous era, holdin
g a lock of their cherished one’s hair as they told their host in a remote rainforest nation about their intended, left behind. Odysseus sharing his yarns about Penelope, while she stayed home and wove. And unwove.
Anne asked no questions, and her expression was hard for Flannery to read. She was listening. She did not grin at the cute stuff — the improbable names Willa came up with for her vast collection of small stuffed animals (a giraffe called Mrs. Huffenstuff, a unicorn named Bruce), or the girl picking up, at three, a copy of A Visit to Don Lennart and exclaiming at the picture on the back, ‘Mommy, that lady looks like you!’ But she nodded when told about the Lego constructions, and the characters Willa invented who went with them. Finally Anne said with a small, almost melancholy smile, ‘All right. Show me one or two of your pictures.’
Easy. Flannery removed her phone again, found one of Willa laughing at the park, the background a blur of green and gray, the main focus that spark-bright heart-shaped face.
Anne held the phone, and read the image closely, as if it were a map, before handing it back to Flannery.
‘She has your hair,’ she said softly, in a tone as though she had said something quite different. With the lightest hand, a hummingbird wing, she touched a strand of Flannery’s blond; then said, without affect, ‘I think it’s time to get back to the college.’
16
They reached Guilford in silence, though not an unfriendly one, and said an ambiguous good-bye, knowing they would meet again a few hours later in the overlit marketplace of the evening’s readings. Flannery felt as she did when she climbed out of the pool, after swimming: suddenly exposed, in a public place, shivering at the cold air on her skin.
Had something else altered the atmosphere between them? Their anxiety in each other’s presence had subsided quickly into charged pleasure at the restaurant, but in the past minutes a balance had been lost. That sweet girl Willa was somehow between them; or Charles, a buried reference; or Jasper, the man unmentioned. Anne must have someone else beside her these days — but how could Flannery ask? And how could Anne tell her?
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