‘I’m not staying here,’ Flannery blurted, at the college gate. ‘I decided to stay in one of the hotels. The Den.’
Anne nodded, scarcely registering interest. ‘Sensible, probably.’
‘It’s kind of the opposite of how it used to be, isn’t it?’ Flannery continued, in some unstoppable gush reminiscent of adolescence. ‘Back then I was the lowly freshman in the dorm, and you were the grown-up living off campus.’
There was nothing to do but hate herself the instant she had uttered this inanity. It reminded them both of the teenager Flannery had been: goofy, awkward, overeager. Flannery was so appalled that all she could do was give Anne an equally awkward pat on the shoulder and say, ‘Anyway, I’ll see you later . . . It’s great to see you . . .’ before turning her back on her former idol, so that Flannery need not witness the pity or irritation that might be playing across that familiar face, the pursed wide lips, the emerald assessing eyes. Whom am I kidding? Flannery wanted to say to herself, and would, perhaps, when she was a safe block or two away. I’m the same idiot I ever was.
‘Good to see you, too,’ Anne said, or so it sounded, as Flannery put her hand up in a gesture of joint farewell and retreat. She returned to her Den, blind to the streets and students, thoughts and regrets crowding out her vision. She thought of installing herself in that quiet, solitary room and filling it with the sound of calls to Charles and her mother and whoever else was required to make Willa’s pickup arrangements work from this distance. No, her mother was not signed up for that particular day, as a week earlier Charles had confidently — in fact, almost indignantly — assured Flannery he would do it, there was no need for his mother-in-law.
So for this afternoon, the hotel room would no longer be an escape. It would simply become the place where Flannery went about the mundane and necessary task of finding someone to take care of her child. Something about her conversation with Anne made this feel like an activity she had to do alone, in secret, as if the rest of the professional world should never have to know.
17
Uneasy.
Something was making Anne uneasy. For the first time in a long while she wished she had a cigarette. Flannery’s casual comparison of their accommodations gave Anne the unnerving sense that in returning to the college now, she was somehow moving backwards. The idea upset her.
She found Margaret, who helped settle Anne in the suite — ‘It was good enough for Toni Morrison, so I don’t want to hear any complaints’ — and then they walked together back to Margaret’s own second-floor office. The expansive, lead-windowed chamber overlooked one of the courtyards and had much the character of Margaret herself: warm, interesting and untidy. Lined with erudition. Bookshelves stretched floor to ceiling, with some of the unlikelier inhabitants (Julian of Norwich; William Hazlitt) half obscured by photographs of Margaret’s children, mugs with pens and scissors in them, scattered cables or chargers, and ceramic dishes collecting paperclips, cough drops, stamps, or coins. To Anne, for whom neatness was as essential as eating or sleeping, such a workspace was anathema, but she sank into the generous leather armchair with relief.
‘This chair is obscenely comfortable,’ she said to her friend. ‘All right, it’s official: you have better digs than I do.’
Margaret poured them two shot glasses of Aperol taken from a bronze tray perched at a slightly drunken angle on top of a few volumes of the OED. They sat together for an hour, trading talk about work (Margaret was finishing an interpretive biographical work on Poe, and the ideas poured out of her), family (they sat and told sad stories of the death of parents), and colleagues (the gossip circulating about the chair of Margaret’s department, whose messy tangle involved a young Mandarin instructor and his betrayed wife’s exposure of a sordid email correspondence).
‘When will people learn not to write things down?’ Margaret tsked.
‘That’s a rhetorical question, isn’t it? We know the answer is never.’ Anne eased deeper into the armchair’s forgiving em-brace. ‘As long as human beings fall in love, or lust, they won’t be able to keep themselves from putting the sentiment into print.’
‘There’s my cue! So, Professor Arden, what love notes have you been penning lately?’
Anne was thrown off balance by the question, and had a brief disorienting moment of wondering if Margaret had seen Anne walking with Flannery; or if she had somehow intuited lines Anne might have thought of writing.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, almost sharply.
‘Relax!’ Margaret laughed and leaned forward. ‘OK, let me put it more bluntly: what did you think of Steven?’
‘Marovic?’
‘Yes, dear.’ Margaret tilted her head. ‘Your cruise mate.’
‘Oh.’ Anne stared back, keeping her own bright eyes wide open. ‘He was good company.’
‘Yes. He found you good company too. I have to tell you, I think he was smitten.’ Margaret looked satisfied, as though she had engineered this result.
‘He’s . . .’ Anne looked down at the pooled crystal liquor in her glass. How to express her reaction to the man? ‘Bald,’ she said succinctly.
‘Oh! Bald.’ Margaret waved a hand. Her own husband Lloyd’s hair was thinning. ‘That doesn’t matter. Come on. Bald is the new . . . um . . .’
‘I don’t want to know how that sentence ends,’ Anne interrupted, though she was laughing now too. ‘All right, how about this? Steven Marovic is married.’
‘Divorced. They’re getting divorced.’
‘Getting divorced.’ Anne’s gaze wandered over to the bookshelves. Always something so pleasantly distracting in another person’s library. Harriet Beecher Stowe. George Eliot. Darwin! The Voyage of the Beagle. With effort, Anne returned to the subject. ‘People can be getting divorced for years, Margaret. It goes on and on. It’s a gerundive state.’
‘Sometimes. In Steven’s case, it’s reaching its conclusion.’
‘All right.’ Anne kept her face neutral.
‘He thought that you might draw him out about it.’
‘Well, I didn’t.’
‘No. I gathered that.’ Margaret knew not to push Anne; she respected the invisible hand held up, urging her to pause. ‘But another time,’ Margaret concluded lightly, ‘you might.’ Margaret stood, collected their glasses, and returned them to the tipsy tray. ‘And now,’ she said, gesturing ruefully to her comfortable jeans and easy flats, ‘I had better change into a more imperious outfit, so I can open the literary games in style.’
18
Anne considered Margaret’s metaphor as she dressed for the evening.
Was tonight, she wondered, more Greek or Roman? An ennobling competition like the Olympics, or an arena full of gladiators and a fight to the death? Anne had built her academic career on questioning the notion that writers had to figuratively kill each other to be heard. Freud, and Bloom after him, were certain that destroying your antecedents was necessary in the creation of self, and Anne had believed this to be wrong, or at least distorted.
‘You’re a literary pacifist,’ Jasper had told her once. ‘You don’t believe in the validity of battle.’
Anne closed the door of her suite and stood out in the musty corridor, and had a sharp awareness, like a cramp, of being alone. She closed her eyes, held on to the door handle a moment, made herself breathe. It came over her suddenly sometimes, a physical sensation. For the most part, Anne was past feeling self-conscious about being single rather than partnered at such events. Most would have left their Others behind, anyway, and Jasper had never been essential to Anne’s social self: they were too independent, and also too deeply connected, for that to be an issue. Nonetheless, having Jasper’s strong arm to hold on to when she went out into the world had provided a years-long comfort, and the lack of it sometimes still left Anne feeling strangely unsteady.
She straightened, opened her eyes, resolved to be al
l right; then set off to the auditorium on the old campus where the readings were to take place. The side street had a film set artificiality to it with the lamplights, the dampness of the flagstones, the unnatural quiet. It seemed possible that Gene Kelly or Lauren Bacall might step out of the shadows and start singing, or at least smoking, but the tall figure who approached from under the stone crossbridge, shoulders curved in a thoughtful, inward posture, wearing a canvas coat that Anne could see was not adequate to the autumn chill, was more in the line of Claire Danes, or Cate Blanchett.
The woman looked up. Before she could remember their previous awkwardness, recognition lit her hazel eyes, and she lifted her delicate chin with a shy smile.
‘Flannery!’ Anne’s muscles untensed. ‘Thank God it’s you.’
A speechless pleasure broke over Flannery’s lovely face, and Anne felt much better, abruptly, about the evening ahead.
‘Ditto.’ Flannery brushed the hair unnecessarily away from her face. That familiar gesture — she had it at seventeen too, a constant, unconscious grooming, that doubled as a way to occupy her hands. ‘Hi.’
‘I was thinking about something a little earlier, about tonight,’ Anne said chattily, as though picking up a conversation the two women had just left off. ‘Let’s walk. You’ll have an opinion on this, I’m sure.’
They fell into step together.
‘I might,’ Flannery said. ‘Try me.’
‘A group of women writers,’ Anne began, keeping her voice low, as she wasn’t eager for her facetiousness to be overheard. ‘Are they going to be vying for position as they show off their talents for the audience?’
‘Competitive, you mean?’
‘Yes. Or will it be convivial, mutually supportive? More like a dinner party.’
‘Like Judy Chicago.’ Flannery considered. ‘Frida Kahlo sitting next to Virginia Woolf? Georgia O’Keeffe chatting with Rosa Parks?’
‘Right. Though that makes the scenario seem a fusty seventies remnant. Old-school feminism.’
They walked together across the chiaroscuro lawns. ‘There’s this famous scholar . . .’ Flannery’s voice had a confident music Anne suddenly recalled: you met her as a ducking, mumbling person who could hardly be heard, or understood; but, when she came to know you, and let her mind take flight, her voice was suddenly beautifully clear. As a bell. ‘She wrote a whole amazing book about women writers not trying to, you know, slaughter each other, but instead to work off each other. I’m just a lowly novelist, but I did read it once.’ She coughed. ‘Possibly twice.’
‘Hmm.’ Anne wrinkled her face. ‘Did the scholar ever expand on, develop the idea — move it past that initial, somewhat pat thesis?’
‘It wasn’t pat!’ Flannery held Anne’s arm for emphasis. Anne felt the touch through her layers. ‘It wasn’t some hackneyed battle cry, it wasn’t a sally in the culture wars, and it wasn’t about victimization. It opened up a conversation. It cast light on writers who had been more in the shadows.’ She was sincere, this woman; Anne could not pretend otherwise. ‘Anyway,’ Flannery said in a lighter tone, ‘she did develop the arguments further in her second book. So there.’ The fluorescence of a campus security post caught the lines on the younger woman’s face: the smile-etch around her mouth, the worry furrow across her eyes. Anne was oddly affected to see the signs of Flannery’s ageing. She was not, then, Dorian Gray.
‘All right,’ Anne conceded. ‘Though I believe the follow-up work isn’t as widely read as the first.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Flannery said, with a rueful laugh.
In the distance Anne could see Catherine Li Mayer and Lisa Jefferson emerging from one of the other gateways. Soon, this happily private moment would be over.
‘On the subject of influence, though, Ms. Jansen, if I may . . . It seemed to me that Sybille Bedford gave you more than just a title to riff off of. That your path paralleled hers, geographically. Is that right?’
‘You always were a close reader,’ Flannery said, adding softly, ‘I was hoping you’d notice.’
Was that sincere, too — the suggestion that Flannery had written with Anne’s reading it in mind? Or merely flirtatious? Anne was left wondering, as Flannery then opened the weighty door for Anne, and the two women entered, together, the arena.
19
It was like surfacing from the depths of a thick, murky pond. It was like coming out of a dark, close cave and inhaling fresh, oxygenated air. It was like having held your breath for several years, and finally letting it go at the point when you were nearly faint and asphyxiated.
All of the analogies that crowded Flannery’s excited mind had to do with breathing. She was breathing again.
Listening to the writers read from and talk about their books, Flannery felt an expansion around her heart and lungs. The jolting alert of her intellect, as of some spell-pricked princess who had been slumbering in a castle tower, was every bit as multicolored and wonderful as in a Disney movie, the kind she would watch with Willa.
Margaret Carter, who had cleaned up nicely in an elegant aubergine dress, gave a generous, well-judged introduction to the conference and the evening, carrying her politics lightly and with humor, and had the audience eager for Ellen Kessler, the first speaker.
Kessler discussed the world, and this reminded Flannery that she cared about the world — yes, beyond her self-involved San Francisco square of it. Kessler’s delivery, without notes, of an impassioned disquisition on the nature of totalitarianism, along with a poignant example from a family she had interviewed in Belarus, jolted Flannery. From Kessler it required a slight shift in one’s seat to absorb Green’s tales about being a Times columnist: the pressing need to be original on a weekly basis, taking in each day’s headlines as potential material. Green did not, like Flannery and a million others, spend most of her time following up links sent by her friends; it was her pieces that others forwarded around. She was more clicked upon than clicking.
Finally Andi Chatterjee, who was as sharply funny as could be expected of someone who contributed significantly to the nation’s comedy diet. ‘Shamelessly promoting’ her first book, Chatterjockey, she was a starry crowd-pleaser, and Margaret Carter had been savvy to close with her. She read a section on the perils of not being thin in Los Angeles, introduced with the line, ‘Hi, my name is Andi Chatterjee and I am not an anorexic,’ which earned a cheer.
The hour and a half ended on a buzz of excitement, students and faculty afterwards seeking signatures in books and a word with the authors. Every sentence had made Flannery think. She had almost forgotten how much she loved to think.
Next to her, throughout, sat Anne. They laughed and applauded together. There was not a moment when Flannery had been unaware of Anne beside her.
Afterwards, there was a collective walk in the dark to a spirited reception, where Flannery lost Anne, for a time. An eagle-nosed, pepper-haired man was determined to monopolize Professor Arden’s company while behind him, like parishioners waiting to make confession, others stood, wanting their turn. Flannery drifted off, wondering who to talk to — she might be oxygenated, but she still had not found her voice in this noisy group. She made her way to the bar, having till now forgotten this institution’s dedication to liquoring up its alumni; an image came to her mind of those late May afternoons when the campus was awash with blazered drunkards bonding under canvas tents. Waiting to catch the bartender’s eye, Flannery was jostled into by the ebullient Chatterjee, who immediately turned the collision into a self-deprecating anecdote and insisted on getting Flannery a martini to apologize. Before long the two were drinking and swapping clumsiness anecdotes, engaging in an intense competition over whose were more embarrassing. Flannery felt younger, and alive. ‘I really want to win,’ she told Andi. ‘I think I’ve got this.’ And she related the spill on her way into the college earlier that day, showing off her bruised wrist as evidence. Chatterjee one-upped her
with an account of a television awards dinner she had attended in a turquoise dress at which she suddenly, without warning, got her period (‘a week early, in my defense; just one of those little menstrual jokes God likes to play’) which meant she had to stay pinned to her padded chair for the evening so the red blot would not show.
‘I thought of telling that story tonight,’ Andi confided, ‘but I didn’t want to make the boys squirm.’
They chatted until someone came to escort the comedienne to an adoring cluster of undergraduates. She excused herself with the line, ‘But now I have to go talk to people who aren’t a whole foot taller than me. You’ve been giving me a complex,’ and gave Flannery a practiced Hollywood kiss before flying away.
Still animated by the martini, Flannery appreciatively greeted Ellen Kessler, who was good enough to feign remembering Flannery and to say artfully, with information possibly gleaned from the conference program, how wonderful it was that Flannery’s memoir had been such a success a decade earlier. (Did she slightly emphasize the word decade?) Flannery’s hunch was that Kessler was more gladiator than Olympian.
Abruptly, Flannery was exhausted. Jet lag snuck up on her like the premonition of a hangover. She was not, herself, a fighter or a competitor of any kind, and it was not even clear that she was someone you would want at your dinner party. Maybe she should go back to the murky pond, the airless, idea-free cave she was used to; suddenly she had little to say about that old Mexico book of hers, or the scarcely read novel that had followed it, and only the sketchiest of answers to the inevitable question, ‘What are you working on now?’ (Why hadn’t she scripted a response to that ahead of time, on the red-eyed plane?) She managed one coherent political note to Kessler about Belarus, then excused herself and made her way to the door. She retrieved her too-thin coat and was for an instant synonymous with the seventeen-year-old who had arrived in this state ill-prepared for the cut of the icy air or the way the cold seeped through your flimsy layers of protection, or how clever, energetic and ambitious everyone was. The way they never let up.
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