‘You’re not leaving, are you?’ A hand on her arm, the face she had always wanted alight by her side. Flannery had not pictured, nor had the Internet accurately told her, how Anne’s face would age, but it was a change, not a diminishing. If anything, Anne’s beauty had grown starker, more defined.
‘I think I should,’ Flannery heard herself say over the shouting and drunkenness, as oily fingers plucked snacklets from belatedly offered trays around them. ‘I’m being empaneled in the morning, you know, and I want to be able to speak complete sentences for that.’
‘Right. I’m the moderator.’ As if Flannery would need reminding! Anne gave her a suggestive look. ‘I’ll try to wield an even hand.’
‘I remember that hand.’ Swiftly, Flannery took Anne’s and kissed it, a semi-ironic gesture of gallantry, then said a garbled good-night to the bewildered, rose-cheeked woman she had flown all this distance, finally, to see.
20
Back in her white, clean, association-free room. No bills, no dishes, no stuffed animals. No one else. No one asking her or telling her. She need not be anyone in particular: novelist, memoirist, soldier, spy.
Flannery showered again. It felt ritualistic, a cleansing; and as she stood in the stream of water, Flannery wondered what she was washing off. The room full of smart peers and students, talking, joshing, trading notes on their work? Or that familial self she was at home, the woman tied by law and kinship to Charles Marshall and her beloved evolving Willa?
Or might she even be rinsing away some slick of emotion she felt, being around Anne?
What are you most frightened of? she asked herself. Flannery had always been her own sternest interrogator, exposing her internal contradictions a step ahead of anyone else who might question her. How can you be this and then say that? Why would you pretend over here, then deny over there?
Now she pressed herself:
What do you fear more: being home, or being away from home?
What are you escaping from — and what do you imagine escaping to?
Is either place safe?
This hotel room was, for the moment, still a haven. In the important ways, it was empty: containing of Flannery’s only a laptop, a few nice clothes, a short pile of books. As she had noted with a cautionary relief when she came back in, no one else was here with her.
The room would only remain safe, however, if it stayed a place of solitude.
Are you really imagining Anne might come back here with you? (How could she not?)
What would happen if she did?
It was behind a blank door in her mind, the answer to that question. Shuttered, dusty. A closed-up shop that went out of business a long time ago.
Flannery turned off the shower. With brusque motions she toweled herself off, her pale skin pinkened at the stomach and thighs from the heat of the water. She did not look at herself in the mirror but left the bathroom, slapped moisturizer on herself with the haste of a harried Slavic masseuse at some low-end spa, then put on her heather cotton pajamas and climbed into the soft, white, laundered sheets. Flannery reached for the telephone, sent a brief affectionate message to Charles including a line for Willa, who should by now be asleep, and set to work getting into that same state herself.
What would happen if she did?
Flannery had always been proud of her imagination, its flexibility and stamina, traveling to surprising places, but right now it was tethered, a tamed bird, unable to reach the higher air.
By the bed was Li Mayer’s book, but Flannery was not in the mood to read about sex acts in Thailand. She reached for Jefferson’s difficult, diamond-edge poetry instead, hoping its lyrical obscurities might act as a soporific.
Ridiculous. Why torment yourself? One, it would never happen; two . . . it would never happen.
And you would not want that wound reopened.
Besides, she answered herself irritably. Silently. I don’t have to want Anne to touch me. It is not about that. It would be enough, more than enough, just to . . . sit across from her, and talk.
21
Her dreams said otherwise.
That was the problem with dreams. They were like toddlers, wandering off without your permission to areas you’d rather they not go. They stumbled with uncanny accuracy into your private effects. Why even have deep, cluttered storage areas if you couldn’t stash things there that were not meant to be found? Flannery had learned over the years that Charles, in spite of being generally self-involved, had moments of unselfconscious intrusiveness, making a sudden unapologetic dive into Flannery’s files or notebooks if he was hit by a bolt of jealousy. The safest place for Flannery to keep anything she wanted secret was in her own head.
But dreams could make their way there, finding what was hidden.
There was kissing; there was an embrace; there was, inevitably, a bed. Flannery tossed in hers, alone, on the Den’s fourth floor, writhing in the stiff sheets as her night mind took her to places she had not agreed or planned to go.
There was a vibration beside her. A repetitive pulsing. It did not build; there was no climax; it simply continued, monotonous.
It was Flannery’s phone.
‘Hello? Yes?’ she slurred into it, not yet awake, confused about where she was.
‘Beauty!’ sounded a hearty voice in her ear, like some character from a children’s film. The goofy bear, or the friendly ogre. ‘Were you sleeping?’
‘Hi,’ Flannery responded weakly, her head falling back down on the forgiving pillow. ‘Yeah, I was. It’s . . .’ She pulled the phone away from her face and squinted in the darkness. ‘It’s one thirty here.’
‘Of course. Fuck. Sorry.’ Charles paused politely. ‘Listen. I just got the most insane email from Gregory. You’ve got to hear this.’
‘Really?’
And her husband proceeded to read aloud, from California, an email exchange between himself and one of the dealers at his gallery about the progress of the piece for Detroit. Issues had come up over the payment for the piece because of the city’s bankruptcy proceedings, and the fact that the Institute was a publicly funded museum. Charles canvassed these complex issues with a combination of insight, self-righteousness and his distinctive sarcasm, and Flannery could do nothing but close her eyes and let his humorous irritation and caustic protest sluice into her tired ears. She considered wordlessly how Charles’s urge was a libido, of a kind: the unstoppable spilling of one’s story, whether or not the listener was ready for it. For Charles it was at times simply the telling that was important, rather than any response.
‘Crazy, right?’ he said, at a stopping point. ‘Can you believe this shit?’
‘It is crazy,’ Flannery agreed. ‘I can’t quite believe it, no. God.’ She allowed an ambiguity she knew would go unnoticed on what she found unbelievable exactly: Charles’s story, or Charles himself. ‘Listen, hon, I am kind of exhausted here, and I have to do this thing in the morning, I should probably go back to sleep.’
‘Sure. Absolutely. Get some rest. You have a big day tomorrow.’ Sometimes he spoke to Flannery just as he spoke to Willa. She wondered whether in some way a women writers’ conference at an Ivy League university and a first-grade field trip to the aquarium seemed pretty much equivalent to her husband.
‘I just wanted to catch you up on what was happening.’
‘OK. Thanks.’ Flannery yawned.
‘Good-night, Beauty. Sleep well.’
‘You too. I love you guys.’
She placed the phone back beneath the bedside lamp, and tried to rediscover her interrupted dream. But the landscape had changed now; she was in a different city altogether; and whoever was beside her, in this episode, it was no longer Anne.
22
She knew now that she wanted.
The word went both ways: a want was a hollow that you hoped would be filled, and a desire, a pushin
g out toward the object of your affection.
Anne wanted Flannery. She had lacked her all this time, without realizing it; and now hoped to find her again, hoping the want was mutual.
Together the following morning they shared a stage, and a fluid group discussion. Anne hosted, or moderated, as though the job were a question of tamping down spirits if they ran too high, acting as a conversational thermostat. It was something she could do in her sleep and nearly had to, given the rough, wide-eyed night she had spent, tossed on squalls of uneasy revelation. It was complicated to want again. Thinking of Flannery next to her during the readings, near her for a few minutes at the bar after, where Anne had hoped she would stay longer. Back and forth Anne turned, between the hollow and the push, the emptiness and the hope to quench it. Sleep would have helped her accept this, but sleep was hard to find.
The panel went well, with challenge and argument, good-natured sparrings and playful riffs. There were a few good lines, one or two from Flannery, and afterwards there was the necessary milling about. A woman with a pink streak in her dark hair cornered Anne, in order to tell her enthusiastically, ‘You’re such a rock star!’ She was a former student, now teaching.
Anne tried to deflect her excessive praise. ‘Oh! Hardly.’ She gestured at the women around her. ‘These are the stars. I’m just . . . management. Or the roadie.’
The woman laughed, then pressed on with a story about teaching The Awakening of Influence, until Anne felt she had to stem the flow. ‘Thanks, Alice. It’s good to see you. Excuse me, though, I have to find . . .’ She looked around, through the unimportant others, till she located her.
Flannery.
She stood still and graceful, a modest birch, her fair hair falling in a benign rain about her shoulders. Flannery had grown into her appearance and her shape. The structured navy jacket she wore complemented her slender height, her jeans enjoyed the lean length of her legs, and her crisp white shirt suited her fair skin. (Anne’s skin turned gray and dull in white whereas Flannery shone.) Yet her discomfort at being looked at endured. She had the instinct to shelter her face, as though it were some vulnerable crop that might be blighted by the bad weather of an unwanted gaze, and so her hand swept frequently across her eyes, shielding them, in the guise of brushing phantom strands of hair away. She seemed distracted, staring at some unseen dust-miced corner of the lecture hall — just thinking to herself, even here, even with all the noise about her — but when she caught sight of Anne her eyes focused and widened. They locked with hers in relief.
‘Hi! You were great,’ Flannery said, moving closer to ward off interruptions. ‘And you had, as promised, an even hand.’
‘Thanks. You had some good lines. I liked what you said about chick lit.’
‘The gum joke? Yeah, it’s not new, but it makes people laugh.’
‘It did.’
‘You’ve got some serious fans,’ Flannery noted. ‘The lady with pink hair, for instance.’
‘I feel for her. She’s an adjunct here — underpaid, overworked, no job security.’ Anne winced. ‘She told me I was a rock star.’
‘You always hated all that, I remember.’ Flannery, the former fawner, was speaking levelly — eye to eye. Anne liked this. ‘You didn’t want groupies, even though you had them. My roommate Susan Kim would have taken a bullet for you. Plenty of people would’ve.’
They were standing so near each other that Anne felt Flannery’s heat. Something deep in her loosened, though it was too soon to start swooning.
‘Well, some fans,’ Anne spoke softly, ‘were more persistent than others.’
‘Oh, I know.’ Delicately, so as hardly to be seen, Flannery’s fingers slid along Anne’s lower arm, a caress that lit places in Anne she had forgotten how to name. ‘Some fans’ — Flannery’s voice had both hint and humor in it — ‘just won’t quit.’
For a moment Anne could only utter a low guttural syllable of surprise. ‘Yes,’ she managed, with the small amount of breath she found.
‘You’ve got to watch out for those ones.’ Margaret Carter was edging toward them from across the room, and Flannery millimetered away from Anne, back to a more proper distance. ‘Listen,’ she said, in a voice almost empty of insinuation. ‘I hope we’ll get a chance to see each other more during the conference. It would be good to, you know . . .’
She let the sentence dangle, and as Anne collected herself, she wondered, like one professional admiring another, or an old hand enjoying the new slant of the former protégé: when had Flannery learned such arts? She had had a couple of decades, of course, but still, here she was, keeping a person guessing, on the edge of her seat. Changing the pattern of Anne’s breaths. Touching her in the right spot.
‘To talk. Together,’ Flannery finished, then in the same smooth movement turned to Margaret, who was smiling and congratulating them both on the morning, and Anne could only, catching herself, follow the younger woman’s lead.
23
The writers were slated to spend the afternoon running workshops with students, but Anne was ‘At Leisure’, in Stella Maris parlance. As Flannery, unleisured, was led away; she cast a mock-longing look at Anne and put her wrists together in a gesture of shackling, shuffling her feet behind the other members of the authorial chain gang.
And suddenly in the emptied auditorium, here was Steven Marovic, not quite meeting Anne’s gaze as he invited her to join him for a coffee.
‘Steven!’ Anne exclaimed, displaced for a moment. ‘I hardly recognize you, without a Balkan sun overhead, or a deckchair at your elbow.’
He smiled, but the fact was the professor did look different to her here in New Haven; or perhaps it was now, these months later. It might have been having Margaret’s overeager urgings in her mind. Or, more likely, it was that something within herself had, like a hand, or a page, turned over.
‘Coffee!’ Anne said with collegial enthusiasm. ‘That is an excellent idea. It’s my drug of choice, during a conference.’
Marovic smiled again with more confidence. Anne felt something in him relax. He seemed to have heard the timbre of her voice; so many messages between people were on an animal level. Wordless. Somatic. We will not be lovers. You can stop worrying about that.
At the nearby bookstore cafe, over espressos (‘They were better in Dubrovnik,’ Anne noted) Marovic popped his question.
‘So. Anne. You’re a reader of Rebecca West?’
She laughed, happily surprised by this opening gambit. ‘Of course.’
‘I thought so. You quoted her once, on our journey.’ He colored slightly. ‘I am preparing a trip for the alumni group to the former Yugoslav countries — Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia — organized along the lines of West’s itinerary in Black Lamb and Gray Falcon.’
‘That’s a brilliant book.’
‘Precisely. I feel the same way.’ He gave a small, formal nod. ‘Might you be willing to lecture on it?’
‘Oh! I see. Provide readings to go along with the tour? As on our cruise?’
‘That’s it.’
Anne leaned forward over the small circular table. ‘You know, an idea came to me a few years ago. I wanted to think about West alongside another English writer, Sybille Bedford. They fascinate me: two women writers, English — adopted English, in Bedford’s case — who wrote fiction as well as non-fiction, and who both wrote keenly and with total confidence about realms often considered masculine. The law. War. European history.’
Marovic looked pleased. ‘There you are.’ He brushed a hand over his hairless, contoured head, a phrenologist’s fantasy. ‘You already have the lecture started.’
‘I do. I could begin writing it after this conference.’ She closed her eyes a moment as an unrelated image, of a fellow conference-goer, fluttered across her mind. She recovered. ‘Tell me, when would this be?’
‘Summer 2015,’ he answered. ‘The
y must plan far in advance.’
‘Of course. That sounds fine.’ By then, Anne would be even more experienced inking them in, her holidays, her summers. ‘But, Steven,’ Anne exclaimed, with mock horror. ‘This will be on land! No Stella Maris then.’
‘No.’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘Trains, it will be. And hotels. Not quite the Orient Express, but. More like that.’
Anne gazed out the large plate-glass windows of the cafe to the New Haven sidewalk, where students walked, head down, buttoned up against the afternoon chill. ‘Tell me,’ Anne asked. ‘Do the faculty on these trips sometimes bring . . . someone with them? A guest?’
Steven Marovic blinked his dark, spectacle-magnified eyes. ‘Of course,’ he replied suavely. He was a sensitive man; she had seen that on the Stella Maris. He had dignity, and Anne appreciated that. He knew what she was asking. ‘It can be arranged.’
‘I just wondered.’ Anne returned her face to him, relaxed, as though the question had been idle, almost insignificant. ‘I simply wondered.’
24
The metaphors flowed, vivid or pallid, the characters spoke in voices supple or wooden, the pastiches worked, or they didn’t. A marijuana farmer struggled to adjust his attitude after the passing of permissive new laws; a teenage girl kept an exaggerated sex diary that was discovered by her brother.
Whose idea was it that writers should want to do this, sit around a formica table with a piece of fiction under discussion, like an anesthetized body about to be opened up, probed, and rearranged? Flannery was the chief surgeon here, the one with authority to order the removal of a spleen or the draining of an abscess, but she was surrounded by second-guessers looking on during the operation, each offering an opinion on which words should end up in the biohazard bin of cuttings, and which ones might remain.
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