Pages for Her

by Sylvia Brownrigg

  She had performed such procedures plenty of times; it was a job that hitched itself to the real work of writing the way an ugly trailer containing all the gear is hitched to a sleeker vacation vehicle, slowing the leader down, and changing its momentum. Across the nation, writing workshops had been proliferating along with global coffee chains, and probably by this point in the century every fourth American either knew how to make a skinny no-foam cappuccino, or had critiqued a fellow student’s character sketch, one or the other.

  On this afternoon, however, Flannery was finding it hard to concentrate. The students, she could not fail to notice, were strong — their work, if self-conscious, nonetheless sophisticated. There was some vying for position, as you’d expect, but they were a good set, easily corralled and hardworking, like obedient horses at some dude ranch resort, familiar with their tasks and capable of performing them.

  A line from the sex diary story floated into the classroom air.

  ‘When they slept together again, it felt like refracturing a broken ankle that had just almost healed, and Kira felt weak.’ The author, a caramel-skinned woman with a pierced nose, stopped there.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Flannery said sleepily to her students. ‘Do you think that works, as an analogy? Maceo, what do you think?’

  A rough-edged young man, who looked like a singer in an indie band, offered, after some hesitation, his opinion. Flannery made a good effort to listen, or thought she did, only to realize after he concluded that she had missed most of his point and so could only nod sagely, ambiguously, without either agreeing with or challenging what he said. Flannery felt badly about this, as she aimed to do her work well, and to respond to the stories the students had brought to her, whatever cannabis field or suburban bedroom they were set in, however many taboos were broken.

  Go back to your rooms, everyone, was really what she wanted to say to this group of people. I think you’re all very talented. You show great promise, honestly. Almost all of you. And I’m sorry to have to send you out early, but — the apology would have been genuine, she would just have to hope they understood — all I can think about is when I’ll see her again.

  25

  Later, Flannery was preparing herself for the dinner.

  One love was drawing Flannery forward, accelerating her pulse, making her second guess every one of her own perceptions and intentions; but the other love troubled her mind too, waves of parental remorse breaking over her. She had left her daughter behind! She was three thousand miles away! This was another reason Flannery had avoided escape before: not all could be pinned on difficulties with Charles, some had been apprehension about her own internal scold.

  Flannery called home, and reached her mother.

  ‘Hi, honey!’ Laura greeted her cheerfully. ‘How are you?’

  Her ear was filled with maternal warmth, and even from a little cell phone it was a restorative, calming substance. Sometimes you didn’t have to dish it out; sometimes you could take it.

  ‘Hi, Mom. Good, things are good. How are you guys?’

  ‘We’re just fine! You’ve caught us eating ice cream. It’s hot. High eighties, even in the city! We stopped on the way back from school.’

  ‘Really?’ Flannery was so steeped in Connecticut, it was a challenge to conceive of California.

  ‘Yes! We were just about to play a game of . . . Here, Willerby, it’s your mom. Watch out honey, don’t let it drip.’

  And suddenly Flannery’s mother’s voice became instead her daughter’s, saying, ‘I got peanut butter pretzel.’

  ‘You did? What is that — a flavor?’

  ‘Yes!’ Willa giggled in anticipation. They had a running joke about the crazy taste combinations concocted by the fancy ice cream place in their neighborhood.

  ‘Did they have my favorite?’ Flannery asked. ‘Salmon caramel?’

  ‘No!’ Laughter.

  ‘How about jalapeño and coconut?’

  ‘No!’ More.

  ‘Or maple bacon? . . . Oh wait, that’s a real one.’ Food conversation was, Flannery realized, all you really needed to connect with your child from a distance. It was not necessary to fill in details on where you were or what you were doing. When Charles was traveling and talked to Willa on the phone, he often chatted to her about his surroundings (‘Guess what I’m looking at. The Hudson River!’), but Flannery had noticed her daughter only half taking in those details. It was the self-involvement of childhood: above all, the kid needed to know that you had not forgotten them. And that you cared still that they were getting fed. ‘OK, so after the peanut butter pretzel ice cream, what game are you and Grandma going to play?’

  ‘Rat-a-tat Cat.’

  ‘That’s a good one. I hope you win –’

  ‘Do you have a message for Charles, honey?’

  The switch back to Laura was unannounced.

  ‘Oh, no. That’s OK, I can try him direct on his phone.’

  ‘He hasn’t been here much today. He was out late last night . . .’ She paused. ‘I think he’s working hard.’

  Flannery heard the slight suggestion in her mother’s hesitation, and chose to ignore it. ‘But things are OK with all of you guys?’

  ‘Really, fine!’

  It was, Flannery accepted, the other reality. Things could actually be fine, without you. That was a whipsaw of motherhood: Oh my God, they need me so much flipping in a bereft instant to Hey, everyone, don’t you need me?

  ‘That’s great, Mom. Thank you so much for everything you’re doing. I’m glad it’s working out.’

  ‘Of course, honey. I just hope you’re having fun there, talking about your books, seeing old friends.’

  Flannery felt a deep plunge of gratitude.

  ‘I am, Mom. Thanks.’ She tilted her head back so that her eyes were on the white plaster ceiling. She breathed deeply, so she wouldn’t cry. ‘I am.’

  26

  At the Dean’s Dinner, Margaret, or the god of seating charts, contrived to place Anne and Flannery adjacent at a long, rectangular table in a golden-lit oak-paneled room that was every stereotype of Ivy League opulence. A mustachioed white man in a coal-dark suit gazed out sternly from a Reynolds-like portrait on one wall; across from him, a couple of racehorses, perhaps his, took the course at Saratoga Springs with gray oil smears for riders, each capped with a bright daub of color, money green or social register blue. Alongside the table a broad ornate fireplace, last used decades before, suggested warm fireside conversations about the next senatorial race, or the nascent CIA, amidst gravel-voiced quotations from Caesar, or H. L. Mencken. A bastion of power and privilege: that undergraduate placard-rattling protest came to Flannery’s mind again. Well, here it was. This was what a bastion looked like, up close.

  ‘He reminds me of someone,’ Flannery said softly, nodding at the off-black-coated gentleman. Anne tilted her head.

  ‘Really? Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. Murphy, maybe?’ Flannery risked a joke that stretched back to the night their affair began, in the apartment of one of Anne’s New York friends and eventually across the Murphy bed they folded down so that they could . . . spread out. After that first raucous night, ‘Murphy’ became a comic character in their romantic banter: sometimes a voyeur, sometimes an instigator, occasionally a figure of propriety or disapprobation. The face of the outside world, looking in at the illicit lovers. It had been a time before marriage equality, when caution was still the norm.

  ‘I see what you mean.’ Anne’s gaze fixed on the painting, as if absorbing a provocative point of art history. ‘He does bear a resemblance.’

  First courses of fishcakes were delivered, hardworking Margaret gave another short speech (Flannery had to admire her reworking the material, like a glib stand-up), and then the dean himself stood, a tall, craggy figure with exaggeratedly large ears and nose, like a cubist sculpture. He opened
with a charming anecdote illustrating his collegiate daughter’s precocity and made a smooth, eloquent transition to the vital contributions made by so many women to the university, and his own and others’ consistent efforts to bring more women onto the faculty, a delivery that sounded both rote and earnest. By the time they were on their pucks of peppercorned beef with dauphin potatoes, Flannery, while still punchy, could feel the social exhaustion that always waited just behind her rare moments of extroversion. At the table’s other end Andi Chatterjee went into her famous imitation of Hillary Clinton, and the table gratefully stilled to enjoy it.

  ‘That’s very good. Very good,’ the dean approved, shaking his head, chuckling, then told a story masquerading as a joke against himself which required him to describe the time he was invited to the White House to meet the then president.

  White uniformed work-study students came back and forth to the table with cake and coffee. ‘I did that job for a year,’ Flannery told Anne. ‘My senior year. Helping cater big dinners for guests, alumni, faculty. By this point in the evening I always just wished they would skip the damned coffee and retire.’

  ‘Let’s.’ Anne leaned in. ‘I’d rather walk, anyway. Wouldn’t you?’

  Wouldn’t she?

  Wouldn’t she?

  Flannery ahemmed into her water glass, which triggered a genuine coughing fit that eventually prompted her to say in a strangled voice to Margaret, ‘I’m so sorry — I’m fine, I’m just going to step outside,’ and then head out and down the steps into a blissfully quiet courtyard.

  She coughed, recovered, waited.

  Five minutes later Anne appeared, holding two coats. ‘I made excuses,’ she said, ‘for both of us.’ She held Flannery’s coat, and as Flannery stepped into it, Flannery felt she was giving herself over to Anne, ready to follow her anywhere. Together the two women left behind the bastion and its privileges, and entered the city’s sleek, black October streets side by side.

  27

  It was important, implicitly, for the walk to have no destination, so the two ambled around in gothic shadowed squares in the damp air trying not to know where they were going. They meandered up a quiet side street, along a busy, shower-slicked thoroughfare, then turned to walk along the top of the town’s church-studded green.

  In Flannery’s circumscribed undergraduate years this area had marked the edge of Known Territory, beyond which the alarmist campus police warned freshmen not to go. When Flannery fell into her passionate days and nights with Anne, this green was one of many lines she crossed, as Anne’s apartment lay on the far side of it, nestled in a student-free part of town.

  ‘Your place was across there,’ Flannery indicated, as if Anne might have forgotten. ‘I knew this path so well.’ She intended her tone to be jaunty, not maudlin, but feared it may have wavered.

  ‘I used to worry occasionally that you’d get lost or stray, trying to find me.’

  ‘I was pretty clueless, wasn’t I?’ Flannery was amused. ‘You were worried you might have to come and find me in the pound.’

  ‘You were adorable.’ Anne stopped just beyond the rays of light cast by a park lamp. ‘As I believe I told you, once or twice.’

  ‘You did.’ Flannery’s hands were deep in her pockets. She shivered.

  ‘Flannery.’

  It was a statement, not a question. Anne’s eyes were a fired emerald, her cheeks pale coral with the chill, and her lips pursed, as if she were about to speak. Or perhaps . . . not to speak. Anne took a step closer to her. She reached a hand out to hold Flannery’s arm. And looked at her, and waited.

  Then she kissed her.

  There, on the green, in the dark, Flannery was met again by that perfect persimmon mouth. She had not known, had not anywhere suspected, how deeply she had missed it. A low moan moved through Flannery as she opened her own mouth, and self, to the kiss.

  Borders dissolved. Passion blossomed, and heat took hold. Flannery forgot words and meanings. Her heart darted, a hummingbird. She took her hands out of her pockets and laced them low around Anne’s back.

  Flannery had forgotten this. The sensation that the base had just fallen right out of you, hollowing you out, leaving nothing but hunger within you and only this one person who could satisfy it. Your palms starting to press and fold. Remembering; and wanting to be reminded.

  ‘Don’t you have a room somewhere?’ Anne asked, at a vibration so low she was almost inaudible. She grasped the lapels of Flannery’s inadequate coat.

  ‘I do,’ Flannery replied, her voice hoarse. ‘Let me take you to my Den.’

  ‘So primitive sounding,’ Anne said. ‘I like it.’

  28

  Primitive or sophisticated; first lover or tenth; a Murphy bed or the rug in the living room or a luxurious hotel mattress with starched white sheets. It made no difference, finally. When two people came together who were meant to, the night and the meeting were elemental, and the trappings ceased to exist.

  All that mattered were the bodies. And the selves.

  It had been years since either Flannery or Anne had made love to another woman. They both discovered that it was not something you forgot. Their hands knew; their fingers found; their skins kissed too, along with their mouths, and everything became slick with this kissing. All that wetness, which seemed to have retreated into locked closets of grief or disappointment, was released again as they rediscovered one another. The first fondlings, whispers and hesitations turned over in the darkness into quickening breaths, heated holds, and that urgent mutual clutch. Don’t let me go. Don’t stop.

  I won’t stop.

  Neither tried to turn on the lights. Neither was inclined to ask, or comment. They mostly communicated in the wordless calls of that kind of night encounter, though now and then they murmured each other’s names in passion. And gratitude. And frankly . . . shock.

  It had been a while since Flannery had stayed in the room while making love. Had it been years, sadly? Was she that far gone? She had gotten into the bad but hard to shake habit of being elsewhere while her body moved and maneuvered with Charles’s. It was not an evasion she was proud of, and she knew that a sense of obligation was not a great erotic motivation, but sex had seemed necessary to keep some level of domestic peace.

  She was present with Anne, and this was the first shuddering revelation in touching her after all this time — that Flannery herself was there to do it. Wide-eyed, even in the dark, opening Anne adeptly, drawing on her younger self’s confidence and that old, adoring knowledge she had long ago acquired. She was stunned that she still could be that person. Her hands befriended Anne’s curved muscled shoulders, caressed those legs that could take on miles.

  For Anne there was necessarily the shyness of being older than Flannery, a comparative whose former advantage had become — there was no way to ignore this — a liability. Where she had been proud of her body, she now had a nascent bashfulness, but the want she felt was intense and Flannery, this miracle girl, was not going to let age or ceremony stand in her way. Flannery was going to take her, and did, and Anne would lose her voice and her propriety in the orange light that came through the unshaded windows, sanctioning this union, forgiving them both their altered forms.

  ‘It’s still you,’ Anne said, after a lush hour. She lay on her side, facing Flannery, her fingers resting on Flannery’s arm. Flannery kept a palm close to Anne’s breast.

  Flannery closed her eyes, hid her face in Anne’s shoulder, breathed the familiar scent of her.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ Anne added, speaking down into the tousled hair that fell over Flannery’s ear.

  Flannery lifted her head to look up at Anne’s face. ‘That’s funny,’ she said. ‘You took the words right out of my mouth.’ She brushed the folded back of her index finger along Anne’s smooth cheek. ‘I was going to say the same about you.’ She touched her thumb below each of Anne’s luminous g
reen eyes, then gently kissed those loved eyelids.

  ‘The words out of your mouth?’ Anne was remorseful. ‘Let me fix that. Here. Why don’t you take them back.’

  Anne found Flannery’s mouth again, to make up for the loss.

  They kissed, and kept kissing.

  Kissing had always been the heart of it.

  29

  Later, Flannery could try to avoid clichés. There would be plenty of time for that afterwards: the reassembling of language and order. For these disorienting, reveried instants, her head could flood with tritenesses, and no one need ever know.

  It felt like it did the first time. It was as though they had never been apart, not for an hour. This was not exactly true. Anne’s body was certainly older and different to the touch, and Flannery’s too, with a low scar across her belly from the caesarean, and the pouched slack of gymless days. But her sentimental heart willed it to be true, tried to make the years fold in like an accordion, as if the intervening history had taken place in a parallel universe, while in this one it was just the previous week that Flannery had slept with Anne in Albuquerque for what she had feared would be the last time, ever.

  ‘My mind is filled with terrible songs,’ Flannery confessed. ‘I don’t even want to tell you which ones.’

  ‘No. Don’t. It would ruin the moment, probably.’

  ‘I worry about that too.’

  The women embraced, their legs entangling, their breaths pooling and waterfalling together, purposeful rapids. Fingers in blond or russet hair, lips on lean neck, palm along thigh, or pressed against a concave lower back.

  There was a pause. ‘It is true, though,’ Anne said again, eventually, ‘that in moments of strong feeling’ — she brushed her lips just below Flannery’s eye — ‘it’s hard to find words that are original.’

  ‘All the sap rises. The sappy lyrics.’ Flannery bit, very gently, Anne’s shoulder. It was so sweet. ‘You can’t ever get past them to say something new.’