‘“I love you is always a quotation.”’
‘Winterson!’ Flannery exclaimed. ‘That is a great line. Also, you know, she writes very well about ravishing redheads, with brilliant green eyes.’
‘And Venice,’ Anne diverted her. ‘The need for webbed feet there.’
‘How are your feet?’ Flannery slid down along the bed to hold one, an overdue reunion.
‘Mmm. Didn’t you once promise something about “bringing me, unshod, to bliss”? Speaking of quotations?’
Flannery winced. ‘I can’t believe you remember that.’
‘Oh, I could recite the entire poem if you like.’ Anne raised her voice slightly. ‘“I’d like to pay your palms / the same favor that you pay these pages . . .”’
‘Stop. Stop!’ Flannery cried, placing her palm half over her lover’s mouth to block the words. ‘I was a kid! It was a love poem! You can’t quote it back to me. Have pity. For God’s sake.’
‘“Searching them for grooves and images / and the secret signs of hunger . . .”’
‘Seriously. Stop.’
‘Just a minute ago, in the dark’ — Anne’s laugh was low, and contagious — ‘you didn’t want me to stop. Which is it? Make up your mind.’
‘Oh, I’ve made it up already, sweetheart.’ Flannery’s answer came with her own laughter, which caught slightly on the emotion in the back of her throat. ‘When I say stop, I only mean with the bad poetry. Otherwise’ — she felt the heat rise within her again — ‘please keep going.’
Time passed. The earth moved. That was another thing they said. All those people, the ones who had already said everything.
Eventually, after all that rush of pleasure, the women’s songs of praise in midnight voices, they both felt the need to regain balance. They talked to each other in ordinary tones, as if they were friends, after all. Languid after-chat.
‘I enjoyed Venice,’ Anne said. ‘But it was just . . . a city, in the end. It didn’t seem the place of all those fantasies, and fictions. Maybe because of the heat, and the crowds. Or because I was there with my sister.’
‘Patricia?’
‘Yes.’ Anne was impressed. ‘I can’t believe you remember her name.’
Flannery considered telling Anne that though other details fled from her mind — the name of the characters in Middlemarch, where she had put the car’s registration renewal form, the date of Willa’s school’s benefit auction — a locked, safe file in Flannery’s memory was labeled Anne Arden, and it had an extensive array of contents. That, and the one containing Willa’s pronouncements and caretaking arrangements, were secure in Flannery’s mind and incorruptible, barring a complete meltdown of the system. The fact was Flannery could still have given back to Anne a travelogue from a journey Anne took to Berlin in her twenties; an unpleasant tale about her mother’s slapping Anne’s cheek in fury at her backchat; or, a happier option, if for Flannery bittersweet, a story about jazz discoveries in New Orleans or a long walk in southern France Anne had long ago enjoyed with Jasper. No doubt that golden couple had carried on traveling after Flannery and Anne had parted ways.
‘Jasper and I went to Venice together, once. So it took some effort not to be swallowed by a wave of nostalgia.’
She startled at the way Anne had replied to her unspoken question. It used to happen years before, too, that kind of mind-reading.
‘It’s been two years,’ Anne added, answering the next thought as well. ‘Since we split.’
Flannery wondered how to respond. It would have felt coy to pretend she had not known or guessed about this. She wanted to seem sympathetic without being prurient, tactful but not feigning indifference.
‘You didn’t have to . . . erase him, I hope? Overwrite him?’
Anne paused. ‘No. I wouldn’t have wanted to. I thought of him, and missed him, but . . . it was all right.’ She looked directly at Flannery as she said this, and even in the dim light Flannery could see the willed trust, the open gaze. Also, that in speaking the sentence Anne was trying to make it true. It gave Flannery a sharp feeling, something like pain.
‘It’s as we were saying before,’ Anne continued. ‘Grief is difficult to talk about too, in anything but the most tired phrases. It’s all been said.’
Flannery kept her calm hands on Anne’s arm. She considered asking more; but what was there to ask, really? Whether he left her, or she left him? Flannery could not see how it would help her to know, or help Anne to tell her. The openmouthed Internet had already blurted out the basics.
‘He has children now . . . ?’ Flannery’s voice was tentative, and she avoided the clause that might have followed — and you never wanted that.
‘Twins. Yes. With his French wife.’ Anne regarded her fingernails, performed a small gathered moment of grooming. Her first nervous gesture.
They lay in silence. Anne’s body shifted, she exhaled, and she grasped Flannery once, as if in conclusion to her story. However much more there was — and pages’ worth, there must be — she would not speak more of it here, now.
Flannery held her lover, and held her tongue.
30
‘I could do right now,’ Anne said, yawning languidly, ‘with a cigarette.’
‘You still smoke?’
‘No. I stopped. But I still smoke about once a year, and if I had one with me, this would be the night.’
Flannery had quit smoking right after college; it was like short hair, something that looked better on others than it ever had on her. Anne, for instance, had been brilliant with a cigarette, a sultry Marlene Dietrich, and over the years the scent of cigarettes had caused an occasional erotic flutter within Flannery, arousing as it did her sense memories of Anne.
‘I wonder if college kids still smoke a lot.’
‘In New York they do. Or they vape. But it’s on the street now, of course, which takes most of the joy out of it. Standing outside in thirty-four degrees, with an icy wind — you have to be committed.’
‘Not like lighting up over drinks at the Anchor Bar.’
‘No.’
‘Drinking the coolest drink — white Russians . . .’
Anne stroked Flannery’s hair, as if she were a child. ‘It was a cute choice. As if we were on a date getting ice cream sundaes or something.’
They were thinking of their first awkward drink together: Flannery stuttering and self-conscious, Anne’s eyebrow raised perpetually in irony. Anne had sipped a cinematic martini, looking very sexy as she smoked, while Flannery made a haphazard stab at adulthood, ordering a sweet, heavily iced drink that would mask the taste of the vodka, so she might not gag.
Anne regarded Flannery now, narrowed her eyes, and took a drag from an imaginary cigarette, reenacting her seductress role. Flannery brushed a few fingers through Anne’s deep auburn hair, then reached out to borrow a puff from it herself.
‘I completely shocked Willa once,’ she said, after faux-exhaling, ‘by telling her, in passing, that I had smoked in college. You should have seen her face. It was like I told her I had robbed a bank.’
‘Capital offense?’
‘Definitely a blot on my reputation.’ Flannery shook her head. ‘You know. If she sees you throwing a yogurt pot into the trash instead of the recycling, she’s going to call you on it. The environment, Mom.’
‘She has standards.’
‘Right.’
‘But that’s a good thing?’
‘Well, it is, yeah. She’s . . .’ Flannery laughed, bashfully. She was not sure whether to continue. Was Anne curious about Flannery’s child, really? Or did she view her as an impediment, a dull conversational detour?
‘Go on.’ Anne rapped her knuckles lightly on Flannery’s arm, for encouragement. Flannery looked steadily into the lovely olive eyes, and didn’t blink. ‘Really?’
‘Yes.’ Anne nodded. ‘You’ve told
me a few stories about Willa, but I would have to meet the girl myself, to know her.’ (Flannery’s ears strained to hear whether Anne’s conditional contained intention, or not.) ‘So tell me about you. How becoming a parent changed you.’
Flannery wondered if she understood the question’s undertow: what might have happened to Jasper, with his twins? She decided to be honest.
‘I don’t know. It improves you,’ Flannery said. ‘Willa’s improved me, anyway. Not, Oh, I’m this better, selfless person now, just . . . becoming a mother strips out a layer of bullshit, of self-indulgence. I had too much of both. You can’t really afford it, when there’s a little person counting on you. She keeps me on my toes.’
Anne was attentive.
‘And hypocrisies. We all have them — well, most of us.’ Flannery made a face, to acknowledge that her former heroine might still be more perfect than the rest of the world. ‘Willa checks me on mine. She’s funny about it, but she catches me out. And because it’s her, I don’t mind. I check her on hers, too, of course. No, you can’t go to Esmé’s fun ice skating party and then a month later not invite her to your birthday. Even if you’re mad at her. It’s like we’re in this project together: getting older, and learning, and trying to be decent people. Obviously, in years I have a head start on her. But not always in instincts.’
‘Your voice is different, Flannery.’ Anne’s was suffused with affection — no jealousy, or sourness. She returned the gesture, brushing wisps of blond out of Flannery’s eyes. ‘When you speak about Willa. You’re louder.’
‘Am I?’
‘You sound more like yourself.’
How remarkable it was to be noticed. Flannery was not used to it. She was right, Flannery thought, yet how could Anne, not having seen her all this time, still know Flannery enough to see that in her?
‘Thank you.’ It was the only thing she could think of to say. Then she kissed Anne’s eyes, one after the other, for the gift of seeing her. She drew Anne closer to her again, and slowly, surely, covered her, wordlessly, with the love that was flooding through all of Flannery.
All of her.
31
This lifeblood, lust.
Here it was again. The hunger to have this girl, Flannery Jansen, in her hands — thirty-eight! Yet still a girl — and that mouth on her own. Anne was stunned by the strength of it. This was why she had been so nervous, of course, the previous morning at home in her apartment, walking across Grand Central station, and on the train. She had not been sure if she was ready for this return.
It was startling to relocate her appetite. Anne had thought she might have lost it. Not that she had mourned its disappearance. Other desires — for stories, for a well-cooked dish, for a particular strain of music — remained, and if her libido had receded, as it was scripted to do at the age Anne had reached, where was the harm?
When she missed Jasper, as she did often, if with less intensity than in the first year after their split, it was not usually their lovemaking Anne yearned for. She felt keenly the lack of his conversation, his company, the way he held her as they slept, as though he was keeping them both from falling off the edge. His humor; their jokes. The couple knew each other’s rhythms and preferences the way you know the route you take to work every day. That was the metaphor of long-term partnership — the well-trod path. Their history was half her life. Jasper reliably gave her pleasure (usually first, he was ever the gentleman), and she fully enjoyed returning the favor, savoring his body as it aged and changed. Anne had retreated internally as Jasper moved ahead into his new life, and the few affairs she had had, while distracting, only confirmed her doubt that she would really know again that lifeblood, which had coursed so thickly between the two of them in their years together.
Questions about dating irritated Anne because the word was so anemic, describing an activity that had mostly to do with assuaging your ego, filling the calendar so you would feel less alone. It did not seem related to the intensity of this midnight venture, the urgency Anne felt to find and touch every part of her former lover, and to open herself up to her in turn. A phrase of Cather’s, That breathless, brilliant heat, came to Anne’s mind, and if Cather meant it about the land and not a body, it was perhaps only because the Nebraskan had not known Flannery.
At seventeen, Flannery had been a pretty, tall, lissome young woman. (On a current campus, she would have been called hot.) She had not known her beauty, or even her own body, then. Drawn to her, Anne had unwittingly taken on the role of her deflowerer. A different person might have relished that naivety in Flannery, but Anne had not asked for the responsibility, nor understood she was assuming it until afterwards, when Flannery revealed that the fold-down Murphy had been her first sexual bed. The news dismayed Anne, and eventually became an element that distanced her from her desire. It was too much to be everything for this young woman: the first, the most, the older, the wiser. The teacher. Anne acquired surprising truths from Flannery too, as they both acknowledged, but ultimately the relational authority tipped in Anne’s direction and the thing simply could not stay balanced.
Twenty years on, Flannery was calmer and surer, aligned with her own personality, rather than standing a foot away from it, willing it to be different. She had made peace with her intelligence, having less need to prove it, and had let herself be aware that she was pretty. She knew her humor, her extant moments of awkwardness, her imagination, and even her capacity for pain — both absorbing it and possibly inflicting it. Anne thought this might be one of the sources of her melancholy.
Anne could feel this woman’s comfort with the contours of her character. There was no longer the air of striving and eagerness about Flannery, as though what was most important might be around the very next corner, and she had better just check; which had been charming, turning wearisome. At seventeen, eighteen, she had wanted so much, felt she had so far to go, and in her young passionate certainty had determined that Anne was the one to take her there. It was clear to Anne that Flannery had long since gone to many elsewheres on her own, and with others.
The years had, to Anne’s eye, only enhanced Flannery’s loveliness. Far now from that age of innocence, Flannery was marked with the blemishes of experience, which deepened rather than lessened her grace.
32
They lay in the referred urban light amidst a disarray of sheets and the half-leavings of clothes. Flannery was as modest as she had always been — her lean legs were tucked beneath the quilt cover, for propriety — but Anne, boldened, lay half-naked on the bed. She brushed a soft thumb along Flannery’s jaw.
‘You know, I’m not as much older than you as I was before.’
Flannery smiled at an angle. ‘I’m catching up with you,’ she agreed. ‘I think that’s a math thing.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yeah.’ She moved her curved hand along Anne’s thigh. ‘It’s all about proportion, right? How much of your life you’ve lived.’
‘We can’t know that. How long we have. Unless you’ve acquired other powers since we last saw each other.’
‘No. But, you know . . . if you and I meet up again in another twenty years, I’ll be nearly sixty and you’ll be pushing seventy, and we’ll be practically the same age.’
‘Seventy! I don’t plan to be around till then.’ Anne shook her head. The thought appalled her. ‘Besides, do we really have to wait that long?’
‘You’ll be great at seventy.’ Anne heard Flannery sidestep the question. ‘I’ll be the one all wrinkled and worn out.’
‘Ah, I think you’re wrong there, babe. Age cannot wither you.’
‘Sure it can. It already has.’
‘Nor custom stale your infinite variety.’
Flannery tilted her head. ‘It’s nice of you to say so. Though you may be thinking of Cleopatra. Different lady.’
With a serious expression, Anne traced over the two grooves etched u
pright into Flannery’s brow. Anxiety, or anger? Or anger caused by anxiety?
The younger woman made a rueful face. ‘Exactly. There will be a lot more of those. They’ll be even deeper by then.’
‘Cares of the world?’
‘I’ve had a few. Then again, too few to mention.’
The worry lines gave Flannery’s face a sorrow that had been absent years earlier, which added to her attraction, though it was hard for Anne to explain why. ‘They’re a sign of character,’ she offered. ‘Though I wish you had fewer of those cares. Dear girl.’
The phrase made Flannery look away, out the window, in the direction of something she had not yet described.
‘Thanks,’ she said, then concealed her face in the act of giving Anne an embrace, in the center of which Anne’s hearing picked out a brief muffled cry. Not, this time, of pleasure. Anne stroked Flannery’s head for a moment.
‘Another cigarette?’ she pretend-offered, with sympathy.
‘No, thanks,’ Flannery demurred. ‘I’m trying to quit.’ She lay on her back, her hands clasped over her chest like a saint’s, and stared up at the midnight ceiling. Anne lay next to her, companionably, gazing at the same hotel room sky.
‘Charles is an artist,’ Flannery said after a while, as if Anne did not know that already, and as if it explained a great deal. ‘He can be difficult.’ Her shoulders moved in a shrug against the pillow.
‘He’s done very well.’
‘He has. Actually, he did one of the pavilions at the Biennale once. A long time ago, before I knew him.’
‘Yes, I saw it. The year I was in Venice, with Jasper.’
‘Really?’ Flannery made a comic grimace. ‘War and Peace. I guess that piece divided people. Some loved it, some hated it.’
‘Jasper rated it. I found it . . . loud.’
‘Oh, did it have audio? I didn’t realize that. I thought –’
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