Pages for Her

by Sylvia Brownrigg

  Their story must continue. The certainty seized Anne. That pattern would be there overhead, to be noticed and highlighted on however many starred alignments the two women were given to spend together, enfolded in one another.

  And now, this October, for one more night, at least — Anne had the thought clearly, before subsiding again into a short, auroral catnap — for one more late, hourless night, they would touch.

  36

  ‘Hi, sweetheart.’

  ‘Hi.’ That dear far-off voice; she sang her ‘Hi’ in two syllables, a small songbird. Love bloomed, a colorful bouquet, in Flannery’s chest.

  ‘How are you, Willerby?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Are you getting ready to go to school?’

  ‘It’s Saturday.’

  ‘Of course, gosh!’ How quickly Flannery had lost track. ‘Well . . . Are you getting ready to not go to school?’

  Willa half laughed.

  ‘You’ve got soccer practice, I guess.’

  ‘Mmhmm. Then Dad says we have to go to the lumber yard.’

  ‘Oh. Well, that could be fun.’

  There was a young yawn.

  ‘You sound sleepy.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Flannery cast around for something to say, finding it oddly difficult. She knew this little girl as well as her own hand — which she turned over to look at, as if for inspiration. ‘So, sweetie, it’s my last day at the conference. I’m doing a reading tonight, then I’ll get on a plane back to San Francisco in the morning. I’ll see you tomorrow! I can’t wait.’

  ‘Me too.’ The girl slurped something. Cereal, probably. She sounded intent on eating. ‘You want to talk to Dad?’

  ‘Sure, sweetheart. You guys having fun together, you and Dad?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Well. What did a telephone ever tell you? Charles kept suggesting a video call, but Flannery was sheltering behind her exaggerated technophobia to fend it off. In fact, she simply balked at having to be seen, had an atavistic shunning of any lens; and perhaps feared the pang she’d feel, watching Willa at a distance. Wasn’t that half the point of going away, anyway — to be out of sight? Was that advantage of travel really over now, in these years?

  ‘Yeah, why don’t you put Dad on. Have a good practice, honey. I love you.’

  ‘I love you too.’

  A short clattering, then: ‘It would be easier if we just FaceTimed. Then we could all talk at the same time.’

  ‘Hi.’

  He grunted. ‘So. Tell me: why can’t soccer start at noon? What is the point of getting all these six-year-olds on the field so goddamned early?’

  ‘It’s a pitch, in soccer. A soccer pitch.’

  ‘OK, but my point stands.’

  ‘They schedule it to maximally exhaust the parents. It’s a conspiracy.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ She heard Charles tearing into a pastry like a bear. He chewed into the mouthpiece. ‘So, how’s it going?’

  ‘Well. It’s been going really well.’

  ‘Terrific.’

  ‘I’ve been talking with some people here, meeting old friends . . .’

  ‘Excellent.’ He swallowed. ‘Listen, before we get Messi out the door here, I wanted to tell you. It turns out I have to fly to Detroit myself. Otherwise they’re just going to fuck the whole thing up.’

  ‘Is Willa right there listening?’

  ‘She can’t hear me.’ Audibly Charles moved to a different part of the room. ‘Anyway. I knew I’d have to go later, but I’ve got to make sure they get things right at this stage. Now.’

  ‘It’s not something Baer could do?’

  ‘It really isn’t. It has to be me. So I’ve booked a flight for tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Yeah. It leaves around noon from SFO.’

  ‘That’s more or less when I get in.’

  ‘Perfect! Maybe we can have a quick coffee at the airport before I board.’

  ‘But who’ll be watching Willa?’

  ‘Couldn’t your mom?’

  Flannery closed her eyes. ‘I’ll ask.’

  ‘You would not believe these people. Total amateurs. They haven’t prepped the courtyard in the right way, so the installation is going to be a nightmare, and then they keep turning all the problems around on me, like they’re my fault. This woman Patricia Hanes is such a fucking schoolmarm –’

  ‘Charles. Can you please try not to let Willa hear you?’

  ‘I don’t mind if she hears me. She can know what these people are like.’

  ‘Don’t you guys need to go pretty soon?’

  Her husband sighed, a deep, pastry-fed sigh of virtue and of duty. ‘We do. Otherwise, you know, she’ll get dropped from the starting line-up.’

  ‘Just be grateful we’re not the snack family this week. You’d have to be at the market buying nut-free granola bars and fruit roll-ups.’

  ‘I just hope all this sporting frenzy is worth it. It better be Willa’s ticket for getting into college, or I’m going to be really pissed off about the loss of sleep.’

  Flannery sighed. ‘OK. Look, I’ll call Mom, and see what we can figure out. I’m reading tonight, by the way. I’m the headliner, supposedly.’

  ‘Are you? Great.’

  Was there more? Did Flannery want there to be more?

  ‘Willa, Muffin,’ Charles called in his stage voice, performing fatherhood. ‘Have you got your stuff ready? Do you want to say bye to your mom? See you, Beauty. Knock ’em dead tonight.’

  ‘I’ll try.’ Flannery said. There was a sentence formulating in Flannery’s mind — There’s a friend of mine I saw again here, honey. I hope you’ll meet her sometime. She’s . . . – but in the event, Flannery did not yet have to find the right adjective for Anne, as Willa was too busy looking for her pair of cleats to come back to the phone, so Flannery hung up and left them to it.

  37

  The quiet in her room after the call was so . . . quiet.

  Flannery had a scratchy throat and tired eyes, though also a foreign warmth within her, and the sweet soak of memories of the night before. Indulgently, she called for room service. She was not ready to face a restaurant full of people.

  Maybe, Flannery considered, Charles’s need to travel to Detroit was a positive. Returning to San Francisco and enjoying a few days alone with Willa might be easier for Flannery than a simultaneous reunion with her husband. She might find a way, at some point, to speak that not yet uttered sentence to her daughter, about her rediscovered friend. Mother and daughter could play, lounge around at home, eat easy food. When Willa was occupied, Flannery could work. The prospect felt newly promising, somehow, to Flannery. Maternal loneliness did exist — people wrote and spoke about it more than they used to — but Flannery had a source of solace now, and it was not simply playing fictional reels in her mind of the life and love of a part-imaginary couple. The comfort would come from the woman herself. The solace was Anne.

  At the door of her Den, Flannery gratefully received a silvered pot of coffee from a friendly, uniformed man, along with a basket full of carbohydrates. She poured herself a cup, then looked out at the morning campus through her window: spires and halls and geniuses. The university’s buildings, ever improved and added to, were the recognizable elements of the institution, but, of course, it was the hearts and minds that made the place what it was. She drank, and thought. Flannery had always thought well here.

  Flannery did not feel she was turning her back on Charles, even as she looked ahead with mute excitement to another night of recollecting Anne. This old, first love was part of the fabric of her self too, whether her husband had paid attention to the weave or not. Her wakeful hours that long night had brought Flannery back a piece of herself, replenishing some essence. (Physics again: adding substance to the b
eaker of her character, while taking no element out of it.) If Charles loved her — however he loved her — would he not want that for Flannery? Would he want her to be whole?

  She replayed the amiable conversation they had just had on the phone, hearing Charles’s assertive baritone in her inner ear. The relationship between herself and the man was more layered and resilient than she sometimes admitted. Did the marriage tie explain this? Flannery, a native skeptic on the subject, doubted it was the promises she and Charles had made at City Hall that united them; people broke those vows all the time without thinking much of it. Hadn’t he? Hadn’t she? In twenty-first-century San Francisco such promises turned rapidly into yet another set of ephemeral messages, like texts or emails — one more collection of overwriteable words stored in the boundless cloud.

  If it wasn’t the vows, was Willa the unseverable link between her and Charles? No doubt. From her life with Charles Flannery had learned for the first time that a child can actually connect two people. What a thought! Fatherless as she had been, growing up, Flannery had not been schooled in this obvious life lesson. As a girl, she had not been that bridge between Laura and Len — not, at least, until she wrote her book, which finally created a relationship, on the page and in the reading world, between her distant and estranged parents.

  Flannery’s coffee-warmed fingers twitched slightly.

  She got out her notebook, sat at the broad desk with its university view, and started to move her blue pen across the green, lined field open before her.

  Why write these pages when she’ll never read them?

  She looked at the sentence. Didn’t everything reduce to grief, finally? It was first and last and security, that familiar deposit. I love you, I miss you — weren’t those always the essentials?

  She scribbled notes to herself, the start of an authorial conversation. She might not use them, but they got her mind working again.

  You did not find the love you expected, your beloved never became your beloved, your husband and you spoke different languages, the texture of your affections was complex and surprising, sometimes even to yourself. Especially to yourself. You were heartbroken when she died, and you said so.

  You lost people.

  You found people.

  One person in particular was there all along, though you had not allowed yourself to know it.

  Anne had for all these years been in Flannery’s melancholy meandering mind, but mostly as a character. Flannery had not expected her to become real. With a wit she had not known she still possessed after some wearying and tumultuous years, Flannery had nonetheless engineered this passionate reunion, come here, to this important place, to find her Anne. And having found her, she did not intend to lose her again.

  Flannery had the morning free, and she got to work.

  38

  Coda.

  Late that evening, they were entwined again. They were going to give each other one more night entire. Anne ceased to worry whether she would be seen emerging from the Den, and Flannery, knowing she was already going to be flying home exhausted and exhilarated, figured the two states would cancel each other out so let go of worrying about what shape she would be in on her return. While she was alive, she would live.

  They came together, then slid apart, they lay in lamplight and moved in darkness, they were silent and inarticulate or they were wild and vociferous, and then relaxed together afterwards, talking like friends. There was a miniature infinity of emotional shades to enjoy on this last night, so they followed the rhythms of one another’s comedy or solemnity, chattiness or quiet. They were wet and hungry, then sticky and sated. Their breaths sped, then slowed. There were tears once — Flannery’s. She didn’t want to talk about it, so they didn’t.

  ‘What made you write that piece?’ Anne asked Flannery at last, during a conversational stretch. ‘It did not sound like Reader, I Murdered Him.’ Anne moved her fingers through Flannery’s thick blond hair.

  ‘No. Well spotted.’ Flannery tilted her head back, savoring her lover’s hold.

  ‘I respect the mystery of the creative process, and all that,’ Anne clarified. ‘I just wondered. It wasn’t one of the ideas you mentioned before.’

  ‘No. It’s new,’ Flannery said simply. ‘It happened to someone I know. Losing someone she loved, a great deal. That’s all. People cover the death of husbands and wives and parents and children; but there’s not so much written on the death of friends. I don’t know . . . the lines just arrived in my mind.’ She answered the hair gesture with a lick of Anne’s neck.

  ‘Inspiration.’ Anne inhaled. ‘Like a train emerging out of the mists.’

  ‘Just like that. A train. A feather falling. The muse. Who knows how it works exactly?’

  Flannery looked at this woman with the wildly green eyes, whose beauty she had known since she was old enough to board an airplane alone, and set off thousands of miles to break new ground. Flannery touched Anne’s arm lightly, a small, familiar gesture — a wordless reference to the fact that they would, somehow, keep alive this warmth between them.

  ‘The muse,’ Flannery repeated. ‘That’s you.’ She cupped that elbow, the tenderest intimacy, in her palm.

  Anne flushed. ‘I don’t mind being a muse,’ she said. ‘In fact, I’m flattered by the idea. But . . . I want you to promise me something.’

  ‘Anything. The moon. The stars. Name it.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘OK. I’m serious too. What?’

  ‘Don’t,’ Anne asked, from a place deep within her, ‘don’t turn us into a story. All right?’

  ‘Not another erotic memoir?’ Flannery kissed Anne’s shoulder.

  ‘Not another erotic memoir. Not a roman à clef, wherein clever readers can guess the real players. And not a long, confessional poem published in some obscure literary journal. None of that.’

  Flannery considered this.

  ‘You don’t want us on the page at all?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You want this kept just between us?’

  ‘Just between us.’

  Flannery thought of a story she could tell, or choose not to tell. She thought of the book she was next going to write. She thought of the years-long love she had had for this person lying next to her, and the importance of agreeing to her request.

  The pact was sealed, as was so much between them, with a kiss.

  39

  Pages for Her

  Why write these pages when she’ll never read them?

  Still.

  I had to try, at least, at last: after the dust to dust had settled, the ashes gone back to being ashes. Language, the now voyager; it’s the only traveler that makes it across that border, as she of all people knew. Pushing its dark boat back and forth between worlds like Charon in the legend. She dealt in words, they were the stuff she handled, and that’s what her friends have left to offer her, apart from the occasional fistful of pretty flowers.

  It’s our shared urge to try to fill the fearful new emptiness with substance or with sound. The symbolic lyric of a flower. The power of the dirge. A voice crying, or murmuring:

  I miss you.

  I love you, and I miss you.

  I don’t speak to my dead, and my dead don’t speak back. I’ve never had the art. They stack up, inevitably. It’s the order of things. One person dies, then another, and on it goes. The lost parent’s lost parent; the college lover, felled by a vicious illness; the doomed and moody cousin. I always meant to talk to her more, and now it’s too late. All I can do is turn half sideways, no longer facing them, and fill my notebook.

  Take a setting, seize it. Find a piece of her spirit later, elsewhere; cherish it.

  There are lions and there are lionesses. She knew this, too; it was her territory. The lion is admired, he is the figurehead, it is his profile drawn and reproduced by artis
ts and designers and it is his roar we hear across the bush, or the overcrowded wilds of civilization. The lions are superb. They are tawny and brilliant. You need not search for royalty references to make sense of these creatures, as our tinsel human kings are so small next to those dramatic animals, but if it comforts you to do it then, yes, certainly, call them kings.

  Just don’t ignore the lionesses.

  The lioness is better practiced at camouflage than her mate. Knows more about hiding. You might mistake her relative slightness, or the green stillness in her eyes, and it’s possible that you won’t at first sense her lean and muscled strength because she’s quieter with it. Her feline beauty, inevitably, will distract you. Don’t let it. Know that even as she paces the city streets she has that veld in her veins and fierce heat in her bones; she’s never lost her sense of scale or her feel for the night’s thorough darkness, or the hunger that goes along with both. She knows that the cooling dead are only ever a moment’s open-jawed pounce away from the hungry living. She can be ravenous, and she can run for miles. Don’t think you’ll catch her. Be satisfied if you can breathe beside her for a while, unharmed.

  Flannery read for a while. She was on a stage, not a place she had been for a few years, and was unused to the squint-inducing lights and the adrenalined alarm of seeing faces arrayed below her. Before she had gone up she had had an acute hit of nausea, and pressed her left hand to her stomach to quell it. She thought of trying to locate a particular face in the crowd, but knew she had to do this without reference to anyone else. She was on her own.

  Yet once she began, her voice strengthened and Flannery let go of everything else: anxiety, pride, doubt, ambition. It was the start of a narrative, just the start. A woman had a friend she loved, who died. She had been taken cruelly, and too early. Other loves and loyalties would come into the plot as the tale unfolded. It was too early to say where they would lead. The words had begun, she was hewing the story out from the rough rock of the blank page, and Flannery intended to watch them, use them, to see what form finally emerged.