Pages for You (14 page)

L
ong and lean was supposed to be the desired shape in life, but next to Anne, Flannery always felt big and gangly. Anne luxuriated over Flannery’s legs, running her hands along them as if along a burnished banister. She admired Flannery’s height, saying once as an exotic compliment that it made her feel she was dating an elegant Great Dane. “Norwegian,” Flannery corrected, not quite sure how to take it.

Despite Anne’s graciousness Flannery felt that they both knew that Anne was the one whose dimensions were mysteriously divine. Flannery fit her arm around Anne’s neat waist one afternoon, in the languid February heat of the apartment, and told her so.

“You are so small and perfect,” Flannery said. “It’s just that: you are perfect.” She let her hands resculpt Anne’s perfection for a soft minute before she heard the silence that met her remark. When she looked up, she found a surprising flutter of grief over Anne’s face.

“That,” she said, “is almost the precise opposite of what my mother used to say to me.”

“Why? What did she say to you?”

“That I was too small. Weak.
Naine
, like my name—it means dwarfish. She didn’t like me very much, my mother.” Anne laughed. Or rather, made a sound that approximated laughter. “Her life would have been immeasurably better if she’d never had me. She could have left my father and gone back home, to Paris. As she was good enough to tell me, often.” Anne reached for her cigarettes from a jumble of torn-off jeans and socks, hunted around for a bedside lighter. Lit, inhaled, plucked a piece of tobacco from her tongue with delicate fingers. Exhaled. “Of course, my life would have been immeasurably better if I’d never had her, either.”

Flannery didn’t move or breathe. She had never heard this before. Any of it: Anne’s French mother, their animosity.

“She used to pinch me, and slap me,” Anne said. Half the cigarette had already disappeared. No one weak, Flannery thought, could smoke like that. “When she was annoyed with me. She’d slap my cheek—to wipe the smirk off it, she said.” Anne stubbed the cigarette out vehemently. “I preferred smirking to crying. It bothered her more.”

Flannery was cautious, still. But she did ask—she had to—

“How could anyone ever hurt that face?” She fit her palm around Anne’s smooth cheek, stroked the loved line of her lips. “That beautiful face. How could anyone?”

For a second Anne’s eyes were a different shade, the hurricane green Flannery had seen once or twice before. She pulled away from Flannery’s hand, an uncharacteristically abrupt movement.

“You know what people are like,” she said, in a voice graveled by old battles. She looked away, her face untouchable. “They’re cruel, and they will do anything.”

“Y
ou never did answer my question.”

Another day, another diner. Anne, gourmet Anne, knew everything anyone could about the city’s eating establishments. Greek, with infinite menus; Italian, steam-filled and carved-tabled; and American, all eggs and hash browns, like the Yankee Doodle.

“What question?”

“About your name. Come on.
Flannery.
How did that happen?”

“I did tell you: it was my mother.” She crunched her toasted muffin, eyeing Anne’s bacon. Flannery had recently decided to stop eating red meat for a mangle of reasons that had to do with politics and preference. Anne was skeptical, and tauntingly savored her carnivorous selections. “All right. It was my mother who named me, but I think the choice had something to do with my father.”

“He was an O’Connor fan? Intrigued by the Southern grotesque? Struck by the way violence and redemption feature in her work?”

“Mmmhmm.” It was easiest, mouth full, to agree.

“No.” Anne, finished, pulled out a cigarette. She never bothered to wait till Flannery had finished eating. “You’re not telling me everything here. You’re holding back. What about your father? How does he fit in?”

“I don’t know. I never knew him.”

Anne put her cigarette down, unlit. “ You didn’t? Why—What happened to him?”

“I’m not sure. My mother wouldn’t tell me. She always said that he was a good man, but that she lost him. Just—lost him. She wouldn’t elaborate. Wouldn’t say how.”

Anne raised an eyebrow. “Maybe he was hard to find.”

Flannery nodded, muffin-filled. “Well. Right. I know.”

“Jesus.” Anne lit up now. “No wonder you want to be a writer. How can you not, with all that behind you? You practically are a novel already.”

Flannery shrugged modestly, as if her mysterious life were her own invention.

“So.” Sped by the cigarette, Anne’s mind moved rapidly. Finally! The biography interest. What had taken her so long? “What about your mother? She ever hook up with someone else?”

“Nope. It’s just been the two of us.” Flannery chewed. “For better or worse. Richer or poorer.”

“And what does she do for a living? For richer or poorer?”

“Poorer, pretty often. She’s an English teacher.”

“Oh great. Like me!” Anne rolled her eyes. “So that’s why you were attracted to me. I’m your
mother.
Of course. It all makes sense now.”

“Well, you didn’t think it was for your looks, did you?” Flannery brushed Anne’s cheek with a buttery thumb—cautiously, so the other diners might not object or notice. “It was always going to be about your mind. Knowing you’ve read all those sexy volumes of literature stacked all over the place.”

“I know.” Anne sighed. A martyr. Pretty enough to die for. “I may as well accept it. You’ve only ever loved me for my shelves of books.”

I
t was true, though. She did worship silently at Anne’s bookshelves. She felt simultaneously a deep peace and a great excitement around Anne’s apartment’s white-painted shelves: the peace of knowing she was in the room that contained everything she’d ever need—Anne; food; a library—and the excitement of seeing how much was ahead of her to take in, comprehend, and ingest. Sometimes Flannery felt that excitement as a pulse in her fingers, a sharp sting in her eyes. She hadn’t read
anything
yet. She had no idea of what everyone had already worked out about the world and love, and transcribed onto their pages. High school had given her thrills, certainly—Dostoevsky’s ice-black moralism and Poe’s ornate terrors, Shakespeare’s many-splendored souls eloquizing fantastically. But Flannery’s desire for more and better company was what had decided her on this forbidding institution, made her willing to brave the arduous trek out here.
Teach me
, she had quietly instructed, since the day she had arrived.
Get me started.

Anne had recently, a significant trust, given Flannery keys to her apartment, and some afternoons Flannery came over to study. The place and its volumes seemed to protect her, like an amulet, from the small trivia of class-taking, the biting anxieties of deadlines. Papers due; tests to be taken; sentences in used paperbacks to be underlined; oral presentations to be coughed and blushed over. She could do all that. Flannery had a fast mind and she could argue well and she was fit, athletic, in her intelligence. If you gave her tricks to master, she could, obedient creature, perform them.

Anne’s bookshelves seemed to have nothing to do with classes and textbooks; they stood above and outside that regimen, far from the minds that created divisions among kinds of knowledge, and placed them in categories for undergraduates (Arts, Language, Science) like the major food groups. Anne’s books had no patience with the dumb, piecemeal task of making yourself smart; they promised something more ethereal, closer to wisdom.

Flannery especially noticed the shelves that spoke of Anne’s work—Cather and Kate Chopin and their different notions of women’s narratives. Those were the volumes (
My Ántonia, O Pioneers!, The Awakening
) visibly thumbed through, dozens of times, by Anne’s watchful hands; their pages had been discovered and remembered by her adventurous green eyes. Through them Anne’s supple mind had traveled, darting and acquisitive. Flannery looked over and loved them, those titles especially, and they filled her with envy: though whether of Anne for her knowledge or of the books themselves for the attention she lavished on them, Flannery couldn’t have said.

A
nne taught her how to eat.

Not that Flannery hadn’t eaten before she knew Anne. She had. In the days prior to the soulless shovels of salad and pasta from the student dining halls, back where Flannery came from, she had even eaten well. She had a Californian’s taste for greenery and whole grains, brown chunky baked goods; but she also had an eye for fruit, for the strange gifts from trees.

She knew things. She knew how to peel a pomegranate, unfolding the tart hidden pleasures of its intricately married seeds. She knew how loquats, with their buttery orange flesh and smooth, honed pits, were a better, rarer treat than the West’s ubiquitous apricots. With protected hands she could pick a prickly pear off a cactus and later tease out from its dinosaur skin a pale pink heart that held the sweet perfume of dry summer.

“I could show you those things, if we were there.” Flannery wanted Anne to understand that she had knowledge, too: there were secrets she could yield, too. “Here I can’t show you anything.”

In the meantime, bound as they were to the East, Anne taught Flannery how to eat.

She taught her the wisdom of ingredients, the principle of the simple best. It was the opposite strategy to the one Flannery had grown used to at the university, whose feeding principle was of quantity over quality: it may be bad, but there’s a lot of it. A mess of items thrown together in a soup or stew, covered over with cheese or pastry to disguise any mistakes. Melt mozzarella over virtually anything, and a twenty-year-old will eat it.

Anne’s kitchen was so sparsely outfitted it made Flannery nervous. How could any substantial food come out of here? (It was true, as Anne had once joked, that Flannery’s bones were still growing.) But then she saw Anne’s bottle of olive oil and was transfixed. She had never seen such a resonant, epic green before—not since the last time she’d looked into Anne’s eyes.

With that oil and a tidy counterful of bread and vegetables, Anne made what seemed to Flannery to be the first genuine meal she’d ever eaten. Grilled eggplant, studded with roasted garlic, scattered with kosher salt and olive oil; crostini with a tomato and basil salsa, also grilled; and a risotto, something Flannery had never heard of, rich with some mushroom that had nothing to do with the gray rubbery disks she ate mostly on pizzas. A mushroom that spoke Italian, certainly. That spoke of other worlds. As did the wine they drank, a red whose name and provenance Anne explained carefully to Flannery, who instantly forgot it.

Finished, they were pungent and sated. Memories of garlic, wine, mushroom, salt, warmed their mouths.

It was Anne who hesitated a little, wondering . . .

And it was Flannery who insisted, promising that their kisses, as proved true, would be all the tastier.

“D
o you remember seeing me at that diner—the Yankee Doodle? That morning?”

Lovers’ languid indulgences: the sugared reconstruction of the narrative of their love. “And then you—” “And then I—” It’s a fun game, for the two who can exclusively play it.

“You ordered a jelly omelette,” said Anne. “How could I forget it?”

“And your first thought was ‘Who is this intriguing, daring woman coming in and finding such a unique item on the menu?’”

“My first thought was ‘Who’s come in here at this hour with a kid?’ But I looked around and there was no kid. And then—all in a flash—I realized
you
were the kid.”

“And you immediately developed this Pygmalion fixation in which you thought, ‘I shall take this unformed girl under my wing and teach her not to order jelly omelettes. I shall educate her.’”

“I looked over at the placer of this order and I thought, ‘Hmm. She’s cute. Why is she staring at me?’”

“Well,” said Flannery—mostly fake-sulkily, but part of her pout was real—“I was busy falling in love at first sight. So I had to stare. That’s what you do when you’re falling in love at first sight. You go into soft focus, and romantic music starts playing in the background.”

“Ah, so that’s what that music was.”

“But, no. See, you didn’t hear the music. You were not experiencing love at first sight. You were concentrating too hard on your damn book.” Flannery tapped Anne lightly on the cheek. Playful—a love slap. “What book was it, anyway? I’ve always wanted to ask you. I assumed it had to be something significant, like the book with all the answers to the world, or the
Kama Sutra
, or something.”

“It was probably Bradley’s book. His first class was later that morning and I was not especially prepared.”

“Aha! So you do remember it. It was a significant encounter.”

“Of course it was. This cute chick was watching me like a hawk as I drank my coffee. I was always going to notice that.”

“Love at first sight. That’s what I was going through.”

“Lust at first sight. That’s what I was going through.”

Flannery sighed. “You know what?” she said. “That’s good enough for me.”

S
ometimes, in the cooler periods, when they gave their physical love a brief vacation and settled into conversation, Flannery did not feel younger than Anne. She felt older, even, and an anchor, definitely: she could tell that was what Anne needed—someone to hold her down, to give her ballast. Anne was not floaty or dreamy—that was Flannery, who could spend an hour staring at the windowed sky when she should be reading and, when asked what she was up to, had to answer, “Nothing. Thinking.” But Anne was fundamentally unattached. It worried Flannery; not for herself, but for Anne. It made her want to hold Anne close, and also just to stay still for her, so that she’d know she could come back to Flannery and find that Flannery was still there.