Pages for You (13 page)

C
hristmas Day they spent as usual with her mother’s sister’s family at a
Better Homes and Gardens
spread of gifts and foods produced by Flannery’s shiny hostessy aunt. Sometime after gingerbread and ice cream, Flannery suddenly felt faint with her contained silences and the sharp pain of missing Anne. She couldn’t focus anymore on the conversations around her, which had nothing to do with the only person she felt like talking to. She excused herself, saying she had to take a walk.

Her older cousin Rachel joined her. This wasn’t part of Flannery’s plan. It was solitude she was after, a moment restored to the detailed adorations of her Anne-fixed mind. Now, with coiffed Rachel walking crisp-heeled beside her, more hiding and dissembling would be required.

They walked up the quiet suburban hill, toward the bend from which they could watch the bay. Rachel, not an especially sensitive creature, launched into a complaint about her stuffy parents and from there, seamlessly, into a long account of her college boyfriend, and how freaked out her mother would be if she knew that Rachel had been having sex. Flannery, half-listening, pulled out a packet of Marlboros from inside her down jacket.

“God! Flannery. When did you start smoking?”

“Recently.” It was an experimental habit she had just taken up for a specific reason: she wanted to make her mouth taste like Anne’s.

“I can’t believe it. You’ve always been so clean-cut.”

Flannery nodded noncommittally. Hoping her careless (unpracticed) smoking might put a dent in that image.

“So,” said Rachel, suddenly more interested in her younger cousin, who’d always seemed a bit stiff and studious before. “Has college back East turned you into a wild child? A party animal?”

Flannery smiled. “Maybe. A little.”

“Do you have a boyfriend out there?”

She looked at the ground. She was a little dizzy; the nicotine made her head spin. “No.”

“Really?” Rachel, charitably, looked surprised. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it. You probably will soon. But you know what?” She lowered her voice as if to share an important, helpful confidence. “Maybe you should quit smoking. Guys might find it off-putting—it makes your breath stink.”

Flannery coughed and crushed her Marlboro underfoot. She couldn’t answer for a minute. Instead, she looked out over the bay’s serene spread of water and suppressed a small yelp of helpless longing.

T
hen, one miracle night, a phone call.

Flannery had given Anne her number and address before leaving, but the mailbox and phone line had so far remained voiceless, so by this late December ringing Flannery had stopped hoping. She sat at the kitchen table paging through the course book, trying to figure out into which new bright fields of literature and ideas the next semester might lead her. Renaissance Poetry? The Age of Enlightenment
?

“It’s for you, honey. Someone named Anne.”

Flannery jumped in her seat, and out of it. “Can I take it—?” she said, reaching for the phone—but there was nowhere else to take it. The bedroom phone was broken, so there was only this one in the kitchen, where her mother sat placidly reading her favorite Jane Austen. Flannery had to wrap herself around the receiver with her whole eager body, in an effort to create a place of her own in which she might enjoy a bodiless reunion with Anne.

“Hello?” She sounded so quiet and tentative, she hated herself for it.

“Hey, babe.” The other end of the line had no such hesitation: Anne was there at once, in all her huskily sexy divinity. Flannery leaned into the wall as her knees weakened beneath her.

“Hi,” she managed. Hoarsely. “How—how are you?”

“I’m good. How are you?”

“Okay.”

“I can hardly hear you.” Flannery caught generic crowd noise beyond Anne. Scholars at conference. Ambient bustle. “Here, why don’t I close this door and see if that’s better,” Anne said. The background receded. “So. What have you been doing?”

“Not much. Visiting friends and family mostly. My mother’s here, you know, so—”

“I get it. So you can’t really talk?”

“Right.”

“That’s all right. I’ll talk for both of us.” She lowered her voice. “I’ve been missing you, babe.”

“Me too. I know. Me too.”

“They have lovely big beds here at this hotel.”

“Really?” Flannery swallowed. “Not here. Here they’re—here it’s pretty small.” She kept her voice peppy and reporterish in case her mother was listening, as she no doubt was. Anne’s got even sultrier.

“I’ve been imagining what we could be doing across it. If you were here.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Sounds—sounds good.”

There was a pause, in which Flannery could hear Anne’s heavy breathing. It was a joke, though. Anne laughed. “Is your mother really right there?”

“Yep.”

“Well. Give her a kiss for me. Listen.” She became brisker. More professorial. “I’ve got some good news. People seemed to love my Cather paper, and I’ve got callbacks at two places. NYU, job of my dreams, and—University of New Mexico. I doubt I have a prayer at NYU—it’s not really my field. But the New Mexicans seem to love me.”

“That’s great! God. Congratulations.”

“It is pretty good. There are so many morose corpses around here going home empty-handed.”

“So. New Mexico. For next year, right?” Flannery’s voice became even peppier. Less convincingly. She looked at the serene back of her mother, who was apparently absorbed in Eleanor’s big-sister dilemmas. It was
Sense and Sensibility
, for probably the tenth time. “That’s pretty far away.”

There was a pause, a space of dead air, which Flannery filled completely with the hope that she hadn’t wrecked this phone call.

“Flannery?” came an unreadable voice from the other end. “Flannery Jansen? You still there?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Because I love you.”

Oh.
“You too. I mean, me too. That is—”

It was the first time they had said it.

And that made the vacation.

D
ays later they met up at the Anchor Bar. Anne chose the time and place; Flannery chose her outfit, carefully. An elegant, sea-colored jacket, cut straight and short in a way that complemented her slender height (Rachel had certified it as “nice,” a recommendation Flannery hoped was trustworthy), straight Levi’s, and a chic new pair of boots, her mother’s Christmas present to her, which might now put Flannery’s own feet on the map.

Anne was there already, waiting in a booth. The two greeted each other uncertainly in the familiar dim, Glenn Millered interior; not as friends, but not, after this short separation and in the public setting of the bar, as lovers. Not yet, anyway.

Anne had ordered them drinks. Gin-and-tonics for them both—“Because you’re a grown-up at last, too, now you’re eighteen. You can get married, if you want to. And see R-rated movies by yourself, without an adult to accompany you.”

“X-rated, too. Don’t forget the Xes.”

They sat at the table, unsure how to reacquaint themselves. Anne had an easy prop to hand—her cigarettes. They always gave her a sense of purpose.

Anne was a damn good smoker, and she knew it. Even if she lit up out of concentration or stress, she looked silkily good; but when, as now, she smoked to seduce, she was unmatchable. She took slow drags, slitting her eyes slightly to keep the smoke from watering them, gazing at Flannery, catlike, as she pulled in the necessary nicotine. Her mouth cosseted the cigarette as if it were her long-lost lover; communicated with it privately, as if they were sharing a private joke. It was all Flannery could do not to throw herself across the shot-glass-and-ash-scattered table and submit to Anne’s mercy.

Finally she just said it.

“You look so sexy, smoking. You’re the sexiest smoker I’ve ever seen.”

Then, because they were in a bar and there wasn’t much else she could safely do with her twitching fingers, Flannery reached over to Anne’s pack of cigarettes, pulled one out, and lit up. Anne watched her in benign disbelief.

“Is that a cigarette in your hand? Or are you just glad to see me?”

Flannery inhaled, narrowed her eyes, exhaled. Expertly, so she thought.

“Seriously.” Anne leaned forward. “Is this your new party trick?”

“I took it up over vacation,” Flannery said. “I wanted to taste like you do.”

“What—old and ashen?”

“I like it.”

“Well, babe.” Anne shook her head. “I don’t know how to tell you this. But—it doesn’t really suit you. You look—cute, you know. Like a kid trying to act grown up.”

It was a blow.

“Not very sexy, then,” she said morosely.

“Not very. Though—” Anne leaned forward over the bar table, took the cigarette gently from Flannery’s fingers, and stubbed it out. Then, holding each of Flannery’s hands with her own, she kissed them, one palm after the other. “With your hands free, now
that’s
. . .”

Flannery looked around the bar nervously. Such openness seemed risky.

“. . .
sexy
,” Anne finished in a whisper. Then sat back. Businesslike now, downing her drink and calling the barmaid over for the check. She packed up her cigarettes and pocketed them. “Yes. That’s what we need here,” she said. Confident, happy with her decision. “I need you with your hands free, and I need to get you back to my home.”

T
he year’s coldest days were the hottest she had ever lived.

They summered inside Anne’s apartment with the heat turned high, lounging on the bed as if poolside, sometimes sipping tall, iced lemonades for a joke. Heat was their one, main, luxury: they chose it over dinners out and fancy gifts, or weekend excursions to exotic places. They picked summering in winter as their treat.

Dress code was casual and scant: sleeveless T-shirts and brief white underwear; a blue, long-sleeved man’s shirt and nothing else; spaghetti-strap tops, sometimes, on Anne, and calf-length leggings. Flannery’s long legs were often free of covering, and she got used to seeing their lean pale shapes stretched out under the admiration of Anne’s moving hands. They never wore shoes. Sometimes for days at a time they wore no shoes, and Anne’s glorious range of pint-sized footwear remained at a sulky distance from their wearer. Cold-blooded Flannery had to wear socks, even though it was summer, soft comforting blankets for her toes—Anne had laughed with delight for about ten minutes when she first examined Flannery’s feet, Flannery never did understand why. Anne was not permitted the same luxury. If Anne covered herself with socks or slippers, Flannery as swiftly removed them, on the insistence that she pet and stroke her, bringing that footloose joy to Anne’s face that went along with any attention Flannery ever paid to her precious feet. She kissed them; massaged them; once she even bit them. (Anne didn’t like it.) She believed that Anne’s feet and her own hands fit perfectly together, and she said so, sometimes. “A match made in heaven.” And purring Anne would agree.

As befitted summer afternoons, Anne did sometimes wear sandals around the apartment. They were the only shoes Flannery allowed, because they graced Anne’s feet so sensually, decorating them with the shapely leather they cried out for. Flannery watched Anne’s feet bathe in her sandals, and she could hardly wait till summer came, when she would be able to hear that satisfying slap against those heels and know that her lover was making her beautiful open-toed way through the world. She dreamed of their real summer-months summer—the one they’d grow warm in together.

Outside, it snowed. And slushed. And froze again; and blackened; and broke bones and sprained ankles, as the treacherous streets caused hurriers to slide, the elderly to fall. Bare branches grew brittle and fractured in the cold snaps, while vicious icicles dangled blades over unsuspecting walkers. There were road accidents and chilblains. Cold sore-blistered lips and encrusted noses. Muffled heads and cloudy speeches, slow-starting cars and the deep-racked coughs of all the stages of bronchitis.

Meanwhile, inside their hot retreat, the two women swooned.

“L
ook at this. Look at you. You’re so
slick.
”

“It’s sweat.”

“I know it’s sweat. It makes you shiny. So slippery.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t help it.”

“Don’t be sorry! —”

“I’ve always been a big sweater. I don’t know why. I sweat like it’s going out of style. I sweat like there’s no tomorrow.”

“I like it.”

“You do?”

“It’s sexy. It shows your—eagerness. That you’re a hard worker.”

“It’s not very ladylike.”

“Well, no. It’s true. You couldn’t really call this a ‘glow.’”

“I know. There’s too much of it for that.”

“Mmmm.” Anne licked Flannery’s stomach clean, slowly, of its thin down of perspiration. Which might have made Flannery ticklish, if it weren’t such a good feeling, one she was happy to succumb to. “Salty. Delicious.”

“It will make you thirsty,” Flannery warned, but she was humming with pleasure.

“If it makes me thirsty,” said Anne, “I will go find myself something to drink.”