Pages for You (22 page)

Jasper drank some of his wine.

“And this”—Anne gestured with that hand, which touched Flannery’s sleeve, too, and once there lingered fondly, unthinkingly—“this is Flannery Jansen.” Then, finally catching Flannery’s gray eyes, she added with a startled appreciation,

“My girlfriend.”

Jasper Elliot did not say anything to that but “Pleased to meet you,” with a salting of irony.

Introductions over, Anne hesitated. Flannery showed no intention of leaving or sitting down; she merely stood, sentrylike, as if ready to escort Anne away. Strapped by the lack of alternatives, Anne came up with a clear line of action.

“I’m in Room 303,” she told Flannery. “I’ll meet you up there in about half an hour.”

And that was it. Flannery nodded again, amiably, then left them to their professorial chatter. Class was evidently dismissed.

T
hey came together in a soulless cantaloupe-colored bedroom with prints of basket-weaving Indians on the walls. Lights from the pool outside gave the curtains an eerie chlorinated glow, while inside, a digital clock etched its rocket-red numbers into the darkness. Flannery had the urge to close her eyes to the unnatural light and southwestern kitsch, but then remembered something Anne had said to her on one of their first nights together: “Keep your eyes open, beautiful. You’ll want to remember this.”

She tried. She tried to keep them open now, but through open eyes she was bound to see what was in front of her: the woman she loved not altogether with her, here, though she was pretending and perhaps even attempting to be. Anne’s movements seemed sincere enough, and her hands knew as well as ever where to go, but her own eyes were shut, as if in denial of what they were doing.

Their lovemaking was quick, more plot-driven than descriptive. It was not an evening for lyricism. Afterward, Flannery modestly pulled her jeans back on, then spent five long minutes in the bathroom alone, opening the faucet to cover the sound of her crying. She washed her face with water so hot it nearly burned her, so that her pale face was blotched with both heat and grief. She tried to comfort her skin with a hotel towel, but it was overstarched and scratchy, more enemy than friend. She looked into the fluorescently unkind mirror and it told her what she already suspected:
This is not one of your fairer nights.
She shrugged at the news. What do you expect?

Flannery went back into the room, ready with a lame joke about keeping up appearances, but there was no need to deliver it.

Anne was gone.

N
o note. No message.

A feeling rose in Flannery that she could not recognize. Whatever it was, Anne had never inspired it before.

Oh, yeah.
Rage.
That was it.

Flannery checked to see that Anne hadn’t left altogether. Her briefcase was still there, a good sign. The obvious place to look was the hotel bar, so Flannery made her way there. (Would Jasper be there, too?) Shaking now with the thought that Anne was making Flannery chase after her. All these miles and months later, and this was still Flannery’s role: to run like a pathetic puppy dog after Anne, panting eagerly for her mistress’s attention. Why had that image ever appealed to her?

“
Fuck
this,” she said out loud as she got lost and outraged in the maze of overbright corridors. “Fuck it.”

Finally she found the lobby, and the Muzak, and the welcoming hostess, and the bar. Which harbored a despondent character in a clichéd slump over a shot glass, at one of the round tables on which was a colorful list of the eleven different margaritas the bar served. Anne looked so pitifully small there that Flannery’s anger almost wavered. Almost.

Flannery sat down across from her, wordless, and Anne did not even look up from her abject posture. The strategy, if it was one, was not going to draw Flannery back in.

It was so alien to Flannery—this distance from Anne. She had never known it so great before: not at college; not in Florida; and not even back home over Christmas, when, though they were thousands of miles apart, her every thought had been Anne-allotted. Even before Flannery had ever spoken to her, when she was still the loved and loathed Tuesday Anne, she felt more of an odd pulse of kinship, a convinced connection, than she did right now. Now she felt unmoored, unrelated. It was a strange, floating sensation.

“So,” Flannery said, in a voice she could hardly hear as her own. “Now I know.”

Anne did not lift her eyes.

“That’s what sex feels like when it doesn’t mean anything.”

Anne winced at the remark, as if she’d been slapped. As she did, the waiter came up cautiously: he was experienced enough to know a bad scene when he was about to intrude on one.

“Ladies?” he said gently. “What can I get you? Another shot of tequila?” Anne nodded. “And—” He nodded toward the frowning young blonde. A pretty face, soured by sullenness.

“A White Russian for me.”

Ordered more or less out of malice, as Flannery hadn’t drunk one for months. But it had the desired effect. As soon as he’d gone, Anne brought her hand to her down-tilting face—as if those fine fingers would be able to hold back her tears.

F
lannery sat at the table drinking, letting Anne cry. In Florida, at Shoney’s, Flannery had cried in a public place, and now she was watching her lover do the same. It was all new. All of it. She was still learning something new, every single day. Still! What a testament to their inventive love’s talent to educate.

Flannery craved a cigarette. Her nerves were so tense that only nicotine could soothe them, and for the first time, she genuinely understood how the drug worked. It wasn’t just a prop or an affectation. It was a tool for mental health. She took one of Anne’s from the pack on the table and lit up. Anne scarcely saw her.

By the time Flannery had smoked half of it, she was not so much soothed as completely dizzy. She had not eaten anything since the airplane’s peanuts and Bloody Marys. Hunger, jetlag, and jealousy all filled her stomach with a bitter bile that threatened to rise to meet the tobacco clouds she was inhaling and the White Russian she was sipping. The drink was so sweet it made her mouth pucker. How had she ever enjoyed them?

Distracted by her sudden nausea, Flannery did not notice when Anne stopped crying. By the time Flannery stubbed out her cigarette—she thanked God it was finished, as it was killing her—she saw that Anne had pulled her face back together. Streaked but still elegant. With a careful index finger she made sure her eyeliner had not smeared, and even quickly reapplied her lipstick. A soft red shade Flannery had not seen before. Desert Deserter? Hot Tamale?

Flannery had never seen Anne cry. Not once. Through the haze of bad music and stomach rumbles she realized she had never seen those smooth cheeks tear-stained, or those green eyes reddened by salt.

They watched each other. No longer allies, as they had been, but not sure yet what else they might become.

“Darling,” Anne said in a clear, resonant voice. “You shouldn’t have come.”

It was a tone of affection and regret rather than correction. Nevertheless, it put Flannery over the edge along which she had been nervously wavering. She excused herself rapidly to find a bathroom, where she could throw up all the incompatible juices that sluiced around inside her.

Darling.
She had called Flannery
Darling.

Flannery had never been Anne’s darling, and the name made her break out in a cold chill of recognition that she was no longer Anne’s babe.

A
s unpleasant as it was to retch in a hotel bathroom, and much as it reminded Flannery of those doomed bulimics back at college two thousand miles and several lifetimes away, her head felt a lot clearer afterward. She wasn’t drunk, sick, or stupid. She knew who she was. She was Flannery. She had flown out to New Mexico to find out how her story went, and now that she was here, she might as well put herself out of any further suspense. It was time to find out.

She returned to the table.

“Are you all right?” Anne said, and though her softness of tone and outstretched hand threatened to bring on Flannery’s own tears, she just nodded, bit her tongue, and sat down.

“It was a rocky flight,” she said. “I feel better now.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put that so bluntly.”

But of course she had. That was Anne: to be blunt. Flannery wouldn’t have recognized her otherwise.

“It’s so sweet of you to have come. And it’s wonderful to see you—”

Flannery’s skeptical look silenced the high note of fakery.

“It was a surprise, that’s all. I didn’t expect you, obviously.”

“Obviously. Neither did Jasper, judging from his expression.”

Anne didn’t answer that.

“Why don’t you tell me about him, Anne.” It wasn’t a question.

“What, now? God, Flannery—” She shook her head. “It’s such a long story. You have no idea . . .”

“You’re right. That’s the problem. I don’t.” Flannery signaled to the waiter. She planned to order some food, and water. “Now,” she said to Anne, her gray eyes as lucid as they had ever been. “For as long as it takes.”

J
asper was, it turned out, Paris. He was Texas and Louisiana (though he was not Mexico: that was someone else). He was the man who played her Monk and the person who had given her that leather jacket, and a silk scarf she wore whenever she and Flannery ate somewhere “nice”; and also her treasured copy of
Les Fleurs du Mal.
He was a French historian. He was cultured and older, and he drank wine, of course. He spoke it fluently—French, as well as wine—and enough Italian to get by if they visited there (as they had), and though he was a timid driver, he was a keen walker and a good reader of maps. They had, over years, traveled, quarreled, near-married, weathered infidelities, then separated, when he got a professorship elsewhere and fell in love with someone else. That had been the previous summer. He was graceful, intelligent, musical; he played the clarinet, singingly He had loved Anne’s body with the confident tenderness of years, and had seen and felt it through changes of language and climate that domestic Flannery had not. He had kissed her endlessly and loved her thoroughly, but he had never found that place within Anne that Flannery had touched. He had not opened up his own body to her hands in the way that Flannery had. He had not drunk iced lemonade with her in coldest January, nor had he written any of his own words for her; the texts they shared were always other people’s. And he did not know what it was like to be two women in love.

Some of these things Anne told Flannery. Some she figured out for herself.

What Flannery found hard to understand was why Anne had to break down again as she told her about Jasper. Flannery could not parse this crying.

“Why so sad, Anne?” she asked in a pause, after the kind waiter had brought her a restorative plate of cheese enchiladas. (“Would you like red or green chile sauce?” he had asked in a discreet, mortified whisper. Spice-lover, she chose green.) Once Flannery started eating, she felt better. If she could eat she was all right, and some survivalist instinct had returned her appetite to her for a short while. Through most of the rest of her short trip she would not be able to swallow a mouthful, and so would have to forgo New Mexico’s other culinary treats.

“It’s a nice story,” Flannery said. “He’s a great guy. You had fun together. Why the tears?”

Anne looked at her through grief-bloodied eyes. For once—literally for the first time since Flannery had caught sight of her, in the Yankee Doodle—Anne did not strike her as beautiful. Ah, because she was ashamed, that was why, and Flannery had never seen or remotely imagined her proud Anne ashamed.

“Why?” Anne repeated in disbelief. She could not hear Flannery’s tone—whether it was bitterness or sarcasm, or blank, optimistic misapprehension.

“Yes.” Flannery challenged her. “Why?”

The distance between them was by now immeasurable. Anne’s expression suggested she had hardly met Flannery before. She shook her head.

“Because I still love him,” Anne said, which Flannery had known and not known. Hearing Anne voice the words of her unspoken suspicion turned Flannery’s last bite of food to lifeless ash in her mouth.

F
lannery had always known his shape. Now she knew how he filled it. She had sensed the space around Anne where he had so recently been. It was palpable, no matter how close the two women had come. But now Flannery had textures to ascribe to the emptiness she had felt before: she knew the man’s handsomeness and the quality of his voice; she knew the way his eyes drank Anne in as if he’d been wandering a thirsty desert for months. Flannery had no idea where he had gone after Anne had left the table to return to her room, but Flannery had to accept the fact that the hotel hummed, probably, with Jasper’s presence still.

“What was he doing here? Did you plan to meet him?”

“No!” Anne said. Overemphatically. “No. I had no idea he’d come. But he teaches now at the University of Texas, in Austin, and it’s not—that far. He must have heard they were planning to hire me. It’s a small world; people talk. He knows the chair of the French Department here, at UNM.”

She wondered if this was true. Did it matter? If Flannery was going to have to start listening for lies, not simply silences, didn’t that mean it was already over?