Pages for You (7 page)

It was the trains to New York Flannery had to keep her eye on. When she heard “Final boarding call!” for any of the New York trains, it was particularly important that she be alert. On the lookout for that familiar face, that cut of hair.

Three trains left for New York. Then a fourth. The place filled up with duffel-bagged students, hatted and scarved, readying themselves with joy or dread for their families. Flannery moved back several benches so she’d be less conspicuous; she knew some of these people (an Art Historian, a World Fictioner) and didn’t especially want to explain to any of them what she was doing there, bag-free, in her scrappy wool coat, clutching (later, now) a half-drunk bottle of orange juice and a book marked in places by strips of paper.

Her eyelids drifted down. Sleep! What a good idea. Couldn’t she have a brief nap while she waited? Just a little one, darling, as Dorothy Parker might say, just a little one.

Her head dipped down; she jerked it back up in the dull, drooling shock of temporary narcolepsy. Wait! What? Where was she? Had she slept?

“Final boarding call . . .”

And Flannery saw something, or thought she did. A single frame from the movie: black leather jacket disappearing around a corner. Cue chase scene and loud music. She got up in a flurry, knocking over the orange juice, and sprinted after the imaginary jacket. That elusive strip of black leather, she was sure she had seen it: it had woken her, finally, out of her lifelong stupor.

S
he ran down the ramp, along a corridor, back up another ramp, and up a short flight of stairs. She was always running, these days.

“Where’s the New York train?” she hollered at a potato-faced man in a uniform.

“Platform Four. Final boarding—better hurry.”

Flannery reached the platform and looked around wildly. Her hair was all over the place, but it was not the time to worry about that. “Anne!” she shouted generally into the November morning, looking up and down the train, because she couldn’t think what else to do, and anything like suaveness or dignity had long since passed her by.

It worked, though.

A face appeared at one of the open doors. No, not a face:
the
face, the face she had been looking for since before dawn, had been seeing all that long writing night whenever she allowed her eyes for a moment to close. That face. Which, unfortunately, looked more bewildered than charmed, right now.

“Flannery! Are you taking this train?” She seemed to find the idea alarming.

“No, no.” Flannery ran up to her, holding out the book. “I just wanted to give you this. For your trip.”

She knew she must look scattered and unkempt—maybe even a little crazy. She’d hardly slept. But she didn’t care now. Her single overriding goal had been to get this bookmarked book to Anne before she left, and she’d done that, and now the rest didn’t matter and she could relax.

Anne read the cover. “Jamaica Kincaid! That’s very sweet. Thank you.”

The potato-faced man blew his whistle. The episode continued cinematic. Anne might have been leaving for the front; Flannery would be playing her bereft, worried sweetheart.

“Well. Have a good Thanksgiving,” Flannery said, helpless now to offer anything but anticlimax.

“Yes. You, too. Thanks for the book.”

“You’re welcome. I hope you like it.”

And before Flannery could extend the awkwardness any further, as she no doubt would have, she made herself turn away, with an embarrassed little wave—failing even to register the last expression on Anne’s face. Which, if she’d seen it, might have struck her as not unlike longing.

Flannery walked down the steps, slowly, without a backward look. As she made her way back through the station, she realized she had a snow of doughnut sugar all down the front of her jacket. She tried dusting it off with a weak hand. It was impossible not to laugh.

“You’re a charmer, Flannery,” she said aloud, shaking her head. “I don’t see how anyone could possibly resist you.”

A
ll she wanted to do afterward was get everything organized, then go to sleep. For weeks, preferably. Flannery had so much sleeping to do. It was very serious. It felt like a job: I’ve got to clear my desk here, get all these trivial matters out of the way, so I can get to the real task at hand, which is to get some
sleep.

The organizational matters were fairly painless because she couldn’t find Nick and had to leave him a note. (She didn’t look as hard as she might have.) On returning to her room after her trip to the station she had found his scrawl of the night before:

Guiltily, she left a letter under his door to say she’d decided she was going to Mary-Beth’s for Thanksgiving, because she’d been so kind to ask Flannery, and it would be such a good opportunity for roommate bonding.

Freshman flippancy seemed like a safe way to take shelter.

All that was then left was to tell Mary-Beth herself, which Flannery did as soon as her roommate returned from wherever the medicine people went when they were off duty. She looked slightly nonplussed by Flannery’s greeting, but was well brought up enough to pretend she was delighted with the decision. She gave Flannery the address and told her she would be welcome to stay for as long as she wanted—just to let the family know. The meal always started at three o’clock.

Flannery was grateful, then told Mary-Beth that she’d pulled an all-nighter the night before, as if on some heroic academic project, and that she had to crash. So she did. Heavily. It was the first of many long-overdue re-encounters with her dreams.

When she woke up in a drugged state, late afternoon, there was a note left under the door in an envelope marked with her name.

And the embarrassing thing was, it was true.

T
he campus was quiet as ash, and the leaves had all long since fallen.

Flannery had the place all to herself: the sullen underground library; the flattened, frostbitten lawns; the tiled halls and granite bathrooms, from which the food-worried girls had finally fled, leaving Flannery the lush joy of uninterrupted showers. She even went to the Doodle, knowing it would be free now of its once dangerous diner. Flannery ordered a toasted corn muffin and a cup of coffee. The waitress was rude to her, but not quite as rude as before, and it didn’t bother Flannery so much anymore. She flung a sentence in Flannery’s direction about being one of the last left to hold out that made Flannery briefly proud, like a pioneer.

There were a few other abandoned souls wandering the barren, purgatorylike landscape, but they tended to avoid each other instinctively, as if they might contaminate one another with their outcast status. Some were legitimate folk, professors or grad students, but she recognized undergraduates, too. Flannery found herself suspicious, wondering, What are you doing here? Don’t people like you? Don’t you have anywhere to go?—which made her realize they must wonder the same about her.

It was the emptiness, after so much fullness, that Flannery cherished. She had been so overstuffed these months. Impressions and changes and newnesses were leaking out of her all over—there just wasn’t
room
in her for all of them. Even from the glowing heart of everything—from the untouchably hot place of her thoughts about Anne—Flannery felt the relief of a vacation. She had done the best she could do: she had written words for Anne. That was all she had. Now she could settle back into herself, and her private dreams, and sleep.

When the phone rang one day, Flannery was startled. She was unsure who it might be, and also whether, wrapped as she now was in solitude, she’d still know how to speak.

“Hello?” Her voice was rusty.

“Flannery?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Anne. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Oh.”

She gripped the phone tightly, close to her ear. “Hi. What’s up?” As if nothing had happened. As if she’d written not a line. As if she were an innocent spinster, padding around her quiet rooms alone, doing the occasional bit of flowered embroidery.

“I think you’d better come to New York.”

F
lannery did not know New York except as a movie and a myth. And as a mysterious, emphatic address on nighttime TV ads, when you were asked to send your checks and orders to New York, New York, the repetition reminding you that you were nowhere, obviously, and everyone who was anyone was in New York.
New York.
As if you were too stupid to have gotten it the first time.

On her way to college a few months earlier—in the old days, when she was still a dumb youngster—Flannery had encountered the city only in the chaos of its airport, in a red-eye glare of post-flight bleariness, when she was moving through a bewildering stagger of accents and languages. She was looking for a bus service enigmatically called a “limo,” which connoted images of sleek, dark-windowed cars, when all it turned out to refer to was a big blue van and an irascible driver, who threw her bags into the back before speeding her and a half-dozen sleepy others to a state she’d heard of, vaguely, but had never quite been able to spell.

The train she rode now was an overlit jostle of tabloid readers and hunched watchers through the grimy windows, and the occasional late, pinstriped commuter with a neatly folded
New York Times.
Flannery had books with her, of course, but her nerves were too raw for her to open them, and she couldn’t stop looking everywhere around her, staring at the faces, searching the colorless blighted stops en route for anything like the glory and glamour she’d imagined.

She never did see it. Flannery didn’t even recognize the city as the train approached it. It was not as though the Statue of Liberty waved you in with her welcoming torch (like those bright-batoned men at the airport)—or that Flannery would recognize the Empire State Building, for example, if it was right in front of her. Perhaps it was; she certainly saw a cluster of high buildings in the distance, but they swiftly disappeared as the train dipped into a rancid tunnel, when the standing and coat-donning of those around her tipped her off that they were nearly there.

The train stopped with a shudder. People gathered their bags and proceeded to hurry one another onto the platform.

Flannery, imitating everyone carefully, did the same, following the crowd out to the station. Maybe, if she could stay a little longer among their New York numbers, no one would have to know that she was not, actually, one of them.

“W
hat are you reading?”

A touch on her shoulder and Flannery forgot the many ignominies of the morning that had nearly derailed her. A touch on her shoulder and she turned to discover Anne—more vivid, alive, and striking than she had been in Flannery’s grainy reimaginings. It always seemed to be this way: there was always more perfection there, in that single person, than Flannery could realistically recall.

“Oh—just this,” she said, closing her book to show the cover of a volume of Julio Cortázar’s stories. As if she hadn’t spent half an hour choosing which title to display, one that might have the right combination of seriousness and surprise.

“Julio Cortázar?” An excited intelligence brought Anne’s features into even sharper focus. It was the right choice. “He’s fabulous. So eerie. But also humane. He was a big translator of Poe, you know.”

“The professor said he only just died.”

“Yes.” Anne stroked the cover with her fingers, as if to remind herself how the stories felt. “Let me guess. World Fiction?”

Flannery nodded, and they spoke, with the eagerness of readers, of fictional worlds—Cortázar’s and Kincaid’s and others’. Flannery’s thoughts and words already felt more rapid here. They had just launched right in, breathlessly, before Anne had ordered or unzipped. Eventually she did both, and pulled out her cigarettes.

“So,” she said, lighting one, “you found this place okay?”

“No problem.” Flannery had allowed herself over an hour to get from the train station to the café in the Village whose address Anne had casually suggested on the phone—“MacDougal, between Washington Square and Bleecker. All right?” Flannery had needed every excruciating minute of that hour in order to submit to a fiasco of misunderstood subway maps, clambering out at a stop many long blocks away, and finally, in a panic, getting into a cab for what turned out to be a two-minute drive to her destination.

“You know,” Flannery said, trying not to sound shy or stupid, “it’s great to be here. I’ve never been here before.”

“To New York? Never?”

“Nope.”

“Really?” Anne laughed. But it was a laugh of invitation, not a shutting out. “My God. Then what are we doing here?” She stood right back up again, without waiting for her espresso. She stubbed out her cigarette with a blunt impatience. “Come on! Let’s go.”