Pages for You (9 page)

Then she stood, still jacketed, arms folded, her eyes green as motel-sign neon. Vacancy or no vacancy? Flannery wondered, though she was pretty sure she knew.

“Anne,” she said softly. Naming her, she thought, might steady her. Flannery felt protective. “Thank you. For letting me stay.” She let the love leak into her voice, hoping it wouldn’t frighten her.

“Well. Thank you,” Anne replied, with an angled smile directed somewhere at the ceiling, “for writing that poem.”

An awkwardness threatened to yawn between them.

“I wouldn’t mind—”

“Do you want—”

They both stuttered, stopped, laughed a little at the broken ice.

“—something to drink?”

So they moved to the safer-seeming kitchen, where they sat down at the round table and talked to each other in fond voices, the scattered chat of new friends; while the air around them wondered if they’d soon be more.

T
here, across the Formica surface, their hands met, Flannery’s right to Anne’s left: the bodies’ first admission that they wanted each other. It was not planned or spoken. It was Flannery seeing those finely shaped, shy fingers, and there is that strange way hands are alive, and animal, separately expressive from the rest of the self. It is no surprise that hands create the characters of the puppeteer, or that movies have imagined them moving independently, spiderlike, around a room. Flannery saw this lovely creature and greeted it with her own, stroking it, covering it, and then, finally, holding it in a half-clasp. A declaration.
I am here. We have touched.

Anne was quiet. Looking down. Her eyes would not find Flannery’s, but her hand held hers, too, returned the embrace with its own strength, so that Flannery knew that Anne was with her, though she was sheltering in some wordless privacy.

Flannery allowed the hands and silence to continue as long as she humanly could, until her nervous heart was stretched taut, too taut to breathe.

“Anne?” she said finally.

The question was everything. It was, in fact, the only question.

To Flannery’s surprise, when Anne looked up at last to answer it, her eyes seemed darker. With lust, and with something else, too—like grief. Or doubt. She didn’t say anything, but she nodded.

Flannery took that as her
yes.
It was her thumb she moved across Anne’s mouth then. Slowly. Following the curve of her lips up to that sweet peak, and back down the gentle slope of the other side. Flannery knew that she knew this mouth already, had lived with its shape and its sounds in her imagination, but she had not yet felt it. Her blunt thumb made this first intimate acquaintance.

“You have the most beautiful mouth,” Flannery said to Anne. And then she did what she had been wanting to do her entire life.

She kissed her.

Y
ou see, it didn’t have to be in the dark, after all.

It could start in the light. There would be hours of darkness later, sure, when in the moon-cast blue they’d wander over and over this new terrain, learning the lay of the land as much by touch as by sight. There would be that long nighttime, enjoying the obscurity of being in each other’s arms. But here was the revelation: it could start in the light. Those uncounted hours alone in her sleepless room had taught Flannery something, after all. That, in love, she could face illumination.

They kissed in the lit kitchen first, because that’s where they’d come modestly, just to talk, to sip some small, late tea together. Not alcohol: they had both decided not to drink. They knew they wanted wakefulness, even if neither might have admitted that she knew what for.

The kitchen can in its way be the place for kisses. It is the heart of a home. (Even of a cramped and somewhat neglected fourth-floor apartment.) Flannery did not yet know Anne cooked, but she could see that Anne’s body was looser in here than when they’d moved around the bedroom. She seemed to feel freer in this room with the food. The kitchen is, after all, the place of heat and eating; the place of treats for the palate; the place a person comes to first thing in the morning, to read, and wake up, and taste the day.

It was the night they tasted. And each other. Starting slow, and slowly faster, their mouths met: first polite and refined; then affectionate, curious; and finally, as their tongues wandered and hungered, their mouths became wide and their desires wider, and they began to find each other with an urgency that brought to mind the word “devouring.” Hands moved through hair coppery and fair, and gradually their bodies drew closer, a chair was moved, the table pushed back. Yet still there was a kind of demureness, almost, a riding sidesaddle, with their legs adjacent, until finally Flannery just climbed off her own chair and straddled Anne on hers, leaning into her, gripping her with her thighs and feeling through their two pairs of jeans the heat now, and wetness.

They kissed like that, through clothes and shudderings, in a light bright enough to capture the startled lust on each other’s faces, to watch each other grow mussed and wild, and finally to see, clearly, that they were going to have to go somewhere else, away from the kitchen, where their skins could touch.

I
t was a lake-blue sky through the window, filled only with the low sound of lovebirds.

Sweet husky calls, a cooing almost, a pleasure-chuckle, some creatures’ shared mutual delight. And it wasn’t their sounds now. (It might have been, earlier: it would be again, later.) Flannery watched the empty, colored air through the rectangular pane and savored this sung-over spell by herself, the figure lying next to her still heavy with sleep, now quiet, her gifts dormant, her sweet mouth slightly open, exhaling dreams. Flannery watched this sky alone for a minute, seeing for the first time how the world changed after a passionate night. The light, the taste on the tongue, the speed of her mind: all different.

She was not now and would never again be the same Flannery. These unearthly noises from overhead seemed themselves a kind of rechristening, a way of calling her by another name. She was changed, and they told her so.

“I used to think it was the neighbors,” said a sleepy voice near her. Flannery shivered in her new skin with surprise. It was the voice of her lover.

“You’re awake.” Flannery felt suddenly a vast and overwhelming shyness—a panic almost, that she was here, exposed, with this woman she hardly knew, with a woman whose delicious body she had explored, certainly, thrillingly, in the dark, but whom she hardly knew. She was here half-naked with a stranger, Flannery was, with this woman,
with a woman.

“I thought it was a couple I sometimes see in the elevator when I stay here,” Anne went on. “My friend Jennifer calls them the Same Family, because they always wear the same clothes as each other, and they have the same glasses and get similar haircuts. A man and a woman—it’s a little strange.”

She seemed so awake, though her cheeks were pillow-crumpled and her hair all over. But she told this story as though they were old friends, and Flannery, who had been so startled by the wakened sight of Anne, moved closer now, to listen.

“I always thought that sound was them making love in the morning, every morning, it seemed, with these same cries. I thought, How like the Same Family, to have the same love cries as each other. It’s perverse. Finally I mentioned it to Jennifer—just the other night, when she called, to see how everything was going. I said, ‘Doesn’t that couple upstairs drive you crazy—every morning, with their passion sound track? Like they’re trying to let everyone in the building know, We’re having sex, folks, and we’re loving it!’ ”

Flannery listened to Anne in wonder. A storyteller! She was a storyteller, too, after all.

“And?” Flannery leaned in closer, to follow the narrative thread. “What did she say—your friend Jennifer?”

Anne’s eyes woke up with the joke of her mistake. “She told me it’s not the Same Family at all.” She laughed. “I felt so stupid. It’s the pigeons.”

T
hey spent hours, or maybe it was days, in and out of each other’s grasps and embraces. Waves would crest, and break, and crest again. Urgencies yielded to the slower breaths of satisfaction, as sticky hands stroked or petted, after: the “There, there” and “How was that?” of the relishing lover. Early on—after they had left the kitchen for their first encounter with the futon they’d come to know so intimately—Flannery had whispered, “I’ve never done this before,” and Anne had whispered back (a hot temptation in Flannery’s ear), “You’ll be fine: I bet you’re a fast learner.” It gave Flannery the confidence to believe it was true. As it proved to be. And there were sweet 2 or 3 a.m. encouragements: “Are you sure this is your first time? Well, kid—you’re a natural.”

They certainly built up an appetite. Noonish the day after their first night, Flannery announced, “I have to eat something soon or I may faint.” “I know. I think we’ve burned through all that Japanese food.” Reluctantly they rediscovered the art of dressing themselves and, more entertainingly, each other: slow blue-jeaned zips up to a fastening waist button, the neat fondle of jacket snaps. They found the street, which seemed a loud and lopsided place, but fortunately contained a breakfast and hamburger joint where they could stock up on protein. They watched each other eat with belated bashfulness, finding in the act an echo of what they’d just been up to. “Maybe we should get a few things to go, too” was Flannery’s practical suggestion, but the minute she said it she blushed at the implication. “Good idea,” answered Anne, licking her lips—whether with lust or to free a bit of ketchup, it was hard to tell. They staggered back to the apartment under the weight of juices, sandwiches, and a few other essentials from the Korean grocery. “I feel like we’re going camping.” “I know. Do you think we should buy a flashlight? And a box of matches?”

Upstairs again, they’d lounge, then lunge. They rested. They rolled; rocked; wrangled. They arm-wrestled in the kitchen for a while, in a lull. Flannery was stronger than Anne, but only just, and she admired the tautness of Anne’s forearms. (She remembered them from that party night by the window.) “Do you work out?” Flannery asked. “No,” Anne told her. “It’s all the theory I read. Keeps me in shape.”

They kitchen-kissed again, then rewarmed the bedroom. Once, sitting up, Flannery gave a startled look at the other wall. “It’s eerie,” she said. “I feel like there’s someone else here, watching us.”

“Who, Jennifer? Don’t worry about her. She’s in Toronto arguing with her family. She won’t be back till Saturday. Besides—she’d approve.”

“Not Jennifer.” Flannery looked doubtful. “I think it must be . . . Murphy.”

“Murphy?” Anne pointed at the bed glued discreetly to the wall. It did have an unobtrusive, eavesdropping look about it. “What, you think Murphy’s kind of a voyeur—‘Two women together, how sexy,’ that kind of thing?”

“Not only that”—Flannery gave a cartoonish wink—“I think he wants a piece of the action.”

“You know what? I think you’re right.” Anne narrowed her eyes lasciviously. “And why shouldn’t he get some?”

So they unfolded Murphy and had a threesome.

I
f doubt had smoldered in Anne at first, the sex extinguished it. So Flannery had to assume, since she could recognize the tremble of hesitation in a person, as she had in Anne earlier that first night. (Her shudder in the elevator.) As their love wore on and they wore themselves into it, however, it became clear that any hanging back on Anne’s part was over.

But what had been her hesitation’s source? Flannery guessed there might be someone else, or the ghost of someone. In such a vibrant life how could there not be? Alive or not (that kisser on the street corner?), present or past (Jennifer, formerly?), Flannery could only wonder. A possibility Flannery glanced at, then turned away from, was a moral qualm about palming a student—might not Anne worry over the propriety, or even advisability, of it? (Flannery was certainly not going to raise that question herself.) Finally, she thought it might be Anne’s own newness around another woman, but from how she talked and moved, from brief mentions and quick jokes, that was evidently not the issue.

Then again, maybe Anne’s worry had been cruder. Perhaps she had not seen ahead of time, as prescient Flannery had, how synchronized these two might be. She might not have devoted as many dimmed evenings to its imaginings as had Flannery. How could Anne know how this lanky girl might appear, stripped of notebooks and knapsacks and the other protective garb of student-hood? Flannery reminded herself that previously she’d been a shy stutterer in Anne’s presence, a drunken near-escapee from a party an uncool White Russian sipper—a twitchy chipmunk, in short, overeager in offering treats and dates to her beloved. Don’t forget you were her pupil once, even if for one session only: back-of-the-class Jansen, doodling inattentively, not answering the questions. After all, you’re a kid. Naïve; inexperienced. How attractive is that? Maybe Anne had been expecting fumblery and awkward edges, the embarrassing wince of misplaced digits, those painful touristic questions: “Which way do you . . . ?” “Here? Is this good?” “What? Did you say faster?”