Pages for You (11 page)

“Sweetheart?” She cleared her throat. “Could you pass me the newspaper?”

“Sure.” Anne hardly looked up from the page to find the paper and hand it over.

“Thanks,” Flannery said casually, so that only she knew of the thrilling step she’d just taken.

Flannery had never before had a
sweetheart.
And now she did.

I
f Anne had been flawless from an untouchable distance, she became sublime, close to. Flannery might have worried—did, in an underlying vein, suspect—that this heroine of hers, this pin-up of smartness and grace, might prove to be clumsy-footed or scarred, pockmarked with some character weakness a young idolizer would not have noticed. Before they’d come together, even stricken as Flannery had been, she could observe her own strickenness and knew that she might have spun this Anne by herself, out of whole cloth. That any actual Anne might be . . . ordinary.

It was not true. The more Flannery knew and saw of Anne, the more she loved her. Her humanness became real: Flannery understood that Anne was brittle-tempered, that she was not always truthful, that she harbored schools of fears under her fearless surface. But these qualities made Flannery want more than ever to protect and adore her—calm her in her tempers, hold her quietly through the stories she did or didn’t choose to tell about herself, and especially to life-raft Anne through when the fears gathered round her, threatening attack. Flannery wanted to keep Anne from the airless despair that she knew pulled on her. There were days when she could feel Anne drift toward its temptation.

Meanwhile, as afternoons were given over to taking in her lover’s look and movements, she became more fascinated by every curve and crevice, every gesture and hesitation. She knew Anne’s face when it had a pale, sleepy sheen, and when her hair was scattered and unkempt. There was a wildness to her beauty then that had intimations of the Brontës. (“You’re very wuthering today, sweetheart,” Flannery told Anne once, but it was an unsuccessful compliment. “Whom did you have in mind? Cathy or Heathcliff?” “Oh, I hadn’t decided. A bit of both.” Her former instructor shook her head, unimpressed by the lack of clarity.) Flannery saw her lover as she slowly smartened herself in the mornings, fitting into her close jackets, her dark jeans, those sturdy and delicate boots. She saw her neat body readied for a day’s admiration from other people. Because, unlike Flannery, Anne knew she’d get that kind of attention. She groomed herself for it.

Flannery kissed Anne’s clothed shoulder, remembering the taste of the skin beneath those layers of wool and leather. She could kiss her everywhere, and did. Her mouth roamed over Anne’s body as freely as her hands, and eyes, and words. Her mouth knew that body’s secret distinctions: its caches of salt, its various textures (the way her earlobe was soft as dough; the hot fold at the top of her thighs), its hypnotic smoothnesses along her back, her cheeks, her stomach.

But Anne’s mouth was still Flannery’s favorite place. Her home away from home. Her own went there always, before and after, returning contentedly to the perfectness of a kiss.

Once there, she could stay for days.

A
nd she loved Anne’s breasts.

It had nothing to do with being a baby or a mother, though it had everything to do with the thrill of drawing out that hollow call from Anne. When Flannery lay along Anne’s lower torso, enjoying her breasts, her hands cupping those beautiful bare shoulders she’d first wanted in Cameron’s crowded apartment, she could feel, with each pull of her tongue, the moan move through Anne’s body, traveling up, slowly, on a sheer current of pleasure, till it crept up her throat and escaped her helpless lips. Flannery would do anything to provoke that moan. It became her favorite sound in the world. She sometimes felt it was so strong and sinewy that she could have climbed up it, as if it were a rope that could bear her weight. Sometimes as she sucked Anne’s breast, till her tongue was all but numb and Anne’s nipple somehow changed flavor—Flannery could not have described the change, but she could taste it—she felt she was climbing up that pleasure-call of Anne’s, even as she slid back up her body, planting aftermath kisses along her breastbone and soft neck; by her ear; on her cheek; and, hushed conclusion, on her lips, now that they’d stopped groaning and had settled back from gasping into something calmer, like the hum of a dreamer.

Flannery loved Anne’s breasts; and Anne, for her part, loved Flannery’s love.

“What did you do to me?” she’d ask Flannery, when her lover had returned to face her, after such a passionate mission. “What did you do? I’ve—I’ve never felt anything like that before.”

Anne’s face was bashful, her skin the rose of post-climax, and Flannery was unable to keep from her own a sly smirk. It was her most prideful achievement. It brought on the narrow-eyed arrogance of conquest, followed by a simple, affectionate delight.

“I don’t know what I do,” she whispered into her lover’s mouth. “But whatever it is, I’d like to do more of it.”

D
id Flannery believe in souls? She wasn’t sure. Or spirits, or other ineffables? She was scared to ask Anne her views on the matter, as it might be something Anne would laugh at. Flannery did not want to risk that laughter.

If she did believe in souls (maybe, who knew, it was something she’d have to grow up a little to form an opinion on), she would say that Anne’s spoke to her through her eyes. Whatever pleasures their bodies shared, it was Anne’s eyes that moved Flannery most deeply. Deeper, certainly, than anyplace words could reach. It made her suspect that eyes must communicate something of the spirit.

She tried, though. She tried to find language to express what she felt.

“Your eyes—”

“They glitter like a cat’s—”

“They are filled with some incredible light—”

“Your eyes are so—they’re
beautiful.
”

Anne watched her struggle, but how could she help her? Flannery searched for words to convey the color: she rummaged around the minerals, coming up with the obvious jade and emerald and, finally, malachite; she said often how feline they were, in color and in that slow, assessing stare. She found the greens outside sometimes, a new bud, a vivid blade of young grass. “There! Look! Your eyes—that color—” But Anne would shake her head, head-tussle her lover, and say, “Stop trying so hard, babe. I know. I get it. You like my eyes.”

God, no. It was much more than that, but Flannery would never find a way of saying it. It remained stuck in her throat, what she wanted to speak of how Anne’s eyes held the concentrated, bright essence of the person Flannery loved.

Many years later, in London with friends, Flannery would find a color that came close.
Absinthe.
She had never heard of it. Her friends laughed about its mythic strength when they saw a bottle of it in a liquor store window. Flannery, stalled, looked away. She lost herself on that damp street, lost London entirely, as she absorbed that vibrant color, and with it a memory of the unmatched fire of her passion for Anne.

A
nd Flannery, too, was discovered. She learned for the first time that she was beautiful, a notion that had never occurred to her before. In Anne’s resonant voice she heard herself described as graceful, lean, curved, lovely—and came to believe the words, a little.

She was learning what it felt like from the inside, this great life secret. She was finding herself capable of sounds and furies she would never have dreamed of—not in
Flannery,
the self she’d known.

Was it like this for everybody? The transformation, and the contrast? Flannery was a still, quiet person: that’s how she seemed even to herself, though in her adolescent journal she had recorded rollicking emotional turmoils, and had known herself capable not just of love (unrequited, for a guitarist in a band) but of disappointment, melancholy, dreamy optimism, and soulful, self-important philosophizing.

But not
this.
Never this. Even Anne, who claimed she’d always sensed this fire under the Nordic Jansen calm—“I saw you dance, babe, and I could see it
then”—
even Anne sometimes looked at her hair-swept, sweat-tossed lover and said, her own cheeks hot with surprise, “My God! There’s something in you, Flannery. There’s something, it’s so wild—where does it come from?” Then, to counter the hint of alarm in her voice, she added, “It’s wonderful.”

Flannery did not know what it was, or where it came from. Did everyone have this? Perhaps not. Did the measure of her passion relate in some way to the measure of her long years of repression? (They felt long to her; and she would soon be eighteen now, which showed just how old she was getting to be.) While all those other kids were playing doctor and nurse and feeling each other up in the cupboards, Flannery Jansen was reading peacefully at home, gathering all her resources for this moment, this intense future adventure with Anne, which would take her into the deepest throes of her shockingly savage body.

It terrified Flannery. Absolutely. She spent nights back in her dorm room blank with fear. What had been released in her? In Anne’s company she mostly felt all right about her expressiveness. No, not all right, she felt
exultant:
here she was, a new person, a woman, a sexual explorer bringing delight to the face she loved most in the world.

Alone, back in her room, she lost her confidence. Quiet again, the way she had always been before, the way she had known herself best, Flannery would sometimes feel completely, darkly convinced.

This can’t possibly be me.

And:

I’ve got to get out of here.

T
hey tried to get back to work. It was something they both had to do as December uncoiled, snakelike, toward finals—and, worse, MLA. Anne was not only giving her paper there, she was going to be interviewed for academic jobs. Anxiety frequently threatened her like an angry swarm of bees.

Together, in Anne’s living room, which was also her bedroom, which was not altogether separate from her kitchen, they tried to work. Far from seeming cramped or enclosed, the room was open, spacious, full of light and novelty and the echoes of what they had done there. The walls were white. The angles were modern. A skylight slanted along the sloped ceiling, and Anne had arranged her bed so that the window’s trapezoid of winter sun fell on her bedspread. She lay on her side within that clutch of light, reading, head cradled in her eloquent hand. That hand: it was hard sometimes for Flannery to look at it without remembering its other talents.

“I can’t concentrate,” she said. She was sitting against a wall in the corner near two heaps of books: a pile for Revolution, for which she’d chosen to write about China, and a pile for Criticism, for which she’d chosen to write about Susan Sontag. Neither could hope to compete with the temptation of watching Anne read.

“Try.” Anne didn’t even look up.

A book spread across her knees, her head dipped misleadingly down. Flannery sneakily stared over at Anne on the bed. Those smart eyes (she could only glimpse the green) covering yards of words, translating all those ideas, moving in and out of real and imagined territories with confidence. The way Anne read was like the way she stepped down the street: sure of her carriage and her direction, while staying open to the new colors and languages around her. It was how Flannery had loved her first, after all. Then, as now, reading through some world that Flannery couldn’t even see. The title of the book was hidden.

“You know, I could spend my life watching you read.” Anne pursed her lips. “That would be tiresome.”

“For you, maybe. Not for me. For me, it would be heaven.” This made Anne’s eyes flicker away from the page. Reluctantly. She did not want to be interrupted right now.

“Flannery,” she said slowly, unable to resist entirely the sound of the name in her mouth, “don’t you have work to do? Haven’t you got a paper to write?”

Flannery took her eyes away from where they wanted to be and returned them, dutifully, to the arguments of Susan Sontag.

“Yes,” she said forlornly. In a voice heavy with the wretched melancholy of frustration. “I guess I do.”

F
lannery only ever wanted to speak poems, unforgettable lyrics, about her nights (and days and mornings) with Anne. That time was sublime. Of course. Yet sometimes, prosaic girl that she more naturally was, she had to accept a blunt fact, too, of her Anne hours: that, at a certain technical level, she was getting the how-to.

One December evening in the dining hall Flannery overheard a conversation fragment from a neighboring table. Crew types, more or less, looking at a flyer advertising a Gay and Lesbian dance and making cracks about gay sex. “Hey, it’s got to give you a serious advantage,” ventured a bulky, joky guy, “to know the equipment so well in the first place. I mean, think about it: you’re already a licensed driver.” But that was the whole point, Flannery wanted to lean over and tell him. She wasn’t a licensed driver at all—she’d just gotten her learner’s permit. She was still more comfortable in the lower gears and would not yet have considered herself safe for freeway driving.

She learned about herself by learning Anne. And as Anne explored her, she brought to life parts of Flannery she had never conceived of and couldn’t have begun to name. Once, Anne had found a spot within Flannery that seemed to be the single concentration of her excitement. It was the place of pleasure, purely, and when it was touched, Flannery just flooded with delight. Literally. As though Anne had turned on a tap. Flannery would have been embarrassed, if she hadn’t been so high on the sensation of it. Besides, Anne herself was crowing with the discovery.