Pages for You (16 page)

Anne disappeared into the bathroom and came back wearing a subtle plum. The color for a night at the theater or a chic Japanese restaurant.

“Dusk Delight? Luscious Lavender? No—Lavender Menace.”

“You’ll never get a job doing this. Even with all your verbal skills.
Mauve Amour.
”

“I’d have a better chance if I’d ever worn the stuff myself. You have to bear in mind, I’m a novice—I mean, I don’t even know which aisle of the drugstore it is.”

“I know. It’s sweet: you’re a cosmetics virgin. Another way I’m deflowering you. Here”—Anne disappeared into the bathroom again—“I’m going to find some to put on you.”

“That’s a little perverse, isn’t it?” Flannery called. “You know who would be into that? Murphy. Our old friend Murphy, in New York. I think Murphy would enjoy this.”

A
nne came back. She insisted that Flannery close her eyes. Flannery felt the breath of her lover, and her concentration. At the smooth, cool, not quite sensual marking of her lips she immediately started laughing.

“Stop! Or it will smear.”

“I can’t help it, it tickles.”

Flannery kept her mouth as still as she could while her makeup artist finished, then got up to look at herself in the mirror. Her face looked completely different. Unrecognizable. She looked a decade older, for one thing; no longer a child. This was someone who had had experiences in the world, and who knew where she was going.

“Go ahead!” Anne laughed. “Guess the color.”

“My God. What have you done to me?” Her mouth was a vivid, femme-fatale red.

“Guess. One word. An adjective. Sounds like—”

“‘Whorish’? ‘Obscene’?”

“
Outrageous
.”

“Outrageous. They’re right.” Still, Flannery couldn’t quite leave her reflection alone. It fascinated her. “Your turn,” she said vaguely, waving Anne back to the bathroom. What would someone be like, who wore this color lipstick?

“Last one,” Anne said. “My lips are worn out.”

She went into the bathroom and emerged a few minutes later, her own lips a dark red—darker than Flannery’s, but as much of a bold statement. The look was so striking it diverted Flannery finally from the distraction of her new personality.

“Whoo, baby!” Flannery catcalled.

“No. It’s not called Whoo, Baby.”

“Well, it should be. We’d make a good pair.”

“This one is something more literary. I thought you might like that.”

“Literary? What—Red Badge of Courage?”

“No.”

“The Fire Next Time?”

“Oh! Great guess. Close. Frenchier.”

“Oooh-la-la?”

“Bad guess. Le Rouge et le Noir.”

“God, that
is
literary. You must be a classy broad.”

“I am. And my makeup is classy, too.”

“Of course it is,” said Outrageous, coming over to meet her. “It’s very classy. I like that in a broad.” She pulled Le Rouge et le Noir down with her onto the bed. “Now come here,
chérie
, where I can kiss it all off you.”

T
hey played each other their signature tunes. Each had favorites to warble to the other—precious lyrics from songwriters’ ballads or classic rock numbers, catchy riffs from current hits that prompted private dancing, or string quartets to bring on more interior reflection. They played them in and out of love and work together, combining and refining their musical libraries until it was hard to remember what they’d listened to before they knew each other.

From Anne, Flannery learned jazz.

It was not an idiom she had picked up before: it existed, a whole country, just outside the places she could find her way around in. Flannery was sure that all the best and smartest people liked jazz—the guitarist she’d once had a crush on; her close high-school friend, a proud aficionado; Nick—so she tried now to adjust her own ear to its rhythms and suggestions.

Anne played her Monk. She played Flannery many people, brass players or pianists, new ensembles or old masters, but it was Monk that took. When Flannery heard
Blue Monk
, she understood something of the form’s wit and artistry. She began to get it. It helped that she could listen to him while watching what he did to Anne. When Monk was on—when Anne was cooking, often, because she cooked best to song, and sang best while cooking—Anne was freed and transformed. He loosened her and provoked her. He met her spirit somewhere Flannery had never encountered it, and they spoke to each other there, privately, trading jokes and concerns. It was hard, in a strange way, not to be jealous.

One night, late February and sleeting, not long before spring break, Flannery waited outside the door to Anne’s apartment before going in. She held her precious set of keys, to her haven here, in her hand.

She heard Anne’s voice inside, and music and laughter. It sounded like a party. Flannery wondered if she’d forgotten some social event. Was Anne having friends over to dinner? Was it a night Flannery was meant to stay back in the dorm?

She knocked lightly and a hectic voice called out, “Come in!” so she did, braced for company and rowdiness.

Inside was Anne at the stove, cheeks pinkish with wine or dancing. The lights were soft. The music was loud. Anne did not stop what she was doing, so Flannery watched her a moment. She was moving—not dancing, exactly; something more like her body’s rising to meet the cadences. Swimming, or flying. It was Monk. Anne’s eyes were closed as she listened, swayed, lost herself to the sensation. Flannery could see the fact all over Anne, in her dreamy hands and smiling mouth, in the ease and desire of her empty arms: she was in love with Thelonius Monk. And—this was harder to know, but it nipped at Flannery suddenly, a bitter suspicion—he reminded her of someone else she loved, too.

It wasn’t Flannery.

I
n Florida, it went wrong. Something started to fade. Flannery did not fade, but Anne did.

Florida had always felt wrong to Flannery, even before it assaulted her skin and scared her witless. The place was Anne’s determined choice, based, as Flannery slowly realized, on a downward mobility of taste: she sought the kitsch and tacky, the anti-university, while Flannery was on the escalator going the other way—up, hopefully, toward Baudelaire and risotto and airplane travel to any place that was not America.

For Flannery this state had always seemed gaudy and improbable, a place where Walt Disney had felt hyperbolic enough to build a World rather than just a Land. (Flannery had vacationed in his Land when she was a child, with her mother, and knew its rides, songs, and foods as the best and original.) Anne said she wanted to see the Everglades, a tempting word but one that brought to Flannery’s mind images of shady, well-tended golf courses or hushed, tidy cemeteries. She had no idea what the “Everglades” were. To Flannery Florida was orange juice, launch-pads for space trips, and old people, and whatever might be meant by the slippery name
Miami.

Miami was not even on their menu. Anne planned the locations and days, the entire itinerary. Passive Flannery followed, dreaming wistfully of Paris. Paris was where they should have been. It had the language, the taste for their passion. In Paris they could have savored foods Flannery found vile in English, and Anne would have taught Flannery a few French phrases (beyond
chérie
and
amour
), delighting over the sound of them on Flannery’s lips. The city’s light would have silvered them. One woman would have bought the other one
des fleurs.
They would have gone to an evening concert in a cathedral, where the orchestra’s harmonies reaching to the domed stone ceiling would have made Flannery think she had heard the music of the spheres. And Flannery would have written something beautiful, afterward; she was sure of it. She would have made that overloved and overwritten-about city hers, and theirs.

Flannery remained certain, even once she became older and smarter and pessimism ran through her veins, that their story would have gone differently if they had traveled to Paris instead.

T
hey took the train down. Anne’s idea: it was cheaper than flying, though it would take them over twenty-four hours to get there. Initially Flannery was itchy and squeamish at the idea of those long Amtrak hours, but as Anne pointed out, it gave them “more bang for their buck,” more states per dollar. “Think of all the places we’ll go through on our way to Tampa,” Anne said to her, but Flannery could not think of them beforehand; her geography was not good enough. If Anne had told her the journey would route them through Louisiana and Kentucky, Flannery would have believed her.

It did not, but it did take them through Washington, D.C., where they had several hours’ layover, enough time to leave the station and take in the highly organized grandeur of the nation’s segregated capital. Flannery knew of her own state’s racial iniquities—the more so since enrolling in a self-improving course on the Ethnic and Labor History of the West—but she had never seen the divide made so visible. It gave her a shocked inkling of how the country’s race disease might look south of Mason-Dixon. (Not that she could have located the Mason-Dixon line, either.) Back on the train south, Flannery listened to a jovial black conductor speaking in two distinct registers: polite and joky to white passengers, warmly intimate with African Americans. These were new tones to her.

One of Flannery’s favorite discoveries occurred in the dining car. Grits, a mythic-sounding food, turned out to be a gummy hot cereal served in a Styrofoam dish. Anne frequently fled their seats to smoke in the card-playing car, as she called it, but the thick choke of air there was too much for Flannery. She’d rather sit at her foldable table, flipping back and forth anxiously between the unlikelihood of free will (Mortal Questions: Intro to Philosophy) and the early slaughter of the natives by all the gold-rush forty-niners she had been schooled to revere.

Out the humidity-streaked window, damp new lands unspooled, frame by frame. The women moved through the Carolinas in the middle of the night and woke to a sun-kissed Georgia. It was warm and beautiful and foreign, busy with unknown demons, and Flannery felt uneasiness, like an insect, crawling all over her.

T
he state’s first act was to sear Flannery’s flesh. They had scarcely arrived, had had time only to stumble, dazed, from the train and out into the morning light of Tampa, collect their rental car, and hit the road for as long as it took to get to a decent beach. Twenty minutes. It was too early to find what they really needed—a bed and a shower—so they took what was available in the interim. Water. Sand.
Sun.

Flannery had never been a sun-worshipper, or a beach babe. She had the body but not the mind for it. Crucially, she had the wrong skin. It was the least western thing about her: her pallor, which gave her a shy unwillingness to throw her body into the elements. Clothed, she could go anywhere—rock, creek, forest, hillside—but unclothed, she quailed. Fear pricked her skin with rash memories and burn worry.

After a brief beachside amble, taking in soft drinks and T-shirts and the buying of a pumpkin-orange beach ball to play with (ironically, of course), the girls sunbathed together. Flannery’s long shape covering a vast blue towel with a shark pictured on it, Anne on a paper-thin spread that read
THE SUNSHINE STATE
, like the license plates.

Anne, in spite of her own redheaded coloring, lay down with a sigh of satisfaction that seemed almost orgasmic. She threw open her arms and heart to the heat. “Thank God,” she kept saying. “We’re out of that fucking train. Out of that fucking winter. Out of that fucking
university
.” Already “university” had a strange sound in her mouth, as if she were eating a pickle: the word puckered and crinkled, and Flannery did not understand the source of her vinegar. There was a hovering in Anne’s thought that Flannery had not identified, a flicker that hazeled Anne’s green eyes and diverted her fonder attentions. Why “fucking” university? What was so wrong about the place that had, after all, brought them together? It might be full of pompous rigidities, as they both agreed, and it might be a self-important place, grandiose, intolerant of outsiders; but it was theirs, too. Their own private school for scandal, as the joke had gone.

“New Mexico,” Anne said into the stern light overhead, “would not have those fucking winters.” New Mexico had begun to make awkward appearances in the sentences between them, a guest Flannery had not welcomed.