Pages for You (20 page)

Flannery’s affections were different from other people’s; they always would be. She did not move in the seasonal step she was meant to. Many other students had also gone to Florida for their break and come back tan and healthy, while Flannery, after weeks of ugly peeling (skin rolling off whitely at the touch—“You’re like a snake” was Anne’s observation), had only a sallow ash to deepen her customary pallor. As the air lightened and people’s dispositions grew sunnier, Flannery’s heart contracted. She became Grinchlike. Sweet, benevolent Flannery might have kicked a lamb, if she’d seen one. Drowned a kitten. Even Susan Kim, over a Mortal Questions coffee, said, “You’re looking a little lifeless these days. Is having a free will getting you down?”

She wished she could tell Susan: it was her lack of free will that was getting her down. It was her lover’s determined determinism to close the door on her life here that had Flannery worried. Mustn’t it mean that Anne no longer loved her? Flannery could not get her to say anything so clear. Anne was perfectly pleasant to Flannery, and their nights, when they spent them together, were still raucous and racy. But fast—as if there weren’t much time. Anne was on her way somewhere else. Flannery felt it happening, and tried to figure out how to fix it so that Anne would not leave her at the same time she left the university. How not to be the baby thrown out with that bathwater?

Anne, meanwhile, was collecting herself to go to Albuquerque again for a brief confirming visit. She was buttoning herself back up, packing her bags. There was no question (Flannery checked, just in case) of her wanting Flannery to come with her.

Anne was flying off, only for a few days. She would be back soon, she promised. In the meantime, Flannery could enjoy life here, among the bright T-shirts and new Frisbees of glorious spring.

F
lannery felt the oncreep of death all around her, even as she waved at the others, fellow youths who had no idea what was coming.
Enjoy the Frisbee while you can
, her immensely old, grizzled self wanted to tell them.
It will all fade, faster than you know.

Anne was gone. It was over. Their farewell had been both somber and perfunctory, and Flannery allowed herself the stagy, melodramatic conviction that she would never see her lover again. The night Anne left, Flannery slept in her dorm room as she often had of late, but this time its small cramped shape seemed overlarge and echoey, as if she herself had already moved out of it. She briefly considered wandering over to sleep in Anne’s deserted, solitary apartment, far from the student fray, but rejected the desire as unhealthy and necrophiliac. “Necrophilia”: a word she had learned from Anne, of course. Flannery could not remember how it had come up. Dracula? Gothic literature? Or perhaps the evil-flowered Baudelaire.

She was giving up, then. Was that it? And Flannery was willing to, too? Throw herself down on the grave, like a loyal dog, howling, till the cold finally claimed her and she could join her mistress in the great beyond?

The metaphor captured her attention for a moment. She tried to pursue it. Flannery had scarcely had a creative thought all year, at least since her neophyte love poem and a scattering of notes she had written in various degrees of lyricism for Anne. It was a pleasure to feel her mind work over imaginative territory again, even if this was a cliché. So was it her lover who was in the grave, or the love that had flourished between them? And what of this image of the loyal pooch following its mistress?

It gave her an idea.

That was a possibility. Flannery sat upright in an indigo-lit dorm bed. Wakened by the bright possibility suggested by her metaphor—and the sounds, out in the courtyard, of drunken carousers.

She would surprise her. That was it. She would surprise Anne. Flannery, bold, loyal soul that she was, would fly out to join her: there, exactly there, in the great beyond.

S
he watched herself perform the adult tricks of travel, all those calls she’d left up to Anne for their Florida trip: airline, car rental, airport limo. How would she pay for this extravagance? She’d think about that later, back home in the summer, when all she would have before her would be money worry and melancholy. For now, she just closed her eyes and charged it. It was as Nick once said to her when he bought tickets to see his favorite band play a gig in New York. When Flannery questioned his means, he said simply, “But, Flannery—that’s why God created credit cards.”

And how easy it was to leave this life, after all—this life that could feel so present and permanent that departing from it must seem to require a tear into a different dimension. There the bunch of them were, young hopefuls, decorating their annually purged dorm rooms with postcards and prints and favorite photographs of friends, filling them with hot pots and dried flowers, throw rugs and stereos. Houseplants, a lamp, maybe some furniture brought up by encouraging parents. They nested there like miniature grownups. As if this provisional student life—with its brushfire friendships and drink-addled intimacies, its gorging on knowledge and blind sexual indulgences—could possibly last. As if it were a home, of any kind at all: someplace to gather one’s sense of self. Flannery had never felt for a minute that these months of shared living took place on anything other than quicksand, and it had given this whole year (these scant seven or eight months, into which an aging decade or so had been condensed) a sliding, wavery feel. She came from earthquake country and knew the dangers of building on landfill. That was, it seemed to Flannery, the best description of this willed group project of freshman year: construction on landfill. A collective confusion of impressions and tendencies, mostly castoffs with a few keepers. What was there to count on in any of it? What structure would remain, founded on that?

Susan Kim had become a real friend. Flannery felt it in her gut. The sharp, funny smoker had proved as good at Mortal Questions as she had been at Criticism, and always came up with an appealingly different angle. “Who do you
save
?” she asked early on when they encountered the utilitarian dilemma posed by the people starving on the lifeboat. “That’s not the issue here. The point is, call your lawyer and talk about the boat company’s liability. Get the class-action suit rolling.
Then
we’ll talk about saving.”

Flannery and Susan had talked about living together next year in their own apartment off-campus, “away from the rat pack.” How much more human they could feel there. They would have great parties. And privacy. Flannery imagined shipping more of her books out here so it felt something like home. The two would cook, and talk at all hours, and one late night, Flannery might tell Susan, finally, the story of what had happened with Anne.
Remember those times you ran into us in the Yankee Doodle?

She had thought Anne would be her anchor. She had thought—well, she hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking, in truth, she had just loved, fallen, jumped—but she had come to think, or at least hope, that Anne might stay fast for her. Improbable though it was. That Anne might continue to be there: there, where Flannery wanted her.

She would not be, though. This much Flannery had understood: Anne would be somewhere else.

And Flannery had to find out, now, where that
else
was, and what was in it.

T
here was an abrupt surreality to leaving campus this way, while everyone else played and studied, making ready for another onslaught of finals. Flannery felt removed from the others, like an ill person heading off to hospital for a mysteriously serious operation, or an astronaut going on a mission into another atmosphere, leaving the earthlings behind in their mundane toil. (Some of which toil she had to take with her: Flannery wanted good grades as much as anyone.) Her impending departure gave the spring light a vividness as she walked around the campus, and made the old buildings now seem radiantly edged. She thought she must have a luminous difference about her, though she had told no one of her trip and it was unlikely that anyone would much notice her absence. Her roommate, Mary-Jo, had registered that Flannery often did not sleep in the dorm room, but she was far too discreet—or, more likely, indifferent—to ask her about it.

Feeling important, nervous, and possibly underpacked (she knew they had winters in New Mexico only because a high-school friend had gone skiing there; otherwise, the place was a blank to her), wondering which response her cinematic action would inspire—a soft-lit, romantic “It’s you, babe,” or comic revulsion: “What—you? Here? Why?”; eighteen years old and poised on that particular knife’s edge between lucidity and blindness—Flannery got herself to the airport. She was ticketed and checked in, scanned and waved through, and she duly lounged, then boarded. Once she was inside the plane and strapping herself in, a calm settled over her as it became clear that she could not back out of this. Flannery Jansen, a quiet, writerly mouse from a one-horse town, was heading to New Mexico, for love. This would become part of her own story, however the narrative went on, ending or continuing: there would always be this episode in it. With Anne or without her, Flannery would make something of this adventure.
Did I ever tell you
, she would one night say to somebody,
about the time I flew to New Mexico, to see the woman I loved?

A
s the plane took off, Flannery felt a surge of airborne optimism. It took her a moment to locate its source (other than the sheer rush of the pressure change). She was heading West. It was just that. The inarguable rightness of leaving East for West: always the better direction to travel in.

Gaining hope as the plane gained height, Flannery found herself leaving behind the lead-footed anxieties and realities that had fought with the swooping romance of this plan from the start. A low, taunting voice had ongoingly warned her: Anne has never seemed like someone who loves surprises. She likes to be aware of what’s ahead of her. And she may, simply, not want you there. This scheme may backfire, in the worst way.

As they reached their cruising altitude, with the mortal world tinied beneath them, Flannery decided to believe otherwise.
Everything that rises must converge
, she reassured herself. It would be all right. Anne would be startled then excited to see her, won over by the sweet folly of Flannery flying to join her. Flannery would surprise her in the hotel lobby, they would go up to her hotel room . . . Here she lost a few minutes, her head turned to the small envelope of plane window, while coarse thoughts warmed her thighs and quickened her breathing. Yes, well. That part was bound to be fine. And
then
, you see, they could go out and celebrate. Of course! They could celebrate Anne’s getting the job, and Flannery could prove how bighearted and open-armed she was, joyful for Anne about this opportunity, which would incidentally take her two thousand miles away.

Flannery felt punchy. This was not a heaviness, this trip. This was a lightness, a giddiness. She persuaded herself into the mood. Peanuts? the flight attendant offered. Sure! A cocktail? Why not? How about another? So the cocktails weren’t complimentary, as a Coke would have been. So what? She was rich now—rich on credit. Borrowing beyond your means—that’s what credit card companies loved you best for. They rewarded you handsomely, jacking up your limit, for performing precisely this kind of gallant, priceless gesture, which would send you spiraling into further debt. But she was not going to worry about that now. She was eighteen, for God’s sake: an age when you’re supposed to have some fun.

The flight attendant was nice enough, but succeeded in dissuading Flannery from a third drink.
You don’t know the whole story, lady
, Flannery wanted to tell her.
This is the woman who sexually awakened me that we’re talking about here. How could I not do this for her? How could I not fly out here, to keep her?

By this time she was tipsy, as the plane itself seemed to be, as it juddered into its Albuquerque landing.

F
lannery could not believe the ubiquity of tacos. They were practically the first thing she saw, a stall selling them, when she walked a bit unsteadily off the passageway into the tidy peach-and-teal interior of the Albuquerque airport. No, it wasn’t an airport: it was a
Sunport
, with Native American symbols painted on its walls to prove it. The woman at the car rental desk, learning she was new to the state, asked Flannery if she knew the difference between red and green chiles. “A lot of visitors think the red’s hotter, but it isn’t: the green’s hotter. Keep that in mind when you’re ordering.” Flannery thanked her for the information, and for the keys to the compact.

She loved the West.

She was foreign here, doubtless—why didn’t she know Spanish? Why hadn’t she been fed it since childhood, as any westerner should be?—but not so permanently foreign as she felt on the East Coast. This place she could learn; there were others here like her. She recognized as like her own the longer vowels and unsheltered faces. They walked slower, as she did. Flannery doubted she’d ever fit in in New York, or Massachusetts, or her blighted university state, which was supposed to be rural and beautiful in parts, a notion Flannery didn’t for one minute believe. If Anne had been offered a place to teach in New York next year, it might have been different; they would have been close, a train ride away, and Flannery might have had the continuing chance to follow that city in her lover’s footsteps. Without Anne, Flannery couldn’t imagine she would ever wear the changing air there as her own, or make the right jokes, or care about their baseball teams, or get the hang of the subway.