Pages for You (21 page)

But the indifferent fact was that Flannery, Anneless, would learn New York anyway. Years later Flannery was to outgrow the need to wear sunglasses in New York City for her protection. She gazed up at the starry ceiling of Grand Central as at the face of an old friend, and it cast its astronomical light over her tolerantly. She finally learned which way was uptown and which downtown if she was walking in the Village along Broadway. (She would be a junior in college before she realized Wall Street was not uptown; after that, people’s directions made much more sense to her.) One day—this is the kind of thing life turns up for a person—she might even walk those streets with another friend who was new to them and allow herself to perform, as if she were a drag artist, the ill-fitting role of guide to that city. She!
Flannery!
“This is New York City; these are its buildings and cafés; these are its famous corners; this is why.”

Such lines are memorable, and we learn to repeat them.

P
eople had affinities for places, as they did for one another. Flannery, for instance, had never shared a humor or rhythm with her western friend Cheryl, but she had with Susan and, yes, with Nick. Here, under this broad spring sun, Flannery knew she had arrived in a state she could live in. Albuquerque had sky light and land shapes—the ragged sobriety of the Sandia Mountains, the dun-colored bed of the mesa—that stirred her already, and she had not even left the lot of the Sunport.

What of Anne and her affinities? Flannery knew nothing of Anne’s home. She considered the fact as she drove down the open, sun-spread road, breathing dry air through the rolled-down window. For once, she thought of Anne’s silence as her own sadness rather than as a withholding that made Flannery feel greedy. (“Stop grabbing, for God’s sake,” Anne had said to her the first night in Florida, over an unpleasant dinner. Before they’d wrestled.) Anne had fled the place that had shaped her language and sensibility in ways Flannery would never know, unless she happened to go to Detroit to see for herself. And Anne did not wish to speak of it. That home stayed where she had left it—behind—and she had no intention of bringing it to life in stories or references. Flannery had asked what Anne would do if a teaching job came up in Michigan. “Ignore it,” Anne told her. “I’d rather waitress.” Love makes people narcissists: this, too, Flannery now saw. Anne’s silence about where she came from was not to spite Flannery, which had been her self-centered conviction; it was to spite Detroit, for whatever insults and injuries it had inflicted on Anne’s beautiful head.

So. New Mexico. What would black-jacketed Anne look like in this rugged place? The setting did not seem right for her, certainly not the way New York did. Oh, Flannery could imagine Anne venturing into the wilderness, driving to Santa Fe and Taos as the airline magazine had suggested, exploring pueblos and tiny churches and the great formations of rock and desert that would forever mimic the visions of Georgia O’Keeffe. Flannery remembered Anne’s rich, dusty stories of her Mexican travels and knew that she could love it, this dry heat and stark beauty. But living here? That elegant figure driving by the strip malls Flannery kept passing en route to downtown? It was hard to picture. It was one of those narrative details that jarred, as if it should be edited out.

But as Flannery pulled into the hotel’s lot, considering the improbability of Anne’s landing here, she accepted this as another encounter with one of the world’s fundamentals: that life patterns zigzag in randomness, when opportunities catch spark and personalities chance to connect. Often as not, a person’s efforts to take the rationally chosen path are thwarted. An obvious New Yorker cannot find employment in New York and is removed to a different imaginative territory altogether, which offers other possibilities. On a Monday someone might read your job application, or request for clemency, or novel in verse—and the light would be right and the spirit optimistic, and you’d learn in a week that you were to be hired, or forgiven, or published.
Yes, you!
On a Tuesday the coffee would not taste as good, the weather was ominous, and the doors would close, gently but firmly:
Thank you for applying, but . . . We have considered your request, and regret that . . . A number of us very much enjoyed your work; however, in the end
I’m afraid . . .
One geography vanishes, and with it an alternative future.

New Mexico. Here it was. And here was Flannery, in the place that had chosen Anne.

T
he problem with being young and making dramatic gestures—though the problem can also afflict dramatically gesturing older people—is that you may run into logistical difficulties that undercut the clean arc of your plan. The gears stick. The machinery clogs and stalls. If you manage it smoothly, your timing works perfectly, the encounter falls as it’s meant to and has the upshot you’re hoping for, and you do not have to spend, for example, several long hours in a canned-air-filled motel room, flipping impatiently from one cable channel to another, wondering when you will find Anne.

Somewhere in her optimistic head Flannery had perhaps figured that New Mexico would not just welcome westerner Flannery with open arms, but that it would announce to her, helpfully, how to locate her lover, so they could get going on their happy surprise reunion. Wouldn’t it be obvious, from the Sunport, how Flannery was to find her?

It was not obvious. Flannery had arrived equipped with one piece of information—the name of Anne’s hotel—but it was not enough to effect the rest. Flannery asked at the reception desk, her heartbeat a loud percussion to the question, whether Anne Arden was staying there. The answer was yes, but she was not there now, at two in the afternoon. An hour’s waiting in the lobby made Flannery wearier and sweatier, and eventually brought on the revelation that it would not be good to reunite in this state, when she was all wrinkled and travel worn. Unlike Anne, her prettiness was not the foolproof kind that could withstand dry air and tiredness without showing it. She needed to shower. Right. She should therefore—what? Rent her own room at the hotel? Wouldn’t that be the suave thing?

Flannery asked about their rates. As nonchalant as she tried to be, even her extravagant self quailed at the figure. It was an impossible amount a night, half as much as the flight had been. For the privilege of a shower! She could not bring herself to pay it. A further hour into waiting, Flannery climbed back into her rental car and drove back toward the airport, having been told by a supercilious clerk that that was a likely place to find a cheaper room. (She had asked specifically for that—“someplace cheaper”—having not yet become versed in phrases like “a lower rate” or “a more economical option” and other polite euphemisms for a cash-strapped person’s alternatives.)

Which was how she came to be in the El Dorado motel late that afternoon, where she showered in a narrow, thin-walled cabinet and then lay down, flipping between talk shows, music videos, and news to distract her from the new, slow drone of dread within her—and calling the hotel every half hour, trying to find Anne.

T
he hotel receptionist got tired of hearing from Flannery and she did not hesitate to make that clear.

“I’m sorry, she hasn’t come in yet,” she said the fourth time Flannery called, her high note of service-job sorriness cracking to reveal the sour undertone of
What are you, some kind of stalker?
“Can I leave a message for her to call you?” She had asked this before. This time Flannery finally said, in an effort to enlist some sympathy, “No, see—it’s a surprise. I want to surprise her. It’s—it’s her birthday,” she added, on a whim.

“Oh,” said the receptionist coolly. The birthday did not mollify her. Flannery thanked her, hung up, then swore at the woman’s rudeness. The West might not, after all, be filled exclusively with the world’s friendly and benign.

Eventually Flannery dozed. She was hungry but wanted to wait to eat with Anne: that was part of the plan, part of the way it was supposed to work. At last, faint with growing doubt and hunger, she managed to get through to a different hotel receptionist, for whom the question of the whereabouts of Anne Arden was a new and interesting challenge.

“She’s not in her room,” the receptionist said. “But can you hold for a moment?” Flannery held, as a talking head on the television mutely narrated a litany of new wars and murders. “Miss?” The voice came back cheerfully. “Yes, Ms. Arden is here at the hotel. She has a dinner reservation in the restaurant. Would you like me to tell her you’re on the phone?”

“Oh! No. Thanks. No—thanks. I’ll just meet her there. It’s her birthday, you see—Thank you. Thanks—” Flannery staggered and stuttered. The receptionist, thanked more in five minutes than she would be for the rest of the evening, hung up to attend to other travelers’ needs, while Flannery went into a small frenzy of anticipation in the worn, drab interior of her El Dorado.

T
hen again, why would she be?

Alone, that is.

Why would Anne be eating alone? Wouldn’t it be stranger for her to be eating alone in the hotel restaurant, as if waiting for Flannery to arrive and fill the space across from her—as if Anne were the kind of person across from whom the space was ever likely to be empty? Flannery had hoped to find her there: an expectant, solitary figure, whose eyes would brighten at the surprise sight of her long-traveling lover. But wouldn’t that, actually, have been stranger?

Of course she was not alone. She was having dinner with somebody, as Flannery immediately saw from the threshold of the restaurant, near the hostess’s tidy podium, where before Flannery could ask for Anne Arden’s table she saw the elegant tilt of Anne’s tigery red head; that graceful neck; those gesturing, eloquent hands. Gesturing, in this instance, to the man she was with.

Flannery stopped, trapped in the dead time of the hostess’s noon-bright “Table for one? Or will someone be joining you?” Flannery all but stalled out, checking her action, her impulsive move forward toward Anne. She almost tripped over her own surprise, so that the hostess’s sun-smile briefly clouded. Wrong question, Flannery wanted to tell the hostess. The question is, Will I be joining
her?
Does she want me to? “I’m just going to—hold on here,” Flannery confided to the hostess, “for a second.” She gripped the podium for support, as if she were considering making a speech.

This was no doubt one of the men hiring Anne, and she was trying to engage and attract him still, even though she had nailed the job. What did Flannery know of the mechanics of the world and its employments? Maybe Anne felt she had to seduce him—all of them—ongoingly. God knew she was good at it. Flannery watched Anne’s technique from the podium. Here it came: her plans and ideas for courses she might teach, the finer dimensions of her dissertation’s argument. A little flirtation. Why not? Anne did it without thinking, Flannery knew; it was a gift or a curse, something that came naturally along with her beauty: the insinuating eyes, the sly smile, the light touching of a sleeve or bare forearm as if to be friendly (and to note the possibility of being more than friendly). Flannery saw Anne touch the man’s sleeve. She could not see Anne’s face, but she could see his. It was animated, rugged with handsome features—a strong jaw, a long nose, a stern but humorous brow. He was looking at her not, Flannery noticed, with a new or nascent attraction. He watched her with something closer to slow, tender besottedness. Flannery looked back at Anne’s hand on his sleeve. It was still there. Her fingers were playing, now, with the cuff of his shirt.

“I’ve just seen some friends of mine.” Flannery felt she ought to keep the hostess up-to-date. Then she ambled over, casual Flannery, as if to say hello here to her two old, good friends. The besotted man saw her first and looked at her with a distant, tolerant expression as if greeting a pretty but pestering student.

It was Anne who turned slowly, feeling a familiar breeze at her shoulder, but the surprise in her eyes when she found this known shape at her side was not the color Flannery had most fondly hoped for.

“Flannery!” Anne called out, a half-choke. And pale, glitter-eyed Anne, for the first time since Flannery had met her, actually blushed.

F
lannery stood smiling and nodding, her hands tucked in the back pockets of her jeans, trapped safely away from where they wanted to be. She was underdressed, too: she saw now that Anne wore a beautiful silk shirt, one that Flannery did not recognize. Flannery could not speak just yet, but her nod was supposed to convey, Yep. That’s right. It’s me. I’m Flannery.

Anne let her face cool for a moment. Her smile was taut, the kind that might snap if you touched it. “How did you—?” She glanced at her dining companion. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, you know,” Flannery said in a high, offhand voice. She sounded younger when nervous. “I just thought I’d stop by.” The line did not have the tone it had had in her inner ear all the times she had silently rehearsed it. It lacked the insouciance she had carefully planned.

“I can’t—” Anne shook her head slightly, as if the act might cause Flannery to vanish. Her disbelief evidently carried with it distress, not pleasure. “I can’t believe you’re here.”

“Would you—”

“Hi, I’m—”

The man and Flannery started to smooth over the awkwardness. Anne cut sharply through them both. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Flannery, this is Jasper Elliot.”

Flannery nodded again to agree—it seemed plausible enough—but her eyes asked for more.

“Jasper’s an old—friend of mine. An old—”