Pages for You (6 page)

“No,” she said. Then, after another pause: “Not at the moment.”

Anne nodded slowly, almost unnoticeably. But the cigarette had dwindled to mostly ash: she had smoked it down fast.

“So,” Flannery continued. “Anne.”

But she had the disadvantage of having no cigarette. All she could do was stir around the last swallows of her thinning drink, clattering the melting ice cubes. She’d have to start smoking. There would be no other way through this.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” A slight, risky emphasis on the “you.”

Anne waited. She stubbed out her cigarette slowly, thoroughly, crushing the sparks as though the most important thing right now was to make sure she didn’t set fire to the Anchor Bar by leaving any of the butt alight.

“No,” she said.

She took a sip, then licked the gin from her lips.

“Not at the moment.”

The two women looked at each other, each wearing a small similar smirk. Flannery lifted her near-emptied drink for a last taste of vodka and cool Kahlúaed milk. Anne, seeing her, lifted hers, too, and simultaneously they said, as their glasses met in a low-pitched kiss:

“Cheers.”

T
he White Russians were beginning to add up. She’d had only two, but so early in the day and on an empty stomach, they were threatening to produce a certain restlessness. It wasn’t revolution yet, but it might get there, and Flannery was pretty sure she wanted to avoid that.

“I’d better go,” she said, looking at her watch.

“Seven-thirty? We must be getting close to your bedtime.”

“They close the dining halls. I wouldn’t be able to get any dinner.”

“Can’t have that.”

“Well, my bones are still growing. As you say.”

Flannery thought she’d gotten the hang of the banter, finally; but then realized, with a small seizure of regret, that Anne was genuinely disappointed.

“Though I could stay—I mean, I have some ramen noodles in my room . . .”

“No. I have to go, too. I have to get ready for New York.” She tidied up her relaxed face, and something of the hardness came back to the set of her mouth. She called the barmaid over so she could pay the check and wouldn’t allow Flannery anywhere near it. Flannery felt humiliated, like a child.

“But you shouldn’t—I mean, I
asked you—
” She retreated rapidly back into nervousness.

“Leave it, Flannery I’ve got it.”

Silenced.

Then, one last glitter. A flicker. A jewel in the eyes.

“Next round’s on you. All right?”

A line that led, with a speed Flannery couldn’t later reconstruct, into an awkward barlit embrace goodbye, serenaded by Glenn Miller; a bland, mutual wish for a happy Thanksgiving; and a going of separate ways, back on the melancholy early-evening street. Anne off to her mysterious elsewhere home and Flannery to the dining hall, to catch what scraps of dinner she could.

Where she could wonder, slowly, what had just happened.

O
nce she got there, of course, Flannery was far too overwrought to be hungry. The place was deserted, with most of the students gone now, and Flannery took a forlorn plate of congealing lasagna into a dim corner where she could sit privately with her treasured reliving of their encounter. Soon, though, she was discovered.

Flannery had almost forgotten about Cheryl, who seemed to have become consumed by Iowan Doug. Cheryl was not a person Flannery was prepared to talk to right now. How could Cheryl be equal to the magnitudes of life? The great swoops of passion, the certainty of heartbreak?

“Hey, Flannery. Haven’t see you in a while.”

“Yeah, hi. How’s it going?”

She sat opposite Flannery with an overspilling bowl of salad-bar salad: yellowish broccoli heads and withered mushrooms struggling to stay on board a Lo-Cal Ranch-drenched mess, across which rust-brown BacoBits scattered guilty nuggets of flavor. Flannery took a cheesy bite of lasagna, not because she wanted any, but to make her own silent point, if only Cheryl knew it, about the dull folly of dieting.

“How’ve you been?”

“Fine. How about you?”

They traded news and Thanksgiving plans. Cheryl was flying West first thing in the morning—her parents were missing her so much, she said, adding endearingly, “I can’t wait to see my dog!” Flannery explained her dilemma: whether to accept the offer of her roommate in New York or that of Nick on the Cape.

“So what’s going on with you and Nick, anyway?” Cheryl’s cheek dimpled with innuendo.

“Nick? Nothing.” Flannery glanced around to see if he was nearby.

“Oh, come on. I keep seeing you two together. What’s up?”

“Nothing, really. Anyway, Nick is—” Flannery started, then stopped, confused. She realized she’d never articulated the fact that Nick was gay. But he was, surely. Wasn’t he? “I don’t think Nick has those kinds of feelings for me. You know, we’re just friends.”

“That’s not what he told Doug.”

“What?” Flannery was unprepared for this.

“He told Doug he has a huge crush on you. Come on, it’s obvious. You can’t pretend you haven’t noticed. And he’s so cute! You’d make a great couple.”

Flannery pushed her chair back abruptly. There was no way to do this gracefully, but she tried to extricate herself from the conversation, the dining hall, the nauseating congealed lasagna, with some bungled excuse.

Cheryl carried on. She was a determined character.

“Doug and I are going to the movies tonight, if you want to join us. Nick might come along, too.”

“Thanks. You know, I’d love to, but—I’ve got some reading I’ve really got to get done.”

Cheryl shook her head.

“Reading?” she said. This time even Cheryl didn’t believe her. “Flannery, it’s Thanksgiving break.”

W
hen she understood that the poems by Marilyn Hacker were about what they had seemed to be about—a passionate, illicit affair between two women, one older than the other—Flannery had to hide the book beneath her pillow. She got up and stretched her nervous arms. She walked to the window. She inhaled the sobering, icy air and exhaled a word, or sound, without meaning to. “God,” it might have been, or “Fuck!,” or possibly just a moan, a sigh from the anxious hollow of her unschooled heart.

She saw a figure, bleach-headed, crossing the half-lit courtyard. Flannery withdrew silently back into her room. It was Nick. She turned off the light, hoping he hadn’t already checked for its reassurance, and then waited. Waited in the stillness—her roommate was off at the lab probably, as usual—for the knock on the door. He’d said something to her at breakfast about going out later for a drink or a movie, and she’d casually agreed. Yes, but that was a lifetime ago. Before she’d ever heard of Marilyn Hacker. Before she knew that Anne drank gin-and-tonics. Before she’d been issued a hasty promise:
The next round is on you.

“Jansen?” He knocked on the door.

She pretended she was dead. Or elsewhere.

“Hey! Jansen!” He knocked again. “Are you in there? You’re not passed out in a drunken stupor, are you?”

It was a joke, but she was insulted. What did he think of her?

“Shit.” Then a pause, as he apparently scribbled a note on the message board her roommate had tidily stuck to their door the first week of the semester. (It was decorated with kittens, but there was nothing Flannery could do about that.) Flannery heard Nick’s retreating steps but stayed still anyway. Wide-eyed. In the dark. What if he was waiting on the stairs? She couldn’t meet him now. It was impossible.

Besides, she found the dark quite comforting. Quite relaxing. The dark had been a good friend to Flannery these past months. It had allowed her liberties she would never haven taken in the light, nor even when drunk. Alcohol did not open any genuinely new territories. It was merely a tongue-loosener, for a shy girl, and a dance-encourager, for someone who was just now, belatedly, starting to inhabit her body.

It was the dark that had taught her those tricks in the first place. Flannery took slow, deep breaths, feeling the familiar shape of her self.

It was the dark that, pulling at her now, allowed Flannery to recognize that she would have to meet those bold, terrifying poems with some voice of her own.

F
or hours in the dark, Flannery just thought. Felt. Heard words in her head and wondered which ones she’d choose to write down. A story or a poem? Or, best, neither? Over uncounted hours in the night her mind traveled the possibilities.

At an uncertain point in the underground journey, she heard her roommate come in. Midnight or one, probably. She heard the roommate go through her evening preparations, find her room, turn out the light. When the silence had stretched into a probable sleep, Flannery got up, turned on her own light again, and started to read more of the Hacker poems. They continued to make her jump and sweat. She put them back beneath her pillow, then turned off the light. Then breathed, thought, wondered further. Then turned on the light. Then wrote some lines on a piece of paper. Then rewrote them. Then went to the window and swallowed great gasps of night. Then came back to her desk. Then took the book from under the pillow, read a few more poems, returned them to her pillow. Then pulled out thick strands of her fair hair, dropping them without thinking onto the floor. Then read aloud what scratches she had so far, in a soft murmur, loud enough that only the writer in her could hear (and not the reined-in student or the timid stumbler). She nodded. Then raided her supply of Pop-Tarts. Then, as the black outside finally softened and gave way to indigo, she let her fingers tap out some lines, and printed them. When she saw and heard them in the rhythms she wanted, she cut them out, line by line. Then, her fingers trembling a little, she placed each thin strip carefully between different pages of a thin book. Her own copy of
At the Bottom of the River
by Jamaica Kincaid. When she was finished, the book was flagged with a dozen flickers of paper ends, like bookmarks.

By then it was light. Or something less like dark. Flannery’s eyes itched with irritation at their tiredness, but her mind was wired. She knew what she had to do.

Miles to go before you sleep, she told herself. Then set out, with Pop-Tart-fed determination, on the long trek to the station.

PAGES FOR YOU

I’d like to pay your palms

the same favor that you pay these pages
,

searching them for grooves and images

and the secret signs of hunger
,

as you may scan these words

for hidden messages.

The lines of your hand might be a guide

to your gifts for pleasure
,

or a clue to where you’ll take me
,

or a map of where I might take you.

They might show me the shape, already, of our fondest caress.

I’d like to pull your glorious boots off for you

so I could touch your toes, and heel, and

the vulnerable pale arch of your delicate foot.

I’d like to borrow from you those miles you’ve seen

and wear them in my own untraveled shoes.

I’d like to treat your feet with slow and ready fingers
,

and bring you, unshod, to bliss
,

while you recite for me some rhythms from these pages
,

keeping us both in the motion of this unfolding story.

I plan to learn enough to read you like a book.

I plan to give this book to you and know you’ll read it
,

so our minds may meet across these pages
,

in the colorful country of another writer’s language
,

where we can flourish in the knowledge

that we are learning how to speak to one another;

and so our mouths will know what to do

when they finally

come together.

I
t was not a comfortable place, but it invited sleep nonetheless. It was one of the long, curved benches that stretched the width of the high, vaulted old station, recently restored. Along these benches you felt both small and sleepy, connected as you were, inexorably, with all the other baffled and weary travelers passing through the quiet halls in the morning. It was still early. The light had been lemony and hesitant as Flannery walked over. It was not yet seven o’clock.

Flannery bought herself some sugared doughnuts and a cup of something trying to pass itself off as coffee and waited, sitting under the black arrivals-and-departures board. From time to time it fluttered busily like a flock of doves, wings flapping, letters and numbers passing, until the machinery settled on the information it wanted to impart. Trains to New York. Trains to Boston. A delayed train to Vermont. One, exotically, to Florida, via Washington, D.C.