heard her.
16
In the car, free from eyes – not that eyes bothered Charles much, anyway; when he wanted an audience he imagined everyone seeing him, and when he didn’t he believed he was invisible – Charles continued, his voice quavering with impatience. He was behind the wheel in congealing city traffic, and everyone was his enemy.
‘Jeffrey’s coming today. Remember? And Baer is out of town.’ Jeffrey was Charles’s New York dealer, Baer his studio assistant.
‘Okay . . .’ Flannery said slowly.
‘No. It’s not “okay” because he wants me to have come up with a line on my new work. I need you to help me with the language. You’re a writer.’
‘Well, I can do that, but I was teaching. You can’t just –’
‘Class was over. You were done. He’s coming today, Flannery.’
‘I understand. But –’
‘You don’t understand. You’re not listening to me.’ He shook his head in frustration. His teeth were gritted.
‘I am listening! I just –’
‘No. You’re not. Because if you were, you’d stop nitpicking here, and realize this is important.’
‘OK, sweetheart, but teaching is important too. It’s embarrassing –’
‘Oh, I embarrass you? Really?’ The contempt in Charles’s tone hung in the air like an industrial fume. Flannery’s heart was thudding now.
‘Please don’t raise your voice.’
‘I’m not raising my VOICE.’
‘You’re shouting.’
‘This is such bullshit!’ He slammed his hands down on the steering wheel, after a sudden jerking brake to avoid rear-ending the Prius in front of him. ‘I’m a man, Flannery. This is what we sound like.’
Flannery turned her head away from her husband then, and watched San Francisco’s dingy streets blur, through her wet eyes. She hated crying. It was so weak. She did not want Charles to see it (though of course she did, too).
The drive to Charles’s studio continued without further conversation. If Flannery expected a softening from Charles, she would be disappointed, though at least the object of his anger shifted, to the other jackass drivers, one slow dog-walking pedestrian in a crosswalk (Can you move along, Grandma?) and the traffic engineers of this stupid backward city.
Flannery made herself think of something else, clear this episode from her mind. She traveled back to her appearance on the TV morning show, when she was interviewed for Don Lennart. The interview had been a short, confusing badminton match between herself and the two hosts, a sparkly black woman and a powder-cheeked gray-haired white guy, each feeding her easy questions that she was supposed to bat back, entertainingly. In the segment’s last seconds, Flannery thought of a funny story she had forgotten to tell about Adele, one that cast her in a warm, heroic light, rather than as the comic sidekick.
‘That reminds me of a time right at the beginning of our trip,’ Flannery began, gathering the practiced sentence in her mind. In that infinitesimal pause, though, the mascaraed hostess talked over Flannery. The seconds drained away, her cheerful summary of Flannery’s book built inexorably to the commercial break, and eventually Flannery had to smile, purse her lips, and know that she had come to the end of her time on the air. Adele had been nice about it afterwards, said she had done great, but Flannery regretted not managing to get out that detail.
When they finally reached Charles’s studio, Charles frayed and damp with exasperation, they sat at his broad work table together, and Flannery calmly helped write a few good paragraphs that framed and contextualized Charles’s new work. She sculpted some language on his behalf.
There would be no apology for Charles’s outburst. Over time, Flannery eventually learned the pattern. Much later her husband might make some other compensatory gesture – that night, he picked up ice cream for her on the way home – and he would turn the story around, neatly, so that it was Flannery who had to be absolved.
‘Listen,’ Charles said understandingly, as he donned his gray silk pajamas. This was hours later, almost midnight, after Jeffrey’s visit to the studio, which had gone very well, and the dinner afterwards, from which Flannery had excused herself. She had been dozing already for an hour or two when Charles came in. ‘I realize the pregnancy makes you emotional. I get that.’
Flannery, lying plumply in bed, nodded, only half awake. She was a writer, yes, or had been once, and sometimes she could still be beautifully articulate.
Other times she simply could not find the right thing, or anything at all, to say.
17
With Willa was born light.
That was all Flannery saw in the first few minutes. She did not see or feel the infant, properly, before people masked like thieves whisked her away to be weighed and measured and deemed to have the appropriate biometrics to join the human race. For Flannery, of course, there was no question about her daughter’s perfection. How else could anyone account for all this light?
It was inside and outside of Flannery, both. The illumination. The point was, the source must have been Willa, and yet it was not as though that tiny baby, just emerged, was emitting bright beams of gratitude that she had escaped her dim cave and gotten her life rolling. (What she primarily emitted were the loud cat cries of any newborn’s arrival.) It seemed rather, to Flannery’s drugged mind – they had tanked her up with painkillers and then anesthetic, when it eventually transpired that the doctors had to slice Flannery open to get Willa out safely – as though on Willa’s joining everyone else in the room, all the darkness went out of the place, out of every corner, leaving only this light.
She could not speak this. She could not say anything at all. Flannery was simply mute and smiling and bewildered. She took in the sequence of events: Charles joking with the nurses, though his eyes blinked with tears; the extreme contrast between his hefty self and the scarcely substantial creature he was cradling, like an image from some cartoon, a bear with a diminutive kitten in its paws; the swaddling of Willa and some helpful nurse’s holding the child before the mother’s eyes. Look at her! Isn’t she beautiful? The images lodged deep within Flannery’s memory, concealed under other immediate realities, and they would stay there always. Her daughter’s arrival.
She had Willa now, and Willa had her, and Flannery’s heart was ripped open into a new, great, terrifying capacity for love. (And, simultaneously, grief, because for some old, indelible reason Flannery felt the fear right alongside the joy – they were inextricable.) She had never known she would be capable of this love, and the feeling left her absolutely exposed to the world and its elements, like driving down the freeway at a hundred miles an hour with the top down and the windows open. Anything could get in.
What shape her fears had, what could happen once you became a mother – all of that would come later. For that day, that timeless hour, Flannery simply allowed herself to bathe in Willa’s light.
18
Once, a long time before, Flannery had felt vulnerable in this way. She had loved
