women at the same time, and each took a sip from their own brews.
‘Do you miss . . . that?’ Charles asked unexpectedly, tilting his chin in the direction of the women’s table.
Flannery blinked. That? Having a drink with a girl, or trading jokes with her? Making love to a girl? What precisely was Charles asking? Flannery took a pull of her beer, pondering possible answers, but was relieved of the need to try any of them.
‘I mean . . .’ Charles continued. ‘I get it. You know?’ He looked serious, and sympathetic, so Flannery nodded apprehensively. Then a light flickered in Charles’s eyes. ‘You may not realize this, but . . . I was a lesbian once, too.’
This Flannery had not expected. She laughed with relief. ‘You know,’ she parried, ‘that doesn’t surprise me.’
‘You felt the vibe, right?’
‘I totally did.’
‘I figured.’ Charles nodded.
‘Besides,’ Flannery shrugged. ‘All the best people were.’
‘Apparently!’
‘Though . . .’ Flannery pushed it further. ‘That thinking seems, you know, binary. Straight, gay. Like you have to be one or the other.’
‘Ah hah. Kind of virgin/whore, you mean?’
‘Well, I didn’t really mean that! But . . . sure.’ Flannery was enjoying this. ‘Right. Are you a prude, or just cautious? In touch with your desire, or a nymphomaniac?’
‘Easy . . .’ Charles ventured, with a satyr’s grin. ‘Or hard?’
‘Dry or wet?’
‘Top or bottom?’
‘They want you to choose one,’ Flannery said, a little drunkenly, and with a hint of melancholy. She could not have said who they were. ‘You have to choose.’
It wasn’t conventional foreplay, but it got the two of them pretty worked up. They drained their beers and then Charles drove them back up to his house, where they fully explored together the possibilities of the heterosexual option.
9
There was a perfectly pleasing place this exciting outlier relationship might have taken in the unfolding narrative of Flannery’s life: a round roll of adventure, a brush with art celebrity, a sexual exploration; a lush indulgence of gifts and pleasure and bodies and surprise. From there you would have expected its slowing, and then its probable ceasing, as the personality differences finally made themselves felt.
Charles was older than Flannery by fifteen years, but there was an exoticism in that too. Flannery felt at sea but not unpleasantly so, as if she were on a cruise ship filled with people of some remote English-speaking nationality. Scots, perhaps, or Australians. Charles could enthral a table with the stories he told in his jovial baritone, while Flannery’s stories flowed through her fingertips, and on the whole she mumbled. When she joined Charles with his studio assistants out at a favored Italian joint, she was most comfortable listening to the men laugh; when the gathering was around his own oversized table she found herself doing what women do, assembling and serving the food. It gave her a way not to have to talk or perform. Charles’s eye for colors and dimensions meant he was great to see the world with, like a chatty camera – ‘Look at the way that woman in line is holding her dog, like it’s a sweater she’s pulling close, to stay warm’ – while Flannery was more of an old-fashioned solvent, taking weeks or months to develop what she had observed. Charles marked his environment, mobilizing people and materials to change the landscape, while all Flannery commanded were the creatures of her own imagination, and she sometimes felt her feet left a faint tread.
It was several months after their autumn meeting at the gallery night, and Flannery had decided simply to enjoy herself. Why not? She did not have to overthink everything. She could simply follow this dalliance to its end. Until then she was a tourist of a foreign lifestyle: fancy restaurants, art openings, heterosexuality. So this is how they live! It transpired that a man and a woman on the street together were invisible to the world, and for Flannery, who had always hated to be watched or even noticed as two women together tended to be (the familiar stranger’s double-take: Which one is the . . . oh, they both are!), this was an unexpected reprieve. She felt as though she had been permitted into one of those country clubs she had previously considered snooty and boring, but it had turned out to be good fun (they had an air hockey table!) and have great facilities (so many clean towels, and fantastic water pressure in the showers!). This straightness made her feel older. At last she was introduced to the way Regular People coupled. Partnered. Made love. This club had existed for millennia, and finally she was, temporarily at least, a member. As long as she could leave again after, all would – probably – be well.
Then she got pregnant.
Late January, a chill San Francisco winter, all light grays and subdued browns, even the Golden Gate Bridge dulled down to a flat, parochial orange – and inside Charles’s house on Ashbury Street in San Francisco, and within his black modernist bathroom, the plastic stick showed two hot pink, unexpected lines.
This happened with straight sex. Flannery had heard of it. Novels, romances, salacious newspaper articles, movies – they all mentioned this. It was a plot device, a soap opera staple, a career changer or reputation smircher; a punishment, or a miracle, or a reward. Women got pregnant after having sex with men, sometimes.
Right.
Once, after she and Adele broke up, Flannery had briefly dated an amusing buck-toothed English woman, who used the phrase about someone, ‘She fell pregnant.’ At the time, Flannery, who loved to hold strange expressions in her fingers like samples of exotic fabric, to test their weave and their texture, commented on the comedy of the words, as she saw them – as if pregnancy were an affliction, like an illness, that you picked up by accident. As if it sent you off in some sort of swoon.
Now, suddenly, fearfully, Flannery was not laughing.
She had fallen.
10
How could Flannery be so smart, and simultaneously so stupid?
It was one of her own enduring questions about her character, from the time she was a bright kid in her fifth-grade class and the teacher’s pet, yet wrote a sarcastic note about an assignment that got her sent to the principal’s office (could she not have foreseen that the joke would misfire?), to her failure to predict, on the elaborately planned Mexico trip, just how rattled and wild it would make her to meet, at last, her father.
What had she imagined – a quick coffee then she and Adele would be on their way? Why would Flannery go to the extensive trouble of finding her unknown father in the first place if she didn’t think it would rearrange her interior, as it did? Yet as the two women got ready to encounter Len Jansen at the bohemian hotel bar he had suggested, Adele fretted over what they should wear, and whether they should act like friends or lovers, to which questions Flannery replied with uncharacteristic hardness, ‘What does it matter? The guy will be too stoned to notice, probably. And we won’t stay long.’ Even Flannery could hear how unFlanneryish her voice was, saying that, and she was wrong and wrong, as it turned out. The meeting might not have been a tear-jerker of reconciliation or redemption between father and daughter – Flannery was pretty sure her father understood the relationship between her and Adele, but it seemed not to
