of time. In their physical appearance, yes, but also in some of the turns of their thinking, unnerving enough for her that hours into the surprising conversation of that first meeting, Flannery offered up an abrupt excuse to leave. Soon after that she hit the tequila, and from there the sex by the saguaro story more or less wrote itself.
Flannery was wise yet foolish. She knew so much, and so little. ‘The eternal sophomore,’ she called herself in A Visit to Don Lennart, a book she wrote in part to understand this very contradiction.
Flannery knew she was smart. Others did too, though not instantly, which gave the discovery an element of surprise when they came upon it, like a hit of salt in a caramel dessert. Flannery was soft-voiced in conversation and not inclined to show off, yet she was not timid about making a reference or an analogy that would catch her listener’s attention. At the publishing house where she worked after college, her boss, a brisk sardonic New Yorker with limited patience, once skimmed skeptically through some catalogue copy Flannery had handed her. Gradually Eleanor’s frown eased, and her eyebrows raised. ‘You wrote these?’ she asked, as if speaking to a child prodigy. ‘With the slant quote from Leonard Cohen? That little quip about mood rings? Nice work, Flannery.’ Flannery had pinkened with pleasure. ‘You play the sleepy Westerner well, but you’ve got a brain in there, haven’t you?’
Sometimes. And yet: her stupidity, leaning at times into an ‘accidental heartlessness’ (her own phrase, again). Just as she had settled into her position at the publishing house, Flannery blindly trampled on a friendly colleague’s territory by sleeping with the philandering poet the woman edited, offending the editor to the point where Flannery wondered if she ought to leave, and started to plan her Mexican adventure. Or it could be a more basic cluelessness, shown by the number of times (two) that Flannery forged a brilliant route for Adele and her to take through a strange and possibly dangerous territory, only for her to get pickpocketed later in some obvious, open market square in Guadalajara.
The ways Flannery saw and didn’t see; looked ahead, yet was blindsided by what came at her.
That was the only way to explain how she could have let herself get pregnant.
It was a teenager’s error. Made her feel seventeen again. Had she really thought she had matured?
There was a morning, once, soon after she arrived at Yale, when Flannery traveled what felt like a great distance from the campus (about two blocks) to find breakfast away from the many freshman eyes in the dining hall. She went into a spare, tiny diner called The Yankee Doodle and ordered from its grease-smeared menu a ‘jelly omelette’. It seemed part of being in the new place – sampling the local cuisine. These crazy people from Connecticut made jelly omelettes! Why not try one?
The waitress raised a brow and smirked at the order. Flannery had misstepped. And indeed the plate that arrived, a yellow-brown slab of egg oozing sickly purple, was both ridiculous and disgusting. Had Flannery been older, she might have framed the mistake for herself forgivingly – Oh well. I’m learning! – but at seventeen she could only dissolve in embarrassment, particularly because the whole fiasco was observed, emerald-eyedly, by an auburn-haired woman who sat a few tables away, drinking coffee and reading.
The bad breakfast at The Yankee Doodle turned into a story of Flannery’s. That act of idiocy got someone’s attention, and the moment Flannery saw that beautiful reader, she was smitten. She learned that the woman was a graduate student named Anne Arden, and one day a few months later, they would start to discover everything important about each other, relish every taste and surface, savor all art and intelligence together. In the headiness of that pleasure, the jelly omelette tale became a joke and a fondness, a necessary first story in the two women’s eventual heated courtship.
So there was that kind of mistake you could make in your life. The silver-lined cloud. The paint spill that tips the canvas into masterpiece. The wrong number you dial, which connects you with a person who becomes one of your most significant.
11
Was this pregnancy like that – a wrong number? Was Flannery at thirty-one going to start a nine-month journey to meet someone she had occasionally imagined – a pen-pal, a character – but did not yet know?
Or was this pregnancy the other kind of mistake – the dead-end error that had neither excuse nor benefit, was nothing but a blot, a crash, a rending? Was Flannery about to be torn up?
‘It’s not a great time for this,’ Charles had nakedly said, lying back in bed one cold morning after a shot of slippery, eager intercourse followed by a hit of the blackest coffee. The drama of the situation had ignited lust in them both, but it subsided, once spent, into a chilly realism. They had known each other four months. It was not long enough to have learned how the other handled surprise, or crisis, or responsibility.
Charles frowned as he looked up at the high ceiling of his bedroom, and his goatee frowned along with him. His New York dealer had just finalized the date of a show in the spring of the following year, and his professional mind was racing along its track toward that goal: timetable, works, contacts, ambitions. Flannery’s professional mind was a disused carriage on a side track, waiting.
A yellow-gray light stole weakly in through the broad sash windows, a bashful ghost. Though not icy, San Francisco could nonetheless be bleak in January.
Flannery lay alongside Charles, moving her hand across his broad, silver-tufted torso. Stroking a wiry chest was an exotic sensation to her still; sometimes it felt like one of the most different sensual pleasures of touching a man rather than a woman. She watched the face of this person she had opened herself to again and again, a man she had allowed to come inside her body and change her life – if she chose to pursue that change. She would be altered, certainly, even if she didn’t. Either way, Charles had, in the way peculiar to that sexual act, taken possession of Flannery’s body. Her physical self would never be hers in the same way again.
Four months! Flannery could not believe her stupidity, nor his, at having so mangled the handling of birth control. Shouldn’t he have been adept at that kind of thing? Charles professed to have been out of practice using condoms, having mostly had partners who were on the pill, and certainly Flannery could claim no expertise, but the bungling was, like the sex itself, their shared endeavor. There was a riot of confusion, yearning, and fear within Flannery, along with an incipient sickness that gave Charles’s bedroom a nauseating tilt. The cruise ship image came to her mind again, though this time she thought more clearly: I might just want to get off, next time we dock, and get back to land.
Flannery palmed Charles’s massive shoulder, pale as Venetian marble and as sturdy. She loved the sheer heft of Charles’s muscles. He could lift a lot, and it showed. If she were ever trapped under a crashed car, Flannery sometimes thought, or in a collapsed building after the next big earthquake, Charles would be able to extricate her. There was a comfort in that. As she touched him, Flannery was thinking, wondering, picturing. She wanted this man who had so marked her to say the right thing to her now. She was not sure what that might be, in these compromising circumstances, but like a voice in tune she would know it when she heard it.
Charles blinked his deep coffee-brown eyes and turned back to Flannery. ‘My Beauty,’ he called her, and sometimes ‘Venus on the half shell’ and, as of a few days ago, ‘Lady Madonna’. She could see a new light in his eyes, and it scared and excited her, both.
‘Listen, Beauty,’ he said, easing himself into Flannery’s caressing hand, ‘if you want to build this person, if you want to sculpt a human being, whoever it turns out to be –’ and his voice was low and nearly breaking, far deeper than his customary register of joke and bluster – ‘I want to be right there with you, Flannery Jansen, for the unveiling.’
He
