as some wordless image moved through her mind of Lenny, that hippie in Mexico she had to travel thousands of miles to meet, in her twenties. This father-to-be was right here. She was in his arms. He was saying he’d stay there.
Flannery opened her eyes and looked at her giant lover, half walrus, half genius, who had with her complicity brought the two of them to this precipitous edge together. It wasn’t the metaphor for parenthood Flannery would have chosen – child as art piece – but what mattered was that Charles was, in his way, giving her a yes. He had said the right thing. Flannery kissed him back, and pulled him closer to her with a short-sighted and old-fashioned passion, along with the even more old-fashioned belief that it would somehow all work out fine.
12
They married, too.
Why not? Flannery was dizzy, excited, seized with a sense that she could change everything about herself in some mad, blurred tumble of adventure. It was like being at some noisy party in an unknown part of town. Do I want another glass? Of course I want another glass! (Wait, where are we again? Do we have a way to get home?)
She moved in with Charles, into the smart, Fauvishly shaded Victorian a few blocks up from the famed intersection of Haight and Ashbury, where hippies and itinerants still slouched toward Bethlehem, just as they had when Didion interviewed them forty years before. At the art college where she had been teaching, Flannery was so unable to discuss maternity leave with her boss that she simply told him she was going to finish the semester and then needed to ‘take time off for some other projects’. She told her mother about the marriage (‘Charles Marshall, honey? The Charles Marshall?’), though left the baby news for a later, rainy day. Flannery’s mother was one of the three people who came to witness what Charles enjoyed calling the couple’s ‘shotgun wedding’ at the San Francisco City Hall on Valentine’s morning. Laura Jansen wore a lilac dress and carried a colorful bouquet of gerbera daisies, as if she were Flannery’s flower girl. The other two in attendance were Charles’s best friends, an architect and his pianist wife, who brought leis to put around the couple’s necks after the ceremony. Flannery stood in the grand, gold-domed building where Dan White shot and killed Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk, a gory fact she could not for some reason get out of her head as she took the vows and promised to do all the things you were supposed to do for your spouse. Check, check, check. I will, I do, I promise. (Where had the murders taken place, actually? Who first found the bodies?) The efficient Chinese American officiant was doing a steady business in marriages that day. ‘People like to choose the fourteenth,’ he told them, with a mild, bureaucratic smile. ‘Helps husbands have an easy date to remember, so their wives don’t get mad at them.’ He winked.
This was the life Flannery was entering: the one where people made jokes that might have seemed fresh in the nineteen fifties, about absent-minded husbands and their nagging wives. The ball and chain. Take my wife . . . please!
The experience was like one of those episodic, night-long dreams. It was strange and at points surreal, drawing promiscuously on history and fantasy and odd juxtapositions, yet it had its own internal logic. Flannery was nauseous, she was pregnant, she was married, and she lived in a house – with her husband. She had become a wife and, if all went well, she would, in October, become a mother.
She found herself wondering in quiet moments, on a sloped street, in a slanting light, when she would finally wake up, and how she would feel when she did.
13
When she looked back on this period later, Flannery would have difficulty distinguishing between the intense nausea of her pregnancy (constant vomiting, in no way restricted to mornings and often at the most insalubrious places – a Safeway parking lot, a museum bathroom) and the dizzying extremity of her leap of faith into the arms and home of Charles Marshall.
Flannery had studied the concept of the leap of faith at college one semester, during a late adolescent foray into existential philosophy. She had been trying to regain her balance after being abandoned by Anne, and delving into explorations of being and nothingness seemed the right way to go about it. Flannery sat listening to a professor who was the spitting image of Leo Tolstoy and as irascible, who spoke chiefly to himself, it seemed, or to the imagined spirit of Søren Kierkegaard, about the paradox of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, by God’s outlandish request; the way Abraham could simultaneously be convinced he would slit his son’s throat, and at the same time entrust to God that at the last instant there would be some catch and he would not have to, after all. Sitting in her self-pitying sophomore slump on a shapeless plastic chair under unflattering fluorescent lighting, Flannery was never entirely sure she got it, but Tolstoy gave her a good grade for the final paper she wrangled for him, so he must have thought she did. Throughout her life Flannery would find that in writing she had occasional access to wisdom or perceptions that eluded her when she spoke aloud. Or acted.
‘Do you worry, though?’ Flannery asked Charles one evening at their local Thai garden. They had learned a few hours earlier that the genetic testing had all looked normal, and Flannery was carrying a girl. She had been surprised by Charles’s ostentatious relief at the news. ‘I mean,’ she tried to explain, to translate the roil of thoughts in her mind to an actual question, ‘about all the sacrifice?’
Charles frowned. ‘Of what?’
‘You know . . . time. Freedom.’ Flannery waved a forkful of green mango in the general direction of all they might be giving up. ‘Independence.’ Charles seemed baffled by the question. At the time Flannery found this endearing, a sign of her husband’s intention to throw himself wholeheartedly into fatherhood, but later she would come to wonder whether it was simply based on assumptions they did not discuss.
‘Nah.’ He shook his head.
‘Our ability to work. Having to take care of the baby all the time.’
‘Art versus parenthood? It’s a cliché, we don’t need to fall into that.’ He slid several morsels of chicken satay off their skewers. ‘We can do this differently.’
Flannery admired his certainty. That was very Charles: sure of himself and his ability to organize the world around him in the way he wanted. She had always responded to people, men or women, who had clarity and edge. She appreciated the ability to be definite, something she often lacked. Such characters aided Flannery in her own efforts to focus the large areas of her internal blur.
‘Great,’ she affirmed, hoping the tasty curries and rice would not make the return journey back up her throat within the hour. ‘I like your confidence. We’ll do this differently. That’s good! Let’s do that, then.’
Flannery decided to have faith. It was a leap, yes. But really, she had already taken it.
14
For a time, they homesteaded.
Charles fed her, hunted and gathered for her. He provided warm, filling meals that pushed Flannery’s belly further and further out. He developed a network of takeout joints from which he collected multiple boxes, and even cooked a few meals himself, eighties-inflected dishes (beef stroganoff, chicken Marbella) that earned Flannery’s briefly sated gratitude.
He massaged her feet, was nice about the ugly clothes, and made sure she drank a lot of water, while he knocked back a near cellar’s worth of his own preferred Cabernet. This was Charles at his best, this slow-motion lope to their child’s arrival. That the man admired himself for doing these uxorious tasks was inseparable from his actually doing them. Flannery did not mind being Charles’s gentle, flattering mirror because she did feel cared for, and that fed something
