Pages for you For a friend

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PROLOGUE

What would happen if I wrote some pages for you? Each day a page, to show you that I am finding a story, the story of how we might have been together, once. Of how we could be.

We will never be together. Sweetheart. I am too brittle, hidden, and snappish, and you are too married. You are altogether too married. For those of us who’ve never known the state it sails past us like a cruise ship, lamps all on and parties raging, as the water gently or rockily allows you to sweep across it. We wave from our smug or perhaps lonely shores, waiting till the sea-scattered brightness has withdrawn its silvery music, and we’re left alone in the dark, on dry land, to carry on with our unfettered midnight explorations.

He’s a lovely man, your Jasper, not that I know him. I know of his qualities by how he illuminates you—you can see the light of him all through your body and most particularly your face as you tell tales of your joint adventures: clifftops and forest walks and long, cool, medieval alleys. Forget-me-not seas and the heart-pure beaches beside them, along which you can both sun-stretch silently or speak. Galleries and night strolls, concerts and banquets. Language and travel, and the many ways those twain shall meet. So alive are these narratives on your wantable mouth and in your essential eyes that I can watch them, movies in my quiet head to play when I’m at home, stirring in my empty rooms, waiting for my own ship to come in.

It will come. They’ll find room for me somewhere. Someone will cough up an extra berth on some deck or another, or there will be a lucky last-minute cancellation. Who knows, maybe I’ll even be given a seat at the captain’s table to mingle with all the uniformed fellows and their glorifying wives. No—not the captain’s table for me, probably. Probably something more like Table Thirteen, with the insurance agents and medical eccentrics, where I can be fêted as a storyteller—Really! But how wonderful! Tell us, what kinds of stories?—and be allowed to sip my sparkling water without causing too much trouble. I’ll sit at my table onboard and silently toast you, across the oceans, where you’ll be sparkling at yours.

In the meantime, I have treats in store for you. A perfect, pitch-purple aubergine; caramelized fennel; potatoes roasted in rosemary, for remembrance. Coriandered orzo tossed with chicken and okra. Kiwis and tangerines. Cake moist with all the ginger and butter one girl can politely afford, to create something fragrantly spiced and suggestive, a taste to remind you of a late glass of wine and mood-loosened limbs: that question in the eyes, or the stray touch of one’s hand on another one’s forearm. The never-kissed kiss. The imagination ignited.

Enough. Enough. The taste treats are real, or will be. Now, here are your pages.

PART ONE

The leaves were confettied brightly over the sidewalk as if a parade had just passed, and Flannery did not think she had ever in her life seen such colors. They would get deeper and more heartfelt, she knew, with warm oranges and pomegranate reds, and she could hardly wait for the experience. Like every other sensation, that sight was still before her. But already they were goldenrod and butternut on the ground, and up in the trees (she looked skyward) infinite greens, all the apple and lime and melon flesh she could imagine. They were so beautiful she wanted to eat them or breathe them, take them inside her, make them part of herself. At the very least, she wanted to not ever forget them. She told her memory to hold on to them; there might come a time later when she would need their solace.

She came from a place where autumn meant oncoming dampness and fog, the new drawl of the school year: a plain, dull gravity of shoulders and hope. Nothing like this fierceness of light and the brisk bite of cold on the cheek, which seemed playful, a love nip, rather than a somber slap of warning that winter might come. She was not yet wary of the winters here, having not moved through one. She knew this approaching splendor meant death and decay, the boding of ice-prisoned branches and slippery black streets, but could not make herself feel the grief in it. All this vividness she could read only as exhilaration. Not melancholy.

Flannery abandoned herself to movie clichés of the East she’d learned as a girl in the West. She kicked her tennis-shoed feet through the leaves. She buried her hands in the pockets of her coat, which had a serious weight she was not used to. She knew that this lift of fall glory, which brought her to a shocking peak of happiness—from where, suddenly, she had a complete panoramic view; could see the shape of her future, the blank scope of her forthcoming cities and days—she knew that she would never again reach such a height of pure, sensual pleasure. Never again in her life.

She was seventeen. She had no idea about anything, really. And she was about to meet someone—literally, around the next corner.

Within that person, a new and altogether unsuspected happiness waited.

Around the corner was a diner. Diner: even the words were new here, as if she were in another country, which every single minute she felt herself to be. She had grown up with coffee shops, not diners. She had eaten not grinders but subs. She’d never considered, not for a moment, the idea of a jelly omelette.

This diner was called the Yankee Doodle, a cheerful name that belied the cramped gloom of the place. The Yankee Doodle had jelly omelettes on the menu, and Flannery was feeling bold as she sat down. Sure, she could have a toasted bran, corn, or blueberry muffin—it hardly mattered which, they were essentially the same, and she could in anticipation taste the crisp buttered edge of each neat disk—but with the gold splendor still in her spirit from the leaves, she said to the prune-faced waitress who waited, wiry with impatience and sarcastic with accent,

“A jelly omelette, please. And a glass of orange juice.” The waitress nodded, scribbled on her pad, and retreated behind the narrow Formica counter, along which a few jacketed shapes huddled over hot drinks and doughnuts, or hash browns mixed with ketchup-bloodied eggs. To a stooped, white-shirted man whose balding head was all but lost to steam clouds of grease, the waitress instructed with unneeded volume,

“Jelly omelette!”

The phrase, ridiculous when spoken, especially so loudly in the bored voice of the waitress, had a single advantage. It caught the attention of a figure sitting at a table in a near corner, from whom Flannery might otherwise have hidden as she sank back into her familiar state of wrong-footed self-consciousness.

Dressed in black, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette. Absorbed in a book—until, that is, “Jelly omelette!” broke the concentration. In one of those gifted premonitions, Flannery noticed the reader an instant before “Jelly omelette!” was barked, so that she was directly facing the elegant autumn-shaded head and already wondering keenly what the book might be.

The green eyes looked up in an irritated humor, to see who could possibly be the author of such an order.

Flannery saw the reader’s eyes, her cat green eyes, and stopped breathing. Never in her life—not at least since the leaves—had she seen such a heartbreaking color.

To that green glitter of mockery—Flannery’s breakfast request was, from an adult, hardly credible—the hungry girl replied with a smile of embarrassment, an apologetic shrug of the shoulders. I can’t help it, Flannery tried to suggest. I don’t know what I’m doing. There was no smile in return. The reader’s glance-flicker was so brief that Flannery’s shoulders were still winced up in their shrug when those eyes turned back to their pages and the serious lips took a deep drag from a cigarette.

Oh. God. Those lips. It was the cigarette that made Flannery notice them, now that the reader’s eyes were turned down toward her book. Flannery had nothing to do but watch that mouth smoking, and though she couldn’t have said why it was so beautiful or described the thrill of its shape—she was too young to have anything like a vocabulary for such things—she could not stop herself from watching it, shaded a darkish persimmon that left its trace on the cigarette. But the ash was low, Flannery saw, and soon the fine, purposeful fingers were stubbing it out. Flannery looked away quickly, panicked, frightened of further emerald mockery if she was caught staring so unashamedly.

The waitress brought her her orange juice, and Flannery took a great swallow as if it were a shot of vodka. It was fakely sweet and an unlikely color, more like a billboard or paint shade than any real fruit. Its strange flavor made her mouth pucker, and she was relieved that the waitress was soon back with a different taste to replace it: a lightly browned yellow omelette, thrown gracelessly onto a thick white oval plate.

Flannery stared down at it a moment. What had she asked for? What was a jelly omelette, actually? With the side of her fork she tentatively cut into it, a clean slice off the edge. Out of the cut leaked a thick translucent purple, as if she’d hit some alien vein. The purple was, she realized, none other than grape jelly. The purple and yellow textures avoided each other uneasily on the plate. They were not meant for each other: being together did not suit them. Flannery put down her fork and sipped her juice, for courage.

Something made her risk a look at the reader, and she was sure that she saw a telltale dip of the head, as if the woman had just been watching her. Emboldened by the idea, Flannery kept her gaze on the now nonsmoking figure, who took a sip of black coffee. And another. She turned the page. She pursed her lips. (Those lips!) She brushed a lick of deep reddish brown hair behind a delicate ear. She sipped her coffee. Her eyes moved to the next page. Flannery abandoned her omelette and watched the woman drink her coffee. Still, she wanted to know: What was the book?

It worked. The reader’s concentration wavered, and finally she looked up, one of her eyebrows raised, an ironic expression.

“Don’t like your breakfast?” she asked in a sly voice, so that the waitress could hear. Flannery didn’t want to come right out and admit it, so she shrugged again, mutely. Idiotically. “You seem,” the reader went on, reaching for another cigarette, “to like the look of my coffee, from the way you’re staring. Perhaps you should order a cup for yourself, if that’s what you want.”

That did it. Flannery flushed from the chest up, a full hot plum of humiliation. She looked away, asked for the check, paid it, and fled the Yankee Doodle. Without looking back. Without waiting for her change.

On the street again, her heart was noisy in her ears, from her fast walk and her embarrassment. Not so noisy, though, that it outbeat the internal words of her silent reply.

It wasn’t that she wanted the coffee, no. That wasn’t it. Rather, she wanted to be the coffee: she envied the dark drink its chance to taste those lips.

She never should have come here. She did not belong. If Flannery belonged anywhere—which her uneasy skin and awkward, long-legged gait made her doubt—it could not possibly be on these busy old university grounds, in a year that had seasons, alongside such sour-souled people. They were all planning to laugh at her, clearly, every single day, until she finally gave in and went back to the land of computers and eucalyptus, where everyone wanted you—sincerely—to have a nice day.

“Hey Flannery!” called a thin-coated ally from across the traffic-blurred street. Another westerner, whom Flannery had met on the first day. They lived on the same floor and shared a crowded bathroom. She was called Cheryl, which made Flannery uneasy, but then with a name like Flannery you could not afford to be choosy. “Are you going to that Intro to Criticism class? It starts in ten minutes.”

“Another new one? Isn’t it a bit late by now?” She already felt she’d been here half a lifetime; it had been two weeks.

“Yeah, but the professor’s just gotten back. From Paris. Bradley. He’s supposed to be great.”

There had been so many beginnings, it seemed—when would they end? Still: Criticism. It could be what she needed. A weapon. Fight them at their own game. Learn the language of prunes.

“Sure.” She fell in step with her half-friend. “Do you think I have time to grab a muffin from the dining hall on the way over?” Her stomach yawned hungrily.

Cheryl checked her watch. “If we hurry,” she said. “But didn’t I just see you walk out of the Doodle?”

“Of the what? Oh yeah, but—”

“Better watch it,” Cheryl teased. “It’s early days to be putting on the freshman fifteen, already.”

The sunny girl playfully reached out to pat Flannery’s stomach. It took all the taut self-restraint Flannery had not to slap her.

The first of any class seemed to be a scuffle of papers and faces, a busy fantasy of the great heft of new knowledge that might soon be gained. Flannery had already signed up for a weighty range of subjects: Intro to Art History; Intro to Revolution: France, Russia, China; Intro to World Fiction; Intro to Animal Behavior. Flannery wondered how she would find time for all these introductions.

Perhaps the blazered, grizzled figure at the sloped bottom of the high-windowed room, who leaned what seemed tipsily into the wooden podium, was indeed great. Flannery could certainly not tell from his introduction to this Introduction. He intoned a litany of words that she did not know but could identify as different weeks on the dense syllabus; he fluently pronounced European names whose printed equivalents she could just pick out on the list of required reading. After he had finished his bewildering garble on the material they might all one day be masters of, he mentioned that there were sections to sign up for—supplementary classes run by graduate students who did the grading, explained Cheryl in a cough-drop whisper, as if Flannery didn’t already know it. Sections were taught by Bob or Anne, figures who sat in the classroom’s front row, backs to the students, raising their weary graduate arms for identification. How to choose between Monday Bob or Tuesday Anne? Like so many of her decisions, Flannery made this one blindly. She chose Anne. Tuesday Anne.

“Goody, I’ll pick her, too, then,” said Cheryl, holding Flannery’s arm.

Flannery held her breath. Intro to Criticism. Here we go. ‘Goody,’ she practiced quietly, in the privacy of her own thoughts, is not something that we, as college students, any longer say. It makes you sound like a fifth-grader.

Maybe she could get the hang of living here, after all. Would the crafting of such retorts be covered in this basic introductory course?

Days she staggered; but nights she swam free, through the cool waters of her imagination. Her body was relieved in the dark of its shy apologies, and her young hands wandered over her own flesh, as if for the first time. She allowed herself whatever late hours she needed for this discovery, even if it made her sleepy for the next day’s Revolution, relying on Coke to power her through the forced labor of note-taking.

How could Flannery be so old and still not know herself? For this seventeen-year-old did feel old. Those private years of intense adolescent reading and music-fueled writing in her journal had made her sure she was full of maturity—of a certain unusual, and in its way impressive, emotional self-assurance. She had an alert awareness of what people were like. She’d talked two of her high-school friends through the loss of their virginity, even as she’d held on easily to her own.

Flannery’s assurance did not reach to her sexual self. She and her body were only now beginning to speak to each other. Where had she been, she sometimes wondered, when all the other six-and eight-year-olds were busy playing nurse and doctor, undergoing examinations in the shaded end of the garden? Why hadn’t her mother ever discovered her and some little friend fondling each other in the closet, so she could spend the right number of years afterward ashamed and still curious? Everyone had these stories, it seemed. The rude older boy who stuck his hand in your jeans. The beer-enhanced groping in junior high that might mean “third base.” She’d even have settled, for God’s sake, for the solitary horseback ride through the dusty canyon one afternoon, when the animal’s seductive rhythms brought on a hot-faced excitement.

Nothing. None of it. Flannery had been kissed and embraced, she’d been dated and danced with, as any pretty teen might be. There had been park fumbles and party fondles, the unexpected encounter with slobber, and within that encounter a thin, faint hint of excitement. But she’d certainly never known orgasm. She had to read about it first, typically, and had then, curious girl, set out to look for it.

At college, thousands of miles from home and the familiar, under safe cover of darkness, she finally found it. Over and over. Oh! So that’s what they meant. Once Flannery found it, she couldn’t stop wanting that pleasure, enjoying the sound of her own short breaths in the quiet night air. More. Over. Again. She had to make up for lost years.

Yet, even as she grew ever more learned in this new field of knowledge, she knew that something was missing. She needed someone else—a face, a figure—to take with her into the fantasy.

Why was Cheryl always around? Why could Flannery not shake her for the shy Puerto Rican girl on the floor below, who spoke with the low lilt of a poet; or even for bleached, surferish Nick with an earring, whose laughter she often seemed to sit next to while eating, though they’d yet to trade anything besides names and home states and complaints about the mold-ridden dorm rooms?

“Hi, Cheryl.” Flannery was too tired to fight it this morning. She’d had a long night: she’d gone to a late screening of a crime caper that starred a feisty black-haired actress—whose leather-clad antics had kept Flannery up, after, back alone in her room. Her stiff fingers plucked now at the cranberries embedded in the top of a sugar-crusted muffin. She needed their vitamin C.

“What are you doing here?” Cheryl stood over her at the table. “Aren’t you coming?”

“To what?” Sometimes college seemed merely an endless exhausting string of appointments. She needed a nap already, and it was not yet ten o’clock.

“Section.” Cheryl pulled Flannery’s sweater. The girl couldn’t stop touching her. It was beginning to get out of hand. “For Criticism. Remember?”

“Oh God. Yeah. Thanks for reminding me.” Flannery swallowed a few more chunks of cranberry muffin, took a gulp of weak coffee, and cleared her dishes. “Thanks. I’d completely forgotten.”

They ambled over to a remote classroom across some foreign lawn. Flannery had to follow Cheryl’s lead there. She ought to be grateful to her annoying hallmate, really, for her organization, and to prove that she was, Flannery allowed Cheryl to flutter on chirpily about a date she’d had the night before with a cute Iowan named Doug.

Tuesday Anne. Right. And here it was, Tuesday. If this is Tuesday, it must be Anne, Flannery thought, entertaining herself sleepily with bad jokes of this kind.

Doug was still in the air between them as the two women found the classroom, but for Flannery their entrance was accompanied by a loud internal sound effect.

Fuck.

She had to be Anne, of course: Anne had to be her. Smaller in the large beige classroom, but just as vivid, as mouth-perfect; just as burn-bright. Sitting at the head of a broad seminar table looking through a folder of papers, handing a sheaf to a student on her right to pass around, giving Flannery a moment to look at her.

She had the same serenely clear skin, the same slick red-dark hair, straight to her chin. And she wore the same outfit. Black leather jacket, in a cut trim and feminine rather than motorcycle-like, silver-zippered in a few strategic places; close-fitting blue jeans, studiously faded; pointed, pretty, argumentative boots. Not high-heeled or spiky, and not black either—a deep animal brown—but certainly the kind that were made for walking. They brought a Nancy Sinatra shiver to Flannery’s hunched shoulders.

She stopped in the doorway, before she’d been seen. “I can’t . . . I forgot . . .” she stuttered to Cheryl.

“What? Come on. This is the right room. I recognize the lady.”

That’s no lady, Flannery wanted to say, but she kept quiet as Cheryl dragged her over to a corner chair. At least the closer seats were filled, so they could sit farther away, near the window. If worse came to worst, Flannery could always jump out of it. The act might have a certain poetry. Might reveal, all too late, her sensitivity to Criticism.

It had to happen. Once seated, Flannery tried to busy herself with her educational equipment, but all she really needed was a notebook and a pen. She placed these in front of her. Someone handed her another printed sheet of paper, which listed due dates for papers, Anne’s office hours, the exam schedule. It had to happen. There was nowhere else to turn. Flannery finally looked up.

And there she was, her tormentor, watching Flannery cannily with her glorious green eyes.

“All right, kids,” the instructor began, getting the irony in at the very beginning. “Welcome to the wide world of criticism. There are a lot of you, which is delightful, but it means extra work for me. Your job is to be able to distinguish, by the end of the semester, Derrida from de Man, Henry Louis Gates from Harold Bloom; mine is to be able to distinguish one of you from another. Sadly, that means roll call. Pretend you’re in the army. Amy Adamson? David Bernstein? . . .” And on she went, stopping after each name for a moment with each face, to lock it in her memory.

Inevitably she reached “Flannery Jansen,” a name that caused her to look around the room with a disbelieving half-smile. Flannery had no choice but to raise her pen in reluctant self-identification.

“You’re Flannery?” she repeated, bringing the rose of embarrassment once more to Flannery’s pale face. “Well, that gives you a kind of head start, doesn’t it, in the literature department?”

She carried on, mercifully, so that Flannery could keep her head down and devote the rest of the hour to not listening to anything else the woman had to say. The instructor went over the material of the first week’s lecture, adorning and explaining and encouraging questions. In spite of Flannery’s stubborn ears she couldn’t help noticing that the words were uttered with an easy wit and grace. She also couldn’t help noticing—it was her fingers that noticed it—a taunting intimacy between their two names. Without thinking about it, while not listening, Flannery decorated the instructor’s name on the printout with some extra letters, so that ANNEbecame FL-ANNE-RY. Having seen with horror what she’d done, she then had to scribble over the entire name, rather violently. Finally, ANNE ARDEN was wiped out altogether, lost to a block of blue ink.

Class was ending. Thank God. People were standing. The ordeal was almost over. Flannery leaned over to Cheryl.

“I’m going to have to switch into a different section.”

“You are? Why?”

“I just—can’t do this one. I remembered I have something else that conflicts.” She was not about to explain her reasons to distracted, Doug-stunned Cheryl.

“Oh well,” said Cheryl, and left in a down-jacketed huff, puffed up in offense. “Whatever.”

Flannery planned to make it up to her later; perhaps by sharing some sweet dried apricots Flannery’s mother had sent her from home.

“Excuse me.”

Flannery stood a good two feet away from where the beautiful woman still sat. Her voice had to be a little louder to cover the table’s distance between them; she would not risk anything like proximity.

“I have a problem.”

The instructor looked up with the mocking expression Flannery knew well enough from the other day’s uneaten breakfast. The TA—Anne—was silent, but her eyes weren’t. I know you have a problem, they said clearly. I can see it.

“I can’t do Tuesdays. I didn’t realize when I signed up for this section. How do I switch?”

The woman nodded, with mirth-suppressed seriousness. “Many more people are taking this class than we expected.” She sounded friendly, collegial. “We’ll probably have to add some sections. I’m sure I’ll run another one. How are Thursday afternoons for you?”

“Bad,” Flannery said, so fast it was clear she couldn’t have thought about it. “I could do Mondays, though. With the other guy—Bob.” She realized that the change might mean sacrificing Animal Behavior. So much for her science credit.

“Hmmm. Monday may be filled up by now.” But the instructor was getting bored with this teasing game. She put her papers away in the folder and said in a more businesslike tone, “Talk to us at the end of the next lecture. Everyone will be reshuffling their schedules, but Bob and I will stay after and try to figure out how to accommodate you all. We want to keep our little darlings happy.”

“Well.” Her rudeness freed Flannery somehow. “We’re all slavishly grateful to you, obviously.”

She turned to go, but not before seeing that elegant head snap back up. As Flannery moved toward the door she heard that voice again. It seemed huskier now, with a nicotined rasp. Oh, of course. It wasn’t enough that Tuesday Anne was beautiful; she had to have a sexy voice, too, one that Flannery might think about dying for.

“Where did you get a name like Flannery, anyway?” the voice asked Flannery’s walking-away back.

Flannery shrugged, her signature gesture, on her way out the door. She only half-turned her head.

“From my mom.”

The voice followed Flannery across the high-walled courtyarded campus, in and out of the stacks of the vast library, down the corridors of the fake-Gothic buildings. It became familiar with her educational geographies, just as Flannery herself did. She heard this voice in the granite-enclosed shower within the white-tiled bathroom (where driven girls performed their furtive rituals of purging); in the stained-glass-windowed dining hall, where she finally met surferish Nick. Loudest of all, she heard it on the thickening, fall-scattered streets, where she walked for solace and thought, quiet spells when she made sure she was keeping up with her learnings and changes. As October took shape, Flannery looked back on her September self as if on a previous generation, one born long before the modern world had begun, when there was still innocence. (Flannery felt she had lost hers on her first trip to the Doodle.) If the then-early yellows and greens had stunned her, the trees’ colors grew only more glorious—mango and marigold, pumpkin and cantaloupe; even, in places, the pomegranate she’d hoped for—till Flannery wondered, numbly, whether they might stop her heart altogether, or blind her cold-tearing eyes.

She continued to hear Anne’s voice in her ear. How was this possible? Flannery hadn’t spoken to Anne since transferring out of her section into Bob’s. Bob made Criticism painless, if not entirely compelling. He had the greedy eyes of a squirrel and was brown-snaggle-haired, with a rough cut of near-beard almost like sideburns. It gave him the appearance of a German leftist from the 1970s, which in turn gave him a nice European authority as he deconstructed for the bewildered students the games and feints of Derrida and the others. Bob enjoyed guy-talk and wordplay and performing faux-casual postmodern tricks, like giving semiotic readings of the food sold at McDonald’s (“What signifies McNugget?”), or making fanciful claims as to the hidden subversions of Hollywood blockbusters. He claimed that those beefy-muscled action heroes could teach Hélène Cixous a thing or two about the meaning of the masculine.

Flannery didn’t actually hear Anne, but once a week she saw her sitting at the front of the lecture hall. She witnessed Anne handing out the exam questions for the midterm. While Bradley held forth, Flannery watched Anne brush her hand through her hair and sensed her fingers twitching for nicotine; she noted her occasional taking of notes; and she took in the curve of her leather jacket as she leaned over sometimes to whisper jokes to Bob, who nodded and grinned. Flannery couldn’t hear the voice or the jokes, mostly couldn’t even see Anne’s face, just the copper cut of her hair. But by a trick of her mind she could feel the woman’s breath in her ear, which made her own note-taking impossible, and melted her deeper, uselessly, into her seat.

Cheryl dropped Criticism, thank God, so Flannery was freed of any connection to Tuesday Anne. There was another class member, a sharp Korean woman named Susan, who was good to talk to in disentangling theory but had an unfortunate habit of telling bewitching tales of her TA—who happened to be Anne. “She’s so smart and funny, I swear to God she’s better than Bradley,” Susan had said once to Flannery Reluctantly, Flannery excused herself out of their study sessions together as a way of trying to regain her balance.

She couldn’t do it. It was unregainable. Flannery looked for Anne on campus even when she swore to herself that she wasn’t, and she found Anne in places she never would have looked. She saw Anne’s face through the window of a Japanese restaurant, where she was eating sushi with an unseeable companion; she saw Anne waiting to cross the street, sipping from a Styrofoam cup, looking impatient; and she saw Anne once in the all-night convenience store, buying cigarettes, when Flannery was there for detergent. Dressed in her laundry outfit—baggy gray sweats and her sheepskin boots, for God’s sake, with a dumb-logoed sweatshirt—Flannery had had to flee empty-handed, and was forced afterward to beg some Cheer from a friend.

Then there were the patterns Flannery had inadvertently noticed. Anne seemed to breakfast regularly at the Yankee Doodle, so that any morning Flannery “accidentally” passed the tiny diner, an internal battle waged whether or not she should look inside. (She had once been burned by Anne’s looking up, too, so their eyes met; humiliated, Flannery had to skip that day’s lecture.) Anne held office hours on Fridays and could be seen crossing the wide lawn toward the rust-colored corner building in the mid-afternoon light. And there was a section of the library—the underground, red-lit bunkerlike section, near the coffee and candy machines—where Anne could be found nights, reading and smoking. Occasionally with someone, often alone. Every time Flannery went to the library she had to ask herself: Are you really going to study? Or are you planning to find an excuse to go buy a Twix bar? Worse—are you going to try to study, only to torment yourself with cravings for chocolate, which you can’t then satisfy as it might mean seeing her face?

The simplest solution to this extravagant problem would have been for Flannery herself to drop Criticism. The approach of the drop deadline made her pretend to consider it. But, she argued with herself, she liked Criticism. Really! It was interesting. She was learning a lot; and she had done so well on the midterm. It seemed stupid to stop taking it just because of a slightly distracting infatuation, which would doubtless pass soon enough. Besides, it was a body of knowledge, she felt sure, she’d one day be glad to have.

But what did she want, really? What did she imagine?

It wasn’t as if, truth be told—and in the overheated darkness of her narrow room, she could tell the truth, at least to herself—Flannery knew. She did not know what she wanted. At a certain late point her mind willfully gave out, apologizing its way into a vague shrug of silence.

Do you want to have sex with that woman? Flannery tried to ask herself bluntly, staring at the dark ceiling, which vibrated with the loud explorations of her upstairs neighbor and his girlfriend. Flannery tried to shock herself into acknowledging a sexual awakening. Maybe that’s what this was—she had heard of such things. Do you mean to tell me you’re a lesbian? she demanded. Is that it?

She had seen the signs around campus. There were signs up for everyone: Latinos and African Americans, Avant-garde Musicians and Bridge Players. In the post office, collecting lifeline letters from her high-school friends, who scribbled to her intensely from their exiles elsewhere, Flannery had noticed a bright purple sheet of paper stuck to the tape-and-tack-scarred wall. “Gay and Lesbian Student Meeting. FRESHMEN WELCOME!” The notice seemed slightly sinister and predatory to the prude lurking within her. She did not think about going to the meeting, but she found herself curious—mildly—about what sorts of people would be there.

The word didn’t appeal to her. “Lesbian.” She didn’t like the sound of it. It sounded slippery and gummy, or slightly nasal, like people with adenoid problems. Besides, if her back was against the wall, Flannery would have to admit that she found José, who was in her Intro to Art History class, also cute, handsome—whatever.

It was just—This much Flannery could say to herself, aloud, could allow into the full light of her wakeful hours.

It’s just simple. It’s simple.

I just want to kiss her.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 439