Dreams said otherwise.

Inevitably.

That is what dreams love to do. Taunt you with a bawdy vividness you have forbidden by day. Rummage through your mind’s closets, dig through its storage drawers, finding hopes or perceptions you had not known you harbored. Colors you had not consciously seen. Jokes of a cleverness you had never suspected yourself capable of.

As the nights grew colder and November crept stealthily on, Flannery’s dreams grew hotter. Less inhibited. They threw off their coverings, stripping down at night even as Flannery was layering more on by day. As Flannery began to sense what might eventually be meant by winter, her dreams headed resolutely toward a bare-skinned summer.

Once, Anne was a small black terrier, and Flannery was stroking her. Cautiously.

Once, Flannery walked in on Anne and Nick. In her own room. Somehow she did not mind, but wished they had not chosen her room for their embraces.

Once, Flannery was still in Anne’s class. Bob was furious. She handed her paper in late and got a bad grade.

Once—

But that one caused a prickling flush when Flannery thought of it, a clutch in her gut and an undeniable heat in her thighs. She’d swallowed hard when she remembered it the next innocent morning. That one: she had to censor that one. In an effort to keep the internal peace.

They were—

It was—

And then, when she—

No, no. That one, without doubt, had to be censored.

Flannery couldn’t see any immediate solution to any of it but to dance. So she danced.

Anywhere she could. She danced at cramped freshmen parties in dorm rooms, at which people paired off with a prompt urgency brought on by the beat and the general beer-cloud of conviction that that’s what they were there for. She danced in daring, off-campus apartments on dark streets, where the students were older, the music was better, and Flannery saw two men kissing for the first time in her life. She even accompanied Nick—she and the bleach-headed math major had become wry outsider friends—to a nearby club, where up-and-coming bands tried out their new songs on effervescent students.

Flannery did not dance in order to pair off, which sometimes baffled her partners. For a while she would pay attention to whoever was dancing across from her, whether man or woman; she would nod, thrust her shoulders, slink her hips forward in sync with the other one’s movements. While dancing, she forgot her awkward feet and virginal modesty. She came closer to moving with the freedom she dreamed about. The rooms were hot, humid with gin breath and sweat and pickup lines shouted into ears, which were answered with grinning nods, as if the listener had heard, when, crowd-deafened, they mostly hadn’t. Like everyone else, Flannery wore scanty tops and jeans, sleeveless T-shirts and leggings: clothing that clung, and encouraged others’ hungering intentions. She was wanted. She knew it, a little, in the back of her shy mind, but she kept her distance and somehow stayed out of arm’s reach.

There always came a time in the night or the dance when Flannery retreated, fell back into herself. She’d close her eyes and go. Her partners, her company could feel it, as if they had just lost this lean, sultry girl over some unseen edge, and all that was left before them was a pretty shell, a body-ghost, someone empty to their touch. Sometimes it was so noticeable that they did touch her—her arm or her shoulder—to bring her back. She’d smile, open her eyes, and maybe toss her head, snap her fingers, take a few steps forward or back. But it was clear she remained unreached. And mysteriously unreachable.

There was someone with her when she danced, though. When Flannery closed her eyes, lost her head to the drink and the music, there was one person she had in her mind, one person for whom she dipped and writhed, swayed and swung. When her hands shaped the air, it was that person’s form they were seeking.

Then, one night, as one of her favorite songs throbbed to its close, Flannery suddenly opened her eyes, wide. Two in the morning, drunk and steamy, in a stranger’s friendly, frenzied apartment.

And there she was.

In front of her. As if Flannery had imagined her into life. As if her creative powers were, after all, that strong.

“Hi, Flannery.”

Anne’s face, in the low party light, seemed shockingly benign. Then again, Flannery was drunk.

“Hi.”

So she didn’t wear the leather jacket every single waking minute: here she was bare-shouldered, in a sleeveless white cotton vest. Black jeans. Simple. But her shoulders seemed so vulnerable, exposed, that Flannery had an odd gallant impulse. Surely they should be covered, those delicate shoulders, with a wrap or a coat. Even a protective arm. Anne seemed so small here.

“Great party,” Flannery said, stupidly. But what else could she say?

“Yeah. Do you know Cameron?” Anne gestured toward a blond, floppy-haired figure who was leaning lustfully into a short black man beside him.

Flannery nodded, smiled, and shrugged in some vague combination that she hoped didn’t commit her one way or another. Actually, she had no idea whose party this was; she couldn’t even remember who had brought her here. Where had she put her drink? Down on some speaker somewhere?

“You looked like you were getting into the music,” Anne said. Still smiling! What was the matter with her? “I didn’t mean to interrupt.” She glanced at the friend Flannery had been dancing with, who was now moving slinkily over to someone else.

“No, no. I was—just getting ready to go, anyway. It’s late.” Flannery wiped the sweat from her face. She felt so tall, standing over Anne. It seemed all wrong.

“You don’t have to leave just because I’m here.” The woman gazed at her with something more like the expected sarcasm. “I’m not grading you, you know.”

“Yeah.” Flannery couldn’t figure out where to put her hands: she had nothing to hold on to. “Listen—do you want a drink? I’m going to get one. I’m dying of thirst.”

Blurred moments later, Flannery was standing over a rickety kitchen table that had been flash-flooded with alcohol: an unruly mixture of rum, gin, and vodka and a variety of drifting, bubbly mixers. Dead half-limes and -lemons had washed up on the shore; some red plastic cups swam tipsily sideways in the current. Others were scattered upright on other surfaces, but they were all half-filled, or lipstick-stained, or choked with damp cigarette butts. None were clean. The scene was vomitous, generally, and Flannery could feel the dangerous rise in her throat of whatever her own poison had been—vodka and grapefruit juice, probably, which someone somewhere had told her was called a Salty Dog.

She could leave now, before it came to staggering around looking for the bathroom. No. No. Flannery breathed. She moved over to the window. She wasn’t as bad as all that. If she could just pause here a minute; then she could come to terms, slowly, with her inability to find that wretchedly beautiful woman a drink. Or she could just sneak away altogether, to escape her shame.

“I thought you might have gotten lost.”

Here she was again! Jesus Christ. She had followed Flannery in here.

“Or that you were planning to ditch me.” Anne’s voice was sly.

“Oh no. Never! You know I’d never do that.” Flannery kept her cheek close to the pane to stay cool. What had she just said? “No. I was just stopping for a minute to get some air.”

“Good idea. It’s so damned stuffy here. Let’s open the other one, too.”

But the other window seemed stuck. The two women had to stand together and push to overcome its reluctance. Flannery could see the taut line of Anne’s forearm muscle as they tried to maneuver it.

It gave, suddenly, so that Anne fell forward, fast, into the icy onrush of night. Flannery instinctively grabbed her shoulders to hold her back—the apartment was on the fourth floor—though there was no real danger of her falling through.

They both drew away from the window then, back into the warmer party air. Each of them shivered with relief, and with cold. Anne looked at her with a smile of an unnamable kind on her moist lips.

“Well, thank you, Flannery,” she said, in mock solemnness. She held her hand out for her hero to shake on. “You saved my life.”

And then what?

Flannery’s memory ended exactly there, and no amount of gray dining-hall coffee the next morning could bring any more back. “You saved my life,” Anne had said, ironically of course; maybe she’d even added “My hero!” to underline the joke. And then—what? Kissed her? Inconceivable. That, Flannery would have remembered. Lit a cigarette, shook her hand, said good night, sent Flannery on her way? Dully plausible. Or had she, rather, laughed savagely, hyenalike, knowing of Flannery’s impossible crush, which that hot-handed clasp of the shoulders made clumsily obvious?

But maybe this crush wasn’t impossible. Maybe—God knows, it was hard to credit it—maybe it was possible, after all.

Hadn’t she complimented Flannery on her dancing? Or had she? Maybe Flannery had made that up. Or, more likely, overinterpreted. Anne said something like Oh,go ahead, keep dancing, which Flannery had feverishly redrafted as My God, you enticing creature, you must dance for me and only for me.

“Hey, Jansen.”

It was a disheveled Nick, bearing a bowl of cereal. He had taken to calling her by her last name. Flannery couldn’t remember why anymore. This seemed to be what college was about—learning a vast amount, thus triggering an onset of chronic memory loss.

“Hey.”

“You look kind of wrecked. If you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Yeah.” Flannery drank some more dreg-heavy coffee. As if that would help. “Listen. Were you at that party last night? In that guy Cameron’s apartment?”

“Was I there!” He laughed, before shoveling cereal into his mouth. He paused to chew milkily, and Flannery had to look away. Her nausea was returning. “You are wrecked. I’m the one who took you there. Remember?”

“Oh yeah. Right.” She did, too. Sort of. She could imagine it, anyway. “So. Here’s my question. I didn’t do anything stupid, did I, before I left? That you saw?”

“Jansen, Jansen, Jansen.” He shook his head sadly. Over a mouthful of Sugar Pops he seemed to consider tormenting her with a series of amusing lies about her embarrassing escapades, but decided benevolently against it. “No. Relax. All I saw was you dancing with some red-headed chick in a tank top, till God knows what hour.”

“Dancing? With her?”

“Yep.” He thought about it for a minute. And swallowed. “Yep. She was hot.”

It seemed criminal to finally have the raw stuff of fantasy—dancing, with Anne, for pity’s sake!—and not be able to remember it. Flannery could not forgive herself. She felt sure that under hypnosis she would be able to retrieve the images. Were they close? What songs did they dance to? How did Anne move?

Then again, Nick might have made that up.

Or maybe just embellished, unaware of how critical accuracy was here. After all, he was probably drunk, too. Maybe she and Anne had one single dance together. That was probably it, and Flannery could just about re-create a montage of smiles and bare arms (she remembered with heartbreaking clarity the curve of Anne’s shoulders), some general moving around to something like music. Flannery remained completely blank, however, on what idiocies she might have uttered, what confessions freely given, what sloppy compliments slurred into that exquisite ear.

It was impossible to go to class, obviously. How could Flannery be in the same room with her, not knowing what had gone on? When the Thursday of the lecture dawned, Flannery was all set to skip it. Then she ran into Susan Kim, who reminded her that it was the last class before the Thanksgiving break, when Bradley would be talking about the extra reading they were supposed to do in preparation for their long-paper assignment. Flannery had to go. Why hadn’t she dropped the damn class? Who needed Criticism, anyway? She went so far as to place a desperate call to someone in Admin to find out if it was truly, absolutely, too late to drop the class now. She got an earful of accented attitude from a secretary (“That’s why we have deadlines,” as if she were stupid), which was enough—almost—to make Flannery break the phone, pack her bags, and head back West. Life was so peaceful there, by comparison.

She went to class late. That was her compromise. In through a rear door, five minutes late, so that Anne would be safely sitting up front, her back to Flannery. For eighty tense minutes Flannery took jittery erratic notes, which she later found mostly unintelligible. Five minutes before the class ended, she packed away her notebook and got ready to go. Susan looked at her quizzically. The professor was just then reaching the heart of what he was hoping from them in their long papers (none of which he would ever read; that was the privilege of the teaching assistants). He listed important pitfalls for them to avoid, tips on how to find something original to say. Flannery missed all of it. To Susan she shrugged with a half-smile and mouthed, Doctor’s appointment. Susan nodded and went back to her own notes.

Flannery left. So relieved not to have to see Anne that on her way out she slammed the door inadvertently. She could hear its loud, wooden reverberations echo through the Critical classroom as she made her lucky escape to the world outside.

There was no question on Friday whether Flannery wanted any proximity to the rust-colored corner building where—she couldn’t make herself forget this—Anne held her afternoon office hours (3–5 p.m., Room 303). She didn’t. She didn’t want to be anywhere near there. She stopped at the post office, which was ghost-townishly deserted already, most students having left for their Thanksgiving vacation. Flannery had a pretty good haul: a Thanksgiving gift pack from her mother, two letters, and a heavy envelope sent via campus mail. Nick had recently discovered the cost-free joys of campus mail and had taken to sending Flannery ridiculous items, “just to keep them busy”—the freshmen face book, his winter hat, a packet of Alka-Seltzer Plus (“for effective relief of headache with upset stomach which may be due to excessive food or drink”—gone over in helpful yellow highlighter).

Flannery bundled up her items and took them away to the bookstore/café where she intended to enjoy them slowly, with a cup of decent coffee, while not thinking about anybody’s office hours, or dance movements, or black leather jacket, or lack of black leather jacket. While not listening to the music playing in the background, which sounded uneasily familiar—a dance tune she thought might have been playing that night in Cameron’s apartment. Flannery worked to drive the music out of her head.

Her friends’ letters were entertaining, filled with familiar accounts of parties, studies, sudden romances. The package from her mother was cute. A pretty scarf, some candy corn, of all things (oh: left over from her Halloween stash, it must have been), and a card that said brightly, “Can’t wait to see you at Christmas! Enjoy your Turkey Day, Honey.” Flannery had been invited, dutifully, to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner in New York by her invisible roommate, a pre-med who wore pink sweaters and with whom Flannery rarely spoke. Nick, too, had mentioned that his family would be on the Cape, and she’d be welcome to join them. (“They’re neurotic as hell, but the food’s good.” It was a time of charity toward others.) She had not yet decided what she was going to do.

What had he sent her this time? Flannery opened the campus mail envelope. A book. Something kitsch, no doubt. Flannery turned it over, surprised. Poems! That seemed serious for Nick. By someone named Marilyn Hacker. Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons.

Inside, a note:

I brought this to give you in class today, but I didn’t see you. Beware delinquency!

Something you said the other night made me think you’d enjoy these. A little extra reading for you over the break. Don’t worry—they won’t be on the final.

Yours,

Anne

Before Flannery had a chance to take in the import of this note, someone sat down at her table. Loud, in a diminutive kind of way, and trailing cigarette smoke. Flannery’s cheeks were, she felt quite certain, cranberry red as she looked up.

Into the bright, almond-eyed face of Susan Kim.

She was laughing. “Oh my God!” she said, smoking, unjacketing, and rolling up her sleeves more or less all at once. “I am so in love with my TA, it’s not even funny.”

Too many stimuli all at once. But Flannery did do one thing immediately, instinctively—she hid the book from Susan. Her eagerness to open and read it was so ferocious she had to sit on her hands.

“Who?” she asked, with a casualness that she felt deserved a medal. “You mean—that woman—Anne?”

Susan inhaled deeply, nodded, and exhaled politely to the side. “I get so hot and bothered around her. You know. That jacket! Those boots! I was just in there with her talking about the term paper.”

That jacket, Flannery thought; yes. Those boots: I know them.

“She said we should meet for a drink sometime.”

“She did?” And did she dance with you? Did she give you some poems?

“Yeah, but I don’t know. With your TA? Wouldn’t that be kind of weird? God, do you think she’s gay?”

Flannery felt a thick choke of jealousy around her throat. She shrugged, then coughed, violently. “Maybe. You know, I—I wouldn’t know.”

“Hey, are you okay? You look a little—” Susan saw the mail scattered like torn leaves before Flannery on the table, and concern crossed her kind face. “Did you just get some bad news or something?”

“No.” Flannery cleared her throat, coughed again, took a sip of coffee. “Just come candy corn from my mother,” she croaked. “Do you want some?”

“Sure. Thanks.” Susan put a cupped palm out for some fluorescent orange-and-yellow cones, popped a few into her mouth, then said somberly, “How was your doctor’s appointment?”

“My what? Oh, okay. It turned out to be nothing. Listen”—Flannery saw the clock over the fiction section. It was just after five—“you know what? I’m sorry. I just realized, I’ve got to get going. I’m late for something.”

Susan was a little hurt, Flannery could tell. She must think Flannery disliked her. Flannery tried to make up for her rudeness with a friendly, compensating gesture.

“Here, have some more candy corn. It’s good for you.” She poured a generous portion out onto the table. “The Indians brought candy corn to the Pilgrims, you know. As a peace offering.” Susan did not look convinced. “And to help them get through the bitterly cold winters.”

It turned out to be pretty difficult, simultaneously reading a volume of poetry and jogging two blocks and half a courtyard to the rust-colored building. The poems became word-blurs as her eyes watered with the cold, speedy air.

Once inside, Flannery ran up two flights of broad marble stairs to the third floor, where she assumed Room 303 would be. (She’d had the number emblazoned on her memory since that first class handout.) But nothing at this university was ever so simple. The place was a maze. The third floor was occupied entirely by classrooms. She ran up another flight, dashed down a corridor, stalled out in a blind alley, retraced her steps, was about to bark with frustration, then half-skidded round a corner and there—thank God!—was Room 303.

Without thinking about it she knocked loudly, her hand emphatic with urgency. What if Anne had gone?

“Jesus Christ!” She saw now that though the door was closed, the light was on. The voice was startled and abrupt. “I hear you. Can you please wait outside till we’ve finished?”

Flannery was silent. She realized—for some reason the possibility hadn’t occurred to her as she jogged—that someone else was still in there with her.

“Who is it?” Now irritated, exhausted. “My office hours ended ten minutes ago.” A pause, followed by laughter. Then, said more softly—intimately, it seemed to Flannery—“Maybe I scared them away. Oh well!”

Flannery leaned against the wall, catching her breath. She heard a mumble of voices carry on their interrupted conversation.

Quietly, quietly, Flannery pulled the book of poems out of the envelope again and thumbed through it. Furtively: as if it were a bomb-construction manual or an advance, sneak copy of the final. A line from an early poem caught her attention.

I bet you blush all over when you come.

Flannery closed her eyes and the book. Her legs were weak: it was a good thing the wall she was leaning against wasn’t.

Maybe this was a bad idea. She could walk away; tiptoe back down the stairs and out of the maze. It would be as if she had never been there at all.

The door opened and light spilled out, catching the sleeve of her jacket.

“Oh God. Is someone still waiting there? You’d better send them in. Come in!”

Brittle with impatience.

At least—small mercies—Flannery did not know the shuffling male student who had had his turn before hers and who nodded to her, sympathetically, on his way out.

She went in, closed the door.

“Flannery!”

“Hi.”

She sat down, mostly because she had to, or her knees might give way. Anne’s face was flushed with surprise. That, at least, was gratifying.

“I thought maybe you had already flown the nest. Or, you know what I mean, flown back to the nest.” Was it possible that Anne was nervous? “The way you fledglings do, around Thanksgiving.”

“I’m staying here.”

“Not for the whole week?”

“No. My roommate invited me to go to New York. Another friend asked me to go to the Cape. I haven’t decided which I’ll do.”

“That’s where I’m going New York.” Well then: that decided it. “I can’t wait to get the hell out of here.” But Anne seemed to feel she’d said too much. “So. I take it you’re not here to talk about your term paper? I’m not Bob, as you’ve probably noticed.”

“I know.”

There was a pause. Anne waited, still as a cat. Her eyes had again that translucent intensity that Flannery found infinitely distracting. The pause expanded with Flannery’s silence, till Anne finally said, “Look, I have to—” and Flannery spoke at the same time, right over her.

“Do you want to go out for a drink?”

That shocked her.

“A drink? When—now?”

When? Flannery hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Sure—now. Or—later.”

Flannery watched the possibility travel across the instructor’s face, like a breeze. What it would take: letting go of responsibility; release; the chance of risk.

“Sure, Flannery. I’ll have a drink with you,” she said. “What the hell? Let’s go.”

They were both startled into silence by their daring decision, and conversation between them stuttered like a broken faucet. Flannery followed Anne out of the building and into the gray dampening streets. She had no idea where they were going, and in spite of Anne’s shorter legs had to jog some to keep up.

“So—” Flannery kept her head down as they passed the brightly lit bookstore/café, where Susan Kim might lurk. “You had a lot of students come by about their papers?”

An immediate cringe. Why talk about that?

“Yes.”

“It must get a little repetitive after a while, all these paper ideas.”

“Mmmhmm.”

A spell of brisk heel-chatter—Anne’s. Flannery’s, flat, were quiet.

“I guess it’s a pretty key part of the class, though. The term paper.”

Anne declined to dignify this vapidness with an answer. She was not going to make it any easier by speaking, apparently; leaving Flannery plenty of room to dig her own ample, comfortable grave.

“At least you don’t have—I mean, at least you’re free over this break.”

“Not exactly. I have a paper of my own to write. I’m going to be on a panel at MLA at the end of December.”

“MLA?”

“The Modern Language Association. Their year-end conference, where everyone in all kinds of fields, including me, prostrates themselves trying to get a job.”

Of course! She had a life outside of Intro to Criticism. Flannery would have to remember that. She would have to bear that in mind.

“Well then, I’m glad I caught you before—”

“Here we go.”

They were at the bar, thank God: the Anchor. Together they ducked out of the cold and into its dim jukeboxed interior. The warmth here, Flannery hoped, might stem the flow of her wintry inanities, and she’d find a way to make herself shut the hell up.

The bar was almost completely empty at that hour.

“At least we won’t have a problem finding a table,” Anne said.

“Yeah. It’s probably good that no one’s here.” Flannery allowed the reminder to hover: this is a student-teacher meeting. We’re not supposed to be doing this. It had the desired effect of throwing Anne a little off her rhythm. Anything, Flannery felt, to disrupt for a moment that stern assurance.

A plump, mannequin-faced barmaid came by, scrutinized Flannery, understood that she was underage; then asked anyway, with a skeptical drawl, “What are you having?”

Flannery ordered a White Russian. Anne started to comment, but checked herself and ordered a gin-and-tonic. When the barmaid had gone, she leaned over the table. Her eyes were fireflies, suddenly, of brightness.

“AWhite Russian?” she teased. “That’s a kid’s drink!” Flannery shrugged, unembarrassed. She felt better in here. It was nice and dark, and the jukebox soothed with a series of Glenn Miller classics. “They taste good.”

“I suppose it’s a step up from a daiquiri.”

“So what do grown-ups drink? Gin-and-tonics?”

“Yes, that. And other things. You’ll have to learn.”

“You’ll have to teach me,” Flannery dared. Before even having a sip! The barmaid brought their drinks, and they waited till she had retreated to continue.

“How old are you, Flannery?”

Anne’s low voice caught at Flannery’s throat. That voice: she wanted to own it. She looked away. “Seventeen.”

“Seventeen!” The startlement was real. “My God. You shouldn’t be drinking that! You should be drinking a Coke. You should be drinking a glass of milk. Your bones are still growing.”

“So how old are you?” Flannery challenged.

“Ancient. Twenty-eight.”

Twenty-eight. Like everything else, of course, it was perfect. It sounded wise; well traveled; sophisticated. Promise-filled.

“Well, cheers.” Flannery lifted her glass, her own gray eyes alight now, she knew, with some unsuppressed delight in the company.

“Cheers,” Anne answered. “To what?”

“To twenty-eight.” Flannery clinked her glass to Anne’s. “It’s a beautiful age. In my opinion.”

The word reached Anne and softened her. Warmth moved her mouth into a heart-shaped pleasure.

“Cheers,” she replied again, with a sudden shyness that made Flannery swoon.

“To seventeen.” Clink. “Ditto.”

They drank, as Glenn Miller played on.

“Thanks for the Marilyn Hacker book. I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet.”

Something like relief loosened Anne’s shoulders. “She’s a wonderful poet. Deceptive—a great formalist, under the conversational style.” Anne sipped her drink. “Something you said the other night about your love of rhythm made me think you’d enjoy her.”

Flannery thanked God in heaven that she’d never have to know what she might have said about her love of rhythm.

“What other poetry do you like?” she deflected. So they talked poetry for a while; or Anne did. Flannery had to plead ignorance. As in so many things. Poetry hadn’t, she explained, made it onto her first, introductory platter. Anne asked her what had, besides Criticism. “Revolution, Art History, World Fiction. I was taking Animal Behavior, but had to drop it.”

“That’s an eclectic mix.”

“Well, I’m undeclared. —In my major, I mean.”

They both let that pass.

“So: World Fiction. Who do you read in that? What is ‘World Fiction,’ anyway?”

“Fiction—from the world, I guess.”

“As opposed to fiction from other worlds?”

“Yeah.” Flannery liked the joke. “That’s probably the kind I’ll write.”

“Ah.” Anne took another sip of her drink, rummaged around in her pockets for her cigarettes. “You’re hoping to write?”

“Not hoping to, exactly.” Flannery looked puzzled. “I just do.”

“And isn’t it a little—daunting, if you write, to be saddled with a name like Flannery?”

Flannery’s shoulders rose involuntarily, their customary punctuation. “I’m used to it. I mean, I’m used to my name. At least I’m not called, you know, Jamaica.”

“That’s true,” Anne said with a tilt of her head. “But then, who is?”

“Oh—Jamaica Kincaid. We’re reading her for World Literature. She’s incredible. I love her.”

Interest sharpened Anne’s focus. She thought, maybe, of bluffing recognition, then decided against it. “I don’t know her work.”

“You don’t?” Flannery said, a little too eagerly. “You’d love it. God, it’s so crazy, and lyrical. Beautiful.”

Then she quieted down and looked into her milky drink, embarrassed. Having, as usual, given too much away.

So that she had the bad luck to miss the gold that had come into Anne’s eyes, which suggested otherwise.

“So. Flannery.”

Anne reached for her hard pack of cigarettes. From the box she slowly drew a Marlboro. With the other hand, she found her lighter.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

After a flick of her thumb, she lit the cigarette, capped the lighter, and took a drag, watching Flannery through narrowed eyes.

Flannery sipped her drink.

She watched Anne smoke. Anne knew damn well how good she looked when she smoked. She was enjoying it. So was Flannery, who was reluctant to interrupt her. Also, she liked inhabiting this moment of suspense. Finally, though, she answered.

“No,” she said. Then, after another pause: “Not at the moment.”

Anne nodded slowly, almost unnoticeably. But the cigarette had dwindled to mostly ash: she had smoked it down fast.

“So,” Flannery continued. “Anne.”

But she had the disadvantage of having no cigarette. All she could do was stir around the last swallows of her thinning drink, clattering the melting ice cubes. She’d have to start smoking. There would be no other way through this.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” A slight, risky emphasis on the “you.”

Anne waited. She stubbed out her cigarette slowly, thoroughly, crushing the sparks as though the most important thing right now was to make sure she didn’t set fire to the Anchor Bar by leaving any of the butt alight.

“No,” she said.

She took a sip, then licked the gin from her lips.

“Not at the moment.”

The two women looked at each other, each wearing a small similar smirk. Flannery lifted her near-emptied drink for a last taste of vodka and cool Kahlúaed milk. Anne, seeing her, lifted hers, too, and simultaneously they said, as their glasses met in a low-pitched kiss:

“Cheers.”

The White Russians were beginning to add up. She’d had only two, but so early in the day and on an empty stomach, they were threatening to produce a certain restlessness. It wasn’t revolution yet, but it might get there, and Flannery was pretty sure she wanted to avoid that.

“I’d better go,” she said, looking at her watch.

“Seven-thirty? We must be getting close to your bedtime.”

“They close the dining halls. I wouldn’t be able to get any dinner.”

“Can’t have that.”

“Well, my bones are still growing. As you say.”

Flannery thought she’d gotten the hang of the banter, finally; but then realized, with a small seizure of regret, that Anne was genuinely disappointed.

“Though I could stay—I mean, I have some ramen noodles in my room . . .”

“No. I have to go, too. I have to get ready for New York.” She tidied up her relaxed face, and something of the hardness came back to the set of her mouth. She called the barmaid over so she could pay the check and wouldn’t allow Flannery anywhere near it. Flannery felt humiliated, like a child.

“But you shouldn’t—I mean, I asked you—” She retreated rapidly back into nervousness.

“Leave it, Flannery I’ve got it.”

Silenced.

Then, one last glitter. A flicker. A jewel in the eyes.

“Next round’s on you. All right?”

A line that led, with a speed Flannery couldn’t later reconstruct, into an awkward barlit embrace goodbye, serenaded by Glenn Miller; a bland, mutual wish for a happy Thanksgiving; and a going of separate ways, back on the melancholy early-evening street. Anne off to her mysterious elsewhere home and Flannery to the dining hall, to catch what scraps of dinner she could.

Where she could wonder, slowly, what had just happened.

Once she got there, of course, Flannery was far too overwrought to be hungry. The place was deserted, with most of the students gone now, and Flannery took a forlorn plate of congealing lasagna into a dim corner where she could sit privately with her treasured reliving of their encounter. Soon, though, she was discovered.

Flannery had almost forgotten about Cheryl, who seemed to have become consumed by Iowan Doug. Cheryl was not a person Flannery was prepared to talk to right now. How could Cheryl be equal to the magnitudes of life? The great swoops of passion, the certainty of heartbreak?

“Hey, Flannery. Haven’t see you in a while.”

“Yeah, hi. How’s it going?”

She sat opposite Flannery with an overspilling bowl of salad-bar salad: yellowish broccoli heads and withered mushrooms struggling to stay on board a Lo-Cal Ranch-drenched mess, across which rust-brown BacoBits scattered guilty nuggets of flavor. Flannery took a cheesy bite of lasagna, not because she wanted any, but to make her own silent point, if only Cheryl knew it, about the dull folly of dieting.

“How’ve you been?”

“Fine. How about you?”

They traded news and Thanksgiving plans. Cheryl was flying West first thing in the morning—her parents were missing her so much, she said, adding endearingly, “I can’t wait to see my dog!” Flannery explained her dilemma: whether to accept the offer of her roommate in New York or that of Nick on the Cape.

“So what’s going on with you and Nick, anyway?” Cheryl’s cheek dimpled with innuendo.

“Nick? Nothing.” Flannery glanced around to see if he was nearby.

“Oh, come on. I keep seeing you two together. What’s up?”

“Nothing, really. Anyway, Nick is—” Flannery started, then stopped, confused. She realized she’d never articulated the fact that Nick was gay. But he was, surely. Wasn’t he? “I don’t think Nick has those kinds of feelings for me. You know, we’re just friends.”

“That’s not what he told Doug.”

“What?” Flannery was unprepared for this.

“He told Doug he has a huge crush on you. Come on, it’s obvious. You can’t pretend you haven’t noticed. And he’s so cute! You’d make a great couple.”

Flannery pushed her chair back abruptly. There was no way to do this gracefully, but she tried to extricate herself from the conversation, the dining hall, the nauseating congealed lasagna, with some bungled excuse.

Cheryl carried on. She was a determined character.

“Doug and I are going to the movies tonight, if you want to join us. Nick might come along, too.”

“Thanks. You know, I’d love to, but—I’ve got some reading I’ve really got to get done.”

Cheryl shook her head.

“Reading?” she said. This time even Cheryl didn’t believe her. “Flannery, it’s Thanksgiving break.”

When she understood that the poems by Marilyn Hacker were about what they had seemed to be about—a passionate, illicit affair between two women, one older than the other—Flannery had to hide the book beneath her pillow. She got up and stretched her nervous arms. She walked to the window. She inhaled the sobering, icy air and exhaled a word, or sound, without meaning to. “God,” it might have been, or “Fuck!,” or possibly just a moan, a sigh from the anxious hollow of her unschooled heart.

She saw a figure, bleach-headed, crossing the half-lit courtyard. Flannery withdrew silently back into her room. It was Nick. She turned off the light, hoping he hadn’t already checked for its reassurance, and then waited. Waited in the stillness—her roommate was off at the lab probably, as usual—for the knock on the door. He’d said something to her at breakfast about going out later for a drink or a movie, and she’d casually agreed. Yes, but that was a lifetime ago. Before she’d ever heard of Marilyn Hacker. Before she knew that Anne drank gin-and-tonics. Before she’d been issued a hasty promise: The next round is on you.

“Jansen?” He knocked on the door.

She pretended she was dead. Or elsewhere.

“Hey! Jansen!” He knocked again. “Are you in there? You’re not passed out in a drunken stupor, are you?”

It was a joke, but she was insulted. What did he think of her?

“Shit.” Then a pause, as he apparently scribbled a note on the message board her roommate had tidily stuck to their door the first week of the semester. (It was decorated with kittens, but there was nothing Flannery could do about that.) Flannery heard Nick’s retreating steps but stayed still anyway. Wide-eyed. In the dark. What if he was waiting on the stairs? She couldn’t meet him now. It was impossible.

Besides, she found the dark quite comforting. Quite relaxing. The dark had been a good friend to Flannery these past months. It had allowed her liberties she would never haven taken in the light, nor even when drunk. Alcohol did not open any genuinely new territories. It was merely a tongue-loosener, for a shy girl, and a dance-encourager, for someone who was just now, belatedly, starting to inhabit her body.

It was the dark that had taught her those tricks in the first place. Flannery took slow, deep breaths, feeling the familiar shape of her self.

It was the dark that, pulling at her now, allowed Flannery to recognize that she would have to meet those bold, terrifying poems with some voice of her own.

For hours in the dark, Flannery just thought. Felt. Heard words in her head and wondered which ones she’d choose to write down. A story or a poem? Or, best, neither? Over uncounted hours in the night her mind traveled the possibilities.

At an uncertain point in the underground journey, she heard her roommate come in. Midnight or one, probably. She heard the roommate go through her evening preparations, find her room, turn out the light. When the silence had stretched into a probable sleep, Flannery got up, turned on her own light again, and started to read more of the Hacker poems. They continued to make her jump and sweat. She put them back beneath her pillow, then turned off the light. Then breathed, thought, wondered further. Then turned on the light. Then wrote some lines on a piece of paper. Then rewrote them. Then went to the window and swallowed great gasps of night. Then came back to her desk. Then took the book from under the pillow, read a few more poems, returned them to her pillow. Then pulled out thick strands of her fair hair, dropping them without thinking onto the floor. Then read aloud what scratches she had so far, in a soft murmur, loud enough that only the writer in her could hear (and not the reined-in student or the timid stumbler). She nodded. Then raided her supply of Pop-Tarts. Then, as the black outside finally softened and gave way to indigo, she let her fingers tap out some lines, and printed them. When she saw and heard them in the rhythms she wanted, she cut them out, line by line. Then, her fingers trembling a little, she placed each thin strip carefully between different pages of a thin book. Her own copy of At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid. When she was finished, the book was flagged with a dozen flickers of paper ends, like bookmarks.

By then it was light. Or something less like dark. Flannery’s eyes itched with irritation at their tiredness, but her mind was wired. She knew what she had to do.

Miles to go before you sleep, she told herself. Then set out, with Pop-Tart-fed determination, on the long trek to the station.

PAGES FOR YOU

I’d like to pay your palms

the same favor that you pay these pages,

searching them for grooves and images

and the secret signs of hunger,

as you may scan these words

for hidden messages.

The lines of your hand might be a guide

to your gifts for pleasure,

or a clue to where you’ll take me,

or a map of where I might take you.

They might show me the shape, already, of our fondest caress.

I’d like to pull your glorious boots off for you

so I could touch your toes, and heel, and

the vulnerable pale arch of your delicate foot.

I’d like to borrow from you those miles you’ve seen

and wear them in my own untraveled shoes.

I’d like to treat your feet with slow and ready fingers,

and bring you, unshod, to bliss,

while you recite for me some rhythms from these pages,

keeping us both in the motion of this unfolding story.

I plan to learn enough to read you like a book.

I plan to give this book to you and know you’ll read it,

so our minds may meet across these pages,

in the colorful country of another writer’s language,

where we can flourish in the knowledge

that we are learning how to speak to one another;

and so our mouths will know what to do

when they finally

come together.

It was not a comfortable place, but it invited sleep nonetheless. It was one of the long, curved benches that stretched the width of the high, vaulted old station, recently restored. Along these benches you felt both small and sleepy, connected as you were, inexorably, with all the other baffled and weary travelers passing through the quiet halls in the morning. It was still early. The light had been lemony and hesitant as Flannery walked over. It was not yet seven o’clock.

Flannery bought herself some sugared doughnuts and a cup of something trying to pass itself off as coffee and waited, sitting under the black arrivals-and-departures board. From time to time it fluttered busily like a flock of doves, wings flapping, letters and numbers passing, until the machinery settled on the information it wanted to impart. Trains to New York. Trains to Boston. A delayed train to Vermont. One, exotically, to Florida, via Washington, D.C.

It was the trains to New York Flannery had to keep her eye on. When she heard “Final boarding call!” for any of the New York trains, it was particularly important that she be alert. On the lookout for that familiar face, that cut of hair.

Three trains left for New York. Then a fourth. The place filled up with duffel-bagged students, hatted and scarved, readying themselves with joy or dread for their families. Flannery moved back several benches so she’d be less conspicuous; she knew some of these people (an Art Historian, a World Fictioner) and didn’t especially want to explain to any of them what she was doing there, bag-free, in her scrappy wool coat, clutching (later, now) a half-drunk bottle of orange juice and a book marked in places by strips of paper.

Her eyelids drifted down. Sleep! What a good idea. Couldn’t she have a brief nap while she waited? Just a little one, darling, as Dorothy Parker might say, just a little one.

Her head dipped down; she jerked it back up in the dull, drooling shock of temporary narcolepsy. Wait! What? Where was she? Had she slept?

“Final boarding call . . .”

And Flannery saw something, or thought she did. A single frame from the movie: black leather jacket disappearing around a corner. Cue chase scene and loud music. She got up in a flurry, knocking over the orange juice, and sprinted after the imaginary jacket. That elusive strip of black leather, she was sure she had seen it: it had woken her, finally, out of her lifelong stupor.

She ran down the ramp, along a corridor, back up another ramp, and up a short flight of stairs. She was always running, these days.

“Where’s the New York train?” she hollered at a potato-faced man in a uniform.

“Platform Four. Final boarding—better hurry.”

Flannery reached the platform and looked around wildly. Her hair was all over the place, but it was not the time to worry about that. “Anne!” she shouted generally into the November morning, looking up and down the train, because she couldn’t think what else to do, and anything like suaveness or dignity had long since passed her by.

It worked, though.

A face appeared at one of the open doors. No, not a face: the face, the face she had been looking for since before dawn, had been seeing all that long writing night whenever she allowed her eyes for a moment to close. That face. Which, unfortunately, looked more bewildered than charmed, right now.

“Flannery! Are you taking this train?” She seemed to find the idea alarming.

“No, no.” Flannery ran up to her, holding out the book. “I just wanted to give you this. For your trip.”

She knew she must look scattered and unkempt—maybe even a little crazy. She’d hardly slept. But she didn’t care now. Her single overriding goal had been to get this bookmarked book to Anne before she left, and she’d done that, and now the rest didn’t matter and she could relax.

Anne read the cover. “Jamaica Kincaid! That’s very sweet. Thank you.”

The potato-faced man blew his whistle. The episode continued cinematic. Anne might have been leaving for the front; Flannery would be playing her bereft, worried sweetheart.

“Well. Have a good Thanksgiving,” Flannery said, helpless now to offer anything but anticlimax.

“Yes. You, too. Thanks for the book.”

“You’re welcome. I hope you like it.”

And before Flannery could extend the awkwardness any further, as she no doubt would have, she made herself turn away, with an embarrassed little wave—failing even to register the last expression on Anne’s face. Which, if she’d seen it, might have struck her as not unlike longing.

Flannery walked down the steps, slowly, without a backward look. As she made her way back through the station, she realized she had a snow of doughnut sugar all down the front of her jacket. She tried dusting it off with a weak hand. It was impossible not to laugh.

“You’re a charmer, Flannery,” she said aloud, shaking her head. “I don’t see how anyone could possibly resist you.”

All she wanted to do afterward was get everything organized, then go to sleep. For weeks, preferably. Flannery had so much sleeping to do. It was very serious. It felt like a job: I’ve got to clear my desk here, get all these trivial matters out of the way, so I can get to the real task at hand, which is to get some sleep.

The organizational matters were fairly painless because she couldn’t find Nick and had to leave him a note. (She didn’t look as hard as she might have.) On returning to her room after her trip to the station she had found his scrawl of the night before:

JANSEN: WHERE ARE YOU? THE BRAINLESS COMEDY WON’T BE THE SAME WITHOUT YOU, I’LL TRY TO REMEMBER THE BEST JOKES AND RETELL THEM TO YOU FETCHINGLY.

Guiltily, she left a letter under his door to say she’d decided she was going to Mary-Beth’s for Thanksgiving, because she’d been so kind to ask Flannery, and it would be such a good opportunity for roommate bonding.

AND ISN’T THAT WHAT THESE BRIGHT COLLEGE YEARS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT—FORMING LIFELONG BONDS WITH PEOPLE IN DIFFERENT MAJORS AND UNFAMILIAR-COLORED SWEATERS?

Freshman flippancy seemed like a safe way to take shelter.

All that was then left was to tell Mary-Beth herself, which Flannery did as soon as her roommate returned from wherever the medicine people went when they were off duty. She looked slightly nonplussed by Flannery’s greeting, but was well brought up enough to pretend she was delighted with the decision. She gave Flannery the address and told her she would be welcome to stay for as long as she wanted—just to let the family know. The meal always started at three o’clock.

Flannery was grateful, then told Mary-Beth that she’d pulled an all-nighter the night before, as if on some heroic academic project, and that she had to crash. So she did. Heavily. It was the first of many long-overdue re-encounters with her dreams.

When she woke up in a drugged state, late afternoon, there was a note left under the door in an envelope marked with her name.

SEEMED INDISCREET TO LEAVE THIS ON YOUR DOOR. ONE QUICK PRE-HOLIDAY TIP: HER NAME IS MARY-JO, NOT MARY-BETH. IT MIGHT MAKE THE BONDING THING EASIER IF YOU GET THAT RIGHT.—NICK

And the embarrassing thing was, it was true.

The campus was quiet as ash, and the leaves had all long since fallen.

Flannery had the place all to herself: the sullen underground library; the flattened, frostbitten lawns; the tiled halls and granite bathrooms, from which the food-worried girls had finally fled, leaving Flannery the lush joy of uninterrupted showers. She even went to the Doodle, knowing it would be free now of its once dangerous diner. Flannery ordered a toasted corn muffin and a cup of coffee. The waitress was rude to her, but not quite as rude as before, and it didn’t bother Flannery so much anymore. She flung a sentence in Flannery’s direction about being one of the last left to hold out that made Flannery briefly proud, like a pioneer.

There were a few other abandoned souls wandering the barren, purgatorylike landscape, but they tended to avoid each other instinctively, as if they might contaminate one another with their outcast status. Some were legitimate folk, professors or grad students, but she recognized undergraduates, too. Flannery found herself suspicious, wondering, What are you doing here? Don’t people like you? Don’t you have anywhere to go?—which made her realize they must wonder the same about her.

It was the emptiness, after so much fullness, that Flannery cherished. She had been so overstuffed these months. Impressions and changes and newnesses were leaking out of her all over—there just wasn’t room in her for all of them. Even from the glowing heart of everything—from the untouchably hot place of her thoughts about Anne—Flannery felt the relief of a vacation. She had done the best she could do: she had written words for Anne. That was all she had. Now she could settle back into herself, and her private dreams, and sleep.

When the phone rang one day, Flannery was startled. She was unsure who it might be, and also whether, wrapped as she now was in solitude, she’d still know how to speak.

“Hello?” Her voice was rusty.

“Flannery?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Anne. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Oh.”

She gripped the phone tightly, close to her ear. “Hi. What’s up?” As if nothing had happened. As if she’d written not a line. As if she were an innocent spinster, padding around her quiet rooms alone, doing the occasional bit of flowered embroidery.

“I think you’d better come to New York.”

Flannery did not know New York except as a movie and a myth. And as a mysterious, emphatic address on nighttime TV ads, when you were asked to send your checks and orders to New York, New York, the repetition reminding you that you were nowhere, obviously, and everyone who was anyone was in New York. New York. As if you were too stupid to have gotten it the first time.

On her way to college a few months earlier—in the old days, when she was still a dumb youngster—Flannery had encountered the city only in the chaos of its airport, in a red-eye glare of post-flight bleariness, when she was moving through a bewildering stagger of accents and languages. She was looking for a bus service enigmatically called a “limo,” which connoted images of sleek, dark-windowed cars, when all it turned out to refer to was a big blue van and an irascible driver, who threw her bags into the back before speeding her and a half-dozen sleepy others to a state she’d heard of, vaguely, but had never quite been able to spell.

The train she rode now was an overlit jostle of tabloid readers and hunched watchers through the grimy windows, and the occasional late, pinstriped commuter with a neatly folded New York Times. Flannery had books with her, of course, but her nerves were too raw for her to open them, and she couldn’t stop looking everywhere around her, staring at the faces, searching the colorless blighted stops en route for anything like the glory and glamour she’d imagined.

She never did see it. Flannery didn’t even recognize the city as the train approached it. It was not as though the Statue of Liberty waved you in with her welcoming torch (like those bright-batoned men at the airport)—or that Flannery would recognize the Empire State Building, for example, if it was right in front of her. Perhaps it was; she certainly saw a cluster of high buildings in the distance, but they swiftly disappeared as the train dipped into a rancid tunnel, when the standing and coat-donning of those around her tipped her off that they were nearly there.

The train stopped with a shudder. People gathered their bags and proceeded to hurry one another onto the platform.

Flannery, imitating everyone carefully, did the same, following the crowd out to the station. Maybe, if she could stay a little longer among their New York numbers, no one would have to know that she was not, actually, one of them.

“What are you reading?”

A touch on her shoulder and Flannery forgot the many ignominies of the morning that had nearly derailed her. A touch on her shoulder and she turned to discover Anne—more vivid, alive, and striking than she had been in Flannery’s grainy reimaginings. It always seemed to be this way: there was always more perfection there, in that single person, than Flannery could realistically recall.

“Oh—just this,” she said, closing her book to show the cover of a volume of Julio Cortázar’s stories. As if she hadn’t spent half an hour choosing which title to display, one that might have the right combination of seriousness and surprise.

“Julio Cortázar?” An excited intelligence brought Anne’s features into even sharper focus. It was the right choice. “He’s fabulous. So eerie. But also humane. He was a big translator of Poe, you know.”

“The professor said he only just died.”

“Yes.” Anne stroked the cover with her fingers, as if to remind herself how the stories felt. “Let me guess. World Fiction?”

Flannery nodded, and they spoke, with the eagerness of readers, of fictional worlds—Cortázar’s and Kincaid’s and others’. Flannery’s thoughts and words already felt more rapid here. They had just launched right in, breathlessly, before Anne had ordered or unzipped. Eventually she did both, and pulled out her cigarettes.

“So,” she said, lighting one, “you found this place okay?”

“No problem.” Flannery had allowed herself over an hour to get from the train station to the café in the Village whose address Anne had casually suggested on the phone—“MacDougal, between Washington Square and Bleecker. All right?” Flannery had needed every excruciating minute of that hour in order to submit to a fiasco of misunderstood subway maps, clambering out at a stop many long blocks away, and finally, in a panic, getting into a cab for what turned out to be a two-minute drive to her destination.

“You know,” Flannery said, trying not to sound shy or stupid, “it’s great to be here. I’ve never been here before.”

“To New York? Never?”

“Nope.”

“Really?” Anne laughed. But it was a laugh of invitation, not a shutting out. “My God. Then what are we doing here?” She stood right back up again, without waiting for her espresso. She stubbed out her cigarette with a blunt impatience. “Come on! Let’s go.”

Everything was so tall in New York that Flannery felt insignificant. She’d always known she was insignificant, of course, but she’d never had the point made quite so graphically before. The buildings and noise dwarfed her, and the swerving, loud traffic made her shrink. Anne, on the other hand—small, intricately formed Anne, whom Flannery knew she could contain in her arms, could carry over any threshold they might cross together—seemed suddenly bigger.

“This is the only city in the world,” Anne said, her voice fluorescent, her eyes hectic with joy. In her tight black leather jacket and her black jeans, she was clothed right along with the crowd. “It’s the city all the other ones secretly want to be. It’s the one all the others chase after.”

Like you, Flannery thought, but all she said was, “You’re bigger here.”

“Everyone is.”

“No.” Flannery shook her head. “I’m not.”

Anne stretched in the sun-slanted street. They were walking down Broadway toward Houston, and the early light reached them in a way that made each step important. Everything was anointed by the light: the bored pretzel seller, the homeless shuffler, the graffiti-blasted subway sign. Storefronts opening with a clatter to begin their day selling music or jackets, used books or vitamins, camping gear or Italian sweaters. And two women, one older, one younger, making their boot-and-shoed way along the great, grimy sidewalk.

“Even you, Flannery,” Anne said, and there was a keenness, an edge in her voice that gave the student hope suddenly. It was not the edge of instruction or sarcasm: it was an edge that might cut into some different heart altogether. Flannery heard it. She listened carefully.

“—If only you knew it.”

Not long after, they stopped at a dank vacant lot near Prince Street, where stalls clustered together selling scarves and T-shirts, earrings and incense.

“I want to buy you something,” Anne said. “I want to buy you a present.”

“For me?” Flannery said stupidly.

“Don’t blush, for God’s sake. You and your blushing—you’re like some Victorian maiden.”

It was more the tone Flannery was used to from her, but still there was an intimacy in it that caught at Flannery’s throat. She’d noticed her blushing! Wasn’t that a kind of compliment? And the word “maiden” hummed in her ears, thrilling her with its mysterious erotic import.

“Well, you act like some stern Victorian mistress. No wonder I blush.”

The boldness of the reply made Anne pause to look at her with a raised brow and a slight upturning of the pretty corners of her mouth.

“See? Now you’re blushing, too.”

“I am not.”

Anne found the stall she was looking for. Sunglasses, apparently. She looked at a selection of different styles, from sleazy drug dealer to minimal Lennon, retro cat’s-eyes or cool oval blue. Each kind she placed on Flannery’s head, then stood back from her, holding her shoulders, watching her intently. Scrutinizing. Assessing. Flannery would certainly have blushed under this attention ordinarily, but she was enjoying herself too much to now. Finally Anne chose a pair to her liking. She turned Flannery around to give her an instant’s reflection in one of the tiny mirrors, but it was clear there would be no debate about it, as Anne was already paying the Chinese man for them. In fact, as Flannery looked at herself in the mirror, she didn’t quite recognize herself. She liked that.

“Sunglasses? In autumn?” she said, starting to fold them up and put them in her pocket as they walked away.

“Keep them on! Christ. That’s the whole point.” Anne tapped her lightly. Affectionately, it seemed to Flannery. “Your eyes keep wandering around wildly, as if you were from some tiny one-horse town and had never been to a city before. You’ll be safer if you keep them on. Then no one will know how young and innocent you are.”

“Oh.” It was an insult, obviously, but Flannery smiled anyway. She felt sharp in her new shades. Anne had chosen for her a slickly chic look.

“No one, that is, except me.”

To be in this city alongside this woman was an airy exhilaration for Flannery. It was like flying. It was the story you tell your wakeful self before sleep, sure it will never take on the full, lit shape of reality.

In her sunglasses Flannery could look around her with impunity at the diverse, infinite faces; at the blurred jostlings and fast-chattering hawkers and random, optimistic runners; at the rampant signs and signals that competed boisterously against the fundamental drabbery of the city’s miles of stone. None of it bore any relation to the collective life in the cities she knew at home. She was here without reference. Often she did not understand what she was looking at. There were pages and pages of books that had turned this city into dazzling fiction, some Flannery had read and many more that she would read through her future. But for now, open and ignorant, she let Anne be the author of what she saw, and the muse for what she would later re-create.

Anne knew the city the way you do a lover, and she had a lover’s indulgence, a way of seeing charm and fancy where there was ostensibly none. As they walked, she pointed out buildings to Flannery that had a history public (“Auden used to live on this street, and he’d go buy the newspaper in his slippers”) or private (“I was once kissed goodbye on that corner by a friend who died the following week, in an accident”). Anne showed her sudden surprising gardens and the great shape of the grid, recited the many names of innumerable foods. When Anne learned that Flannery did not know what a knish was, she took Flannery east and easter to Yonah Schimmel’s Bakery so Flannery could sample a spinach-heavy treat and absorb a crucial fact about how the city tasted. “It’s something you have to know,” she told Flannery, and “It’s okay—you can take off your sunglasses now, to eat.”

It was hard, as the hours and light eventually faded, and this wandering dream day passed, for Flannery to know whether she was seeing New York or seeing Anne; whether she was hearing New York’s busy commentary or just listening to Anne’s. The voice that had serenaded her through the turbulent displaced weeks at college was now walking beside her, shaping the air in her ear, coming resonantly from a nearby body that Flannery wanted to hold. Had been longing to hold. Had written about longing for . . . Those bold words that had acted as a spell, as she’d hoped, to bring the two of them together.

It was a miracle. How was it possible? And more to the point, when would this amiable preamble end?

Dark fell, early, and brought with it a quiet offset by the luminous neon and the city’s waking up for its most famous hours. As New York grew louder, the two grew qu

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 376