Pages for You (8 page)

E
verything 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.”

N
ot 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.”

T
o 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?

D
ark 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 quieter; the conversation changed and lost something of its earlier energy.

They ate dinner in a Japanese restaurant near Astor Place, where Flannery had the best of both worlds: declining, herself, to have sushi, knowing perfectly well she’d dribble rice and raw fish all down her if she did; but given the rare chance to watch Anne as she placed slithery eel delicately into her mouth and fed herself morsel after morsel of skin-pink ginger. They drank sake and ate eagerly, but the speech between them was uneven.

Ordinary biography did not move Anne, and she seemed happy to let silences break over them like waves. She was scarcely interested in where Flannery was from, or what it was like, or how foreign she felt here, or what that was like. She had obviously not taken in whether Flannery had siblings. (She didn’t.) She made one or two references to her own sister, Patricia, who was married and lived in Texas. When Flannery ventured, “What part of New York are you from?”—as if she would have understood the answer, anyway—Anne said in a bored tone,

“I’m not from New York. I’m from Detroit.”

“Really?” It was so different from what Flannery had imagined, from the way Anne moved through these streets. Flannery thought Anne must have known them since girlhood. She was sure they’d wrapped themselves around their Anne for years. Now she understood that Anne’s adoration was that of the adopted daughter rather than the natural offspring. “So—” Flannery started, eager to know everything. What was Detroit like? How and when had she left it? What—where
was
Detroit, anyway? (Other than in Michigan.) And how had it colored her?

“So.” Anne repeated it as a challenge, a taunt almost. She had a steel in her that suddenly appeared at times, closing all the doors, shutting everything down, forbidding absolutely any further questions. It was like a high-tech Bond trick, a foreign locking mechanism: it became abruptly impossible to find anything like an opening.

“Do you miss it?” Flannery asked, thinking how much she missed her own home.

“Almost never.”

That was the end of that, quite clearly.

Possibly one day Flannery would learn a little about the “almost.” In the meantime, the easiest subject for them to circle back to was reading.

T
hey walked along the street, separate in the numbing November cold, and Flannery sensed that the fire between them—she was sure she’d felt it, once, that she had not invented it—was all but out.

“Where are you staying?”

It was not a question Flannery had fixed an answer to. Not that she’d assumed . . . She hadn’t, exactly. It was just that her planning mind had given out past the point where she found the café on MacDougal; if she could just find the café, she thought, the rest—whatever rest there might be—would take care of itself.

“Well, I—I could go to Mary-Jo’s. She said I’d be welcome. Or—I can always just take the train back tonight. There’s probably one back, still.”

“The last one’s in about half an hour,” Anne said crisply.

Flannery shrugged. For the first time, perhaps, since arriving in New York. But suddenly she was tired. “That’s probably what I should do.” Her voice was flat. “Take the last train.”

They walked in silence. Not an especially companionable one. Flannery was moping; Anne, evidently, was thinking.

“I’d invite you to stay where I am,” she said with a trace of apology, “at my friend Jennifer’s. But it’s such a poky little apartment. It’s just a one-bedroom. With a futon.” She slicked her hair back behind her ear. “Though Jennifer did tell me the place has a Murphy bed, too. I’ve never actually tried it.”

“What’s a Murphy bed?”

“What
is
one?” Anne’s tongue was still sharp, though she tried to blunt it somewhat. “You know, you’re cute, Flannery—you really don’t know a damn thing.”

Flannery took hold of Anne’s arm then, to slow her down. She was walking so fast! “You’ve got to stop saying that.” She had Anne’s attention now. “I know all kinds of things. I know how to survive dorm life, though it’s totally degrading. I know how to take the train to New York. And I know how to wait at the train station for someone who’s going to New York, so I can give them something I want them to have.”

It was the first time either of them had mentioned what Flannery had written.
Pages for You.
Remember?

It broke through whatever carapace had formed over the baffling object of Flannery’s desire. “You’re right,” Anne said. Quietly. “You do know things. I’m sorry, I’m being a shrew.”

They were walking down University Place now, and reached Tenth Street. Anne steered them around the corner, down half a block, then stopped. She blew on her bare hands, glanced up at a dim apartment building, kept her eyes away from Flannery’s.

“Well, this is it.”

Flannery was bewildered. This was what? Goodbye—just like that? Wasn’t Anne even going to help her get a cab? Before she could question her, Anne carried on.

“Do you want to come up?” she asked, in an oddly humble voice that just about made Flannery melt right there on the sidewalk. “You can see what a Murphy bed is. It’s something every girl, sometime in her life, should find out.”

I
t was the flutter-doubt that gave Flannery assurance. As they shed the night’s cold, standing in the stuffy intimacy of the elevator, Flannery saw Anne’s slight frame shiver—from some hesitation, some internal query. Sensing it, Flannery suddenly knew.

This night is mine. She is giving it to me.

This beautiful confidence kept the young woman cheerful as the older one fumbled with the lock and issued coughed apologies for the paper-strewn disarray of the apartment (but they were formal, not genuine, Flannery thought, and she could see signs, too, of an order in the narrow room, a just in case, for company, clearing). Flannery watched Anne’s hands fly about the room untamed, gesturing at Jennifer’s Frida Kahlo postcards, her shrine to Marlene Dietrich, the “view” that could be seen, if you twisted yourself around by the window, of Wall Street (but showing this required Anne to lead Flannery over to that end where the futon lay and perform an awkward dance step around an object that said loudly, Bed.
Bed.
BED). Tucked rustily into the wall behind a flamboyant Indonesian print, Anne said easily, on surer ground here, was the Murphy bed. This was a less fraught demonstration, as it implied their sleeping separately, so Anne could show Flannery the lethal-appearing spring mechanism, make an unavoidable joke about the prospect of its giving way, mid-sleep, to snap the sleeper wallward. She patted the traplike item almost affectionately, as if it were a pet.

“Now you know. A Murphy bed. That’s how it works.”