with Daddy, who indulgently let her pick up objects in the carpentry aisle, encouraging her to feel the texture of sandpaper, or even the heft of a hammer.
Daddy: hearing her daughter speak those two syllables re-arranged something within Flannery, fixed one of her inner workings, got some fundamental emotional mechanism to run more smoothly. She was forever grateful to Charles for that, and when her husband aggravated or disappointed her, demeaned her even, she reminded herself of this shift, and how permanent it was.
‘You won’t have the same material as me, sweetheart,’ Flannery whispered into her daughter’s perfect mollusk ear, as she splashed and cleaned her in the evenings in the large and elegant claw-foot tub. There, too, Charles’s previously tasteful arrangement of soapstone dishes on a weathered wooden cabinet had been brought downmarket by Willa’s brightly colored frog sponge, her waterproof Dr. Seuss books, and the bubble bath that smelled of fake strawberries. ‘You already have a very different story from mine.’
Willa might have nodded had she been older, but at that tender age she simply grew, as children do, into herself, as the particular braid of nurture and nature came together to form her.
From her father Willa inherited an infectious laugh, an urge to build, and a knack for playing with Legos that set her apart from her princessed peers. (She was focused, careful, and inventive as she wove imaginative tales in and out of her constructions.) Her dark eyes; her dimples; her square feet. From her mother she received thick fair hair; the ability to sit still, to observe and remember; a will not to do the done thing; strong teeth, and a smile that brought abrupt light to an otherwise serious, worry-tending face.
From both her parents, or more precisely how they were together, Willa acquired an innate uneasiness, borne of the unarticulated reality that neither father nor mother, given their own angled histories, knew properly what it was to be a family. They were attempting roles for themselves and the others in their triangle, as if posing constantly for hidden cameras. Husband and wife, father and mother – parts that Charles and Flannery had, after a few months of sex and camaraderie, pledged to play, in the presence of a dutiful bureaucrat one Valentine’s Day at City Hall. Scriptless, they were improvising, with mixed results.
22
È un disastro.
Of a different kind. In the spring, when Willa was six months old, this small family traveled to New York for a dinner in Charles’s honor ahead of a new show of his preparatory drawings and maquettes at his Upper East Side gallery. They stayed in a chic hotel in midtown that had nothing to do with children. Charles’s choice. Arriving early in the morning after a difficult night flight, during which the pain in Willa’s ears caused her five hours of distress, a predicament about which she alerted the entire airplane with her piercing cries (though Charles was able to sleep through the racket, as the misleading phrase had it, like a baby), Flannery was unable to shake off her intense, nerve-frayed irritation at the throbbing music playing in the hotel lobby and the sinister nightclub red of the front desk lighting. How were these appropriate notes of welcome for her and her infant? She was uncharacteristically short-tempered and fussy about the room not being ready and their lack of a cot for Willa, while the gel-haired hipster at the reception desk fielded her complaints with a restrained voice that had within it, Flannery couldn’t help feeling, the chilly implication that such problems were her own fault for getting pregnant in the first place. She stood holding a sleepy, disgruntled Willa against her, and felt awkward and ignorable, like the help that had been brought along to carry the bags and child, while Charles, large and benevolent, stood for ten enthusiastic minutes with some suited professional he’d met leaving the hotel who had to ask if he was Charles Marshall, whose pieces at the Whitney a few years earlier he had much admired. ‘Oh, you saw those?’ Charles boomed to the man warmly. ‘Well, thank you. Yeah, I was pleased with how they hung that show. And tell me, what did you think of . . . ?’
So the visit continued. Midtown was a foreign world to Flannery, who knew only the Village, Tribeca, carvings of Brooklyn – certainly not these broad avenues with people who were older, richer and straighter than any Flannery used to brush up against in that city. Flannery was a wife in this Manhattan, and when she met other wives at the gallery she was unpracticed in how to talk to them. She was not yet fluent in Wifese. Flannery decided that when she returned to San Francisco, she had better join a moms’ group, so she could learn at least one of these new tongues. She knew she could pick it up; she was a quick study.
Certainly up here on Madison or Fifth, near horse-drawn carriages driving tourists around the park and manicured men and women carrying shopping bags, Flannery felt a more than geographic distance away from the streets of Soho, and any ghosts of hers who might still walk there. In her old life and a previous self, Flannery once chance-encountered on Prince Street a charismatic woman with auburn hair and a dry, delicious intelligence whom she had never stopped adoring. Flannery had tried in those few affectionate but awkward minutes to show off that she knew New York now, worked and lived there (while Anne’s partner, a silvered professor named Jasper, stood beside her, waiting patiently); but now Flannery saw that the New York she had known then was not the same as the one where she was staying now. Her single effort to meet an old work friend for dinner one evening in Chelsea was thrown off by a last-minute cancellation by the babysitter about whom Flannery had anyway been dubious, seeing as the recommendation came from a hotel which clearly wished children harm. At that point Flannery wrote off this trip as a visit to Charles’s New York, not her own, and made peace with how strange it all was to her.
In the end, non è stato un disastro totale. With Willa alongside her, Flannery did manage the one crucial dinner with Charles’s Manhattan coterie, where he was celebrated and toasted. Charles swelled handsomely in such light. His size suited him then; in fact, it seemed the only appropriate shape for someone of his accomplishments. Even through the miasma of jet-lagged exhaustion, Flannery admired her husband’s ease and success in these different arenas – social, artistic, sartorial (Charles wore an elegant Italian charcoal suit, that made you realize that he was a man of Venice, Rome, New York, not only provincial San Francisco). Flannery laughed along with the rest at Charles’s jokes, smiled and nodded at Jeffrey’s praise of him, then retired early to the minimalist gray hotel room where she and Willa could shelter far from the fame and the fashion.
‘It’s over. I did it,’ Flannery said to Willa as she climbed out of her high heels with a groan of relief. She immediately took off her stockings, too, bunched them up and put them in her suitcase, hoping not to have to wear a pair for another six months. ‘God, sweetheart. You have no idea how exhausting these things are.’ She lay Willa down on a blue plastic changing mat across the crisp, white-sheeted queen bed, and cleaned her up, before fitting her into a daisy-decorated sleepsuit. Snap, snap, snap. How satisfying it was to dress an infant. She wished, not for the first time, she could wear sleepsuits every day, too. ‘You know some people, like your dad, love big fancy dinners. I never have. It’s a flaw, maybe, but –’ Flannery held her beautiful girl up high overhead; Willa squealed with delight – ‘I’d rather just have mashed sweet potatoes with you!’ She covered her in kisses, drawing delighted gurgles from the child, then placed her gently in the center of the bed while she got ready, too. Finally, to slow them both down, Flannery started singing a few not entirely appropriate songs – old favorites by Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen – as a kind of mournful lullaby. They were the only tunes Flannery had by heart.
Flannery flew back a few days early with Willa. She and Charles agreed it would be better, so that he could focus on his work connections and she could retreat to their child-friendly hearth on Ashbury Street. That Charles had a two-night stand after Flannery left, with a young nose-pierced video artist, a woman who had the wit (or lack of it) to pick up the hotel room phone and flute into it when Flannery called from San Francisco, was neither here nor there. Flannery was upset with Charles, but not that upset, and her internal shrug confirmed something Flannery had begun to suspect, that a drift had started to develop between her and Charles. Frankly, she was still so relieved to be back at home with Willa, away from that awful hotel and the foreign city it was a part of, that she could not bring herself to mind about his infidelity as much as she probably should have.
Flannery had not been back to New York since