Flannery had not completely lost sight of that auburn-haired beauty.
In previous eras a person might lose a love and then not know where she had gone or whether she were alive or dead – until a startling glimpse at a distant market place or town square, or singing hymns in church.
However, in the over-surveilled and close-circuited twenty-first century, former beloveds scarcely had room to vanish. It was easy to find people: their tracks were everywhere. Anne and Flannery, whose bond had been a thickly worded one, their short-lived love nest lined with books and papers, were both in professions that brought them in frequent contact with print.
Flannery knew she was going to be a writer long before Anne expressed skepticism that she could be. (‘Ah. You’re hoping to write?’ Anne had asked seventeen-year-old Flannery, to which Flannery had replied simply, ‘Not hoping to. I just do.’) As adults Anne and Flannery both were published, hired, connected to institutions. They were, as Californians put it, squarely on the grid.
Yet they had corresponded just twice, in twenty years.
When A Visit to Don Lennart was published, before the circus of appearances took over, Flannery received a postcard in an envelope. On one side, a Velásquez portrait of a plump, bearded man, The Buffoon Pablo de Valladolid; on the other, the familiar slanted hand. The envelope was addressed to Flannery, care of her publisher, and was sent from Anne’s university at the time, Emory. Flannery saw the envelope when it arrived in the tarnished brass mailbox in the East Village apartment she shared with Adele, and stood leaning against the scuffed wall on the ground floor, finding it hard, for a moment, to catch her breath.
Dear Flannery,
Might your Don look something like this absurd but oddly dignified Spanish gentleman? (I like your title’s nod to Sybille Bedford.) You always knew your stories would make their way into the world; and I learned early on that you were a person who could make her imaginings real. Congratulations on the publication of your book. I am pleased for the nation’s readers that they’re being given the chance to relish your voice at last, and have pages of yours to hold for themselves.
Anne
‘Pretentious,’ Adele judged tartly when Flannery showed the card to her. ‘Who does she think she is, God?’ (I might have made her think so, Flannery thought. It wasn’t her fault.) Adele had heard enough stories about the wonderful, remarkable Anne to last her a long while. Nonetheless, Adele’s judgement did not stop Flannery drafting dozens of replies to the postcard, in her head, on paper, on the computer. She pretzeled herself into knots one day at the Museum of Modern Art with the effort of selecting a postcard whose image would perfectly convey what she hoped to express (Cézanne landscape? Lovely, but bland. Warhol’s Marilyn? Trying too hard. Naked Picasso ladies? Suggestive, therefore tacky). The difficulty defeated Flannery, not least because she did not know what expression she was really after. No single image was ideal. No words worked, finally. All remained unsent.
A few years later, when Flannery had moved back to San Francisco, she heard from an old Yale friend that Anne had been hired, in a bit of university poaching, by NYU, and whisked away from Emory in Atlanta (along with, the friend helpfully added, her historian partner, Jasper Elliott). In the teacup of high-end academia, this had created a temporary storm. Still, Flannery knew New York was where Anne had always wanted and intended to be, and that the city deserved her. Taking a leaf from Anne’s book – Flannery had always been more likely in this relationship to imitate than initiate – she sent Anne a postcard, addressed from Flannery’s art college in San Francisco, to the department at NYU. Agonies again over an appropriate picture, but finally from a trip to LA she found a card of Diego Rivera’s Flower Carrier. With its dozen lilies and its faceless girl it was, Flannery hoped, not too devotional, but she made herself stop worrying and simply send it. Her words were sparse. It was more a gesture than an actual communication.
Dear Anne,
The city has you back. I’m happy for its university, and for you.
Unlike Anne, though, Flannery did stick her neck out. In writ-ing – where she had always located her greatest boldness.
She signed the card with –
Love.
24
Human history could not be written with some different lexicon. You could not search and replace one name for another, once powerful words had been coined. That currency lasted. The verb that described one person’s online interest in another person, whether motivated by nostalgia or fascination, lust or regret, sounded like the sound produced by Flannery’s own toddler. Google. To search on the Internet for information about a person, thing, or place. I google, you google, they google.
Flannery googled.
What had Anne Arden been up to?
Flannery did not use to google. She had, at least, taken a substantial break from it. This was before Willa was in preschool, during the moms’ group era. In early motherhood each phase seems of epoch-defining length: before they hold their head up, when you can still go out to restaurants because they are angelic and sleep all the time; when they start crawling, and you are imprisoned in your home trying desperately to ‘proof’ the place, as if your child were a criminal or a rodent, requiring lines of defense; and after they start walking and getting into real trouble, a good time to join the moms’ group so you have other people who understand the true proportions of these problems, which to the rest of the world seem trivial. Flannery could not understand how any parent had time to watch television, have a coherent thought, or go online. There were simply no available hours in her day. If ever there were, Flannery used them to talk to actual living people – her friends, her mother, Charles.
Now, though, that Willa was at the Blueberry Preschool (that had been Willa at week seven, according to the fruit growth chart), Flannery began to resume relations with her computer. She browsed material she could put together for a part-time job application. And she got back to googling.
Anne had won a teaching prize at Emory. There was a citation on the department website, and trampling through the online jungle further, Flannery came upon a picture of her, small and smiling, with the university’s dean. A modest, self-contained expression that compressed a little her musical, lovely mouth. The familiar high-edged cheekbones and Celtic elegance, even in miniature.
Going further back, Anne’s book, The Awakening of Influence, had been extensively reviewed when it was published in the mid-1990s. ‘Brilliant.’ ‘Challenging, thought-provoking, and meticulously argued.’ ‘Not only paradigm-shifting but perspective-altering; a crucial step forward in our understanding of modern American literature.’ ‘To call Professor Arden’s profound book a landmark in feminist scholarship is to risk limiting its audience, or overlooking the true achievement of her generous work, which is to expand our humanist understanding of American letters.’
Flannery felt a flush of pride. Her Anne! Though, of course, Anne had not been ‘hers’ in fifteen years or so, if she had ever been ‘hers’ at all. (They had laughed about Flannery containing Anne, but it was a spelling joke – it only worked on the page.) You did not own people. Marriage was one thing, and might not yet have escaped its association with leashes or shackles, but love was not possession. People were not each other’s property. That included children and their parents.
Nonetheless: her Anne! Had shifted paradigms, altered perspectives, expanded humanist understanding. Flannery was not surprised.
Then, deflatingly, a blog post. Flannery might have missed this item, and wished she had. But on looking up at the clock in her improvised office (a narrow room upstairs, formerly used for storage), Flannery calculated that she had ten more minutes before she had to leave to pick up Willa; just enough time to find it. Blogs and posts and tweets, people’s endless chatter-blurts about their meals, dogs, travels, interested her not at all. But googling was, as its name also suggested, not entirely unlike ogling; you looked, and then you could not look away. Some purple-haired graduate student in New York wrote an irreverent foodie blog she called Finger Lickin’ Good.
Went