too, their talk a colorful thread along which were strung bright beaded nights of sex. It was when Charles started to share stories of his early New York years, before his success, his scrappy early marriage long before the heiress (‘my very first wife,’ he called the New Yorker jokingly; ‘we were kids, we were pups, we scratched and bit each other because we didn’t know any better’) that Flannery started to feel the shape of the man beside her, and a tenderness toward him surfaced, which only enhanced her attraction. Flannery noticed, with the surprise you have at finding a new wrinkle or mole on your body, the desire within herself to protect the great Charles Marshall. How crazy was that? That she, Flannery Jansen, author of one hit book and one not, believed she might somehow tend to this famous man who commanded steel and aluminum, men and machines, art critics and dealers? That she did, as a matter of fact, want that job?
People experiment in romance in so many ways. They need to leave themselves behind, or complement themselves, finding substance in the areas where they feel empty. They risk similarity, or difference. They find their twin, or their opposite. They seek loves of different ages or creeds, nationality or skin hue, to rub up against the expectations of their family or culture or simply to create roughness and traction in their own interior. Montagues want Capulets, Janes their Rochesters. Flannery Jansen might once have made sweaty, urgent love under a saguaro cactus with a willowy Nordic girl named Adele, who was frequently mistaken for her sister, but at thirty she was in a rolling, rollicking affair with the heavy, hearty artist Charles Marshall.
Opposites attract? Yes, Charles was Flannery’s opposite. A man with arresting charms and pungent faults, loud virtues and quiet failings, just like anyone else; but also, point by point, a person like a study in everything Flannery, in her native self, preferred not to be. On she went, though, taking and acing it, the Charles Marshall course. Swallowing new knowledge. Earning an A.
8
The knife-edges of sexuality.
Separations fine and sharp between the two sides.
Flannery was thinking about the issue as she walked up from the arts college on Dolores Street where she taught part-time, to the house Charles owned in the Haight, where she was spending more and more evenings, and mornings, and portions of the day. It was a steep climb, then a cresting of the hill and a saunter back down near Buena Vista Park. There was plenty of opportunity for vertigo.
She imagined an interlocutor, an interviewer, quizzing her.
Off one edge of the blade: your newfound passion for a man requires suppressing your previous yearnings for a woman. Are you in denial? What about Anne, or Adele?
Off the other edge: your engagements with lesbian lovers did always mean not acknowledging your equally real heterosexual feelings. Were you in denial? (Adele had been wary of that drift in Flannery; at points in their travels Flannery had flirted with men with a little too much intention, and Adele had nipped at her afterwards, in jealousy.)
Bisexuality, though – as a word or a label, as a principle, as anything other than a simple, ubiquitous, under-spoken truth about the human heart – satisfied nobody. To Flannery it had always sounded like a science project, and not the prize-winning kind. It confused people. You were better off disavowing it, just as retaliatory parents sometimes disavowed their gay children, or gay friends coolly shook their heads over one of their own who stepped out with the opposite sex. (Hasbian!) To describe yourself that way made you seem shifty and indecisive, like an independent voter. Pick a party! Pick a side! Come on, your allegiance matters.
Flannery’s heart was pounding at this point in her walk, as she neared the top of Seventeenth Street, and the city was spreading out behind her. If she turned around, she could see the Castro melting into the Mission District, whose taquerías and mercados were losing ground to tech-influenced joints like single-drip coffee purveyors and chic design shops. Past the Mission, looking east, there were still the shipyards, and beyond them the gray and mobile Bay, flecked with vessels.
And what about the guys?
Flannery breathed. Panted, a little. (Really, she ought to be fitter than this.)
What, specifically, about this particular guy, the one she had met?
Was Charles the kind of straight man who hankered after watching two women make love, perhaps so he could enter the fray at some point and helpfully assist – a Penthouse letters type? Adele had been certain, rightly or wrongly, that there were plenty of those. Or did Charles nurture an ambition to conquer and convert a nice lesbian, like missionaries in African nations hoping to bring Christ’s blessings to the uninitiated? Or was Charles rather – this had to be a possibility – simply a confident person, at home in his ample masculine self, who accepted the complexities of sexuality and was as content to hear about Sapphic love as any other kind?
Flannery was thinking of a conversation the two of them had had the night before, at a bar at the edge of the Castro District, near her apartment. Several gay men drank together, generally muscled and tattooed, while two women leaned toward one another heatedly over bottles of Dos Equis. Charles and Flannery noticed the women at the same time, and each took a sip from their own brews.
‘Do you miss . . . that?’ Charles asked unexpectedly, tilting his chin in the direction of the women’s table.
Flannery blinked. That? Having a drink with a girl, or trading jokes with her? Making love to a girl? What precisely was Charles asking? Flannery took a pull of her beer, pondering possible answers, but was relieved of the need to try any of them.
‘I mean . . .’ Charles continued. ‘I get it. You know?’ He looked serious, and sympathetic, so Flannery nodded apprehensively. Then a light flickered in Charles’s eyes. ‘You may not realize this, but . . . I was a lesbian once, too.’
This Flannery had not expected. She laughed with relief. ‘You know,’ she parried, ‘that doesn’t surprise me.’
‘You felt the vibe, right?’
‘I totally did.’
‘I figured.’ Charles nodded.
‘Besides,’ Flannery shrugged. ‘All the best people were.’
‘Apparently!’
‘Though . . .’ Flannery pushed it further. ‘That thinking seems, you know, binary. Straight, gay. Like you have to be one or the other.’
‘Ah hah. Kind of virgin/whore, you mean?’
‘Well, I didn’t really mean that! But . . . sure.’ Flannery was enjoying this. ‘Right. Are you a prude, or just cautious? In touch with your desire, or a nymphomaniac?’
‘Easy . . .’ Charles ventured, with a satyr’s grin. ‘Or hard?’
‘Dry or wet?’
‘Top or bottom?’
‘They want you to choose one,’ Flannery said, a little drunkenly, and with a hint of melancholy. She could not have said who they were. ‘You have to choose.’
It wasn’t conventional foreplay, but it got the two of them pretty worked up. They drained their beers and then Charles drove them back up to his house, where they fully explored together the possibilities of the heterosexual option.
9
There was a perfectly pleasing place this exciting outlier relationship might have taken in the unfolding narrative of Flannery’s life: a round roll of adventure, a brush with art celebrity, a sexual exploration; a lush indulgence of gifts and pleasure and bodies and surprise. From there you would have expected its slowing, and then its probable ceasing, as the personality differences finally made themselves felt.
Charles was older than Flannery by fifteen years, but there was an exoticism in that too. Flannery felt at sea but not unpleasantly so, as if she were on a cruise ship filled with people of some remote English-speaking nationality. Scots, perhaps, or Australians. Charles could enthral a table with the stories he told in his jovial baritone, while Flannery’s stories flowed through