at a favored Italian joint, she was most comfortable listening to the men laugh; when the gathering was around his own oversized table she found herself doing what women do, assembling and serving the food. It gave her a way not to have to talk or perform. Charles’s eye for colors and dimensions meant he was great to see the world with, like a chatty camera – ‘Look at the way that woman in line is holding her dog, like it’s a sweater she’s pulling close, to stay warm’ – while Flannery was more of an old-fashioned solvent, taking weeks or months to develop what she had observed. Charles marked his environment, mobilizing people and materials to change the landscape, while all Flannery commanded were the creatures of her own imagination, and she sometimes felt her feet left a faint tread.
It was several months after their autumn meeting at the gallery night, and Flannery had decided simply to enjoy herself. Why not? She did not have to overthink everything. She could simply follow this dalliance to its end. Until then she was a tourist of a foreign lifestyle: fancy restaurants, art openings, heterosexuality. So this is how they live! It transpired that a man and a woman on the street together were invisible to the world, and for Flannery, who had always hated to be watched or even noticed as two women together tended to be (the familiar stranger’s double-take: Which one is the . . . oh, they both are!), this was an unexpected reprieve. She felt as though she had been permitted into one of those country clubs she had previously considered snooty and boring, but it had turned out to be good fun (they had an air hockey table!) and have great facilities (so many clean towels, and fantastic water pressure in the showers!). This straightness made her feel older. At last she was introduced to the way Regular People coupled. Partnered. Made love. This club had existed for millennia, and finally she was, temporarily at least, a member. As long as she could leave again after, all would – probably – be well.
Then she got pregnant.
Late January, a chill San Francisco winter, all light grays and subdued browns, even the Golden Gate Bridge dulled down to a flat, parochial orange – and inside Charles’s house on Ashbury Street in San Francisco, and within his black modernist bathroom, the plastic stick showed two hot pink, unexpected lines.
This happened with straight sex. Flannery had heard of it. Novels, romances, salacious newspaper articles, movies – they all mentioned this. It was a plot device, a soap opera staple, a career changer or reputation smircher; a punishment, or a miracle, or a reward. Women got pregnant after having sex with men, sometimes.
Right.
Once, after she and Adele broke up, Flannery had briefly dated an amusing buck-toothed English woman, who used the phrase about someone, ‘She fell pregnant.’ At the time, Flannery, who loved to hold strange expressions in her fingers like samples of exotic fabric, to test their weave and their texture, commented on the comedy of the words, as she saw them – as if pregnancy were an affliction, like an illness, that you picked up by accident. As if it sent you off in some sort of swoon.
Now, suddenly, fearfully, Flannery was not laughing.
She had fallen.
10
How could Flannery be so smart, and simultaneously so stupid?
It was one of her own enduring questions about her character, from the time she was a bright kid in her fifth-grade class and the teacher’s pet, yet wrote a sarcastic note about an assignment that got her sent to the principal’s office (could she not have foreseen that the joke would misfire?), to her failure to predict, on the elaborately planned Mexico trip, just how rattled and wild it would make her to meet, at last, her father.
What had she imagined – a quick coffee then she and Adele would be on their way? Why would Flannery go to the extensive trouble of finding her unknown father in the first place if she didn’t think it would rearrange her interior, as it did? Yet as the two women got ready to encounter Len Jansen at the bohemian hotel bar he had suggested, Adele fretted over what they should wear, and whether they should act like friends or lovers, to which questions Flannery replied with uncharacteristic hardness, ‘What does it matter? The guy will be too stoned to notice, probably. And we won’t stay long.’ Even Flannery could hear how unFlanneryish her voice was, saying that, and she was wrong and wrong, as it turned out. The meeting might not have been a tear-jerker of reconciliation or redemption between father and daughter – Flannery was pretty sure her father understood the relationship between her and Adele, but it seemed not to fluster him – yet there was a connection between this man and herself that Flannery had not conceived of ahead of time. In their physical appearance, yes, but also in some of the turns of their thinking, unnerving enough for her that hours into the surprising conversation of that first meeting, Flannery offered up an abrupt excuse to leave. Soon after that she hit the tequila, and from there the sex by the saguaro story more or less wrote itself.
Flannery was wise yet foolish. She knew so much, and so little. ‘The eternal sophomore,’ she called herself in A Visit to Don Lennart, a book she wrote in part to understand this very contradiction.
Flannery knew she was smart. Others did too, though not instantly, which gave the discovery an element of surprise when they came upon it, like a hit of salt in a caramel dessert. Flannery was soft-voiced in conversation and not inclined to show off, yet she was not timid about making a reference or an analogy that would catch her listener’s attention. At the publishing house where she worked after college, her boss, a brisk sardonic New Yorker with limited patience, once skimmed skeptically through some catalogue copy Flannery had handed her. Gradually Eleanor’s frown eased, and her eyebrows raised. ‘You wrote these?’ she asked, as if speaking to a child prodigy. ‘With the slant quote from Leonard Cohen? That little quip about mood rings? Nice work, Flannery.’ Flannery had pinkened with pleasure. ‘You play the sleepy Westerner well, but you’ve got a brain in there, haven’t you?’
Sometimes. And yet: her stupidity, leaning at times into an ‘accidental heartlessness’ (her own phrase, again). Just as she had settled into her position at the publishing house, Flannery blindly trampled on a friendly colleague’s territory by sleeping with the philandering poet the woman edited, offending the editor to the point where Flannery wondered if she ought to leave, and started to plan her Mexican adventure. Or it could be a more basic cluelessness, shown by the number of times (two) that Flannery forged a brilliant route for Adele and her to take through a strange and possibly dangerous territory, only for her to get pickpocketed later in some obvious, open market square in Guadalajara.
The ways Flannery saw and didn’t see; looked ahead, yet was blindsided by what came at her.
That was the only way to explain how she could have let herself get pregnant.
It was a teenager’s error. Made her feel seventeen again. Had she really thought she had matured?
There was a morning, once, soon after she arrived at Yale, when Flannery traveled what felt like a great distance from the campus (about two blocks) to find breakfast away from the many freshman eyes in the dining hall. She went into a spare, tiny diner called The Yankee Doodle and ordered from its grease-smeared menu a ‘jelly omelette’. It seemed part of being in the new place – sampling the local cuisine. These crazy people from Connecticut made jelly omelettes! Why not try one?
The waitress raised a brow and smirked at the order. Flannery had misstepped. And indeed the plate that arrived, a yellow-brown slab of egg oozing sickly purple, was both ridiculous and disgusting. Had Flannery been older, she might have framed the mistake for herself forgivingly – Oh well. I’m learning! – but at seventeen she could only dissolve in embarrassment, particularly because the whole fiasco was observed, emerald-eyedly, by an auburn-haired woman who sat a few tables away, drinking coffee and reading.
The bad breakfast at The Yankee Doodle turned into a story of Flannery’s. That act of idiocy got someone’s attention, and the moment Flannery saw that beautiful reader, she was smitten. She learned that the woman was a graduate student named Anne Arden, and one day a few months later, they would start to discover everything important about each other, relish every taste and surface, savor all art and intelligence together. In the headiness of that pleasure, the jelly omelette tale became a joke and a fondness, a necessary first story in the two women’s eventual