about the paradox of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, by God’s outlandish request; the way Abraham could simultaneously be convinced he would slit his son’s throat, and at the same time entrust to God that at the last instant there would be some catch and he would not have to, after all. Sitting in her self-pitying sophomore slump on a shapeless plastic chair under unflattering fluorescent lighting, Flannery was never entirely sure she got it, but Tolstoy gave her a good grade for the final paper she wrangled for him, so he must have thought she did. Throughout her life Flannery would find that in writing she had occasional access to wisdom or perceptions that eluded her when she spoke aloud. Or acted.
‘Do you worry, though?’ Flannery asked Charles one evening at their local Thai garden. They had learned a few hours earlier that the genetic testing had all looked normal, and Flannery was carrying a girl. She had been surprised by Charles’s ostentatious relief at the news. ‘I mean,’ she tried to explain, to translate the roil of thoughts in her mind to an actual question, ‘about all the sacrifice?’
Charles frowned. ‘Of what?’
‘You know . . . time. Freedom.’ Flannery waved a forkful of green mango in the general direction of all they might be giving up. ‘Independence.’ Charles seemed baffled by the question. At the time Flannery found this endearing, a sign of her husband’s intention to throw himself wholeheartedly into fatherhood, but later she would come to wonder whether it was simply based on assumptions they did not discuss.
‘Nah.’ He shook his head.
‘Our ability to work. Having to take care of the baby all the time.’
‘Art versus parenthood? It’s a cliché, we don’t need to fall into that.’ He slid several morsels of chicken satay off their skewers. ‘We can do this differently.’
Flannery admired his certainty. That was very Charles: sure of himself and his ability to organize the world around him in the way he wanted. She had always responded to people, men or women, who had clarity and edge. She appreciated the ability to be definite, something she often lacked. Such characters aided Flannery in her own efforts to focus the large areas of her internal blur.
‘Great,’ she affirmed, hoping the tasty curries and rice would not make the return journey back up her throat within the hour. ‘I like your confidence. We’ll do this differently. That’s good! Let’s do that, then.’
Flannery decided to have faith. It was a leap, yes. But really, she had already taken it.
14
For a time, they homesteaded.
Charles fed her, hunted and gathered for her. He provided warm, filling meals that pushed Flannery’s belly further and further out. He developed a network of takeout joints from which he collected multiple boxes, and even cooked a few meals himself, eighties-inflected dishes (beef stroganoff, chicken Marbella) that earned Flannery’s briefly sated gratitude.
He massaged her feet, was nice about the ugly clothes, and made sure she drank a lot of water, while he knocked back a near cellar’s worth of his own preferred Cabernet. This was Charles at his best, this slow-motion lope to their child’s arrival. That the man admired himself for doing these uxorious tasks was inseparable from his actually doing them. Flannery did not mind being Charles’s gentle, flattering mirror because she did feel cared for, and that fed something that yawned within her. There was no sign that this man would be down in Mexico getting stoned at the time of his daughter’s birth, and for that Flannery was deeply, yearningly grateful. ‘I feel like I’m in Little House on the Prairie, or The Waltons,’ she told Adele on the phone one day when Charles was at the studio. ‘I should be out collecting eggs from the henhouse.’ She and her former co-traveler, who lived in Chicago, had a friendly telephone relationship now.
Adele was quiet for a minute, then said, ‘Well, you always said you used to love those shows.’
‘They’re so cheesy,’ Flannery agreed. ‘But I really did.’
For Flannery, the house was expansive after the years of apartment living, and gradually she came to feel it was less of a movie set and more her actual home. On the main floor, raised above the sloping ground level, was a broad bay window that looked out over the row of painted Victorians facing, and in the window was a long, electric-blue couch that became one of her favorite comforts.
‘My first wife, Miriam, wanted us to have a baby,’ Charles informed Flannery one sleepy May afternoon, when they lounged together on that couch. ‘We were way too young. It would have been a disaster.’ Flannery’s legs stretched across Charles’s lap, her puffy feet encased by his ample hands. ‘Then there was this very athletic woman I dated, Rebecca. She wanted to us to have a kid together, too – I’ve told you about her?’
Flannery shook her head. And you don’t have to now, she added silently, but she had learned the futility of trying to stop Charles when he had a story to tell. He fondled his beard affectionately as he recalled these waystations in his life, temporarily pausing in his attentions toward Flannery’s swollen ankles.
‘She was an amazon, black hair, very into yoga, before anyone else had heard of yoga except for hippies. I mean, before there were spandex outlets on every corner. Bec was amazingly flexible.’ The memory caused Charles to pause. ‘Anyway. She thought she was pregnant briefly, then miscarried. She bled, heavily. It was alarming.’ Flannery felt a sharp pang of sympathy for this remote, unknown woman who had lost her potential child. ‘And after that she went into this crazy pregnancy overdrive – she had to get pregnant, we had to have a kid together, it was a sign from the universe . . .’ He shook his head, and sighed. ‘I wouldn’t do it. Not like that, under that kind of pressure. It was the wrong time.’ Flannery marveled at how certain he had been, and how the cold clarity of his thinking had not, she guessed, felt to him like coldness.
‘Not until you, Beauty,’ Charles said. His brown intelligent eyes returned to her. He had made their own story one of predestination, inevitability; which made it very close to being, actually, planned. It was up to Flannery to hold on to the small kernel of truth that it had not been. ‘And the Peppercorn, of course,’ the future father added, touching Flannery’s swelling belly. ‘Peppercorn’ had been Charles’s name for the creature growing within Flannery since she had early on found a chart that illustrated fetal growth by food items: peppercorn at week five, blueberry at seven, kumquat at ten. At week twelve, Flannery encouraged Charles to change his nickname to Passion Fruit, but it hadn’t caught on. ‘I was waiting for the two of you.’
‘We’re flattered,’ Charles’s third wife joked, placing her hands over the bump, too. She was still astonished by what was happening beneath it. ‘Flattered.’
At the word flattered a flirtatious joke Flannery and Anne used to share surfaced suddenly in Flannery’s memory. ‘Flannery will get you nowhere’, Anne used to say to her with mock sternness, standing half clothed, her deep red hair giving the white walls a fiery glow, as if the apartment were a den of delicious iniquity; Anne said the phrase with a slight admonishing shake of the head when she felt their affair was taking too much valuable time away from her efforts to work on her doctoral thesis or prepare for the job market. ‘Oh, on the contrary,’ the eighteen-year-old Flannery would reply, with the verbal swagger love makes possible, ‘Flannery will get you everywhere.’
She smiled inadvertently at the recollection. Charles, caught up in his own reflections, did not notice, and Flannery chose not to share the memory with him. Past romances: was it always a good idea to discuss them? Not necessarily. Sometime Flannery might tell Charles about Anne (if he proved interested). But not now. For the moment that long-gone passion could stay deep within Flannery, not far from the little Passion Fruit herself – who jumped or kicked slightly just then, the first of many occasions on which the growing girl would seek to weigh in on her parents’ spoken and unspoken conversations.
15
Before the child’s arrival there was an eruption – not in itself significant, and certainly not as bad as others that followed, but it gave