A tall, freckled student with the awkward long neck of a giraffe approached her, his bulky gray backpack giving him an ominous stoop. Flannery looked up at him and felt a sentimental pang – her last student. Pregnancy made her sappy, all the time.
‘Hi, Ms. Jansen,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something? Before you go?’
Flannery hoped it was a simple question, answerable in a few minutes. She could stretch to so little at this point. She just wanted to lie down. ‘Sure,’ she encouraged him, faintly.
‘What’s it like to have a book on the bestseller list?’
‘What’s it like?’ The question disarmed her, though she knew that A Visit to Don Lennart was largely the reason people signed up for her class. She stared into the young man’s face. He had bright, eager eyes, a smattering of color on either cheek, rubbery lips slightly open with curiosity. He had written, she thought she recalled, an oddly affecting piece about a barber.
‘It’s . . .’ she started, her muddied mind searching for the right adjective, because she wanted neither to mislead nor condescend to her student. Surreal? (Too easy.) Fun? (Only somewhat true, and lazy.) Unexpected? (Accurate, but it didn’t tell you anything.) ‘It’s . . . um . . .’
A slap on the door. It swung wide open.
‘Flannery! There you are. Jesus. Come on, we’ve got to go.’
Flannery and the freckled student startled. ‘Sorry,’ Flannery said, her face flushing, but she stood up. Was this really happening in her classroom? Being ordered out like a dawdling child?
‘No problem,’ the boy shrugged. ‘I just –’
‘I need you to come now.’ Charles snatched Flannery’s jacket from the back of the chair, and made an impatient sweeping gesture to get his wife out of the room. ‘I’m not even legally parked. I don’t want those fuckers to give me a ticket.’
Charles glared at the young man, as if he represented the parking authority. Flannery apologized again to her student but allowed herself to be ushered out so that as little as possible of this would be witnessed by someone else.
‘It’s disorienting,’ Flannery threw over her shoulder hurriedly. ‘In a word!’ She tried to laugh, as if this were a joke, but she was too embarrassed to look the kid in the face, and see whether he had heard her.
16
In the car, free from eyes – not that eyes bothered Charles much, anyway; when he wanted an audience he imagined everyone seeing him, and when he didn’t he believed he was invisible – Charles continued, his voice quavering with impatience. He was behind the wheel in congealing city traffic, and everyone was his enemy.
‘Jeffrey’s coming today. Remember? And Baer is out of town.’ Jeffrey was Charles’s New York dealer, Baer his studio assistant.
‘Okay . . .’ Flannery said slowly.
‘No. It’s not “okay” because he wants me to have come up with a line on my new work. I need you to help me with the language. You’re a writer.’
‘Well, I can do that, but I was teaching. You can’t just –’
‘Class was over. You were done. He’s coming today, Flannery.’
‘I understand. But –’
‘You don’t understand. You’re not listening to me.’ He shook his head in frustration. His teeth were gritted.
‘I am listening! I just –’
‘No. You’re not. Because if you were, you’d stop nitpicking here, and realize this is important.’
‘OK, sweetheart, but teaching is important too. It’s embarrassing –’
‘Oh, I embarrass you? Really?’ The contempt in Charles’s tone hung in the air like an industrial fume. Flannery’s heart was thudding now.
‘Please don’t raise your voice.’
‘I’m not raising my VOICE.’
‘You’re shouting.’
‘This is such bullshit!’ He slammed his hands down on the steering wheel, after a sudden jerking brake to avoid rear-ending the Prius in front of him. ‘I’m a man, Flannery. This is what we sound like.’
Flannery turned her head away from her husband then, and watched San Francisco’s dingy streets blur, through her wet eyes. She hated crying. It was so weak. She did not want Charles to see it (though of course she did, too).
The drive to Charles’s studio continued without further conversation. If Flannery expected a softening from Charles, she would be disappointed, though at least the object of his anger shifted, to the other jackass drivers, one slow dog-walking pedestrian in a crosswalk (Can you move along, Grandma?) and the traffic engineers of this stupid backward city.
Flannery made herself think of something else, clear this episode from her mind. She traveled back to her appearance on the TV morning show, when she was interviewed for Don Lennart. The interview had been a short, confusing badminton match between herself and the two hosts, a sparkly black woman and a powder-cheeked gray-haired white guy, each feeding her easy questions that she was supposed to bat back, entertainingly. In the segment’s last seconds, Flannery thought of a funny story she had forgotten to tell about Adele, one that cast her in a warm, heroic light, rather than as the comic sidekick.
‘That reminds me of a time right at the beginning of our trip,’ Flannery began, gathering the practiced sentence in her mind. In that infinitesimal pause, though, the mascaraed hostess talked over Flannery. The seconds drained away, her cheerful summary of Flannery’s book built inexorably to the commercial break, and eventually Flannery had to smile, purse her lips, and know that she had come to the end of her time on the air. Adele had been nice about it afterwards, said she had done great, but Flannery regretted not managing to get out that detail.
When they finally reached Charles’s studio, Charles frayed and damp with exasperation, they sat at his broad work table together, and Flannery calmly helped write a few good paragraphs that framed and contextualized Charles’s new work. She sculpted some language on his behalf.
There would be no apology for Charles’s outburst. Over time, Flannery eventually learned the pattern. Much later her husband might make some other compensatory gesture – that night, he picked up ice cream for her on the way home – and he would turn the story around, neatly, so that it was Flannery who had to be absolved.
‘Listen,’ Charles said understandingly, as he donned his gray silk pajamas. This was hours later, almost midnight, after Jeffrey’s visit to the studio, which had gone very well, and the dinner afterwards, from which Flannery had excused herself. She had been dozing already for an hour or two when Charles came in. ‘I realize the pregnancy makes you emotional. I get that.’
Flannery, lying plumply in bed, nodded, only half awake. She was a writer, yes, or had been once, and sometimes she could still be beautifully articulate.
Other times she simply could not find the right thing, or anything at all, to say.
17
With Willa was born light.
That was all Flannery