Pages For Her. Sylvia Brownrigg
you could make in your life. The silver-lined cloud. The paint spill that tips the canvas into masterpiece. The wrong number you dial, which connects you with a person who becomes one of your most significant.
11
Was this pregnancy like that – a wrong number? Was Flannery at thirty-one going to start a nine-month journey to meet someone she had occasionally imagined – a pen-pal, a character – but did not yet know?
Or was this pregnancy the other kind of mistake – the dead-end error that had neither excuse nor benefit, was nothing but a blot, a crash, a rending? Was Flannery about to be torn up?
‘It’s not a great time for this,’ Charles had nakedly said, lying back in bed one cold morning after a shot of slippery, eager intercourse followed by a hit of the blackest coffee. The drama of the situation had ignited lust in them both, but it subsided, once spent, into a chilly realism. They had known each other four months. It was not long enough to have learned how the other handled surprise, or crisis, or responsibility.
Charles frowned as he looked up at the high ceiling of his bedroom, and his goatee frowned along with him. His New York dealer had just finalized the date of a show in the spring of the following year, and his professional mind was racing along its track toward that goal: timetable, works, contacts, ambitions. Flannery’s professional mind was a disused carriage on a side track, waiting.
A yellow-gray light stole weakly in through the broad sash windows, a bashful ghost. Though not icy, San Francisco could nonetheless be bleak in January.
Flannery lay alongside Charles, moving her hand across his broad, silver-tufted torso. Stroking a wiry chest was an exotic sensation to her still; sometimes it felt like one of the most different sensual pleasures of touching a man rather than a woman. She watched the face of this person she had opened herself to again and again, a man she had allowed to come inside her body and change her life – if she chose to pursue that change. She would be altered, certainly, even if she didn’t. Either way, Charles had, in the way peculiar to that sexual act, taken possession of Flannery’s body. Her physical self would never be hers in the same way again.
Four months! Flannery could not believe her stupidity, nor his, at having so mangled the handling of birth control. Shouldn’t he have been adept at that kind of thing? Charles professed to have been out of practice using condoms, having mostly had partners who were on the pill, and certainly Flannery could claim no expertise, but the bungling was, like the sex itself, their shared endeavor. There was a riot of confusion, yearning, and fear within Flannery, along with an incipient sickness that gave Charles’s bedroom a nauseating tilt. The cruise ship image came to her mind again, though this time she thought more clearly: I might just want to get off, next time we dock, and get back to land.
Flannery palmed Charles’s massive shoulder, pale as Venetian marble and as sturdy. She loved the sheer heft of Charles’s muscles. He could lift a lot, and it showed. If she were ever trapped under a crashed car, Flannery sometimes thought, or in a collapsed building after the next big earthquake, Charles would be able to extricate her. There was a comfort in that. As she touched him, Flannery was thinking, wondering, picturing. She wanted this man who had so marked her to say the right thing to her now. She was not sure what that might be, in these compromising circumstances, but like a voice in tune she would know it when she heard it.
Charles blinked his deep coffee-brown eyes and turned back to Flannery. ‘My Beauty,’ he called her, and sometimes ‘Venus on the half shell’ and, as of a few days ago, ‘Lady Madonna’. She could see a new light in his eyes, and it scared and excited her, both.
‘Listen, Beauty,’ he said, easing himself into Flannery’s caressing hand, ‘if you want to build this person, if you want to sculpt a human being, whoever it turns out to be –’ and his voice was low and nearly breaking, far deeper than his customary register of joke and bluster – ‘I want to be right there with you, Flannery Jansen, for the unveiling.’
He kissed her tenderly. Flannery closed her eyes. Tears collected at their corners, as some wordless image moved through her mind of Lenny, that hippie in Mexico she had to travel thousands of miles to meet, in her twenties. This father-to-be was right here. She was in his arms. He was saying he’d stay there.
Flannery opened her eyes and looked at her giant lover, half walrus, half genius, who had with her complicity brought the two of them to this precipitous edge together. It wasn’t the metaphor for parenthood Flannery would have chosen – child as art piece – but what mattered was that Charles was, in his way, giving her a yes. He had said the right thing. Flannery kissed him back, and pulled him closer to her with a short-sighted and old-fashioned passion, along with the even more old-fashioned belief that it would somehow all work out fine.
12
They married, too.
Why not? Flannery was dizzy, excited, seized with a sense that she could change everything about herself in some mad, blurred tumble of adventure. It was like being at some noisy party in an unknown part of town. Do I want another glass? Of course I want another glass! (Wait, where are we again? Do we have a way to get home?)
She moved in with Charles, into the smart, Fauvishly shaded Victorian a few blocks up from the famed intersection of Haight and Ashbury, where hippies and itinerants still slouched toward Bethlehem, just as they had when Didion interviewed them forty years before. At the art college where she had been teaching, Flannery was so unable to discuss maternity leave with her boss that she simply told him she was going to finish the semester and then needed to ‘take time off for some other projects’. She told her mother about the marriage (‘Charles Marshall, honey? The Charles Marshall?’), though left the baby news for a later, rainy day. Flannery’s mother was one of the three people who came to witness what Charles enjoyed calling the couple’s ‘shotgun wedding’ at the San Francisco City Hall on Valentine’s morning. Laura Jansen wore a lilac dress and carried a colorful bouquet of gerbera daisies, as if she were Flannery’s flower girl. The other two in attendance were Charles’s best friends, an architect and his pianist wife, who brought leis to put around the couple’s necks after the ceremony. Flannery stood in the grand, gold-domed building where Dan White shot and killed Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk, a gory fact she could not for some reason get out of her head as she took the vows and promised to do all the things you were supposed to do for your spouse. Check, check, check. I will, I do, I promise. (Where had the murders taken place, actually? Who first found the bodies?) The efficient Chinese American officiant was doing a steady business in marriages that day. ‘People like to choose the fourteenth,’ he told them, with a mild, bureaucratic smile. ‘Helps husbands have an easy date to remember, so their wives don’t get mad at them.’ He winked.
This was the life Flannery was entering: the one where people made jokes that might have seemed fresh in the nineteen fifties, about absent-minded husbands and their nagging wives. The ball and chain. Take my wife . . . please!
The experience was like one of those episodic, night-long dreams. It was strange and at points surreal, drawing promiscuously on history and fantasy and odd juxtapositions, yet it had its own internal logic. Flannery was nauseous, she was pregnant, she was married, and she lived in a house – with her husband. She had become a wife and, if all went well, she would, in October, become a mother.
She found herself wondering in quiet moments, on a sloped street, in a slanting light, when she would finally wake up, and how she would feel when she did.
13
When she looked back on this period later, Flannery would have difficulty distinguishing between the intense nausea of her pregnancy (constant vomiting, in no way restricted to mornings and often at the most insalubrious places – a Safeway parking lot, a museum bathroom) and the dizzying extremity of her leap of faith into the arms and home of Charles Marshall.
Flannery had studied the concept of the leap of faith at college one semester, during a late adolescent foray into existential philosophy. She had been trying to regain her balance after being abandoned by Anne, and delving into explorations of being and nothingness seemed the