Pages For Her. Sylvia Brownrigg

Miguel de Allende who happened to be Flannery’s father Len, a parent she had never previously met. She had returned to New York and, at twenty-five, gone so far as to do what she had always meant to do: write. She produced a wry, racy memoir of the girls’ circuitous odyssey and that fraught paternal meeting. A Visit to Don Lennart, a book of wit and raunch and many-pixeled vividness, spent months on the bestseller list and handed Flannery her quarter hour of fame. Under duress, she had pushed herself to appear on television and radio to talk about herself and her story, a degree of exposure that Flannery had foolishly not anticipated, and which led to a strange interior dislocation. She began to find herself hard to find. Still in motion, Flannery carried on to write a second book, because everyone told her to while she was still hot – as if her name were a potato, or a pizza – but this second was a novel with subdued characters set in a remote and not quite real California, pulled from some mournful place within her and in which she deliberately chose to avoid any autobiographical elements. After Flannery finally clawed her way back from the dark dream of its composition she learned that the book had gone largely unread, consigned to the death heap of fictions deemed to be quiet. By this point fairly unmoored, Flannery went a little crazy and cheated on her girlfriend Adele, who had been her companion in Mexico and had anyway never recovered from the shock of being turned into a character in her lover’s pages. Flannery drifted into the deserved, expected, but nonetheless distressing breaking apart of that relationship. She had finally, in a combination of resignation and surrender, retreated to San Francisco to recover, the best part of which was that she could live again with her old college roommate Susan Kim, who now worked at a boutique fashion designer’s and was as stylish, smart and impatient as she had always been.

      ‘I can’t move a millimeter. I’m exhausted,’ Flannery protested from the chic second-hand daybed by the window. ‘Wake me up when it’s time to vote for the president.’ But Susan, undeterred, dragged her out anyway, with the authority of a decade-old friendship and to thwart Flannery’s desire to stay in watching an entire season of a television show about the mob. Susan made Flannery dress, and dress presentably. ‘You’re getting some oxygen. Like it or not, lady.’

      And there, under gallery lighting, in a room with stark, gorgeous desert photographs Flannery mistakenly thought were his, she met the artist Charles Marshall, a large and charismatic man, who with his stories and attention took her far away from herself – which was precisely where Flannery Jansen wanted to be.

      6

      Charles charmed her, compelled her, pursued her.

      His beard was a deep animal brown that matched his warm dark eyes, and his laugh was like a punctuating blast from the orchestra’s brass section. He found Flannery amusing, and himself too, as he unspooled practiced, theatrical tales of his exotic life in a world Flannery knew little of – galleries, studios, commissions. The humor in his stories came from his sharp eye for surreal detail (‘So we open this gargantuan box and under a thousand peppermint-green Styrofoam popcorn nuggets find this exquisite little eagle skull, the size of a walnut’) and neat way of puncturing inflated egos, if not always his own (‘So the guy’s standing there holding his champagne flute talking about the St. Kitt’s wedding he went to and flinging names down, all the pop stars and moguls who were there. It was like celebrity confetti, you couldn’t even see the ground around him for all the names he’d dropped’). Flannery could sense the energy and wit in Charles’s art mirrored in these performances. The scale on which Charles Marshall created, along with the sheer dimensions of his success – in the nineties he was the American Pavilion’s featured artist at the Venice Biennale – reassured Flannery. He was large enough to shelter her after her own overexposure (her skin still felt pink and peeling from the experience with A Visit to Don Lennart, as if she’d been irradiated by all the attention) and more than that, to dwarf with his notoriety the very brief period of hers.

      ‘Flannery Jansen?’ Charles Marshall laughed, shaking her hand, engulfing hers with his supple and substantial paw. ‘The author of the book about Mexico?’

      She nodded, oddly surprised that this man knew of it. Hadn’t she seen gossip page pictures of him with an indie film star on his arm? And maybe years before that, when she was still in college, a reference somewhere to his lavish wedding to an East Coast heiress?

      ‘Sex in the saguaro patch. Right?’

      Flannery nodded again with a practiced smile. The saguaro patch always came up. ‘The single best-known thing about me,’ she said with mock ruefulness, pushing her sandy hair behind her ear. ‘It’s like my signature tune, that scene – it follows me wherever I go.’

      ‘But you knew it would. Right?’ The man had not quite let go of Flannery’s hand. ‘Two girls going at it, fueled by tequila – a great steamy scene, and cactus spines to be extracted afterwards, bringing it back to comedy. Come on! It had everything.’

      Flannery agreed obligingly, and then Charles issued his brief brass laughter and she, disarmed, found herself joining him. She had had this scene quoted back to her a hundred times, yet somehow in his telling it seemed comical to her again, and better than that – forgivable.

      They were standing close enough by then that Flannery could smell him, and something stirred in her. Charles Marshall had the scent of real stuff about him – oil, paint, wood, steel – unlike all the writers she knew who gave off the air of nothing more substantive than neurosis, perhaps the lingering aura of a struggle with language. She was tired of writers, herself included. They did not build. They needed no muscles. Their hands were scrawny, and lacked strength.

      Lust traveled between Charles and Flannery in the gallery. It was dense enough that you could almost touch it, and Flannery, young though she still could be, was old enough to recognize that they both intended to satisfy their desire.

      7

      This affair was not, if you had been reading Flannery’s life closely, a complete surprise.

      As she had recognized in the early days of her adulthood, not long before she introduced Adele to her dear, puzzled mother (who did not want to be negative, she just wanted to understand), Flannery had known attractions to men as well as to women. Flannery had gone to bed with a few, even. The tall and rangy contractor guy. That notorious poet. Ill-advisedly, her publicist on the paperback of Don Lennart. She could be drawn to men; she had just never been drawn in by a man.

      Charles Marshall drew Flannery into him, and he did not let go. He almost smothered her, with his size and his personality and his disproportionate gifts. He showered her with offerings, flowers and jewelry and clothing and, even more persuasively for Flannery, small Charles Marshall originals: a tiny ingenious bicycle built of beat-up ballpoint pen casings and two old typewriter ribbon wheels, with a banner that said love story across its handlebars; a headband of interwoven shot silk and oxidized silver with a card attached that said to my Beauty.

      Strangely, Flannery found that she did not mind being smothered, and she did not object to the inundation of splendid gifts. (‘The guy’s a genius,’ said Susan Kim, somewhat awed. ‘I may have to steal some of his designs for my boss.’) After the artificial public self Flannery had had to create for the promotion of her memoir, it was a relief to disappear into the encompassing embrace of Charles Marshall. (‘Charles Marshall, honey?’ her mother said, when Flannery eventually confided in her. ‘The Charles Marshall?’) Truly grateful, Flannery reciprocated in the way she was best able to at that time: she gave up every inch of her lithe body to him, handing over to Charles all the pleasure he had the hunger and the energy to take.

      The lust between them was intense and mutual and all but unquenchable, for a time. Charles was the opposite of all that Flannery had wanted before and perhaps that mirrored inversion generated some of the heat of the attraction, like a magnifying glass focusing solar rays. The man was large, a heavy breather, a snorer, a guffawer. Previously Flannery had loved the petite, the tactful and the elegant – her first great love having embodied those qualities most purely – though anyone Flannery loved had also to have a straight spine, and a strong nerve. When Charles and Flannery made love, the man announced himself like an important guest at a party when on the threshold of climax, and