Dear Reader
Page 19
“You may be correct, Flannery, I don’t know too much about that.”
“Truthfully, I’m no expert. What I’m telling you is straight out of the Norton Anthology.”
“In any case, your girl did it, didn’t she? Wuthering Heights. It isn’t a short story, is it? And of course she didn’t have a fancy laptop, did she, Flannery? So that’s quite a lot of ink and quill-pen action—was it the Protestant work ethic or a touch of mania? But let’s cut to the chase. Emily’s male characters? A bit over the top, am I right? Linton is a bit too much of a goody-goody, right? And Heathcliff? What an evil fellow. Or is he merely misunderstood?”
Flannery tried to keep her facial expression neutral, but her eyes widened.
“I thought you said Wuthering Heights was a girls’ book. You seem to know a lot about it.”
“I’m a genius.” He winked—an odd, old man gesture: “You seem very happy in this store.”
“Oh, I love bookstores.” Oh, no. Did she have to sound so joyful? She chirped: “But I’m so worried about Miss Sweeney.” Why did her voice sound false? She really was worried about Miss Sweeney!
Heath nodded in response to the growing gravity of Miss Sweeney’s situation. He turned back to the fiction bookshelf and ran his finger along the C’s. “You know what? I imagine that someday I will be in a bookstore, someplace, and I will see your name on the spine of a book, and I will say, ‘My goodness, I once met Flannery Fields, and she was a very nice girl indeed.’ Is that what you are going to Columbia for in the fall? To be a writer?”
The sweet pleasure of Heath divining her dream heated Flannery’s skin so intensely that it felt like her face might be crackling, caramelizing with pleasure. She fanned her face with Wuthering Heights and heard the caught laugh in Miss Sweeney’s voice: Infatuation has turned you to crème brûlée? Dial back the flame on that word torch, Flannery.
Of course she was acting bizarre, just like any other person who dreamed of being a writer. Wanting to be a writer! It was so completely embarrassing, so … so self-aggrandizing, just … gross: I’m a special snowflake and I’d like to share my pristinely original thoughts, via carefully crafted sentences, with the whole wide world! Flannery imagined there were worse aspirations: The desire to be a writer probably ranked above dreaming about—Someday! Somehow! If I work really, really hard!—selling drugs to depressed tweens, but, really, not by that much.
“Yes, well, I guess that being a writer is something that I’ve considered, you know, vaguely, but it’s not something I would actually pursue.” Flannery crossed her arms over her chest, so that Wuthering Heights was right in front of her heart. But Heath smiled so kindly that she couldn’t keep up the ruse. “I know it’s stupid, and I know I should want to do something better, something that helps people.”
“Has a writer never helped you? Has a book never helped you figure out your life while you were living it? What will your book be about?”
“I do have an idea, but it’s probably just so incredibly stupid … but, okay. To begin with, it’s all based on a true story. The setting is Kentucky.”
“A fine start. Bluegrass and bourbon. Pretty horses and fast women.”
“How do you know these things?”
“There’s this newfangled invention called reading, Flannery. You might trouble yourself to look into it.”
Flannery laughed, a little breathless from just thinking about her idea, which she truthfully considered an excellent one. “Anyhow, the time period is in the past, it’s not in the way, way back, you know, it’s not in 1712. It’s the 1940s in the land of bluegrass and bourbon, specifically in Appalachia. There is a community of people who have blue skin. No, really. Their skin looks very, very blue. Google it, Heath: the Blue People of Kentucky. It’s a minor blood disorder that gives them their blue-hued skin. They’re perfectly healthy. But of course, it isolates them.”
“They quite literally have the blues. Is that what you are saying to me?”
“Exactly, and so to avoid being bullied or harassed or worse, they go deeper and deeper into the Appalachian woods to live their lives, and they never make contact with outsiders. And then one blue girl walks out of the wilderness: She goes to a clinic with her brother, and though the country doctor working there has heard rumors about the Blue People of Kentucky, he has never actually encountered one. The doctor is shocked, but more importantly, kind and curious, and he figures out that the blue cast of their skin is caused by a recessive gene passed down through a small population intermarrying, and the cure is pure paradox: It’s a common drug called ‘methylene blue,’ and one injection cures the blood disorder. So of course it makes me imagine how it felt for the Blue People of Kentucky to emerge from the forest. Would it be freedom or heartbreak? And it also reminds me of”—Flannery tapped the cover of Wuthering Heights—“Cathy and Heathcliff. Would they have been happier if they stayed blue, if they went deeper and deeper into the forest together? They could have lived out their lives in remotest Appalachia—the metaphorical American moors; they could have lived, you know—”
“Happily ever after?” Heath arched his eyebrow. “Rainbows and bloody balloons and watercolor sunsets?”
Flannery met his gaze. Why had she told him her idea? Oh, God. “Well, any potential plot sounds stupid when you attach the phrase ‘rainbows and bloody balloons and watercolor sunsets.’”
Heath looked down at his feet. “True enough, Flannery, true enough. I apologize. Your book idea sounds wonderful. It’s just making me a bit sad … for personal reasons.”
“Oh,” Flannery said quietly. “Okay. Is it because—”
“They’re called ‘personal reasons’ because they’re personal, Flannery.” Heath smiled. “But your Blue Period is coming to an end. You, Flannery Fields, are the girl leaving the Appalachian woods. Say farewell to Kentucky—take your last sip of bourbon and ride off into the sunset on your racehorse. And listen, I really do like your idea quite a lot. I’m not just BS-ing you, Flannery. And I get where you’re going with it: The methylene blue is the apple in the Garden of Eden, am I right?” But he didn’t wait for her reply. “The blue girl that walked to the doctor’s office and set everything in motion can’t go back and live in the forest. She’s just like Eve with her big crunchy bite, or Cathy with her impetuous, wandering heart. But really, couldn’t Heathcliff just give her a break? Couldn’t he have found a new girl? Couldn’t everyone grow old and chuckle about their teenage antics? And original sin for all humanity because … of a bite of fruit? And the image of the long-haired girl in the Garden holding the waxed Red Delicious in front of her face? When you consider the agricultural geography, you know that Eve would have actually been holding a pomegranate—lovely ruby seeds and pith with inedible skin so tough you need a knife to slice into it, thus rendering Eve’s symbolic bite nonsensical.”
Flannery nodded. “Wow. You really have spent a lot of your gap year reading.”
Heath nodded. “Just whatever I buy off the blankets on the street. It’s pretty hit or miss. Lots of motivational books—if I want to find out who, exactly, is the thoughtless bastard who moved my cheese, or how to live my life with intention, I’m well set.”
“I see,” Flannery said archly, still smarting a bit from the “rainbow and balloons” comment. “Alright. Well, you’ve really broken down both Wuthering Heights and the Creation story for me with your mansplaining.”
“Flannery! I already apologized. Don’t be a grudgy goose.” He punched her arm gently. “And I hate to ask, as it doesn’t sound like a terrific compliment, but what is mansplaining?”
“When a man explains something to a woman, assuming she knows less than he does.”
“So: not quite a compliment, but in the direct vicinity thereof.”
Flannery laughed, warming to him again, and she was still eager, frantic, really, to talk about her novel. “You know in my book, I also plan to draw a subtle and ironic though meaningful—I hope—parallel to ‘De Daumier-Smith’s Blue
Period,’ this amazing short story by J. D. Salinger, who of course wrote…”
Flannery raised her hand and flicked her wrist with a flourish and held it there in midair like a game show hostess indicating a fabulous prize; she smiled and nodded, as if enjoying the covetous oohs and the ahs of the studio audience. But Heath was silent.
Flannery dropped her hand and laughed, thinking how easy it was for a common fact to slip your mind. “The title of J. D. Salinger’s seminal novel? I’ll give you a little hint.” She echoed Miss Sweeney’s words, how she’d introduced the book to the class before their first discussion. “It’s not the Bible, and it’s not the Koran, but people either love it or hate it.”
“I’m quite sure I have no idea, Flannery.”
“The first famous young-adult novel?”
“I already said—”
“Catcher in the Rye!”
But Heath didn’t have the face-palm OhmyGodofcourse! moment. He shrugged. “Never heard of it, as I previously said, Flannery. Is it a takeoff of ‘Coming through the Rye,’ the Burns poem?”
“What?” Sure, she knew the poem from freshman lit—Miss Piccone’s literary crush on Robert Burns had prompted many assignments. But she was mostly surprised that Heath knew an obscure poem from over two hundred years ago and not the famous book published in the 1950s, and that he sang a few stanzas under his breath: “Can a body meet a body coming through the rye? Can a body kiss a body need a body cry?”
Heath pulled another book from the shelf. “What’s this? God, not another title thief! Everybody’s ripping off Scotland’s favorite son. This fellow John Steinbeck stole his title from the Burns poem, ‘To a Mouse.’”
Flannery laughed. “John Steinbeck, great American novelist and title thief!”
“What’s this about then, this Of Mice and Men?” He thumbed through a few pages.
“You’ve never read Of Mice and Men?”
He mistook her surprise for snobbery and pitched his voice in horrifying imitation of hers. “‘You’ve never read Of Mice and Men?’ Oh, how many famous books have escaped the eyes and heart of poor Heath Smith? What a shame. What a shame for Heath to be so hopelessly stupid, what a sorry shame it is.”
“I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that … it’s assigned a lot in school, so I just assumed … It’s probably only assigned in American schools…” Flannery stopped her rambling apology and tried, instead, to summarize Of Mice and Men for Heath, but her words sounded watery and rambling, unworthy.
Still, Heath shuddered. “Even a heartless bastard like myself couldn’t keep reading something so sad.”
Flannery nodded, still flustered. “It is sad,” she said absently.
“I bet I know a book we both have read.” Heath found a slim volume on the shelves and pulled it out with a satisfied: “Here we are!” He held “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” so Flannery could see the cover. “Now, this one I’ve read, Flannery. But if someone asked me if I’d like to read about old Bartleby again, I’d have to look them straight in the eye and say…”
Heath and Flannery said it in unison: “I would prefer not to.”
It was the lamest of literary jokes, a lame subset of jokes in the first place, yet Flannery felt the tension between them dissipate and she knew the joy of instant connection—Instant Karma knocking her off her feet!—a geeky bliss that suggested their cerebellums had just joined, gray matter to gray matter. Flannery imagined a nerd baby flying out of a book wearing over-sized horn-rimmed glasses and yelling “MAMA,” a definitive Immaculate Conception that would make Flannery Madonna of the nerds.
Yet in these fast seconds of fanciful happiness, Flannery felt a pang of shame: Miss Sweeney had not been in her thoughts at all. She looked at Heath in profile, his finger moving along the book spines, and shivered, desire and dread converging as she held up Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights. “This is the book I need to read.”
“Of course. I’m sorry; we’ve gotten a bit off track.” He swept his hand to the carpeted stairs, where Flannery perched on one side of the third step like a cat, her back stretched straight and her legs drawn close.
“Just let me pay,” Heath said. “And I’ll join you.”
“Oh?” Flannery looked up. “What are you buying?”
He held out a book with blue peacock feathers on the cover, The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. “I’m quite keen on her first name.”
Flannery’s heart fluttered: Hope is the thing with feathers.
Miss Sweeney’s red-ink words scrolled away in Flannery’s mind: That’s Dickinson, not Brontë, Dear Reader. Know your Emilys.
Flannery opened Wuthering Heights and read.
Nine
Dear Reader, so there I was, a Flannery O’Connor postcard in my hand, hearing that familiar voice: It seemed like a minor miracle for the two of us to be in the same exact spot in all of Manhattan, but it was a misfired miracle, for I had not conjured Brandon, but his nemesis, Miles McPherson, with his small rectangular glasses, and, beneath his unbuttoned jacket, a Charlie Brown sweater—wavy merino wool with a big zigzag across the chest—hipster Brooklyn all the way. It was the same sweater he’d worn in his photo from the cover of the New York Times Book Review. My mouth dropped open from the surprise, and I felt like I might vomit up my Starbucks. Since I hadn’t eaten any solid food—since when?—my stomach was basically a coffee urn.
“Oh, hey, Miles,” I said casually, though I hadn’t seen him since my Columbia days. I put the postcard back on the spindle.
“You cut your hair.”
Miles looked so sad standing there in the entrance of Westsider Books, his left arm holding the door open, the cold air streaming in. I could see the man at the cash register watching us. I assumed we would quickly find out if he was the owner and responsible for the heating bill, or if he just worked there.
“I guess I did.” I touched the ends of my long bob, as if surprised. It wasn’t like I’d gone full-on Sinead. I just hadn’t wanted to be the person who grew old with princess curls streaming down her back.
“It’s still nice. I remember the first time I saw you in Gender Studies. You were sitting next to the window, and the sun was hitting your hair, and it was all lit up—red and gold and chestnut brown and blonde, a rainbow of dark fire tones.”
Dear Reader, Good God, who talked like that? Miles McPherson.
“Oh, I—”
“Mr. McPherson?” The man at the cash register sounded cheerful. “Would you mind pulling the door shut?”
Owner.
“Sorry!” Miles called out, still looking at me. He pushed the door back even farther so I could walk in.
I brushed past Miles as I entered Westsider Books; my hand started to hurt, that old metallic ache. A rod still aligned my middle finger.
“Also, your eyelashes were pure black, and I wondered how you had your fire-hair and black eyelashes.”
God. Like he didn’t know. “Mascara.”
“As I found out later. The silver tube in my bathroom.”
Now, along with the jarring memory of my betrayal of Brandon, I felt the onset of a migraine: blinking zebra stripes obscuring the vision in my left eye.
“So what are you doing in the city, Caitlin? Are you living here now?”
“I live in Connecticut.” I took a deep breath. The store smelled of moldy books and winter coats packed too long in mothballs. Was Brandon in here? Was he watching, furious? Or was this part of a still-unfolding plan? Did Brandon now have the power to punish me by arranging a coincidental meeting with Miles that I would find excruciating?
“Oh? Connecticut?” Miles blanched as if I’d told him I’d just been released from prison. No, he would have found the fact I’d been to prison interesting, whereas Connecticut, which Miles surely perceived as the zenith of provincial blandness, only disappointed. “I wasn’t sure what happened, if you moved back to Kansas after graduation, or what.”
In the back was a dark-haired man in a plaid shirt, the resident tabby cat figure-eighting around his feet until he reached down and picked it up: Jack Kerouac snuggling the feline. There was a bearded guy in a corny J.Crew safari trench coat who caught my eye and looked away, shy. Oh, okay: That was why the women liked Hemingway.
I looked back at Miles. I met his gaze; we were the same exact height. “Well, I know what you’ve been up to. Congratulations on your book.”
Miles nodded, and breezily thanked me, as if my thanks were his due—ah, the old arrogance. “Now I’m working on trying to finish my next one. But. The twins aren’t the best sleepers, so I’m just averaging like four or five hours of sleep each night myself. Did you know that I’m married and have twins?”
I nodded. I had a subscription to New York magazine, and had read the feature article on his literary life, and so was duly informed that Miles had married the summer after he’d graduated from Columbia, to “a woman I had known only a month, but who looked like a Disney Princess and swore like a sailor.” I thought that an awfully curious phrase, as Miles had grown up wealthy on the Upper East Side, and to my knowledge, didn’t know anyone who served in the Navy. There was a photo of his wife, Gwendolyn McPherson (née Adams-Wilson), a self-described “feminist stay-at-home mom” holding their twins, Pearl and Buck. Dear Reader, my Midwestern childhood had included many trips to Disney World, and while his wife certainly looked lovely enough to wait tables at any second-tier Disney theme restaurant in Orlando, she could have never strolled the grounds of the Magic Kingdom and been mistaken for royalty. Miles and his wife had moved to Iowa City for the writing program and had returned to NYC with his novel published to acclaim and brisk sales. The Sorrows of Young Tate was hailed as a “masterful post-ironic journey of American Manhood.”