Chapter 14
“So,” James began, closing the front door. He gestured awkwardly around the foyer of his house with arms spread, hands open. “Welcome.”
Anne was about one second away from asking “What, to homosexuality?” before she realized just in time that he was trying to be nice.
So she closed her mouth on her absurd question and fished a couple of tissues out of her purse instead. Not letting herself think about the awful sight she made, she dabbed carefully at the tender skin under her eyes.
The tissue came away streaked with mascara, not the only place she’d left her makeup. On the pale salmon shoulder of James’s polo shirt, black smudges stood out in a large wet patch. James hated stains. Hated any physical blemish or imperfection. They’d shared that once.
“I’m so sorry about—” She gestured toward the stain.
James looked down at his shoulder and shrugged. “Nothing that can’t be dealt with later. Arthur’s a genius with laundry. What that man can do with a little white vinegar and baking soda would shock even you.”
She’d sprayed Tide on James’s clothes their entire marriage and never once been praised for it. “The guest bathroom, I can’t remember, it’s—?”
“First door to your right.” He pointed. “I’ll be in the kitchen. Wine? I know it’s still early, but if an occasion ever called for it—”
“God, yes,” she said automatically. “Wait. Not right now. Thank you, though. Water, please. Sparkling, if you’ve got it.”
“Water?” He repeated it like she’d made her request using a different language, and started down the steps into the sunken living room. “All right. Sparkling water. Sure. Coming right up.”
“Wait a second.”
James turned around expectantly. “Yes?”
“Do you—do you have anything to—? I know I’m here without being invited, and I really don’t want to be rude, especially after you’ve been so kind to me, but—” She could feel her face heating. “To be honest, I’m a little—”
Clearly puzzled, he waited for her to complete her sentence.
“Hungry,” she finished.
His mouth opened in genuine astonishment.
Had Anne ever admitted so explicitly to James that she owned something as humiliating as an appetite? “I haven’t had lunch. It would be nice to have something to snack on. If you’ve got anything handy.”
“You’re—?”
“A hungry lesbian, James. Catch up.”
He laughed, a quiet, kind laugh, conspiratorial, as if they’d shared a private joke.
A pained, tight coil inside Anne—one that’d been corkscrewed tightly since the car ride home from Joshua Tree—loosened slightly.
“I think I can put something together for us.” James wasn’t winking at her, not quite, but the tone was close. “Fruit?”
“Don’t you dare start with me,” she warned, although the corners of her mouth were twitching a little. “We’re not there yet.”
But maybe they would be. Eventually.
In the bathroom down the hall, Anne took a moment to stare at herself in the enameled cast-iron mirror.
Stared at her reddened eyes and her pale skin and her tousled hair, the same color as the wine she’d left on the kitchen counter back home.
Most of the makeup she’d applied that morning was gone.
She splashed a little cold water on her cheeks and pinched them for color.
“You’re a lesbian,” she told her reflection, and, incredibly, the woman in the mirror didn’t fall apart or change or shrink from the word. She just said it right back.
It terrifies you, doesn’t it? Sadie had asked her.
Sadie was right. That word did frighten Anne.
It carried old and ingrained associations with women you weren’t supposed to be like.
Women who were made fun of, sneered at, pitied.
And although she knew that times had changed, a voice inside her still shrieked that lesbians were other people.
Not her, not Anne. Someone had made a mistake.
She wasn’t supposed to be one. She was supposed to be what she’d always tried so hard to be.
You’re not normal. Sadie, under a black sky in the night desert. And neither am I. We’re both so much better than that.
Fear, yes. But not just. Relief, too. Marrow-deep, shattering relief.
Because that one word, lesbian, had already given Anne a first gift: permission. No matter what happened next—what Sadie decided or didn’t—Anne didn’t have to try so hard anymore.
On her way to the living room, she passed a tall, broad bookcase, overflowing with stacks and stacks—Arthur’s doing, James wasn’t a reader—and several books lying face up on the shelf at eye level. A familiar cover immediately caught her eye.
Anne stopped short.
Close to the Feeling, the title read, over an illustration of one hand reaching toward another. Below that: Sadie Rosenthal.
Sadie’s most recent chapbook had been published by a small Northern California press just a couple of months ago.
She’d labored over this one for nearly a year, rewriting and rewriting each poem until every letter, every apostrophe, every semicolon felt exactly right.
It made perfect sense that James and Arthur would have a copy; Arthur was the kind of person who liked to quote Pablo Neruda in casual conversation.
Unable to stop herself, she picked up the thin book. It fell open on a page with a piece of paper, wrinkled where once it had been folded into a small square. Anne recognized it instantly.
From the desk of Anne Harris Lowell. Her own stationery. And on that stationery, Anne’s own familiar script, scrawled below.
For a long moment she stood there with the chapbook in her hand and stared down at that piece of paper, remembering.
February. Sadie’s publication day.
That morning, Anne had picked up a bouquet and arranged it in one of her better vases. She’d ordered a spray of flowers—no filler—that reminded her of Sadie. Blue orchids, Japanese anemone, delphiniums, and jasmine.
She’d set down the vase on Sadie’s front doorstep and rang the bell, walking away quickly before Sadie could open the door.
Too much to be there in person, too vivid.
Instead, she’d preferred to imagine the way Sadie’s face would light up when she saw the flowers, her grin wide and splendid on that lovely face.
There’d been a note to accompany the bouquet.
She’d written a handful of drafts on her stationery, none of them right.
First: Congratulations. Then: I know you worked very hard on this book.
I’m sure it’s wonderful. Then: I admire the way you share yourself with the world.
And: I’m so proud to be your friend. One last draft: just the word I and the letters lo, before Anne had torn up the paper.
Then the final version, the one Anne stared at now.
For the bravest woman I know.
A
How had Anne’s note gotten into this copy?
She picked it up and noticed what lay behind the paper: the collection’s title poem. Sadie had once said that it was dangerous to use the same title for a poem and the chapbook that held it. The poem had to be muscular enough to take the weight of all that expectation.
Anne held the book a little farther away from her face and squinted, trying to make out the words without the help of her reading glasses.
Yes, the wave is very sorry to intrude like this:
can’t help but rush unasked to touch the sand,
then scared, recoil.
And the wave comes back again.
What’s tide but obsession’s endless need?
And fear’s a sea that pulls away.
Beloved, I’m sticky with it, both
the fear and the compulsion. Last night
I dreamed you grew a poem in open hands,
held it up to me and called it your surrender. Here I am,
you said, here’s honey, salt. Taste.
Language fails.
What I tell you gets close to the feeling, never grasps
the thing itself. A map is not the land.
Speak anyway. Fail.
Tell me the failure’s worth the trying, tell me
like the tide, tell me again, again, again.
Anne read it a second time, then a third, her heartbeat wild.
It was about her. She didn’t understand the poem, but she knew, somehow: It was about her. At some point in the past year, Sadie had written these lines about Anne and put them into her chapbook, probably trusting that Anne’s aversion to poetry would keep her safely away.
Speak anyway. Fail. Well, Anne had done that today, hadn’t she? But that wasn’t where the poem ended.
Tell me again, again, again.
Impulsively, Anne clutched the book to her chest, breath shallow in her chest. “James?” she called out and walked into the kitchen. “Sadie’s latest book. Where’d you get it?”
James stood at the massive kitchen island.
He’d already laid out a small feast for them: grapes, a few rinds of cheese, some crackers, olives, almonds.
A glass of sparkling water sat next to the spread.
“Oh, that? She loaned us her copy a while back. I told her I wanted to buy our own to support her work, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Don’t worry, I’m still ordering one.”
That explained the note. But it didn’t explain everything else Anne couldn’t figure out: what Sadie meant by the dream in the poem, why it mattered that language failed, what the tide had to do with any of it.
Would understanding the poem help her understand Sadie better, or what Sadie needed?
It felt impossible, like some kind of feelings scavenger hunt set up by an English major.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” James’s gaze dropped to the book in her hand. “It’s none of my business, but now that you’ve mentioned Sadie—does she know yet?”
Anne looked away, not trusting herself to make direct eye contact. “I haven’t told her, no.”
“But she knows something.” The sharp, perceptive note in his voice reminded Anne that this was the man who’d taken Backlight Artists Agency from obscure origins to international dominance. “Where is Sadie? Why isn’t she here with you?”
Wasn’t Sadie here with Anne, in a sense? Wasn’t she always? “I don’t want to talk about it right now,” she said. “Not yet.”
“But—” James began, and then they both heard it: the sound of the front door opening. Arthur was home.