Maybe I'll Call Anna Read online

  Maybe I’ll Call Anna

  William Browning Spencer

  New York

  This book is dedicated to Max Gartenberg

  Part 1

  David Livingston

  August 1966

  1

  Garamond was on call for the E.R. that night. He was wearing a green scrub suit, and he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. Garamond was in his late twenties and much taken with his own romantic image: scruffy, world-weary saver of lives. When I came in Garamond was arguing with Invisible Vaughan (thus named because he was never to be found when needed, could walk across crowded rooms without being seen). Vaughan was the resident psychologist, a fastidious man with a naked face, large glasses, and an eerie deadness of manner, as though all the crazies that passed through the emergency room had sucked the vitality from him.

  Garamond was shouting, and Vaughan, arms folded, was squinting darkly. “Don’t fuck with a Ph.D. in psychology,” Vaughan’s squint said.

  They were arguing about admitting a patient. I didn’t want to hear about it, so I went across the hall and cleaned up from the last shift. I put a bunch of hemostats and scalpels in the autoclave. Then I walked into minor surgery.

  She was sitting on the gurney, and the plastic tubing from an I.V. dangled next to her. A piece of white adhesive fluttered from the crook of her left arm. She wore a grey dress, the kind of dress that girls wore a lot in the sixties when we were all giving simplicity a run for its money. She smiled at me and said, “Hello.” She was incredibly pretty, with clear dark eyes and long brown hair, young and achingly bright.

  She seemed composed, her hands folded in her lap, a good child in a folktale.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She smiled. “Are you another doctor?”

  “Actually, I’m a brain surgeon,” I said. “I moonlight as an orderly though. Brains all day long. You get sick of them, you know? Who needs brains? Give me good looks any day. So how are you doing?”

  I couldn’t make out what she said at first, because she was looking at the floor, speaking softly, with a faintly flirtatious manner which, I later learned, was simply Anna’s manner in the presence of men, a reflex, a physical tic. I had her repeat it.

  “OD’ed,” she said. She looked up and smiled grandly. “Bad dope. A girl can’t be too careful. Doc says I can go but I better be careful. I told him: ‘You bet!’”

  She jumped off the gurney, a perky jump for an overdose victim. She put on a pair of wooden sandals, then turned and picked up a record album that was lying on the sheet. It was the latest Beatles’ album, Revolver. Another incongruous touch, but I had come to accept a certain amount of surrealism working in an emergency room. She walked out of the room and down the hall, clutching the record in front of her. I followed her.

  Dr. Garamond must have seen her striding purposefully for the lobby. He ran out from behind the admitting desk shouting, “Miss Shockley! Miss Shockley!” He put an arm around her shoulder and steered her back toward minor surgery. I followed. “We are thinking of admitting you,” Garamond said.

  Anna rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Dr. Vaughan said I could go. He said I was fine.”

  “He’s rethought that,” Garamond said, smiling painfully. “We think a little time in the hospital, just to sort things out, wouldn’t hurt.”

  One of the nurses hollered for me, and I had to leave. A drunk under the inventive spell of alcohol had managed to cut his hand on an escalator. I got him into a cubicle, washed his hand in PhisoHex, and listened to a gush of invective against someone named Melanie. An intern named Culver came in, sewed the drunk up, and I went to see how Garamond was faring with Anna. He was sitting in minor surgery alone; his hands were on his knees and his head was lowered. He didn’t look on top of things.

  I walked back to the lobby, pushed the doors open, and walked outside. It was August, a hot, black night. North Carolina had been invaded by a million crane flies, big, leggy insects desperate for human companionship, and I swatted them away and lit a cigarette. Anna, disconnecting from shadows, walked over to me and said, “I don’t know what his problem is. Is this hospital so hard up for patients that they gotta take anybody who sneezes in a draft?”

  “A drug overdose isn’t exactly the common cold,” I said.

  “You got another one of those cigarettes?”

  I handed her a cigarette which she held in her mouth waiting for a light. Thrusting the cigarette toward the flame, she looked a bratty thirteen. She blew smoke and she smiled again, an odd, sly smile. “Larry has always got stuff, drugs, you know. Chemicals are Larry’s thing. I’m not a chemical person myself. I was bored and stupid, which happens sometimes. It’s not a lifestyle or anything. I don’t have to be checked in for observation.”

  “Who’s Larry?”

  “This guy I live with.”

  I didn’t like Larry, instantly. Where was he anyway? Anna’s taxi arrived and she patted my shoulder as though reassuring me and said, “See you around.” I watched her get into the taxi. Then I went back inside.

  The E.R. got busy after that. Two teenagers had driven off the road and the car had taken a couple of flops. They looked in worse shape than they were: a couple of broken ribs and some facial cuts that bled the way facial cuts will—with great bravado. I finally had time to look at Anna’s admission record.

  She’d been brought in by someone named Robert Kalso. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  Anna’s address was given as 502 Morley Avenue. Her full name was Anna Holmes Shockley and she was eighteen. She had, by her own admission, taken a lot of downers. “Handfuls!” the admissions clerk had quoted, the exclamation point tall with disapproval. Robert Kalso lived at the same residence. He had found her in a groggy, incoherent state. Anna had volunteered the information about the drugs, and Kalso had become worried and driven her to the emergency room. Garamond had pumped her stomach, got the old electrolyte balance back up to snuff, and—grudgingly—set her free with an appointment to see Dr. Coleman, the psychiatrist on call that night. Invisible Vaughan hadn’t found any reason to keep her, and Garamond had failed to talk her into voluntarily committing herself. The bird had flown.

  I finished reading the report, smoked a cigarette, and wondered who Anna Shockley was and whether or not she had intended to kill herself. I could see her very clearly in my mind; she had a kind of fragility that was disturbing, that immediately sent a ghostly sense of loss echoing through me.

  Nothing was going on in the emergency room. It was three in the morning. I went back to the nurses’ station and tried to read a paperback novel whose hero was yet another Holden Caulfied clone. I couldn’t concentrate. The girl, Anna, had made an impression on me that seemed unwarranted by our brief encounter. I didn’t approve of Garamond’s concern, which I felt was elicited not by any desire to help a fellow human being but by the wondrous, doomed shout of Anna’s beauty. I didn’t approve because I felt the same way, and I knew what kind of an altruist I was. I was, in fact, already in love with Anna. I knew nothing about her except that she was pretty. I didn’t approve of the way men were treating her.

  I didn’t approve of Larry’s drugged indifference and I didn’t approve of Garamond’s feverish solicitude.

  The girl had put me in a bad mood; somehow her extraordinary beauty had wrenched me out of my routines. I felt faintly queasy, always a sure, lovesick sign.

  I went home that morning and sat amid the clutter of the two-room garage apartment that I was renting on a week-to-week basis, and I studied the painting which I had tentatively titled Presentiment of Rain, which was beginning to feel all wrong. Finally I settled in to work on the canvas, bringing out some detail in the shadows,
working mechanically, unemotionally. I stopped work after two steady hours. I lay down on my cot and slept, a sleep of thin, grey dreams. The telephone rang and I fished the receiver out of the glare and confusion.

  “You’re mad, Livingston. You can’t go on like this; it will finish you. Haven’t you had enough of the world’s squalor and clamor? Come back to academia, my boy. Come back to the sweet, monastic silences, the late-night arguments on aesthetics, the blonde girls in their colored smocks, reeking faintly of turpentine, so serious, so sweet.…”

  I hung up. Ray called back, of course, and I told him to come over later on—I looked at my watch—about two. I found that I was awake, however, with no chance of returning to sleep, so I fixed myself some eggs and put a pot of coffee on. An hour later I drove by 502 Morley Avenue because I didn’t have anything else to do and I was curious. I was also, I suppose, a romantic, a term I grow less comfortable with as the years go by. Now it seems to suggest schizophrenics fixated on movie stars, but then it was a prouder thing, an acknowledgment of the great strength in dreams, life’s infinite possibility.

  502 Morley Avenue turned out to be a large white, three-story Victorian house on a corner lot. The grass was in need of mowing; grasshoppers whirred across the lawn. In the driveway a sleek, waxed Mustang, resplendent in sky blue and chrome, looked incongruously peppy in the tall weeds. There was a sign in the yard, handmade, announcing boldly: ROOM FOR RENT! Always a sucker for the declamatory, I went in and rented a room.

  I thought I’d just take a look at the room. I had been meaning to move. The room, located at the top of the house, was lit by a skylight. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. It was a painter’s dream; the light was a bountiful, golden harvest. At that moment, I honestly forgot Anna’s presence in the house. I simply marveled at my good fortune. The person who had brought me up the stairs to this perfect studio was a skinny teenager named Hank, shirtless and shoeless, wearing a pair of immense khaki-colored shorts. Hank told me that the owner of the house was Robert Kalso and that I would have to talk to him about renting the room. I said I’d come back later and left. I went back to the garage apartment, getting there just as Ray was pulling up to the curb.

  2

  “You are getting sicker, Livingston,” Ray said. “Quitting college to work in the emergency room of Cameron Hospital is one thing, but renting rooms in the houses of suicidal chicks is another, darker pocket. I worry about you, Livingston. I wish I had more friends, so I wouldn’t have to hang out with you. But I just don’t know that damned many people. It’s a shame.”

  I went to the refrigerator and got us both another beer. “I haven’t actually rented the place yet,” I said. “But it’s great. The light is perfect.”

  Ray scowled and gulped beer. Ray had a haggard, wild-assed cowboy look that he cultivated: big ragged mustache, snarled hair. He was a methodical painter of realistic egg temperas, one of the few students at Newburg College whose work I sincerely admired. He was living with a very sweet Oriental girl named Holly. Since I had left the school, Ray and Holly were about the only people I still saw.

  “I figure I can move on Thursday,” I said. “Will you help?”

  Ray looked disgusted. “Sure,” he said.

  I talked to Robert Kalso later that day on the phone. “My name is David Livingston,” I said. “I was in your house today looking at the room for rent. I’m interested in renting it.”

  “Great,” he said. He had a jovial salesman’s voice. “You got a job?”

  I told him I did and prepared to elaborate, but he interrupted. “Then move on in,” he said. “We’ll be looking forward to seeing you.” He hung up.

  3

  That’s how I came to live in the Villa. One of the vast transient population that passed through Kalso’s house had named it the Villa, and the name had stuck. The name appealed to Kalso’s quirky sense of humor. “I will meet you back at the Villa,” he would say, pulling on imaginary gloves. Robert Kalso always appeared to be engaged in some sort of self-parody, some complicated, private joke. He was a thin, red-headed homosexual and the son of Albert Kalso, a wealthy, prominent citizen of Newburg. I liked Kalso instantly. He was a professional photographer who took elegant, sepia-toned photographs of reedy girls in white. I was very impressed by these photos, more so, perhaps, because they sold for amazing sums in New York. I assumed Kalso was in his mid-forties, but there was no way of reckoning his age. His role at the Villa was less landlord, more master of ceremonies, renegade scoutmaster. “We are all riffraff here,” he would say, drinking a glass of wine. “A threadbare, orphaned lot. But we are a democracy, God love us! We aren’t a bunch of heartless, cold-blooded communists!”

  Ray brought his pickup around on Thursday and helped me move. The sun seemed almost violent that day, and I was sweating in a pair of cutoff jeans and a t-shirt. Hank, the skinny kid who had shown me the room, came out on the porch with a quiet, round-faced girl named Gretchen. They helped carry stuff up to my room. In passing, I saw several denizens of the house: a pale, bearded kid who lay on the living room floor with earphones on, jiggling to mainlined music; a scowling, beer-bellied blond guy with a mustache; and a pretty girl with short, curly black hair. A variety of unidentifiable noises suggested the presence of teeming masses. This proved to be the case, and I never identified all the residents. I still hadn’t met my landlord, who was downtown at his studio.

  At noon, we stopped for awhile and Hank and Gretchen sat on the porch with us, smiling and eating bowls of brown rice and vegetables. They were a cheerful, delicate pair, absolutely comfortable in each other’s company. Their type seems to have thinned considerably since the sixties when they flourished, roaming the earth in brightly colored flocks, taking vitamins, sharing insights and dope, getting clear, mating with an almost passionless goodwill.

  Ray had baloney sandwiches and beer stashed in a cooler. We ate the sandwiches and drank the beer, and Anna came out on the porch and said, “Hi.” She didn’t seem surprised to see me, and when I told her I had rented the room, she nodded her head. I offered her a beer and she took it. She sat cross-legged on the porch in a pale blue dress and smoked cigarettes and said nothing else. The heat of noonday made silence a fitting, proper response, and I felt a sense of well-being, of having, by some innate cleverness, revitalized my flagging sense of purpose, rededicated myself to Art and Genius.

  The blond boy came out on the porch. He wore jeans, cowboy boots, and a vest over a dirty yellow t-shirt. He had a shiny, fleshy face and blue eyes.

  “Let’s go,” he said, and Anna stood up and followed him through the tall grass to the gleaming Mustang. He had opened his door and was about to get in when she said something to him and he stopped. He looked up at us, looked back at Anna. He said something, and I could see Anna react, harden somehow. Larry—for I was sure that’s who it was—said something else, and Anna glowered. I studied Larry. He was the kind of guy who had played football in high school, probably gotten a lot of mileage from the sport, had a few privileged years to indulge his arrogance. He had put on weight since then, put on bitterness. This present argument, I guessed, was an old one or a variation of an old one. It had that replay feel to it. Anna stood still, shoulders slightly raised, frowning.

  Then, almost casually, Larry’s hand shot out and collided with Anna’s cheek. She spun backwards, gracefully pirouetting in the hot afternoon. Larry wrenched open the door of the Mustang, jumped inside, gunned the engine into life, and squealed out of the driveway. Anna was quickly on her feet and walking back to the house. I ran across the porch in time to see her face and the red, quarter-sized mark on her cheek. She walked past me and into the house. I didn’t follow her.

  We got the last of my meager furniture moved into the room and I went out to the pickup truck with Ray to thank him for helping. “You come and see Holly and me,” he said. He squinted toward the house. “Anna,” he said. He looked at me and shook his head. “This is gonna be a goddam mess, you know that? You have no sen
se at all, Livingston. Not a lick.”

  He shook his head again and got in his truck and drove away. I sensed some disgust in my friend, the kind of close-friend disgust that is sincere and unsettling. I figured he must have seen Anna’s face when she came back on the porch after being knocked down; he must have seen the smile, so sure, so full of winning. I was a little unsettled myself.

  4

  “I’d fuck her,” Skip said. Skip was the skinny kid I had seen listening to music the day I arrived. He had shiny, putty-colored flesh and a scruffy mottled beard. He nodded his head when he talked, words tumbling out over a yellow, aggressive grin. No one else at the Villa listened to Skip, having learned long ago that Skip never said anything a person would wish to log in his memory. Right now he was talking about Anna, and I was ignoring him, haying already determined that he knew nothing about her except that she was pretty.

  Skip would pop in on me at any hour of the day. He was, supposedly, attending Newburg College, but I had never seen him crack a book. He considered himself a fellow artist, since he painted surreal canvases of hands reaching through brick walls to fondle nude female buttocks of legendary, wet dream proportions.

  “I’d fuck her,” Skip repeated. “I’d slide her little panties off and get down on that little honey pot and I would tongue it slowly, ease them white thighs apart …” I didn’t like to imagine Skip having sex with anything human, but I wasn’t particularly offended since Skip and Anna in tandem were beyond my imaginative powers. I even liked Skip some. I had an affection for him because he was such a tremendously bad painter.

  While he talked, I cleaned off my brushes and thought about Anna, Skip instantly fading into the shadow of that thought.

  I had been at the Villa for one week, and I had talked to Anna six times: twice in the living room, twice on the porch, once in the kitchen, and once—briefly, but countable—on the stairs. Anna was always around, generally barefoot in summery shifts or sun-faded jeans, and I could have talked to her more, but I was determined not to let this obsession with a suicidal child make me miserable. So I resolved to avoid her, a resolve which only heightened the sweaty, heart-palpitating nature of the inevitable encounters.