Maybe I'll Call Anna Read online

  I would often see Anna out on the porch drinking beer and smoking cigarettes (she didn’t smoke pot because she said it made her paranoid). She read paperback gothics and odd little books with titles like The Nature of Divine Laughter, books written by someone named Father Walker, a local guru and ex-high school teacher who ran a commune just outside of Newburg in the mountains. Hank and Gretchen, those children of light, were true believers in Father Walker and his commune (called simply The Home) and they had seeded the house with little blue, yellow and orange books. The message seemed to take root in Anna, who, I quickly discovered, had a weakness for the exotic and otherworldly. Anna told me about Father Walker’s message and his followers who were called Dancers of the Divine Logic or, for the sake of brevity, simply Dancers.

  “We each have a Dance,” Anna told me. “John Walker teaches how to hear the music of your Dance, how to move to it. He teaches Listening.” She must have noted a certain skepticism in my expression, because she frowned and said, “I’m not selling anything. You don’t have to believe in anything. Larry doesn’t believe in anything, and he’s strong that way. I know I’m not strong. I keep believing things.”

  Larry was often gone on mysterious errands. Anna rarely went with him during the day, although she always accompanied him at night when, I assume, they plunged into the social whirl. During the day she would sit on the porch with a sulky little kitten named Wooster—a gift from Larry—or she would sprawl on the living room sofa listening to records. She was crazy about the Beatles and would sing along to songs like “Help” and “Yesterday” with a small, clear voice that faithfully rendered every inflection.

  Anna liked to talk, and would go on cheerfully about reincarnation, astral planes, television shows, movies, books she had read. She didn’t talk about herself or about her past, and all I knew about her was that her parents lived in a small town out west and she had bolted (her word) when she was fifteen.

  She did tell me one thing which suggested that her past was not a pleasant one. I don’t know exactly how the conversation arose, but she said, “That’s what Henry always said.”

  I asked her who Henry was and she told me that he was an uncle. Then, in her breezy fashion, she added, “He started screwing me when I was eleven years old. We’d sneak off to this funky little shed with a mattress that smelled like dog piss. Said he’d kill me if I told anyone.” Anna laughed then, surprising me. “I wasn’t going to tell anyone. I loved Henry. Old Henry, he was mean, but he was strong, you know. He was a strong old son of a bitch.”

  As time went by I realized that Anna loved that word: strong. It was her finest compliment.

  Anna’s relationship with Larry was more complicated than I had hoped. My few encounters with Larry had been unpleasant. He seemed to actively dislike me, and I would have disliked him even if he hadn’t been with Anna. Despite his illegal calling, he had a chubby self-righteousness, the air of a TV evangelist doing God’s work.

  And Anna loved him. They fought constantly, often violently, but they made up just as mercurially. This wasn’t a relationship slowly disintegrating. This was the relationship, and it satisfied something inside Anna, an addiction to attention that asked only for intensity.

  “Yes sir, I’d fuck her,” Skip said again, and I put the brushes away and walked down the stairs, leaving Skip to his humid dreams. Wallpaper was peeling in the hallway, hanging in long, kelp-like strips. The Villa was in a state of comfortable decay. I knocked on Kalso’s door, but he wasn’t in, as I determined by pushing the door and peering inside.

  Kalso’s room was decorated in the same sepias that characterized his photographs, a pastel island in a house given to the garish styles of the sixties: quivering, primary colors, batik wall hangings, lava lamps and a variety of homemade art.

  I wanted to pay Kalso the rent, but I wasn’t worried about it if he wasn’t. I went outside, into the August sun, and got in my car. I drove over to Romner Psychiatric Institute to have lunch with Diane.

  She was waiting for me when I got there, and we drove to a restaurant where a lot of lawyers were eating lunch. We managed to get a table in the back, and Diane told me: “We are all going to hear Saul play at HaveAnother’s. I want you to bring your friends Ray and Holly so I can meet them.”

  “Hey, that’s great.” I said, although I could have done without seeing Saul.

  Diane Larson was the pretty, dark-haired girl I had seen that first day. I had talked to her that same evening when I had come downstairs and found her fixing a sandwich in the kitchen. We discovered that we both worked in hospitals and we were soon talking like old friends, comfortable in each other’s presence.

  We drank a lot of beer that night and Diane told me about herself. She was a social worker at Romner Psychiatric Institute, had just gotten the job, and was hell-bent to help people. I abandoned the cynicism of youth for the moment in deference to Diane’s fierce determination to do good. She was excited about Romner, which was a shiny new psychiatric and neurological facility, a private institution but with a lot of funded money for welfare programs.

  Diane had rich parents in Boston, something of an embarrassment to her, and she was tragically, illfatedly, in love with an asshole. Her boyfriend, Saul Weber, lived with her at the Villa. He was an arrogant, swarthy guy who wore headbands and jackets with fringe on them and had a limp desperado mustache and the yellow paranoid eyes of a man who will ingest any chemical substance that will alter his psyche—for better or worse, it makes no difference.

  Diane told me about Saul that first night, and when I actually met him the next day, the contrast between Diane’s glowing reports and the reality was irreconcilable. For a moment I wondered if there might not be two Sauls, but then I saw the look in Diane’s eyes, and I knew, alas, that this was the Saul.

  I had mentioned Anna that night, too. I had said something noncommittal like, “That Anna’s a pretty girl.”

  Diane had said, “Gorgeous. Stay away from her. She’s not well, you know. She has severe emotional problems.” I didn’t say anything. I suppose I could have said that I met her in a hospital where she had dropped by to have her stomach pumped, but I didn’t. I was offended at the suggestion that anything was wrong with Anna.

  At the end of that first night, Diane and I were friends. That fast. I suppose we both realized, intuitively, that we weren’t destined to be lovers and so could be friends without preamble. Our obsessions were elsewhere.

  The lunch wasn’t as good as it could have been, because Diane talked about Saul with a blind enthusiasm that cried out for correction, and I had to content myself with nodding my head and eating a stale tuna salad sandwich.

  Before dropping her back at work, I had agreed to go to HaveAnother’s to hear Saul and his band play. I could switch shifts with Leon; he owed me one anyway. Anna was going too, but that wasn’t incentive since Larry was also going. I expected an ordeal, but I was doing it for Diane.

  The evening fulfilled my worst expectations. And then some.

  5

  HaveAnother’s was the kind of bar that you would start hating just about the time that you were too drunk to successfully leave it. And we were all pretty drunk. Everyone was lurching around with brown paper bags, buying mixers at the bar. Saul’s band, called Boilermaker, cranked out one lackluster cover after another, including a horrendous rendition of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” in which Saul, singing lead, ignored the wry tone for sheer self-pity, sweat flying out of his forehead, eyes bulging as various chemicals hissed in his brain.

  The room was thick with smoke, and the dance floor was slippery with beer, kids falling down, kids groping each other, larger groups of kids watching the gropers with envy and disgust. Ray and Holly, at least, seemed to be having a good time, holding hands and smiling. They were always happy together, brazenly so, I thought.

  I was about to comment on this thoughtlessness when Skip and Saul and Diane came back to the table. The band was taking a break, and Saul looked like a m
an who had taken the opportunity to send new chemical messages deep into his cerebral cortex. Diane looked happy but nervous.

  Skip sat down next to me and gulped from his beer. “Beer really makes a guy piss,” he said. “Tell you this joke, okay? There was this guy and he went into the john at a bar and there was this guy in there pouring a beer down the toilet and the other guy says, ‘Hey, what are you doing that for?’ and the first guy says, ‘Avoiding the middleman!’” Skip laughed and slapped the table. Drinking made his face shinier with the glow of malnutrition. Suddenly he looked up and waved.

  Larry and Anna steered over to the table. Anna looked angry and Larry looked pleased with himself, costumed in a silver vest and wearing a cowboy hat. They sat down and Anna said, “I want to go home.”

  Larry smiled in front of him, a sleepy smile that happened to be directed at me. “Wanting don’t make as much noise as farting,” he said. Skip, sitting next to me, burst into wet laughter. Larry turned to Anna and added, in a benign and regal tone, “I just got an appointment that I gotta keep, and then we’ll go.”

  “I gotta go now,” Anna said. “This place gives me the creeps.”

  “We ain’t leaving now,” Larry said. He reached over and caught her wrist. Anna was smoking a cigarette, stuck in the corner of her mouth, eyes squinted away from the smoke. She reached up with her free hand, took the cigarette out of her mouth and blew the smoke up toward the ceiling and said, “Let go of me, Larry.”

  Larry smiled wider, goggled his eyes in mock terror.

  Anna jammed the burning cigarette into the back of Larry’s hand, shoving with a vicious little twist. Larry roared, and the table flew up into the air, along with my beer and a number of other glasses and bottles.

  Anna was out the door with Larry close behind her, screaming, “You fucking bitch! You fucking bitch!” We all followed them outside.

  HaveAnother’s was providentially located out in the woods where it wouldn’t disturb a more civilized element. There was a lake where drunks could piss at frogs and push each other into the water. There were woods where, in good weather, sudden romances could be instantly consummated. It was a college student’s idea of heaven.

  Larry ran around shouting Anna’s name and the rest of us drank beer and watched Larry. Larry, who wasn’t entirely sober himself, slipped on a muddy spot and went down with a curse. When he got back up, he must have decided that enough of his dignity was already gone. He stalked back into the bar. Slowly, in twos and threes, the crowd followed him. I went down to the lake and took a piss and was just zipping up my fly when Anna laughed behind me.

  I turned and she said, “I guess I showed that fucker, didn’t I? I guess he’ll know I’m not joking next time.”

  I shook my head. “I expect he’ll beat you into rubbish the next time he sees you.”

  Anna sighed. “Yeah. He’ll have to do that. The son of a bitch.”

  I drove Anna home. I went into the kitchen for a beer and Anna went to bed. The Villa was quiet. The folks were still out cavorting, and Kalso was in New York. The only noise was the soft susurration of cockroach feet.

  I sat at the kitchen table and drank three beers. I didn’t need them. They weren’t absolutely necessary. I could have gotten along without them. But they were a comfort.

  I heard a car pull up, saw its lights glaze the kitchen window. I recognized the sound of Larry’s heavy boots. He came into the kitchen where the unkind light made his face look puffier than usual. He sank down into a kitchen chair with a big sigh.

  He pushed his cowboy hat back and looked at me. “Well, pardner, I see you brought the little filly home. I want to thank you for your concern.”

  I thought Larry might get ugly. I had no idea what I would do if he did, but I wasn’t frightened of him. I disliked him too much to fear him, if that makes any sense.

  He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “Let me tell you something. You probably think I’m a bastard. Sweet little Anna. Cute little button-nose Anna. Honey-assed Anna with a body that don’t quit. You ever fuck a snake?” Larry burst out laughing. His hat actually flew off. His hair was sweated down over his forehead, thinning. He looked older than when I had first seen him.

  He stopped laughing. “What I’m trying to tell you is you don’t know shit about Anna and me. We belong together. I’m going up there right now, and I’m gonna be just as sweet as syrup. I ain’t gonna say a word about tonight’s little misunderstanding. I’m just gonna forgive and forget. Girl uses me for an ashtray, what the hell, too many drinks, that’s all. I ain’t one to hold a grudge. I’m gonna let it go. And you know what?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Hey, come on now, ask me what.”

  “What?”

  “Anna ain’t gonna be happy till I hit her.”

  I stood up and started to leave the kitchen. I wasn’t interested in Larry and his concern for Anna’s welfare.

  Larry grabbed my shoulder. He surprised me with a sudden burst of rage. He brought his face up close to mine and spoke in a trembling, hoarse voice. “Listen, you high and mighty motherfucker. I am telling you a truth that could save your life. You come waltzing in here with some notion of rescuing the fairy princess from the dragon. Well, it ain’t that way, and if you want to leave with your educated balls intact, don’t start that bullshit with Anna. Hell, she’ll draw you in. You ain’t the first prince charming on a fucking horse. She’ll say, ‘Oh that sorry Larry done me wrong!’ Then she will whack your balls off, buddy. Believe me. She enjoys it.”

  Larry backed off, shook off the last of the rage. He seemed, suddenly, a little sheepish. “Hell, I’m telling you for your own good.”

  “I appreciate your concern,” I said. I left the kitchen, went up to my room and looked at my latest painting and was struck by its pretentiousness. I wondered why I thought I was an artist and inhaled a great gout of drunken self-pity and fell asleep.

  6

  Somewhere in November of that year, Newburg got a rare dose of snow and freezing rain and everyone rushed outside, discovered the treacherous properties of ice, and broke something: an arm, a leg, a hip. The emergency room was in turmoil, and I was exhausted by the time I got off work.

  I just wanted to sleep, but when I walked into the kitchen I found Anna, crying. She had been crying for some time, obviously. Her nose was running and her eyes were red. She was wearing a pale green terrycloth bathrobe and slippers with big yellow roses blooming on them and she was rocking a kitten in her arms. The kitten was obviously dead, its head pathetically skewed, mouth open. I reached down and tried to take the kitten from her. She looked up and glared at me. I said, “Let me have Wooster, Anna,” and her mouth fell open and she moaned. “Wooooooster,” and she let me take the kitten from her, following it with dazed eyes as though it were floating toward the moon. I wrapped the kitten in a towel and placed it in a shoebox I found in the hall closet.

  I came back to the kitchen and fixed Anna a cup of coffee. Anna brushed her hair out of her face. Her face was blotchy, her lower lip was swollen and her hair was in snarls. While the coffee perked, Anna opened the newspaper and stared at the funnies.

  When I put the steamy cup in front of her, she looked up. Her eyes glittered with tears. But when she spoke, her voice was under control. “Do you think cats have souls?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, Anna.”

  “You couldn’t have a real heaven without cats,” she said.

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  “We’ll have to bury Wooster. We’ll have to read something over him. Something from the Bible, maybe. No, I’m going to read that St. Francis prayer. St. Francis would have liked Wooster.”

  I agreed that St. Francis and Wooster would have hit it off. I went looking for a shovel and Anna went up to her room to find the poem. We met back in the kitchen and marched outside.

  The sun had come out, melting the snow, and Anna stood over the muddy patch near the oak tree as I dug the hole and laid
Wooster to rest. Then, in a quavering voice, she read the St. Francis prayer from a wooden plaque. She was wearing a great woolly sweater, jeans, boots, and a blue ski cap for the ceremony, and she looked as young and full of divinity as a choirboy at Easter.

  She read the prayer:

  “Lord, make me a channel of thy peace—that where there is hatred, I may bring love—that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness—that where there is discord, I may bring harmony—that where there is error, I may bring truth—that where there is doubt, I may bring faith—that where there are shadows, I may bring light—that where there is sadness, I may bring joy. Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted—to understand, than to be understood—to love, than to be loved. For it is by self-forgetting that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven. It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life. Amen.”

  When Anna finished reading the prayer, she turned to me and said, “I am not going to let that sonofabitch get away with this.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to let that fucker kill Wooster and get away with it. I can take care of myself. He didn’t have to go for the kitten. He threw Wooster across the room. Big bullshit he-man. He killed Wooster.”

  “Leave him,” I said. I felt dizzy and sick out there in the cold sunlight. I had had a long night, and I was unprepared for the sudden irrational rage that engulfed me. I turned and walked back toward the porch. “You should leave him,” I mumbled.

  I went inside the house and was halfway up the stairs when Anna came in through the door and said, “You can’t just leave a guy like Larry. A fucker like that won’t just let you leave.”