Maybe I'll Call Anna Read online

  I said I didn’t know, and she nodded and looked triumphantly at Grant, as though I had sided with her. He glared at me, sensing a troublemaker.

  Anna reached into her purse and began hauling out plastic vials of pills—blue pills, steely black pills, two-tone pastel pills. Grant knelt down and began picking up the pills, opening bottles, pouring the treasure in his broad hands. He smiled piratically.

  Fear, which had been rising in a black tide, gave way to quiet rage. Goddam you Anna! I thought.

  I seethed while the transaction was completed. I turned to the TV, trying to disassociate myself from the proceedings, and watched a fat woman study the relative whiteness of two blouses.

  Grant had his drugs, and now he felt that some primitive social amenities should be observed. I declined a beer and watched Anna accept one and drink it and flirt with Grant.

  “You’re mad at me,” Anna said when we were back in the car and driving away.

  “Good guess,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it. I was experiencing self-loathing of heroic proportions.

  Anna sighed, the exhalation of a human being much maligned and misunderstood. “You aren’t even going to ask me why this was such an emergency, are you?”

  “No.”

  “I had to have the money. Larry is getting weirder all the time, and I need some money of my own.”

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t know how bad things have been going. You haven’t been noticing anything lately. Joan moved in, and that was it. Fuck the rest of the world.”

  “It’s Sam, Anna. Not Joan. And you’re not the rest of the world; you are just one spoiled girl, one small, selfish, crazy person.”

  “You don’t have to get so goddam angry. It’s amazing, really amazing to me how you can make a big deal out of everything. I mean, everything has got to mean something, right or wrong. You are touchy, is what you are, and I never know when you are going to get angry. I can’t help it the way things are. I’m sorry it was such a fucking imposition. I won’t ask for any favors anymore.”

  “No, don’t,” I said. I drove back to the Villa, and we both got out of the car without saying anything—Anna had now settled into her martyr’s role—and I went up to my room to discover that four of my paintings, including the largest canvas, were missing. I found a note from Kalso saying he had taken the paintings to New York, but I felt too beat down and traumatized to seek revenge for this incredible presumption. Instead, I called Ray up and asked him if I could move in with him and Holly for a couple of days. He said that would be fine. I threw a few things in the car and drove away. I didn’t see Anna when I left, which was good. I felt rotten—but oddly relieved.

  9

  I only stayed with Ray and Holly a few days, just long enough for Ray to sit me down and give me a lecture. “The thing is, Livingston, you ain’t interested in real relationships, that’s the thing. I don’t know where that comes from, maybe your mother being put in that asylum. I know you feel she was taken away from you by a bunch of tight-assed relatives. I’ve heard your side of it, although your old man strikes me as a decent enough guy. I still think you ought to talk to a shrink about that stuff. Anyway, you’re afraid of intimacy. So you get these relationships that aren’t relationships at all; they are doomed fantasies.”

  I protested. Ray continued, “Yeah. What about Melissa? Another hysterical girl, and a murderous psychopath to boot.”

  “That’s something of an exaggeration,” I said.

  “What about that time she tried to set you on fire when you were sleeping on the sofa? That goddam sofa reeked of lighter fluid.”

  Ray, like any good friend, had a keen memory for the telling detail.

  “Melissa was volatile,” I allowed.

  Ray sighed. “Relationships are hard, but you have to have them with real people. You can’t fixate on some lovely—and I’ll admit you have an eye for authentic beauties—and ignore the person.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “You’re making me sound like a shallow guy, Ray. You aren’t doing me justice.”

  Ray sighed again and went into the kitchen for another beer. He hollered back to me. “You ain’t shallow. You are deep, my boy. Deeply sick and, as your friend, it is my duty to point that out. You are sicker than a dog full of dirt.”

  “I’d marry Holly in a second,” I said. “I’d do that.”

  Holly came into the room on that note. “No such thing,” she said. She smiled her perfect, Far East smile. “You don’t settle down. You too quick for me.”

  I didn’t feel quick (or fast, which may have been a sharper translation of Holly’s thought). It was true that in college I had pursued several young women passionately, and I had been mistaken in my affections. But I was seeking true love, an eternal verity.

  To a casual observer, it might have looked like a number of brief liaisons, but it was no such thing. It was a quest.

  I was in love with Anna My leaving had resolved nothing, and I worried about her; yearned for her. I would encounter her in my dreams in situations of dire peril. She would be hanging from the edge of a cliff, and I would arrive just in time to watch her plummet to an angry sea. Or I would catch a glimpse of her terrified face in the upstairs window of a burning house just before the whole tremulous structure crashed in flames.

  I moved into another garage apartment and began painting full time, thanks to Kalso, who had miraculously managed to sell several of my paintings. I quit Cameron’s emergency room the day after Kalso handed me a check for twenty-seven hundred dollars, payment for two of my paintings minus a modest ten percent. Since then, Kalso had sold several more paintings: My expenses were few. I declared myself a professional and bid goodby to the world of sick and injured people, who, in any event, I had come to regard as querulous bullies.

  At one or two in the morning, the phone would ring. It would be Anna, awake, frightened of the night. Sometimes she would be wound up, talking a mile a minute. Sometimes she would be drunk, incoherent.

  Anna talked about anything, everything. Anna talked about Father Walker and The Home. She had been out to the commune with Hank and Gretchen, and it had made a great impression. Father Walker was a strong man (her famous compliment again) and the Dancers were truly enlightened folk. She understood my reservations. A lot of religions were just bullshit. She told me that when she was thirteen she had attended a Sunday school class where the teacher had demonstrated the miracles of the Bible with card tricks. Anna had seen the teacher palm an ace, and the fraud had shaken her faith in Christianity.

  “But I’ve got to believe something,” Anna said. “It’s my nature to believe things. Women are more like that than men, you know. We have to keep going on, so we are born to believe.”

  “I miss you, Anna,” I said.

  Anna said that her relationship with Larry was degenerating. That is what she said, and I was sure she was telling the truth. But degeneration seemed to be the relationship’s fuel, a compost of the spirit in which they both thrived, and I didn’t see the two of them breaking up in the near future. Anna hinted that she and Larry might split up, but such hints were, I think, a kind of payment in hope, something to sustain me while I listened to Anna’s far-wandering, late-night chatter.

  She didn’t realize that she didn’t have to lure me on with promises, that her late-night ramblings filled me with longing. I was, indeed, sicker than a dog full of dirt, stupefied with desire. Anna seemed terribly vulnerable, and her excitement and laughter, the by-products of alcoholic euphoria, made the circumstances of her life seem more appalling, more fatally set on a tragic course.

  “Larry’s getting weird,” she would whisper (Anna liked to whisper her revelations; a whisper was her dramatic italics). She told how she had gone into the bathroom one day to find Larry sitting in the bathtub in water up to his armpits with a .38 revolver in his hand. Another time, she had found him in the closet.

  “He was on something heavy, some kind of speed,” Anna said. “He was all s
queezed up, hugging himself, and it gave me the creeps. I mean, Larry is a big guy, but he looked small and dead. His eyes were tight closed, and his knees were pulled up to his chin, and he said, ‘Close the door’ in this dead voice, without opening his eyes or moving at all. It was fucking creepy, I tell you.”

  It sounded creepy. But I knew that Anna didn’t intend to leave him. Indeed, she told her “creepy” Larry stories with real relish, delighting in them, anecdotes to cherish.

  Diane dropped by to tell me that she and Saul were splitting up. Good for you, I told her. She came by two weeks later and said that she and Saul were back together again. Good for you, I told her. A friend should be supportive. I asked her how Anna was and Diane said, “Noisy. She and Larry are pretty noisy. I think you should stay clear of Anna I don’t like living in that house. I keep telling Saul we should move, but he doesn’t want to move, says the rent is too good a deal.”

  “Saul wouldn’t move,” I said. “He loves Larry like a brother. Like a car loves gasoline. Like a cigarette loves a match. Like a swimming pool loves water. Like—”

  “Okay, I get the point,” Diane said. “Saul isn’t doing the harder stuff anymore, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know that. What do you mean? He’s not doing anything explosive, is that what you mean?”

  Saul’s drugging really wasn’t a good subject to rib Diane on. She was a straight arrow herself—drank a few beers on the weekend and that was it—and she hated Saul’s chemicals. But she blindly loved the guy, was desperate to absolve him from all wrong. Loving Saul was a formidable task, and I should have been charitable. I knew a thing or two about obsessions.

  “I hate Larry,” she volunteered.

  “Me too,” I said. “He’s a hateable kind of guy.”

  Diane changed the subject. She talked about working at Romner Psychiatric. Some of the glow had worn off the job. Her good intentions had collided with apathetic fellow workers, schizophrenic young men who couldn’t hold jobs, middle-aged women who thought they were Joan of Arc, the chronically depressed and the irreparably damaged. Because Diane was who she was—a serious, solid citizen possessed of an almost mystical well-meaning (call it decency for lack of a better word)—she got things accomplished in spite of the obstacles. She praised one fellow worker, a new staff member, Dr. Richard Parrish, for his dedication and attention to individual patients.

  “Romner would be a tremendous hospital if it had more doctors like Dr. Parrish,” she said.

  I envied Dr. Parrish. Aside from Saul, who had slipped through on Diane’s blind side, her approval was hard won. While I knew that Diane liked me, even loved me as a friend, I was also aware that she thought of me as a fairly frivolous specimen, someone inclined to loll in the sun with the radio turned up loud to drown the pained cries of importunate humanity.

  There was some truth there. I was prepared to envy Dr. Parrish but not to emulate him. My social conscience wasn’t large.

  When Diane left, she turned and hugged me. “I like this place,” she said. “It’s healthier here; you’re healthier. You can lead your own life here.” I didn’t like the assumption that I was leading someone else’s elsewhere. I thought I had done a fairly good job of being my own person while at the Villa—despite Anna’s powerful gravitational field.

  After Diane’s exit, I thought about the irritation her last words had inspired. I wasn’t happy with her glib conviction that life away from Anna was better. It wasn’t. I was lonely and I missed the Villa. I missed Anna. Diane could say I was well out of it, but she was still there. What did she know about being out of it? I was in exile.

  I felt like an exile when I ate lunch with Kalso. The busy world seemed just off stage. He talked about New York. I was going to have to go to New York soon, he said. There were people I had to talk to. He had been telling them that I was a misanthropic dwarf who lived in a hovel, but that happy fiction would have to be destroyed in the near future. I didn’t want to go to New York.

  I felt like an exile when I met Skip in the Safeway. He had his arms filled with frozen pizzas, the staple of his life, and he walked outside with me into the heat.

  “I flunked out of school,” he told me with disbelief. “I can’t believe it. The cocksuckers could have given me some warning. Instead—blam! My folks say no more money, and I’ve got to get a job, but I can’t see myself working. I mean, I tried to squint up my eyes and maybe picture myself in a McDonald’s hat or something, but I couldn’t do it. Fucking work! Look, maybe you could talk to Kalso about selling some of my paintings in New York. I mentioned it to him, but he seemed preoccupied or something. I know he got you a good deal, and I was hoping maybe he could do the same for me.”

  I mumbled something about not seeing much of Kalso myself, and I left Skip standing there in his undershirt and ratty, threadbare jeans, looking dumfounded, a child hexed by evil magicians, turned tall and skinny, bearded and orphaned in an instant, his tricycle stolen, stranded in adult town.

  Me too. I missed the Villa. Even Skip.

  10

  In the middle of July, on a day of terrible loveliness, Hank and Gretchen drove Anna and me out to The Home. It was Father John Walker’s birthday, and therefore a big occasion. Anna was excited, more animated than I had seen her in weeks, so I went along, although I didn’t relish the prospect of hundreds of people high on the spiritual emanations of an ex-high school teacher and practicing guru whose message (which I had gleaned from the books Anna had given me for Christmas) was, essentially, this: Everything’s okay.

  Walker had originally belonged to Eckankar, another group of astral traveling mystics, but he had had a revelation and started his own group. Cynic that I am, I have always assumed that the revelation went like this: “Astral plane business is a sweet deal. Maps to nirvana are selling like cheap dope at a Grateful Dead concert. Where can I pitch my tent?”

  Anyway, the drive out of town to the farm where Walker and his followers lived was lovely. We drove through green, rolling hills. Yellow and white wildflowers made a shimmering pilgrimage across open meadows toward the promise of blue, benign mountains. Anna’s brown eyes caught every gleam of lake, every majestic, rolling cloud. She was wearing a blue denim shirt and tan shorts. She was laughing and sun-washed, touching my arm as she talked, her words racing along, flirting. We sat in the back of the old Dodge while Hank drove, Gretchen at his side.

  We lifted beers from the cooler at our feet.

  “That Walker is no fool,” I said. “Just getting to his place sets you up for some sort of spiritual enlightenment, a divine knockout punch.”

  Hank and Gretchen knew I was a doubter, and they were untroubled by my cynicism. I was standing in my own shadow, as far as they were concerned, and they would smile with the sweet tolerance of the saved, hoping I would come around. We drove over a bridge and I looked down at the wild, scrappy Yurman River, heaving and jumping, water in a hurry.

  We turned onto a dirt road and rumbled along for several miles before turning onto a yet smaller road. Gravel pinged against the car as we bounced through a tunnel of trees and dusty shrubs. Then we lurched out into full sun again and stopped at a wooden gate where two teenagers with long hair and radiant countenances waved us on.

  We parked the car in a field that had been roped off for that purpose and walked up to a big white farmhouse where Hank and Gretchen and Anna began hugging people and were hugged in return. No one hugged me. I expect my aura shone with too cold a light. We all trooped down to a field and sat down on blankets in front of a wooden stage platform with a mike, a snaky tangle of electrical cords, and two monolithic grey p.a. speakers.

  The afternoon continued to exhibit beautiful weather. Larger, whiter clouds rolled across a bluer sky. Various laid-back types got up on the stage. Most of the people were young. They talked of love and light. They sang folk songs and little homemade songs about joy, and the crowd sang with them. There were soft-voiced testimonials to The Home, to being lost and then discovered in t
he great, warm compass of God’s care. Occasionally the speeches would grow too diffuse for me, the karmic references too obscure, and my mind would float off, but I wasn’t overly irritated. I looked at Anna, and saw her face glowing with true-believer zeal as she leaned forward, hands flat on the ground.

  Finally, the big moment arrived, and John Walker came on stage. I don’t know what I had been expecting. He was a short, stocky man with close-cut hair. He was wearing a blue, short-sleeve shirt and white slacks, and his face had a scrubbed, affable shine, big smiling, faintly evangelistic. He began speaking quickly in a quiet voice. He thanked us all for coming, made a joke about the press being in attendance, said that he had promised he wouldn’t perform any miracles that might embarrass a journalist—that got a laugh—and launched into a discussion of love that was an odd combination of pop psychology, down-home preaching, and mystical paradox.

  He seemed a sincere, articulate man. I felt no vital urge to abandon my old life and come live on the commune. I found myself watching Anna. She was obviously much impressed. I had never seen her so excited. After the meeting, she went off with Hank and Gretchen, and I would catch glimpses of her in the distance talking to one group or another. I looked over once and saw that she was talking to John Walker himself, who was surrounded by a smiling entourage, a chosen group whose faces glowed with privilege.

  When I looked again, Walker was gone and Anna was returning across the field, wending her way through blankets, attracting the frank stares of young men.

  On the drive back the sun sent out thick golden, last-call light, granting to trees and farmhouses and rusting cars a shimmering, triumphant reality. The light fell across Anna’s enraptured face as she talked and laughed, and I knew that I was bereft of will in her presence, that the best I could hope for was some luck in keeping the extent of my powerlessness a secret from her.