Maybe I'll Call Anna Read online

  It was dark when we pulled into the driveway at the Villa. I walked Anna to the door, and I turned and started toward my own car which was parked across the street.

  “Hey!” Anna shouted, and she ran to me. “I don’t feel like dealing with Larry. It’s been too good a day, and I don’t want to spoil it. We could drive around or something, what do you think?”

  I said I thought that was a good idea.

  I got some more beer at a 7-Eleven and we drove over to the ruins of the Sully Amusement Center, a failed shot at a highbrow Disneyland. Ralph Sully, a local entrepreneur, had felt that the world needed culturally uplifting amusement parks, so he had created one based on classical myths. The avid pleasure-seeker could ride the Ulysses roller coaster or cross the river Lethe in a paddle boat. The idea was to educate while entertaining. It was an idea that only attracted vandals. The park fell into almost instant disrepair, then burst into flames in the middle of its first summer, sinking into weedy, vine-snuggled abandonment. Now it seemed truer in spirit to the long-ago myths, filled with mysterious shapes, cyclopean corpses.

  We sat in the shadowy moonglow in a ruined pavilion where the last of large, vandalized wooden pigs—remember Circe?—rooted, and Anna, sitting astride a blue boar, talked about Walker. The pale moonlight seemed to cover her with milky light, and I felt enchanted, fortunate.

  “You think he’s a phony, don’t you?” she said. “Yeah, well, Larry does too. What you guys don’t understand is that you are just reacting to what Walker calls ‘soul disappointment.’ He says that lots of times really spiritual people go for drugs and alcohol because they have quarreled with God. When Walker told me that, it explained a lot, because Larry is always angry. It’s because he’s fighting God. Probably, in a different reincarnation, he was close to God. Maybe Larry wanted something, wanted it too hard, and they fought over it. Walker says …”

  Anna talked about battles in the astral plane, the ways of God, and the ways of Larry in particular. Then she was talking about her parents, although I’m not sure what the transition was, some thought that careened her off into childhood.

  She got surprisingly vehement, remembering. “Dad was this skinny, mean guy who was always after us kids to get Jesus. Dad was someone to duck. He was mostly sick. I remember him in bed, sitting up in his undershirt, coughing and smoking cigarettes and telling me what I couldn’t do. ‘Don’t go talking to none of the Joneses,’ he would say. ‘They’s trash.’

  “He was a man with a lot of don’ts. Don’t go playing with the cats, they was likely rabid. Don’t go takin’ too many baths, cause it’s a sin. Don’t watch television cause they can control your thoughts with the TV waves.”

  Anna frowned, still sitting on the wooden pig, and threw her empty beer can into the bushes. “That ignorant old man. He would have killed me with his ignorance if he could have. He hated the way I took to school. Ma, she was born to suffer, so she married a man who suited her. But I couldn’t stand it. I’ve got three brothers and two sisters, and, to this day, there’s not one of them can read. One’s a preacher, too, makes a virtue out of not knowing the alphabet, gets that congregation nodding its head, amening away at the sin of reading.”

  Anna laughed, slid suddenly off her perch, and hugged me. “You’re messing with trash,” Anna said. She kissed me, taking me by surprise, her hot tongue pushing against my teeth, her arms encircling my neck.

  I held her in the cooling night and kissed her hard in return, knowing that it was, something other than me that inspired this physical exuberance.

  We rolled around on the ground, picking up little pieces of twig and rotting leaf. I unbuttoned her shirt, willed it to disappear amid disorienting kisses and the incredulity that always accompanies sex. The whiteness of her naked flesh awoke me to my surroundings, and I muttered something about going to my apartment.

  “Your apartment?” Anna said. “Oh, I know your kind. Gonna show me some paintings, I bet.” Anna reached forward and deftly unzipped my fly. She took my hardness in her hands, ran a bawdy tongue over the shaft. “I ain’t that kind of girl,” she said, “to be eyeballing a bunch of paintings in a strange man’s apartment.” We sank down into the tall grass, Anna growling in my lap, all giggles and voluptuousness.

  “You are all right, David,” Anna said, as we lay naked, pebbled with mosquito bites, sweaty and sticky with bits of grass and sand.

  We were still coupled, loosely, and although I was physically spent, the uncanny nakedness of Anna, the flare of her hips, the swell of her fine breasts, made me want to keep the moment forever, shelter it from time.

  “I love you,” I said, looking as far into her eyes as my soul could carry me.

  “I love you too.”

  I took Anna back to my apartment. It was understood that she was leaving Larry, that our lovemaking had consummated that decision.

  That’s how I understood it.

  I awoke to the steady blare of a car horn. We had made love again in the room, revived by showers and the luxury of sheets, then fallen into righteous sleep. Now the bed was empty, and Anna stood with her back to me, looking out the window. I got up and crossed the room as the car horn persisted, filling the night. I touched Anna’s shoulder, the rough fabric of her shirt. She stiffened slightly. “That motherfucker,” she said.

  I looked down at the gleaming Mustang under the street light. Larry was staring up at the window, honking the horn. He was smiling and thumping the horn like it was a broken thing.

  “Come back to bed,” I said. “The neighbors and the cops won’t let him honk that horn all night.”

  I touched Anna’s arm and she jerked away. “That son of a bitch,” she said. “Who does he think he is? Does he think he fucking owns me?”

  “Come back to bed,” I repeated, feeling a smallness in my voice, a scratchy late-night noise of defeat. I realized that Anna was dressed, that she wasn’t coming back to bed. She turned away from the window and marched to the door.

  “I’ll be back,” she said, and she was out the door, and I heard her tennis shoes thump down the wooden stairs. I waited. Perversely, I didn’t go to the window. It was three in the morning. Then it was three fifteen, the long minutes filled with seam-splitting silence. Every now and then the silence would jump with the slam of a car door. Then the Mustang squealed away. I waited another fifteen minutes, and then I got up and looked out the window at the empty August street. A Volkswagen bug buzzed down the street at around five, but other than that, not much was happening.

  Anna called that afternoon, but I wasn’t in a conciliatory mood. We fought. It was the first fight of many. She came by that evening. “You are just like Larry,” she said. “You want to own me too.” We made love. She didn’t stay that night, and I didn’t protest.

  11

  Reluctantly, I allowed Holly and Ray to feed me dinner on an evening when the company of a doting married couple was a way of courting suicidal thoughts. Diane was there too. I drank a lot. At some point in the evening, I entered the kitchen to find Diane and Holly kissing. They were wrapped around each other, kissing with unseemly earnestness, and Ray was pulling the last of a six-pack from the refrigerator. We were all fairly drunk. Ray and I went back to his living room where we sat down on his sofa (a rotten sofa upholstered in fiberglass fabric that had tormented my flesh on more than one comatose night).

  “Your kitchen has turned into a hotbed of lesbian activity,” I said.

  Ray shook his head. “Nope. As usual, you miss the point. Neither Holly nor Diane is queer.”

  “I’ve seen less impassioned fucks,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, that’s just it,” Ray said. He was drunker than I was (if memory serves) and he was pointing a sententious finger at me. “It’s passion, of course. But it ain’t sexual passion. That has always been your great confusion, my boy. You see all passion as sexual in nature. No, Holly and Diane are engaged in the passion of consolation. They are sharing their disappointment in men. That is a great bond women h
ave.”

  Diane and Saul were split up again, so maybe Ray was right.

  “How’s Anna?” Ray asked. It had been six weeks—six stormy weeks—since Anna and I had become lovers.

  “Same as ever,” I said.

  “I take it she couldn’t make it tonight.”

  “You don’t see her, do you?” I said.

  Ray wasn’t improving my mood. He was my best friend, but he had an uncanny ability to find a sore spot and thump it with a hammer, all the while displaying an expression of scientific interest.

  “I read that people who don’t keep appointments or are always late are exhibiting hostility,” Ray said.

  “I’m going to exhibit some hostility if you don’t shut up,” I said.

  Diane and Holly came into the room holding hands. Holly went over to Ray and cuddled him while Diane sat on the sofa arm and absently patted my head in a gesture that I found immensely demeaning.

  “Cut it out,” I said.

  Diane looked surprised, hurt. Then, quickly, her face turned all understanding, lighted with maternal insight. That did it. I had to get out of there. I left and drove absently around Newburg, then back to my apartment. The door was unlocked, and Anna was in bed, waiting.

  “Don’t turn the lights on,” she said. “Just come here.”

  She reached for me and drew me into the bed. She was naked, and her body radiated heat. I scrambled out of my clothes, a shameless puppet to her will.

  I hadn’t been expecting her. I was never expecting her. Her presence, therefore, was always a surprise and a reward. Now I kissed her and tasted the salty taste of her, and cupped her exquisite breasts, and raced with her toward climax. In the bathroom, afterwards, I saw the blood smeared over my face and turned back into the room, snapping the light on. One of her eyes was glued shut, the lid turning purple, and blood dripped from her lip.

  But she grinned. “I didn’t want to spoil things,” she said. “I thought we could fight about this after.”

  “What did he do?”

  Anna shrugged. “Nothing special.”

  “You should put some ice on that bruise,” I said, and I walked toward the refrigerator. Halfway to the refrigerator, I turned, sickened by the reasonableness in my voice, the resignation that I loved a girl who was, as a matter of course, going to get beaten up on a regular basis by a psychotic boyfriend.

  I ran back to the bed, grabbed her by the shoulders, and shook her. “You are never going back to him!” I shouted. “Listen to me. You have to make a choice.”

  We screamed at each other. Anna prowled the room, naked and angry, shouting back.

  The argument ended with Anna dressing in a rush and slamming out the door. Other arguments had ended that way. A pattern was emerging.

  I fell asleep and was awakened the next morning by the ringing of the phone. I didn’t immediately recognize the voice on the end of the line. It was Kalso, but his voice was uncharacteristically shrill.

  “Larry’s dead,” he said.

  I asked him how it had happened.

  “Look,” he said. “I want you to get over here right now. It’s not Larry I’m worried about. It’s Anna.”

  “What about Anna? Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine. Just get over here.”

  12

  Diane was there when I got to the Villa. She was sitting on the sofa with Anna. Anna looked up when I came in but there was nothing in her eyes, no greeting.

  “I killed him,” Anna said. “I killed the motherfucker.”

  Kalso spoke: “Heroin overdose. Anna didn’t have anything to do with it. But she found him, and she’s shaken up. We can’t get her to go to the hospital, but I want you to get her out of here for awhile. The police are going to be back, and I don’t think she should talk to them right now.”

  Anna was pale and still, sitting on the sofa with her hands in her lap. I sat down next to her, touched her shoulder. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t care who knows,” Anna said.

  Diane brought Anna a cup of coffee, and she drank it. Anna was wearing a bathrobe, and her hair fell over her face. She began to shiver, and Diane took her upstairs. When they came back down, Anna was wearing a yellow blouse and jeans, but she still looked and moved like a child who has been tugged into clothes while half asleep. Anna’s face was puffy and alien, as though the shock had awakened a different person, now inhabiting her features. Her eyes and mouth were blurred by trauma, and her expression, unreadable really, could have been identified as an ill-tempered pout.

  “Just get her out of here,” Diane said. “Anywhere. Go.”

  I drove out of town. Skies were vertigo blue and I found myself heading toward the mountains, toward the commune.

  Anna said, “It’s okay. Larry wanted to die.”

  I looked at her. “You’re upset,” I said. “You didn’t kill Larry.”

  “Larry will be glad to hear that,” Anna said.

  We drove in silence until Anna, spying a 7-Eleven, demanded that we stop and get some beer. I didn’t argue. Back in the car, Anna popped the top on a Budweiser and said, “Larry didn’t like needles. He took a lot of things, but mostly speed and downers, pills. He had this crazy attitude about prescription drugs. They were okay, stamp of approval from the AMA or something. He was as crazy about that stuff as Hank and Gretchen are about brown rice. Sometimes, listening to Larry, you’d think he was a health nut, just like Hank and Gretchen. He really believed in chemistry.”

  Anna was growing more animated with the alcohol; it always had a marked, instant effect, as though the taste alone shifted a psychic gear. “I hated that motherfucker,” she said. “He got meaner all the time, and it was the drugs that were doing it, but the drugs were Larry, you know, so there wasn’t any way of separating the two, of saying, ‘He’s an okay guy when he don’t drug.’ Hell, the fucker was always drugged. I got so I could tell what drugs he was taking by the kind of trouble he’d come looking for. He was really ugly last night.”

  We drove on through the beautiful mountains. I didn’t want to say anything, and I thought perhaps that Anna would fall into one of her private silences. But she didn’t.

  “He didn’t feel anything,” she said. “He didn’t even jump, didn’t moan. So long, Larry.” I glanced at her. Her face was wet with tears.

  “Stop here,” Anna said. “I want to walk down to the river.” I pulled in before the bridge and we walked down to the broad, still-raging Yurman River. We had to scramble through chest-high bushes and negotiate a shadowy pine forest before arriving at the riverbank. Anna, who had been carrying the beer, sat down on a rock with a triumphant air and squinted at the sun.

  She looked at me. “We can be together now,” she said. “Larry’s gone.”

  “Simple as that,” I said.

  Anna frowned. “No, it’s not simple. I know that. Don’t treat me like a child, David. You like to treat me like a child. But don’t do it, please. You can say a lot of things about Larry, but he didn’t treat me like a child.”

  She hadn’t killed Larry. I knew that.

  “I love you, Anna,” I said.

  She nodded her head, took a quick swallow of beer and said, “I did it for you.”

  Anna stared at the river and drank another beer and started to cry. I went over and put my arms around her and she rocked back and forth against me and said, “I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.” It became a crazy chant, then lost coherence and she fell asleep in my arms. I didn’t move, but held her against all ugly odds and my own willful hunger, and I held her through the afternoon and watched a crow scavenge in the stagnant pools, and I thought about stuff, much of it profound, and reached the foregone conclusion: Nothing mattered but Anna and me.

  13

  I drove Anna back to the Villa that night. She was tired and went straight to bed. Diane and I sat in the kitchen and talked. Diane said that the police had come again, but they didn’t indicate that they would be back tomorrow. They se
emed to know about Larry’s drug habits. They weren’t in mourning, and an o.d. wasn’t suspicious considering Larry’s history. Kalso, who had called the ambulance, had told them that he had found the body. Anna hadn’t yet entered the picture. But she would. We agreed that the police would want to talk to Anna, since she was living with Larry. If nothing else, they’d want to know where she was that night.

  “Do you think she killed him?” Diane asked in a rush.

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “No,” Diane agreed. “Why does she insist she did?”

  That was a trickier question and I sidestepped it entirely. “You know,” I said, “I wouldn’t feel any differently about Anna if she had killed Larry. It would have been self-defense, really.”

  “I doubt the police would take that view.”

  But we overestimated their interest in a dead drug dealer. For the next couple of weeks, we waited for something to happen. Having a talent for paranoia, I assumed the quiet bid some Hitchcockian maneuvering on the part of formidable sleuths. Slowly, I realized that the cops had been glad to see the last of Larry, were uninterested in the precise nature of his demise, the nuance of circumstance. No one expressed the least interest in Anna’s part in Larry’s death. The coroner’s inquest swiftly settled on accidental death by self-administered overdose.

  I moved back into the Villa, back into the old studio room. I would have preferred for Anna to come live with me, but there was no extricating her from the room she had shared with Larry. Indeed, although we were still lovers, she would always leave at some point in the night to return to her own room.

  This behavior, which I found exasperating, was a bountiful source of argument.

  “I need my privacy,” Anna said.

  “I love you,” I said.

  Anna folded her arms and glared at me. “That’s cheating,” she said. Which was, of course, true.

  14

  “Don’t do that!” I shouted, having resolved to say nothing, to close my eyes.