Maybe I'll Call Anna Read online

  Clara shook her head sadly. She wore silver-rimmed glasses and wore her hair pulled back so tightly it sucked her cheeks in, made her eyes bulge. This was all in a vain attempt to wrest authority from an impossibly benign, maternal countenance. “No,” she said. “I can’t do that.”

  “Yes you can. This was an accident. But Anna’s not well, and the last thing she needs is a lot of police milling around. They’ve got her over at Romner Psychiatric right now. Diane rang up a doctor she knows over there, and he admitted her. I just think she doesn’t need a lot of noise over nothing. I think.” I stopped talking; the words just came to an end somehow.

  I didn’t know what I thought, but I wasn’t able to talk about Anna yet, that was clear. Clara said, “Okay. I’ll get Gill down here.”

  I assured her that I would be fine. I had made my own cursory examination of the wound. A bathroom mirror revealed a two-inch-long furrow racing up my right shoulder, an inch to the right of my collarbone. I had been in the act of sitting up when Anna fired, and if she had moved her hand slightly to the right, the bullet would, just as smoothly, have entered under my chin and skidded unceremoniously into my brain, causing all manner of confusion. As things stood, the bullet must have gone on to smack against the wall behind me.

  That was my diagnosis, anyway, and Dr. Gill Andrews confirmed it as he stitched me up. “Yeah, she didn’t draw a good bead on you.” Gill had listened to my story of an accident, the classic didn’t-know-the-gun-was-loaded story, and his matter-of-fact acceptance, a series of thoughtful nods, turned the tide with Clara. The police went unnotified, my visit unlogged. Gill was a young resident, five or six years older than I was, a lanky, longhaired guy who didn’t take himself too seriously. We were good friends, having discovered a number of shared enthusiasms (like P.G. Wodehouse and Bob Dylan) in late-night conversations in the E.R.. I’d had him over to the Villa a couple of times. He had briefly met Anna, although his sole comment had been raised eyebrows and the exclamation, “My God, what a beautiful girl.” I didn’t like the lifted eyebrows; they seemed to suggest that he had pictured me with someone less stunning. But then, I was always defensive about me and Anna together, always expecting some dissenting voice to shriek, “This union must be sundered. It is against Nature and all the gods!”

  Gill sewed me up and then asked me what I intended to do. I realized, quickly enough, that he hadn’t bought my story.

  “You are looking rotten,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  Gill leaned forward. He had a long face with a large, beaked nose, a handy countenance for interrogations. “You look rotten,” he repeated. “All your freckles are faded out, and you have a general swampy, underground look to you.”

  “Swampy? Is that a medical term?”

  Gill nodded. “Worse than that. It’s the truth.” I laughed.

  “You want to talk about this stuff?” he asked.

  I told him I didn’t, and he nodded his head. “Yeah, well, you aren’t dead. Maybe I should get Vaughan to lock you up while your luck is holding.”

  “Thank you.” I said. “I appreciate your concern. I’ve had a rough night, no doubt about it. But I’m okay now, honest.”

  Gill said, “If they release your girlfriend tomorrow, what are you going to do? If some underpaid and overworked social worker says, ‘Take three Librium a day and see us on alternate Tuesdays at six’ what are you going to do? Look. I’m asking because I’m your friend, remember? I don’t think that gun went off by accident, at least not the way you describe it, and I don’t think your friends dropped her at Romner Psychiatric just because the trauma of almost killing you temporarily unhinged her. I would just like to know what you intend to do. You don’t look too swift, and I’m really not at all sure that you should be walking the streets.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said. I watched Gill’s mouth clamp shut in recognition of my unreasonableness. He shrugged his shoulders and stood up.

  “Okay,” he said. “If you feel like talking later, give me a ring.”

  I thanked him again and left.

  When I returned to the Villa, Diane was up waiting for me. She told me that Anna had been admitted without incident, that everyone at Romner had been kind and efficient. Dr. Richard Parrish himself was going to interview her in the morning, and right now she was sedated.

  “How is she?” I asked.

  “She’s okay,” Diane said. I stared at her. “I don’t know how she is, really. Just because I work at Romner doesn’t mean I know what’s wrong with Anna. I’m vocational rehab, you know. I’m not a psychiatrist.”

  “Did she say anything?” I asked. “When you were driving her over there, did she say anything?”

  “No. Yes. She was in shock. She wasn’t making any sense, ranting all that mystical bullshit.”

  “Did she say anything about me?”

  Diane looked weary. Those quick, grey eyes had dulled, and the lateness of the hour brought me a vision of her ten years hence, still pretty but braver, more determined.

  Apparently she hadn’t heard me. I repeated. “Did she say anything about me?” Diane looked up, clearly exasperated.

  “Jesus, David. Jesus.”

  “Well?”

  Diane shook her head sadly. “As a matter of fact, she did. She said, ‘Tell David I love him.’”

  I smiled. I hadn’t intended to, but I could feel an idiot smile stretch across my face. I don’t know what that smile looked like, but Diane’s eyes widened. “Goddam it, David!” she screamed, and before I could say anything she had jumped off the sofa and raced up the stairs.

  I went upstairs to my own room. I could smell the fiery smell of the gun’s discharge, and I began to feel faint. I walked downstairs, knees trembling, and drank two beers, sitting in the soupy yellow kitchen light.

  I felt better after the beers, and I lay on the mattress and thought of Anna’s words. “Tell David I love him.” Maybe everything will be all right, I thought. Why not? Well, why not?

  16

  Dr. Richard Parrish saw Anna the next day, in the morning, and Diane called me from the Institute to say that they were keeping Anna for observation.

  The second day that Anna spent at Romner Psychiatric Institute, my life was altered by a letter in the mail. It was a letter that a lot of people were receiving back then. The United States Army requested my presence.

  I saw Anna once before I left. We met in the dayroom of one of the wards. The room was bright and clean with a television, sofas, a ping-pong table in one corner. Two grim-faced patients were slowly bouncing a ping-pong ball back and forth as though it were a task they were being graded on. I watched them, waiting for Anna to come into the room. I gave them a “D.” On the walls there were paintings by patients, and inspirational poems, poems about the goodness of life and God. I studied a pencil drawing that someone had obviously labored over for weeks, erasing, redrawing. The drawing was titled, “Jesus and His Dog,” and sure enough there was Jesus with a dog on a leash. The dog had a halo. The unknown artist had worked hard on Jesus’ smile, erasing and redrawing until the paper was translucent, but the smile still wasn’t right. Jesus had the cheesy smile of a born huckster.

  Anna came into the room, and she looked good. She smiled and ran to me and hugged me. “Get me out of here,” she said, and laughed. I asked how she was doing, and she said it was okay really, that she got on well with crazy people, and that Diane was going to help her get a job. Everybody in group agreed that she ought to have a job, some independence. She had been letting other people run her life for too long, just floating from parents, to Larry … just floating. She said that Dr. Richard Parrish was a great man, a man who could tell what she was thinking before she thought it.

  I told her I was going into the army. I hadn’t known how to tell her. I had feared that this revelation would trigger some new emotional breakdown, but Diane had advised me to go ahead. If Anna was going to react badly, it was just as well that she do it now, wh
ile she was around folks equipped to handle such outbursts.

  Anna said it was too bad. The fucking army! She asked if there was any way I could get out of it, and I said that the time for getting out of it was past, that I was stuck now. She commiserated with my bad fortune, told me to write, said she would miss me. We didn’t talk about her shooting me. We both understood that that was a part of her illness, an unhappy, pathological twitch. I left thinking that she looked good, better than she had in months, happier. She was even wearing makeup. She had taken my leaving well, too. That had gone much better than I expected. I hated her a little.

  I went to Charlotte, North Carolina, where I was inducted, then a bunch of us were flown down to Fort Benning, Georgia, for basic training. One of the guys in our group was appointed temporary platoon leader for the duration of the trip. Moments earlier, he had been regaling us with a dirty story; now he was transformed into an authority figure. He seemed to change physically, his face blooming with new corpulence and anxiety. A whining tone entered his voice. “All right you guys. We gotta be at gate thirty-two at eighteen hundred hours.” Eighteen hundred hours? He began to walk with a funny, officious waddle and complained when we lagged behind. “This is serious business,” he shouted.

  I didn’t like the army. I didn’t like the flat, squat buildings and the unblinking solemnity of things. It was not a place for anyone with a sense of the absurd. Sand Hill was aptly named, and leaping awake at four in the cold November mornings was a depressing business. I was surrounded by fierce, frightened children. I had other things to do, and the army had picked a bad moment to tap me on the shoulder.

  My attitude was bad. I got a summary court martial for refusing to obey orders. “Cut it out,” the lone colonel warned me from behind his desk. It wasn’t much of a court martial.

  I was transferred out of my original platoon and into another platoon. The members of this second platoon were in the army because they chose it over reform school, and they were a contentious, brawling bunch. They were informed that their new member, David Livingston, wasn’t playing the game properly, and that his failure to shape up would adversely affect the whole platoon. So shape him up, boys.

  This is sound psychology, and the army way. Peer pressure is powerful stuff. But the plan failed. It would have succeeded with your ordinary lot of good citizens. It probably would have succeeded in the first platoon, all of whom were eager to fare well in their new career. But the army had forgotten that this particular platoon had an authority problem. These kids had entered the army when asked, “You want to do some time back in juvenile detention or you want to enlist and help out Uncle Sam?” Their dedication was not absolute, and the largest of the lot, a red-headed Irish boy who sang, “Duke of Earl” with real power, came over to me and said, “I like your attitude. Any of these gimps try to give you a hard time, you let me know, and I will personally straighten them out. I’ll jump flat in their shit.”

  I thanked him for his concern. Word got around. My bad behavior went uncorrected by my peers.

  Refusing to fire a rifle, refusing a wide variety of orders that stuck me as unreasonable or foolish, I received a general court martial. This was fancier: more colonels, a court stenographer. I was sentenced to the Fort Benning stockade.

  The stockade wasn’t the hellhole of rumor. No one tried to knife me or rape me. The place was largely stocked with AWOLS, just frightened kids who had run away several times and were now sitting behind bars waiting to go back to their companies or receive undesirable discharges and go home. I wasn’t uncomfortable. Like many people I have since encountered, the army taught me to hone certain skills of invisibility. I became adept at dodging work. There was a fenced-in compound where we inmates chopped wood and hosed down olive-drab automobiles. I lay in bed for hours reading Remembrance of Things Past which I had discovered in the prison library. I don’t know what that tiny little library was doing with Proust. I read Proust’s convoluted, sickbed sentences until I suffered my own derangement of time, until reality shivered in parenthetical expressions and fine delineations of meaning. I remember looking up from the novel to listen to an argument. The argument was about the location of Africa. Three of the five arguers maintained that Africa was in Texas. A fourth said that Africa was somewhere in South America. The fifth person maintained that Africa was “a big motherfucking place” across the ocean, but he was a lone voice crying in the wilderness.

  I got letters from Ray and Holly that adopted a cheerful, newsy quality, totally alien to the real Ray and Holly. I wrote back saying that whoever was pretending to be Ray and Holly cut it out and let the real Ray and Holly write. I’m not sure they knew what to make of that, but, saints, they continued to write me. Diane wrote, talked about work at great length and then apologized for talking about it. She wrote that ex-boyfriend Saul had staged a whirlwind conversion, giving up drugs for Christian Science, marrying a solemn, thin woman named Cynthia Downs who, like so many people, had briefly resided at the Villa.

  Kalso wrote, keeping me abreast of my career. He told me that my stock had risen considerably with my incarceration, that it had been a brilliant move in a business where personal style counted for so much. Not only was I a brilliant painter, he wrote, but I had a tremendous flair for self-dramatization.

  He had sold a still life of mine called Mud Lamps for a little over fifteen thousand to a private collector who was interested in purchasing additional works.

  And Anna wrote. Her letters were surprisingly articulate. I know that “surprising” sounds condescending, but I was surprised. I had always known that Anna was intelligent, but her intelligence didn’t seem to glow white hot in the area of personal communication. She could never quite say what she intended to say, and she was aware of this. It frustrated her and she withdrew, saying nothing at all.

  “I woke up this morning and I thought of you,” she wrote. “I thought so clearly of you that the whole room dimmed and I myself dimmed so that, all morning, I felt unreal and was confused when customers came into the store and spoke to me. I was amazed that they could see me, that I wasn’t a ghost from being sick with wanting and missing you.”

  Anna’s letters made me ill with longing. And they made me ecstatic. I had always doubted that she loved me with the same fevered intensity that I loved her (one of the oldest kinds of accounting in the world) and I suspected that I had always been a convenient lover. And yet, now, she was writing me ardent, eloquent love letters.

  She had gotten a job as a cashier in a drugstore, and the novelty and adventure of actually going to a job every day, talking to a variety of people, getting a paycheck, delighted her.

  She continued to go to an outpatient therapy group that was run by Dr. Parrish. She complained about various members of the group: Jennie who talked too much and a creep named Bobby who was too off-the-wall, scary, and paranoid to be in group anyway.

  Anna’s letters created a wrenching desire to see her. I had moments of doubt too, when I thought that maybe it would be like Anna to write love letters from a safe distance, that the ability to fashion such sentences would be reason enough for their existence, but I killed such thoughts with disgust. They didn’t do justice to the girl I loved. I attributed such negativity to my surroundings, to the general all-male cynicism (dark-faced, long-boned Terry, lying on his bunk and saying, “My old lady probably pumping some dude right this minute, shouting, ‘Slam it in, Henry!’ and that’s okay. Long as she mark her calendar for old Terry’s release and don’t forget that date. Now old David here, he don’t think his woman fret none ’bout her pussy. Maybe, like when she’s taking a bath, she might rub some soap on it and think of him is all. Yessir, that be about the most she would do. Sheeeeit, man, you living on Mars if you don’t think she putting out this very second.”).

  I didn’t know how long I was going to be in the stockade. I had celebrated Christmas in the stockade; now routine had drained time of any meaning and the end of April was approaching. I didn’t like to go ou
t into the compound because the warming of the days, the quick, rain-filled skies, spoke too many changes. I felt left behind, abandoned in the springtime celebration. Had I exhibited some willingness to return to my company and be a soldier, I would already have been back there. But the stockade suited me as well as anything in the army, and I stayed there while they decided how long they would let me stew before discharging me. During those months of waiting, Anna’s letters sustained me.

  Then Anna’s letters took an odd, disconcerting turn. With uncharacteristic coyness, she wrote, “You know I would never do anything to hurt you”—this from the woman who had tried to blow me away with a .38—“but for a long time now I have been feeling differently about ‘us.’ Well, it isn’t so much that. I still love you. I’ve been feeling differently about someone else. I guess you know what that means. He is a great person, a fine person, and I don’t think we can ever be together. Circumstances won’t permit it. But I would be lying if I didn’t tell you about this.”

  Circumstances won’t permit it? I decided that Anna had been reading too many gothic romances. Her talent for self-dramatization was immense, but I hated this new twist. I would have preferred her lying. I began to dread her letters. They were the weirdest mixture of candor and reticence. I wrote her angry letters which I destroyed for fear I would never hear from her again if I sent them. I wrote her reasonable, tolerant letters asking for more information, and these letters I also destroyed, because I didn’t want to know anything about this mystery man, this sage, gentle character. I was satisfied with my own image of him. I imagined him as a smug, self-satisfied lecher with a glib smile, good looking in a manner which, while initially attractive, quickly palls. The cleft in the chin begins to look like an aberration, and that expression in the eyes, originally so winsome, is correctly identified: self-pity, vanity, low cunning.

  Anna, no fool, would soon sour of this prince. I would get out of this goddam stockade where the army had hurled me, and I would set things right. I was making some money. We would move out of Newburg, go somewhere on the coast. Nags Head maybe, where the salt air healed, where the steadfast sun and the rolling ocean reaffirmed the essential goodness of life.