Maybe I'll Call Anna

by William Browning Spencer

  “You don’t want to leave,” I said.

  “How do you know what I want? When did you become such a fucking expert?”

  I continued walking up the stairs. “You’re right,” I muttered. “I don’t know anything.”

  “Well, you don’t!” she shouted after me.

  I went into my room and lay down on my cot and plunged into sleep. It was late in the afternoon when I awoke and went downstairs. Anna and Larry were on the sofa in the living room, locked in a steamy embrace, your basic resolution of a lovers’ quarrel. I wasn’t particularly surprised. I felt oddly disoriented, however. I felt that there was something in my life I had to resolve, some mystery I had to unravel. This was urgent business; some profound decision was demanded of me. There was a six-pack of beer in the refrigerator and I carried it back up to my room, sat on the cot and drank the beers.

  I didn’t go to work that night, but sometime during the evening I left—noting that the sofa was now empty—and walked to a nearby grocery store and bought a couple more six-packs, and even later on that evening, I resolved to leave the Villa entirely, maybe leave the area, go to California. I wasn’t sure about California, however, since I remembered Diane calling California “lobotomy country.”

  Thinking of Diane, I decided to go talk to her, so I got up, carrying the last of the beer, and walked down the hall to her room. It was late, maybe two in the morning, and I woke her up. Saul wasn’t around, his band was playing in Charlotte that week. I said, “Hi,” and beamed my best smile and Diane wanted to know what the hell I wanted, and, reeling in the hall, I explained about my tentative decision to go to California and what did she think?

  “I think you are drunk,” she said. “And I don’t know if I want to talk to a drunk.”

  “You are very pretty,” I said. Which was true. She had curly black hair and fine, grey intelligent eyes. She was wearing a blue t-shirt and baggy sweatpants and her frown was a sleepy, just-wakened frown, tousled and full of secret dreams. “Very pretty,” I repeated.

  “Actually, I’m sure I don’t want to talk to you right now,” she said.

  But she let me in and we talked about some things, like Anna, and Diane agreed that maybe I should leave the Villa, which hurt my feelings since that would also mean that I would be leaving Diane, my friend. Diane talked about Saul and how Saul had this problem with being faithful, but Saul was painfully honest, and that helped. Then she talked about Saul’s gentle side, his almost lyrical tenderness; fairly disgusting stuff, but I listened. Later on, I asked her to sleep with me, and that’s when she threw me out, but that was okay since the erotic overture had been impractical.

  I went back to my room and fell asleep with a sense of accomplishment which the morning revealed to be spurious.

  7

  I stayed at the Villa, and I began to work seriously on my paintings. I didn’t know if they were any good or not, but I felt that I was no longer simply intimidated by technical concerns. I had left college to escape what I felt was an academic fussiness, and I was trying to paint with some emotion, with some sense of life.

  I worked hard. There is nothing like unrequited love for priming the creative pump, and I finished twenty-two paintings that winter. That was a lot, since I painted in a painstaking manner, layering paint, trying for a kind of translucence that would send the onlooker searching for metaphysical answers—with real hope of finding them. I painted realistic objects and scenes, intent on profound revelation. I was certainly grandiose in my dreams of what art, and mine in particular, could do. I always believed in art’s transforming power, and I still do, although I sometimes feel as though I’m worshipping in an empty church.

  Anna got in the habit of coming up to my room during the day. She would watch me paint, read her miniature metaphysical books, and doze on the dusty, sheet-covered sofa. She would sometimes leap out of sleep, shivering and scared, lost for the moment. “I’m a magnet for bad dreams,” she said. “I draw them into my head.” Looking at the winter skies, she would wax philosophical. “I always feel like I’m missing my life,” she said one day. “Do you ever get that feeling?”

  “Everybody gets that feeling,” I said.

  “Yeah. Maybe.” Anna hugged herself. “I wouldn’t mind dying if it would answer questions. But I’m afraid of dying most of the time, because it might be more confusing than living.”

  Anna thought long, convoluted thoughts, and, lying on the sofa, she would speak them at the rafters. I didn’t know what she believed, and what she didn’t believe, what she was merely trying out, launching into speech.

  “I like your paintings,” she said. “But they are sad paintings.”

  “Sad?”

  “Well, maybe not sad. They just aren’t hopeful. There aren’t any people in your paintings, you know.”

  “There are enough people in the world. No need to fabricate more people.”

  Anna stood up and walked to a painting of the suburbs, houses with pink roofs that rose like the backs of dinosaurs foundering in a murky twilight tar pit.

  “This is my favorite,” she said. “It makes my mind fly.”

  “I’d like to give it to you,” I said.

  “David! Really?”

  “Sure.”

  She hugged me.

  “It’s a wonderful present,” she said. She was genuinely excited, and she took the painting and ran out of the room. Later she came back and had me come downstairs to look at where she had hung it over her dresser.

  Larry’s gonna love that, I thought, smiling around the cluttered room.

  Ray wanted me to enter a juried show in Charlotte, and I let him submit some slides of a few paintings, but I wasn’t enthusiastic about the proposition. In any event, the slides impressed no one, and they were returned with a polite letter of rejection. I wasn’t surprised. My paintings didn’t photograph well; they turned muddy and dowdy. My favorite aunt, Helen, was the same way. A beautiful woman, but put her in front of the camera and you would capture a stocky, sullen female with a formidable jaw, squinting into the sun in a rage. My father, on the other hand, photographed beautifully. The camera failed to reveal his self-serving soul.

  Christmas came, and I got a Christmas card from my father with a check for five hundred dollars. I gave Anna a little necklace with a scrimshaw pendant. She was delighted and the next day gave me a present, the collected works of Father Walker, spiritual leader of the Dancers of Divine Logic. I expressed delight, and was delighted—Anna had given me a present.

  I rarely saw my landlord, often going weeks without catching more than a glimpse of him. I would leave the rent check under his door on the first of the month, and he would cash it in a week or two. Then, two days after Christmas, when I was experiencing the usual holiday isolation blues, Robert Kalso visited my room. It was around four in the afternoon and Kalso was wearing an olive drab army jacket and blue, billowing pajama bottoms. His feet were bare and he was holding a bottle of wine.

  “If you are busy, say so,” he began. “Throw me out. If the muse is wearing her slinkies and breathing heavy, heave me out. I am an artist myself, and I understand that you can’t drop the muse when her blood is up and expect to find her waiting patiently under the covers when you come back. So say the word and I’ll leave.”

  I assured him that I was finished painting. He produced two wine glasses and poured us each a glass of wine. “Ostensibly, I’m here to invite you to the Villa’s New Year’s party. Actually, as a resident of the Villa, you don’t need this invitation, but I know your type, pathologically sensitive, and you might not venture out of your room if you thought for a moment you weren’t invited. It will be a costume party, but you needn’t costume yourself if you are not so inclined. I have proclaimed it a costume party because some of my friends, alas, are always in costume, and this way they are less apt to look out of place. Anyway, I hope it will be fun, and I would like you to come if you can.”

  I told him I would be delighted to come if I were not w
orking, but that the hospital would probably require my services that night.

  “In any event,” Kalso continued, “I’ve actually come to look at your paintings. The invitation was a transparent excuse for gaining entrance. I have known, of course, that you painted, but I confess I didn’t have much curiosity about that. Frankly, I suspected that you might be another unfortunate fan of Dali’s, like poor Skip, a sort of Grandma Moses on drugs. But you gave Anna a painting, and she showed it to me, and …” Kalso shrugged. “I thought I would like to see some other work by you. Do you mind?”

  He was already up and prowling around the canvases in his bare feet and ballooning pants, evoking images of Charlie Chaplin in a highbrow skit, and I did mind, but I didn’t tell him so. He took a long time looking at them, saying nothing, which I found yet more irritating as I began to imagine some comment being formulated, some summing up of my winter’s work that, complimentary or derogatory, would be monstrously off-base and condescending. But when he returned to his chair, he only nodded and said, “You are a serious painter. Do you have an agent?” I told him I didn’t. He nodded his head and poured another glass of wine for each of us. “It is almost impossible to make a living as a fine artist,” he said, and I felt I was about to hear a lecture I had heard before, but he continued, “but I believe you can do it. You have genius and you have luck.”

  I raised my eyebrows. I wasn’t taking exception with the genius, just the luck. Kalso, to his credit, recognized the gesture for what it was and nodded his head violently. “Yes, luck. You’ve met me. I’m going to be your agent.”

  As it turned out, I didn’t have to work on New Year’s Eve, having worked Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I didn’t think about the party until I heard it in full roar, and I didn’t feel much like celebrating, so I stayed in my room doing some rough sketches for a large canvas, an abandoned warehouse that I had photographed earlier in the year. The photos were undramatic, but they helped remind me of the day, what the light had been doing, a certain ominous, alien feel, and I was trying to draw that and failing. Anna came into the room and sat down.

  “Who are you supposed to be?” I asked.

  Anna laughed. “Dracula,” she said. “What do you think?” She was wearing a top hat and a black cape and her face was covered with pancake makeup. Her lips were bright red and two Halloween wax incisors increased a slight overbite. She stood up, turned around and sat down on the sofa again. “Well?”

  “That’s not who I would have guessed.”

  “Who would you have guessed? No, forget it.”

  “I would have guessed Bugs Bunny as a funeral director.”

  Anna laughed and I joined her, feeling suddenly light-hearted and witty. I could never avoid the echo effect of Anna’s laughter; it always resonated within me even when there was nothing to laugh about. She was a virulent infection, in her brightness and in her darkness.

  “There’s too many people downstairs,” Anna said. “And some of them are real weird. New York fags. Creepy stuff.”

  “‘Creepy stuff?’ says Dracula?” I asked, goggling my eyes. “Pot calling the kettle creepy.”

  Anna slid off the sofa and onto the floor. “Are you happy, David?”

  “Huh?”

  “Are you happy?”

  “I love you and I ain’t got you,” I said. “You belong to an underworld drug magnate. Of course I’m not happy, under the circumstances.”

  I was seeing more of Anna by then, and my declarations of love, having met with derision, had evolved into clownish, self-deprecating set-pieces. I wasn’t happy with that evolution; it seemed to settle passion’s hash for all time, but at least there was warmth between us now, friendship. I didn’t want to be her friend. I wanted to be her lover, and sometimes I would go into sulks when she was around. In Anna’s presence, I was capable of mood swings to match her own.

  “No, really,” Anna repeated, “are you happy?”

  “Come away with me and I will be happy.”

  “Maybe I will,” Anna said. “If that’s all it would take to make you happy. You’re sweet, you know.”

  I decided to kiss her then. New Year’s brings out a horror of oblivion in me, with its terrible retrospective. She let me. She touched my cheek with her hand, and then she stood up and said, “I’ve got to go now. But everything will work out, you’ll see.”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I doubted that anything would work out. Later on that night, I ventured down to the party. Kalso was dressed as a circus ringmaster, and he winked at me as I passed him. The house was jammed with people, most of whom I didn’t know. I saw Diane, perched beside her man, who was supposed to be a sultan or something and who was leaning over a waterpipe making obscene sucking noises. Anna and Larry were engaged in a loud shouting match out back, their cloudy breath exploding over them. I could see Anna had had too much to drink—we all had too much to drink that winter—and she was staggering slightly. She turned and ran off toward the woods that bordered the Villa in the back, running with a ragged windmilling of arms, and Larry chased after her into the cold, brittle black of 1967. I snatched the better part of a bottle of Gilbey’s gin from an end table—with no remorse for the man whose hangover would be lessened by its theft—and went back upstairs to engage in some serious self-pity.

  8

  Somewhere around the middle of January, I met a pretty, extremely healthy girl named Samantha at a party Ray and Holly threw. Sam was one of those women doomed to find and nurture men at their most maudlin and self-involved. She found me, and she moved in with me, and she moved out again in the spring. I would like to do her justice; she was a wonderful person. I just can’t remember that much about her. I do remember that she sang plaintive folk songs of the incest and murder variety while accompanying herself with the ukulele. It wasn’t as bad as you might think. And she wrote poetry. And she seemed to live solely on brown rice and a kind of cardboard sold in health food stores, part of a religion which I never got straight although she explained it several times. I should remember some intimate and magical things, but I don’t.

  I remember that Anna glowered at me during this period. Anna didn’t like Sam and was openly rude to her. Anna felt deprived of my company and it pissed her off.

  “She’s not your type,” Anna told me when she got me alone.

  Sam and I lasted until the middle of May, and I think that was a good time in my life, a peaceful time.

  I was pleased with myself. I liked to think I was free of Anna. I wasn’t, and when Sam left, leaving me with a poem of bittersweet farewell that began, “From yearning for night to dreaming of dawn, even lovers arrive at goodby,” it wasn’t long before Anna was once again ruling my moods.

  Then, one morning in June around ten o’clock, Anna woke me up. “I need your help,” she said. She was upset, shaky. Could I drive her downtown? I said I could. I had gotten around forty-five minutes of sleep, but Anna’s genuine need brought me awake, alert.

  As soon as we were in the car, Anna’s sense of urgency evaporated. She leaned back, popped open a can of beer, and smiled at what was, certainly, a fine spring day. “You are a good friend,” she said.

  “Fine,” I said. “What was the emergency?”

  “I’m glad you got rid of Joan. I didn’t trust her. She was too heavy, you know.” Anna delighted in calling Sam Joan (short for Joan Baez). I had never found it particularly funny.

  “I didn’t get rid of her,” I said. “She left.”

  “Hey, don’t get all hot about it. She left—like the dinosaurs when they detected a chill in the air.” Anna laughed wildly. She was delighted with the analogy. I, on the other hand, was growing more disenchanted with the whole adventure.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Hey, come on. Don’t get all sulky.”

  I drove in silence. She leaned over and kissed my ear. “Here,” she shouted. “Pull over here.”

  Following Anna’s directions, I had brought us to the seedie
r side of Newburg, a land of scruffy dogs, trailer parks, and shedlike bars with neon signs advertising beer.

  I pulled to the curb in front of a small brown house with tall, yellow grass and bald patches of dirt in the yard. This was balmy June, and everything was green, all the bright, hopeful shades of spring, but this lot was anticipating August, already burnt-out and weary. A skinny girl with lifeless brown hair and acne stood on the porch, regarding us with suspicion. She went inside the house without saying anything.

  “It’s okay,” Anna said, and her reassurance awakened the first real spark of fear. What’s okay? A grey dog with sharp, rat-like features came around the side of the house and growled at us. Anna went up and knocked on the door.

  The door was opened by a big, bearded guy. He had one of those immense, Southern stomachs, belligerent stomachs, and meaty arms covered with curly black hair. “Hey little girl,” he said, and he smiled at Anna. “Who’s your friend?” And he glared at me.

  “This is David,” said Anna. “He’s okay. This is Grant, David.”

  Grant stared at me and I smiled. “Hi,” I said.

  “Come on in.” He stepped out of the way, and we walked into a room only slightly larger than Grant. It contained the skinny girl and a child in diapers. The child was chewing on a candy wrapper. The candy, something chocolate, liberally bathed her pasty body.

  I sat down on a sofa surrounded by trash. Someone had got to the sofa, and slashed the tweedy brown fabric with a knife. A yellow, desiccated sponge stuff leaked from the arms. “This is Loraine,” Anna said, introducing the girl. I nodded and smiled. I don’t think I said anything. I was still having trouble with the trash. I couldn’t imagine such an accumulation of McDonald’s sacks, Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets, crushed beer cans and empty soda bottles occurring by accident. There was something theatrical about the squalor—as if I were in some skit about garbage. The girl was watching a game show on a small TV, and she turned to me and said, “I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know how they can know all those things. I said to Grant, ‘It’s fixed.’ What do you think?”