Maybe I'll Call Anna

by William Browning Spencer

  We were hurtling through absolute blackness on what I knew to be a country road, too narrow for two cars, too narrow for two fat men on bicycles, and Anna was laughing, the black air screaming through the car’s open windows, the slippery smell of rain carrying a clean terror of its own.

  Anna snapped the lights back on, and a stark, dripping wall of vegetation erupted in front of us. She spun the wheel and we swooped effortlessly downhill.

  “Goddam it, Anna I don’t think it’s funny,” I said. My hands ached from clutching the dashboard.

  Anna laughed. “Don’t worry. I’m a good driver. I had a good teacher.” Her eyes sparkled with concentration; her hair flew in the black wind.

  I regretted teaching Anna to drive, but it had seemed like a good idea. It would be a step toward independence, away from the passive, passenger existence that had characterized her life. That was my thinking on the matter. Besides, fortuitously, she had a car. She now owned Larry’s Mustang.

  Larry’s father had come down in the wake of his son’s death. He was a thin, balding man whose manner suggested that his son had picked a particularly poor time to die. “My wife”—Larry’s stepmother (his real mother was dead)—“just left me. And things ain’t going well at the shop. I hope this can be cleared up quick enough.” Larry’s father, who urged everyone to call him Bud, cried considerably, was red-eyed every time I met him, but his tears seemed drawn from irritation as much as grief. “What am I supposed to do with this hot rod?” he asked Kalso. “I reckon I’ll have to go about selling it. I can’t see myself driving a hot rod.”

  By accident, I happened to be present during this conversation, and I was surprised when Kalso spoke up.

  “I’d like to buy the car,” Kalso said.

  I couldn’t see Bud driving the Mustang, it was true. But I couldn’t see Kalso driving it either.

  Bud’s eyes had narrowed, transforming him into a sort of suspicious Airedale, and he said, “I’d have to think about it. I don’t know much about cars, but it looks like it’s in real fine shape, like it’s been kept up.”

  “I’m sure we can work something out,” Kalso said.

  They did. And that night a euphoric Anna burst into my room to tell me that Kalso had given her a gift. Guess what?

  I guessed. A sky-blue Mustang.

  I was right.

  I asked Kalso about it when I got him alone. “Expensive gift,” I said.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve gotten used to the car in the driveway. Besides, I am a sentimental fool. I take in boarders and acquire family. If Anna were a boy, she would inspire less noble advances. As it is, she inspires a mawkishness that appalls me. Let’s not talk about this again.”

  So we didn’t.

  I taught Anna to drive, but she was fearless from the start, ready to rocket into traffic. I went with her to get her license. It was a proud day for her, and she wore a dress. She seemed nervous but capable, determined. The officer who gave her the test was much taken with her. And she did look beautiful, victorious in white when she came out of that austere building and raced down the steps, jumping into my arms, forcing me to take her full weight and swing her in the sunny air. After she had her license, she insisted on driving everywhere. And when I was busy she was often out flying down back-country roads, drinking beer.

  “It’s okay,” she told me when I worried about it. “It’s something I like to do. It’s freedom. Freedom can’t hurt me. I need freedom.”

  That late summer and fall brought me moments of intense happiness. There is a temptation to haul out the photographs: Anna in a bathing suit, sitting stolidly in a wading pool holding an umbrella over her head, the shimmering arc of water from a garden hose descending like laughter around her; Anna eating a watermelon, mouth wide; Anna standing on a beach in a windbreaker, hair flying; Anna wrapped regally in blankets, looking up from a book, peering over giant, horn-rimmed glasses. The evidence of good times is overwhelming, undeniable. And I can never forget the glory of Anna naked, as she moved across the room. She would stand very straight, flat-footed, smoking a cigarette in the middle of the room. It was a picture I wanted to paint, but I never did, because the act of painting would have stolen from the simple act of being with her. She was not a graceful girl—clumsy, awkward, often self-conscious—but she was possessed of a magnificent femininity that transmuted everything she did, enclosed her in erotic intent. I was obsessed with her, and that obsession doesn’t make me the most objective man available regarding Anna and her charms. But there is no doubt that Anna had a powerful, physical authority.

  To say that my attraction to Anna was physical is to say more and less than the truth. Anna did not go unnoticed in any crowd. But her physical beauty had shaped her character more than beauty—always a powerful force—shapes most of us. She had a refugee air about her, as though still stunned by some calamity, a tornado, a terrible war, and I believe that the trauma, the storm behind her, was this piercing physical beauty. I loved Anna and I loved the victim within.

  I suppose I thought of myself as a victim, too. That summer and fall were not carefree. We often argued, loud shouting matches that usually ended in Anna’s roaring off in the Mustang. Arguments were a way of life with Anna. I wasn’t exactly an innocent bystander myself. I was better than most at discovering betrayal and resentment. We argued and we made up. Anna enjoyed teary reunions. She recovered quickly, forgetting everything. I brooded, saying nothing. I found it palatable some days to think of myself as a man bludgeoned into an untenable relationship by the fatal hammer of sex. There is something to be said for believing that you have been deprived of volition, robbed by some force older than evolution. And some days—the bad ones—I would try to believe that I had been swept along against my will.

  Those days when I would try to deny any responsibility in this relationship were the frightened days. By late September, there was no avoiding a cold reality: The mental and emotional tremors that haunted Anna were increasing in intensity and frequency.

  I could no longer dismiss Anna’s fitful behavior as emotional turbulence, the birthright of pretty girls.

  We were drowsing in bed one night. It had been a chilly day, and the furnace had kicked on, filling the small upstairs room with thick heat. The lethargic aftermath of our fevered, desperate lovemaking, combined with the heat, made it hard to stay awake. I was aware that Anna had gotten out of bed and was prowling around the room. I heard things being knocked over, heard Anna sobbing, and I pushed myself out of sleep.

  “Wooster,” she was crying. “Wooster, come out.” She was shivering, despite the heat, and I ran to her where she knelt by the side of the sofa. She didn’t seem to recognize me at first, jumped and trembled. “Wooster is unhappy,” she told me, with wide, unseeing eyes.

  “He’s here,” she said. “I know he’s here:”

  I reminded her that we had buried Wooster and she said, “I know that, David. It’s why he’s so unhappy. We had no right, no right to do that. No right!” She began shaking her head, repeating, “No right. No right!” I brought her back to bed and held her. She jumped away, would not be quieted, ran to the window and peered out. “The ground’s so hard,” she said. “So hard.” I brought her back to the bed again, and this time she stayed. Finally, she slept, and in the morning, she said nothing about the incident.

  I didn’t ask about Wooster. I didn’t want to look into the abyss. I just wanted Anna.

  Diane said, “I know you don’t want to talk about it, but we have to talk about it. Anna appears to be having schizophrenic episodes. This morning she told me that she had seen an angel. And that’s not the first thing she’s told me that’s been really odd.”

  “Anna talks like that,” I said, writhing on the sofa where Diane had directed me to sit while she had her say.

  Diane shook her head. “If I know about this stuff, then you certainly know about it. You have got to stop denying that anything is wrong. It’s immoral, really.”

  “Immoral
? You been talking to angels too?” I asked.

  “David, I think Anna should see Dr. Parrish. Just let him talk to her for an hour. If he gives her a clean bill of health, fine, but if not, he can help her.”

  “Anna’s fine,” I said.

  “You know she isn’t.”

  I was beginning to think that Diane’s living at the Villa was a mixed blessing. Saul was gone for what appeared to be good. He had left for California (Diane’s “lobotomy country”), taking the at-loose-ends Skip with him. While Diane’s freedom from Saul was cause for celebration, she now had more time than was healthy to scrutinize Anna and me. What she saw altered her face subtly, superimposing a ghostly disapproval over her smiling, civilized features. She had to work at not saying things, and the need to say them had, as I knew it would, finally overpowered her.

  I got up from the sofa, exit on my mind, “I’m worried about Anna. I know that Larry’s death freaked her out, but I think we’re working things out fine. Look, I’ll be the first to holler if I think anything is really wrong.”

  Diane frowned at me. “Okay.”

  I disengaged, retreating to my room.

  I was worried, and I don’t know why I didn’t grab at Diane’s suggestion. Yes, I know why. The same reason a person who suspects cancer doesn’t rush out for a biopsy.

  But I was worried about Anna. Anna had told me about the angel, too. The angel had told Anna not to eat red meat. “If you eat red meat,” the angel had said, “I will come back and kill you with a butcher’s knife.” Anna had been genuinely terrified.

  But no more hoodlum angels spoke her name, and the days were quiet, and I painted, and Anna drove her car and lay on the sofa and watched me paint, and everything was normal enough.

  The odd thing about this period is that, despite the emotional chaos, I was painting better than I ever had. I was young—I had just turned a portentous twenty-one in April—and while I felt ancient when talking to Anna (Kalso always referred to Anna as my “ward.” “How’s your ward getting on?” he would ask), I was becoming increasingly aware that I knew almost nothing.

  Kalso had finally convinced me to fly up to New York with him, to see just who my benefactors were, and I had done it, grudgingly. I hadn’t enjoyed the trip because I didn’t like being away from Anna, and I was convinced that I would be exposed as a fraud. I had the arrogance of youth—and youth’s self-consciousness.

  The trip went well, but it didn’t feel like an experience I wanted to repeat. Harold Brell, the gallery owner, was a small, elegant man in a three-piece suit. His face was deeply tanned, his hair was cloudy white, and he had blue, searching eyes. He seemed extremely comfortable in the city of New York (he told me he had been born in Munich). He assured me I would be rich and famous. He suggested I move up to New York and when my refusal was immediate he laughed and said, “Not for you, of course. Too much here. I agree. Excitement, but nothing to think about, no serenity, I think.” He had clapped me on the shoulder. “The recluse, you.”

  I look at the paintings I painted back then, and I don’t feel the need to apologize for them. They are better than they should be. I was very lucky. Had I chosen a direction that demanded more emotional maturity, I would have failed. But I settled for hymns to the surface, shiny wonders. It was when I looked deeper, stretching the limits of my emotional integrity, that I failed. That’s why, after that first self-satisfied leap to success, there was a dark, floundering period when I thought I might never paint again. Having failed to struggle as a young artist, I struggled as an older one.

  But that is getting ahead of the story.

  On the first day of October Anna returned from a day at the commune with Hank and Gretchen. She often spent the day out at the farm, and since I was painting all day long (an awesomely selfish business), I could hardly object to her pursuing her own spiritual destiny. I liked to think that she was drawn by the comradeship and the clear bracing weather. I liked, actually, to think about it as little as possible. On this afternoon, Anna was particularly flushed and excited. Guru Walker had told Anna that she had, in a former life, been sold into slavery and prostitution by her parents. This was in eighteenth-century England. Her father had owned a pub, and times were rough.

  I told Anna that that was an old fortune-telling tale, a common lie to titillate elderly women who wanted, desperately, to believe that excitement had once visited their drab lives.

  I may have gone on at too great a length. I hated the balmy, effortless believing of reincarnationists, astral travelers, transcendentalists. I was in the middle of a sentence when Anna screamed, shoved me backwards, and ran into the house. I ran after her, but she slammed the door to her room and refused to let me in. I apologized through the door and went away. I assumed that the usual time would elapse in our ritual quarrel, that all would be forgiven by evening. I was complacent on that point, I suppose, for I remember going back to painting and rapidly settling into the rhythm of work. I forgot what time it was, and when I glanced at my watch I was surprised to find it was after ten. I had assumed that, somewhere in the course of the evening, Anna would have come in, and I would have apologized, and she would—with some initial resistance—have accepted the apology.

  I went and knocked on her door, and a slurred voice told me to go away. This happened sometimes. Anna’s drinking could throw the whole ritual out of whack. I shrugged and resolved not to talk to her until the next day.

  The next day was overcast and chilly. I awoke later than usual and went downstairs. Anna wasn’t anywhere around, so I went upstairs and knocked on her door. No one answered, but I thought I heard a voice, so I entered. Anna was sitting up in bed reading out loud. She was reading from one of Walker’s self-published books, a small blue paperback titled The Road Home which I had once opened and perused. The book contained sentences like: “Imperfection is man’s physical reaction to perceived death. Imperfection consists of this and nothing more: believing the lie of imperfection.” Heavy stuff, really, the midnight revelations of college sophomores in chemically-altered states of mind. I never understood how the Hanks and Gretchens—lilies of the field folk—could wade through this stuff. But they did.

  The room was dark except for a small bedside lamp that bathed Anna in yellow light. She had on an old blue flannel nightgown decorated with roses and cigarette burns. She was wearing her glasses, which always made her appear younger and slightly incredulous, and was reading aloud in a monotone.

  “Anna,” I said. She read on. “Anna?”

  I went over to the bed and touched her shoulder.

  “Get out of here,” she said. “You are the Shadow Principle. Maker of Darkness.”

  “Anna.”

  Anna turned away from me and read on. Now she read at an even faster clip, like a priest in a cheap vampire flick, keeping the undead at bay with a barrage of holy words. I felt another wild diatribe bubbling up within me, another cult-debunking lecture, so I left quickly.

  But I was worried now, really scared. There was always a breathless, scattered look to Anna just before a fit, and that panicky feeling had been very much in evidence, a black spirit of hysteria. When Diane came home from work in the afternoon, I asked her to look in on Anna. Diane’s face, when she returned, was not hopeful.

  “I think we should get her to a hospital.”

  “I thought you might say that,” I said.

  Diane took my hand and patted it. “David, hospitals help people; Anna needs help.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Diane had picked an unfortunate phrase. Since I was a kid, “needs help” had been a euphemism for insane, a phrase always on the lips of my father and my father’s immense clan of relatives who had nothing much to do, in the narrow town of my birth, but be solicitous and overbearing. My mother had “needed help” and she had gotten it with a vengeance.

  I got up and went upstairs. Anna was sleeping, and I didn’t want to wake her. The book lay by her hand. I picked it up and put it next to her on the night table. Then I turned o
ff the light and went back to the studio.

  I couldn’t sleep that night, and I felt unusually cold, as though the autumn had crawled into my bones, worked a change toward winter there. And so I was awake when I heard the door open and I heard Anna’s quiet tread, and I started to sit up just as the room erupted in a single, mind-numbing thunderclap, a red shriek in my ears and eyes. I was cuffed off the mattress by a powerful blow. I tried to stand, but I felt lopsided, baffled. My shoulder began to throb as I knelt against the window sill. I heard shouts. The room light blazed on, and Anna, wearing a flannel nightgown, blinked owl-like and unseeing. Kalso came running in and took Larry’s gun from her hand.

  I had wondered what had become of that gun. The police hadn’t found any gun. “Well, there it is,” I thought.

  I noticed then that I was bleeding.

  “Anna?” I said. “Are you okay?”

  Anna was definitely not okay. She stood in the center of the room moving her lips soundlessly.

  I started to cry. I felt … what did I feel? Defeat, I think.

  15

  I had always been able to charm Clara Newcomb, the night shift head nurse. A long-running routine had evolved in our working relationship. I maintained that Clara, who was the mother of three teenagers and happily married, was a wild, pot-smoking hedonist who lived to party. She maintained that I was feeble-minded, that a rich uncle had bribed the hospital’s director. How else would I have obtained the cushy job of orderly, a job so obviously beyond my mental abilities? I tried to charm her that night with the old jokes, the old routines, but she wasn’t buying it.

  “You don’t walk into an emergency room with a gunshot wound and walk out again without it being reported,” she told me. “I’m sorry, but that’s the law.”

  “Clara, I’m okay. I’m pretty sure I’m okay, anyway. I tell you what. I’ll make a deal. If you’ll page Gill, and if he’ll come down here and take a look at me in an unofficial capacity, and if he says I’m okay, then we’ll forget I even walked in the door.”