Maybe I'll Call Anna

by William Browning Spencer

  He tried to hide the anger, but Anna was always quick to see such things. “I work all day,” she shouted back. “You don’t want me to drink or do any drugs. You want me to sit in my room with the lights out, I guess. I’ve got to have some kind of social life.”

  “I understand that.”

  Anna folded her arms and looked away, eyes misting. “I don’t think you understand anything. How could you? It’s different for you.”

  “I am trying to understand,” Parrish said. “I want to. I am genuinely concerned about you.”

  “Are you genuinely concerned about that debutante you’re seeing?” For one weird moment, Richard Parrish felt found out, and Anna’s brown eyes seemed to read him with a harsh, effortless cynicism. But he recovered quickly.

  “What debutante?”

  Anna smiled. “That woman who is always coming to see you. The nervous one with the green eye shadow.”

  Parrish smiled. “Oh, that one.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe it’s not your business. Maybe I’m the doctor and you are the patient.”

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s my girlfriend. We’re going to be married, as a matter of fact. I love her. Does that answer your question?”

  Anna said nothing. She looked like she had been slapped. Her mouth was slightly open. She slowly narrowed her eyes, enclosing some thought, as though hearing a distant sound that made no sense but might be puzzled out.

  She stood up. “That’s okay,” she said, speaking to a bookcase. “I’ve got to go—because I’ve got a life of my own.”

  Richard Parrish spoke sharply. “Anna, don’t just run away. I think we should talk about this. It’s not unusual for a patient to feel strongly about her doctor. In fact, it’s very common, and it has to do with my role, my authority. This sort of transference doesn’t really have anything to do with me.”

  Anna had one hand on the office doorknob. She still had the look of someone thinking furiously, racing a mental engine in neutral. She suddenly flung the door open, turned and ran out. Parrish raced around his desk and shouted after her as she fled down the hall, her long hair flying, her tennis shoes slapping on the shiny floor.

  She banged through the ward doors and out into the lobby and up the exit stairs. Parrish didn’t follow, as a nurse stepped out and looked at him. He smiled sadly and shook his head at the nurse and walked back to his office. He locked the door, sat at his desk, and thought, “Well, she’s gone. She’s someone else’s problem now.”

  He prided himself on the finality of that thought, the offhand way it dispensed with Anna Shockley. His hands were shaking as he rooted through the desk for more Valium.

  The next day, Thursday, he went to Nathan’s Drugs. “I just wanted to see if you were all right,” he told her. She was glad to see him, almost jumping with delight. She was wearing a pink headband and a yellow blouse with small green flowers stitched around its collar, and the effect aimed for was probably old-fashioned innocence. Anna, however, had such an exuberance of body—and the blouse was too small for the full-breasted girl—that the effect was somewhat steamier, making Parrish think of an erotic Victorian novel that he had once discovered in his father’s dresser drawer.

  “This was great timing,” Anna said. “I’m off in ten minutes. We could go get lunch.”

  Richard Parrish looked at his watch. “It’s only one,” he said.

  “I’m off at one on Thursdays. I told you that. Fridays I have to work until eight and …” She launched into an elaborate explanation of her schedule, which Parrish didn’t hear.

  Parrish waited for her to get off. It was a day of boldness, and as he waited outside in the heat he rolled up his sleeves and took off his tie.

  Anna came out of the drugstore giggling, exuberantly shedding the workaday world. She threw herself into his car when he opened the door, and they drove off.

  They decided they would make a picnic of it so they drove out of town. “I know where to go,” Anna said. “It’s a great place.” Parrish found himself falling easily into the role of obliging chauffeur as Anna told him where to turn. “We’re almost there,” she said when he thought they had driven too far, when the pull of obligations and guilt chastised him. They stopped and bought a bucket of chicken, and giant Cokes, and a glutton-sized bucket of coleslaw. “I love coleslaw,” Anna said.

  Richard listened to her babble. Anna had raw energy, no doubt about it. She could infect the rest of group therapy with her moods. This seemed to be tied to her illness, this emotional contagiousness she had. Her pathological self-involvement was also her great charm. Paradoxically, she was often radiantly unself-conscious.

  They pulled out of the Kentucky Fried Chicken—and it may have been Richard’s imagination but the balding counter man seemed to eye them with lewd envy—and Anna directed Parrish down a dirt road. She showed him where to park the car and they climbed down to the Yurman River. They ate the chicken in the shade of an oak tree, blinking out at the sun and water.

  “This is one of my favorite places,” Anna said. She was lying on the grass, staring up at the willow-lined bank.

  “I can see why,” Parrish said. “It’s beautiful.”

  “I drive out here a lot,” Anna said. “It helps me think.”

  “You’re making progress. I’m proud of you.”

  Anna smiled and blushed, as she always did when praised. “You did it,” she said.

  They didn’t say anything for a long time, watching a large white heron wading in the shallows. As they watched, its silver neck darted forward and a thin, shivering shard of fish squirmed in its beak. The fish wiggled down the bird’s throat.

  Parrish felt enchanted, freed. When Anna leaned over him, smiling, a maiden descending from the clouds saying, “Look, a four-leaf clover,” he caught her arm and drew her down to him. He kissed her, and there was less of passion in his kiss than of indolence and general well-being. It was the fierceness of her reciprocated kiss that set the alarm clamoring, swept him with hot fears. He lurched to his feet, rudely pushing her back as though she were an incubus, a demon sent to suck his soul from his lips.

  “Anna,” he said. “Please.…” He had been distracted, muddled by the warmth and perfection of the day, and he watched as Anna’s eyes caught and then mirrored his confusion.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and Anna turned and ran. He ran after her, but she was quick, and she plunged into the shadowy pine trees. The sun began to set swiftly, fogging detail, producing clumps of thorny brambles that bit his hands, muddy hillocks that caught at city shoes. He shouted her name in the woods and stumbled forward. She didn’t answer, and anger mixed with his desperation. Goddam the bitch.

  He hated himself as he climbed the slippery hill back to his car. Sunset filled the river with glorious red, and he felt more the fool amid this last surge of beauty. He opened the car door and sat down. The red sky drained to darkness, and he felt a dull lumbering fatigue enter his body.

  Maybe she had fallen, hurt herself. Maybe she had done herself some intentional harm. Maybe she had simply reached a road and hitchhiked out, leaving him to stew. She was capable of that. She was crazy.

  He laughed, a cold, cruel knife of mirth, hurled at himself. He was not in the habit of kissing emotionally disturbed girls. His colleagues would not applaud this maneuver, that’s for sure (it was, among other things, blatantly unethical). They hated him, envied him and feared the ramifications of his forthcoming marriage to Jane, and they would gloat horribly at his downfall. He had been lulled, by the day, by her powerful sexuality, and he had imagined that he was someone other than who he was, that she was not a patient in his care.

  For the first time in a long time, he thought of Vivian. His chest seemed filled with cement. He sobbed.

  He sat in the car in complete darkness. He might have been asleep, or near sleep, when the door opened and Anna slid in on her side. He turned and looked at her. “You can take me home,” she said.

  He tu
rned the key in the ignition and turned the lights on. Tunneling through the darkness, guided by the yellow beams, he drove back to town. He dropped her at the Villa and drove back to his own house. He hadn’t said a word, nor had she. He did not know what to say, but he would have liked to say something. He would have been curious to hear his own voice. Would it have been full of apology, this voice? Would it have been serene, the clinical psychologist returned, or would it have resounded with recrimination, the injured lover, the misunderstood friend, the put-upon Samaritan? If he had said something, his voice might have given him some clue as to how he really felt. But he had been silent, and he entered his house and lay on the bed in confusion until sleep overtook him.

  So it came as a surprise, the way his heart jumped two weeks later when he answered a knock at the door and found Anna standing there. He felt momentarily dizzy with excitement. She hadn’t come to the last two after-care sessions, and he hadn’t thought about her much. When he did think about her, his thoughts were so tinged with recriminations that he was glad to let her image fade. He had been busy with an overloaded patient schedule, and Jane had been more demanding of late.

  Since they had made love, Jane had assumed a more proprietary air, and Parrish was finding more and more of the stuff of arguments in the atmosphere. But he did not argue. He was unfailingly amenable. He didn’t want an argument that might escalate into a force that could blow them apart. He was interested only in marrying her. After they were married, after he was securely settled, there would come a time when he wouldn’t have to submit to her every whim. But, for the moment, he was entirely in agreement with his mother’s philosophy: the marriage at all costs.

  And so he let a number of resentments seethe and smolder under his flesh, and he smiled and gave no clue to their existence. He thought, when he thought at all about his feelings toward Jane, that he didn’t like her much, but that he might have liked her more if he had not been so intent on marrying her.

  Now Anna stood in his doorway, with the porch light shining down on her smiling face. “Hi,” she said.

  She was wearing an extremely short pair of dark blue shorts, sandals, and a yellow and green t-shirt. There seemed, as always, a richness to Anna, a dazzle of Anna, a largess of young womanhood. A large green moth, evidently agreeing, ignored the light and swooped at Anna, and she brushed it away and jumped back. “Eek!”

  “Better come in,” Parrish said, and he stepped back and let her in.

  Anna laughed, still brushing invisible moths from her face. She sat down on a sofa and smiled at him. “I know it’s late. What time is it, anyway?”

  Parrish looked at his watch. “Not late,” he said. “Five after eight.”

  “Anyway,” Anna rushed on, “I thought you might like to go for a drive or something. I mean, I could take you out and buy you a beer. And apologize. Okay. I’m sorry.”

  Parrish noticed then that Anna’s smile, despite its brightness, was starched and untrue. Her eyes glittered, and when she had walked past him he had detected the strong odor of beer.

  “I’m the one who should apologize,” Parrish said.

  “Anyway,” Anna continued, “the whole thing is really dumb. You’re a shrink, and I’m this rehabilitated dropout who works at a drug store, no match in heaven as they say, and I also wanted to come by to tell you that I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what I’m going to do with my life and I’ve decided to move out to The Home. I didn’t talk about this stuff because I know how you feel about Father Walker and the Dancers, but he says I’m really spiritual. He says your average person is like a melody played on a clarinet or something, beautiful but all single notes, you know. He says that I have harmonies in my song, like a symphony is how he explains it, and that he can show me how to glorify my soul.”

  Richard shook his head ruefully. “Why didn’t you tell me about this before? I thought you trusted me, but you don’t trust me at all.”

  Anna shrugged her shoulders. “Hank and Gretchen are moving out to the commune. They asked me to come along. I said I’d think about it. I thought about it. You would have just confused me, so I thought about it myself. Without any help, you know. Look, you don’t have to worry about me getting weird like before. Father Walker says that happens sometimes, the experience of divinity can be so powerful that it sets up a physical vibration, like an echo. And the echo isn’t real, isn’t holiness, but a sickness caused by holiness. Once you’ve gone through it, it can’t happen again, like having the measles.”

  “That man’s a fraud!” Parrish shouted, grabbing Anna’s shoulders.

  Anna jumped up, shaking her head, hair flying. “He isn’t. He cares about me more than you do!”

  Parrish shoved her back onto the sofa and sat next to her. He spoke very slowly. “Anna, when you came here you were an extremely ill girl. You are much better now. But you are not well. If you go out to The Home, you’ll probably get sick again.”

  Anna glared at Parrish and said nothing. He waited. The silence stretched out, and the room stretched, all the shadows of it lengthening, and Anna’s dark eyes continued to transmit a black and virulent anger. Slowly Parrish took his hands off her shoulders. Anna stood up and walked toward the door.

  “I shouldn’t have come here,” Anna said. “I knew you wouldn’t be happy for me.”

  Parrish could hardly see her. The light from the lamp on the end table expired at her feet, and the light from the porch threw her into silhouette. But she seemed more substantial than anything in his past or present. She seemed the promise of his future, moving forever away.

  He couldn’t let her leave.

  “Anna,” he said, and his voice seemed fatally small. He wondered if she would be able to hear it across the long room. “I love you.”

  “Oh,” Anna said. It was an exclamation of confusion, a short intake of breath that fell again into the pooled darkness and left them separated, and then she ran to him.

  They made love on the sofa.

  It was an awkward, fumbling business. Anna cried out when she came, and her body shuddered and she hissed his name in his ear, “Richard.” She had never called him Richard, and it made him giddy in the moment, as he raced toward his own climax. Later, as they lay on the sofa, all damp arms and legs, she called him Richard again, and fear bumped and flapped its wings in his chest as though the use of his first name was somehow more irrevocable than the meshing of bodies. Richard, she had said. They were together, this doomed girl and he. They were intertwined in this new familiarity.

  “This is wrong,” he said. “I shouldn’t have.”

  A hand, smelling faintly of his own semen, touched his lips and she said, “No, it’s right. You don’t love her. You love me.”

  “Her?” For a moment, disoriented, he didn’t understand this “her” and then he did. Jane. My God, Jane. His future spiralled into a great black chasm. He sat on the sofa in the darkness and Anna wrapped her warm arms around him and murmured—all unaware of the effect—“Richard, Richard, Richard.”

  9

  Two weeks later Richard Parrish sat in his study and wrote in his diary. He was writing in his defense.

  “She sought me out,” he wrote. “She has a kind of sexual cunning, not to be underestimated. This is not my fault—although I’d get no understanding, no sympathy from my jealous peers. Wouldn’t they revel in it? I’ve got to stop seeing her.” Parrish put the pen down. He felt possessed, lunatic. He picked the pen up and continued, “Jane’s bound to find out. Just last night, Jane called when Anna was sleeping next to me. I thought, ‘She’ll hear Anna breathing,’ but she didn’t. I talked to Jane, told her I’d call her in the morning, and when I hung up the phone, I felt ravenous for Anna, and I woke her and we screwed until we were both slippery with sweat. But it can’t last, and then it’s goodby Jane, goodby career, hello jail.

  “The patient went right back to sleep, and I lay in the dark. I’m coming down with something, the same virus that has half the staff on sick leave
, and that’s not helping matters any. I’ve got a fever. Yesterday, I looked into Anna’s eyes and saw Vivian. Vivian before things went wrong, the way Vivian’s eyes would fill up with me. The situation is intolerable.”

  Later entries in the diary: “She says she loves me. There is an implied threat in her words. I am not imagining this. She is aware of her status, her power.”

  “I am not the first person to be overtaken by a sexual obsession. This could happen to anyone. I can wallow in it or get out. It’s that simple.”

  “Now she says she is pregnant. This is the cheapest, most banal of lies, a sad commentary on her desperation.”

  “Jesus, it’s true.”

  She came to him in his office and told him. She was smiling, radiant. “I went to see Dr. Hamil today,” she said. “He says I’m pregnant. We are going to have a child, Richard.”

  He hadn’t believed her. A week later, beginning to have second thoughts, he had called Hamil. He told Hamil that, as Anna’s psychiatrist, he needed the information, needed to know the truth of Anna’s declaration. “The girl’s a compulsive liar,” he told Hamil. And Hamil, a cautious man, had said that he would get back with Parrish. Whomever Hamil talked to had confirmed that Anna Shockley was, in fact, Dr. Parrish’s patient.

  Dr. Hamil returned Richard’s call. He confirmed it; Anna was pregnant.

  10

  “We’ll get married,” Anna told him. “You won’t regret it. You’ll see. I’ll make a good wife. I can sew and cook.”

  Parrish thought that the initial sense of unreality would fade, that the problem would come clear, present itself as a problem in the real world with a real solution. But that wasn’t happening. The sense of absurdity was growing rather than shrinking. He was sitting in his office listening to a teenage girl tell him she was going to marry him. An old story. Boy gets girl in trouble, marries girl. He had done it himself: Vivian. Now he had done it again, only now it was utterly ludicrous. For one thing, he was marrying Jane Solomon next month. For another thing, he had no intention of destroying his career.