Six hundred miles away Olivia was thinking about her father. She thought her father would be like her grandfather when she met him. She thought she would go for long walks with him as her aunt and grandfather did, out across the hills at sunset. She imagined herself arm in arm with her father in whatever sort of hills or fields he inhabited in the faraway state of North Carolina. She had looked North Carolina up in the encyclopedia at her school. It said there were rolling hills and pastures near Charlotte. They would walk there, and, perhaps, she would find a horse and show him how she could ride. A sister would be there too. The one he was protecting from the truth. Still, a sister might be nice. A sister might be good if you could make friends with her. But most important was the father. To walk the hills and tell him the secrets of her heart and ask his advice about her future. Olivia stood beside her bed, looking out the small paned window at the bare yard and the apple tree her grandfather had planted for her when she was four. Yes, it would only be ten days now and she would go on the plane; and take off and land and walk down a runway and her father would be standing there and would take her hand and then her life would be complete and not always weighted with the loss of a piece. As if her life were a picture puzzle on a table and a piece was gone.
Her grandmother came into the room. “Bobby Tree is here,” she said. “He wishes to speak with you. Do not look that way when a friend calls on you.”
“Tell him I’ll be out in a minute. Go on, tell him to wait a minute.” Olivia put down the book that she was holding. Pretended to be straightening her desk. Her grandmother waited. “Go on, tell him I’ll be right there.”
“Is this what the coming of those people does?”
“All right. I’ll tell him myself.” Olivia went out into the living room. He was sitting on the sofa talking to her grandfather. Wearing a plaid shirt and ironed jeans, with his hair combed and his boots polished. A fine air was about him, like a horse anyone would want to own. He stood up and spoke to her. “I’ve been missing you. You never come by the stables anymore. I’ve been wondering where you were.”
“Why didn’t you call me, then?”
“I just thought I’d come on over. You want to go ride around town with me? We could get a hamburger or just ride around. If they would let you.” He turned to her grandfather. “Can I take her into town?”
“I’ll go,” Olivia said. “Let me get a jacket.”
They walked out together into the darkening night. Small cirrus clouds drifted across the moon. The constellations were appearing. Always if she walked out on such a night Olivia was astounded that the stars were there. Bobby Tree took her arm, helped her into the car. She felt the soft flannel of his sleeve against her wrist. The smell of pine trees was everywhere. The last time she had gone out with him they had gone to Sam’s room at the stables and lain down upon a bed but in the end she wouldn’t take her clothes off or allow him to take off his and she had been angry with him ever since that night and would not talk to him on the phone.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked her now.
“I won’t end up like my mother. I won’t live in a trailer and follow a roadie around.”
“Nobody’s asking you to.”
“So why did you come out?”
“I thought you might be lonely and want someone to talk to. I never see you since I finished school. You want to go to a movie?”
“I might.”
“Is your dad coming out here to see you?”
“No, I’m going there to visit them before too long. To North Carolina where they live.”
“You want to go look at the river? It’s at flood stage. You ought to see how high it is. I heard it was going to flood part of Arkansas tonight.”
“Okay. Let’s go look.” He turned the car off the main road and started toward the river. He reached out a hand and Olivia took it and moved over closer to the driver’s seat. “All right,” he said. “All right then.”
Anna stood in the middle of her workroom thinking terrible convoluted thoughts. So he’s letting her come up here. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to love her. God, she may have a terrible time. Jessie might get jealous and throw a fit. Anything could happen. Why did I get involved in this? Goddammit, it’s because Philip won’t meet me in Atlanta. No, it’s honest. Goddammit, they are my genes. I care what happens to them. We have to help this girl. Have to see that she has what she needs.
Anna pulled a piece of white cotton bond out of a package, stuck it in her typewriter and started typing a letter. She was typing standing up.
Dear Daniel,
I wish I would stop STICKING MY NOSE IN YOUR BUSINESS. Replicating DNA, that’s what’s causing all the trouble. They’re calling the shots, making me crazy, my empty troubled womb.
I keep wanting to make everyone be like me, sober, hardworking, driven, nervous, lonely.
Anna sat down. She felt terrible. She felt like she was catching a cold. She sneezed and wrapped her arms about herself. She was wearing a pair of washed-out lavender sweat pants from a gymnasium on Fifth Avenue in New York City. On top she had a dark soccer shirt with red and yellow stripes, a Christmas present from her cousin, LeLe. Above her head floated a single Ping-Pong ball, a gift from Captain Kangaroo. Wherever Anna lived that Ping-Pong ball hung from the ceiling of her workroom. She look at it now, floating in a little piece of light. She looked out the window. The rain was letting up. Maybe it would be a nice day after all.
The phone was ringing. Anna answered it, leaning back in her chair, blowing her nose as she answered the phone. “Hello.”
“Anna, it’s me. I’ve changed my mind about Atlanta. How soon can you get away?”
“Ten minutes from now. I think I’m catching a cold. Do you care?”
“No. Look, I can leave this afternoon at four. I got someone to take my calls. I can get to Atlanta by seven. Can you do that? Can you meet me there?”
“What’s your flight number?”
“Eleven thirty-two. Are you all right to fly?”
“I’ll probably be well as soon as I hang up this phone.”
“Call me back and tell me what time your flight arrives. If I’m not here, tell my service. Look, I love you.”
“I know you do.”
So Anna closed the door to the house and carrying one small fold-up suitcase, and wearing a beautiful charcoal black Valentino dress and a Ferragamo scarf and camel-colored high-heeled shoes she boarded a plane for Atlanta. When she got there he was waiting and they went upstairs to the airport hotel and went inside and took off all their clothes and lay down upon a bed and began to make love to each other.
It is on this moment of balance I must end: the strange moment when spirituality rejects ethics, when happiness springs from the absence of hope, when the mind finds its justification in the body.
“What are you thinking?” he said later.
“I am thinking of Camus. That’s what you get for fucking someone who reads too much.”
“Do you want to go out to dinner?”
“No, I want to lie here and feel your foot with my foot and look at you. Call room service. Order something.”
“Are you happy, Anna? I mean, in general, with the world as it is, can you find a way to live in it? Because I can’t lately. It isn’t only missing you. It may be the time of year. I don’t know what it is. Lately when things go wrong at the hospital. I’ve got a six-year-old kid with lymphoma, a friend’s child. I was the one to discover it. So they asked me to stay in on the treatment. I should have done something else for a living. They told me that. They knew it in Boston. They told me a long time ago. Never mind. Why do you look that way?”
“I couldn’t have borne that. Any kind of disease or disability. No wonder I wasn’t a mother. If anything went wrong I couldn’t bear it. I can’t bear to cut my finger. If something disabling happened to me I’d kill myself. I know I would.”
“Nothing will.” He pulled her into his arms. It was dark in the room. The heati
ng system hummed. The building creaked. Overhead the airplanes crisscrossed the sky.
“How can I bear to be this happy?” Anna said. “Listen, I’m no good at happiness either. I wish you’d leave right now.”
“No, you don’t,” he said, and began to make love to her some more.
In the morning they moved to a better hotel in downtown Atlanta with a waterfall and shops where Anna bought pale pink underwear from Belgium and chocolates from Sweden and candles. She bought six beautiful white candles and lit them in the room and made love to him by candlelight.
“This will make me write a love story,” she said.
“Go ahead. As long as I’m not in it.”
“You’ll be in it. You will be a Chinese graduate student who meets a girl at dawn on a bridge. Would you like that?”
“Will she make love to him?”
“If he wants her to. He will be very careful about engaging his affections for someone who seems so far away. She will be a beautiful Western girl and he will think she is inaccessible.”
“Will you write about the child with lymphoma?”
“No, it would make me too sad. I only write stories with happy endings. What time is it?”
“Six o’clock. We don’t have to leave until morning. Don’t think about it now.”
“Let’s go to a movie.”
“We could.”
They went out to a shopping mall and saw a Chinese film called The Yellow Earth. It was about a beautiful Chinese girl who falls in love with a brave man and loses him. In the end the girl drowns herself in a river.
“Why is this making me so happy?” Anna asked.
“Why did your cold go away?”
“Very mysterious. Inside this mystery is another mystery. Also, you would never have seen this divine movie without me. Think how marvelous it would be to live with me. Always something wonderful going on. Me thinking up wonderful things for you to do.”
“You would be terrible to live with.”
“I know. I am. I would be.”
“We’d be terrible together. At each other’s throats in a week’s time.” He stopped and took her arm and pulled her near him. They were in the middle of the pink marble vestibule of the mall. People walking all around them. “No, that’s not so. We would be wonderful together. We would work.”
“Oh, shit, Philip. Don’t start that.”
When they got home they made love again and this time it was worse than before, more wonderful and terrible than anything had ever been for him or for her. “‘Death is beaten by praying Indians, by distant cows … by hazardous meetings that bridge a continent.’”
“Who wrote that?”
“‘One could never die. Never die. Never die while crying. My lover, my dear one …’James Dickey … It was in an anthology I taught out of once. On the opposite page was a poem about a man trying to make up with his wife. It was a funny poem. The Dickey poem isn’t funny.” She rolled away from him and sat up on one elbow. The lamp on a bedside table cast pink shadows on her arm and face. She looked very beautiful and he imagined how she must have been when she was young. A luscious woman, high cheekbones, wide eyes, small nose. A once-in-a-lifetime woman and he could not keep her, even if he was free. No one would ever get to keep her and Philip knew that as well as he knew his own name.
“The other poem starts off with this couple riding in a taxi through New York City and the man says, ‘Come back … forget that figment of your imagination, the blonde … We will have a celebration to end all celebrations. We will invite the undertaker who lives beneath us and a couple of the boys from the office, … and Steinberg, who is off the wagon, by the way, and that insane woman who lives upstairs, and a few reporters, if anything should break.’” She went on, not giving him time to laugh. “It’s a better poem than the Dickey poem. The strange sexual tensions of the married state, so high-strung and so funny, dear and funny. I wish we could be married so we could have a fight and make up in a taxi.” She rolled back beside him and they held each other for a while without speaking.
“Shit,” he said. “What in the name of God did we do this to each other for?”
In the morning they were very polite and both of them pretended to be in a hurry to go home. They dressed and went downstairs to the dining room to eat breakfast. The hotel dining room was surrounded by a series of fake waterfalls. The very heart of nineteen eighty-five, Anna thought. After a long silence she remembered something that cheered her up.
“The passing within range of two powerful and mutually exclusive fantasy systems. Is that what has happened here? Or maybe my chemistry did a fix on your sperm and I have been inoculated with your DNA. In short, why do I love you?”
“I don’t know. I tried all year to figure it out. I walked out one morning and stood by the East River and thought I understood it once, I tried to call you, I did call. At that time I thought we should do as you wished and just leave it all and go away and live somewhere. Anywhere, for however long we could make it last. I could practice anywhere.”
“I know. You told me that. You called me.”
“We would take the baggage of our lives with us, Anna.” He was very intense, the freckles standing out on his face, a beautiful and haughty man. “So I talked myself out of that. But I have never regretted falling in love with you. We deserve our passions.” She was listening as hard as she could, trying to find solace somewhere, anywhere, in any word, any idea.
“It’s because we are growing older,” she said finally. “It’s tacky to mention it but the body ages and you and I both know damn well the great passions are behind us. This is my last, my very last. Goddammit, Philip, I give up. Let’s get out of here.” She stood up. “I’ll go get my bags. Have a porter up for them if you will.” She felt like herself, felt like Anna. She walked out through the dining room full of breakfast eaters, past newspaper readers reading all sorts of useless articles, poorly written about things that had no bearing on their lives. Her disdain and haughtiness caught up with her. She had been accused all her life of thinking she was above other people. Maybe I am, Anna thought now. I may be in this hotel playing out the end of a love affair with a married man who won’t marry me but at least I’m not reading the Atlanta Journal at eight o’clock in the morning.
“I won’t tell you I won’t see you anymore,” she said when she left him. “I’ll never do that again. I have to come to the city sometime soon. In a month or so. I’ll see you then.” She raised her eyes. “I changed my mind. I will be your mistress, or whatever you will have me for. This is okay. Some love, some grief. I love you.”
“I love you back. When will you be coming to New York?”
“This summer. As soon as I finish this book.”
“I’ll see you then. Call me when you know what day.”
12
Then Olivia was coming. Anna had barely unpacked her suitcase and opened her mail when it was Saturday again and Jessie and Daniel asked her to go with them to pick up Olivia at the airport.
“Oh, no. You need to go alone.”
“But we might not know who she is. You’re the one who knows her.” Jessie paused, then threw herself across the room and into Anna’s arms. Daniel stood in the doorway.
“Are you okay?” Anna asked.
“Go with us, Sister. We need you to go.”
They drove to the airport in the old convertible Jessie used for transportation to school, all three of them crowded into the front seat. Playing the radio. Not talking. Be quiet, Anna kept telling herself. It’s only one more thing happening. Jessie’s hands were clenched into fists. Daniel was driving very fast out Harris Boulevard to the Billy Graham Parkway. They parked the car and ran into the airport and were twenty minutes early and there was more waiting.
“She looks like Jessie,” Anna said. “She looks like me. She looks like you.”
“I know that,” he said. “You told me that already.”
Then Olivia was there. They crowded around her. It see
med to Anna that the whole airport must be encircling them and everyone in the whole town of Charlotte, North Carolina. Daniel was being hearty and solemn and Jessie was being very formal and Anna was too busy worrying to register anything more interesting than fear. Only Olivia seemed to know what she was doing there. “I was scared to death to get off that plane,” she said. “It’s the hardest thing I ever had to do.”
“Was it a bad ride?” Daniel put in. “Sometimes that flight from Nashville can get hairy. It looks like clear skies but you can’t see far from here.”
“It was all right,” Olivia said. “I meant I was afraid to see how you looked.”
“How do we look?” Jessie asked. She took her father’s arm.
“Nice,” Olivia answered. “Just fine, I guess.”
“Listen,” Anna said, for she had finally found some words. “This is basically an adventure, of the first order, of the first magnitude. You don’t get moments like this very often. Let’s soak it up. Don’t diffuse it.” The others all looked at her.
“I’m glad I’m here,” Olivia said. “I’m glad to be here.” She moved closer to her father and searched his face, then touched his arm, just the very slightest touch of her hand upon his rolled-up shirt sleeve. No one said a word. Then Jessie took Olivia’s hand from her father’s sleeve and pulled her away from him. “Let’s go get your luggage,” she said. “I know you want to get out of this filthy airport. You can’t even breathe for all the diesel in the air.” She pulled Olivia along with her. They moved out in front of Anna and Daniel.
The Anna Papers Page 10
