Part 1
David Livingston
August 1966
Garamond was on call for the E.R. that night. He was wearing a green scrub suit, and he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. Garamond was in his late twenties and much taken with his own romantic image: scruffy, world-weary saver of lives. When I came in Garamond was arguing with Invisible Vaughan (thus named because he was never to be found when needed, could walk across crowded rooms without being seen). Vaughan was the resident psychologist, a fastidious man with a naked face, large glasses, and an eerie deadness of manner, as though all the crazies that passed through the emergency room had sucked the vitality from him.
Garamond was shouting, and Vaughan, arms folded, was squinting darkly. “Don’t fuck with a Ph.D. in psychology,” Vaughan’s squint said.
They were arguing about admitting a patient. I didn’t want to hear about it, so I went across the hall and cleaned up from the last shift. I put a bunch of hemostats and scalpels in the autoclave. Then I walked into minor surgery.
She was sitting on the gurney, and the plastic tubing from an I.V. dangled next to her. A piece of white adhesive fluttered from the crook of her left arm. She wore a grey dress, the kind of dress that girls wore a lot in the sixties when we were all giving simplicity a run for its money. She smiled at me and said, “Hello.” She was incredibly pretty, with clear dark eyes and long brown hair, young and achingly bright.
She seemed composed, her hands folded in her lap, a good child in a folktale.
“Hi,” I said.
She smiled. “Are you another doctor?”
“Actually, I’m a brain surgeon,” I said. “I moonlight as an orderly though. Brains all day long. You get sick of them, you know? Who needs brains? Give me good looks any day. So how are you doing?”
I couldn’t make out what she said at first, because she was looking at the floor, speaking softly, with a faintly flirtatious manner which, I later learned, was simply Anna’s manner in the presence of men, a reflex, a physical tic. I had her repeat it.
“OD’ed,” she said. She looked up and smiled grandly. “Bad dope. A girl can’t be too careful. Doc says I can go but I better be careful. I told him: ‘You bet!’”
She jumped off the gurney, a perky jump for an overdose victim. She put on a pair of wooden sandals, then turned and picked up a record album that was lying on the sheet. It was the latest Beatles’ album, Revolver. Another incongruous touch, but I had come to accept a certain amount of surrealism working in an emergency room. She walked out of the room and down the hall, clutching the record in front of her. I followed her.
Dr. Garamond must have seen her striding purposefully for the lobby. He ran out from behind the admitting desk shouting, “Miss Shockley! Miss Shockley!” He put an arm around her shoulder and steered her back toward minor surgery. I followed. “We are thinking of admitting you,” Garamond said.
Anna rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Dr. Vaughan said I could go. He said I was fine.”
“He’s rethought that,” Garamond said, smiling painfully. “We think a little time in the hospital, just to sort things out, wouldn’t hurt.”
One of the nurses hollered for me, and I had to leave. A drunk under the inventive spell of alcohol had managed to cut his hand on an escalator. I got him into a cubicle, washed his hand in PhisoHex, and listened to a gush of invective against someone named Melanie. An intern named Culver came in, sewed the drunk up, and I went to see how Garamond was faring with Anna. He was sitting in minor surgery alone; his hands were on his knees and his head was lowered. He didn’t look on top of things.
I walked back to the lobby, pushed the doors open, and walked outside. It was August, a hot, black night. North Carolina had been invaded by a million crane flies, big, leggy insects desperate for human companionship, and I swatted them away and lit a cigarette. Anna, disconnecting from shadows, walked over to me and said, “I don’t know what his problem is. Is this hospital so hard up for patients that they gotta take anybody who sneezes in a draft?”
“A drug overdose isn’t exactly the common cold,” I said.
“You got another one of those cigarettes?”
I handed her a cigarette which she held in her mouth waiting for a light. Thrusting the cigarette toward the flame, she looked a bratty thirteen. She blew smoke and she smiled again, an odd, sly smile. “Larry has always got stuff, drugs, you know. Chemicals are Larry’s thing. I’m not a chemical person myself. I was bored and stupid, which happens sometimes. It’s not a lifestyle or anything. I don’t have to be checked in for observation.”
“Who’s Larry?”
“This guy I live with.”
I didn’t like Larry, instantly. Where was he anyway? Anna’s taxi arrived and she patted my shoulder as though reassuring me and said, “See you around.” I watched her get into the taxi. Then I went back inside.
The E.R. got busy after that. Two teenagers had driven off the road and the car had taken a couple of flops. They looked in worse shape than they were: a couple of broken ribs and some facial cuts that bled the way facial cuts will—with great bravado. I finally had time to look at Anna’s admission record.
She’d been brought in by someone named Robert Kalso. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
Anna’s address was given as 502 Morley Avenue. Her full name was Anna Holmes Shockley and she was eighteen. She had, by her own admission, taken a lot of downers. “Handfuls!” the admissions clerk had quoted, the exclamation point tall with disapproval. Robert Kalso lived at the same residence. He had found her in a groggy, incoherent state. Anna had volunteered the information about the drugs, and Kalso had become worried and driven her to the emergency room. Garamond had pumped her stomach, got the old electrolyte balance back up to snuff, and—grudgingly—set her free with an appointment to see Dr. Coleman, the psychiatrist on call that night. Invisible Vaughan hadn’t found any reason to keep her, and Garamond had failed to talk her into voluntarily committing herself. The bird had flown.
I finished reading the report, smoked a cigarette, and wondered who Anna Shockley was and whether or not she had intended to kill herself. I could see her very clearly in my mind; she had a kind of fragility that was disturbing, that immediately sent a ghostly sense of loss echoing through me.
Nothing was going on in the emergency room. It was three in the morning. I went back to the nurses’ station and tried to read a paperback novel whose hero was yet another Holden Caulfied clone. I couldn’t concentrate. The girl, Anna, had made an impression on me that seemed unwarranted by our brief encounter. I didn’t approve of Garamond’s concern, which I felt was elicited not by any desire to help a fellow human being but by the wondrous, doomed shout of Anna’s beauty. I didn’t approve because I felt the same way, and I knew what kind of an altruist I was. I was, in fact, already in love with Anna. I knew nothing about her except that she was pretty. I didn’t approve of the way men were treating her.
I didn’t approve of Larry’s drugged indifference and I didn’t approve of Garamond’s feverish solicitude.
The girl had put me in a bad mood; somehow her extraordinary beauty had wrenched me out of my routines. I felt faintly queasy, always a sure, lovesick sign.
I went home that morning and sat amid the clutter of the two-room garage apartment that I was renting on a week-to-week basis, and I studied the painting which I had tentatively titled Presentiment of Rain, which was beginning to feel all wrong. Finally I settled in to work on the canvas, bringing out some detail in the shadows, working mechanically, unemotionally. I stopped work after two steady hours. I lay down on my cot and slept, a sleep of thin, grey dreams. The telephone rang and I fished the receiver out of the glare and confusion.
“You’re mad, Livingston. You can’t go on like this; it will finish you. Haven’t you had enough of the world’s squalor and clamor? Come back to academia, my boy. Come back to the sweet, monastic silences, the late-night arguments on aesthetics, the blonde girls in their colored smocks, reeking faintly of turpentine, so serious, so sweet.…”
I hung up. Ray called back, of course, and I told him to come over later on—I looked at my watch—about two. I found that I was awake, however, with no chance of returning to sleep, so I fixed myself some eggs and put a pot of coffee on. An hour later I drove by 502 Morley Avenue because I didn’t have anything else to do and I was curious. I was also, I suppose, a romantic, a term I grow less comfortable with as the years go by. Now it seems to suggest schizophrenics fixated on movie stars, but then it was a prouder thing, an acknowledgment of the great strength in dreams, life’s infinite possibility.
502 Morley Avenue turned out to be a large white, three-story Victorian house on a corner lot. The grass was in need of mowing; grasshoppers whirred across the lawn. In the driveway a sleek, waxed Mustang, resplendent in sky blue and chrome, looked incongruously peppy in the tall weeds. There was a sign in the yard, handmade, announcing boldly: ROOM FOR RENT! Always a sucker for the declamatory, I went in and rented a room.
I thought I’d just take a look at the room. I had been meaning to move. The room, located at the top of the house, was lit by a skylight. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. It was a painter’s dream; the light was a bountiful, golden harvest. At that moment, I honestly forgot Anna’s presence in the house. I simply marveled at my good fortune. The person who had brought me up the stairs to this perfect studio was a skinny teenager named Hank, shirtless and shoeless, wearing a pair of immense khaki-colored shorts. Hank told me that the owner of the house was Robert Kalso and that I would have to talk to him about renting the room. I said I’d come back later and left. I went back to the garage apartment, getting there just as Ray was pulling up to the curb.