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 seedier 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?”

I said I didn’t know, and she nodded and looked triumphantly at Grant, as though I had sided with her. He glared at me, sensing a troublemaker.

Anna reached into her purse and began hauling out plastic vials of pills—blue pills, steely black pills, two-tone pastel pills. Grant knelt down and began picking up the pills, opening bottles, pouring the treasure in his broad hands. He smiled piratically.

Fear, which had been rising in a black tide, gave way to quiet rage. Goddam you Anna! I thought.

I seethed while the transaction was completed. I turned to the TV, trying to disassociate myself from the proceedings, and watched a fat woman study the relative whiteness of two blouses.

Grant had his drugs, and now he felt that some primitive social amenities should be observed. I declined a beer and watched Anna accept one and drink it and flirt with Grant.

“You’re mad at me,” Anna said when we were back in the car and driving away.

“Good guess,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it. I was experiencing self-loathing of heroic proportions.

Anna sighed, the exhalation of a human being much maligned and misunderstood. “You aren’t even going to ask me why this was such an emergency, are you?”

“No.”

“I had to have the money. Larry is getting weirder all the time, and I need some money of my own.”

“Sure.”

“You don’t know how bad things have been going. You haven’t been noticing anything lately. Joan moved in, and that was it. Fuck the rest of the world.”

“It’s Sam, Anna. Not Joan. And you’re not the rest of the world; you are just one spoiled girl, one small, selfish, crazy person.”

“You don’t have to get so goddam angry. It’s amazing, really amazing to me how you can make a big deal out of everything. I mean, everything has got to mean something, right or wrong. You are touchy, is what you are, and I never know when you are going to get angry. I can’t help it the way things are. I’m sorry it was such a fucking imposition. I won’t ask for any favors anymore.”

“No, don’t,” I said. I drove back to the Villa, and we both got out of the car without saying anything—Anna had now settled into her martyr’s role—and I went up to my room to discover that four of my paintings, including the largest canvas, were missing. I found a note from Kalso saying he had taken the paintings to New York, but I felt too beat down and traumatized to seek revenge for this incredible presumption. Instead, I called Ray up and asked him if I could move in with him and Holly for a couple of days. He said that would be fine. I threw a few things in the car and drove away. I didn’t see Anna when I left, which was good. I felt rotten—but oddly relieved.