The Anna Papers Read online

  The Anna Papers

  Ellen Gilchrist

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1989 by Ellen Gilchrist

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Excerpts from “Adultery,” copyright© 1966 by James Dickey. Reprinted from Poems 1957-1967 by permission of Wesleyan University Press. First appeared in the Nation.

  Excerpt from Ernest Hemingway, On Writing edited by Larry W. Phillips. Copyright© 1984 Larry W. Phillips and Mary Welsh Hemingway. Reprinted with the permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Company.

  I FALL IN LOVE TOO EASILY by Sammy Kahn and Jule Styne, © I944 (renewed 1972) METRO-GOLDWYN MAYER INC. All rights assigned to SBK FEIST CATALOGUE PARTNERSHIP. All rights controlled and administered by SBK FEIST CATALOG INC. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

  “Elegy” by W. S. Merwin from The Carrier of Ladders. Copyright© 1970 W. S. Merwin. Reprinted with the permission of Atheneum Publishers, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Company.

  Excerpts from “Love 20c The First Quarter Mile” from New and Selected Poems by Kenneth Fearing. Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press. Copyright © 1956 by Kenneth Fearing.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition May 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-63576-152-8

  For Rita, for Tom, for Jim

  “Love is also a good subject, as you might be said to have discovered.”

  —Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

  Prelude

  A man and a woman are alone in bed. It is very dark outside, a pitch-black night with no stars. New Orleans, Louisiana. Nineteen hundred and seventy-three. July. The very heart of summer. An air conditioner hums in a far room. Outside the open window a thousand crickets and tree frogs are making a raucous din. An outrage, an uproar of cicadas and crickets and tree frogs, the hum of the air conditioner’s motor. A record player is playing Bach, Bach played on a twelve-string Martin guitar. A candle is burning on a table beside the bed. The air is full of the sound of love, the smell of love, the taste of love is all over her lips and breasts and hair. His arm is across her body. He rises above her and shakes his head.

  “Jesus Christ. Who’s been making love to you?”

  “Nobody,” she says. “I’m married. Married people don’t make love. They make deals.”

  “God, that’s so cynical.”

  “No, it’s just true. And he won’t be home for a month, so don’t remind me of it.”

  “Where’s he gone?”

  “I told you. He’s in England on business. And he always fucks around on me when he’s gone or when he’s in town, so what difference does it make? Don’t worry about it.”

  “I want you to go to the coast with me as soon as I finish my exams.” He shook his head again and lay back down beside her and was still. He was waiting for an answer.

  “Where would we go?”

  “To my mother’s place. There’s no one there all summer. She’s in the Orient.”

  “Then I’ll go. I’ll do whatever you want me to. I love you. I told you I loved you, Pointer, why can’t you ever believe that when I say it?”

  “Because you’re married. You just want something to do while he’s gone.”

  “I do not…. Come here. Get close to me. My God, this is so good I can’t believe it.” And she pulled him over on top of her and began to make love to him again. His body was so beautiful and young and strong. He was so angry, so crazy, so intense. She had seen him one afternoon on a tennis court at the club and asked who he was and then she had stood beside the court watching him play for almost half an hour. She was very beautiful and very rich and very spoiled and she knew that if she stood there and watched him he would begin to desire her. It didn’t occur to her to wonder if what she was doing was bad or good. She had seen something she liked and she wanted to find out more about it.

  He stopped in the middle of the match and poured water for himself and his opponent. As he raised the cup to his lips he caught her eye and he kept on looking. She moved one leg in front of the other leg and lowered her head. She took a yellow tennis ball and bounced it a few times with her racquet and caught it. When he went back to the baseline to begin the new game, she took her rings off and stuck them in the zipper lining of her tennis bag. There was a white spot where the rings had been and she held her hand out to the sun to begin erasing it.

  “Should I go on home?” she asked her cousin, Rhoda Manning, who was in the dressing room. “Or wait around?”

  “Wait around,” Rhoda advised. “This is no time for games.”

  “Games work.”

  “Yeah, I know. But they aren’t worth it. Waste too much time; besides, everyone always sees through them.”

  “They work even when people see through them.”

  “Then do whatever you want to do.” Rhoda finished combing her hair, tied a white terrycloth headband around her head and picked up her bag to leave. “I’m staying,” Anna said. “He’s the best-looking man I’ve seen around this town in years.”

  “He’s just a law student.”

  “So what? You can’t have everything in one man.” The women parted and Anna went up to the balcony overlooking the courts and ordered a glass of tea. She propped her legs up on the rail and thought about how nice the day was and how lucky she always turned out to be. How the universe always gave her what she needed, whether or not she deserved it, the universe just kept on supplying her with goods.

  “What are you thinking about?” he said.

  “I was thinking about how much I love to make love to you.”

  “What else?”

  “About the first time I saw you. How beautifully you were playing. You were beating the shit out of Maynard. Even when I started watching it didn’t faze you.”

  “I thought you were gorgeous. I asked Maynard who you were. I almost choked when he told me. I had just asked your husband for a job about a week before. He turned me down by the way, so go tell that to your Freudian.” Pointer moved his body to accommodate hers and she turned her back to his chest and cuddled up inside his arms like a child. He went on. “Do you always get what you want, Anna?”

  “Yes. I mostly do. I’m lucky. Terribly lucky or else I just want things harder than other people.”

  “Wasn’t there anything you couldn’t have that you wanted?” He ran his hand down her side, he caressed the soft roll of flesh around her waist, he caressed her little stomach, he caressed her thigh; his hand was warm and soft, like a woman’s hand. Tender, a tender man when his desire was satisfied. He wasn’t really interested in the conversation. He was interested in the quality of her skin. She had miraculous skin, the softest skin he had ever touched.

  “I wanted a baby,” she said. “But I couldn’t have one.”

  “And you’ve had three husbands and you still couldn’t get pregnant?”

  “I could get pregnant. I just couldn’t carry them, couldn’t keep them alive. I don’t like to talk about it, Pointer. It makes me sad. I’m going to get up and blow out that candle and close the windows. Those goddamn cicadas are like a rock band. Did you ever hear them so loud?”
/>   “I can smell the honeysuckle out there. It’s wonderful. Leave it open.”

  “It’s mock orange too. And a night-blooming plant next door. I’ve forgotten the name.” She disentangled herself and walked across the room and blew out the candle. She took a silk dressing gown from the bedpost and put it on. “I’m going to get a drink. Can I bring you anything? Water? Brandy?”

  “Are you going to see me tomorrow night?”

  “Yes. And any other time you want me to.” He held out his hands to pull her back into the bed but she left the room and walked down the long dark hall to the kitchen, past the antiques from her grandmother’s house, past the bench from her first husband’s grandfather’s farm and past the paintings they had bought together and the photographs from the second marriage and into the kitchen which was painted white and royal blue, the Virgin’s colors. She was thinking about the twin fetuses. She was thinking about her womb and its seeds. She was thinking about Pointer’s come inside of her and how many days it had been since she had last menstruated and how many months it had been since she had seen the obstetrician who did the last operation and how many times she had had her fallopian tubes blown out and how much it hurt and how wonderful it was to make love by candlelight to someone who had never seen her be sad.

  She reached up in a cabinet and took down the brandy and filled two gold-banded brandy glasses that had been a gift from her first husband’s uncle and carried them back to the bedroom.

  “I don’t know what we keep doing wrong,” she said, handing him a glass. “I don’t know why things don’t work out.”

  “Because we’re crazy,” he said. “Come on, Anna, get back in the bed and help me get some sleep. I’ve got an exam at nine in the morning.”

  She put her glass down on the table and turned back the cover and climbed in beside him. “You’re right,” she answered. “We’re all crazy. Crazier than loons or lemmings or wild geese or fish schooling. Doomed and crazy. Doomed to mess each other up and help each other sleep. I love you.” He moved beside her and together they fell into a lovely remorseless, charmed sleep.

  The evidence for telepathy is overwhelming. Anna’s husband called an hour later. The phone was ringing and ringing in the dark house. She picked up the extension beside the bed.

  “Hello.”

  “Anna. It’s me. What are you doing?”

  “What do you mean? I’m sleeping. It’s the middle of the night here. Where are you?”

  “I’m in London. I want you to come over here. I’m lonely for you.”

  “I can’t do that. I have to play in a tournament next week.”

  “Fuck the tournament. I need you. Listen, there’s a doctor over here who’s doing miracles with babies. Transplants. I don’t know what all he’s doing, but you should see him.”

  “No. No more doctors. It doesn’t work. My body kills babies. I don’t even care anymore.”

  “You do care. And I want you. I’m lonely for you. I want you with me.”

  “I can’t help it. I can’t come over there now. I don’t want to fly. I hate to fly across the ocean. I’m sleepy, Jodie. I was sound asleep. I’ll call you when I get up. Where will you be tomorrow morning my time?”

  “Never mind it then. I was hoping. I thought we were married, Anna. I thought I meant something to you. I thought I could call up my wife and ask her to come over and keep me company while I make a living. Dumb old me.”

  “Don’t be that way. I’m working. I’ve got a dozen deadlines to meet. I’m two months late with a book. You know that. Come home if you hate it there.” But he had hung up the phone without saying goodbye and Anna replaced the receiver and rolled back over and patted Pointer on the arm until they both fell back to sleep. In her dreams the lost children of her womb lined up across the tennis court to accuse her of killing them. Her husbands were together on the balcony looking down and watching. She sighed in her sleep and reached down into her tennis bag and Pointer appeared and told the children to go away and took her arm and led her into the snack bar to get her a drink and a grilled cheese sandwich.

  It was a long night. It was a night Anna would always remember. Twelve and a half years later, on a cold November morning, as she stuck a cyanide tablet in her mouth and walked off a pier into the Atlantic Ocean wearing a fur-lined Valentino jacket with a hood and a pair of knee-high leather boots, leaving behind a man she could finally really love and leaving behind the Pap smears and blood tests and tissue cultures that said she was going to die anyway and soon and in plenty of endless disgraceful boring cruel pain, on that day, on that morning, as she walked out onto the pier holding the pill in her gloved hand, as she passed the last boat tied to the pier and looked up into the cold cloud-covered sky, for some reason all she was thinking about was Pointer and how silly and human and vulgar and funny he had been. What dreadful questions he was always asking and how selfish he was and what a terrible social climber and what a divine tennis player and how the sun had beat down on them all summer when they played doubles, when together they beat the shit out of half the couples at the New Orleans Country Club and how they had moved out to Metairie and even gotten in the car one afternoon and gone up to Jackson, Mississippi, to play a senator and his girlfriend in a match. She remembered Pointer’s hand on her thigh and his dick inside her the first time she ever fucked him and how wild and selfish he had been and matched her selfishness and nobody needed to be ashamed of themselves and she stuck the pill in her mouth and walked on off of the pier.

  I

  Anna

  1

  Arlington, Texas, County of Tarrant, summer, nineteen hundred and eighty-three. Anna was spending a week at a spa in Texas. On the first afternoon of her visit, her old friend Dr. Carl Jancke came by and took her blood pressure and examined her. It was a formality, a prerequisite of the spa.

  “Have you had a mammogram lately?”

  “No.”

  “When?”

  “Never.”

  “Pap smear?”

  “No.”

  “That’s unwise, Anna. Not worthy of you.”

  “Well, I don’t need a Pap smear. I won’t get anything.”

  “How about coming by my office tomorrow?”

  “Hell, no. I came in here to get the fat off my back. Not to have medical examinations.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t need a mammogram, Carl.”

  “One out of eleven women die of breast cancer. One out of eleven.”

  “Don’t scare me.”

  “Okay. I won’t.”

  “I’ll do it when I get back to New York.”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise.”

  “Good. God, you’re a good-looking woman, Anna.”

  “Thank you. It’s the genes.” She gave him a hug, but not a promise of anything to come. And of course she never got the mammogram or the Pap smear. Anna didn’t like anyone touching her unless she was in love with them.

  Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital, New York City, New York, late fall, nineteen hundred and eighty-three. Anna was reciting a poem written by Sappho in the fifth century B.C.

  “You know the place; then leave Crete and come to us, waiting where the grove is pleasantest, by precincts sacred to you….”

  Anna leaned close to her friend, the cold cheek, the cold sheets, the dark eyes of her dearest and most treasured friend, the kindest of all mentors, sweet, sweet memories of kindnesses given and received, cards, letters, calls in early morning hours. Anna continued reciting the poem because Joel had asked to hear it. The other people in the room moved back. A nurse waited by the door. Outside the window rain fell on New York City while Joel Norris died to Anna’s voice, her hands in Anna’s hands. She was sixty-three years old and she had spent the last two years of her life being tortured in hospitals and she had died anyway.

  “Oh, God,” Anna said, and turned to the others. Her editor was there and his gentle wife and two women she vaguely knew. Joel’s nephew stood by t
he window. He would be Anna’s agent now. Their eyes met. Their grief made them friends. Then Anna took her editor’s arm and they went out into the hall to make the phone calls.

  “I wouldn’t die like this,” she said, as he fished in his pockets for the quarters. “No one will ever make me die in a hospital.”

  “You aren’t sick, are you?” He turned to her and took her arms. “Anna, is something wrong with you?”

  “Nothing that isn’t wrong with all of us. I’m getting old. I forget names. I don’t heal. My immune system isn’t as good as it used to be. I don’t heat up. Let me use the phone. I want to call Philip.”

  “Is that still going on?”

  “Only when my best friend dies. Nothing will ever be the same now. Nothing will heal.”

  “You ought to go to the doctor. Go up to Boston and let Carlyle look at you …”

  “And then?”

  “Stop fucking Philip. He won’t leave Caroline. He never will.”

  “I’m not trying to get him to.”

  “Yes you are.” He was so solemn. He knew her so well. He read the goddamn books in manuscript. There was nothing to hide. No reason to hide anything, and besides, Joel was dead.

  “She was perfect,” Anna said. “They don’t make them anymore. Et cetera. Now I will be crying when I call him. Fuck it all, Arthur. Fuck death.”

  “Anna.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t call him. Go with us to dinner and stay with us tonight. We have to call all the others. Don’t call him.”

  “I have to, Arthur. Don’t listen.” She put a quarter in the slot and called the married redhaired baby doctor who was her lover. She gave a number to an answering service and in a minute the doctor, whose name was Philip, called her back. Anna turned her back to her editor and began to talk. When she hung up she took her editor’s arm and held it. “I’m going to see him now. And I’m leaving New York. For good. Very soon.”