Anna From Away

by D. R. MacDonald

  She thumbed a book about rocks from Melissa (I heard they have a lot of them there, her friend had written inside), then read over her letter: I’ve been stopping by to check on your garden, like you asked. Looks nice, could use a bit more watering, Chet says he’s been on top of it, but maybe not every day, he’s not here much. The azaleas and rhododendrons are lovely as usual, the orchids are coming out, lemon trees have lots of blossoms. I miss seeing you at the pool on campus, so do the girls, you got them and me into swimming, you were our incentive, but we’re sticking with it. I did my hair blonde last week, wanted a radical change (don’t we all?). Mort is indifferent, but Chet took one look and said, Melissa, that colour is not you. I felt like asking what is me, but I was afraid he’ d give me a detailed answer (!). A handsome flock of cedar waxwings blew through for a couple days, all over the holly tree and the ivy, then they moved on. Moving on is the slogan of the day (?). Chet asked what I knew about you, I said you were doing good work. That’s still true isn’t it?

  “Yes,” Anna said out loud. “It is.”

  She poured a glass of white wine and sipped at it. She supposed she would get comfortable in the scuffed but meaty arms of the easy chair, as she had so often under the lively colours of her lamp, and put on music—what sort didn’t matter much at the moment—read a copy of Art World she had saved like a treat. Tightening her robe, she was aware suddenly of her skin beneath it, of warm flannel on her breasts, and that took her back somewhere nice for a few seconds, called up the last man who’d touched her there and brought his lips to hers, until the windows rattled with wind. Wake up, Anna! Chet would be enjoying himself, that was a given, hardly a Saturday passed that he didn’t. I could be a Saturday night man every damn night of the week, he said once, I can’t help it. Many times she had joined him, but that had stopped even before his wooing of Alicia Snow. Anna had her work, her own friends, she didn’t need him to help entertain herself, and, God knew, Chet didn’t need her anymore, as participant or observer, to enjoy himself, he had his woman.

  Anna had been a bit plump growing up, but she learned that it didn’t matter much to the boys and later the men who wanted her. She would never be lean and lithe like Alicia Snow, but she had toned her limbs swimming, and she was comfortable with her body. You’re deliciously curvaceous, Chet had told her, in the days when he loved to nuzzle her and define her shape with his hands, you have a lovely ass. My legs are strong, she might have said to give the assessment a different slant, even my arms, but she didn’t. The night she beat him arm wrestling was still some years away.

  Maybe it was a fluke, the strength in her arm on that particular Saturday night. They’d lain bellies-down on the hardwood floor of his study, gazing hard into each other’s eyes, dark with too much wine and some kind of passion that had moved on from physical love, from adoration, from the simple delight of each other’s taste and warmth, to an unspoken competition neither of them was clearly sure about, only that it sometimes filled them with a brief, intense hatred of each other, as if one of them was at fault for all the unnamed grievances that ground at them, like sand in sweat. Her modest but growing reputation as an artist of talent? She could guess what Chet’s were—his literary mediocrity, the truth of which he had feared for a long time but which youth could always excuse, there was time to get better, to get good, for some writers it came late, the mastery, the vision, and of course he was trapped, he knew that, there was nowhere upward he would go, and nothing else he could do. But how was she at fault for that? She wasn’t, he knew she wasn’t, but his resentments still flared up too often, she was right there in front of him after all, she was the one who had fallen in love with him with all the hope that implied, and only her could he truly hurt enough to regret it deeply afterward, basking in the pain. Anna herself, well, if he wasn’t getting anywhere, how could she presume to? Yet eventually she did, her artistry grew and flourished even though she knew he had narrowed down her life, put a fence around it, trapped her too inside his own limitations.

  But that night on the frayed oriental rug beside his desk she had slowly pushed his arm to the floor, there was no way he could have beaten her that night, and she never forgot the look on his face, inches away, no intimacy in his eyes, blazing as they were with confusion and shame. Of course they both laughed about it the next morning, in the languor of hangover, a spontaneous absurdity they wouldn’t visit again, drunken hijinks, Chet had been weakened by wine, hadn’t he? We’re going to hit the bars, Anna, he said, I’ll take bets, Who dares to arm wrestle my wife? She can beat any man in the house, I’ll say, slap your money on the table, boys, and then your elbows! But it was as if he were relating someone else’s story, she laughed along with him, quietly, watching his face. They’d clutched the heat of their coffee at the back door and watched stars fading like ice bits in the black sky, their whispers shivering white in the open door, winter, there, on a safe street in a safe town. He never mentioned to anyone the story of how Anna put Chet’s arm straight to the floor, and neither did she, because where that strength came from she did not know. Nor what she might do with it.

  What she craved right now, terribly, as she hadn’t since a long time, was a cigarette, what it might conjure. She could taste the acrid burst of a struck match, the unfiltered smoke of a Pall Mall, the lift and buzz, the vigorous talk that had gone with it drinking in bars, huddled with friends in old, dark, high-backed booths batting opinions back and forth, so much was new then, exciting to discuss, especially what they hated (sexual hypocrisy, the grey dreariness of the Cold War, real and ugly racial injustice, the Vietnam War). They embraced the changing mores eagerly, the emerging liberties in words and images and deeds, the fading taboos, they tried out drugs (Anna rejected the hallucinogens, something unsavoury and unhinging about LSD), she and Chet flirted with Beatnik poses for a little while, it was fun.

  Yet although they cohabited almost by principle, it seemed natural that they would eventually marry: they were children of an earlier time, marriage still had weight, it signified mutual respect, it testified that their love was singular, and for the long haul. It was, at least to Anna, a kind of protection, though just how was never specified, never spoken. But perhaps its erosion had been inevitable from the start: you couldn’t “mess around,” as Chet liked to call it—divesting it of all harm—and keep that particular kind of love intact. They’d lived on together, barely aware of their own easily rationalized infidelities, barely acknowledging the shredded marriages around them. Until Chet’s fascination with Alicia Snow turned into, as Anna saw it, a blinding and sappy love. At first, he had wanted both: to keep what he had with Anna, the comfortable old clothes of their marriage, while dressing up for another life with Alicia Snow, and he had been deluded enough to believe Anna would go along with it. The Swinging Sixties.

  Alicia Snow. Anna couldn’t utter her name without feeling that it carried a kind of spell.

  INSTEAD OF buttoning up in flannel underwear and jeans and a wool shirt suitable for a lumberjack, Anna on a whim pulled out of the little upstairs closet the dress in the old garment bag. She expected something plain or worse, but no: whose special dress was this? Nineteen forties clearly, with the squared shoulders, a soft, light, draping wool, deep burgundy. Full gypsy sleeves gathered at the wrist. There in the cold room Anna dropped her robe and, in panties, shivered into the dress that fastened like a coat. Soft pleats flowed from beneath the bust to the hem, the right side wrapping over and fastening snugly at the waist where a large sequined oval showed like a delicate buckle. The buttons were hidden under the drape so nothing disturbed its comely lines, the hem falling just above the knee. She wouldn’t bother with a bra. Pity she didn’t have a scarf for the vee of the neck, maybe cream or a rich yellow, but she turned in front of the dresser mirror and even in its mottled glass and the poor light, she thought it stunning, the fit of it perfect. It smelled of the wood shavings in the bottom of the bag but she felt so good in it she didn’t care.

  In he
r bedroom she dug out first a pair of black leather shoes she’d tossed in a suitcase at the last minute almost as a joke, narrow two-inch heels and an open toe, party shoes. She hooked into her lobes a favourite set of earrings, silver hoops encircling small moonstones, a long-ago gift from her dad, he liked to see women in striking earrings. And then Anna plucked out the flattened joint Chet had pressed tightly into the binding of a book he’d given her, Poems of Departure, with a note in tiny script—Some night you’ll want what these have to say, and this. She hadn’t, mainly because in its smoke she would yearn for places she could not be, and its pleasures would be quickly over—this little stash was it. But this once, she would slip back into that old high, let go, do what she wanted. Who was here to judge her? She had not yet allowed herself even one night to get good and tipsy on wine and sink into the music of her past: too hard to come back from it, to hear the house silent when she climbed the creaking stairs to bed.

  Downstairs on her small boom box she put in a cassette of B.B. King. She lit the joint with a kitchen match and closed her eyes as she took a deep hit, held it, then another before pinching it out. Chet, he was four hours behind her, yet, knowing him, probably way ahead. Anyway. The grass set her shivering, oh, if she had one of those short mink coats of the forties, how fine that would look with this dress, but she had to settle for hugging herself in a yellow wool shawl she found upstairs. In her room she cranked the music up and began to dance slowly into the kitchen, smiling as she moved, circling the table, clinging to herself. How long since she’d been in a dress, felt the air on her bare legs? Not here. The music evoked old parties, flirtations, dancing, fun, she didn’t know at the time why she dropped them in her suitcase, these tapes, but maybe she knew there’d be a day when she’d need them, her beloved blues—Etta James, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy, Keb’ Mo’—she’d had to create her own space for them, they were not the music of here.

  She smoked a bit more, sang along with B.B. King’s “Never Make Your Move Too Soon,” though moves like that she had no worries about, then took a break in the fat armchair, crossing her legs, showing her knees, she lifted her feet up to check out the shoes. Yes! She laid her head back, let her mind go. That tall, lanky Aussie at a party a couple years back, a geologist, gentlemanly, leaning his tanned face toward hers as they talked, how she’d loved getting close to him when things warmed up, he wore a soft suede shirt, his muscles moved slowly under it as they danced. Something good might have come of that but he had to return to Perth suddenly, and she found out later that he was married as well. Just another empty shirt on the back of a chair, Melissa said, you didn’t miss much.

  The cassette was winding out its final number and Anna was thinking of the next tape that might sustain her mood, what other fantasy she might entertain, she didn’t want the silence to flood back, when she heard the knocking. Oh, hell! She jumped to shut off the music, but whoever it was would have heard it already. And the pot fumes? Unmistakable. She felt almost heartsick at this interruption, she was enjoying herself, she had needed this evening so damn long, she’d paid her dues. What were they doing here? She had to shift herself to another place, and quickly, she swiped angrily at the smoke. Who would understand this private little party anyway, the only guests her and her memories? She hid the Chardonnay in the fridge, enough remained for another time. She wrapped the shawl to her chin and tried to reel her mind back somewhere close to normal.

  THERE ON THE PORCH, smiling in the light from the hallway, was Livingstone, hoisting a bottle by the neck, dancing from foot to foot, hooing breath smoke to exaggerate the cold. “Breagh’s not home! She was supposed to be! But hey, I see Anna’s lights, and then I hear that good music, so …”

  Heat rushed into her face: glad it was him and not someone else, yet she didn’t really know him, he had intruded after all, yanked her back, and he’d have had to come almost the full length of her driveway to see her lights. She could not help but believe that letting him in would be a mistake. But what was she to do, send him away as if she were the local schoolteacher? She sighed and opened the storm door.

  He seemed to sense her coolness and stood just inside as if waiting for instructions or a sign he was not unwelcome. Anna thought of seating him in the parlour but it was ridiculously chilly, and a room where people had probably sat up straight, the couch smelled of mice and the ceiling light was a grey globe, about as welcoming as a funeral home. Unrealistic to think he might leave soon enough to save her evening, its prospects were rapidly vanishing.

  Livingstone proffered the wine, a bottle of Chilean red, and she thanked him and led him into the kitchen, that’s where social life occurred here anyway, wasn’t it. She didn’t know what he expected—maybe that, absent Breagh, Anna would do in a pinch? For what? Amusement? But people did drop in on each other here uninvited, if not often on her, and never at night.

  She found herself talking faster than she should, just to get him greeted and seated, not in the true, warm, private heart of the house—her workroom—but at the kitchen table, with its cloth checkered red and white you could clean with a sponge. She sat near the stove, opened the shawl. He reached for the corkscrew, sniffing the cork it held before he unscrewed it.

  “You having a séance in there, Anna?” He nodded toward her room. She’d left a candle burning on the little end table with her tapes and her books. Oh, that was bright of her, yes.

  “No … maybe I was, sort of.”

  “Must be a few spirits roaming around this place, I’d think. Old-timers thought so.”

  “Benign ones. So far.”

  He stood at the back window, hooded his eyes. “They like the blues, do they?”

  “Do you?”

  “You bet. I play mainly Celtic stuff, but I can do some mean licks of that kind.” He kept peering out. “Nice spot here. Good view of the water, up and down.” He turned around and stared at her. “That’s a dynamite dress.”

  “It’s borrowed. Would look great on Breagh, don’t you think?”

  “Better on you. Not her colour.”

  “Any colour is hers, I think.”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “Saturday evening.”

  “It is, so.”

  He popped the cork and Anna wanted to let him drink alone, it might cut his visit short, but where would such hospitality get her? She was coming down anyway, her nervous system falling into more familiar paths, pulse rate dwindling. She fetched two water glasses.

  “Sorry,” she said. “No stemmed crystal.”

  Livingstone filled the small tumblers and raised a toast. Anna drank quickly, she didn’t care, the evening was out to sea. Then he sniffed the air, tilted his head. “Wouldn’t happen to have a bit of that lying around, would you?”

  “A bit is all I’ve got, believe me.” There was no point in denying it, she wasn’t fooling him, he had taken in the whole ambience.

  “I’ll pay you back, and then some,” he said. “I’m just not holding tonight. Breagh doesn’t want it in the house. Her little girl and all.”

  “I don’t need any payment, thanks. This was just a souvenir, you might say. Just that, that’s the end of it, finis.”

  “It’s not exactly unknown even on this road. Don’t worry about it. I don’t.”

  “It’s not the worry.…” She had tried hard to avoid the California stereotypes, striven to be taken on her own terms. So, the matter of discretion, of giving in, of consequences. She did not want Livingstone to provide her with anything, she was on her own.

  “I’ll keep your secret,” he said.

  There was a cool, subtle draft on her legs, she should have put on tights.

  “I’m sure you’ve kept a few, Livingstone.”

  “Can’t live without secrets, Anna. They heat up our lives. Look, save the roach. I feel like I’m bumming your last cigarette.”

  “It is my last,” she said, “don’t forget that.” She took the half-smoked joint from a kitchen drawer as if it were money soon
to be squandered. A small piece of her past done with. Would that temper his gossip?

  “Cool,” he said, reaching for it with the broad smile that softened his face. “I was right about you.”

  “I’m afraid to ask.” She didn’t care right now what he meant, she hadn’t much control of what he thought about her.

  They passed the roach back and forth until Livingstone pinched it out in a teacup saucer she’d used as an ashtray. “Good stuff,” he said. “I always like to try something new. California? Mexico? Maui Zowie?”

  “I don’t know, it was a gift.”

  Then he began to talk, there was no theme or thread, local or worldwide, it didn’t seem to matter,

  “You know, Anna, this farmer in South Africa, he had a good vineyard, but it got raided over and over by a pack of baboons. Man, they loved those grapes. So what the farmer does, he plants this different kind of grape, see, real juicy, dark red, all along the border of the vineyard. The baboons they start eating these grapes first, they ripen early, but when the juice stains the baboons’ hands, it looks like blood, and that scares the hell out of them. They run away, they don’t come back.” He raised his hands and turned them slowly, backs to palms.

  “No baboons here,” she said.

  He laughed. “Have to know where to look. Follow the grapes.”

  He kept glancing into her room, so she gave in and showed him her drawings, and his questions about them, even if they were just talk, were not flippant—what attracted her to a subject, why the pond under a harsh moon instead of a day with sun and snow, why a composition of fractured pieces of an old barn instead of how the barn really looked? She told him that “really” was a key word, that there were different sorts of reallys, ways of seeing, and this was how she tried to get at them, get into them. It was wearisome to be forced to explain, she did not want to sound pedantic or superior or artsy, and she’d had to come down from a totally private high that had little to do with her work, and nothing to do with him.