The Angel's Cut Read online

  ‘We need a doctor. Let’s get him to my car.’ Flora gave Millie a shove. ‘You roll him onto the blanket. I’m sure I can help you drag him.’

  Millie did as she was told, while Flora went on, speaking faster all the time. ‘He can’t have meant to kill himself. He just got out another big stack of library books. And he just restocked my cupboards.’

  Millie said, ‘Restocking your cupboards might be his way of taking care of you, seeing to you before going out into the wasteland to drink lye.’

  ‘This isn’t lye.’

  ‘Poison. You know what I mean.’ Millie added, ‘I knew a guy who drank lye. It burned his insides out.’

  The women each took a corner of the blanket and pulled Xas’s now inert body slowly up the slope to the gate, through it, across the lawn and into the light of the spider web encrusted lamp above Flora’s back door. There Millie crouched and searched Xas’s legs for a bite, for puncture marks in the fabric of his trousers.

  ‘He has a gash on his cheek,’ Flora said, and then realised that she’d never seen a scratch on him, or a bruise, or any kind of blemish.

  ‘There is a mark on his ankle too,’ Millie reported. ‘Like a rope burn, as if he’s been tied.’

  ‘His wrists are all right,’ Flora said. ‘There’s no marks of any kind on them.’

  ‘So it’s not bloody Cole,’ Millie said.

  Flora started to laugh. She laughed at Millie’s vehemence, and because they both knew what she meant. And she laughed in a kind of wry distress because she understood that all this time she had been expecting to see signs on her friend’s body of Conrad Cole’s passionate ill-use.

  Millie carefully turned Xas’s head. She slipped her fingers into his mouth to check his tongue.

  ‘Careful.’ Flora didn’t know how to warn her friend about the foam.

  Millie gingerly pushed two fingers and a thumb between Xas’s teeth. His cheeks stretched as Millie’s fingers probed his mouth. It seemed that Millie wasn’t stung, as Flora had been, though she did say, ‘This frothy stuff tickles like sodium bicarb.’

  Flora had a thought then that maybe Xas was faking. Perhaps he’d staged all this. Maybe this was all-of-a-piece with his odd habitual altruism, his strange stories, his manic busyness. With considerable difficulty, Flora got down on her knees. Millie put out a hand to help, then reminded, ‘We should get him to a doctor.’

  Flora slapped Xas hard across one wet cheek. The moisture had an oily, acidic feel to it, but stung her palm no more now than the slap itself did. ‘Stop it,’ Flora whispered, and slapped him again, backhand this time.

  ‘Okay. Enough,’ Millie said. ‘You’re reminding me of a teacher I had who was always slapping me when I couldn’t stop coughing. He can’t help it, you know.’

  ‘He’s putting it on.’ Flora was determined. She hit him again.

  He moaned. It was an enormously satisfying sound and, hearing it, Flora felt masterful, faintly amorous and, for an instant, completely free of pain. It was as though by doing violence to him she was passing on her chronic pain, handing it up to some vast, engulfing, anodyne being. She had an image of herself as a child in church, sitting beside her grandmother, exempt from everything but keeping still, taking the collection plate from a person at the head of the pew and passing it on to Grandma without having to put anything in it herself. She started to cry. She sobbed, ‘Stop faking,’ and punctuated it with another slap.

  ‘Flora!’ Millie was shocked.

  And then Xas spoke. He said something. Flora didn’t hear what it was. She seemed to lose her sense of continuity. She had meant to hit him again. She saw that her hand was raised, frozen, up by her head. The blood on her palm was so red it looked independently alive, as though it might any moment coalesce from a smear into a drop, then harden into something living, like a beetle perhaps, a red beetle, that would fly away, leaving her hand wiped clean.

  Millie had her own hands over her ears and her shoulders raised as if to defend herself against a very loud sound.

  ‘I’ve gone deaf,’ Flora said—and heard herself saying it.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Millie. ‘What was that? What did he say? Was that really just him speaking?’

  Xas was trying to lift his head, his eyelids fluttering. A line of white showed beneath his thick lashes, his consciousness as far away and threatening as lightning on the horizon. Millie stooped again to stroke his head. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘what happened?’

  Xas wouldn’t let the women put him in Flora’s car. He held onto the door, wedged himself there. They tried to prise his hands free, but weren’t able to. Finally he managed to say, ‘No.’

  Millie helped him to sit on the running board.

  ‘It’s over,’ he said.

  ‘Was it a fit?’

  He peered at her, his head still wobbling on his neck.

  ‘Epilepsy?’ Flora said. That would figure—epilepsy and religiosity, like some character in Dostoevsky.

  Xas nodded. It looked like capitulation rather than assent. Of course he wouldn’t have wanted them to know he was an epileptic. Flora thought of his pilot’s licence and things began to make sense—Xas had fits and hid the fact because he didn’t want to lose his licence. All the disproportionately alarming events of the last hour instantly became much less scary.

  ‘We thought you’d been bitten by a snake,’ Millie said.

  Xas laughed, then said, ‘Sorry.’

  Flora wanted to kiss him, despite the sand and muck on his face. Millie did kiss him, planted one on the top of his cropped, velvety head.

  ‘Flora, can I borrow your car?’ Xas asked.

  ‘And how does this relate to your fit?’

  ‘It doesn’t—unless you’re worried I’ll crash it.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘It’s only for a few days.’

  ‘Why do you want to borrow my car?’

  ‘I’m just reverting to my last constructive thought before—before my fit. I’ve been planning for a few weeks to ask whether I could borrow your car and go see if I can find something I lost somewhere, some time ago.’

  Something, somewhere, some time ago. Xas’s obscurity seemed to Flora as much a part of him as his occasional strange literal-mindedness.

  ‘Say yes, Flora,’ Millie said. Then, to Xas, ‘Or—sweetie—you could borrow my car.’

  ‘Flora’s is more beaten up—in case I do have another fit,’ he said and gave Flora a weak but teasing smile.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said again.

  Millie put her hand under his arm and helped him up. ‘Come inside,’ she said, ‘and let us put you to bed.’

  Los Angeles

  February, 1930

  Xas had Flora’s car, so Millie offered to drive Flora over to Culver City where she had a meeting with Crow about his next film. Millie dropped Flora at the studio gates and she walked unmolested through a clutch of autograph hunters and onto the lot.

  Crow was waiting in the writers’ suite with Wylie White, a playwright turned screenwriter. When Flora arrived Wylie informed her gloomily that he and Crow were having a quarrel. He said, ‘Crow is expounding his ideas.’

  ‘I do not expound,’ said Crow and whipped his feet off Wylie’s desk, preparatory to jumping up and taking charge of the room by towering over its occupants and furniture.

  Flora glanced at the open stove door and spotted the bottle Wylie kept hidden there. She found a glass, wiped it, and poured herself a whisky.

  Crow decided not to get up, after all, only pulled the chair Flora had her hand on nearer to him before she sat. He said, ‘Wylie and I are talking about dialogue.’

  ‘Crow’s taken my screenplay and scribbled all over its facing pages. If we record all his dialogue our film will be as long as Greed before they cut it.’

  ‘It will if the dialogue is spoken by someone like Johnny Swanson.’ Crow named a fading star. ‘Swanson, intoning, and gazing into the air beyond the camera as if he’s dazzled by footlights. He cultivated
that look on stage, and his stagey voice to go with it.’

  Flora interrupted. ‘Connie, I thought you despised sound.’

  ‘For one thing it’s against my philosophy to despise the inevitable,’ said Crow. And Flora wondered why it was that all the men in her life had to have philosophies. ‘For another, what I really disliked was having to do things over in Spirit. The strain on the budget.’ Crow threw his long arms wide as if to gather in a scoop of the room. ‘I love talk,’ he said. ‘Apart from learning to fly, big-game fishing, watching my own horses compete down at Agua Caliente, and being in bed with a beautiful woman, most of the real excitement of my life has taken place in conversations. Film talk should be like that, big, stuffed with substance.’

  Wylie picked up the dog-eared pages, and waved them about. ‘This isn’t substance! This is characterisation!’

  ‘That’s the substance I care about! Jokes! Bitching! Flirtation! Bullying! How people behave and what it says about them.’ Crow leapt up, lunged at the stove, grabbed the bottle, and filled his glass. He didn’t offer it to Wylie, but turned to Flora with a smile and a courteous indrawing of all his limbs and asked her if she wanted a refill. She did.

  ‘No one talks like this!’ Wylie shouted, still waving the pages.

  ‘Are you proposing that people in films speak like the man in the street?’

  ‘Connie, this is a movie, not Shakespeare!’

  ‘Ah, Shakespeare—the only excuse we have not to talk like the man in the street. If it ain’t Shakespeare it had better be Joe Blow.’ Crow turned to Flora again. ‘I ask you—do you think that you talk like the man in the street?’

  ‘No. But I’m the woman in the street.’

  ‘See!’ Crow gave a hoot. ‘That’s dialogue!’

  Wylie threw down the screenplay. ‘No, dammit, that’s conversation.’

  Crow began pummelling the writer’s desk. Several of Wylie’s pencils jumped out of the jar he kept them in and rolled away.

  ‘Two things!’ Crow yelled. ‘One: “I’m the woman in the street” is an idea. An idea about the world. Two: if she says “I’m the woman in the street” to draw the attention of her interlocutor to the fact of her sex, then sex is involved—because she’s gently reminding the man that she’s a girl. She is also reminding the audience that she’s the girl in relation to the man. The audience is always present, so is always being addressed by characters in movies!’

  Flora reflected that Crow couldn’t have drunk too much if he could still pronounce ‘interlocutor’. But then Crow was one of those people who disprove arguments based on ‘what people actually say’.

  ‘She was addressing you, Connie,’ Wylie muttered, sly and satisfied.

  Crow looked flummoxed and stalled, then he glanced at Flora. She raised her glass to toast him. Crow said, gravely, ‘Thank you, Flora. Believe me, I haven’t forgotten you’re a girl.’

  ‘Can I have a look at the screenplay?’ Flora said.

  Wylie tossed it to her. She fumbled her catch and the pages exploded into a flapping mess around her. Flora picked up the one page left on her lap. Crow’s additions were long, and very funny. She said, ‘How do you expect the actors—?’ then stopped, on catching a gleam of triumph behind Wylie’s round spectacles.

  Crow said, ‘People in talkies are talking slower than people actually do. Is that natural? But, anyway, should we appeal to what’s natural, or to what’s right? What will seem right.’

  Wylie butted in. ‘Stahr says—’

  ‘If you quote me Monroe Stahr I shall thump you, Wylie,’ Crow said. Then, to Flora, ‘It’s all style, see? Movies are artifice. So why not have actors speak faster than people do?’

  ‘They won’t be heard, Connie.’

  ‘I say they will. If the human brain can manage a dogfight, then it can manage to sit in a cinema listening to people talking at sixty miles per hour.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Flora, ‘that seems reasonable.’

  Wylie said, ‘Thurston does not need to start his speech barking “No!” seven times. It sounds like he’s on Benzedrine—I mean, as if he is, not just you, Connie.’

  ‘Dick will know how to do it—like a big, gorgeous, good-natured bully. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” Touching the girl at the same time.’ To demonstrate Crow placed a hand on Flora’s forearm and leaned toward her, looking at her brow rather than into her eyes. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no,’ he said, then, ‘See?’

  Wylie got up and gathered some pages off the floor. He looked at them, disgusted. ‘Here’s two pages of yak and only one direction, “He watches her fiddle with cutlery”.’

  ‘It speaks volumes,’ said Crow.

  Flora said, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if it read, “He watches her fiddle with his utensils”?’

  Crow laughed.

  ‘Get out of here, both of you,’ Wylie said. ‘Leave me the bottle.’

  Flora remained sitting for a minute, only raised one foot as Crow picked up and reassembled the screenplay. ‘I’m getting this typed up, as it is,’ Crow said to Wylie. ‘And we’ll try it that way.’ He gave Flora his hand and helped her out of her chair. As they went out he said to the writer, ‘And Wylie, stay away from Stahr. I’ll deal with Stahr.’

  They went down the steps. Flora said, ‘I’ll stop in at the commissary and see who’s there.’

  ‘How’s your friend?’

  ‘Which of my friends?’

  ‘That man you’re living with.’

  Flora frowned. ‘I’m not living with him, he’s just—living with me.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Crow. Then, ‘Is that addressed to me?’

  ‘Don’t, Connie.’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Don’t flirt with me.’

  ‘All right.’ He squeezed her hand and kissed her on the hair.

  ‘Did you call me in just to witness an argument?’

  He said, ‘I wouldn’t have won it if you hadn’t witnessed it.’

  ‘No, I guess not,’ she said. It was true that Crow was always more assertive with a female in his audience.

  They walked along for a little time in a slow traffic of cars, and costumed figures on bicycles, and alongside one piece of scenery on wheels, a tropical beach backdrop that still reeked of turpentine.

  Flora said, ‘Why do you ask about Xas?’

  ‘I’m just curious. He’s living with you. Gil would have been curious about that too. So I guess I’m acting as Gil’s proxy.’

  ‘Xas is sleeping with Conrad Cole.’

  ‘I’ve heard that too. But that’s a big club, Flora. Living with you is a little more exclusive, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘It isn’t significant, Connie.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ said Crow then kissed her once more when they reached the place where they were to part ways.

  A couple of days later Flora sat in on a studio screening of Flights of Angels. Afterward Cole asked her to wait, he wanted to speak to her. She braced herself for the usual bad news, that he’d like her to cut the movie again, just when they had a date for its first screening, and it was opening in theatres countrywide—and how much time did Cole think it took to make hundreds of prints?

  Flora remained in her seat as the screening room emptied. Cole went out with the studio people and didn’t come back for a whole twenty minutes. Flora had given him up and was putting her coat on when he reappeared. He loped down the aisle and began to pace before the blank screen. He paused for a moment, and glanced up at the projectionist’s booth. Flora looked back too, saw the lights go out. And, as though this was a cue, ‘Where is Xas?’ Cole said.

  Flora was surprised and didn’t immediately answer.

  ‘Come on!’ Cole said.

  ‘He borrowed my car for some business of his own.’

  ‘I gave him money,’ Cole said, as if this followed on from her statement.

  Flora waited for more. She knew Cole had been paying Xas, but wondered if he’d finally paid him off.

  Cole began to bi
te his thumb.

  ‘How much money did you give him?’ Flora felt that she was throwing him her question as, in a film, someone might use a belt or branch or jacket to pull another person out of quicksand. ‘How much?’ was a question that would keep Cole talking.

  It worked. Cole took his thumb out of his mouth—its nail bloody at the quick. ‘Ten thousand,’ he said. Then, ‘Everybody has ambition.’ He began to pace again. ‘Even layabout Gus at the gas station has ambition.’

  Flora nodded in encouragement.

  Cole said, ‘I can’t be near anyone I can’t trust.’

  Flora watched her employer, wary. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I have a bit of a hangover. I’m not following you. Do you mean that you can’t trust Xas because he’s not ambitious? Or because he is?’

  Cole looked bewildered for a second, then simply continued. ‘I’m not saying I need people to jump through hoops for me, only to be fully attentive to my needs.’

  ‘Wasn’t he?’ Flora asked, but Cole didn’t seem to hear her.

  ‘That’s just what I happen to ask. That’s my requirement. That’s not unreasonable, is it?’ Cole planted his feet and glared at Flora. She was very glad that there was a row of seats between them. She nodded faintly and Cole went on. ‘Do you have any idea how many people I have on my payroll? Thousands. Paying people is straightforward. I’m a straightforward person. Anyone who thinks that it’s too much trouble being paid, and being accountable, can just walk away.’

  ‘So—you’re saying Xas has walked away? From you? Because he took offence when you paid him?’

  Cole put one knee on the seat in front of Flora, and loomed. ‘He said to me: “Whatever you want, Cole. Whatever you say.” He said I could put my foot on his neck.’

  Flora didn’t have any trouble believing this. Xas was fearless, and immune to indignity, and there was something wrong with him. Flora gnawed her lip, then finally voiced this thought. ‘There’s something wrong with him, Con.’