The Angel's Cut Read online

  ‘I did think I might want to marry her, so I had everything arranged. Then I thought I might not want to—I might prefer to work on breaking records. I decided that I’m not in a hurry with anything else.’

  ‘What else?’ Xas stroked the lobe of the good ear.

  But the man’s gaze had moved to take in the body above him, and his face stopped looking clever and turned blank and greedy again. ‘Are you really like this?’ he said, nonsensically.

  ‘What else?’ Xas said again, hungry to learn who this person was.

  The man made a noise of exasperated delight and seemed about to answer when Xas heard someone whistling. The whistling was a tuneful, carrying rendition of a popular song.

  The man was watching his face. He lifted his own head to listen. He frowned in concentration. ‘Is someone coming?’

  ‘Yes. Whistling.’

  The man scrambled up. Xas followed. They began fastening buttons. They were laughing, wasting time looking at each other instead of attending to what they were doing.

  Xas saw the woman first, crossing the field, against a blue and mushroom pink sky—the sun wasn’t up yet. She was wearing a fox stole and a cloche hat, which framed the long, pale oval of her face. Her dress was cut on the bias, a thin fabric that showed her hollow thighs and the round bosses of her hip bones as she walked. She was carrying a brown paper bag. She came into the hangar and stopped, raised an eyebrow at the two of them, and set the paper bag down on the trestle table.

  ‘It’s only Flora,’ the man said, breathless.

  Flora had dressed and got out of the house when it was still dark. She had a danish and coffee at Albert’s, while the baking shift made Cole’s sandwiches with the day’s first bread. The sun was just below the horizon when she crossed the bridge over the mire the county had made of Coral Canal. The oil rigs lining Trolley Way stood against the pre-dawn sky like black latticework.

  At Mines Flora parked her car and went toward the hangar that housed Cole’s experimental distance racer. The morning was so still that the airfield felt like a soundstage. Flora pursed her lips and began to whistle, and her tune floated away from her and seemed to echo against the pale shell of the twilight.

  When she came to the hangar door Flora saw that Cole had his back to her and was buttoning his shirt. His hair was tousled and he was laughing his disconcerting, shiftless giggle. When he laughed, Cole looked his age, which was twenty-five. He seemed big, gangling and coltish.

  The man Cole was with was even younger, but was at that moment more composed and in better order. His hair was neat, cropped, and a velvety black, and, as soon as he saw Flora, he stopped trying to tidy himself, as if not wanting to draw further attention to the opened layers of his burrowed in clothes. He only ran a hand across his mouth and stood still. So still, it was as though he was attempting to vanish. It was something that Flora had only ever seen wild animals do.

  She put the paper bag of sandwiches down on Cole’s plans. She said to her employer, ‘Here’s your very particular order.’ She flicked it with a finger.

  Cole fell on the bag and rummaged in it. He took a sandwich and stuffed it into his mouth then groaned with pleasure. ‘Have a sandwich,’ he said to Flora, around his sandwich. Then, ‘This is Flora,’ to the other man.

  Flora had only recently begun to understand the broad prejudices of Cole’s promiscuity. He liked mechanics, carpenters and suchlike—young men, hungry, poorly educated, pliant, and in California in oversupply. The movie stars whom Cole wooed and loved and lavished his attention on might, in the end, be interchangeable, but these others, these semi-literate nobodies, were disposable. The stars had Cole’s goodwill, gifts, free publicity, his interest in their careers. The mechanics and carpenters were generally taken up, turned to use, and sacked. Flora was rather surprised Cole had introduced her—surprised that he’d done anything to acknowledge the presence of this person.

  Flora didn’t want to look at the guy. She wanted to spare him any further embarrassment. And herself, too.

  ‘Flora McLeod,’ Cole added after a pause, speaking around his sandwich. ‘She’s editing my film.’

  ‘Cutting-room Flora,’ said the young man, softly. It took Flora a moment to realise he’d made a pun, and one that seemed aimed to claim her attention more than entertain Cole.

  She had been carrying Cole’s bow tie balled in her first. She opened her hand and it unravelled. She smoothed its length between her fingers and put it on the table. She did so pointedly, as though Cole were her lover. She did it to warn the man, then looked at him to see what he made of it.

  ‘I don’t know this guy’s name,’ Cole said, to Flora. He sounded delighted.

  ‘Let me think about that for a moment,’ said the man.

  ‘I don’t even know what he’s doing here,’ Cole said, laughing still.

  The young man said, ‘Yesterday Frank somebody flew one of your Fokkers out of here. He burst his eardrum and had to put down elsewhere. I believe he’s at St Mary’s hospital. I promised to return the plane.’

  Cole had been listening, looking keen and meek, and lipreading, Flora realised. She had scarcely ever seen Cole showing such a need to know what was being said to him. But then, when he had understood, his face stiffened. He finished chewing, swallowed, and said, ‘Elsewhere, you say? But I know that St Mary’s is in Santa Monica, and that Clover Field is where Conrad Crow is shooting stunts for his little film. My Fokker has been at Clover Field, hasn’t it? Being used by Crow—isn’t that right? I hope you don’t take me for a fool.’

  Flora reached in the paper sack, pulled a sandwich in half, then, after some thought, into quarters. She was always watching her weight, hated it when her belt of unyielding scar tissue tightened even a little around her hips. She nibbled the sandwich and looked from Cole to the man. She felt sorry for him, though relieved to find that he was a pilot—better than a mechanic, better able to defend himself against Cole’s fresh-faced mad Roman emperor act.

  Flora might have felt sorry for the young man, but she gave him up for lost. She had known Cole for some time, had seen him being generous one moment and brutal the next, bashful then tyrannical, anxious then overpowering. She stayed in the hangar only because she knew her presence might mitigate the degree of humiliation to which the young man would be subjected. She had long ago divined that things went worse for people who displeased Cole when there were no witnesses.

  Cole was saying how the writer Ray Paige had told him a story some years back, that he had used as a basis for his film Flights of Angels. ‘The story is about some aces. Paige let me buy it. But Paige has been working on Crow’s film and he reckons he’s reusing his story. But I bought the story, so it’s mine. Because I’m in no hurry to finish Flights of Angels they think they can do that. Crow thinks he can do that to me.’

  There was something odd here. Not in the situation—Cole scoring, undressing some stranger, then, later, dressing him down—but in the figure, the stranger. Flora was looking straight at him now, but she couldn’t seem to see him properly, beyond generalities. She saw black hair, radiant pallor, a slender male figure of a little under six foot whose clothes were out of order, shirt half buttoned, jacket open, thick canvas-and-fleece flying togs half off and hanging around his waist. Flora saw a pilot—a step up from the mechanics, but still just a guy, some careless, venal, star-struck guy. Flora realised that he was possibly as pretty as any of Cole’s movie stars. But—Flora blinked—there was something wrong with him, or with her eyes. She couldn’t seem to see him properly, as though her eyes were failing and she was peering through a spot of blur. As if someone had buttoned up her pupils with glass buttons. She was having some optical difficulty, but only with the man, not with the rest of her field of vision. For a second he seemed about to spill, to pour out of the edges of his body. It was as if he had something bright hidden behind him.

  She shook her head, shut her eyes and said, ‘Have you decided what your name is?’

  ‘Xa
s,’ said the young man. ‘It’s short for Texas.’

  ‘I’ll call you Tex, then,’ said Cole.

  ‘Will you.’

  Flora opened her eyes. ‘Are you from Texas?’ she said, ‘like Cole?’

  ‘No one is from Texas like Cole,’ said Cole. ‘The boys at my school back East used to call me Tex. I didn’t like it.’

  ‘He likes to be called Mr Cole,’ said Flora.

  ‘And I likes to be called Xas.’

  Cole found the remainder of a sandwich in his hand, frowned at it, then threw it away. Then he advanced on Xas and offered his hand. ‘Nice to have met you,’ he said.

  Flora looked away. Her mouth was dry. She didn’t want to see what Xas made of this dismissal. When she looked back she saw that he was walking away from them. He hadn’t said anything.

  ‘He got the message,’ Cole said to her.

  Flora asked, ‘What was the message?’

  ‘Well—I can hardly say that no friend of Crow’s is a friend of mine, can I, since you’re a friend of Crow’s. But that guy must know the rules. Those people always know the rules.’

  ‘Oh, they do, do they?’ Flora said, then, ‘I can’t believe you left him to hoof it.’

  ‘I admit I would have liked to have finished with him.’

  ‘You did just finish with him.’

  Cole looked at her sly and sidelong and said, ‘Honey, you know what I mean.’

  Flora laughed. She’d interrupted them. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘but you’re the one who called for sandwiches.’ She could predict, watching Cole’s routine of yawns and tendon-popping stretches, that he was going to ask her to drive him to the studio. He’d say, ‘Someone can collect my car later.’ He could have asked the young man to deliver his car wherever he wanted it taken. He could have given the guy something to do—but no, not after he’d detected contamination by Conrad Crow.

  ‘I’m ready to work, but too tired to drive,’ Cole said. He stretched again. ‘Frank Flynn is out of my film, and out of the Red Eagles.’ He seemed to bask in his own malice.

  ‘Make a note, Miss McLeod,’ said Flora, biting.

  ‘Flora, honey, there’s no profit in feeling sympathy for stupid people.’

  ‘Frank only took a chance for a friend. And that guy said Frank was in hospital, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Frank should choose his friends better.’ Cole put his hand under Flora’s elbow and walked her to her car. She disapproved of him but, despite that, was moved by his warmth, the sidelong look he gave her, his eyes black with unsated sex and sated anger. The smell of his body made her flush, all over, till her scars began to crawl and itch. Cole’s own smell, of starch and expensive hair oil and the metal of machinery, had an overlay of something new, like the smell of cold, wet air that comes into an open cockpit when a plane flies through cloud.

  Minutes later, when they saw Xas ahead of them walking at the edge of the unsealed road, Flora began to slow.

  Cole said, ‘Don’t you dare.’

  She sped up again, and they rattled past, raising dust.

  *

  An hour later, at the studio, someone with a sad, watchful face handed Flora a newspaper, then, while she was still staring blankly at the headline, and photo, they told her what had happened to Gil Crow.

  The piers, Forest Lawn Cemetery, and Sunset Boulevard

  July, 1929

  Ocean Park Boulevard and the piers: Lick, Venice, and Santa Monica. It was midsummer, and everything was open late. By night all the structures were outlined in green, pink, and white lights. Ferris wheels were dew-dropped webs, and the rollercoasters were silvery tangles. On still nights the stretches of sand between the piers weren’t long enough for anyone to be out of range of the noise: the steamy thunder of a calliope, laughter, and thrilled screaming.

  By day, sun umbrellas covered the beaches like a carpet of button mushrooms. The sea was full of slick, bobbing heads. The piers smelled of tomato sauce and fried onions, ice-cream, hot tar and fresh paint. They were so crowded that people brushed up against one another under the monstrous coloured and carved facades of rides and bathhouses, theatres and noodle houses and ballrooms, every building bulging with tumorous decoration, and creatures, like the blue serpent wound around the door of Dragon Gorge. Everything and everybody was crowded up against the ocean in a way that made the open space of the sea beyond the city look like a closed window at the back of a long dusty room.

  Xas, going about among the summer crowds, discovered to his surprise that he was fully visible again. Over the years he had managed to grow a repellent shell made of apparent preoccupation and purpose, and actual independence and indifference. His shell announced to the world ‘My looks deceive you,’ and ‘There’s no pleasing me.’ It had formed gradually, and was, by the summer of 1929, as perfect as a pearl. But it seemed to have disappeared overnight, and Xas found that, instead, he was wandering around inside a fragrant bubble. He could smell the fried onions and tomato sauce, the sauerkraut and soda and cider, but if he turned his head toward his own shoulder, or held his hands to his face, he smelled Conrad Cole, he smelled hunger and hair cream, starch and laundry soap, machine oil and sexual fluids. It drove him mad, and his madness seemed to give off its own light. People turned toward him, looked, and didn’t look away. They made eyes. He stank of unfulfilled longing, so got offers. He was asked if he wanted company. He was plied with drinks and cigarettes. He was bumped against, breathed on, pressed, and once his mouth was touched tenderly and boldly by a woman who, like him, seemed haunted by some focused longing.

  Xas kept moving. He went on directly away. Away from Mines Field. He didn’t know what else to do. He was in the kind of panic only angels experience—fear, accompanied by smooth, kinetic, self-preserving retreat.

  The last time he’d felt anything like this, it was real, a cultivated emotion that arose from admiration, troubles endured and shared, and ground lost and found. It was true love, and his love was worthy. Xas kept telling himself that angels don’t simply ignite. He tried to call to mind things that would put him off what he found himself wanting. He remembered Conrad Crow saying: ‘I’m not Cole; I don’t leave in the footage with deaths.’ He gave himself a stern talking-to while walking unhurriedly away through carnival nights and the white haze of late June, and early July days, in the crowds, his feet in the water, and the sleeves of his jacket knotted around his waist.

  On the second day, when he had to seek shelter from all the attention, he went in among the forest of the piles of Lick Pier.

  The man who found him had cigarettes in the pocket of his shirt, a pocket with a torn corner. His shirt was unbuttoned to his sternum, his skin was tan, his lips scabbed with white scales of sunburn. He said, ‘I have a bottle.’ He said, ‘My room is only a block back from the beach.’

  Xas looked at this person and thought: ‘I’ve been here.’

  After his wings were cut off he spent much of the following winter wrapped in a blanket and crouching in a corner of the Soldiers’ Gallery in Château Vully. (His lover, Sobran, had often slept at Vully, although his own home was only two miles off.) Xas had crouched, still and silent, till Sobran, exhausted by his grief, threw him out into the snow. After that Xas went away, he wandered and, for a long time, he let anyone who wanted to have him have him, as if their use could somehow make him disappear. During that time he wasn’t ever taken up and tended to. Instead his misery attracted a certain kind of person, those not frightened by an abject, unresisting, resilient being. The kind of person blind to the glaring contradiction of a someone who would put up with anything, yet stick at something trivial—like never removing their shirt. Xas had come to hate those people, and they had allowed him to sink into hatred for everything, for himself and the man he loved, for God and Lucifer—his Maker, and the general he had followed. He hated those who took him up and took him—and there was no end of them.

  Among the thick shadowy piles of Lick Pier Xas looked at the face of the man making an
offer. ‘I’ve been here,’ he thought, ‘and this is just this. I don’t want this.’

  A wave washed over his bare feet. He was carrying his boots tucked in his armpits. He said to the man, ‘No.’

  The man moved nearer and put his hand on Xas’s hip. He said, ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m kidding myself,’ Xas said.

  The mist of tension and speculation cleared for a moment and the man looked at Xas properly. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I won’t bother you then.’ He backed off, disappointed, but decent.

  Xas went on the rides, burning the money he’d earned flying stunts in Crow’s film. He returned to each pier’s rollercoaster again and again, stirred and soothed by the tattoo of rattles as the cars went up, clacking over joins, their couplings ringing, then the roar down, the rushing tumult of bangs and screams. After a few days he found himself riding only on the Hi-Boy rollercoaster at Ocean Park Pier. He rode it over and over, dropped and tossed on switchbacks, and flung around bends, deafened by shrieking. Xas rode and watched the patterns of other riders, the patterns of the rollercoaster’s use. At one bend, where the track sent the cars curving out abruptly toward the bay, then snatched them back, he’d raise his arms over his head to let his upper body go with the momentum, straining against the safety bar.

  The angel plotted, fixed on a quiet time, then got a seat in the last carriage, at the back, and alone. He knew that he was being antisocial, that if anyone saw what he was planning to do they’d be alarmed. He might set off searches and rescues and—since he’d returned to the ride many times—talk of an elaborate suicide. But Xas felt that he needed to do something to shake himself out of those apparently indelible sensations: Cole’s smell on his skin, Cole’s voice in his ear, phantoms of Cole’s hands still handling him.

  He had decided it must only be sensation he was after, some powerful sensation, the inward storm of skin on skin, the dependence of one body on another, desire and wakefulness, and desire and sleepiness, the sweet hour afterward where the lovers seem to fall through warm mist. The angel remembered it all exactly and wanted it again. But he was, he told himself, only craving a sensation he’d wantonly attached to Cole, to the smells, sounds, textures and temperatures personal only to Cole. Cole was coming between him and his memories of love. Real love. It was wrong, and false. Cole’s body odour must only be a fixed idea, a fetish, not a new shrine.