Earth Angel (11 page)

“My flight is in the morning.”

“Take another flight.”

I got out of bed. “Where’s the bathroom?”

He pointed down the hall.

I went to his bathroom and returned with a small jar of Vaseline.

“What the hell’s that for?” he asked, pulling a pillow onto his lap.

“Turn over.”

“No.”

“Turn over. You remember from med school that sometimes manipulating the prostate causes erections. In pediatrics they warn
you that sometimes with a rectal exam of little boys they get erections. We’re supposed to ignore it. In your case, though,
I’ll make an exception.”

He shook his head. “This is a bit too weird.”

I shrugged. “Your choice. But I’m on a plane at seven in the morning.”

He stared at me a long minute. He rolled over.

I smeared some Vaseline on my finger and his anus. Then I inserted slowly. I began to massage his prostate while reaching
around to hold his penis with my other hand. Slowly, very slowly, it seemed to grow. I continued probing. Then, without thinking,
I said, “Have you had your prostate checked recently? Not that it’s too hard or anything. Still, you are approaching the age
where you need to be cautious.”

He pulled away from me and yanked the covers up over his body. “You know something,” he said. “I don’t think this is going
to happen.”

The plane was crowded and I was scrunched against the window reading while the two businessmen next to me watched the in-flight
movie. Occasionally they would both laugh and I would look over to see them staring at the small screen, grinning. The man
next to me was in his thirties and wore red suspenders under his suit jacket. He smelled of too much cologne and I would sometimes
cover
my nose just to avoid the smell. The man on the aisle seat was black. He had a small computer on the lap tray which he typed
into as he watched the movie.

I was reading a biography of Sir Richard Burton (the explorer not the actor) by Edward Rice which I’d bought at the airport.
I was at the part where he leaves his lover, Isabel Arundell, for thirty-three months to return to Central Africa and the
Nile River. Isabel’s parents were trying to marry her off to a well-to-do English gentleman. She toyed with the idea of becoming
a nun. But she resisted both temptations. In those thirty-three months of waiting, she received from Burton only four letters
and a six-line poem. But that was enough for her to maintain her vigil. Then one day she goes off to visit a friend for tea.
Her friend is out but she decides to wait for her anyway. The doorbell rings and the maidservant answers and Isabel hears
the voice she hasn’t heard for almost three years. Burton had returned to London the night before and had come calling to
find out Isabel’s address. The man who had searched for the source of the Nile was searching for something so mundane as her
address. Isabel runs down the stairs, they see each other, and embrace. Immediately they leave, hailing a cab and telling
the driver to just keeping driving them around. Isabel’s journal describes her reaction:

He put his arm around my waist, and I put my head on his shoulder…. It was absolute content, such as I fancy people must feel
in the first few moments after the soul has quitted the body. When we were a little recovered, we mutually drew each other’s
pictures from our respective pockets at the same moment, to show how carefully we had kept them.

But the Richard Burton who returned from Africa was not the same man who had left. He had kissed her goodbye the dashing,
handsome adventurer and secret agent
who spoke many exotic languages and wrote romantic poetry. He returned after twenty-one attacks of jungle fever partially
paralyzed, partially blind, and according to Isabel, “a mere skeleton, with brown-yellow skin hanging in bags, his eyes protruding,
and his lips drawn from his teeth.” Yet Isabel proclaims:

Never did I feel the strength of his love as then.… He returned poorer and dispirited… but he was still—had he been ever so
unsuccessful, and had every man’s hand against him—my earthly god and king, and I could have knelt at his feet and worshipped
him. I used to feel so proud of him; I used to sit and look at him, and think, “You are mine, and there is no man on earth
the least like you.”

I put the book aside and tried to nap. Suddenly, somewhere over the Rocky Mountains, I felt my body empty. Not of fluids or
anything tangible, just a general sense that I was lighter and missing some essential ingredient. I figured I might be about
to throw up, so I struggled past the two businessmen. The cologne man deliberately pressed his knee against my butt as I went
by. The black man quickly removed his computer and flipped up his lap tray. “You okay?” he asked.

I smiled and nodded, then bolted for the restroom. I looked back at my seat, just to make sure I hadn’t left some mess there.
No blood or urine. Clean.

In the bathroom I checked myself in the mirror. No sweats, no fever. Just a lightness and a feeling that I was leaking some
essential part of myself. I thought back to that passage in Isabel’s journal, her description of love so powerful it was like
the soul leaving the body. I sat on the toilet and placed my head in my hands. When I lifted my head and saw myself in the
mirror, I saw that I was crying again. I didn’t try to stop. I let myself cry. And as I cried,
I felt myself filling up again of whatever had vacated. It was as if the tears were reabsorbing into me, giving me substance.

I cried all the way over the Rockies until a flight attendant knocked and asked if I needed help.

“T
HIS CAN’T POSSIBLY WORK
,”
HE ARGUED, TWISTING HIS NAPKIN’S
neck for emphasis. “You’ll just end up embarrassing me.”

“You have to trust me,” I said.

“I do?” He frowned.

“I have your best interests at heart.”

Professor Gordon Moore looked at me, uncertain, the way my cat sniffs a new brand of cat food. He was an attractive man, kind
of a dark-haired, unkempt Rutger Hauer, but he had let himself go a bit. He was ten pounds overweight, his hair was mussed,
and his clothes were wrinkled and didn’t really go together. He’d shaved that morning, but had missed a few spots where dark
stubble spotted his chin. He clapped his hands together as if in prayer and shook his head. “This is just too weird. Stuff
like this doesn’t happen to me.”

“Have a little faith,” I told him with a big toothy smile.

“I’ve never done anything like this before. Not even answered an ad in the personals.”

“But you’ve read them, right? You’ve been tempted to call.”

He shrugged. “I don’t really believe in it.”

“No one does,” I said. “Until it works. Look, Professor Moore, in a perfect world I wouldn’t be talking to you about this.
You wouldn’t need me. But in a perfect world you’d be home right now with a girlfriend or a wife and children, listening to
what they all did during the day instead of sitting in a crummy bar with me and facing another lonely night in an empty apartment
eating nonfat pretzels and grading papers.”

He grimaced. “Being alone is not the same as being lonely.”

“Of course not,” I said, thinking about my own hotel room, my own empty condo back home, my own empty Tim-less future. “But
it sure feels like the same thing.”

He looked up from his big hands and stared into my eyes. He was deciding whether or not to let himself have hope. Seeing the
raw edge of sadness in his eyes chilled my scalp and made me want to run away. Don’t hope in me, you fool, I’ve already screwed
up twice so far. But I forced myself to stay put, to return his questioning stare with as much confidence as I could muster.
Silently I chanted my mantra:
I will make this work. You will be happy. I will make this work. You will
—

He looked again at the phony business card I’d had printed. “Look, Ms. Weiss—”

“Call me Grace,” I said. Grace really was my middle name (after my mother’s mother); Weiss was my mother’s maiden name. So,
if I had to, I could make a case for having a legal right to use both those names. Although I would have trouble explaining
why the business card said I was vice-president of Moonlight Becomes You, “A Personalized Matchmaking Service.”

“Look, Grace, I appreciate the drinks and the pitch. But you’re wasting your time. I’m not interested. Sorry.”

Gordon Moore was Helen Sagan’s stepbrother, her closest surviving relative in California. After my Chicago disaster,
I’d decided to try someone closer to home, where I felt more comfortable. Helen had been confident and efficient. She had
made my job easier, my life better. Gordon, eight years older than Helen, was just the opposite of his dynamo stepsister.
His shoulders hunched forward in defeat, making him look older than his forty-four years. He taught English as a Second Language
to mostly Vietnamese kids at the San Francisco Community College. He had a perpetual look of mistrust, as if he suspected
you of making obscene phone calls to him or secretly opening his mail.

I will make this work. You will be happy
. I had arrived in San Francisco two days ago with a whole new plan of attack. Instead of offering cash—which wasn’t as easy
to give away as I’d first thought—I would find out what the person wanted most and try to get it for him. In Gordon’s case
I had hoped it would be something simple, like a Mercedes or Caribbean vacation. Cash was too mundane, abstract; but place
the very thing someone has been dreaming about in front of him and he’s hooked. All I had to do was find out what he wanted.
What he dreamed of.

But Gordon lived simply and without avarice. I’d found out all I could about him after a lengthy and expensive lunch with
the administrative assistant of the English department. I’d told her I was an administrative assistant from Los Angeles Community
College, thinking about transferring to the area. I pumped her for information about the school, then asked her about any
single men in her department. She knew everything about everyone. Gordon had been teaching here for eighteen years. Had a
reputation for earnestness, students liked him but found him a bit dull. Since he and his wife divorced eight years ago, the
guy had been a ghostly presence on campus. He showed up, taught, and disappeared, never attending faculty meetings or other
school functions. “He’s good-looking,” the
administrative assistant said, cutting into her carrot cake. “If I wasn’t married, I’d probably go out with him. Hell, I’d
probably go out with him anyway.”

I’d observed him on campus, walking to and from classes alone. I’d even followed him home a couple times, watched from my
parked car as he went up to his apartment on Union Street. I could hear CNN filtering from his window or old Beatles records,
especially
Rubber Soul
. Once he played “Norwegian Wood” three times in a row and I knew this was a man who needed me. His sadness invigorated me.

A woman, that’s what he required, I’d decided. Maybe not Burton’s Isabel, but at least someone to talk to, maybe have sex
with. My first thought was to hire a hooker, do a
Pretty Woman
–type thing. Hire one for six months. All she had to do was date him, be available whenever he wanted to go out, treat him
like the good man that he was. That would prime his pump, so to speak, get him back into the swing of dating. But I decided
against that. I didn’t want to become a pimp. I wanted romance, not commerce.

So I had the business cards printed up. Told him we were a new company test-marketing the area. Whole new concept in dating
services. We don’t find a man or woman for you, we don’t have a menu of faces to choose from. We help you get the person you’re
already interested in. Have a crush on someone? We help you win that person (provided he or she is not married, engaged, or
living with a significant other). At no cost to Professor Moore, we would assist him in his pursuit of anyone he names.

But he wasn’t interested.

I couldn’t let that stop me.
I will make this work. You will be happy
.

“Hypothetically,” I said, “let’s pretend there is a woman you know, or would like to know. Again, for the sake of argument,
let’s say I arrange for a date between the two
of you. Isn’t your life better off than it was before? And at no cost to you.”

“That’s another thing I don’t understand,” he said. “How can it be free?”

“Simple. In exchange for our services, you agree to let us use your story and physical representation in our ad campaign when
we move into this area. Local boy makes out good. Okay?”

He didn’t say anything. Having strangled one napkin he began shredding the edges of the bar napkin that his wine glass sat
on. “Why me? How did you get my name?”

“Research,” I said mysteriously. “You fit the profile of the demographic group we want to reach.”

“My life’s not that pathetic,” he said. He opened his wallet and took out a photograph of himself and a knockout redheaded
woman standing in front of some old fountain, probably in Europe. They both looked thin, tan, and gorgeous, like soap opera
stars. “This was my wife. Debra. We were married for six years and then she ran off with a visiting Canadian poet we’d brought
on campus for one semester. So, you see, it’s not as if I haven’t been in love or don’t know how to act with a woman.”

“That was eight years ago, Gordon.”

He laughed. “Hmm, maybe my life is that pathetic.”

I touched his hand and he stopped shredding the napkin. “No, it’s not. You have to think of yourself as a professional athlete
who’s just gone through a slump. Now you’ve hired a personal trainer to get you back in shape.”

“I don’t see how it’s possible,” he said. “You can’t force attraction between people. If the chemistry isn’t there, it just
isn’t there.”

“Exactly my point, it’s chemistry. The phenylethylamine, or PEA, is a substance in the brain that causes humans to feel elation
and euphoria. The brain’s hundred billion neurons allow its different parts to communicate with each
other by jumping across the gaps, or synapses. The PEA helps the impulse jump from one neuron to another. PEA is also a natural
amphetamine, it juices up the brain. That’s why when you’re in love you can stay up dancing all night long, have sex, and
still lie around and chat about what rascals you both were as kids. When the neurons become saturated with PEA, you’re experiencing
love. See?”