The Angel's Cut (13 page)

X
as fixed Flora's roof, climbed up into the ceiling and lay on his back to settle the wavy rows of tiles back into place by pressing them with his hands and feet. He replaced all the rusted wire that held the tiles in place—then came down after a whole day under the roof, covered in sticky black dust, and with fingers scored by stripes of rust. He spent half an hour at the basin with a scrubbing brush, and even after that his hands looked as though they had been hennaed, like those of the Indian dancers Flora had once seen.

‘Why didn't you wear gloves? I could have found some.'

Xas only shrugged and went to the window seat and his pile of library books.

Every other day he caught the trolley into the city and changed his books. He always used the short cut. Flora couldn't, for she was too stiff and uncertain on her feet for the scrambling it required. From the trolley line along the shore, he would get off at a certain stop and walk through
the shallow built-up strip of stores and houses, then across a waste lot. Flora had explained the empty land. ‘There's a plan at the county offices for a highway. This land is set aside for part of that highway. It's what is called “a paper road”—a road that exists only on paper.'

All the backyards of Flora's street opened onto the paper road, sandhills stilled by pasture, lupins, and wild mustard, by leggy plumbago where it was moist and, where it was dry, by creeping succulents, and beds of orange poppies. The land was divided by a tidal stream, and crisscrossed by sandy tracks. In one place the stream spread an apron of water to make a marsh, where ducks nested. Horses were sometimes grazed on the pasture below the thickets of live oak and white alder on the higher ground on the far side of the stream. And in the fall—Flora said—people from the properties along her street would go out with pails to gather berries. And sometimes, she said, when she looked out her kitchen window she would glimpse the vivid chestnut and vermilion plumage of an Asian pheasant, for, at the turn of the century, someone had released breeding pairs of pheasant and grouse and quail. Only the quail and pheasant had flourished.

Xas came and went by Flora's back gate. He contrived never to be in the house at mealtimes. She was left to suppose he went out to one of the cheap eateries along Windward Avenue. Sometimes Millie would catch him before he went, and give him money to buy her cigarettes. On those occasions he'd always arrive home with Millie's smokes, and her change.

When Xas had finished settling the roof tiles, he borrowed a ladder from one of Flora's neighbours and replaced some of her guttering. He cleared the drains, then cut the long grass in her backyard—kept cutting it, so that after a couple of months it looked likely to submit to his discipline and turn into a lawn again. He set up an outdoor clothes line. He lifted the sod in a rectangular patch in the newly reformed lawn and spent a few days preparing the soil with a compost of seaweed he hauled from the beach in sacks. And then, when it got cooler, he began to turn up with plants—mostly flowering annuals. He gathered seeds by pulling seed heads off the plants in other people's gardens. He'd do this when Flora and he were walking together from her trolley stop. He'd sit at her dining table sorting the pods from the lint in his pants pockets, putting them into piles on sheets of paper, and fending off the cat, O'Brien, who kept fishing for full pods as well as the emptied ones he was allowed to play with.

Flora watched Xas. She picked up O'Brien and put him on the floor. ‘Seeds are a spring job,' she said. ‘I'm a country girl. I know these things.'

‘I want to be ready. I'll package these up for now. And I'm collecting tin cans too. I don't want to be scratching about looking for something to use as seed trays when the time comes.'

‘So you'll still be here in the spring?'

‘If you tell me to go away, I will.' He looked up as he said this and she tried to read his expression—got lost for a moment just looking at him. Then her heart clenched into a
knot, as hard as the scars on her hips. ‘I'm not supporting you,' she said.

‘Of course not.'

Flora stamped her foot. ‘I wasn't saying that I
refuse
to support you. What I mean is that you're doing all these things for me—mending my roof, mowing my lawn—and you're living on next-to-nothing; on whatever Cole gives you. And you don't actually have any agreement with him about money, do you? He just sometimes gives you something.'

‘I only need a little, Flora. For the new guttering. For cat food. To put petrol in your car or Millie's when I borrow them. For the clubs.'

Xas was still going to jazz clubs with Millie. He liked his friend's company, but it seemed to take him a while to decide what he thought about the music.

Their nights would often start at the Apex on Central Avenue, where they listened to Ivie Andersen, a young singer with an eerily pure voice. Xas took to the singing before he made up his mind about the music. Then, one evening, he and Millie came back and he was on fire with enthusiasm. He sat at Flora's dining table twisting his short hair into little points and talking—practically panting with excitement about ‘simple tunes and interesting textures, like a great talker shooting the breeze'. After that he and Millie began to turn on Flora's radio every evening at seven to listen to the late broadcast from Radio City Music Hall. They'd talk for hours about the Duke.

Flora felt a little jealous of Millie, and stepped up her campaign of taking Xas to any screening she could find of
the films she loved. She showed him Murnau's
The Last
Laugh
, Dreyer's
Joan of Arc
, Abel Gance's
Napoleon
, Lang's
Metropolis
, Weine. She was surprised by how little he'd seen.

‘I saw
Metropolis
in Peru,' he said, when she asked him, as they were stepping out to the movies one evening. Her making suggestions of films she knew were showing and he must see.

‘But you're German!' Flora said. ‘You must have seen
Caligari
, and
Dr Faustus
and
The Last Laugh
too.'

‘Someone in Le Crotoy told Millie I was German. But I only lived there for ten years.'

‘You're not German by birth?'

‘No.'

‘Then what name did you put in your library card?'

‘Why wouldn't I put Xas?'

‘It's only a nickname.'

‘All right—I put the name that's on my pilot's licence. My French pilot's licence.'

‘Which is?'

‘Jodeau.'

‘But isn't Jodeau the name of your friend who died?'

‘Yes.'

‘So—Xas?'

‘Yes?'

‘Why am I calling you Xas?'

‘It's my name.' He mused. ‘Someday I'd like a document with my name on it.' He was smiling, cheerful, then suddenly his step faltered and he put a hand to his side.

Flora touched his shoulder.

‘No,' he said. ‘A human document, like a driver's licence, or a library card.'

Flora thought: ‘He's not speaking to me.' But there was no one else near them. She said, ‘Are you all right?'

He nodded and they walked on. He put out his hand and twisted the dried head off a poppy hanging over a garden fence.

‘Does that hurt you?' Flora said.

He put his hand in his pocket and said, ‘What?'

‘Your side. You sometimes clutch at it, as if it hurts.'

Xas didn't answer.

‘I think you have scars, like I do,' she said, and pointed at the place he'd touched.

‘Yours give you a lot of trouble. Mine don't,' said Xas. ‘That's why I fixed your roof. I wasn't trying to get you to ask me to stay. I just couldn't see you climbing up there.'

‘I have enough money to
pay
someone to fix my roof. I'm not helpless. And I didn't think it was necessary to see to those tiles just yet—though I do appreciate it.'

‘When the wind blew from the sea the tiles sounded like the streets of Paris after the coup d'état—the same loud stony clanking.'

‘What?' Flora said again, then laughed because he was laughing. ‘What does Cole think when you come over all whimsical like that?'

‘When I'm with Cole I mostly just listen.'

‘I bet you do.' Flora had put in quite a bit of time listening to Cole's tyrannous bouts of talk.

Xas gave Flora his hand to help her up the steps of the trolley. As he did he said, so casually that it was almost insinuating, ‘I meant the coup d'état in 1851. Someone I knew was there and told me about it. About how the loosened cobbles made the street like a riverbed. The citizens kept prising them up to throw at the soldiers—then someone would put them back.' He handed Flora along the aisle and onto a bench. ‘It works,' he said.

Flora told him he sounded like a defensive screenwriter. ‘“It works.” Honestly!'

‘I wasn't in Paris myself in 1851,' he said. ‘I know that wouldn't work.'

‘Needless to say,' said Flora, then giggled again, startled into it by his own sudden, pretty, wild laugh.

‘No,' he said, through his laughter. ‘Paul reported the sound of the loose cobbles. Paul de Valday, the Comte du Vully.'

‘Oo la la!' said Flora, waiting for the rest of the story of his encounter with the aristocracy, or with history, whichever it was to be.

‘I was in Damascus at the time,' he said.

Flora kept giggling. She looked around her and saw they were attracting attention—attention but not disapproval; people were smiling at them.

‘Oh, all right, I'll play. What were you doing in Damascus when Paul what's-it told you about the cobbles?'

‘No. I heard Paul's story later. I was in Damascus at the time of the coup d'état. I was trying to find out what had happened to my friend, Apharah Al-Khirnig.'

‘Who was what?' Flora asked, wondering how long he could keep his game going, and how exotic his answers would become.

‘Apharah was a cultivated and wealthy widow.'

‘And what
had
happened to her?'

‘I found her grave and put flowers on it. Waterlilies, which wouldn't have lasted long. Then I went to Scotland. Then back to France. Then to Turkey.'

‘To another dark-eyed widow?'

‘There's a salt dome in Turkey that is the gate to Hell.'

Flora nodded sagely. ‘Naturally. And you wanted to scout out Hell before having to go there yourself. In due course.'

‘I found a copper pipeline leading from an evaporation pond and disappearing into the ground at the salt dome. The pipe had been laid to convey water into Hell.'

‘That's sensible,' Flora said. ‘I don't imagine Hell has any water.'

He looked mildly chastened. ‘I don't know why I never thought of a pipeline myself. I
carried
water. I suppose I must have wanted things to be difficult.'

‘Xas—are you trying to prove to me that you can act?'

He shook his head. ‘Why would I do that?'

She brushed his shoulder with her ear. ‘I have connections in this town, you know.'

That night, late, after the bright layers of images from the three films they'd seen had loosened and lifted from his thoughts, Xas was able to think about his ‘game' with Flora. He'd just followed a line of truth. He'd let himself speak
openly. But it wasn't play. He was shocked at how right it had felt, and then how sad it was that it couldn't change anything. He had wanted to tell Flora. To tell her in order to imagine his life going on like this—with him lying in his narrow bed in the slightly damp back bedroom of Flora's house, his hands behind his head, listening to light rain tick on the secure roof tiles. Flora was in her room, asleep, with O'Brien curled in the crook of her knees. Millie was out at a club but would probably be back soon. And his lover, Cole, was in easy reach, but not actually there, which was more restful. Xas knew his desire to stay put wasn't about being at a convenient proximity to Cole. It was about Millie, in a mild way. But, really, it was about Flora, and her house. Xas simply felt that he'd like to stay. ‘Stay here, rest here, recover here,' he thought, almost in prayer, but trying not to pray. He knew that what he wanted wasn't possible. But it was nice to have discovered what he wanted. That he wanted something at all. And that what he wanted was a good thing, not a bad thing.

C
ole had given up the house he'd been renting and had found a more secluded and better managed bolthole, a room on the ground floor of the newest apartment block on Sunset Boulevard.

Xas hadn't been to Cole's house, the man always wanted to meet somewhere else—at the studio gates, an airfield, or a street corner at a certain time. But when he shifted into a ground floor room off the garden of Château Marmont, Cole seemed to feel it was time to set some rules.

Cole was waiting for Xas at a door in the garden wall. He stood aside, but as he did so, said, ‘I don't want you coming here unless you're invited.'

The sitting room of Cole's apartment had silk rugs on its tiled floor, soft furniture, and low light. The curtains were closed, the room dusky. Light was pooled on a polished wood sideboard under a Tiffany lamp. There was another lamp on a low table between two settees. The surface of the
table was covered in glossy photographs—publicity shots of actresses. The photos were laid out in overlapping rows, as though Cole had been playing patience with them.

Cole sat back down in his place, before the photographs, and frowned at a full glass of milk on the corner of the table. The glass had a paper circle on top of it. Cole picked up the glass and passed it to Xas. ‘Throw that out.'

Xas carried the glass to the small kitchen. He poured the milk away and rinsed the glass, passing his hands back and forth through the stained sunlight shining in the dark blue glass that framed the clear panes of the kitchen's windows. As he moved his hands through the blue light, the veins in their backs appeared and disappeared. He stood there for some time, running water, mesmerised by the sight of his own hands being more or less human.

‘What are you doing?' Cole said. ‘Come here and look at my list.'

Cole had a list of items and their prices—his planned spending on the opening of his film. ‘I've wired a copy to my business manager. He called me yesterday to tell me to be a little more careful of my spending. “For an indefinite period,” he said. Seems I took a hit with the rest of the market. He's had to lay some people off. It'll be all right though. This country runs on gasoline. Anyway—I'm cutting back. So I'll keep on running my current car, and I won't get married.'

‘Were you planning to?'

‘Yes.'

‘To?'

‘Kay. Or maybe Myra. I think perhaps I should marry Myra. But, anyway, I made it clear to my manager that, no matter what, I'm committed to making a big splash with the premiere. He's an old stick-in-the-mud. He reckons I'm only planning to throw some kind of big party, but this film's opening has to be an occasion, it has to say that the movie has arrived, and that it's unparalleled.' Cole turned the list so that Xas could read it:
stunt planes, coloured smoke pots, klieg
lights, arc lamps, jazz bands, vaudeville acts, lilies, roses
…

Xas looked at the list, then up at Cole. ‘You called me and asked me to come over. What did you have in mind?'

Cole flicked back his cuff. ‘My watch has stopped.'

Cole had recently given Xas a watch of his own. It had been in heavy rain a couple of times, but was still working. Xas told Cole the time.

The man reset his watch and wound it.

‘You asked me over to get the correct time?' Xas said.

‘I haven't seen you since you jumped out of my car at the studio gates.'

‘To help Millie.'

‘And you're mad at me for not helping? I don't see why. You know where I draw the line. I don't expect to be entangled in your life. We're not
affianced
.' Cole paused, and seemed to consider Xas's silence—a silence perhaps striking even to someone hard of hearing.

Xas said, ‘Millie was saving to establish a Coloured flight school. Her bank went bust. She imagined her money was still there, in its vault, because she'd carried cash into the building, dollar by dollar. Actually, you know, that's how I
assumed banks worked—they kept people's money, took it and stored it, like wine in a wine cellar.'

Cole began to laugh, and kept on till he had to wipe his eyes. ‘And you're so slick with a slide rule! How can you understand math, but not money? And what do you do with your money, given your naivety about banks?'

‘I spend it,' Xas said. ‘I fritter it away on clubs and booze and downpipes.'

‘Did you say downpipes?'

‘Yes. I fixed Flora's guttering.'

The man studied Xas through narrowed eyes. ‘Why are you always so helpful?' he asked. ‘Not just to me but to—all sorts.'

And Xas found himself answering with a kind of desperate impatience, ‘I have to live with people.'

But Cole was going on, developing some point. ‘I'm more choosy. I like
talented
people,' he said. ‘I recognise that, although you're a nobody, you're quite talented. For instance, you're analytical—you noticed the torsional weakness of the wings of my plane.' He gestured at the photos on the table before them. ‘And you are beautiful. Didn't you notice that when you came in I was looking from you to these publicity shots, making comparisons? You never seem to be looking at me when I'm looking at you, unless we're like this, face to face.'

‘I get alongside you, Con, so I can speak into your good ear.' Xas looked down at his own hands, then sidelong at Cole's, the fine-grained skin, faintly roped with veins, light tan, with slightly too long, but very clean fingernails. Xas
wanted those hands touching him. He wanted not to have anything to hide. Cole's curiosity about what he did with his money was unusual. Usually Cole and he would work on whatever problem Cole was playing with in his mind. Xas had helped Cole with the film, as some kind of technician. He'd helped test aircraft. He'd chauffeured Cole about, fetched sandwiches, making sure they were made to the correct prescription. He'd listened to Cole's plans.

It had been good. Xas had walked into the fogbank to follow Cole's thinking, and it had been good. He'd watched Cole set up his dinners with actresses, watched him go out pressed and perfumed and
premeditated
—and once or twice Cole would turn to him and kiss him like someone stuffing their mouth while talking. The kisses happened, then the talking resumed and Xas hadn't had to answer any awkward questions.

Now here he was, sitting in a curtained, dimly lit room, feeling tired. He sighed. ‘All right,' he said, ‘I'm a nobody. Good to get that established.'

‘You're not making the best of yourself.' Cole said.

But Xas had stopped listening, for, in that moment, he'd remembered that, though he was a nobody, he did have means. He had the means to help Millie. He had money of a sort. All he had to do was to find a valley near a lake in the Californian Sierras, and the split apple rock into which he had dropped his only real earthly possession—a rope of perfectly matched black pearls.

Fifty years before he had been caught in a forest fire. The blaze had jumped from one ridge to another, torn sails of
flame separating from the wave of fire cresting hundreds of feet high. The flames were behind him, then before him—emptying the valley of air. His mule dropped to its knees and rolled onto its side, kicking. The fire was cacophonous, but still Xas could hear the rasping hitch the animal made as it tried to suck breath in a vacuum. And he heard a bright smash from the saddlebags, where he kept the photographs he'd taken on his trip across the Rockies. His mule was finished. His camera and the fifty glass plate photographs were too bulky to save. But he remembered his pearls, took them off, wrapped them in his shirt, and dropped the bundle into a deep crack in a boulder split like an apple. After that he walked on through the flame's agonising but ineffectual heat, held upright in blinding, billowing transparency, almost afloat on the fire's twisting updrafts. He emerged on a smoking hillside, naked but for his charred leather belt, and smeared with ash. He didn't go back when the valley cooled. He didn't try to retrieve his pearls, because he wasn't ready to discover he'd lost them.

The pearls had once belonged to Lucifer, who had worn them to demonstrate—in a way that his indestructible body could not—that he was above discomfort, above the fire, living in the shade and insulation of his book-filled fortress. All angels are indestructible, and if they are also proud they must keep something perishable close to them and declare: ‘I mean to keep this.'

With this recollection came a feeling of ash coating his skin. Xas remembered, and felt his empty, superficial self drifting up like feathers of ash on a forest fire's thermals.

‘You're smiling again,' Cole said, bemused. Then, ‘Can you do something for me?' Xas heard the springs in the sofa creak as Cole moved. ‘Come here now,' Cole said.

Again Xas was taken in by everything: Cole's thick oiled hair, the strength of his hands, and the flushed, furred lobe of his good ear.

They were kissing, but something was wrong.

‘I don't do this with people like you,' Cole whispered. ‘So you have to do what I want.'

Xas found himself in a horror of puzzlement. Somehow Cole didn't smell or taste right. He had a smell like dry mouse droppings at the back of a cupboard.

‘Take your shirt off,' Cole whispered. ‘Turn over,' he said. ‘You can't always keep your back against the bed.'

Xas made a soft noise, somewhere between laughter and distress. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘But I have lines I draw, just like you.'

Cole paused. He asked, ‘Is there something you're hiding? Something
wrong
with you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Something freakish? Or something like Flora?'

Xas saw an opportunity to distract the man. He said, ‘What exactly happened to Flora?'

‘She can tell you, if she wants. What happened to you?'

Xas was silent.

‘Is it ugly?'

Xas stirred and murmured, ‘Yes.'

‘I don't want to press you,' Cole said. ‘And I don't want
to see. I don't like ugly things. But you would tell me if it was something contagious?' Cole must have had some fear pushing him to go on, for he added, confidingly, ‘I've been feeling off-colour lately.'

Without thinking, Xas said, ‘I think you
are
sick.'

‘Why do you think that?'

‘You smell different.'

Xas had hoped to distract Cole, but was a little alarmed at how successful he was. ‘You didn't answer my question,' Cole said. ‘You didn't tell me whether or not it was contagious.'

Xas put his mouth against Cole's good ear. ‘No,' he said, then touched the lobe with his tongue. ‘It's an injury, not a disease.'

‘Good,' Cole said. His voice was tight. Then, ‘I'm not sick,' he added.

In the early hours of the morning, Cole was restless, and exhausted, and talkative still. He wanted to try out more ideas. But everything he said let Xas know that Cole thought he was angling for something—permanent employment, a salary. Xas listened, and ran his hands through the man's thick, slick hair, while Cole kept trying to interview him.

‘Come on, then,' Cole said. ‘Why don't you try to impress me—without unbuttoning your shirt.' He peered at Xas, his head reared back on the pillow. ‘Hasn't that been your aim all along—to impress me?'

When Xas didn't respond Cole went on. ‘I think you are one of those people who can only answer questions, like the
clever boys at my prep school. You can't think what to say, given a broad charter.' He stroked Xas's face. ‘But you're better than that, too, aren't you? You have your beauty, and your facility—your way of turning out to be good at things.'

‘Con,' Xas said, ‘what do you imagine I want? Do you think I do this,' he kissed Cole, ‘in hopes of a position, or income?' He stroked the man's chest; felt both Cole's heart and his own beating in the tips of his fingers. ‘I'm interested in your life, and what you'll do with it.'

Cole sat up abruptly, and curled his arms around his crooked knees. He said, ‘For now why don't you go get us some more ice. I'm going to take another shower.'

And Xas thought: ‘I've said what he wanted me to say.'

Cole opened the door of the room for Xas as someone opens the door for a bee that has wandered indoors in the hope that it will find its way out again. And then, once Xas had put on his boots and laced them up, Cole had another idea. He decided to make an offer. Of money. ‘Before I wire my list of expenses to my business manager I'm of a mind to add a few thousand “miscellaneous”.' He winked.

Xas came and leaned in the doorframe opposite the man. It was January, crisp in the mornings, but only cold when it rained, which it did with modest infrequency. The sun was out. The bougainvillea had opened, and its colour warmed the air.

Cole said, ‘If you had ten thousand dollars to invest, now, when businesses are closing down all over and almost everyone has retrenched their spending, where would you
put it? That's my question for you. And don't tell me you'd give it to that Coloured girl.'

‘You want to see if I have vision, don't you?' Xas said. ‘Because that's what you're proud of in yourself.'

‘With just ten thousand you'd have to have a lot of vision. With most of the exciting industries it's better to have real money and to spread the investment.'

‘Sound recording. Aviation. Movies,' Xas said. ‘I know. I have your list even if I don't have your vision—or any real money. But I can think of one safe business, somewhere I could put the whole ten thousand.'

‘Safe? Even now?'

‘In a growing city.'

‘Construction,' Cole said, and shrugged. ‘But growth will slow for quite some time. And there's oil exploration— overall a great business, but chancy.'