The Angel's Cut (15 page)

‘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.'

X
as 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 bite 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.'

Cole stared at her. The muscles in his jaw bunched and jumped. ‘I know. And I don't buy his “circus freak” line. He only wants to make me think of carnivals because carnivals move on. That's what he's done. He got what he wanted, and gave himself a way out.'

Flora said, ‘What do you mean “circus freak”?'

‘He says he has something wrong with him. Something congenital. That's why he won't take off his shirt.'

Flora said she'd thought Xas was only shy. ‘Or something,' she added, uncertain.

‘I should have known better!' Cole shouted suddenly. He turned away from Flora to face the screen. He clenched his fists and threw his arms wide. For a moment he held this pent-up, beseeching, histrionic pose.

‘Con,' Flora said. ‘Xas was ill. The other night he had some kind of fit. Maybe that has something to do with wherever he's got to.'

Cole dropped his arms and rounded on her. ‘I know he's sick. And
I'm
sick. And that's why he's made himself scarce.'

Flora frowned at him.

Cole said, under his breath, ‘They're always the filthy ones.'

Flora understood what Cole meant. ‘The filthy ones' were the men Cole slept with—his secret liaisons. Flora guessed that Cole had picked up a dose from who knew where—possibly even Xas, though Xas's fit hadn't been at all suggestive of venereal disease, except maybe tertiary syphilis in its end stage.

Flora stood, with her usual difficulty, and sidled out of the row. She went up to her employer and closed her hands about his upper arms.

He stared down at her hands and trembled like an overtaxed racehorse.

‘Con, dear,' she said. She walked him backward and sat him down. She would have liked to crouch at his feet, but wasn't able to.

‘Let's not quarrel,' Cole said.

‘We're not quarrelling. You're upset.' She took his hands gently, mindful of the scabs where he'd gnawed the skin from the sides of his fingers—one of this insanely fastidious man's several unclean habits, like his fondness for sex with strange men. She asked, ‘Have you seen a doctor?'

‘Yes,' Cole said.

‘Are you being treated?'

‘Yes.'

‘Have you talked to Myra? Jean? Kay? Or, for that matter, Monty?'

‘It's not them. They all have ambition.'

‘Ambition doesn't make anyone immune to venereal disease.'

‘It's him. He's to blame,' Cole said. Then, very bleak, ‘Where is he?'