The Angel's Cut (27 page)

F
lora was awake when Xas looked in on her. She was trying, with her schoolgirl French, to puzzle her way through his copy of Saint-Exupéry's
Terres des Hommes
.

‘There you are,' Xas said. Then, ‘I saw Crow.'

Flora laid her book down. ‘How is he?'

‘How do you think?'

‘Busy? Too many irons in the fire?'

Xas studied her face. ‘Is that a euphemism?'

‘The railroading film, I mean, and that Sabatini property.'

‘He's moving on from MGM, he said. He had a fight with Sam Goldwyn. So that's Bill Fox and Jack Warner and Goldwyn he's fought with so far. He tells a good story, though, doesn't he? Actually, we stopped on Larchmont Boulevard and had a bite to eat.'

Flora was surprised by this. Crow always gave her the impression he was being forbearing about Xas, keeping his lip buttoned on the whole subject of her sharing a house
with ‘Cole's special friend'. ‘What do you suppose that was about?' she said.

‘I think he was buttering me up.'

Flora waited for him to say more. They stared at each other for half a minute, till Flora realised that he was fishing, that he thought Crow's friendliness related to some change in their relationship—her and Crow's.

‘Why would Connie butter you up?' Flora said.

Xas gave the abrupt abbreviated nod he used when he'd guessed right. It got so that she could interpret these not-quite-human tics of his. ‘Other people joined us,' he said. ‘Crow might fight with the heads of studios, but everyone wants to know him. I sat back and watched them. Eventually Crow sat back too and we monitored each other's reactions while this stupid bunch tried to hustle one another, and one woman struck meaningless poses in order to show off her figure.'

‘Because Connie's in the market?'

‘Is he?'

Flora could see that he was imagining a secret dalliance with Crow. She kept her eyes down and flicked through the book looking for illustrations. ‘So, that was it for the evening?'

‘No. The hopped-up crowd took their leave, and Crow pinned me down by buying me a very fancy dessert—without asking. Then Dudley Nicholls came over and they had a good-natured scrap about the writers' strike. Crow said the strike breakers had “shown admirable professionalism”. So—is Nicholls supposed to be writing Crow's comedy?'

‘I doubt it. Is this comedy something quite apart from the railroad thing and the Sabatini?'

‘Don't you know?'

‘He hasn't asked me if I want to work on any comedy.'

‘Better comedy than tragedy,' Xas muttered. The remark was just audible and Flora was pleased to have heard it. Not only did Xas think she was involved with Crow—he was feeling protective. She smiled at him.

He said, ‘I'm going to bed,' and took himself off.

C
row came to the gate himself, opened it, and followed Flora's car up to the turning circle before his house.

‘My phone isn't off the hook, you know,' he said to her. ‘You could have called.'

Flora shook her head and stayed in her seat. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Sorry to sound unwelcoming, but if you've turned up because you think I'm in trouble, then by all means do feel unwelcome.'

‘I've never been here, Connie. To your house.'

‘Is that so?'

Flora got out of her car and gave Crow her hand. He tucked it under his arm and walked her up the curving flight of fieldstone steps that led to a terrace under a pergola covered in white wisteria. It was cool there, and Flora would have been happy to stop, but Crow seemed to want to give her a little tour—of the exterior, anyway.

There was a stone terrace and asymmetrical pool at the
rear of the house. By the pool were chairs, and loungers with white cushions and fringed canopies. There was also a drinks trolley, typewriter, piles of pages.

Beyond the pool was a strip of lawn, then a hedge of aspidistra, and then olives at the edge of the property. Beyond
that
Flora glimpsed two surveyors climbing the rocky slope of the canyon. One was carrying a theodolite and the other a surveyor's pole.

Crow said, ‘Yes, they are about to build houses in a dry wash. I expect it'll all come down on me one day.'

‘Isn't there something you can do?'

Crow laughed. ‘Move,' he said. He picked up a whisky bottle and shook it at her invitingly.

‘Just a small one. With ice.'

Crow poured. Flora looked longingly at a lounger and then sat on a chair. She removed her cheaters to admire the colour of the pool. In a breeze coming up the valley its ruffled blue surface caught the sunlight so it seemed there was a school of white fish there, hanging still in some impossible current.

‘I wonder that you've never been here before,' Crow said. ‘Surely you've had an invitation?'

‘There were invitations to parties, I believe,' Flora said.

‘Seems you always come to find me when I'm somewhere else—avoiding people.'

Flora sipped her drink and looked about her. ‘So, this is your life,' she said, then, ‘You never came to my house either.'

They were silent for a time and the wind changed direction. A whiff of chlorine came off the pool. The
chlorine seemed just as inviting to Flora as the colour of the water. She used to swim in the ocean, and at the hot saltwater baths in Venice. She might still swim if bathing costumes were as modest as they'd been when she first came to Hollywood.

‘Cole used to come to my house,' Flora said. ‘And Gil.'

‘Gil was there the night before his accident.'

Flora scrutinised Crow. ‘How do you know that?'

‘Myra.'

Flora frowned. She couldn't think how Gil's wife had known, unless, that night, Gil had gone home to Myra and happened to say something. Flora hoped it hadn't been anything beginning, ‘Flora McLeod thinks …'

‘You never said anything, Flora.'

‘It was a private conversation, Connie. And Gil wasn't the pilot, so his state of mind had no bearing on the accident.'

‘It wasn't good then, his state of mind?'

‘Myra was seeing Cole. You must know that whole story by now.'

Crow nodded.

‘Well,' said Flora. Then, ‘It's all so long ago.'

‘You believe that? You believe it's all water under the bridge?'

Flora looked at her friend. He was wearing cheaters and she couldn't see his eyes. She could see only his stubborn, reticent mouth and slightly weak jaw. It occurred to her that Crow's character had begun to make its alterations on the architecture of his face. She thought that since she occasionally had conversations where someone, speaking
from personal experience, said, ‘Before Christ', then actually she shouldn't claim that anything was ‘long ago'.

‘I'm sorry. I don't mean to fob you off, Connie. But the conversation I had with Gil was about me and him. Mostly.'

‘Fair enough,' Crow said, and leaned back in his chair. ‘So, you're here because someone has given you the task of checking up on me. Since I'm not working, or off at the racetrack, or hunting, or on my boat, there's some cause for concern.'

Two months before Crow had finished a film of which he was rightly proud, a film that found favour with audiences everywhere except that vast somewhere, the Midwest, and therefore hadn't in the end returned the studio's investment to its satisfaction. After that he'd lost the Sabatini project, his kind of film—martial, masculine and fun—and one he knew would have made him money.

When Flora had seen him in June, at the opening of the racetrack at Hollywood Park, Crow had been his usual self-congratulatory, big-spending self. Then, only a month later at a party at Buster Keaton's old mansion, Flora hadn't arrived fashionably late, but had caught Crow on his way out. It was a party the host had put a lot of effort into. There were paper lanterns all around the pool, and over the top terrace an awning made of yards of white silk. Flora had come with Avril, who was recently divorced and defiantly dateless. She'd found Cole there, with Sylvia Seaton, as he always was these days. Cole was enjoying himself, and was even relaxed enough to remark to Flora in a whisper that one reason he was enjoying himself was because the low-
slung lights made it easy for him to lip read. Xas was there, with the band, Lee Young's Esquires of Rhythm. In their break, he introduced Flora to Lee. Later Flora had spotted him in the middle of a noisy group of guests having what appeared to be a very earnest discussion with Sylvia. Then she'd bumped into Crow again, who was looking displeased. He said he was leaving. And she said, ‘You're
still
leaving, are you? Why don't you just stand here for a wee minute and talk to me?' He scowled, and didn't talk. She was a little drunk, and nerveless, so she just stood near to him and stared up at him, waiting to hear him complain. Connie's complaints were always so imaginative. But then he twined his fingertips with hers and came nearer, so that they were standing hip to hip, or rather his hip was touching her waist. Flora was very surprised. Crow wasn't a physical person, and he had his pick of beautiful girls. He only had to say, “Are you interested in being in the pictures?” and they'd come running. But he was holding her hand. After that he had conducted her to a curved stone seat, and they'd sat together, still holding hands.

It was Flora who let go. She removed her hand from Crow's when she saw Xas coming their way, walking down a flight of steps in his not-quite-competent way, his gait careless, as if he was expecting at any moment something different to happen than his sole meeting the next step and his leg having to support him. He looked coltish and inebriated—but what Flora knew she was looking at was an angel walking downstairs, his steps a series of falls, each one commemorating his former power to refuse gravity.

Crow said to Flora, ‘Is he worth it?' Then, before she could respond or even think through what he'd said, he was gone.

‘Was that Crow?' Xas said.

Flora gave him a scathing look. His eyesight was too good for the pretence.

‘It's what people say,' Xas said, apologetic, and sat beside her. ‘I'm getting away from Cole. He and Cary are having a conversation about how everyone is out to diddle them.' He pulled a face. ‘Did I interrupt something?'

Flora looked into the schools of white light that seemed to hover just under the surface of Crow's swimming pool. She took a deep breath and filled her head with chlorine and the scent of honey mesquite blowing down the canyon.

‘Would you like a swim?' Crow offered.

‘I don't,' she said. She'd just been about to admit that she was here because he'd held her hand.

‘But would you like to, anyway? There are costumes in the pool house. And, if you like, I can go indoors.'

Flora contemplated the pool for a little longer then said, yes, she'd like that.

It was a long time since Flora had felt weightless. She swam and floated from end to end of the pool, suspended in blue, liquid sunlight. The cypress trees surrounding the pool looked impossibly tall and black, etched against the still sky. Flora trod water at the deep end, gazed up at the cypresses and imagined she was looking up from her own grave, through transparent earth and stone, at time passing so fast
that every hour was empty of people. The people were moving too fast for her to see them. The clouds were passing too quickly to mar the largely cloudless southern Californian sky. Flora remembered the cypresses at Forest Lawn Cemetery, black beacons, burning for decades. She thought about Gil, and Millie, and how much time had passed.

After half an hour she climbed the curving flight of steps at the shallow end of the pool, and shouldered her own weight again. She went into the pool house and stripped off the wet bathing suit. She put on a thick towelling robe and fastened its belt.

Flora went to the pool house door and put her eyes to one slit in its wooden louvres.

Crow was back. He'd lit a cigarette and poured another drink and was rolling the frosty glass back and forth across his bared breastbone inside the opened top of his shirt.

Flora left her clothes and shoes in the pool house and went out to him.

The hair on Crow's chest was grey, his skin damp with the condensation transferred from the sides of his glass. Flora touched his chest. He touched her neck; said her skin was still cold. Then he moved his hand, parted the robe and ran his palm down her flank. Flora followed his touch, losing it as it passed across a deep scar, where there were no nerves in her skin. She tilted her face up to his and he kissed her. Then he flicked his cigarette into the pool and took hold of her face between his long, dry palms and kissed her some more.

They were in his bedroom, both undressed. Flora showed him her scars, the deep inflexible ones. She raised her leg to demonstrate how, if the scars did bend, they folded. She stopped before the fold became a sharp crease. ‘If I do that, it splits,' she said. ‘Do you see? I'm sorry.'

Crow brushed her nipples with his thumbs. ‘Have you ever let yourself get carried away?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Then there's afterward. And I'm always alone with that.'

‘Really?' Crow was dubious.

‘I haven't let myself get carried away, and be hurt, for a long while.'

Crow tucked the knuckle of one thumb into a scar and the tips of two fingers into another. ‘Now try,' he said.

Flora raised her leg. The scars moved, but didn't fold. Their waxy surfaces were braced against Crow's fingers. Crow smiled at her, smug and lascivious. She laughed.

‘I have an idea,' he said, and went into his large walk-in wardrobe, emerging with a white silk flier's scarf, of the sort popular during and after the war when cockpits were all still open to the air. The scarf had yellow marks on it—possibly old bloodstains. Crow held the scarf by one end and twirled it, so that it wound into a rope. He caught its end before it could unwind, and then tied it around Flora's hips, where it slotted into two of the deep scars. ‘Ah-ha!' Crow said. He set his long thumbs carefully into the two remaining scars and walked her backward toward the bed. He said, ‘Let's think of my grip as a dead man's brake. I must not let go, no matter what.' He sat Flora down, then
lifted her up the bed and lay down over her. ‘It's an interesting challenge,' he said.

Flora stayed at Crow's house most of that week. The following week they holed up together at the Furness Creek Motor Inn in Death Valley. Then she went to Palm Springs with him and they were seen together, on the golf course, at a table for two.

In the kind of company Crow liked to keep—that of hard-drinking, tight-lipped tough guys—Flora passed as a good sport, someone who could hold up her end in any conversation, and who did not require the careful handling or gallantry more ornamental women would naturally expect. Crow would introduce her as ‘my friend, Flora McLeod'. As Flora McLeod she was known for her work, and Crow's ‘my friend' explained that they were intimate and, everywhere they went, she was silently acknowledged as Crow's chosen companion.

Their affair had happened quite naturally. She was his confidante. Besides, for Crow, sex was idle and unceremonious. If he wasn't avid or passionate Flora could assume that that was because she wasn't beautiful or difficult. She didn't expect him to be faithful. She didn't expect the affair to last. She accepted it as an interlude, part of the long varied story of their friendship. Often, at the end of an evening, they'd retire together and sometimes Crow would grin, and produce the old flier's scarf, and twirl it while she laughed.

When they left Palm Springs she made a point of
remembering to pack the scarf but, just as pointedly, left something else behind. When she was checking their rooms she went into the bathroom and saw that she'd left the rubber diaphragm she'd only just got sitting on the side of the bath. She looked at it for a long time. She thought about the maid's embarrassment on finding it—which was silly, because surely those people eventually saw it all. Flora considered the maid, and she considered how
mad
she was to think of leaving it. And then she left it.