The Angel's Cut

by Elizabeth Knox

  Mines Field

  Late February, 1930

  When Xas checked in with Cole from a phone box in the Breakers Beach Club, Cole said, ‘I’m having a problem with a Bristol I want to use for the flyover at the premiere. I’m taking it up to check it out. Would you like to go with me?’

  And Xas said, ‘Sure,’ and arranged to meet Cole that afternoon at Mines. He went home to change his clothes, and caught the trolley.

  He and Cole put on thick flying togs, for the Bristol was an open cockpit two-seater. They took off from Mines and climbed into the cold air at eight thousand feet. Cole mushed up through a loop, took the plane gently over, its engine missing and catching the way Bristol engines sometimes did. Xas thought it sounded just fine.

  Cole glanced back and signalled ‘hold on’—for the Bristol had no seat belts. Xas clamped his hands on his seat. Cole tilted the Bristol into a shallow dive and pushed the stick over gradually. The plane began to spin. The solid part of the world became a barrel and they shot along a chute of air aiming at open sky. They flew out over the water, spinning still, the Pacific a tubular blue solidity whose sides they seemed to swipe as they went by. Then Cole put the plane into a slow bank from inverted, up and over, and they were flying level.

  There was a haze on the sea, plumping out its normally notched surface. The ocean looked vertical, not horizontal, the distances robbed of distance, and the horizon a knife-edge.

  Xas relaxed now that Cole had finished his aerobatics, and let go of the sides of his seat. He looked back at the city, in its depression, and under cloud like fungus, not white, but stained with smoke and car exhaust.

  Cole turned again to look at Xas and smiled with a kind of merry intensity the angel hadn’t seen before. Cole signalled to him to look forward, to enjoy the view.

  Xas looked and saw nothing much—only Catalina off to the right in ripples of tide as though it had just been dropped there and was still making waves. Other than that there was only open water and open air ahead.

  Los Angeles

  February–September, 1930

  Xas had gone one morning to see the appraiser Flora had found for him. He’d said he was hooking up later with Cole at Mines. Then he hadn’t come back.

  Days went by. Then weeks.

  Millie kept expecting him. When she went out to the Apex Club she would leave notes to tell him where he could find her.

  Flora tried to tell Millie that she thought that possibly they’d seen the last of him—but Millie would only purse her lips and shake her head.

  Flora tried to contact Cole. But Cole was incommunicado, though Flora was cutting trailers for Flights of Angels, and had messages from him, delivered by one of the many anonymous people he now had working for him.

  Cole’s hermitage was still his room at Château Marmont. Owing to the Depression and a lack of investors the apartment building had become a hotel, and Cole had simply stayed on. The hotel management confirmed for Flora that, yes, Cole was in, and meals were delivered to him, and empty plates removed, but his curtains were always shut fast. When, in late March, Flora finally took her selection of trailers to the hotel, she sent a message in with them: ‘Have you seen Xas?’ To which Cole made no reply.

  Xas’s presence had altered Flora’s house, not just its emotional temperature but, it seemed, its material existence, so that after a time, although Flora stopped waiting for him to return, the house itself seemed to. His cleaning and mending owned him. The house seemed to shine with reflections of his attention as much as with its floor polish and new paint. It seemed intent on keeping faith, as Millie was.

  Millie did wait for Xas, and nightly renewed her notes saying where she’d be. She asked after him at every airfield in Los Angeles. But Millie had her own plans to keep faith with. She had to recoup her lost seed money. So, in May, she sold her car and bought a two-year-old, closed-cabin Velie Monocoupe, and entered the San Francisco to Hawaii air race. The race had a thirty-thousand-dollar purse and, unlike the Powder Puff Derby—a competion for women pilots flown out of Clover Field—San Francisco to Hawaii wasn’t whites only.

  The day Millie flew out to San Francisco, Flora was the only person at Clover Field to see her off.

  They stood for a time in the shade of the Monocoupe’s wing, Millie sweating in her powder-blue flying suit. She was saying, ‘Even with all the new navigational instruments it’s a risky course. I’m hooking up with my Navy man in San Francisco, but, as it turns out, he isn’t going to be much use. His maps are all nautical, and show the Pacific from sea level.’

  Flora took her friend’s hand. ‘Can’t you find someone better?’

  ‘It’s too late for that,’ Millie said. ‘This is my chance. I have to take it.’ She kissed Flora, opened the plane’s door and stepped up into the cabin. Then she turned back and said, ‘Besides, you know who I wanted.’

  Flora nodded.

  ‘He lived in the air,’ Millie said. ‘And he was the nicest man I ever knew.’

  Flora nodded again but didn’t reciprocate—it didn’t seem quite the right way to speak about Xas.

  ‘He wouldn’t lose his way,’ Millie added.

  ‘If you think you’re going to get lost, then you shouldn’t fly,’ Flora said. ‘You know, I’m pretty sure Xas was trying to sell those pearls of his to pay for your flying school. He might have managed it. He might turn up tomorrow with all the money you need.’

  Millie shook her head. ‘No one is that nice. Not even him. And, Flora, this is a change of tune for you. You haven’t exactly kept a light burning for him. You tried to talk to Cole—then you just let the matter drop. Instead you’ve been working, and rushing about, and hitting the bottle—’

  Flora interrupted. ‘Millie, I think those pearls were stolen. And perhaps by trying to sell them he brought trouble on himself and had to leave.’

  Millie’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Then what good was it for him to be so generous and naive—and not be here when I need him?’

  ‘If he turns up in the next couple of days I’ll send you a wire and put him on a train.’

  Millie’s face got a faint glow of hope. ‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘maybe that’ll happen.’ Before fastening the cabin door, she added, ‘Take care of yourself, honey, will you? Just ease off a bit.’

  Flora said, yes, she would, and they closed the door together. Flora checked its handle then stepped away. Millie took her seat in the cockpit, and waved. Flora turned back to her car which was parked just behind the farthest row of battered Jennies. She heard the Monocoupe’s engine start, but didn’t look again till Millie had taxied away.

  Flora had been drinking heavily throughout March and April, but by the end of May, after Millie had gone, she was drinking to stay drunk—all the time a little foggy, ill, anaesthetised. Drunk, Flora was confident confiding in people whose opinions didn’t matter to her, but whose attention was sustaining. When she drank and hadn’t any other appetite, she would feel smug rather than excited when Crow’s cameraman Pete Zarvas drove her home from some place where there had been dancing and she’d not danced. He’d stop by her gate and wouldn’t invite himself in, but would unbutton her shirt and touch his tongue to her nipples while she massaged him through his open fly. He’d do all the twisting about to position himself. She could just sit up straight with her head resting on the back of the seat and move only her hand. Flora knew that Pete looked on her as some kind of aperitif, for afterward he’d go out and spend time with some other more flexible and demanding woman. He never offered to do anything more to Flora, and she never asked, but when she went indoors with his spit still on her breasts, drying in small tugs that kept her nipples stiff, she’d feel appreciated and attractive.

  When Flora drank she never wholly sobered up. All her sleep was drunken semi-consciousness. She’d go to work feeling poisoned and fragile and not have enough energy to join in Crow’s brainstorming sessions until she was really moved and interested.

  Crow was making a film for the
studio from a screenplay by a writer recruited from the women’s pages of Harper’s, at the same time as planning his comedy with Wylie. Crow had told Flora that the Harper’s women’s screenplay was desperately sentimental—but it was all he had been offered after Spirit. Though audiences had liked Spirit, the film had run over budget, and the plane crash hadn’t helped. Crow asked Flora, ‘Would you please find me something for this Helen Hope to do?’ Helen Hope was the eponymous heroine of the screenplay. The magazine story had been vague about Helen’s ‘charity work’, but the film would have to put the character somewhere. Crow said, ‘She needs some concrete occupation to give her all the moral currency she’s supposed to have. She needs manifest good works. Vic Fleming would have had her conducting choirs of orphans—but that’s not my style.’

  Flora would sit brainstorming with Crow and others, silent at first, nursing her now chronic hangover, until something was said that provoked her to speak. She’d join in the talk, and enjoy the sound of her own voice—rough and reluctant. She’d enjoy the sharp things she’d say, words distilled by impatience down to essentials. Though she could never sound like the men with their sulks and enthusiasms and perpetual pleasurable tussles for dominance, Flora nevertheless thought that she managed to sound like a pithy sibyl, the voice out of the ground of a hibernating oracle.

  Drunk, Flora felt invulnerable, insular, and abandoned, all at once. And, so long as she kept clean, and kept to time, she felt she didn’t have to be in any other way civilised, or rational, or ever to feel she was waiting for something better.

  Crow had developed a habit of giving Flora news about his private life as though offering an apology. His wife came back from her latest rest cure and they bought another house. He told Flora about it—saying he really did think he was doing the right thing there. Then he purchased another couple of racehorses. He drove Flora out to his stable to see them—saying, ‘I know you think it’s a frivolous hobby.’ He talked to Flora about his fears for his wife’s health. Flora was fragile and irascible and Crow was careful with her, but chose to share these things. In her sour hangovers Flora felt these confidences as a power she had over her friend. She enjoyed it. It was something. Something better than the silence of nobody else in her house.

  *

  Flora was never to know for sure what happened to her friend Millie Cotton. But what she imagined was this:

  Millie and her retired Navy navigator lost their way. Perhaps it was night. The navigator pored over maps in the weak light of the cockpit. In later years Flora would dream about that little capsule of radiance carrying those two souls in the huge darkness over the ocean. As it got light they maybe dropped down to look for islands, or ships. They ran low on fuel. They ran out of time.

  Of the seventeen planes that set out from San Francisco to Hawaii, only nine made it. Some pilots ditched and were rescued. One wreck was found. Three planes, including Millie’s, disappeared altogether.

  There was a memorial service. Flora attended. And Conrad Crow. And Millie’s old landlady and some of her fellow tenants from Watts. And jazz club patrons, musicians, a couple of bootleggers, and Millie’s old boyfriend from Texas—one of the men she’d hoped to go in with on the flying school. All the Powder Puff Derby flyers were there too as a kind of honour guard: Margaret and the two Ruths, Clem, Amy, Amelia, Phoebe, May, Marvel, Claire, Edith and Vera.

  Flora sobbed helplessly all the way through the service—for Millie, and for all the things Millie had asked of the world and of her life, hopes that should have been reasonable, and within the reach of her hard work and daring.

  When she came in from the service the first thing Flora saw was Xas’s library books lying in a dusty pile on the window seat. She went straight back out again, returned them, and paid his fines.

  A month or so after Millie’s memorial service, Flora stopped drinking. She didn’t decide to, or intend to, but, one day, she had a task that took too much time for her to get to the day’s first drink.

  It was the day she packed up Millie’s belongings. In the early afternoon she sat on the sling-backed single bed in Millie’s room and looked at how little there was. She thought, ‘This shouldn’t take me long.’ But each of Millie’s possessions asked her to stop and look and acknowledge it. Flora remembered everything—this scarf, that hat, this pair of shoes. She could even see what was missing, the few things Millie had with her when she left for San Francisco. Millie had always been careful with money, and each of her purchases had been a considered one. They were good things, and well cared for. The shoes were stuffed with balled newspaper, the clothes hung on padded hangers. There were mothballs in the wardrobe, with a clove-studded orange pomander. Flora could remember Millie making the pomander one evening while they listened to the radio. Looking at her friend’s tidy room it seemed to Flora that all this thought and order and care should have been a charm against what had happened.

  When Flora did eventually get up from the bed she only pottered about for an hour picking up and caressing this and that, saying hello to Millie’s belongings, then placing them back where they belonged—where Millie had put them. Finally she left the bedroom and wandered around the rest of the house. She opened the drawers and wardrobe in the damp back room and looked again at Xas’s few anonymous things. She had already gone through pockets and shaken books. There was nothing. All Xas’s things had to say was that he hadn’t meant to stay.

  Flora went around the rest of her house. Her room, the living room, bathroom and kitchen. In the kitchen the shelves were lined—Xas had done that—but the dust had begun to settle again. The rooms were once again cluttered. It was the house of someone who didn’t live with her eyes open. Sure, she could keep her eyes open in the dark, cutting film, watching artificial scenes set, and artificial acts repeated over and over. She could look for the best take. But she couldn’t pay attention to her own house. It was dingy, disorderly. To Flora it looked as if she wasn’t even in occupation—of the house, or her life. She hadn’t any plans. Millie had had plans. Millie had had a use for herself.

  Flora stood in her drab, slovenly kitchen and whispered, ‘She should be alive.’ Then she went out and sat on the back step, where she was joined by O’Brien, who flopped down beside her to clean his rich fur—the only cared for thing at her address.

  It was late afternoon by the time Flora drove over to Millie’s old apartment building on Vermont Avenue in Watts to give Millie’s former neighbour her gramophone and discs. The neighbour asked Flora to stay for dinner, and because Flora ate, the food confounded her craving for alcohol. The following morning, for the first time in months, Flora didn’t feel unwell. That afternoon, instead of sitting down with Pete and Wylie and other drinking buddies, Flora made a little experiment: she ran away from her craving. She drove out to Malibu and sat on some weathered steps that went down to the sand. It was late September and most of the brightly painted shacks were shut up and the shore almost empty. Flora smoked and thought about Gil and Millie and Xas. And while she sat there it seemed that some other Flora, a woman who had been doggedly trailing her for months, maybe years, finally caught up and sat down where she was sitting, slipping into her sore body, providing it with an extra notch of contrast, or wash of colour. She was joined on the steps by the Flora to whom things had mattered more.

  The sun went at its usual fall time, though it seemed earlier. Flora drove home. She went into her kitchen. She picked up a dry glass from the draining board. It wasn’t much later than she usually started drinking, and she did feel that there wasn’t really any great harm in starting. But, nevertheless, she replaced the glass and opened a packet of crackers instead. She was a little curious about how she’d feel the following morning. Would she feel any better? How much improvement was possible? Flora had forgotten how it felt to be wholly well. She couldn’t expect to discover that, since she was still strapped into her cilice of scars, and even if it turned out that her body was after all a whole habitable world, the pain of her scars w
as still that world’s equator. But Flora was curious. If, the following morning, she felt better, then perhaps her interior would become bigger, and some part of her would at least be further from the pain.

  She put away her last unopened tequila, conserving not just the bottle itself, but also the option of a steep descent into what drink gave her, stimulated self-forgetting, sensual relaxation, sensuous numbness and vertigo. That ongoing twilight could remain an option, a last thing to turn to.

  Instead, Flora ate crackers and a withered orange and made a shopping list:

  bread

  butter

  cookies

  tomatoes

  beans

  bacon

  —before her imagination failed her.

  She went to bed sober.

  The next day she noticed that her stomach was flatter—it had been swollen—and that the scarred skin on her belly wasn’t pulling so much.

  Over the following weeks Flora rediscovered lucidity. Initially there were times when she felt she was eighteen again, fresh and full of energy. But that didn’t last. Sobriety wasn’t like the promises of the Prohibitionist preachers she remembered hearing when she was a girl in Brawley. She found herself living in relation to a reality no more real than her drunken one. It was just new to her. She missed her old life: the muddle, the self-righteous ire, the pleasurable spite of her drunken self. She missed her own infantile blundering. She had a little less pain, and far more fear of it. She missed never having to choose. Pete had touched her, but she hadn’t had to say, ‘Yes, you.’ The old life was simple; she was hungry and she drank, she was heated and she drank. There were no better choices, and there was no better time. The world was in soft focus and Flora was surrounded by objects and faces that radiated light. And when she passed out, her bed was made of balloons, and nothing that touched her touched heavily.