The Angel's Cut

by Elizabeth Knox

  Flora felt dazed, but this was her chance to get answers and she wouldn’t let it go by. She could sense Xas clearing all these considerations away, and hiding himself from himself. She said, ‘When I was a child in church the preacher would talk about fallen angels as demons who tempted people. But the note says that fallen angels aren’t demons.’

  ‘Lucifer maintains that, like earth, Hell was there already, inhospitable and ugly, but a whole real world. He says he first went to Hell about the same time God started to store souls there—and that he took to going there to be alone with his thoughts. Out of Heaven—its colour and clamour—he was able to think, he said, and he came up with his heretical ideas. Then he aired them in Heaven and argued with other angels—not with God. I guess with God by proxy, but he never seems to acknowledge it.’

  ‘So there are no demons?’

  ‘Yes, there are. Demons are the oppressed native people of Hell,’ Xas said. ‘Fallen angels are their colonial masters. Demons are low creatures, and impossible to like—but I do think they deserve something better.’

  Flora laughed. ‘That’s a remarkably Christ-like thought.’

  *

  Xas buried his face in Flora’s hair and closed his eyes. He wouldn’t say anything further. The things he’d kept from Sobran he’d keep from Flora too. For Flora would understand, like every other Christian, that humans had earthly lives and immortal souls and God rewarded each soul for its life. And how could it matter to her—whose daily life was one of pain—whether God made the world or not, since He took care of human souls once they came home to Him? That’s all she needed to know.

  Xas had his own heresy—his very own. His heresy was that God didn’t just sort individual from individual but within each individual, at least all those He let near Him, so that souls in Heaven were not the people they’d been on earth. Xas had believed this since the death of his first human friend, the bee-keeping monk, whose soul he’d sought out in Heaven, and found greatly altered. Xas wouldn’t show Flora the fine print, because what all the old songs had to say was true—in Heaven there was no trouble or sorrow or pain.

  He opened his eyes and gazed at her pale, sleepy face. He kept his lips shut tight. ‘Who are you? Who are you?’ he thought, as if by concentration, and questing will, he could keep her, all of her, alive forever and out of the happy conglomerate good that was Heaven—that was her best hope.

  Intermission

  Los Angeles

  1932–1938

  In 1932 Xas was settled in Venice with Flora. He got a job. A friend, Tram, sent Xas to talk to some people he knew at Lockheed, where they’d signed him up as a test pilot. (‘Tram’ was Frankie Trumbauer, an old friend of Millie’s, and a saxophonist of elegant and otherworldly sounds. He was also a pilot who knew test pilots, and later became one. Tram was flying for fun, and haunting the after-hours clubs on Central Avenue. His collaborator Bix Beiderbecke had finally drunk himself to death, and Tram had rather lost his way.)

  In ’32 half the country was out of work and yet Xas and Flora found themselves in well-paying jobs. They bought new beds, a new sofa, rugs, and a phonograph. They had the house painted and papered. Then Xas borrowed a truck and drove the furniture they no longer wanted out to a refuse tip on the edge of the desert where—he later told Flora—he sat watching animal and human scavengers, and a dust devil churning this way and that, full of rags and yellowed paper. Then he drove off again and took everything to some Hooverville and invited the people there to take what they could use. (And when Flora told him she was glad he’d thought of it, he’d just stood there sadly shaking his head and saying, incomprehensibly, ‘So many things. Things burying things.’)

  The years passed. Prohibition ended. Every year the Los Angeles River flooded. In ’35 there was a crisis at Flora’s studio when Monroe Stahr died in a plane crash in Ohio. Stahr’s funeral was the last time Flora spotted Crow’s ex- wife (Crow and Edna had divorced in 1932). Edna attended the funeral because she was Stahr’s late wife’s sister. Crow and Edna stood together in the demonstratively weeping crowd, Edna clutching the hand of a woman in a very plain hat and coat who Flora thought must be her nurse.

  With Stahr gone Flora worked on a film Crow was doing for Warners. She drove further every day—Burbank again instead of Culver City. She saw less of Xas. She’d come home to find a pot of chilli on the stove with heating and serving instructions and maybe cornbread on the kitchen counter wrapped in a dish towel. Xas’s cooking had improved, she supposed, till he told her that the food was a gift from the Mexicans he’d befriended and was helping. (‘Helping’ meant he’d dug them a well.) Or she’d come home to find a note saying where she could find him. Usually at a jazz club. He’d have put on his suit to go to the Alabam, and then would follow his musician friends to the black clubs where, around three a. m., they’d lock the doors and the black and white musicians would play together. Flora did sometimes go out and join him. She’d knock on the door and say, ‘I’m Huss Hintersee’s friend.’ (One of his Mexicans adopted a Spanish pronunciation of Xas, and it caught on in the jazz clubs and at Lockheed too.) Flora would join him up on the balcony where he’d be sitting with his arm on the rail, looking down on tables and guests, and the floor covered in cigarette ash, trodden in and smeared into clouds. They’d listen to Nat Cole then drive home singing.

  Conrad Cole set a new airspeed record. He wooed this and that beauty. But Xas was the only one to share Cole’s sovereign darkness, those rooms from which all light was excluded, where he holed up and was at peace, or sweating with fear.

  Cole bought, then eviscerated, a great studio, and both Xas and Flora were party to many discussions—while sitting with movie people in the velvet banquettes at the Trocadero, or in the dappled light of the Clover Club—about whether Cole had terrible taste in movies, or just supposed the ‘general audience’ must have.

  Then, in 1935, Cole met the vivid and brainy Sylvia Seaton, and fell in love. They set up house together. He was happy and in good health. Xas was surprised to discover how relieved he felt. It was as if he’d carried Cole to the far bank of a flooding river, and could now set him down. Xas had been afraid of the future—Cole’s future—but could now tell himself that the man was in better hands than his own.

  Flora’s back lawn was by this time carved up into flower and vegetable beds. Xas fed her out of his garden. She didn’t put on much weight but, over time, felt better, had more energy, was more supple and resilient than she had been since her accident. She was both grateful and resentful to be the object of his care. His reaction to loving her seemed to be a desire to make her last. He didn’t want to lose her, so looked after her. He worried about Cole’s mental state, and her material one.

  After they’d been living together for a couple of years Flora finally let Xas inspect her scars.

  In her accident Flora had suffered first-degree burns around her knees and ribs, the places where the fire had touched only momentarily, first where the dry fronds of the grass skirt were hanging, and then where the burning material floated up around her like an opening flower. The fronds had been consumed quickly, and Flora was already in flight, so the flames and smoke had streamed away from her face. Her halter top hadn’t caught fire so her breasts were protected.

  The burns to the tops of her thighs and patches of her stomach under her navel were, however, second-degree. The fire had burned down to living skin, but it didn’t destroy her nerves. Instead it left them raw, scorched, and reacting in a weeks-long scream of pain. Those burns had healed under shiny, thinned skin, pigmented alternately in patches of red and purplish pallor. This skin was not as pliable as normal skin, its give as far from normal as that of pigskin work gloves is when compared to kid evening gloves.

  But the second degree burns were not the worst of it.

  Flora’s grass skirt was decorated around the hips by butterflies made of celluloid. When the skirt caught fire the celluloid ignited, shrivelled, melted, then clung, fiercely hot and m
olten, to her skin. When Cole caught Flora in the curtain and carried her to the floor the flames had gone out, but the hot material of the decorations went on scorching its way deeper into the flesh that it had adhered to. Flora had sustained four third-degree burns in spots—the largest the size of the top joints of three of her fingers. The molten celluloid had seared its way down through fat to muscle, destroying nerves, leaving pits in her body full of eschar, scabs of dead hardened flesh surrounded by living flesh starved of blood.

  It was these burns that made Flora’s doctors fear for her life. Two days after the fire she’d swelled up to twice her normal size and, for some hours, was producing only a tiny amount of nut brown urine. But she had no inhalation injury, and since it was the height of summer she didn’t succumb to cold, as burns victims often did. The doctors kept her on a saline drip, and her kidneys slowly recovered and, miraculously, no infection ever found her wounds.

  Flora’s scars marred her beauty—gave her pale figure the look of a foxed photograph. But it was the four pits of scars around her hips that gave her most of her problems. They were like rivets driven into her flesh connecting layers of skin and fat and muscle that should normally be able to glide against one another. They pulled at the less seriously damaged skin around them, wouldn’t bend or stretch, so that if Flora squatted, or spread her legs, at least one of the four would crease right across in a hard fold, then split and bleed lymph.

  Flora showed Xas her scars on an occasion when one had ruptured and was weeping clear matter from its pale pink interior. She was in the bathroom, with a bottle of iodine in one hand and a cotton ball in the other. She was feeling very sorry for herself and called out to Xas, asking him to come and help her dress her wound.

  Xas came in, and stood for a moment studying the scars. Then he crouched and licked the oozing fissure. His tongue was warm and soothing and, after a minute, Flora began to feel light-headed and indifferent, as though she’d taken a couple of Nembutal. Xas left the wound wet with his spit then fetched her nightgown and dropped it gently over her head and lifted arms. He put her to bed and, in the morning, the wound was much better, sealed under spit, a thin glaze like gum Arabic.

  When the wound was quite healed Xas took to rubbing lanolin into Flora’s scars—something that had been recommended to her by the doctors who had followed up on her case when she returned from Brawley to Los Angeles, a treatment she’d given up for tequila, taken internally. Flora was embarrassed by these attentions. They were too intimate for her simply to accept them as more of his husbandry—like the meals he cooked her, and her bedding changed twice a week, no matter how busy they both were—all his efficient, unstinting, inexhaustible care. Xas would apply the lanolin and then hold her for a few minutes. He’d catch her after her shower to treat her or, if he came in late and found her still awake, he’d appear and would burrow in her bed clothes and pull down her pyjamas to apply the lanolin. She sometimes suspected him of wanting something—some sexual recompense. He was so tender it was like worship. He wasn’t brisk and businesslike. He’d stay under the covers, his arms wrapped around her, his palms against the top of her buttocks and face pressed into her belly. Sometimes he’d go to sleep like that, or they’d go to sleep together and she’d wake up a while later—because the light was still on—and would look at the lump he made under the covers and would worry, stupidly, that he wouldn’t be able to breathe.

  Xas’s attentions worried Flora, but she didn’t stop him or confront him or interfere with whatever trajectory he had. After all, he never had imposed on her in any way. And he made her feel good, made her aches and pains fade, made her sleep better. And he kept his clothes on, and stayed with her for only an hour or two and, eventually, she came to think of his visits as equivalent to O’Brien’s.

  Her cat always spent part of the night with her. He’d come in through the bathroom window—adding each time to the river of claw marks on the paintwork. He’d saunter into her room, jump onto the end of the bed, circle her, purring, then settle down behind her knees to give himself a long, vigorous, bed-shaking wash.

  They were the same, the cat and the angel, warm presences that shared her bed. And sometimes, when Xas was lying next to her, Flora would slip her hand down the collar of his shirt to sink her fingers into the feathers on his back, and actually let herself think of him—the smooth- skinned, springy, shapely body beside hers. Flora never let herself feel anything more than wonder, for she was too fragile and inflexible to imagine herself asking for something more than warmth and closeness. The feelings she had for Xas weren’t answerable, there was nothing she could do with them. Besides—she told herself—she only considered what she might ask because he was benevolent and earthly, like his own garden. But she must never forget that he was also like his brother—his brother the Devil. So whenever she found herself feeling infatuated with the warm, affectionate, sleepy angel who nursed her scars and then stayed for a time under the covers embracing her, she’d just shake her head at her greed for pleasure. How forgetful and arrogant of her to be greedy for pleasure, after all those years of pain.

  Venice, Los Angeles

  May, 1938

  Flora 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.

  Beverly Hills

  Late July, 1938

  Crow 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.