‘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 s
cars, 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.
Venice, Los Angeles
August, 1938
Xas, coming home late through the waste ground of the paper road, saw his brother waiting on the track near the back fence, a looming shadow against the southern horizon where, beyond Washington Street, the pumps of the Venice Peninsula oilfield hunched under the oily light of the lagoon.
Xas sat near the archangel and waited for him to speak. After a time he became aware of a muffled buzzing. It was O’Brien’s snoring purr. Xas reached out, fingers punching through the crust on the dry sand, before finding the cat’s soft vibrating body.
It hadn’t rained for over a month. The wind was blowing across the parched country, and Xas could smell sage, wild mustard and manzanita in the canyons. Between gusts of those dusty scents, he smelled the thick roux of muddy water in the nearest canal, Flora’s orange trees and, finally, his garden, the fatty stink of squashes, wilted lettuce, herbs, flowers, laundry soap—for he’d been reduced to watering with greasy suds he bailed from the washing machine.
There was a carpet of cornflowers and poppies spilling down from the open gate—self-seeded from plants he tossed away when he thinned his flower beds. The moon was full and the poppies were partly open, their petals as crepey as the wings of newly hatched butterflies. The stars were bright and close and the night so still that Xas could actually hear the oil pumps’ pushing heartbeats.
Though sunset was hours ago, the house would still be hot. All its windows were open, so Flora was home. She hadn’t been home for days. She’d been with Crow. Xas didn’t like coming home to an empty house, but he always did, to feed O’Brien. Xas hoped that Flora was fast asleep. He resolved to submit; to get whatever it was the archangel wanted over with quickly. Flora must not wake up, come out, and discover them.
After a moment Xas said, ‘Since you’re not speaking to me I suppose you’re making yourself known to God.’
‘He always knows where I am,’ Lucifer said. ‘Whether or not you’re near me. After all, it isn’t a very big blind spot I’m in. I’m sure that when the sun is low in the sky He can see my shadow moving far ahead or far behind me as I fly.’
Xas listened to the oil pumps, O’Brien’s vibrant circular breathing, and the contented creaking of ducks nesting in the congealing marsh. He practised patience.
After a time Lucifer said, ‘I am thinking of proposing to God that Hell gets a copy of every film.’
Xas shrugged. He looked at the open windows. The interior of Flora’s house was as black and hot and uninviting as the insides of a carbon-coated oven. He kept an eye out for Flora, and continued to practise patience. It wasn’t as if he was sleepy. And he had nothing to do the next day.
Lockheed had asked him to take a leave of absence in order to recover from an accident. Some weeks before he and his co-pilot had had to bail out of a burning plane. Whenever Xas was flying with someone else and had to bail out he’d always wait to see how the other person was before opening his own chute. That was his policy. He and his co-pilot had left the plane together but, because Xas was lighter, the other man was a little below him by the time they reached terminal velocity. He looked down and saw his co-pilot’s parachute pack on fire, the flames pale and smokeless in the blue air. The man deployed the chute, and it didn’t even have time to open before it was fully alight. Xas rolled himself into a ball and tried to race the man down. He uncurled now and then to steer himself nearer. He could see that the man was conscious, hanging onto the cords, looking up, and going down in a spiralling trail of sparks and smoke and fragments of burning silk. Xas finally caught the ends of the trailing cords. But he hadn’t been watching the ground and he’d only seconds to think—maybe only one second to do the right thing. But he was thinking like an angel, so once he caught the man for a moment, by reflex, he tried to open his wings. He tried to open his wings, and felt all his muscles move and his scars smarting and only then remembered to pull his ripcord. Xas kept hold of the man, but they weren’t going slow enough when they hit the ground.
Xas understood what had happened, understood it thoroughly. He didn’t have any quarrel with the facts—he just didn’t seem to be able to come right afterward, so Lockheed stood him down.
Lucifer abruptly started speaking; explaining the origins of his plan. ‘That woman you live with once wrote me a note that mentioned a “Conrad Cole”. I was curious, so I found him in a movie magazine. I read some of those magazines. Then one of our brothers gave me Sergei Eisenstein’s “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form” and “Methods of Montage”. For some years I read about film—though most of the printed matter on the subject is merely gossip and advertisement. I didn’t see a film till 1934, when t
hey opened the first drive-in.’
‘I guess for you it was more of a hover-over,’ Xas said.
Lucifer was quellingly still and quiet for a time, then he began to talk to God. Xas listened to his brother’s end of the negotiation. Lucifer asked that Hell receive an eleventh copy of any film copied ten or more times. Xas could tell that his brother supposed ten was a negligible number. Xas thought of various people in the Hollywood colony making movies of their parties, picnics, and tennis matches. Ten was too few. Hell would eventually drown in children’s birthdays and pool parties, beach barbecues, beauty contests, and beloved dogs begging and rolling over and playing dead. But Xas didn’t say anything to warn Lucifer. He just let his brother make a mistake—he even enjoyed it.
Lucifer concluded his negotiation. He stretched, adjusted his wings, but didn’t get up. This subtle but thick rustling roused O’Brien, who made a melodious chirping noise, before resuming his blissful purring.
Xas frowned at the cat, and his brother remarked, ‘Your forehead looks like sheet music, without the music.’ The light was behind Lucifer’s head, so his smile was audible rather than visible. ‘So,’ he said, ‘to return to our conversation of seven years ago—why did I cut off your wings?’
Xas tried to get to his feet, and Lucifer put out a hand and held him down. ‘Shall I help you?’ Lucifer said. ‘You went to Heaven to find the lost page of Jodeau’s brother’s suicide letter. Jodeau’s wife had burned it because it accused her of murder. She burned it, and therefore sent it to Heaven, where all destroyed originals go. You went to Heaven to find it. To steal a tiny bit of lost truth.’
Xas was very surprised that his brother knew this.
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