The Angel's Cut

by Elizabeth Knox

  But, as it turned out, Xas was mistaken. For as he sat there on the cliff top, trying to fathom his own new understanding, at least enough to come up with a question, God began to talk to Lucifer. Xas heard his brother’s response. Lucifer sounded very tired. He said, ‘It does me no good to be good to me.’ And then he broke off, looked at Xas, and reached for him. Lucifer clapped his hands over Xas’s ears, and pulled the angel toward him so that Xas’s face was buried against his chest. Xas was unable to hear his brother, or read his lips. He could feel the vibrations of Lucifer’s voice in his chest, and his ragged, shallow breathing.

  The consultation took only a moment. When it was over Lucifer shoved Xas away from him.

  Xas shouted, ‘Go away!’ But Lucifer was already in the air. The archangel tore straight upward, rapidly dwindling from sight. The sound of his wing beats grew softer and seemed to spread till they were coming from every part of the sky.

  When Xas walked back into Flora’s house two days later, he found her suitcase by the door. She was in a sparkling kitchen polishing cutlery. ‘Where were you?’ she said. ‘I called Cole and he was cagey. He really is putting all that behind him, isn’t he?’

  ‘All that?’

  ‘His wild past,’ Flora said. ‘Look—Connie’s calling every hour now. I’ve been putting him off, but I don’t want him to think I’m reluctant to go away with him.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Palm Springs again. But I didn’t like to leave O’Brien.’

  ‘I’m here now,’ Xas said.

  Flora closed the lid of the caddy and put it, and the polish, away. She left the rags for Xas to deal with and washed her hands at the kitchen sink. ‘I’m sorry to sound brusque. It isn’t as if you’re unreliable. But I couldn’t think where you’d got to. I even called Tram and Lee Young.’ Flora ran through a list of jazz musicians. ‘And Lockheed, in case you were back there and somehow managing double shifts, though I didn’t think it likely.’

  Xas said, ‘Why don’t you just ask me where I’ve been and whether I’m all right?’

  ‘I’m afraid to.’ Flora fell quiet and fidgeted. She flipped up the edge of her wavy bob, and fiddled with her beads. Finally she said, ‘Well—you’re in one piece, so…’

  ‘Have a nice trip,’ said Xas.

  An airfield in Texas

  September, 1938

  It was when they were in Florida, where Crow was meeting with a writer about a book he planned to film, that he finally fell out with Flora. Or maybe it was less a falling out than a series of exclusions. Whatever, Flora had seen it coming. In Miami, after a few days, she noticed that whenever she’d say something—her ration of conversation in a room full of men—Crow wouldn’t look at her. Instead he’d purse his lips and wait for her to fall silent. She’d review what she’d said. Had she said something silly or slight? Or something that ‘called undue attention’ to herself—as her exacting grandmother always warned her a girl must never do.

  By the end of the trip Flora was reduced to pleasantries in company, and Crow was always out late, and tired or inebriated by the time he came to bed.

  *

  Flora and Crow had sleeping berths on the airliner back to California. Flora turned in early, hoping to avoid any argument with Crow. He was annoyed with her, or disappointed in her, and she judged that it was better she didn’t seek to know why. Not just yet. Back in Los Angeles she’d be at her house and he’d be at his and they could resume contact when it suited him—go on as they were, or as they’d been before their affair.

  Flora turned in, got into her pyjamas, and climbed into her bed. A little over an hour later a hostess shook her awake. She was told she had better get up and strap in. The pilot had decided to put down ahead of a storm in a little airfield in Texas.

  The plane was already descending, gunning its engines against gusting winds. The craft was jostling, its lights dim and bright by turns. Flora got up, put on her coat over her pyjamas, then pushed her slightly swollen feet into her shoes. She returned to the seat opposite Crow and buckled up. He nodded to acknowledge her, then continued to peer out the porthole beside him.

  Rain was washing the glass, rain and slushy snow. Beyond the raindrops the world was black. Then it appeared—the sky around a thunderhead lit up within by lightning flashes. The plane vibrated as the thunderclaps pushed through it. Flora couldn’t hear the thunder over the engine noise, but she felt it in her teeth, and in the bones of her skull. Her ears popped.

  For a short time the plane passed out of the rain and the coach was quieter, then the engine sound grew as the plane accelerated before touching down. The plane came in to land and ran, tilted nose up and back down, fast, then slowed in spurts, pushed by the wind.

  Flora cupped her hands by her eyes and pressed her face against the glass. She saw hangars and a huddle of Quonset huts, one showing lights. The plane taxied to this shelter, rocked by wind gusts. Yellow dust drifted in waves on to the edge of the tarmac. The black front of cloud Flora could see from her side of the plane bloomed with light one more time, then blurred. The rain hit the airstrip, washed the dust down out of the air so that, within seconds, sand-filled rivulets were running across the tarmac, and the hard-packed earth was filmed and shiny with fallen water.

  The plane came to a standstill. The hostess reappeared and told them they would be all stopping a while to shelter in the building just to the right of the door.

  Crow went down the steps ahead of her, waited to help her, then let her hand go and dashed for the hut. A hostess came after Flora with an umbrella, but they were only under it for a moment before it turned inside out and was torn from the woman’s hand.

  Flora struggled into the building. Crow had waited at the door, and drew her inside. The other passengers were there already, panting, shaking their coats. The building had a tin roof, no ceiling, only beams from which bare bulbs were suspended. Under the deluge the room was roaring. The hostess arrived, without her umbrella, apologised on behalf of the airline and invited them to make themselves as comfortable as possible. She gestured at a shy looking man who seem to be saluting them with a steaming coffee pot. He retreated behind a counter and began to pour coffee. Most of the passengers kept their coats on and stayed standing to drip dry. Flora accepted a cup of coffee. She followed Crow to the window.

  The room faced east. It was flat country, the nearest range of hills only a low stickleback at the edge of the world. The sun was coming up, but it didn’t appear. All that showed over the silvered ground and in the thick silver air was a bright oval like the view through an antique Claude glass, an eighteenth century optical instrument that concentrated and isolated a view so that it could be painted.

  Flora saw that there was a bird just beyond the window. It had been beaten out of the air by the cloud burst. Its drenched wings were spread, its beak gaping as if it couldn’t catch its breath. It fluttered about, kicking up water, then stopped struggling and drooped. Its breathing gave a little hitch.

  Flora hurried back outside. She got down on her knees to retrieve the bird. Her coat trailed in the puddles. When she got up, clutching the bird one-handed against her silk pyjama top, she put her other hand on the windowsill in order to keep her balance, and it came away covered in flakes of sun-blasted paint. She went back in. One of the other passengers opened the door for her.

  Someone emptied a wastepaper basket and, when Flora put the bird down on the floor, they placed the basket over it. Flora stood over the basket and watched the bird collect itself, blink, shake its wings, then shut them. ‘It’ll be okay, I think,’ said the person who’d found the basket.

  Flora’s pants clung clammily to her shins. Her coffee was cold. Crow wordlessly brought her another. He watched her drink it. He was wearing a cool, blank expression. ‘Are you cold?’ he asked.

  ‘Only very wet,’ she said.

  ‘That was a little sentimental, you know.’

  ‘If it was filmed it would be sentimental.’ She sipped her coffee.
It had been stewing and was shockingly bitter.

  The world beyond the waiting room was now only that lozenge of yellow light. A waterfall dropped in solid splashes from the gutter by the door. The water made so many sounds it seemed to be different kinds of water, softer or harder, colder or warmer; dense and misty, clean and dirty. It came from everywhere, fell straight down from the sky, then in cascades from the building, then rebounded from the ground to thump the clapboard walls.

  ‘This is biblical,’ Flora observed. She was feeling drowsy, uncomfortably damp, but comforted by something—something she couldn’t quite figure out, about the bird, about her decision to scoop it up, and bring it in out of the storm.

  She had always liked animals. ‘Too soft for farming,’ her grandmother had once said. That was twice in one night she’d thought of Grandma McLeod. Did it mean anything? Was that why good people shouldn’t go to Heaven? Because—as Xas had once seemed to hint—they couldn’t go whole? And, if they didn’t go whole, was that because if they were good and beloved they left useful bits of themselves behind them? Things that their loved ones had to keep in order to live. To live well. To know that a bird being beaten to death by the rain is like a woman on fire and running in panic through the horrified guests of a café.

  Sometime later Flora woke up. She was propped against the wall. There was a space beside her on the bench, yet Crow was on the other side of the room, straddling a chair, his arms across its back and head hanging. There was a scattering of cigarette butts beneath the chair, one smoking faintly; it had been pinched out halfway along its length, yet Crow had lit another and already its tip was a fragile inch of ash.

  The rain was quieter, the radio audible again. Flora’s neck hurt. She thought that Crow might have considered lying her down and bundling his jacket beneath her head. Or he might have stayed by her and let her head rest on the cushion of his arm.

  She got up, went to the window, and wiped a clear circle on the misted glass. She cupped her hands around her eyes and peered out. There was the plane, its propellers strapped. There were several other planes, the Quonset huts, one illuminated, and a hangar. There was a sign above the door of the hangar. It read: Millie Cotton Memorial Flight School.

  The glass squawked as Flora’s hands dropped. She leaned against the window, her damp coat blotting the glass in clear furry-edged patches. ‘Connie,’ she said.

  Crow didn’t respond.

  She called him again.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ He got up slowly as though he was having trouble with gravity. He dropped the cigarette and ground it out. Did all this with an elaborate show of effort.

  ‘Look,’ Flora said, once he was beside her.

  Crow gave a grunt of surprise. He said, ‘Her friends must have got together and done it anyway. Then named it for her.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s strange that we didn’t know?’ Flora said.

  Crow shrugged. ‘Different worlds, I guess.’ He knocked on the glass with his knuckles. ‘Now that would be sentimental if it was in a film.’

  ‘Yes,’ Flora said, ‘it would be sentimental because it would be supposed to mean something.’ She paused, then said, ‘It might mean something anyway.’

  ‘It means her friends found money to start a school and named it for her.’

  ‘But we’re here.’ Flora touched her own chest, and then his arm. ‘We’re here by accident.’ Then, ‘What’s wrong, Connie?’

  ‘Must something be wrong?’ Crow said.

  ‘No, but—I thought that it all went well in Miami.’

  ‘It did.’

  Flora moved her hand from his sleeve to his hand, she wrapped her fingers around his. Crow let her hold his hand but didn’t reciprocate, didn’t close his grip.

  ‘Though I did spend some time on the phone arguing with Cole,’ Crow said. Cole was to produce this next film.

  She said, ‘Con’s feeling his oats. Since flying around the world he’s the world famous Conrad Cole. No one is his equal when he gets full of himself like that.’

  ‘I couldn’t ever be his equal, Flora. He always had me at a disadvantage. You understand that, don’t you? You understand that our friendship was founded on compromise.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Crow turned his head to examine her. ‘Oh—come on!’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Flora—I obtained film stolen from him and cut it into my own film. It was dishonourable of me.’ Crow turned away and looked at the white glass, for the condensation had closed Flora’s window again. ‘Don’t you have any idea of the kind of position that put me in with him?’

  ‘Are you saying,’ Flora began, then hesitated. ‘Are you suggesting that I put you in that position?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ Crow growled. Then changed the subject. ‘Do you think your friend’s failure with Millie is the reason he takes such good care of you?’

  ‘Xas?’

  ‘Yes, your friend, Cole’s powder puff.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Though it can’t be too much trouble—taking care of you—what with one thing and another, like his advantageous relationship with Cole.’

  It sounded to Flora as though Crow was accusing Xas of being involved in some kind of lucrative blackmail. What had Cole been saying?

  Crow asked suddenly, ‘Whose idea was it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stealing Cole’s film?’

  ‘It was unwanted footage.’

  ‘Apparently there is no unwanted footage.’

  ‘It was my idea,’ Flora said. ‘Xas had nothing to do with it. I’d only just met him.’ Flora wanted to deflect Crow’s hostility from Xas. It was silly of her to want that. Crow was saying she was a thief—that she was if ‘Cole’s powder puff’ wasn’t. It was herself she should defend, but she couldn’t see why Crow had suddenly found the need to blame her or, if he was in fact blaming her, why he’d given her an out, why he’d offered her someone else to blame instead.

  But Crow had always been like this. She shouldn’t kid herself. Crow was prepared to respect what people could do for him. People like Xas. Crow would pay for work. He’d offer praise. He’d offer the largesse of his company, his approval. But he’d not alter one of his prejudices, so that everyone had to eventually remain where he’d first filed them, under ‘a good sport’, or ‘fake’, or ‘fag’, or ‘traitor’.

  Crow said, ‘You have to be able to trust people.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘I don’t like this,’ Crow said. He sounded uncomfortable, fastidious. ‘I don’t like having to give anyone the air, Flora, but I think I have to tell you that I don’t want you editing this next film.’

  Once Flora was able to react she only shrugged. Crow was firing her before he’d in fact hired her. They had no agreements, no contract governing the terms of their work, or their affair, or their friendship. Flora was ashamed of his behaviour. Whatever had prompted it, boredom with the affair, panic about her being some burden to him—whatever—his behaviour was shameful. She found she couldn’t look at him. He was letting her go. She loved him, and he was letting her go.

  At that moment Flora understood that she’d be all right. In a day or two she’d feel indignant, scornful, straight in her head. ‘Life goes on,’ she thought. ‘Life goes on and you find you can’t even control which way you turn your head. You refuse to look at someone, then lose sight of them for good.’ She made herself look at Crow then. She met his pale blue eyes and made herself imagine a time, months or years from now, when they were over this, and were sitting together somewhere having a drink and chewing the fat. In her head Flora turned the knobs of her Moviola, and let the film run on. She shut one gate, let the loop of film appear, shut the other, and made a cut. She pushed the unwanted footage aside. She’d forget this, then she’d forgive him.

  She looked out the window again, at the sign: Millie Cotton Memorial Flying School. She said, ‘Cole gave Xas some money bac
k in 1930. Xas invested it in a funeral home, the Madill Brothers in Santa Monica. They have branches in Long Beach and Pasadena now. The brothers send Xas quarterly reports. I always imagined he reinvested his dividends. But perhaps some of it comes here. That would be like him; to do that and not mention it.’

  ‘And we set down here by chance and discovered it,’ Crow said, ‘It is almost a Hollywood story.’

  Venice

  October–December, 1938

  Xas noticed a new smell in the bathroom after Flora had been in there. It was one of her smells—he knew them all—but altered.

  On the morning he registered the change he left the bathroom and followed Flora into the kitchen where she was toasting bread and brewing tea, wandering from sink to refrigerator to table. She was taking small careful steps. It was her normal indoor gait, but had something of the restraint Xas had noticed in her movements when he first met her.

  Xas observed Flora for a few minutes, then finally passed his verdict. ‘You’re pregnant,’ he said.

  Flora went on buttering her toast, pushing the butter, now black with crumbs, to the edges of each slice. She was steeling herself. In a moment she’d take a bite. Her stomach was empty. She felt sick with emptiness, but too sick to eat.

  Xas asked, ‘Have you told Crow?’

  ‘Not yet. Connie and I had a falling out.’

  ‘But you are going to tell him?’

  Flora finally took a bite of her toast. She was so hungry that she felt the fat in the butter go to her head, then some letting go in every cell of her body. She said, ‘You never told me about the Millie Cotton Memorial Flying School,’ and resumed eating.

  Flora didn’t tell Crow. Didn’t tell him, or see him. Her acquaintances had become accustomed over the years to her patterns of inactivity and retreat. It was understood that she wasn’t robust. Closer friends knew Flora retreated when she was in pain, or depressed. They respected her disappearances. Besides, Xas would take care of her.