From the Teeth of Angels Page 2

  Two days later, Caitlin and I decided more or less on the spur of the moment to leave. We’d had enough and weren’t getting any pleasure at all from the place. Our bags were packed and the bill was paid within hour and a half. Neither of us likes saying goodbye to people and, as you can imagine, we were spooked by McGann’s story. It’s not something anyone would be quick to believe, but if you’d been there that night and seen their faces, heard their voices and the conviction in them, you’d know why both of us were uncomfortable in their presence. Then it happened that as we were walking out to the car, we ran right into Miep, who was coming toward the office in a hurry.

  Something was clearly wrong. “Miep, are you all right?”

  “All right? Oh, well, no. Ian is… Ian is not well.” She was totally preoccupied and her eyes were going everywhere but to us. A light of memory came on in them, and her whole being slowed. She remembered, I guess, what her man had told us the other night.

  “He had another dream today, after he came home from the beach. He lay down and it was only a few minutes, but when he woke—” Instead of continuing, she drew a slow line across the lower part of her stomach. Both Caitlin and I jumped at that and asked what could we do. I think we both also started toward their bungalow, but Miep shouted, really shouted, “No!” and there was nothing we could do to convince her to let us help. If that was possible. More than that though, the thing that struck me hardest was her face. When she realized we weren’t going to try to interfere, she looked over our shoulders toward their place, where Ian was, and the expression was both fear and radiance. Was it true? Was he really back there, scarred again by death, scarred again because he hadn’t understood its answers to his questions? Who knows?

  On the boat back to the mainland, I remembered what he had said that night about the Moose Church and how people should be allowed to worship whatever they want. That was the look on his girlfriend’s face—the look of one in the presence of what they believe is both the truth and the answer to life. Or death.

  Our thoughts,

  Jesse

  Putting the letter down, I closed my eyes and waited for her to speak.

  “Well, what do you think, Wyatt?”

  I looked over, but the morning sun sat right on top of her head like a hot yellow crown. I had to squint even to make out the shape of her face.

  “I think it’s intriguing.”

  “Whaddya mean, ‘intriguing’? Don’t you believe it?”

  “Sure I do. That’s been my problem for years—believing. Sometimes I think it’s not leukemia that’s killing me, but terminal believing. Terminal hope.”

  “Wyatt, don’t be facetious. This could be it; the thing that could save you. Why aren’t you more—”

  “More what? More excited? Sophie, I have cancer. They’ve assured me I’m going to die. That I don’t have much longer to live. God’s doing me a big favor by letting me even be here today. Can you imagine what it’s like living with that in your head every minute of the day?

  “In the beginning, when I first knew I was sick, there were all kinds of things in me that simply aren’t anymore. I woke up every morning and cried. I went through a period where I looked at the world twice as hard because I never knew if I’d see any of it again. Life became a three-D movie; I made everything stand out, stand at attention. But even that goes away after a while, strangely enough.

  “I read about a woman in New York who had her purse snatched. That’s lousy, right? But know what else the thief did? Started sending things back piece by piece on special occasions in her life. She had a Filofax in her bag where she’d marked her anniversary and kids’ birthdays, things like that. So on her first birthday after the purse was stolen, she got her driver’s license back in the mail. Along with a greeting card from the guy. Next, he sent back her birth certificate. It went on and on. Such a perverse story, but clever too, you know? The man was into dread. He figured out a perfect way to torment her for years. He didn’t want to steal a bag—he wanted to burrow into her life like a tick.”

  Sophie nodded but smiled too, as if she knew something I didn’t. She kept smiling when she spoke. “At the same time, it’s almost sexy when you think about it: all that attention and the time he spent at it. How many creeps would go to the trouble of stealing your purse and then sending you a birthday card?”

  I knew I could count on my friend to understand. “That’s exactly my point. Death is like the purse snatcher and that’s what’s so goddamned mean. It steals things from you, and then slowly gives some of them back so you start getting confused but hopeful at the same time. If it’s going to steal my purse, then just take it and get the hell out of my life. Don’t send back old credit cards or a license I’ve already replaced.

  “I read a letter like this, or an article in the paper, saying some doctor in Osaka claims to have found the cure for cancer in a derivative from plum pits… I don’t want to have any more hope. I don’t want to believe somewhere in the world is a cure or an answer or a guru who’ll be able to take away my fear. I would like to learn how to die now.”

  She looked at me disgustedly. “ ‘Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be.’ Whatever happened to that, Wyatt? You were the one who gave me that poem. Does learning how to die also mean learning how to stop living?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then maybe you’re full of shit. I don’t think that’s how God wants us to do it, and I’m not talking about going gently into some good night. I’m not experiencing what you are, granted, so maybe I have no right to talk about it at all, but I’m going to anyway. The only way to defeat the purse snatcher is go find him. Find him, show him your face, and say, ‘I’ve found you and you can’t scare me anymore.’ If Death keeps torturing you by sending back stuff you thought was gone, then go find Him and tell Him to stop. I think you learn how to die by… Oh, shit!”

  I hadn’t been looking at her as she angrily spoke so I didn’t realize she was crying till I looked up at that last word. Her face was wet with tears but her eyes were furious. “The minute I finished reading this letter I called you, I was so excited. If you can find this Ian guy, he could have the answer! But it doesn’t interest you?”

  “Sure it does, but maybe finding the answer doesn’t mean finding a cure for my illness.” I picked up the glass of orange juice and took a long, cold drink. Sophie always squeezed her own juice, and it was a delicious treat. Fresh orange juice, tart and full of stringy pulp that burst with its own taste when you nibbled it.

  “Wyatt?”

  “Hmm?”

  “What is it like?” From the tone of her voice, it was clear what she meant.

  Rolling the glass between my hands, I looked down into its orange swirl. “I met a young woman when I was taking my last treatment. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. Cancer of the throat that had spread down into her chest… the works. She would have fooled me if I hadn’t known what to look for, because she’d done a good job of disguising herself. Had all her hair, or at least a very good wig, and lots of natural color in her cheeks. But that’s another thing you learn to recognize—what’s real and what’s makeup, wigs, tanning studios… This girl told me the only thing she could do now was wait for the results of her treatments and try to figure out ways of fooling the world into thinking she was one of them. Healthy, whole; a real human being. Because that’s one of the things you learn when you get sick.

  “What’s it like? Get cancer or start to die and you quickly see how people work. It’s very different from what you thought all your life, believe me. Anyway, this woman told me something chilling. Said she’d just received her last radiation treatment. There’s only so much you can be given before it stops helping and starts to destroy you. They give you so-and-so many doses and then that’s it—if all those rads or whatever they’re called don’t work, you’re out of luck. But know what else they told her? Not to get near babies. And certainly don’t touch any, because she was so full of radiation
that she would be dangerous to them.”

  “No!”

  “That’s the truth. As if dying’s not bad enough, huh? It’s that kind of humiliation too. The worry you might throw up in the restaurant if you don’t take your medicine at the right time. Or suddenly not being able to lift yourself out of a chair. Or when pain becomes so unbearable that you have to ask a stranger in a voice that won’t scare them to call you an ambulance. What’s it like? It’s like being the radioactive woman. Except you’re radioactive to the whole healthy world. Everyone looks at you as if there’s something wrong with you. As if you glow, or are infectious, and no matter how many times they’re told that’s not true, they secretly think it is. But there isn’t anything wrong with you – it’s what entered you that’s wrong. There’s… I’m going in circles. What’s it like? It’s like being the radioactive girl. You’re not living anymore; you’re juggling. It’s such a mistake to think you can escape.”

  “This makes me so depressed, I have to eat something. I’m going to the kitchen. Do you want some more orange juice?”

  “Yes, that would be very nice.”

  She got up and jingled her way across the patio, followed by Lulu. Lulu, the black French bulldog who, halfway through her comfy life, grew cataracts on her eyes and went blind. Sophie bought a small tinkly bell which she wore on one of her slippers so that the dog always knew where to find her in the house.

  Sophie and Lulu. The three of us spent a great deal of time together. Sophie’s late husband, Dick, had owned a rare bookstore in downtown L.A. that was one of my favorite hangouts. He was a man who loved books and taught you how to love them too. I never could figure out which of the two I liked more. When Dick passed away, Sophie and I became close. We talked on the phone almost every day and ate dinner together three or four times a month. She was only in her mid forties when he died and left her both a healthy business and inheritance. But she showed no interest in getting involved with another man. For a while I thought she had fallen in love with a woman who worked in her store, but I was wrong. I asked her about that side of her life one day. She said I was the only other man she had ever really loved, but since I’m gay… I said tell the truth. She said that was the truth.

  “Wyatt! Come in here, you’ve got to see this!”

  “What?”

  “Just come in here. Fast!”

  I quick-stepped from the baking sunlight into the shade of the eaves. Swung open the screen door and walked up the two steps to her kitchen. First thing I saw was Sophie with her hands on her hips, shaking her head. Then I heard before I saw the frantic clitter of Lulu’s toenails on the linoleum. Clickety-stickety-click she spun in panting, snuffling circles, then jumped up against the counters all in a mad rush because she knew something wonderful besides her mistress was in the room.

  Something wonderful was a small calico cat sitting on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. It was cleaning its head by licking a paw and then wiping it over its face. I’d not seen the cat before, but it acted with the calm and deliberation of an animal completely at home in its surroundings.

  “You gotta see this. It’s our daily ritual. That’s Roy, the neighbor’s cat. He climbs in through the window and sits there, waiting for Lulu to smell that he’s here. Since she went blind, her nose has gotten extrasensitive. Once she catches a whiff of him, she proceeds to go nuts and hunt for him as if he’s the golden fleece. But she’s so stupid because he always does the same thing. In through the window, sit over the sink, wait. Now watch what happens.”

  The dog became more frantic the closer she got to the cat. Roy seemed bored by her scrabbling and twitching. Perhaps he only saw it as his due for deigning to be there. He kept cleaning his head, with an occasional frozen pause to check on the whereabouts of his fan.

  “Every day this happens?”

  “Every day. It’s like a Noh play—each goes through exactly the same moves, same roles, everything. Wait, though; part two is about to begin. First Lulu has to get tired and give up.”

  We waited for that to happen and it did a few minutes later. She collapsed in a gasping, exhausted heap on the floor, her head held up high so that she could pull in more air. Roy, finished washing, stared like an indifferent god at her. Lulu had definitely given up.

  Slowly His Majesty dropped down from the windowsill to the sink to the floor with nary a sound. But the dog heard; she perked right up again. Roy walked over to her and swatted at her rear end, just barely touching it. She turned, but he was already in front, swatting at her face. Now she went crazy. Like a skilled boxer, the cat leaped and parried and pranced and was wonderful the way he stayed out of harm’s way. Sophie and I started laughing because the two of them really got in the most extraordinary workout. After a few more seconds of this leaping and lunging, Lulu now thoroughly out of her mind with excitement and frustration, Roy sprang back up on the sink and right out the window.

  “The phantom strikes again.”

  “And it happens every day?”

  “More or less.”

  “Fabulous. But I think she likes it.”

  “She loves it! Once by accident she got hold of his paw and was so startled that she didn’t know what to do. And you know, I was just thinking. Know what it reminds me of, Wyatt?”

  “What?”

  “Your thing with hope. What you were just talking about.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’re like Lulu with the cat. You’re blind, but you know it’s there. You can smell it and feel it. It keeps tweaking your tail. The closer it gets, the more you whip around and around, trying to catch it. Till now, when you’ve given up and are down on the floor.”

  “And whatever it is that’ll save my life pokes and torments me to remind me it’s there? That’s stretching it a bit, Sophie.”

  “It is not! You and I have been talking about this ever since you got sick. I remember the things you’ve said. Maybe you want to give up hope or think you have now, but I don’t believe it. And neither do you because both of us know it’s still there. ‘Cause that’s what hope is. We can’t really see it, but it keeps brushing its paw past our face close enough so that we feel the breeze. It’s always there but sometimes we catch hold of it and having it scares the hell out of us, and we let go. Like dumb Lulu the one time she caught Roy.

  “Anyway, here’s your orange juice.”

  For a certain period in every life, a person can do no wrong. That period may last an hour, a month, or much longer, and that is the real unfairness of fate. But length aside, there does come a moment for everyone when he is invincible, infallible, immortal. Even if it lasts only an afternoon.

  I was lucky—supremely lucky. For some years, I was the host of a very successful children’s show on television. It was not the best time in my life because those years were all rush, deadlines, sprint from here to there, hurry-up-and-get-it-done. But the momentum and energy that came from it were exquisite. Solid gold adrenaline. The best you can hope for is to live in a present so full and all-encompassing that you lose any sense of future or past. For those years I lived in that kind of packed Now, and it was enough.

  My roommate was the producer of the show and we thought we had the kind of relationship that could survive Hollywood, success, too much money, not enough time, everyone and his brother coming out of the closet… all those things. But it didn’t. I fell in dubious love for a couple of weeks with a film critic in New York and had a short frivolous affair with him. I confessed everything over the phone to my friend and partner in Los Angeles, hoping he would understand.

  He didn’t. When I returned home, he had already moved out. What was worse, afterward he treated me with the same good will and kindness in our working life as he had privately. What is more distressing than being treated well when you know you don’t deserve it? I was dismayed, but I was also a STAR, which flattered me into believing for a time that I was allowed to behave badly and get away with it. Hey, all of television land still loved me.
They didn’t know what I had done.

  Not many people know how to be famous, to twist the phrase, and that included me. I behaved atrociously toward someone I genuinely loved, then tried to brush it away like lint off my cashmere sleeve. Instead of atoning, I decided on a spree. Went out and had a ball and almost forgot down deep what a shit I was. Drinks on the house! Strike up the band!

  Then one day while taping the show, I didn’t see a thick cable on the floor and tripped over it. I fell on my arm and got a nasty bruise. Which didn’t go away. It was the color of an angry thundercloud, and it stayed around for weeks. Until then, I’d been one of those lucky ones who are rarely, if ever, sick. I went to hospitals to visit others, never to stay. My medicine cabinet contained a bottle of aspirins and an unopened package of cold pills.

  The doctor spoke slowly, as if someone were carving his every word into stone tablets as he pompously enunciated each one.

  “We’re concerned about these test results, Mr. Leonard.”

  “But it’s only a bruise that’s stuck around, doctor.”

  “Unfortunately, it is more than that.”

  I tried to shut my eyes but fear wouldn’t let me. How quickly we understand the worst. So many simpler things in life we fail to grasp—algebra problems, trip directions, why love failed. But we hear “it is more than that,” and our understanding increases a hundred thousand times. More. Take that quick desperate breath that is the only possible first reaction, then say, “What do you mean?”

  He explains even more slowly. It is your first lesson in the language of death.

  In the hospital the only two interesting people I met were Radioactive Girl and Liver Man. The others were a mixed bag and blur of panic, greed, and resignation. We knew why we were there, but our misery did not love one another’s company. It only reminded us of our running clocks and isolation. We wanted to be out of there, away, even without a clean bill of health. Just out. Didn’t want to walk down those shiny corridors, look out the clean windows into gardens that were too silent and well kept, gardens that reminded you of cemeteries. In a hospital what you miss most is the roll and tumble of real life. A pastrami sandwich served by a surly waiter. Horns honking, people passing in animated conversation… And there are really only two facial expressions in a hospital—great fear or calm. Once in a while you see sadness, but people try to hide that; it’s either unprofessional or unfair to show it. Hugh called them faces squeezed out of a tube.