From the Teeth of Angels Read online

  “Why didn’t your father keep it?”

  “Because Mom and her brother were extremely close, and Dad probably thought it was the one thing of hers he could give Len that mattered. Len’s a shy man and I believed him when he said he hadn’t read it. But I did and instantly suffered another death—my own. How about some coffee?”

  I started to get up but Wyatt pulled me back down. “Come on, Arlen, you aren’t leaving after that. What are you talking about? Forget the coffee.”

  “All right. My mother and I were real pals. She died when I was a teenager and it was one of the worst traumas of my life. I never got over it. There were so many things I needed to do with her and tell her. But one day she was just gone. I wasn’t even around—I was away at school. I loved and trusted her more than anyone because, most important, she was my friend. The Girls. That’s what Dad called us, the Girls. We were always together, and I think he was often jealous. But she died just when I was beginning to become a woman. You remember what those first teenage years were like—so much coming at you at once and you had no idea how to handle it. Sex, figuring out who you are, what you want to do—all the biggies. Suddenly my only guiding light was dead, and who was there to turn to? Definitely not my father, who was a good guy but very straight, and totally blind to who I was. My friend Rose became a good substitute later on, but for a few years I was on my own after Mom’s death, and I did a lot of wrong things.

  “I’m getting off the track. I thought we were as close as a mother and daughter could be. At least that comforted me when I thought about her dying so young: at least we loved and appreciated each other when she was alive. She was my biggest supporter and believed in me no matter what. In return, she knew I told her everything and was as honest as I could be. It was a good relationship, Wyatt. I don’t know many kids who get along so well with their parents. When I was still famous, an interviewer once asked me what I’d wish for if I could have one wish and whether I’d give up my career for it. I immediately said yes, because my wish was to bring Mom back to life. That would have been worth ten careers.

  “So you can imagine what a wonderful, unexpected treasure it was to suddenly have her diary in my hands. It was that great woman alive again. Now I could hear, across all the lost years, what she had to say about things we’d known and shared. It was a remarkable thing to possess, a real gift from God. And coming so soon after Minnie’s death, it instantly lifted a whole ton of the weight off my soul. I would read it in little bits, savor each piece, do a page a day, and that way stretch it out a long time.

  “The first entry I read said, ‘The best thing about fall is that Arlen leaves for school and I don’t have to be around her for a while.’ ”

  “What?” Wyatt sounded as surprised as I felt the first time my eyes read those words on the diary page.

  “That was the first entry. It almost didn’t bother me. I thought she must’ve been depressed, or whatever, and didn’t really mean it. I could remember times when she got on my nerves. So what?

  “But this was different and she meant it, all right! Because there were other sections, too many of them, that said the same thing. I’ve memorized them. Like ‘My daughter keeps telling me things about her life that I don’t want to hear and that make me like her even less.’ And ‘How many times have I written in here that I would give anything to leave my husband and daughter, go off, and start again? Have a second chance to try and make another life that means something?’ ”

  “Oh, Arlen! God, you poor thing. What did you do?”

  “Wept. Stared at the wall and felt my whole history slipping away from me. Then I made myself read more, hoping for some light, for a change in her feelings, but it was all, all the same. No let-up, no change. I read the whole book in an hour and a half. Those years. All those years I thought we were so close, but page after page in that sweet handwriting I remembered so well… They said the same thing: she hated her life. She thought my father and I were selfish boors and she’d have given anything to escape us. The only time she ever had any peace was when I went away to school.

  “And then she died. It was horrible.”

  “Did you tell Leland?”

  “Yes. He was superb. Told me to put it all into perspective. Talked about how proud she would have been if she could have known me now. How happy she would’ve been to know she’d been so wrong about her daughter. Lovely things, but they did no good. And the fact it happened so soon after Minnie died…” I closed my eyes tightly. “How can these things hurt us after so many years and changes?”

  “Because memory keeps them fresh. That’s the trouble with memories—they’ve got a half-life of a thousand years, whether we like it or not.”

  “You’re right. But can you see how the whole thing was collapsing? Leland’s sickness, my mother’s diary, the dog. Where was the other side, damn it? The things that might have balanced these horrors? It should have been the love for Leland, but he was a time bomb, a time bomb on the other side of a piece of thick glass. It felt as if everything I knew and loved was either gone or exploding. It was a fucking nightmare.

  “What it ended up doing was making me love him more. I thought, Okay, maybe there’s only so much time left for us together, but he’s all I have and the best I’ve ever had. He grew in me till I almost couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  “How did he take that?”

  “Beautifully. I kept thinking, How can he stand me now? How can he want to hang around someone who’s all pain and has nothing to give?

  “But he did, and there came a point when I knew that if he died, I’d kill myself. There was no other way.” I said this calmly because the real truth, however painful, is always calm. “The last blow, the knockout punch, came in a telephone call. You know my friend Rose Cazalet. Next to Leland, she’s my only other real friend. We’ve known each other more than twenty years. Her husband was my agent; I’m godmother to their child. We’re like sisters. Years ago she was raped and badly beaten by a guy she was going out with. It actually happened twice, but the second time she saved herself by knocking the guy’s eye out with the heel of a shoe.”

  Wyatt’s hands flew up to cover his face.

  “And thank God she did, because she was sure he would’ve killed her otherwise. The guy went to prison, but you can imagine how long it took for her to recover.

  “In the same week as the dog and the diary, her husband called me. He said that guy had gotten out of prison, found out where Rose was living, and come for her—”

  “Stop! That’s enough! Come on! One week? It’s not possible.”

  “The world’s full of people suffering every day of their lives.” I said it so angrily that I shocked myself. Wyatt looked at me and we were both silent.

  He sighed and shook his head, then rubbed his hands briskly up and down his legs as if he had suddenly gotten cold. “I know, you’re right. What happened to her?”

  “He cracked her skull and broke her arm. She was unconscious, and he must have thought he killed her, because he ran away.”

  “Was she—Will she recover?”

  “She’s in the hospital in stable condition. She has trouble remembering things. The doctors think it will take some time before she’s all right again.”

  “What happened to the guy?”

  “He’s still on the loose. Roland called me right after it happened, and I was ready to fly over, but he said I shouldn’t for the time being. It might excite her and that would be bad. I’ve been calling every day, and he says she’s a little better.

  “I was so shook up. One week. Everything together in one week. The only thing that kept me sane was Leland. I was terrified, truly terrified, down deep in my bones. What next? What could happen next? And you know what? You start creating things in your head that scare you just as much. Maybe this’ll happen now, or this. You get sick worrying about what little you have left. I didn’t want him to go anywhere without me. I was sure something would happen to him.

  “The
night before you called I asked him to make love with me. I didn’t care about anything else anymore. Nothing. I just wanted him. He was safety, the only good left. Even before I met him everything was slipping away, only more quietly, like a pulse going out of a body. Now everything in the body was dead except for this one shining light that kept me alive. And that’s all I wanted; that light inside me for a little while so that I could be sure there was goodness in life. What else was left? What else did I have to hold on to, to know being alive wasn’t just… shit?” I sighed and pulled a pillow into my lap. “We talked for hours about it. At first he wouldn’t even listen when I tried to bring it up, but I insisted. He had to listen, had to do it. If he cared for me at all he had to touch me. It was the first time we’d ever fought about anything, but I didn’t care. We both cried, stomped out of the room, came back. At one point he even said yes, but a moment later he slapped his head and said it was crazy.

  “It was madness, it was murder, and not in any way necessary, because he’d promised he would stay with me. I said that wasn’t enough. Finally there was nothing left in either of us and we went to sleep.”

  “Together?”

  “No. He said he had to think and even being in the same bed with me would confuse things. I was too empty to argue. In fact, I was so tired I just put this pillow under my head and stretched out here. He slept on the floor next to me. The next thing I knew, the phone was ringing and it was you, calling in the morning.”

  “Great time to call, huh?”

  “Yes, it was. I was glad you did, very glad to hear your voice. Hearing it reminded me that there were other good things out there in the world—Wyatt Leonard and The Finky Linky Show, kids, life. No, I was very glad to hear from you. And I was happy when you asked us to dinner. As soon as you did, I knew that was the best thing for us; I’d take a bath, put on some makeup, and we’d go out to dinner with you.”

  “What did Leland say?”

  “Oh, he seemed very glad. And when we saw you in the restaurant, all my spirits lifted. I had a nice time.” It sounded so poor, a “nice” time. “So we had a nice dinner with you and I felt much better. I didn’t say anything to Leland about sleeping with him, but it was in the air as soon as the two of us left you.

  “When we got to the front door of the house, he put his hands on my shoulders, looked me in the eye, and said, ‘All right.’ Just that. I closed my eyes and said, ‘Thank God. Thank God.’

  “I went straight into the bedroom to get ready. I had a special nightgown I wanted to wear for him. Halfway across the room I looked at the bed and saw it was completely made up with new red-and-yellow sheets I’d never seen before. They had a pattern on them. Roses. Exactly like the ones he’d given me. Obviously he had made up his mind earlier and gone to the store to buy them without my knowing.

  “On my pillow, that spanking new, fresh pillowcase, was a big envelope. I recognized it as one of his. The kind he used for his photographs. I was so touched by the sheets and excited about what was about to happen that I wanted to push the envelope away and get going. But I knew that far some reason he wanted me to see what was there before we began, so I sat down and took it onto my lap. He came into the room then and I thanked him for the sheets. I thanked him for being my friend and for whatever was in the envelope.

  “He put his hand to his waist and bowed very deeply. It was a wonderful gesture—silly, cute, and kind of shy. I gave him a little round of applause and opened the flap.

  “And screamed. What? What was this? Why was he showing it to me now? Why at all? At first I didn’t recognize myself. There was a shrunken, diseased, hairless thing propped in a white chair, its mouth open and curved down as if it was gasping for breath. The eyes were so deep back into the skull that you didn’t think they were eyes at all. I shouted at him, ‘What is this? What are these? War pictures? Why now, for God’s sake, why show them to me now?’

  “Without knowing what I was doing, I let the photo slip out of my hand, but there was another, and it was worse, because then I recognized who was there. In spite of my horror I looked, then I threw down all the pictures and jumped back across the bed away from them, away from him.

  “The second was clearly of me, this monstrosity, lying on my bed in the beautiful nightgown I was planning to wear for him that night. And she was dead. Shrunken and diseased and emptied of anything that had ever been human. Me. It was me there. The nightgown, my bed, and just enough of something in the face to show it was a picture of me. Yes. Yes. Me. No one else could have looked at it and known, but I did.”

  By then Wyatt had lowered his head to his lap. I leaned down over him and put my arms over his back. I smelled his cologne and felt how tense his muscles were. I spoke almost in a whisper.

  “Leland walked over and picked them off the floor. He paid no attention to me as he went through them. There must have been ten. He’d hold one out and say, ‘I think this one’s good. Shows all the delicious wrinkles in your skin. The National Enquirer would love it. “Sex Goddess Dies of AIDS! Exclusive pictures inside.” ’

  “When he was done going through them and admiring his own work, he dropped them on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘That’s what you’d have looked like, Arlen, give or take a few months. Hey, remember what your favorite poet Charles Simic says? “Death has a cock that is always erect.” I stole lots of lines from him, and you thought they were so cool. Dumbass ditz.’ He lay back on the bed and yawned. I didn’t move. ‘But to tell you the truth, Arlen, the thought of fucking you and having to stick around here any longer bores me. You bore me. Call your pal Wyatt if you have any questions. He knows who I am.’ He stood up, and the last thing he said before walking out was ‘If you ever want to kill a dog, use strychnine; it’s much more vivid.’ ”

  Wyatt groaned and slowly straightened up. “The moment I walked into that restaurant and saw who was with you, I almost died.” He looked at me and laughed, a real laugh, deep and full. “I wanted to meet this guy so much. The man who stole Arlen Ford’s heart. I remembered him from that one meeting, but it was all so quick that I only vaguely recalled what he looked like. But this time when I saw you, you were at the table with Philip Strayhorn.”

  “It was Phil? You actually saw Phil with me?”

  “Yes. And when you introduced him as Leland, he looked at me and smirked as if we were in on the joke together. I guess we always see the person from our dreams.”

  “But I didn’t have dreams like you and the others!”

  Wyatt shook his head as if I were missing the point. “I know. It’s worse for you because he’s been here in real life for you all along.”

  “So, he kills you with a disease and me by destroying anything I’ve ever loved or believed in. He joked once about how I was always cleaning. Said I seemed to be in a constant state of getting ready for company. But I was never neat before I moved to Austria. I just wanted to keep the few things around me in order. For once. Don’t you think it’s better that way, knowing where things are? I guess I was getting my life in order so that I could give it up. But I still have a lot of questions to ask you, Wyatt.”

  In an instant his face went from sadness to great anger. His normally pale cheeks flushed bright red. “What can I tell you that you don’t already know? Death’s here. What could be simpler? He’s probably in this room somewhere listening to us, but what difference does it make? To me He’s Strayhorn, to you He’s Leland whatever his last name is. The people He likes, He kills nicely. No muss, no fuss. That’s for me, you see. I wanted to know answers, so my ‘pal’ gave them to me. Result? I’m so scared, I don’t even want to get up from this couch. His answers don’t mean anything. They didn’t help me understand.

  “He doesn’t like you, for some mysterious or stupid reason, so He tricked you into loving Him as you’ve never loved anyone. When you got to the point where you were willing to die for Him, really die, first He killed your dog, then He showed you your mother’s diary, then hurt your friend. A
s you said, everything you loved. Result? It only made you need Him more, because He was the last thing left. Am I right? Then He showed you those pictures as His coup de grace. He didn’t want to waste the time sleeping with you and infecting you, because you’re a bore. A bore!

  “What other questions do you have, Arlen? Oh, that’s right, I’m the guy with answers to the big questions because I’ve talked to Death. And you think that means I know something? I know nothing. None of His answers helped because none of them applies to now, this minute, when we’re still here and alive but down to nothing. Don’t you see? He begins by giving you everything you want—love and hope, or answers when you’re scared, but none of it helps or protects you. Maybe you think it does for a while, but it doesn’t. He’s insidious. Look at us now. We’re both finished. What was that word you used, chalef?”

  “That which from life to death transforms. He’s the shochet.”

  “Right. Get a coffin. Write a will. It’s over.”

  That afternoon while Wyatt sat with a drink in his hands and didn’t want to talk anymore, I took my bicycle and went out riding. It was something I’d often done in California when life got to be too much of a pressure cooker. I’d get on the bike and ride until I was physically exhausted and I had no more energy to worry about what I’d been worrying about. Because I’m so hyper, it sometimes took hours, but it never failed to work.

  This time I rode down to the Danube and flung myself into pedaling pedaling pedaling until the fire in my legs and pumping of my chest took some of the fear and confusion out of my heart. I knew I couldn’t escape, but I could turn the volume down, and maybe that would help me think more clearly. I hoped so.

  I rode beside the water, watching barges from Russia and Bulgaria go by, bicycles and laundry lines on their decks, people moving about their lives out there on that famous water. I thought about Leland and my life and what was happening, what Wyatt had said, and what little could be done now to turn any of this away. I passed old couples walking arm in arm, pointing to things along the way. I passed families and knew I would never have a family. I passed kids, dogs. My dog was dead. He had killed it. What had I done to deserve His hatred? What did anyone do to deserve Death? I rode and rode.