From the Teeth of Angels Read online

  Liver Man Hugh Satterlee was all the things I missed outside. Animated and funny, he had, astoundingly, managed to retain his sense of balance throughout a nightmare ordeal that made me cringe just to hear about it.

  Years before, they had found a tumor on his liver. It didn’t respond to treatment and worsened until he was close to death. Then, miraculously, a donor was found and Satterlee was given a transplant. He recovered. His wife died. A year and a half later, another tumor was discovered growing on the new liver—in exactly the same place as the old one. Inoperable. Time to die. When I knew Hugh, he was about to be moved to a hospice in Palos Verdes so that he could “at least die with a view.”

  “Bet you never heard a story like mine. Spooky, isn’t it? Maybe I should start a tumor business. Bring me your organs and I’ll grow tumors on them for you. Like those surrogate mothers, you know?”

  The only thing that distracted me from the omnipresent fear and boredom of hospital life was to ask people for their stories. Some were eager to talk, but others regarded me distrustfully, as if I were trying to take from them the last thing they would ever own—their personal history. Before I was discharged from the hospital the first time, I sat for an afternoon with Hugh and told him some of the stories I’d heard. He was very ill. His eyes were exhausted and bloodshot, although now and then he smiled or chuckled when he heard something he liked. When I was finished, he sighed and wondered out loud if Death was the final pencil sharpener.

  When I asked what he meant, he said most of the people I’d talked about had probably never once really used their lives, although it was the only thing we ever truly own. Think of it like a pencil, getting duller and duller until finally there’s no lead left to write with. Then Death comes along, and if you’re lucky, you’re given a while before it happens to think things over, put them in their place, whatever. Just like sharpening the pencil so that it can be used again the right way.

  Unable to stop a wave of bitterness flooding over and through my voice, I asked, “What good is sharpening it if you’re never going to use it again?”

  “Because it’s back the way it should have been all along, Wyatt. I don’t know about you, but I always found sharpening pencils a very pleasant thing to do. And afterward, placing them on the desk ready to go. It didn’t matter if I was going to use them then or in a month. Having them there, seeing them clean and sharp… that was the real pleasure for me. These stories you’ve heard? Doesn’t it sound as if the people are finally savoring their lives for the first time? It does to me.

  “But you know something else I’ve thought about? I was poor most of my life. Have you ever been poor? I mean really rock-bottom poor, not a dime in your pocket? It’s a terrible, terrible place to be. Horrible thing to experience. And you know what? You learn the experience in one second. Know you’re poor for ten minutes, and you’ve learned the lesson for the rest of your life. You don’t need to go through years of it, like school. One day, an hour, and you know all about it. Same thing’s true with dying. Know for sure you’re dying for even ten minutes, and you’ve learned the lesson forever.”

  “That contradicts what you just said, Hugh.”

  “Yes, it does.” He closed his eyes.

  A week after Sophie showed me the letter from her brother, he disappeared. Jesse Chapman worked for an agency in Vienna that helped refugees from the East Bloc find places to live in the west. Consequently he was often traveling, but this had nothing to do with that. His wife called after he had been missing four days. His employer had no idea where he was. It was not like Jesse to disappear for even twelve hours without letting someone know where he was. He’d gone to work with a briefcase and an overcoat. No luggage, and he did not take his credit cards. At breakfast he’d been calm and talked only about what they were going to do that weekend.

  Sophie and Caitlin Chapman had been college roommates and remained close over the years. Caitlin called Sophie first because she was her best friend as well as her husband’s sister.

  I’d met Jesse a few times when he was in Los Angeles, and he’d struck me as a stable, competent man. His suits were dark; he wore his hair long but carefully cut; while on vacation he still shaved every day. He did not strike me as a passionate man. His letter about the travel agent who dreamed of Death was a surprise because I had never known Jesse to be the witty, observant man who came across in it.

  To be fair, I think it’s also necessary to say that Jesse Chapman didn’t like me. No matter how open our society has become about homosexuality in recent years, there are still a great many intelligent, sensitive people who have real trouble dealing with gays. I am in no way swish, nor do I particularly like those who are. I don’t believe in sexuality as theater and am uncomfortable with those who feel compelled to dance across life swinging pink boas behind them, hooting and mincing all the way. But I have never hidden what I am either. I am not sorry and I am not ashamed. Apparently after we met the first time, Jesse asked his sister in a low voice if I was a fairy. When he heard I was, it colored every subsequent conversation we had. He watched and listened to me from a distance. Then one ugly night we got into a stupid argument about boxing, which I know a lot about because I used to do it as a kid. Jesse didn’t know a thing, but spoke with the assurance of one who most certainly did. To make matters worse, Sophie kept interrupting to tell her brother he didn’t know about boxing; why was he spouting off like this? Which didn’t help. I wasn’t any better. I knew he was full of baloney and could have let him have his rant and left it at that. But behind his words, I felt, was the distinct connotation that I was gay so how could I know about the sport. So I got pompous, he got defensive, and we ended up being barely civil to each other.

  When Sophie called to tell me about his disappearance, I was doing nothing but reading medical textbooks about my disease and wondering what to do next. When there is only so much time left, you become schizophrenic about the last days. On one hand, you feel compelled to try to make everything matter—each meal a feast, any conversation full of wit and memorable lines. This might be the last one, so make it matter. Even if it’s ending, life is full of treasures and it’s wrong not to savor them while you can. That’s the feeling when you’re positive and hopeful. On the other side of your moon is the despairing cynic who sees no point in getting out of bed in the morning because sooner or later you’ll end up flat on your back there till the hopeless end. It is a constant battle between the two. From one moment to the next you never know which will emerge victorious. And whichever one does win, the other is disgusted.

  “Wyatt? It’s Sophie. I’ve got some bad trouble and you’ve got to help me.”

  The cynic ruled that day. One hand held the telephone to my ear while the other rested on a dull book of densely packed sentences explaining in cruel detail how little hope there was. She had trouble? How dare she even use the word with me!

  I listened while she explained what had happened but grew increasingly more impatient as she continued. He had disappeared? What of it? A man had dropped from his life like a pine cone off a tree. Was I expected to get down on my dying knees with the others who really cared about him and search for where he might have fallen? Forget it!

  After I’d asked the appropriately sympathetic questions, a large silence dropped over the conversation and each of us waited the other out to see who’d speak first. Sophie finally did. What she said changed the trajectory of the rest of my life.

  “You owe me a wish, Wyatt.” Said as quiet as a whisper and a final sentence.

  I reared back, as if stung by the biggest bee on earth. “No! Sophie, you know you can’t ask that now. It’s too late. I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “Tough! I don’t care what you want to hear. You owe me a wish and I’m using it now. That was the deal. Those are the rules.”

  “Goddamn you! Then what is it? What do you want?”

  “I want you to go with me to Europe to find Jesse.”

  “Are you mad? Europe?�
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  “You have to. We promised each other.”

  “Sophie, I’ve got leukemia, remember? Sometimes I don’t even have enough energy to get out of a chair.”

  “I know, but you’re also the world’s smartest person in a crisis. There’s nobody I trust as much, either. If you get sicker there, they have good hospitals. Don’t worry, I checked. I’ve been talking on the phone for the last three hours. You’re the last call I had to make.”

  “Where is there, by the bye. Where would we be going? Europe is a large place.”

  “Austria. Home of Mozart, whipped cream, and Nazis.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “No, he was from Israel.”

  When Dick died, I made a big mistake. After the initial shock and funeral and the weeks needed to put a dead man’s affairs in order, I suggested to Sophie that we go away somewhere together. I used the standard lines: it’ll be good for you; being someplace new will take your mind off it… I was extremely concerned about her and was convinced a good chunk of time away from home would spark her spirits and help her to start fresh. To my amazement, she liked the idea.

  “Where would you want to go?”

  Surprised that she hadn’t protested, I had no next sentence. I hadn’t thought that far in advance because I was so sure the whole conversation would be spent convincing her she should make a trip.

  “Go? I don’t know. We’ve got the whole world. You choose. Where would you like to go?”

  “Switzerland. I’ve always wanted to go to Switzerland.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “I know, but it’s true. I’ve always wanted to go in winter and be up high in the Alps in a snowbound hotel. The mountains are all around and in the morning you hear big booms because avalanche patrols are dynamiting places they think are dangerous.”

  “And you smell wood smoke and wear sunglasses because the light off the snow is blinding.”

  “Right, but only during the day. Around four every afternoon it starts to snow big lazy flakes and everything is quiet.”

  It was the happiest I’d heard her in weeks, but I had to ask again to make sure. “You really want to go to Switzerland? Because if you do, I’m going to arrange it immediately.”

  “Are you serious, Wyatt?”

  “Yes. I think we could both use a vacation, and Die Schweiz sounds good to me.”

  “ ‘Schweiz’? Do you speak German?”

  “High school German, but it’d be fun to try it out again.”

  “Oh, let’s go! It’s a brilliant idea. You’ll arrange it?”

  “Every step.”

  But why oh why did I choose what I did? At the travel bureau I looked through handfuls of brochures and leaflets promising Switzerland the way Sophie wanted it. In the end, I signed us up for a week at a Club Mediterranean in Zims, a ski resort in the Berner Oberland that had a perfect view of the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau mountains. I’d never been to a Club Med but had heard they were bustling, happy places where one ate well, danced at night, and sometimes met interesting people. I checked again with Sophie and luckily she agreed that it sounded like fun, so when we later walked smack into Uh-oh’sville, I didn’t feel quite so bad for having steered us into it.

  The trip over was a pleasure. We flew into Zurich and then took increasingly smaller trains from there toward the mountains. At Interlaken it began to snow. By the time the little cogwheel chugger slowed to a stop in Zims, the whole world was snow, low clouds, people speaking French and German stomping by with colorful skis over their shoulders. We stood outside an original Art Deco train station breathing in cold clean air. As if on cue, we turned to each other at the same moment and embraced.

  “Wyatt, you’re a genius! It’s perfect.”

  Uh-huh—for the next half hour.

  Club Med owned an immense old resort hotel built in the 1920s that had been one of the main reasons I’d chosen to go there: in the photographs it looked exactly like Sophie’s description of her dream getaway hotel.

  But about thirty minutes after passing through the front door, we knew we’d made a serious mistake. Children ran shouting and screeching through the lobby and corridors as if either they or the hotel was on fire. Instructors and staff buzzed around like smiling zombies on methedrine—organizing, directing, telling you what to do, where to go, asking why when you weren’t out skiing, sledding, skating, signing up for the many splendid things the Club offered. At all meals they told you where to sit. If you had the unimaginable cheek to say you didn’t want to sit there, the smiles slid off their faces in an instant, like slush down a windshield, and they became nasty as only the French can be. The brochures had made it sound good-natured and relaxed. Far too quickly we discovered it was both hyper and vaguely fascistic. By the end of the first day we were calling it Club Dread.

  Yet we found our way through the week there because the landscape was stunning and we thoroughly enjoyed being with each other. We hiked, went sledding, watched skiers shush down the sides of white on blue-black mountains. It snowed every day, and every afternoon we walked together a little farther up the trails that led into even deeper snow and silence.

  We were resting on a black bench in the middle of a snow field eating tangerines warm from our pockets when Sophie first spoke of the idea.

  “Nothing smells up here but the fruit. Did you notice that? Down below you smell the trees and the dung from the barns, but here it’s only these. So pungent and out of place, isn’t it? I love it when my hands are full of the scent. Dick and I were eating oranges in bed one morning. Before I realized what he was doing, he took up the peels and began rubbing them all over my body. They were cold and smooth. It was delicious. I smelled so wonderful. Then we made love, of course. The whole room was a perfume of sex and oranges. I’ve never eaten one since without remembering that morning.

  “Wyatt, I heard something last night that got me thinking. I wanted to talk to you about it, but held off ‘cause I wanted to think it through first. Don’t say I’m nuts till I’ve finished.

  “After dinner when I was waiting for you in the lobby, there was a man telling a little girl a story. He was speaking English, so it was kind of hard not to listen. It was the fairy tale about the man who goes fishing and catches a flounder, but it convinces him to throw it back in return for three wishes. Remember that story?”

  “Yes, ‘The Fisherman and His Wife.’ I did it on the show. The wishes ruin their lives.”

  “Sure, because it’s a fairy tale. They’re always so tediously moral. Nobody gets away with anything fun and all the interesting people are bad guys.

  “But listen, this is different. I started thinking, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you had a partner or a friend you could make a pact with: each of you would be granted one wish by the other. No matter what the wish was, the partner would have to do everything in his or her power, short of committing a crime, to make it happen. I wish I’d been able to do it with Dick; he would have loved the idea. What do you think?”

  I ran my tongue around the inside of my cheek and watched a bunch of blackbirds flying over the snow. “It sounds like a Sophie Chapman idea. Do you want to do it with me? You’re willing to take that chance?”

  “You and Dick are the only men I’ve ever trusted enough to love—besides my brother. But he’s blood, and you can’t count family. I think this is the kind of promise people wouldn’t dream of making today because there’s no trust, and let’s face it, it’s dangerous. Who knows what the other guy’ll want?”

  “True. And you’re serious about this? We pledge to do what we can to make each other’s wish come true, short of murder?”

  “No! We do everything we can to make it come true, not just what we can. That’s the difference. Everything.”

  “One hundred percent serious?”

  “A hundred percent.”

  “I’ll tell you truthfully, I like the thought very much, but it does make me nervous.”

  “Hey, me too! When t
he idea hit me, I thought about the people I know. But which ones would I trust to do this with? Only you.”

  I looked at the birds again. I said yes to her deal because of the birds at that moment more than anything else. More than my love for Sophie, more than our friendship. How the birds dipped and swooped beautifully as one; all consummate faith in one another’s movements. Not having to think if going left was correct because going left was the only direction in their one grand mind then. Consummate faith. Sureness that if I ever did have something I wanted desperately, someone would care enough to work hard, perhaps even harder than I myself, to bring it about. Complete faith that they’d not ask me to do something beyond my powers for them. Like birds flying together.

  “It’s a deal.”

  As we shook, she craned her head back toward the tin-colored sky and said loudly, “Dick, you’re the witness. You heard every word.”

  We joined hands and walked back down to Club Dread.

  In the years since, neither of us had made our formal wish. Thus the moment on the hill sank back into a pleasant snapshot in my mind’s photo album. Remember that afternoon? That bench? That’s where we made our pact. Just like kids.