Lost Angels Page 4

  He shifted his glass on the black tabletop like a chess piece. He could press a legal claim to the contents of the Smythe box, but the only thing in it had been the contracts. He rested the page Jaime had typed on the table. It took up nearly half the dry area. "You realize I'm under no obligation to indulge this sort of ... behavior."

  She leaned forward in entreaty. "Okay, so I'm as crazy as a firefly in a meths bottle. What's wrong with humoring me if you get something you want?"

  Drake laughed. It was a harsh sound, like a cough. "I win either way. With a story like you've just told me, if you bother me again I can have you detained. If I endorse this fantasy fiction you've laid before me, you'll leave me alone. And if I don't - according to you - you'll vanish anyway, like the other two." He could taste the blood. "I think you've prepared for everything in this tactless scenario except for your bluff being called."

  He produced a pen from a breast pocket and held it before her, like a magician preparing to prestidigitate. Jamie's heart went bang.

  "I'll sign. But you must do something for me in return." He slid a brass-colored metal object across the slate tabletop. "Let's find out just how deeply you believe your own story, Ms. Ralston."

  It was a hotel key embossed with a room number.

  "Everyone gets what they want," he said.

  The room seemed to plunge vertiginously. In one hideously elongated instant, she flashed back to the crude scene at Pamela's birthday party and realized that in some quarters the war never stopped, ever. The urge toward vengeance had swelled in both of them, poisonously heavy, dense as a tumor. That was how Pamela's letters had become her trump card. Let Drake win them and find out what his daughter really thought of him.

  His angle of attack was clear. Here was a chance to slap her down, hard and humiliatingly, to neutralize her through collusion. His ejaculate could scorch away the tough fiber of her determination, which, in a way, he had been responsible for creating by founding Pamela's tortuous childhood - the upbringing that made her crave her imaginary allies just strongly enough.

  Jaime saw the hotel key as a chance to spit in Pavel Drake's face, for Pamela, for herself. Payback time for all the grief and rotten karma. All the gesture would cost her was her existence.

  I love you, Pamela, she thought bitterly, as her mind raced toward the hard truth of her situation. The end it reached was not pleasant to acknowledge.

  I love you and I want to do right by you. But I'm also terrified I want to live very much. Would you call this a betrayal? Or common survival sense? If you would forgive me this, why didn't I tell you about Jason that once? And if you won't forgive me... is there anything I could ever do that...

  Her soul was crippled, and odious, and it did what it had to. "Sign," she said, taking the key, already thinking that the true pain would be brief.

  "In due time?" His smile was like a pleat in his face. "Excuse me for just a moment." He was all the smooth mercenary now. He had a fast colloquy with Charlene, and pointed toward Jaime. Then he disappeared into the neon murk near the restrooms. There was probably a meeting to cancel.

  In Jaime's bag was Pamela's contract. She'd read it a thousand times today, and soon she might burn this mortgage on her life. Tucked into a fold of the document was the postcard, from which she hoped to draw strength. She examined both while Drake was gone. When she saw her signature side by side with Pamela's on the contract's final page, a solitary tear leaked from her eye. Just one. It burned coming out, a generous, salty reaffirmation of her own being. It struck the page and skidded through the middle of her name. The faded purple ink blotted and ran.

  You could not buy these pens anymore, she remembered. They stopped making them. Pamela had gotten livid.

  Charlene checked in at the bar and glided back to Drake's table just as a raucous stripper's hymn began to bump and grind out of the Object's migraine-sized PA system. She smiled at what she saw. Pavel Drake's latest Bambi had fled back to the forest, forgetting her purse and leaving behind a hotel key, an untouched drink, and a scatter of papers. With schooled motions Charlene swept up the bag and stuffed the papers into it. It was time for her to make a discreet trip to the Ladies. The postcard was the last item in. It featured a timed-exposure of Chicago's Lake Shore Drive at night. It would get chucked into the Object's dumpster along with the other junk just as soon as the wallet was vacuumed of cash and plastic.

  Charlene cut loose a snort of disgust that caused her bare tits to bob. That girl, that amateur, had been young enough to be Drake's daughter, for christsake.

  Dear Jamie

  Phone not in yet but plenty of time to write as I got here just in time for the blizards, In re our "what do I want from my friends" disc earlier I gave it some thot and here it is, gameshow style: (1) I'd want a person who'd always be my friend and never forget me and always remember the right dates and places, which I'm lousy at. (2) A handsome-ass lover who loved me enough to die for me (oh romantic notion) ... or at least say so. (3) A buddy whose more organized than me, but who thinks like me - someone I could COUNT ON no matter what to take care of the odds and ends I allways forget & am too sloppy to finish, or something.

  Somebody to be there for me, somebody JUST LIKE YOU, doo-dah, doo-dah.

  Its freezing here. Windy City, big dealski. Outta space, stay tuned for next card. Miss you terribly and love you lots. STAY WARM, and XOXOXOXOX

  Love,

  Pamela

  BRASS

  The lovemaking was just fine. Stabilizing, perfect.

  The medoc jug - how trendy - was a crimson third shy of empty. The sheets had been virgin cotton up until a couple of hours ago. Floating oil wicks had replaced the customary votive candles. From their many perches on a stylized bonsai of chrome, the wicks threw back tiny, star-filtered prongs of diffused white light. The air conditioner mumbled, pushing out cool. The lovemaking ... well, the sex had been terrific. Its afterglow was comfortably disorienting, a warm feeling the man in the bed hoped might grow more familiar with time, and thus more dimensional, and more perfect.

  Green amplifier telltales winked from across the room. Grant Mantell was content to stare them down from his lazy splay across his newly inaugurated bed. The tape reel was a recording-studio-style ten incher packed with choice tracks of symphonic soundtrack music - selections Jennifer had dared him to identify without giving him a chance at fair competition. It had run dry nearly twenty minutes ago. Grant felt no digging urge to dash over and change it, or kill the machines, or anything. Apart from the new tape, Jennifer had showed up with an orgy of snackables - summer sausage, cheeses, chips, still-warm French sourdough bread - through which they had feasted shamelessly. Within arm's reach, a crumbling plug of cheddar was nailed to a small cutting board by one of Grant's carving knives. The blade caught some of the candlelight, and Grant wondered if the frequency with which he contemplated the ease of potential murder - or suicide - was abnormal. Thoughts, blackly thrilling, never straying beyond the broom-closet area of his mind, absorbed him.

  He approved of his own casual control. Good for me. There were psychos in rubber bedrooms the world over who had somehow failed to acknowledge the sympathetic relationship cutting utensils had with food, who wound up making the Thanksgiving cutlery part of wifey's or hubby's anatomy. Men were not meant to stick women with knives - that was funny, goddamnit; funny must still be worth something. Luckily, Jenny was asleep and therefore incapable of deriding the chauvinism of her partner's dumb post-coital philosophizing. Her right arm and leg were laced over him; her breath brushed warmly against his neck in a regularly cadenced rasp that was not quite a snore. The sheets were impossibly twined around and over and under, damp-dry patches cooling in the dark.

  He raised his head, the bed gave an obliging little creak, and the snow-white Alsatian snoozing beneath the stereo shelf lifted his turret-like head attentively. The broad, thick brush of white tail batted the carpeting in three hopeful thumps. When nothing happened, he lowered head to forepaws with a do
g-shrug, staring into the dark with that peculiar, patient resignation that made him such an affable companion. Jenny had brought Max along, too. Max had gotten bored snitching tidbits and so had flopped near the door to doze and listen while his masters made friction.

  Carefully, conscious of Jenny's slumber, Grant stretched his arms backward to lace his fingers through the intricate metal weave of the golden headboard. The bed itself was a wonder. Thinking of the bed made him look naturally toward his other recent acquisition, the mirror. It hung on the wall close by the bed's port side, overseeing the thin corridor of carpet on which he unceremoniously dumped his boots at bedtime. It was huge - three feet on a side, demanding leaded setscrews to secure its weight to the wall beams - and gaudy enough for a whorehouse. Its wide frame was of scrolled brass, inlaid with smaller idiograms reminiscent of the hood of an Indian incense burner. Hanging it next to the bed was an obvious and uninspired choice; realistically, it was the only place for it. The exterior wall featured timbers every three feet. This sucker was heavy ... but next to the bed it was at least stable.

  Inside the slightly canted sheet of silver, Grant could see himself along with parts of Jenny in the bounce-back from the amplifier and candle lights. His hair was a riot. He adjudged himself a crowd face with an Irish nose and deep-set, glittering eyes. Black eyes; so intent that, one of the first observations Jennifer had made was "Your kind of eyes make stupid people feel uncomfortable." That had been at their first lunch together, and ever since their meeting she seemed to work at helping him with his self-image. She was anything but insecure herself, and his deferral to her critical abilities was great for his ego. Thus his carriage was not masculine (that would have been too simple) but authoritative. He was not movie-idol attractive, but with his character lines, what the hell difference did it make? And so forth.

  It was a matter of perspective on oneself. There, see? He pursed his lips in the semi-dark. Thanks to TV commercials, nobody was happy; everyone was self-conscious and insecure. To such a cosmetically atrophied outlook, the goal of being handsome according to media rules was to end up in bed with a woman like Jennifer, he thought. It was the logic of commerce. He was outside it, totally, and here he was in bed. None of the stupid rules, therefore, were real.

  Jenny would have resented comparison to a brainless TV muffin, anyway.

  He looked back at himself in the mirror a second time, scrutinizing. He squinted. He wrinkled up his brow. He bared his upper row of teeth. In the dim light, and through the cheesecloth fog of his own narrowed eyelids, he saw himself reflected back as a demon. Some kind of vampire. The light molded his imagination into a vulpine countenance, satanic and grinning, just a few feet away.

  He fought to maintain the accidental illusion for a few more seconds, fascinated. He perceived the gargoyle lines of the hungry face, saw the sharp slits of nostril and the pointed chin and the eyes, like glossy chips of obsidian. It was a medieval woodcut of Lucifer rendered into glass and stone.

  And it returned his gaze steadily, hungering. Someone had told the bogeyman under the bed to slither forth for feeding time.

  He relaxed his facial muscles and there was silent pain. The reversed image of the digital clock told him he had lain for more than five minutes with his face frozen into that bizarre rictus; five minutes that had been like thirty seconds. Now his eyes ached and his jaw was sore. A thin headache vein began to pulse wetly away and he grimaced. The face in the mirror grimaced back. It was his own face, the one with the great character lines and the Irish nose - his wild Irish nose, he thought crazily. There was no monster stalking him from the glass, no visage sporting deathshead eyebrows arched up in black contrails and fangs dripping bubbly gobbets of saliva. It had been perspective and faint light, yes, and of course the medoc. A lot of it sat in his bladder, but the alcohol fizzed away in his bloodstream with a red tingle. It reminded him of the way people got blitzed in pubs like the Hairy O or the Piece de Maurice, always winding up in the john and convincing their mirror-selves they weren't really drunk, before grinning like a fool and shuffling carefully out to rejoin the world.

  After a moment of such roundabout contemplation (during which Max spot-checked the proceedings and, finding only more human frippery, worked on making the floor more comfortable) Grant thought he might like to try and make the demon come back for an encore. But what if he looked back up and the demon was already there, ahead of him, waiting?

  He jerked his head up suddenly. A clean lick of auburn hair drooped across his forehead, simultaneously with that of the reflected Grant. No demon.

  Somehow this did nothing to reassure him; he had been struck by the fancy and concentrated on it even harder. What if, someday, you were to glance into the mirror and see a malignant, demoniac version of your own face, meeting you eye-to-eye, unflinching? Smiling hideously under the awful brightness of a bathroom light, making movements you weren't making with your own face?

  Dear God, what if it said something?

  He glazed his eyes, the whites above the pupils becoming visible. The oil wicks seemed to intensify without, providing any real light at all. "My turn," he growled. "Now you get in the mirror."

  A blackly exciting tendril of fear uncoiled in his stomach. His speech scared gooseflesh up along his arms, and the fine, light hairs there snapped to attention, prickling. He stopped to admire the terrorization he had wrought. Another second might have convinced him that a palpable threat perhaps existed a few feet away, in the mirror - a total product of his imagination. An English instructor at Cal State Northridge had once told Grant that he possessed no imagination whatsoever. That was not what caused his peculiar exhilaration. His actions had the tang of supernatural defiance, like pissing in Satan's face and then daring him to do something about it. Wow.

  He smiled then, broadly, idiotically, thinking that this must be what was meant by the term enjoying yourself Here I am, enjoying my own self (and without masturbating, the Rodney Dangerfield imp in another quadrant of his brain was quick to add), and my reflection seems to be enjoying himself - itself - too.

  Grant looked up to check. Inside its weight of brass the glass remained implacable while his image stared back at him with an identically sheepish expression. By Cromwell, he thought with detached wonder, I must still be a tad fuzzheaded.

  As if agitated by his fantasizing (or stray brain-waves, leaking out to knock her rudely up from slumber), Jenny stirred, with a grunt that hinted at her return to the domain of the living and the crazy. Her hair hung every whichway in streaming black loops, and her eyes were slightly puffy with sleep as she rose on one elbow, mouth open, and caught sight of herself in the mirror.

  Her face often pushed Grant into ruminations on the strange convergence of their lives. It always seemed surprising to him that Jenny was attractive, that he knew and she knew it especially, and that it was no big deal. Her face was not sculptured into the clean, perfect architectural flawlessness preferred by the purveyors of sterile fashion. Her mirror might have told another woman that her mouth was a tot too large and wide, that her chin was not well defined, that her eyes seemed too far apart. The concert of her facial components, however, certainly proved Poe's dictate that true beauty was largely a matter of strangeness of proportion: her face was darkly compelling, rather than blandly pretty. That was as close as Grant could pin it, and it served. Her height matched his own six feet to the inch; that leonine accumulation of jet-black hair usually served to accentuate her altitude further, and when she wore heels it became impossible. But now, curled into him in bed, she did not appear even vaguely Amazonian.

  Jenny looked up into the reflection of her darkly compelling face and said, "Yuck." She covered her face with her hand and immediately parted the fingers so that a single agate-gray eye peered out for a second look. "Caught unawares again. With my pants down, to wit. So to speak." She yawned.

  He glided his hand into her hair; indicated he was awake. He tried to suppress a tiny belch, but it billowed up through his
innards with a rumble. Why couldn't burps or the grand old anal thunder ever rattle forth when one's love partner was dead asleep? The eyeball swiveled toward him in mock reproach. "Ah, excuse me."

  "Me, too." Jennifer yawned generously again. "For falling asleep on you - literally, I mean."

  "That's unconditionally okay."

  "You are rather comfortable, you know."

  "Thank you."

  "What is it you're doing ... up there?"

  "Staring at the pretty lights," he said. "Making faces at myself in yonder mirror."

  "Aha - unbridled excitement in my absence, I see." She grimaced, trying to read the clock in the mirror, failing, then turning. "Have you been awake all this time?"

  "Making faces for three hours?" she said as the digital box growled over to 4:02. "Since one A.M.?" When she became inquisitive her voice rose into an exotic register of inflection that almost classified as an accent. No one Grant had witnessed had ever believed her claim that it was straight Woodstock native (whatever that classified as); they always counted on some foreign port lurking in her past to validate their conjectures of mysterious background or eclectic blood.

  Grant yawned this time, nodding in response.

  "Thrilling," she said, deadpan.

  "Yes, it was." He was not facing her. From there the conversation did not stop; rather, it became irrelevant. They ceased talking as though by telepathic agreement.

  Under the hazed light the bed frame returned a golden aura as they rearranged themselves. Its brass was a bold but gentle presence in the room, like the fire of the oil wicks, or the silver and gold of the mirror in its frame.