From the Teeth of Angels

by Jonathan Carroll

  She was not yet beautiful. Good-looking enough, but not THE FACE people know and worship any chance they get. That all came after her mother died in our senior year. Arlen returned to school stricken by the loss and utterly, overwhelmingly beautiful. Don’t ask me how it happened. I believe most people turn into adults when they reach puberty, while others change because of love or adversity. Arlen Ford became the face that launched all the ships because of the death of her mother. I would swear to that. I vividly remember her walking into our dormitory room that Sunday night after returning from the funeral. She was all loss and havoc, sorrow and anger too. But like macabre artistic fingers, those bad things somehow combined to sculpt her face into the one we adore now.

  She quit school a month later. So little time to go till graduation, but no matter: one Saturday she packed a bag, gave me a hug, and said she had had it. She was leaving. She’s been impulsive as long as I’ve known her. Trusts her instincts but is also willing to accept any consequences. I like that. I like it in anyone. It ain’t how high you jump, it’s how you land. No matter how this woman has landed over the years, she has always accepted full responsibility.

  She was eighteen, beautiful, and broke. First she went home to her father in Manhattan, but on hearing she’d quit school, he (understandably) hit the roof. They had a vicious fight that ended with her moving out. The first time she called me, she said she’d gotten a job as a saleswoman at Bloomingdale’s in the pillow department and was living at the YWCA. I was totally impressed and terrified for her. Selling pillows and living at the Y? She was either crazy or an enviable character straight out of one of those 1940s’ screwball comedies: A Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Arthur “gal” who spoke fast and smart and got the job done superbly. But even hearing about this drastic change in her life, I never really doubted she would succeed at what she wanted. She was my best friend and I honestly believed we special ones could do anything. That’s the real joy of being young—pure dumb faith. There’s no way we’re going to fail at what we choose to do with our lives.

  By the time I graduated, she had already met and moved in with Nelson Crispi. Isn’t that a great name? He worked at the Strand Book Store and wanted to be a playwright. He was the one who got her into books. Before, she’d read only for school and then the occasional mystery novel or thriller while on vacation. Nelson gave her a lasting love and hunger for literature that was invaluable in more ways than one.

  When I visited them in their Houston Street walk-up apartment in New York that summer, we drank Medaglia D’Oro coffee thick as fur which they brewed on their tiny stove in a weirdly shaped coffee pot Nelson had bought in Italy. According to him, it was the only way to make it.

  I was so jealous and impressed! We were all about the same age and I had lived with Arlen until only a few months before, but both of them seemed so much older, so sophisticated and in the know. They talked about life in Manhattan and people they knew. Actors, poets, a rich woman who kept a live fox in her apartment. New movies, great cheap restaurants they’d discovered. Fellini, Lermontov, the Second Avenue Delicatessen… All the passwords to the other side of life where the glittering secrets were. I wanted to roll this knowledge, these titles and names and places, off my tongue too, like Nelson, like Arlen. They weren’t showing off; they didn’t need to, because this was only life as they were living it and they were simply describing it to me. I was jealous as hell, of course, yet I loved them for this knowledge and unconscious cool.

  Also for the first time in my life I recognized a tangible tightness in the air around them, if I can call it that. And innocent as I was, even I recognized that it was sex. They were crazy for each other, not that they ever made a big show of kissing or touching when I was around. No, I just knew in my quick-study heart that these two were in the middle of a feast and were reveling in it.

  What on earth could be better than that? She’d been right to leave school. I was the fool. The blindered goody-goody who did what she was told, got good grades, and already woke up in the middle of the night in a fever wondering what to major in at college. The result? In the fall I’d be sitting in a classroom yet again, this time for four more years. Of what? Arlen would be living in wonderful New York doing compelling things, making love at all hours of the day and night with her writer-paramour… while I studied verb tenses or geography, or sat in the student center on a Saturday night wishing to God in Heaven that I had a date. A date! How could I ever take that nonsense seriously again after seeing this? Here was my best friend with her own lover and apartment and a life that scoffed at vacations and fraternity parties on the weekend.

  I returned home both elated and miserable. I would go to college to satisfy my parents, but if it ever pissed me off for one instant, I’d pull an Arlen and leave. I knew people in New York now. I carried that knowledge within like a lucky charm in the pocket you can’t help touching every few minutes. Arlen was my talisman and example; she was the way life should be.

  We kept in close contact. Through those phone calls and, later, our endless letters I heard about her adventures, various lovers, travels, discoveries, and eventually her being discovered.

  There has been a lot written about how Arlen Ford was discovered, most of it silly or maliciously wrong. This is how it happened, plain and simple. Nelson read an ad in The Village Voice about an open casting for a low-budget film that was going to be shot on the Lower East Side. Talk about the right place at the right time! The film turned out to be Weber Gregston’s first, The Night Is Blond, and although she’d gone along to it with her boyfriend more as a joke and to see what a movie casting was like, Arlen landed a small role. A few years later in an interview, Gregston said he noticed her because of the way she crossed the room the first time he saw her.

  “God knows she was beautiful, but more than that, she was one of those charismatic presences you’re forced to watch when they enter a room. The magnetism’s that strong. They can stand there doing nothing but you’ve got to watch.”

  If you know anything about Arlen’s life, you know things got better and worse at about the same speed from here on. She began taking drama classes and loving them. Then Nelson went into turbo-boost paranoia-jealousy overdrive about her sudden success. If anyone should have understood what was happening, why the world was suddenly paying attention to his girlfriend, it was this guy, because no one was a greater Arlen fan than Nelson Crispi. But I think by then he was so in love with her that he simply did not want to share her. Which was a very wrong move on his part because she was already way beyond that. She didn’t use him as a stepping-stone (as his nasty book on their relationship snivels), but once he became an impossibly annoying whiner and finger-pointer, it wasn’t long before the relationship ended.

  One winter’s day there was an urgent knock on my dormitory door and there she was.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I came up for the big game.” She opened those miraculous black eyes even wider than usual. “Didn’t I? Isn’t there one this week? This is college. There’s always a big game going on!”

  We stayed up late filling in the blanks of our lives for each other and laughing. She’d met so many people in New York and done everything I could imagine doing. But the irony was that, despite all the wonder and excitement of life in New York, she had a terrific time being a plain old college girl with me for a week.

  She thought I was amazing because I understood what the instructor was saying in Russian class. She asked me so many whispered questions in art history about the slides of Renaissance paintings that we both got the giggles. The teacher gave me a look that would have frozen lava. Over my protests, Arlen insisted we go to a fraternity party. We didn’t have a good time and left quickly, but in the short hour we were there she managed to provoke two high-volume, go-for-the-jugular arguments with two pompous frat brothers. I would have called them fools and marched off after five seconds, but she enjoyed the confrontations and kept goading her opponents. She also held an
unfair advantage over them because in each argument, the guy would be halfway into making his points, and then look at her and instantly get lost in her magnificence. All she had to do was give one of her you’re-quite-a-guy looks, and he was a goner. Her beauty could vacuum-clean a man’s mind in an instant.

  Arlen knew this and used it to her full benefit. When we got home later and talked about it, she was cold as an arctic eel on the subject.

  “Men want to go to bed, then maybe talk. Women want to talk first—a lot—then maybe go to bed. That much I’ve learned. So okay, if that’s the way of the world, then I’m going to use it my way.”

  “You sound cold and conniving about it, Arlen. Like there are no nice men on the whole earth.”

  “Sure there are nice guys. But I’ll give you something else to think about, Rosey, that’s been bothering me lately. Answer this. How many superb women do you know? I’m talking about intelligent, sensitive women; ones you like spending lots of time with because, among other things, they’re great company. They know how to talk, have a good sense of humor, aren’t just givers or takers.”

  “That’s a hard question. I need time to think about it—”

  “Beep! Time’s up. Wrong! You need about one minute because the answer is almost none. Neither of us knows many great women. They’re rare birds. Worse, generally speaking, we also know women are ten times more sensitive, thoughtful, et cetera than the male species… which leaves us in pretty bad shape when it comes to finding desirable men. How many real winners do you think are out there waiting to sweep us off our feet?”

  Despairing, the innocent freshman romantic in me frowned at her. “This conversation is not lifting my spirits, you know. Why are you saying this? All those great times you’ve been having… It sounds as if the only trouble you have is that too many men want to sweep you off your feet.”

  “Yes, into bed. But do you want them in your life the next morning, when your makeup’s smeared and maybe you’ve got gas from the ritzy meal last night? Do you want to spend the rest of the day with this man doing nothing? Just maybe read the paper or take a walk if the weather’s nice? Hold his hand or even pinch his ass not for any sexy reason but only because you like him? Or can you imagine spending the same day inside because it’s February and snowing outside, but you’re both so content and caught up in what you’re doing that for long stretches you forget he’s there? Except at the same time you know he’s there because he adds to the small bliss of the afternoon. It’s rare. The only thing I know, Rose, is be careful. Use what you’ve got, and don’t let the man get the upper hand. Not ever. Even when you love him with every cell of your skin, it can go bad really quickly. Even when you think you’ve got the relationship down pat. Even when you’re positive you know all his nooks and crannies.”

  I couldn’t get out of her why she was so damned defensive and skeptical, especially in light of her recent triumphs. But she wouldn’t reveal any more, and then our week together was over.

  One of the results of her visit was that we became devoted correspondents. Talking on the phone was nice and immediate and we did it often, but both of us loved getting mail and trying to put the best, most insightful, witty parts of ourselves down on paper for the appreciation and approval of the other. Arlen had discovered the letters of Frank Sullivan and sent me a copy of that wonderful book. We read to each other from it, saying how rewarding it would be to go through life with a pen pal like Sullivan. Let’s do it. Let’s make a vow that at least once a week from now on we’ll write to each other and try to make the letters as good as anything in our lives. It is an agreement I have cherished.

  Arlen kept working at various jobs, continued her acting lessons and auditions, and finally left for Los Angeles after being invited to join the Swift Swigger Repertory Company. I was depressed that she would be moving so far away, but I’d assumed it would happen sooner or later. Also the sneaky thought existed that if nothing came clear in my mind after graduation, I might go out there and stay with her a while, take a look around, and see if it was the place for me too.

  That spring she called to say she’d landed a very good part in a film, which turned out to be Standing on the Baby’s Head. Is it necessary for me to say more about Arlen Ford’s career? From the day the movie opened she was a bona fide star.

  I went to see it with none other than Matthew Flaherty, the man I’d been waiting for my whole life and the same fellow who later tried to kill me. Although that sounds dramatic, it is true, but not an important part of this story. Except what Matthew did moved me to L.A. more quickly than I might have gone.

  We met in the university library. I had been studying for an exam and took off to go to the bathroom. When I returned, there was a most handsome man holding my Russian history book in his freckled hand, looking at it with complete concentration. He was tall and virile. He worked on the railroad but came to this library whenever he got a chance in his time off to read and think. In his pants pocket was a collection of poetry by someone I had never heard of. Inside were lines like this:

  I have left my breath with you

  It is there, warm and secret,

  By your ear, on your collar

  against your throat.

  EEYOW! Are you kidding? Bull’s eye! I was an indulged little patty-cake college student who thought I knew my way around because I was studying psychology and dark Russian novels. Ergo I was a perfect sucker for this noble railroad savage, who had poetry sticking out of his pocket and an obvious interest in me. That he worked as a laborer and had never gone beyond high school made him all the more alluring and heartbreaking. He was also the first lover I ever had who took care that I liked it and then made me like it more than anyone else had.

  Life was rapture for a while. Until he began saying he didn’t like any of my friends. To please him, we saw no one else when he was around. Small sacrifice. We stayed locked away together in my place, in bed, or in his car going from wherever he wanted to wherever. I saw nothing wrong with it—we were in love and lust. It was only on the weekends.

  The end began in a bar when a man a few stools away kept looking at me. Matthew threw a quart-sized beer mug straight at his head. Blood, broken glass, chaos.

  I was so frightened and appalled that I wouldn’t talk to him for a month. He left flowers in front of my door, presents; he wrote letters. He tried so hard that, scared as I’d been, I was flattered. I agreed to meet him for coffee. He was the king of charming, sexy, and decorous behavior. And I’d missed him. I longed to reach across the table and touch his mouth.

  We started again, but it finished in bed one night a week before I was to graduate. We had made love and it was good. Both of us were tired and we fell asleep immediately. I don’t know how much later it was, but I woke to his snoring. It was so loud it made me smile. I gave him a little poke in the arm but it did no good. I whispered, then spoke in a normal voice, then poked harder. Nothing worked. Still smiling, I reached over and gently squeezed his nose with two fingers. He breathed once; his throat choked and blocked. He jerked straight up wide awake. Grabbing my hand, he bent it back till I screamed.

  “Don’t ever touch me when I’m sleeping,” he said, and slapped me full force across the face.

  And then he beat me.

  Your own bed is where you never need be afraid, if you’re lucky. Forget sex. Sleep and exhaustion, the pillow you know, your night light adjusted just so; this is where you can let your guard down completely. Leave it in a corner with the pile of still-warm clothes from today. The Dutch say there’s no sound more lovely than the tick of the clock in your own home. You in your own bed is even better. But when it goes wrong, when you’ve made the primal mistake of inviting the wrong person to join you in sex or sleep, oh, that is the worst nightmare: coming out of the black comfort of sleep in your own bed to terror.

  I do not want to talk about it. Forgive me, but I cannot. He hit me till I bled and there were hanks of my hair on my bed, sticking to the front of his T-shi
rt. I screamed and screamed. My despicable neighbors, the ones I baby-sat for, did nothing for half an hour. Forty-five minutes? I don’t know. The police didn’t come until a vicious eternity had passed and I was beaten beyond hysteria. When they arrived, Matthew was on his knees in front of me, crying and apologizing. Please please please. I love you so much. Oh, my baby.

  Two days later they released him. The first thing he did was return to my apartment. I was there because I had to hide my wrecked face at home. He opened the door with the key I’d given him on the anniversary of our first month together.

  “Rose, honey, I’m home! Are you here?”

  That is exactly what he called out. As soon as I heard his voice, I started screaming. He ran into the bedroom and caught me by the foot as I tried to climb out the window. This time the neighbors did act fast and called the police, but not fast enough.

  In the few minutes it took for them to arrive, my lover had punched me in the throat, torn off my sweatpants, and, forcing me to the floor, started to rape me. Only now there was the shoe. New black high heels I had bought to wear to commencement. I’d been trying them on when he pulled his key from the lock and called my name. I didn’t plan to go to graduation, what with my face looking like bad meat, but they were new and I liked trying them on in the safety of my little bedroom.

  There was the shoe on the floor. On my back, coughing from a punch, feeling him pump dry into me. His eyes were closed, his expression peaceful. I turned away. Barely able to breathe, I saw the shoe. My hand was already halfway there. Snatching it up, I swung as hard as I could at him—one two three. On the third blow, I felt no resistance when it struck—no hard bone, no bouncy skin. Soft, so soft. He froze, made a terrible strange sound, and flipped off me, roaring. The metal-tipped heel had gone directly into Matthew’s right eye, into the delicate jelly that was his perfect vision, and killed it.