Lost Angels

by David J. Schow

  The contact was unexpectedly electric; a thrill zipped through Jaime's skin and her nipple condensed to a nub.

  She had never wanted to have sex with Pamela. Call me Victorian. Many times she had wanted to hold Pamela while she slept, to warm her when the emotionally calloused men she attracted called "time" and began sniffing elsewhere. But she was pretty sure this did not mean she wanted to jump Pamela's bones.

  Well. Maybe once.

  Women had invented the thing the magazines now called "male bonding," she thought. Her love and friendship with Pamela expressed itself in a million tiny gestures and touches - tactile reassurance for the constitutionally handicapped. A superstitious shielding against urban hostilities, built like a flawless pearl, layer upon layer accumulating day by day. Pamela was her Hyde half, different, damned near opposite, but essential. At times she could be infuriating. Jaime had recorded so much about her - things that were annoying, even insignificant, but which resonated later and now made her want to weep to mourn their permanent loss. The queer tic Pamela developed, for example, when something pierced her armor and punctured her feelings - a rapid-fire batting of one eyelid plus a startled, quick sniffing noise as though she was recoiling from an actual blow. Her maddening use of non-words. Excape. Idear. Irregardlessly. Her approach to laundry, which up until recently had been to dump in half a box of detergent and set the machine on HOT.

  HOT could deal with anything. Other traits were less quaint.

  "You didn't ask me how my folio went down at Avatar Publishing." Pamela would say. "I took it in two days ago."

  "Oh, I was wondering about that." Jaime would begin, dreading what came next. "How'd it go?"

  "You're so tied up in what you're doing, you don't care."

  "Don't give me that, of course I care." Jaime was confrontational and often not as gentle as she might be in such engagements. She had to stay in character. "So, how'd -"

  "You're just asking me now because I brought it up!" Pamela would get petulant and stick out her lip (See, you don't really care.)

  "No. Seriously. How'd it go (Goddamnit!)?"

  "I don't want to talk about it." Which meant, of course, I win. And just when Jaime would be ready to scream and tear hair, Pamela would humanize. "I guess I'm really a bitch, huh?"

  (Go on, tell me I'm a bitch, that's what you want.)

  Ready to shriek

  At times like that, Jaime hated her best friend, knowing all along she still loved her twice as strongly. It was a problem now and then, as it is any time you get to know another human being intimately. But she did need Pamela to know she would always be there for her ... even if Pamela pissed her off beyond rational endurance.

  The carpeting, the Napas mugs, the wardrobe were all courtesy of Jaime's rise in retail from assistant buyer to buyer for Sanger Harris. Now, instead of lording over the paperwork for Glassware, Linens, and Bath Shoppe, she got to make the purchasing trips to New York and points past. Such work necessitated a wardrobe that Pamela would have considered an insurmountable feat of program planning, and a methodical approach to documents totally at odds with her pile-file habit.

  1984 has come and gone Pamela said, jumping ahead to pour Jaime coffee while her friend made a pit stop in the bathroom. "In 1980, I figured we'd all be dead by then anyhow. Now I guess it's 1990?'

  Jaime emerged in slacks and an oversized, shapeless epaulette shirt from Banana Republic. On anyone else it would have been all wrinkles. "You'd better not just die on me! Without telling me, warning me first."

  "I won't. I promise. But did you hear what I said about cremation? What do you think?"

  "I want to sell my body to science - if I don't die old and decrepit, that is. Let 'em recycle me. Why trash corneas like these? I mean, have you ever seen corneas this classy?"

  Pamela giggled. "Not a bad idea?' She pondered it, but only for an instant. Then she was off and running toward whatever came next. She never wasted too much time on a single topic; it was another lineament of her character that her anal-retentive corporate daddy hated most. Finally, she said, "Have you got a will, Jaime?"

  Her response was too offhand. "Sure." She had never mentioned it to anyone. More forgotten paper.

  Pamela seemed to go far away fast. "I didn't know."

  "Hey ... I left everything to you, kiddo." It was the only response Jaime could think of to lighten the tone.

  Pamela's voice remained tiny. "Oh. Good."

  That, for Jaime, summed up Pamela's lifelong hate affair with documents. It had been inspired, doubtless, by her father's obsession with same. No insurance. No will. No messages. Nothing.

  Nobody dies this young.

  When Jason caught Pavel Drake staring at them over the flower-bedecked casket, he put a protective arm around Jaime. His nearness was comforting, even if the day was too muggy and her glove-tight formal getup too close.

  "He's probably checking out my legs," she said.

  "It's sweltering out here," Jason said, breaking eye contact with the far side of the fresh grave. "But I'll be goddamned if I'm going to stand around with those mouth breathers under her dad's little circus tent."

  "I was thinking the same thing. Have I ever told you what dear Daddy did at Pamela's birthday party?"

  "You'll have to ... some other time." They leaned into each other. It would be so easy to simply split the funeral and go home with Jason. If they no longer had Pamela ... well, who did they have?

  It was Maurois, as Jaime recollected, who wrote "In literature, as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others." Approval of your best friend's lovemates (or books) was nice but usually inappropriate, if not embarrassing. In the case of Jason Parrish, the test was irrelevant. He was the sort of guy whose food looked better than yours because he had ordered it.

  Pamela and Jason had met in Chicago at a horror film titled Piece by Piece. Charming. The screening had been downtown at Facett's Multimedia, and Jason had come to review it for the Trib. They were the only two who lasted through to the end credits. They wound up warming a booth at some sleepy suburban coffee shop while predawn snow drifted down to bury the city.

  Career-wise, Pamela had lit off on another of her flank attacks, and half a year had passed. Jaime knew she would soon be magnetized back to her home ground. The care packages and correspondence were voluminous enough to fill a Knudsen dairy crate. When Pamela returned, live and in person, Jaime had filed the crateful of memories in the rear of her clothes closet.

  Near the end of the Chicago phase had come one postcard Jaime never forgot. In it, Pamela had specified the qualities she preferred in her closest friends, and its implication was that the arrival of Jason on the scene had completed her personal equation for happiness. During one of their thousands of long-distance calls (the bills for which overrode the gross national product of Paraguay), Jaime had gotten the lowdown on Jason in salacious detail.

  Pamela had gone on at length about how considerate he was in the sack, and Jaime thought ruefully of little acorns and mighty oaks.

  Jason got fired from the Tribune, but he had savings, and Pamela gladly filled the gaps. Then the film magazine she was designing collapsed, and she flew back to Jaime. Two months later, her connections in graphics yielded up a post at the Herald Examiner, and Jason was booked west on United.

  Jaime's attraction to Jason was crude, at first, and entirely the fault of Pamela's giddy enthusiasm. She had seeded in Jaime the sort of interest that could not really be helped. Or stopped. It had taken a few months, but the inevitable finally happened.

  Jaime felt the sparks jump across her nerve endings.

  Pamela had gotten roped into an all-night session of paste-up, purely a la carte, at good pay. Jason had been loafing around her apartment; it was his day off. And Jaime had dropped by with a bottle of Gray Reisling. No excuse was needed.

  It was not merely the unspoken commonality between them. In the end, Jaime had moved first, casually touching him when their automatic dialogue ran thin. Th
eir embrace quickly waxed to critical mass. They were blameless. They finished folded together on Pamela's fake Persian rug, naked, purring, and spent.

  To Jaime's certain knowledge, Pamela had never guessed. Today, only the vibrations of unease lingered. She found it difficult, even with him right beside her, to recall the specifics of how they furiously plundered each other in a pile of still-warm clothing, except that she had passed into light unconsciousness following her third orgasm. Pamela had been right about his magic tongue.

  "I'm sorry," she said to the casket. "I wish you were here so I could tell you I'm sorry, so you could get mad, so we could make up. It only happened that once. I guess I messed up. But you promised you wouldn't die on me. Does this make us even?"

  It was too damned easy to forget how much you could love someone, until they died and it became impossible.

  The unconcerned mourners filed away and Pavel Drake beckoned the cemetery attendant, who released the catches on the aluminum rack supporting the casket. Canvas straps slowly unreeled, clicking metronomically, and the box containing Pamela settled into the dark hole.

  It was almost as if Jason's infidelity had been unthinkable to Pamela. Or just not relevant. With Mickey, she'd tried to matchmake.

  "You want to fuck Mickey, doncha?" Pamela had opined at lunch one day. It was during the hiatus before Jason had come to Los Angeles and he and Pamela had spent a whole weekend in bed before emerging into the daylight to say hello. She could get spiteful or sharp when she wasn't getting laid regularly.

  "Say what?" Jaime returned with a pained expression.

  "Oh, Mickey's attracted, you bet. I saw him gobbling you up with his eyeballs."

  "Jump his bones, maybe, but sleep with him, never. I'd get athlete's sheet." They both laughed. Tension defused.

  Mickey was the one who never forgot Pamela. He picked the most appropriate oddball Christmas gifts for her and beat everyone to the punch line by phoning her at midnight sharp on each of her birthdays. Mickey Banks and Pamela were a pair that quickly discovered they were better friends than lovers. The thing that endeared Mickey was his knack for bestowing just the right words to vocalize feelings on those rare days Pamela found herself inarticulate over some transient grief. He never overlooked dates important to her. He was constitutionally incapable of it. Maybe that was why he had ducked the burial. There was no more Pamela to remember ... except for the one inside their heads.

  Mickey had saved Jaime from Pavel Drake at Pamela's twenty-fifth birthday party.

  After four flutes of Perrier Jouet, Pamela had begun to pout and sink into her "quarter of a century" bad-rap. Her smile had turned tipsy, brittle, and forced. The whole awkward bash had come at the insistence of Pamela's father, who Jaime had heard was a big plastics baron. She had retreated to the wet bar to grab a sparkling mineral water, and somewhere behind her Jason proposed a jokey toast to lighten the mood. Ah, the things we suffer for our friends

  "We've achieved eye contact several times, dear, but I don't believe we've been formally inflicted on each other." Jaime turned around and shook a hand. "Pavel Drake. I'm Pamela's father. The one who's getting stuck with the bill for this rodeo."

  They traded chat; Jaime thought of empty calories. She had only heard penny dreadfuls about Pamela's father, from Pamela. By the time she got a peek at his engraved business card and had mentioned her own job in retail, she saw the wattage in his eyes bump up and realized that the brown stuff eroding the ice in his glass was not tea.

  He nodded too much as he talked, working his lips, probably because they were getting numb. "Good advancement in retail," he said. "Upward mobility. I admire that. It's always been Pamela's big problem - no ambition. She daydreams, you see. Twenty-five and nowhere, and she wonders why she's not happy, and with her great imagination she can't figure out why." He sniffed imperiously and glanced at Jaime's bosom before meeting her eyes again. "Oh, my daughter has a terrific imagination, Miss Ralston. But it's unproductive; she can't turn a penny profit with it. Twenty-five now. And I'm beginning to fear she's never going to amount to anything."

  Already Jaime's body was begging to flee, but for Pamela's sake she made a game try: "I wouldn't say that, Mr. Drake. She's knocking out a nice little berth for herself with the graphics and designs and layouts. She's always seemed most interested in the mechanics of publishing, and she's fascinated by processes, not—"

  He cut her off with an impatient ahhh noise of discontent and a wave of his hand. She counted three gold rings. "That magazine horseshit." he spat. "I offered her a flicking vice-presidency and apprenticeship when she turned twenty-one. None of this entry-level ass crap. Fifty large per annum to start, with perks and deductions out the wazoo. And here she is ... farting around with this pissant magazine diddly. Jesus Christ in a Handi-Van ... "

  He drifted, then refocused. His hand lit upon her shoulder, to perch. "Now, I think you understand how the business world works, don't you, dear? What'd you think if I offered you a position, hmm? I don't know where you came from, but you look like you'd be pretty good."

  Jaime could not believe she was staring into his sharktooth leer, wincing at his one-hundred-proof breath, suffering a snapshot nightmare of the sort of position Pamela's father had in mind. It almost took her balance away.

  Someone tapped her shoulder, causing Drake to snatch his hand back. "Care to dance, m'lady?"

  It was Mickey Banks, in his black shirt and jeans and corduroy jacket and cowboy boots, and Jaime wanted to embrace him madly. She turned while Pavel Drake was still on hold. "There's no music," she said.

  "I'll hum," he said, and did, pulling her free. Jaime knew Mickey's combat smile. The grin on his face was almost it. "Excuse us, please, Mr. Drake."

  "Yeah, right?" Drake gestured loose-jointedly with his glass. As Mickey led Jaime away, she thought she heard Drake mutter fucking cooze.

  "Anything you want is yours, Banks," she said once they were across the room and safe. "God, my brain just blanked, Pamela's dad... " She bit her knuckle and made a face.

  "Yep. Pretty repulsive, huh?" He took a neat gulp of vodka and orange juice. "Whenever he starts cranking up his blood alcohol, I get this knotted fist right in my sternum. It won't unclench till I get out of range. I see his sheer charm rubbed you the same way."

  A sympathetic phantom pain blossomed near her heart, in the hard knot of cartilage where her ribs met. "I feel sorry for Pamela, most of all."

  "Me too. Imagine having that guy bounce you on his knee. Daddy Dearest. He drove Pamela's mom straight into the most expensive lunatic asylum in town. She died there." He saluted something imaginary with his glass.

  Jaime paled. "I had no idea." Pamela had made a few shrugging allusions to an unpleasant childhood but had never burdened anyone with specifics. Except Mickey. It figured.

  "It is but one single chapter in a whole rancid serial," he said knowingly, squeezing her hand.

  She nodded. "I guess I didn't realize what she was up against. But she's got you and me, right? And Jason. Jason's good for her."

  "She's nuts about him?"

  Several couples away, Pamela was threatening to douse Jason with bubbly if he did not cease with the dumb toasts. A cork went bang and somebody got drenched. Everybody laughed.

  "Thanks, Mickey." She tilted forward to kiss him. Just as she made lip contact, he averted his head so that she got his cheek.

  "Be good?" He smiled, putting two fingers to her lips. "I'm not made of iron, you know."

  Jaime knew. Athlete's sheet, indeed.

  This was no joke. The casket lid was not going to pop back; Pamela was not going to sit up and yell gotcha. That would have blown Pavel Drake's tubes, all right. On the other side of the hole, Pamela's father shook hands and kept a stiff upper. He might have been blowing smoke at some fund raiser. Jaime imagined his eyes, behind their tinted glass, stripping and ravishing her.

  The burden of remembrance is a weighty thing, she knew now, intimidating enough to bow the shoulders of the
spiritually weak. Responsibility to the dead often starts time bombs ticking within the survivors when they discover that death is not TV not Disney, never easy or graceful or clean. Or temporary. Maybe Mickey was manufacturing his own brand of anguish right this moment. Jaime could not shove the Kipling poem "The Thousandth Man" from her mind, where it skip-repeated like a scratched record.

  Nine hundred and ninety-nine depend.

  On what the world sees in you,

  But the Thousandth Man will stand your friend

  With the whole round world agin you.

  And that goes double for girls, she thought. There were nine hundred and ninety-nine usurious flickers, and more, afoot and breathing while Pamela was not. How could you be expected to stand against the world's indifferences and banal evils when the good guys kept dropping? No fair. And Pamela was becoming a larger part of her life every moment Jaime herself breathed. That dull void in her heart, the Pamela-sized hole that had been ripped in her, was the worst thing she could ever feel.

  The hole filled by Pamela's casket was beginning to look more and more like a mass grave for all the good things they had shared. Four people had gone under today, not one. Jaime stepped backward, away from the loamy darkness of that pit, as though there was a risk of slipping in.

  "I want to find Mickey," she said. "Now."

  Jason shook his head. He was despondent now and had withdrawn to the point where he had not even noticed Jaime talking to herself - to Pamela - at grave-side. "I have to go home," he said after a deep breath. "I have something to do."

  It's hitting him, she thought. He was going to burst into tears if she didn't stop hanging onto him, if she did not leave him alone right now. And the more she thought about Mickey's truancy, the madder she got. She could do this by herself. "Well ... fine. We'll link up later, yes?"