Lost Angels

by David J. Schow

  "A moment," she said. Strength tried to slither away and was recaptured. "I'm going down to your car to wait. If I know you at all, you ran off and left it open. Let's pretend I went to check to see if it was locked. You come down looking for me. If you see me sitting there wiping my eyes, then all is well, and we can fight later. And I won't say I love you, because by now you either know it or you don't. I don't want to just loiter here, with you watching, in case anything does happen. That's strange, isn't it? I should know whether something should happen. Or shouldn't. But I don't." Her voice stayed low and level, like a worker, newly fired. "Goodbye, then. Lover."

  "Not goodbye," he said as she turned to leave, and he reckoned he saw her eyes glint toward him, briefly chromium in the dim light. "Not ever."

  Jennifer was gone. She closed the front door behind her, but only after Max, anticipating another jaunt in the car, perked up and followed her out hopefully. Damned pointy-eared turncoat. The gentle way Jenny closed the door was more horrible than a million doors slammed hard against nightmares.

  Grant would never see her again.

  Once again he was here in the brass bed, by candlelight. This time he was utterly alone, and his nose told him the sheets needed changing. The odor of the candle made itself thickly evident; he could hear the wick sizzling in the absolute quiet. There was no way the candle could tip over, or roll away, as it had in his father's hands. Summer heat plus the Pinto's dashboard had conspired to reform the tallow cylinder into an Impressionist mini-pyramid. Grant read aloud.

  After the flat, parched echo of his own voice died, he sat there like the village idiot. He had expected the air in the room to roil, to hear a distant, unearthly howl as the teardrop of fire flickered while he recited the words. He made it to the end of the passage. His hands were shaking. Nothing provocative happened. The sun did not break the clouds.

  Max sat in the cockpit of the Pinto, licking his toes. His tail started wagging, in hopes of A RIDE. There was nothing so dramatic as a note using the word love and ending in midsentence. There was no residue, no evidence. Jennifer could just as easily have hailed a cab for parts unknown. Max's tail ceased moving as Grant sat down hard on the oil and soot-stained concrete, his back pressed to a hubcap, and wept the first honest tears he had known in twenty-eight years. The dog cocked his head, sympathetically.

  Before he cleared out of Los Angeles for good he made a lot of phone calls. He told Toby Wolff, the photographer, that Jennifer had pulled stakes for the gauntlet of modeling agencies in Manhattan, and indeed, this was an impression Grant's own gut feelings clung to - that she had merely walked out of the garage and out of his life. It was the way many people dealt with death. The lost one was assigned a status of permanent incommunicado, making them unreachable instead of obliterated. He felt certain that some blinking mental telltale-lamp would have gone dark if she really was dead ... provided that she was ever really alive. She had been alive enough to photograph. And Toby Wolff had chalked up a lot of photographs. They all hurt to look at, even the bad ones.

  With the help of a rented van and some able bodies from Starving Students, Grant engineered the transport of the bed, mirror frame, the candle and book, plus every shard of broken glass up the Pacific Coast Highway, to a secluded lookout called Point Pitt. In the middle of the night, the load went into the ocean and the movers pocketed big tips. Grant felt good when he saw how fast the baroque brasswork sank into the boiling whitecaps of seawater. Up at Point Pitt, the water ran deep close to shore. The admonition of the late Mrs. Saks still nagged, however: Fire cleanses. Not water. That sort of detail was important to the folks who kept Darkmoon Occult Supplies in business. But the act made him feel relieved in a bitter, minor way, and upon his return to the city he left an extra hundred bucks in an envelope for Jade Wing, slipping it through the door slot at an hour when even Darkmoon's lamps were out. Go and try to bribe the forces of darkness, sure. But it, too, felt correct.

  The inheritance funds were tapped and new lawyers and accountants were engaged. The proper city officials got their palms crossed with baksheesh. Grant's representatives secured Mrs. Saks' property, tore down her house, and dedicated the resultant residential park to his father, via a bronze plaque. Calex never got a hold of the property, and the plaque stands there to this day.

  Max happily rode shotgun as L.A. shrank in the car's rearview. Grant wondered if the dog sensed, or knew. He wished he could know if Max had sat thumping his tail while Jennifer walked quickly out of the parking garage ... or phased into thin air like a lap-dissolve in a TV commercial. He wondered about the dog, but not too much, because that was the road back to paranoia and lunacy.

  Instead, he drove north to begin waiting.

  He forced himself not to notice when Max's brilliant, clear blue eyes began to darken into a unique shade of agate-gray.

  CALENDAR GIRL

  Brett Deitz was fourteen years old when he first saw Drea Wiseman. Even with fold creases trisecting her body and a staple rammed through her midsection, she was the most beautiful woman Brad had ever seen; at least, that's what he decided after he'd jerked off to the photo for the tenth time. The magazine became the first thing Brad ever actually stole from his Dad, which is to say, his father winkingly permitted Brad to "borrow" it and never asked for its return. Mom had not been consulted, and Brad inferred that she did not need to be advised. It was a small, harmless conspiracy at first, the sort of watershed that makes a kid feel grown up.

  A week before Brad turned seventeen, he succeeded in nailing Joanne Pennyworth during a dusk-to-dawn horrorfest mostly composed of Hammer Films monstrosities. Neither of them cared about the endangered species status of the drive-in at which they finally achieved mutual intromission; it teetered precariously on the rim of extinction while Brad turned another corner in life that made him feel even more grown up. If there were bare tits onscreen, Brad missed them because he was sunk into the real things. Joanne was one of those rare redheads with genuinely red nipples, and later they had laughed because they had steamed up the windows of Brad's Mustang with their heat. On three previous "dates" - so called because there was really no other word that covered social excuses for sexual contact - she had hand-jobbed him to orgasm, on a memorable fourth occasion she had fellated him, and Brad had more or less returned the same courtesies to her. Each time he had climaxed, he had visualized Drea Wiseman's face, from the magazine, and imagined her lush body coiled or unfurled for him, as in the nine photographs (with three costume changes) that accompanied the centerspread. On the night of the drive-in, Joanne had shown up bearing condoms, and when Brad climaxed he definitely saw her face and not Drea's. Joanne bit her lip when she came and Brad had fetched her a napkin from the snack bar to dab at the dot of blood; he found the tiny wound unbearably erotic. Their relationship eventually ran away to wherever young love and lust vanishes.

  Brad wondered what Joanne Pennyworth was up to today. Probably brided and bred, long ago, her name changed, perhaps several times. He knew now that he had not "nailed" Joanne that night; rather, she had enveloped him. The penetrative teen conquest imperative proved insufficient to describe how he had felt inside of her. He would always remember Joanne, but not in the sort of mental space he still reserved for the foldout of Drea Wiseman.

  Brown hair and brown eyes in golden light, clear polish on the nails, no jewelry, and somehow she doesn't impress him as some tart who would spread for a magazine. The gaze she lends the camera is inviting, not salacious. The little stat box lists useless personal trivia, probably fabricated, but for some reason Brad believes her age as given —21.

  That would make her 53 or 54 now, he calculates as he sees a hand-lettered sign on the Boulevard which reads SEX TAPES 3/$10 OLD PORNO • OLD ADULT BOOKS • "COLLECTOR'S" MAGAZINES. Sun-bleached videocassette sleeves littered the yellowed windows of a narrow storefront; the display inventory was a weird melange of dated hardcore, dated stereo gear, lots of incense and paraphernalia, and stacks of printed matter older
than all the other junk combined. Several of these ragtag emporia fought for dominance on the Boulevard and featured no real specialty; they were part thrift shop and part junkyard with liberal dashes of dust and fake nostalgia. The employees invariably seemed stoned or spaced out enough to answer just what you see to virtually any question, and their ability to make change was not to be trusted.

  It was the faded cover of one of the magazines in the window that had arrested Brad's attention, and within minutes, he owned it. He opened it right on the street and there was Drea Wiseman again. She looked different in broad daylight, but then, these magazines were traditionally perused under artificial light, in private. The colors mismatched Brad's memory of them. But it was the same magazine he'd liberated from Dad nearly three decades back.

  Drea had not changed. She was still beautiful, lush, available for him. She was still twenty-one years old. That evening, somewhat guiltily, Brad masturbated to the photo. Later that night, less guility, he did it again. Drea Wiseman had made him come more than most of his girlfriends or relationships - the hormonal wish list of collisions, drive-bys and near-misses which made up the history of his love life.

  Brad Deitz had gotten married at age 35. The bride who had consented to this merger was named Suzanne Dalton, an advertising manager for a small publishing company who helped Brad get his first masthead gig as a magazine art director - skin, naturally. After six months on the job, Brad had louped so many layouts of naked female flesh that all he could see were the pores, bad bones, and disastrous complexions begging computer makeovers. Thousands of soulless eyes making empty come-ons to the camera. The seduction of it, the romance, had been leached away, and the sterile leavings of artificially-moistened genitalia in macro close-up failed to move him. He dumped his surplus of romance into his courtship of Suzanne, hence the wedding.

  It was not a bad marriage. Suzanne had one restaurant for each day of the week and dined rigorously at six p.m. every day. Sometimes Brad had to rendezvous with her, in a synchronized Day Runner way, or risk piling up more rain checks. She always left a kitchen, a bathroom, or a closet looking undisrupted by the passage of anything human; frequently Brad's only clues were moisture in a drain, or mild leftover condensation on the shower door, or one of the evenly-spaced clothes hangers repositioned a degree out of true. He allowed her tidiness to influence his habits but never gave up that residual affection for occasional clutter or spontaneity; in fact, she came to depend on his fancies to keep their lives unusual. Their lovemaking was like installments in a serial - first conventional, then outlandish, now naughtier than six months ago, next week nice and cuddly - as though it was graphed according to a blueprint Brad could not see. It was certainly varied enough. Other men complained about not wanting to even see their wives naked anymore; Brad had always been curious about what the wives were saying, in their circles. Brad never tired of seeing Suzanne naked, or making love to her. It was not a bad marriage.

  Suzanne engineered their divorce like a military extraction from an exodus zone. They split everything evenly and fairly. She left no imbalances. She only took what was hers, and relocated to New York, were she landed further up the corporate ladder. It could reasonably be said that Suzanne left their marriage in better shape than when she had entered it, but Suzanne did everything that way. The only consolation offered by Brad's friends was on the order of you should be relieved she didn't really nail you, and clean you out. No one disliked Suzanne, even after she was gone. Brad would enter what was formerly their shared apartment and sometimes wonder what was different about the place. He did not feel bad, exactly; his friends had convinced him he had no reason to feel bad. But Suzanne was gone, leaving Brad alone in the company of retooled foldout girls. Later, staring at a Risque calendar, Brad noticed that they had been husband and wife for two years exactly, to the day.

  Brad benefitted from several office rebounds, and quickly learned to file those interludes properly, and not fuck in work territory. Suzanne sent regular checks until all their plastic was balanced out, then Brad never heard from her again, not even holiday cards. He was mooning about that, morosely, on the day he met Jennifer Spikers by literally running into her. She had brought her photography portfolio to the editorial cubicles of Risque - one of the twenty-seven titles produced monthly under a company banner encompassing everything from Pubes! to Just Past Jailbait Magazine - and had collided with Brad in the corridor to the elevators. She soon scored a richer proposal from a competing company, and Brad had scored Jennifer, and eight months after that, he was mooning and morose again.

  The depthless gazes of the women in the magazine spreads chided him: We told you so.

  He pin-balled onward for several more years in this fashion. The woman who had most recently crashed and burned on him was named Molly Sweidenvelt, and Brad was in the post-relationship process of mentally reviewing the liaisons of his entire life. One periodically tried to recall all the names, the faces; it was surprising who was abruptly forgotten or who suddenly surged forth in memory. He was walking down the street, striving to remember Jennifer's last name, when he had spotted the magazine in the window, the one featuring Drea. His first girl.

  Inside what they called the "Raw Room" his co-worker Philippe had just scattered a new stack of slides on the big lightboard. Every one of these vaginae wanted to be a movie star.

  "Philippe, you remember Drea Wiseman?" He showed Philippe the magazine, handing it over as if it were a classified government document.

  "Before my time," said Philippe. "Didn't she star in a sitcom or become a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader or something?"

  "No." If she had, Brad would have collected video.

  "You know who'd know? Cherique. She's been den mommy to all these exhibitionists since the dawn of recorded history. Before 1990, even."

  Cherique - real name, Melissa Cordoba - was stuck somewhere in her middle sixties, dyed her hair to match her bright orange lipstick, and still affected a rhinestone-bedecked cigarette holder. She called everyone "sweetie" but Brad suspected she knew not only the real names and pro names of everyone who had ever glided through the Risque offices, but never forgot any of them. She was the Number Two of the whole enterprise; the only life form with veto power over Cherique was the Old Man himself.

  "Sometimes y'know I think about doing me a book titled The X-rated Whatever Happened To," Cherique commenced in her Los Angelicized Bronxese, firing up a Nat Sherman the color of a traffic cone. "Excepting that it would be too sad, y'know, what with all the suicides and some of the murders and then there's the AIDS. Still, sweetie, I don't think there's a day passes in this office that somebody don't ask me about whatever happened to so-and-so, and usually, if they didn't die, they wound up having kids or getting married. I think Drea Wisernan's name was really Carla something, and she did that actor for awhile, the guy who played the gigolo in New York? Then she had a kid by some French artist, I think. She was in exactly one movie, under a different name, too - Ramsey Rushmore. Not a porno, a real movie. It had one of those, titles like Extreme Implant or Terminal Force. Ask me again tomorrow, sweetie, and I'll probably make more sense."

  Brad located a sell-through copy of Forced Confession at the same Boulevard shop that had the old issue of Drea's magazine. It had been released direct-to-video in 1987 and featured no then-nascent celebrities. None of the cast of nobodies were credited with other movies in the generic blurbage on the cassette sleeve. The director was Italian.

  Twelve minutes in, there she was, in lopsided Eastman color pink with age. Fourteen minutes in, her top came off for the first time. The rest was more or less along those lines.

  "I missed it when it premiered at the Chinese," said Philippe the next day, in the Raw Room. "My tux was at the cleaners."

  "Whoa, I'm twisting in the backdraft of your acid Wit," said Brad.

  "Nice bags. Did Cherique know her?"

  "Not usefully. Hey, where did these come from?" Brad snatched a new slide off the light board and squint
ed at it against the ceiling lights. "That's McCabe's latest goddess. I didn't catch a name."

  "It's Drea. Look - she's a twin sister?" Brad began sorting the other slides of McCabe's latest drop-off. "I'm not kidding; look."

  Philippe shrugged. "Nice bags."

  "It's her, Phillipe. How old are these?"

  "I can hear your heart beating faster. Are we infatuated today?"

  "How old, Philippe, fucker?"

  "These are the opposite of old. These are not Dream Girl. These were shot last Thursday. There's a little date on each one of them. Y'know, the kind of thing a professional would notice right away?"

  "Do you want me to bring you a tampon for your mood; maybe you can jam it all the way into your ear?"

  "No, because you're gonna want to take the slides, and you're gonna call McCabe, and I'm gonna have to finish this whole wretched layout by my lonesome, and stop me when I veer from the truth."

  "You're a prince, Philippe?'

  "You're a queen, Brad."

  Brad knew better than to fart around with McCabe's answering machine, which he had never known to be actually picked up during a call in all of recorded human history. He drove straight to the photographer's house, taking the Pacific Coast Highway, leaving the top down.

  McCabe's Malibu aerie was all flat white angles and too much glass; the sort of balconied showoff place onto which a realtor would tack half a million just for the view. The seaward windows usually got boarded up every time some new hurricane checked in from Hawaii; they were still covered with plywood in honor of El Niño as Brad stored his car in the elbow of a turnout that could park nine vehicles end-to-end. Most of McCabe's cars were home.

  McCabe waved Brad to a sofa facing the ocean through a single unboarded window and installed a drink in his grasp - a virtually uncut Scotch that nearly took Brad's breath away. He lent his own photos a two-second glance. "Sela Brownlee; so what? Did I fuck her? Sure."