The Third Angel

  Lennie was acting as though she were embarrassed at being found out, but at what, Frieda had no idea. Was there some fellow Lennie had fallen for? Could she really be as foolish as Frieda and have gotten involved with one of the guests? That just didn't seem like Lennie, who was careful enough to always look after number one.

  “I'll be in soon,” Frieda told her.

  “You don't answer to me,” Lennie said. “I don't need to know your private business. You're a big girl, Frieda, as am I.”

  Well, that was the policy of the Lion Park, wasn't it, at least for guests, so the same was surely true for the help. Privacy at all costs, no questions asked and none answered; secrecy even among friends.

  Frieda brought Jamie's laundry back to his room, folded it, and left it on the chair. His T-shirts were worn and thin. He had two paisley shirts, one blue and green, the other different hues of red, orange, and yellow. Both needed ironing, which was really no bother. Frieda was a capable person. She liked ironing; it allowed her mind to wander. She wondered if that's why her mother never complained about housework.

  When she was done, and everything had been neatly put away, Frieda felt she had accomplished something. This is what her mother must have meant, the true purpose of housework. To set things right. The room smelled nice now. Like lemon and soap. She'd given Jamie extra pillows and one of the good blankets, a silky coverlet usually reserved for famous guests. Well, he would be famous someday, so it was just as well. She hoped the A&R man had listened to what she'd said about talent.

  Frieda lay down on the bed for just a moment. She thought about the wild look in Lennie's eyes, as if she'd been caught at something really horrid when all she'd been doing was taking the stairs. Frieda's father had told her most people had secret lives, but usually they were secrets no one wanted to know. She thought again of the list her mother had sent her. Always use bleach to wash the bedding you used with him, or better yet, throw it all away and buy new sheets. Frieda fell asleep already dreaming that she was in a car with her father, on a dark lane. There were lights turned on within the houses they passed by. Every light is a life, Frieda's father told her in the dream. Every one is as worthwhile and as easily damaged. Frieda woke up because in her dream someone sat down in the back of her father's car; she could feel his weight and all of a sudden she felt cold. She wondered which angel it was. She wondered if she should look, or if in his glory and his terribleness, the Angel of Death would take her right then and there if she faced him. Frieda started to cry in her dream, even though she could feel herself waking. She opened her eyes and there was Jamie beside her on the bed, staring at her. He smelled of smoke and alcohol.

  “What a nice surprise,” he said.

  Frieda hid her face against his chest so he wouldn't know she'd been crying, but he knew.

  “I understand,” Jamie said. “This world is a hard, cruel place, Frieda.”

  He told her all about his leg, about the months in the hospital, about the pain he carried with him always. He had fought his disability as though going into battle; he was a hero, really, one who refused to bend to his genetic flaws, that damned leg, all that torture of braces and surgeries and ridicule. By the time he got to the part about heroin, there was, in Frieda's mind, nothing he could do wrong.

  “You could see a doctor about the drugs,” she said. “Get help.”

  Jamie laughed at that. “I've seen too many doctors in my life. I know how to deal with my pain. But I think it's the thing that makes me unable to write. I give everything to my dreams when I get high. It knocks me out, takes every part of me. I have the songs inside of me, but they float out when I'm in pain and I can't catch up with them.”

  Frieda took out the paper on which she'd written “The Third Angel.” She'd meant to give him “The Ghost of Michael Macklin,” but that song was too much; it seemed to tear a person in two. She would try this one first. It was a solemn moment really, and if she hadn't been Frieda, with her brand of confidence, she would have been shaking. She read it to him, and when she was done Jamie stared at her as though he were suddenly completely awake. He hadn't really seen her before.

  “Holy shit, Frieda,” he said. “I didn't know that was in you.”

  “I know something about pain, too,” Frieda said. “My father is a doctor. I used to go on calls with him when I was little.”

  “I thought you were going to write me a song about a ghost, but instead you wrote a song about me,” Jamie said. “I'm honored.”

  They spent the night together, even though it was expressly against hotel rules, even though Frieda was fairly certain there was only one person who was falling in love. But you never could tell about these things. Time had the power to alter everything; her mother had written that in her list. Even love. It was worth it to be with him no matter what. Being with him was a dream, hot and intense, as if they were somewhere outside of the rest of the world. He made her feel things she hadn't expected, and she did things she hadn't even known about, found parts of love that were deeper, more urgent. She knew he'd been with so many women, but she didn't care about that. She was the one in bed with him, and it wasn't one kiss she gave him but a thousand.

  Jamie told her no other girl could be to him what she was. She would be his muse, not just now but always. When the morning came around, Frieda could hardly stand to leave him. She had never understood how people could be in denial, how, for instance, someone with a terminal diagnosis could get up and get dressed and make breakfast and not think about dying every second of the day. And yet she was like that about Stella. For Frieda, Stella didn't exist; she had faded into blond nothingness; she might as well have been living in the sky above them. The reality was here, at the Lion Park. The two of them in bed. The angel that watched over them. The song that had appeared like a dream.

  Frieda herself was dreamy that morning. She overslept and had to sneak out of Jamie's room and run down the stairs to the second floor. She quickly got ready; she was on the morning shift, as was Lennie. It wasn't easy to be up half the night, doing things you shouldn't be doing, and then report to work. Frieda and Lennie both were exhausted; they drank black coffee in the dining hall. Of course they were too late for breakfast. Lennie didn't look at Frieda or speak to her, but then again she was in a rush.

  “Where were you all night?” their third roommate, Katy, asked Frieda as they were collecting their baskets of cleaners and sponges and mops. “Don't tell me you're moving into Lennie territory?”

  “Actually, I fell asleep in a room I was cleaning. It was embarrassing. Thank goodness it was an empty room.”

  “Well, good,” said Katy, relieved. “I'd hate to see you fall into the easy money like Lennie. Not that it's so easy if you ask me. The guys who are paying her certainly aren't Mick Jagger, if you know what I mean. She must just close her eyes and count to a thousand and pray for them to be done.”

  Frieda laughed. “You're mad. What do you mean?”

  “I mean that's how she makes her money. You don't think she's shopping on the King's Road with the wages we earn here? Your father's a doctor, you don't have to worry about money.”

  “I worry about things,” Frieda said. For instance she was thinking now about venereal diseases and the risks a girl could run when sleeping with strangers. She was thinking that perhaps she didn't really know her closest friend.

  “You don't have to worry like us,” Katy said. “Not like Lennie.”

  In the afternoon, when the first shift was through, Frieda looked for Lennie, who seemed to be avoiding her. Lennie's sister, Meg, said Lennie had gone to the park, to have lunch. Frieda went after her. Hyde Park was huge, but Frieda knew Lennie's favorite place, down by the Serpentine. Lennie was there, smoking a cigarette. The weather was cool and most of the golden leaves of the trees in the park had been shaken off by an early-morning rain. Everything felt damp and gray.

  “Are you following me?” Lennie asked.

  Frieda sat down on a bench beside her friend and sni
tched one of Lennie's cigarettes. Her father had made her promise that she would never smoke. He did so on a night when they went to visit a man who was dying of emphysema. It was one of the worst things Frieda had ever seen. She was ten years old. The man was in his bed, struggling for air. Save me, he'd whispered to Frieda's father, who slipped an oxygen mask over the patient's mouth. That was when Frieda realized there were some people you couldn't rescue no matter how you might try.

  “Look, I'm not going to explain myself to you or anyone else,” Lennie said. “So fuck off, Frieda. What I do is none of your business.”

  “All right,” Frieda said.

  Lennie looked at her friend and laughed. “That's it? No lectures about how I'm ruining my life? How sooner or later one of these fellows is going to murder me? How I'll get syphilis or I'll get pregnant and be left to beg on a street corner? That's what you think, isn't it?”

  “You're Lennie to me no matter what you do,” Frieda said. “As long as you're not on my street corner,” she joked. But in a way she was serious; if you loved somebody you were honest with them, weren't you? You told them the diagnosis, just as the doctor always had. What have we here? he might have said of Lennie. A girl who does whatever she pleases no matter the consequences?

  “Oh, I'll be there. I'll show up wherever you live.” Lennie grinned. “I'll come with a tambourine and a little monkey that screams outside your window all night. You can throw me down a few pence and a bar of chocolate. Dream on.”

  “You're my friend. Whatever you do I support.”

  “Well,” Lennie said. “That's a relief.” She stubbed out her cigarette and became quite serious. “I need the money. That may not be an excuse for the things a person does in life, but I don't give a damn. I'm not planning on being a maid here forever. Meg is the one who sets it all up and I give her half. In two years we plan to have our own place. A bed-and-breakfast. Maybe I'll hire Katy to be the maid.”

  They both laughed at that.

  “Wouldn't she be Mrs. Mick Jagger by then?” Frieda managed to choke out. That notion sent them into near hysteria.

  “That would be like you, thinking something lasting will come of you and Mr. Rock Star-to-be.”

  Frieda shut up then. She was not at all amused.

  “No!” Lennie said when she saw Frieda's expression. “I thought you were a fucking pragmatist. I thought you saw people for who they truly were.”

  “We're not telling each other how to run our lives. Remember?”

  “He is a lost cause, Frieda. Anyone can see he's on drugs. You need to know what you are to him: the girl who cleans his room. Or maybe you're the girl he takes to bed whenever he's got a free minute and can spare you the time. Then you clean his room. That's it, isn't it?”

  “Shut up,” Frieda said. “You don't know anything.”

  “I know you've got as much chance with him as Katy does with Mick Jagger. Actually, less, because your fellow is hungry, so he'll do whatever he has to in order to make it. And that doesn't mean marrying the maid.”

  “You're not one to give advice,” Frieda said. “Not with who you're spending nights with.”

  “Oh, now it's me,” Lennie said. “Turn on me why don't you?”

  “Did I judge you?” Frieda asked.

  They sat there on the bench, mulling things over.

  All that day Frieda thought about what Lennie had called after her as she was leaving the park. In the end, people always show you who they are. That's what Lennie had said. You just have to be able to see it.

  She met Jamie again that night. They ran into each other in the lobby and he told her to come up when she was done with work. Clearly, he was interested. Lennie really didn't understand anything at all. When she was free, she went upstairs, but no one answered in Jamie's room. Frieda let herself in with her key, the skeleton key that fit every room in the hotel. She had a moment of thinking, He won't be there, I'll just walk away, but he'd fallen asleep waiting for her. She took off all her clothes and got into bed beside him. She wasn't going to think about anything. She wasn't going to worry the way she always did. She was just going to be. She was Frieda, here in his room, nothing more.

  “I thought you'd never get here,” he said to her when he awoke.

  He wasn't the first man she'd been with, and that hadn't been Bill back home either. It had been a boy she met on holiday when she was fifteen. She had decided it was time for her to have sex, the way someone else might decide it was time to get a driver's license, and she'd gone ahead with it. Pragmatic, that's the way she'd always been. This was entirely different. It was as if she'd imagined Jamie; that's how thoroughly she felt she knew him. The rest of the world was slipping away, which was what Frieda wanted. No one else existed. So this is what it was when you fell in love. It was so deep, so vast, Frieda was amazed. She had put away the list her mother had sent her. She never wanted to read that advice again. She just wanted to be herself.

  While they were still in bed, arms around each other, Jamie said, “I want to play the song for you.”

  Frieda had nearly forgotten.

  “I think you're going to like it,” Jamie said. “I hope to God you do.”

  He got up for his guitar, then came back to her.

  “It's rough, you know,” Jamie said. “Unfinished.”

  Frieda loved unfinished things. Finished was over and done with; she liked process, she liked moving things: rivers, clouds, heartbeats.

  Jamie's voice was so sweet, very clear. It seemed to come from a place other than inside him. Even he seemed a little surprised by the purity of the tone. He sang “The Third Angel” and it became something else entirely, much more than the words Frieda had written down. It became the story of a man chased by demons and by drugs. His story.

  Jamie finished. He put the guitar down on the floor, then lay beside her again.

  “Utterly wonderful,” Frieda said. “I love it.”

  “I told you you were my muse. What would I have done if I hadn't met you?”

  When Frieda told Lennie the next day, Lennie laughed out loud. “You wrote the damned song, did he ever mention that? Or did he just claim it as his own?”

  “It is his own. He wrote the music. When he sings it it's changed. I'm doing another one for him. A really good one.”

  “At least I get paid for what I do, Frieda,” Lennie said. They really weren't so much alike after all; they had both begun to see that. Ever since they had professed not to judge each other, something had gone wrong. “I'm just being honest with you, Frieda, and maybe you don't like that. But you wrote the song. It's yours.”

  Later in the week, Frieda learned that her father was coming to London for a conference and he was planning to see her. She hadn't expected him to be in touch, but there really was no way to avoid him once he telephoned. She hadn't been answering the letters from the doctor that her mother forwarded, but when she received a phone message from Meg, she felt cornered. Frieda hadn't told him where she was working, but somehow he'd found out. She'd phoned him then, out of desperation really. She didn't want him to see where she worked. It wasn't that she was embarrassed, not really. She simply didn't want her separate worlds to crash into each other there in the lobby of the Lion Park. And then there was Jamie. She couldn't even imagine the two men in the same universe. Best to keep the doctor away at all costs.

  She agreed to meet her father at an Italian restaurant that he recommended off of Bayswater. She was a little late because she kept changing her outfit, trying to decide whether to look serious or carefree. In the end, serious fit the occasion. She wore a plain skirt and blouse that would have been perfect back home in Reading. But she wasn't giving in entirely; she wore her short black boots with the buckles. She wasn't about to go back to sensible shoes. And a bit of eyeliner; not Cleopatra, but Frieda Lewis all the same. Herself still.

  Her father was waiting when she got there and had been for some time. She was more than half an hour late, even though she had hurried. She was
dreading their meeting, and it was worry that had slowed her down. She was usually on time, early as a matter of fact. At least until today. Dr. Lewis was looking at a newspaper when Frieda came inside the restaurant. Seeing him, Frieda felt her love for her father; but she thought about how he'd betrayed them and love didn't seem quite so important. She gave him a kiss on the cheek when he stood to greet her, maintaining a cool demeanor.

  “I thought you'd disappeared off the face of the earth,” he said.

  “Oh, no.” Frieda ordered pasta and salad. The doctor was a vegetarian, and although Frieda wasn't as strict in such matters, she found herself following his diet most of the time. This evening, however, she thought she probably wouldn't eat. She had no appetite. That was how this whole thing started. It was how Frieda had come to leave home in the first place. She wanted to be in London, but she was also reacting to her father. She didn't owe him her life or her future, did she? Not after the way he'd left home. She didn't owe him anything at all.

  “Look, Frieda, I think you're overreacting. True enough your mother and I are no longer together, but that is not the end of the world.”

  “It is for her.” Frieda wanted to say, It is for me, but that complaint seemed childlike and selfish.

  “So to punish me, you run off and instead of going to university you're working as a maid?”

  “Who told you that?” Frieda was livid that he had managed to find out so much about her life and worse still that he knew she was reacting to him.

  “Does it matter how I know?” the doctor said.

  As soon as he refused to tell her, Frieda knew it was her mother. How could she have aided him?

  “She told you? I didn't think she would even speak to you.”

  “Who does this kind of behavior hurt the most? You, Frieda, that's who. It's your life that you're ruining. Being a maid. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not for you.”

  “I'm not ruining anything. I'm having fun,” Frieda said. “I'm living my life. I don't owe anyone anything and if I want to be a chambermaid for the rest of my life, I will be!”