Cole stared at her. The muscles in his jaw bunched and jumped. ‘I know. And I don’t buy his “circus freak” line. He only wants to make me think of carnivals because carnivals move on. That’s what he’s done. He got what he wanted, and gave himself a way out.’
Flora said, ‘What do you mean “circus freak”?’
‘He says he has something wrong with him. Something congenital. That’s why he won’t take off his shirt.’
Flora said she’d thought Xas was only shy. ‘Or something,’ she added, uncertain.
‘I should have known better!’ Cole shouted suddenly. He turned away from Flora to face the screen. He clenched his fists and threw his arms wide. For a moment he held this pent-up, beseeching, histrionic pose.
‘Con,’ Flora said. ‘Xas was ill. The other night he had some kind of fit. Maybe that has something to do with wherever he’s got to.’
Cole dropped his arms and rounded on her. ‘I know he’s sick. And I’m sick. And that’s why he’s made himself scarce.’
Flora frowned at him.
Cole said, under his breath, ‘They’re always the filthy ones.’
Flora understood what Cole meant. ‘The filthy ones’ were the men Cole slept with—his secret liaisons. Flora guessed that Cole had picked up a dose from who knew where—possibly even Xas, though Xas’s fit hadn’t been at all suggestive of venereal disease, except maybe tertiary syphilis in its end stage.
Flora stood, with her usual difficulty, and sidled out of the row. She went up to her employer and closed her hands about his upper arms.
He stared down at her hands and trembled like an overtaxed racehorse.
‘Con, dear,’ she said. She walked him backward and sat him down. She would have liked to crouch at his feet, but wasn’t able to.
‘Let’s not quarrel,’ Cole said.
‘We’re not quarrelling. You’re upset.’ She took his hands gently, mindful of the scabs where he’d gnawed the skin from the sides of his fingers—one of this insanely fastidious man’s several unclean habits, like his fondness for sex with strange men. She asked, ‘Have you seen a doctor?’
‘Yes,’ Cole said.
‘Are you being treated?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you talked to Myra? Jean? Kay? Or, for that matter, Monty?’
‘It’s not them. They all have ambition.’
‘Ambition doesn’t make anyone immune to venereal disease.’
‘It’s him. He’s to blame,’ Cole said. Then, very bleak, ‘Where is he?’
‘He’ll be back. He’s not about to steal my car.’
Cole nodded. ‘That’s true.’ He looked a little calmer. Then he changed the subject. ‘The film is splendid, I think,’ he said, with serene self-belief.
‘Yes,’ Flora said, and stroked the backs of his hands.
‘And it’s done with. And the well fills up from behind. There’s always something for me to do next. But—Flora—it’s not always good that flows in when a project has gone.’
‘I know. You just have to be more patient.’
‘And you’re drinking too much,’ he added.
‘All right,’ she said, to humour him, and because she was touched. Though, come to think of it, she could really do with a drink right now. She said, ‘When Xas returns my car I’ll send him straight to you.’
Cole nodded. Then his eyes wandered and he dropped his head. A moment later he lifted a hand, very slowly, as though he were pushing it up through syrup, not air. He gestured for her to leave him.
Xas came back after eight days. He brought Flora and Millie rock candy from some beauty spot up in the Sierras. Millie insisted they celebrate his return over Flora’s protests that one week’s absence didn’t make him a prodigal son. Millie couldn’t be discouraged. Having lost all her savings she was now spending every cent she made.
They went out to eat on Santa Monica Pier. Millie and Flora ordered a pot of tea with their meal then decanted the contents of their hip flasks into their teacups. Millie got Flora talking about her few years acting, and about how she was never the girl who got the man. Then, tipsy, Flora moved in an apparently natural progression from never getting the man in movies to talking about Crow’s shortcomings. Connie was a braggart, she complained. He was never satisfied with his real achievements. ‘He’s always making up big boastful lies,’ she said, swinging her cup as though conducting an invisible orchestra, her fingers slippery with spilled tequila. ‘For instance—he makes this wonderful film then has to say he came up with the whole story though I know for a fact that he lifted it from a magazine.’
‘Flora, honey,’ said Millie, ‘you always said that it would be a relief not to be working for Mr Cole, so why are you complaining now you’ve hooked up with Connie?’
Flora gave Millie a hooded-eyed look. She found her purse, her pillbox, and popped a couple of Nembutal into her mouth, washing them down with her last swallow of tequila. Then she leaned across the table to whisper mushily, ‘Can we go to Mexico soon?’
‘Sure,’ said Millie.
‘You might as well start trying to build up capital again,’ Flora went on.
Millie’s face went still and remote. She leaned back in her chair and cast her gaze down. ‘Let’s just plan to top up our supply. You get in touch with those boys of yours.’
Flora promised to call the bootleggers. ‘You can come too,’ she said to Xas, who shook his head, and began, ‘No, I’m thinking—’
‘Cole needs him,’ Millie interrupted, salaciously drawing out ‘needs’. She made cupping and kneading gestures. Then, ‘Are you going to eat that?’ She pointed to the cake in front of Xas, then took it without waiting for his answer.
Though she was intoxicated Flora had noticed that when she asked Xas if he’d fly down to Mexico with them and he’d begun to make his excuses it appeared he was about to go on to say not just why he couldn’t do it, but why he wouldn’t be there at all. Flora had laughed at Millie’s teasing, the vulgarity of which was a relief to her because whenever she considered what Cole might believe he wanted from Xas it worried her terribly. Xas and Cole pressing one another’s bodies—that was normal. Flora actually liked to imagine that, instead of helplessly imagining them—those two strange and strenuous people—apart, and surrounded by vast gulfs of empty space, as though they were falling from a ditched plane. Xas had shaken his head, said, ‘No, I’m thinking—’ when Millie interrupted to tease him. ‘He’s thinking of leaving,’ Flora had thought. Now she took a deep breath and attempted to speak clearly. ‘Xas, what are you planning?’
‘Flora asks with drunken solemnity,’ said Xas. ‘I don’t make plans. I only let time go by.’
She waved a finger back and forth beneath his nose. ‘You’re planning something.’
‘Well—I need to find a good appraiser.’
‘Huh?’ said Millie.
‘I have some jewellery I need valued.’
‘Can’t Cole help you with that?’
‘Cole recycles his diamonds whenever the girls throw them back in his face. Sometimes he even asks for them back. But he never sells them. There are always more girls to woo.’
‘How many diamonds are we talking about?’ said Millie, bemused.
Xas shrugged. ‘They’re just tools to him.’
‘So you haven’t counted them?’ Millie said, and all her dimples appeared. ‘Though you’re the one who gets to polish Cole’s tools.’
Flora had an idle sideways thought that if actors spoke their lines very quickly then it might be possible to get these sorts of jokes past the censors’ exhausted attention.
‘I have something I want valued so I can sell it for its full worth,’ Xas said. ‘I don’t need a fence. I want someone who can appraise jewellery.’
‘I’ll find you an appraiser,’ Flora said.
Without getting up Millie moved her chair around the table in a series of little hops till she was sitting right beside Xas. ‘Can we see your diamond, honey?’
br /> ‘Was it a diamond Cole gave you?’ Flora was surprised. She wished she wasn’t quite so drunk. ‘He did say he paid you. But I thought he only gave diamonds to actresses.’
‘Cole gave me money and made me promise to invest it. It was a kind of test, I think.’
Millie asked, ‘How much money?’
‘Nine and a half thousand.’
Millie said, ‘So there’s no diamond.’ She sounded disappointed.
Xas got up to reach deep in one pocket of his wide-legged pants. ‘No. But I have these.’ He produced a wad of dusty cloth and sat back down. He peeled apart layers of fragile cotton and Flora recognised cuffs and buttonholes, and that the rag was a very old shirt. Then the two women were looking down into this dusty nest at a clutch of large, lustrous pearls. Black pearls, with a nacreous sheen, both lilac and green—no—blue too, Flora saw, and pink, and creamy gold, the colours like ripples of oil running on gloomy pond water.
Millie moaned in admiration.
Flora thought the pearls looked real, but asked anyway. ‘They must be worth—’ she said, but couldn’t think of a figure. She sensed a little flurry in the tables beside theirs and looked up to see all the craning heads and amazed, avaricious faces. ‘You’re causing a stir,’ she said.
‘I’m not. They are,’ Xas said, and gathered the pearls into the dusty shirt once more and stuffed them back into his pants pockets.
‘Are those really yours?’ Millie said.
‘A relative of mine gave them to a friend of mine. Before my friend died she gave them back to me. She never did wear them. Agnes, her daughter-in-law, wore them once or twice but for most of that time they were shut up in a bank vault.’
Flora took note that there was only one name in this little narrative, and it wasn’t the name of his ‘relative’.
‘You’ve been carrying these around?’ Millie said.
Xas smiled at her. ‘I used to wear them, but for some time now they’ve been stashed in a safe place.’ He put his hand on the back of hers, didn’t just pat it, but began to play with her fingers.
Flora kicked him under the table. The restaurant wasn’t segregated, but it was terribly unwise for him to start winding his fingers with Millie’s in any public place. He looked at Flora, wide-eyed, but didn’t release Millie’s hand. He clearly didn’t see why he should. But Millie remembered herself and retrieved her hand and gave Flora a look that seemed to warn—don’t say anything, don’t do anything to spoil his unworldliness. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said.
Flora offered to get the check then had to deliver a little lecture to her friends on the importance of learning to accept gifts graciously, speaking a little more pointedly to Millie, because she knew that Xas was planning to give Millie the money from the sale of those preposterous pearls. ‘Then he’s going to leave us,’ Flora thought, as she counted out coins at the cashier’s desk. ‘He’s going to make his extravagant gesture, acquit himself of our care, and leave us.’
Millie had them drop her off at a club on Central Avenue. Flora drove back to Venice, and parked with one wheel pushed up against her already unstable fence. Xas got out of the car and went up to the porch, where he waited facing her door. He didn’t have his key. She called him back. He came down the steps and into the moonlight.
‘Give me those pearls,’ she said.
He put his hand in his pocket and produced the rag bundle, and offered it to her. She unwrapped it on his open palm. She studied the shirt with its dust-starched creases, its grandpa collar and its holes for collar studs. The shirt was like something from a studio’s costume department, something an actor would wear in a western.
Flora stepped closer to Xas and eased his jacket off one shoulder and arm. He transferred the wrapped pearls from one hand to the other to let her remove his jacket altogether. It dropped behind him on the path. While Flora did this she said to him, ‘Shhh. Stay still. Do this for me.’ He did oblige her; he remained passive. She said, ‘I’m not going to do anything bad. I’ll keep asking you as I go.’ She looked up at him and met his serious, alert expression. She said, ‘I’m going to undo this button.’ She touched the button at the base of his throat. She unfastened it. ‘I’m going to undo another three.’
‘You’ve been talking to Cole,’ Xas said.
‘About what?’ Flora’s spread the top of his shirt to uncover his collarbones. She ran her fingertips along one and then the other. His collarbones were like lines drawn under something for emphasis, under two words, like ‘touch me’.
‘Shirts,’ Xas said. He was standing with his head level, but eyes lowered, eyeing her, aloof and hawkish. Flora lifted the pearls out of the rag in his hand. They were warm. She raised her arms—her scars shrieking at her—and slipped the string over his head. The pearls settled with weighty kissing noises. ‘Three more buttons,’ she said. She undid these slowly, and slowly eased his shirt open so that she could see the whole rope, the curve of its end only an inch above his navel. She didn’t touch his skin again or uncover his shoulders. She knew he wouldn’t let her, that he was shy, or frightened about people seeing his body—possibly only women, though he didn’t seem at all wary of women in any other way.
Flora stepped back and looked at him. Against his white skin his nipples were a shade that might be found on the mouth of one of the very best porcelain dolls, a pink that was perfect, pretty, almost inorganic.
Regarding him Flora was as moved as she expected to be, but what moved her was knowledge, a cool intellectual acknowledgement of his extraordinary beauty. Dammed up behind that was something that astonished her, a catastrophe of feeling that wasn’t tenderness or infatuation or lust or even love. For Flora knew she loved Xas, that she’d come to love him without being afraid of what would happen to her if she did. If he went she’d grieve, she knew that. But the suspended feeling wasn’t love, or fear of loss, it was something else, something she wasn’t equipped to feel because—mad thought—people never felt it: a powerful, fatal feeling of responsibility, as if just being near to him involved her in something that mattered. Something that mattered and no one ever spared a thought to, like air, like the breathable gas that wrapped the world.
Flora said to him, ‘You don’t make sense. And I have feelings about you that don’t make sense.’
A look of distress appeared on his face and the pearls suddenly belonged to someone else, someone who could never wear that look.
‘You’re going to leave,’ she said.
‘I have to.’
‘Did he do something?’
‘Do you mean Cole?’
Flora nodded.
‘No.’ Xas’s mouth was twitching at one corner. ‘I—I only have to find someplace else to live. But—but it can be in Los Angeles. And I can still come around—sometimes—and—and—’
He was stammering. Flora wanted to put her arms around him but didn’t dare to when he was showing so much skin.
‘—and fix things,’ he finished.
‘Do you see me as a responsibility? Like your old mother or something?’
‘Flora!’ He sounded agonised and jittery. He wrapped his arms around himself, sealing his skin and the pearls away under his shirt. Flora saw that his cuffs and collar were grey with grime and that his hands were dirty. There was red clay under his fingernails as though he’d been digging. As though the pearls had been buried somewhere and he’d dug them up and driven back to Los Angeles and hadn’t thought to wash the dirt off his hands. She said, ‘Do you expect me to say, “Go with my blessing”?’
‘I’d like to stay, Flora, but I can’t.’
‘Is this about Cole?’
Xas shook his head.
‘Do you know that Cole has a dose of the clap?’
‘I thought it might be that. He smells of mice. Mouse droppings in the back of a cupboard.’
‘He thinks you gave it to him.’
Xas sighed and said, ‘I shouldn’t have given in to Cole. I shouldn’t have wanted to give in.’ r />
‘What you should do is see a doctor.’ Flora turned away, hesitated, then asked him why he was washing his hands of Millie. ‘I know you mean to pay her off with the price of those pearls.’
‘I’m not paying her off.’
‘I think you are,’ Flora said, ‘I think you’ve picked up more than the clap from Cole.’ As she went up her path she said over her shoulder, ‘I’ll look into appraisers for you first thing tomorrow.’ Then, ‘Don’t leave that jacket lying where I’ll trip over it.’
Flora went into her bedroom and closed the door. She took off her hat and fluffed her hair. She sat down at her vanity table and peered at her own reflection. She tried to see herself—whatever it was that inspired people to confide in her, then keep her at arm’s length.
The day before she had been on a long drive with Crow. They’d run into each other at the apartment of a friend, near Griffith Park. When they left together Crow asked her to go with him to Pasadena. He was visiting his wife, who was in Las Encinas sanatorium. He said to Flora that he didn’t mind the drive out, but disliked the drive back. He’d often find himself at the racetrack instead of the studio. ‘But I can’t go today because I’m dodging a bookie.’
As he got older, Crow, always an undemonstrative man, had become more taciturn and businesslike. This little insight into his domestic and financial troubles was a great concession, Flora thought, to her and their old friendship. Throughout the trip, as they drove from Griffith Park through Burbank and on past the airports to Pasadena, and while she waited for Crow in a tea shop near the sanatorium, Flora had felt a future in the outing, in Crow’s confidence in her, and his desire for her company.
Now she saw she’d been wrong. It was just that there was something about her. Something half-dead. Crow had given her his heart to weigh, as if she was that Egyptian god—Anubis, was it?—who weighed and measured hearts. Xas was doing something similar. Sometimes Flora felt he was handing himself over to her, but only to work on, not to keep. She felt that he’d finished with himself and it was now her job to make something of him, reassemble him in some order that made sense, and played cleanly, as a film would once she’d finished cutting it.