Earth Angel (12 page)

He gave me a funny look. “So, what do you do, shoot her up with PEA’s and point her in my direction?”

“No, I’m just saying, take the mythology out of romance and you have just what you said, chemistry. A simple chemical reaction.
You ever meet someone and have no sexual interest in her at first, but then you get to know her over a period of time and
suddenly she’s very attractive to you?”

“Sure.”

“Well, we just accelerate the process. Try to show you off in the best light to whoever you’re interested in. Let them get
to know you to the point where we’ve stirred up those PEA’s and let the chemical process run its course.”

He nodded as if it made sense.

“Is there someone you had in mind? Someone specific you’re interested in?”

“Well, there is someone.” He stared at the ragged fringes of his napkin, then nodded again. “I don’t know…”

“Who, Gordon?”

He didn’t answer. Finally he looked up, his eyes soft and hopeful. “Grace, just tell me you won’t make me look foolish. If
this doesn’t work out, word will get around the department, and I will end up…” He thought for a moment, then gave up and
shrugged. “It would be very difficult for me around here. You understand? Pathetic or not, this is my home. This is where
I live and work. It’s all I’ve got.”

“Trust me, Gordon.” I forced another confident smile and slid my trembling hands from the table and placed them on my trembling
legs.

J
ACKIE
F
REARS TURNED HER BACK TO THE CLASS TO WRITE ON THE
chalkboard. As she reached up with the chalk, her short denim skirt rode up the back of her thigh, revealing a tan mole shaped
like an arrow pointing up between her legs, like those old diner signs that say EATS. She lifted up on her toes to cross a
t
, and calve muscles tightened like fists.

I was peeking into the classroom from the open door. I glanced at the students. Some were watching what she wrote, copying
down everything in their spiral notebooks or typing into their laptop computers. But most of them, women included, were staring
at Jackie Frears’s exquisite legs. They were long and tan and shapely even in the flat sandals she was wearing. The sexy exposed
bottom half of her body seemed in sharp contrast to the top half, which was primly covered with a crisp white blouse with
long sleeves. Her thick, black hair was piled on top of her head and she wore glasses with thick, black frames.

“These are some of the better films in the sports genre,” she said as she wrote. “You’re going to have to see at least three
of them on your own so you can write the compare-and-contrast paper.” The list of films lengthened on the
green chalkboard:
The Hustler, The Natural, Champion, Deliverance
. “Now some of you may be surprised to see
Deliverance
included with sports films, but I’ll explain that choice in a minute.”

Somebody made a squealing sound like a pig.

Jackie Frears set the chalk down and turned around with a smile. “Yes, well, that’s not the sport we’ll be talking about for
you Ned Beatty fans. Though, just as a footnote related to an earlier discussion we had of women in movies, the rape of Ned
Beatty is one of the most memorable scenes in movies. When you think of
Deliverance
, it’s the first thing that comes to mind, right?”

“ ‘Them panties, too,’ ” a boy in the front row mock-drawled.

“Exactly. You even remember the lines from that scene. What’s odd about that is that there have been a thousand or more similar
scenes in movies in which men rape women. Yet, how many of those can you quote the dialogue from?”

The boy in the front row shifted uncomfortably.

“I’m not trying to lay some heavy feminist interpretation on you, but one has to wonder why, if that scene is so memorable
and powerful, haven’t we seen more of them in movies. Whereas we can’t seem to get enough footage of women being raped.”

No one answered.

“Well,” she said smiling, “that’s entertainment.” She walked over to the desk and leaned against the edge, facing the students.
Suddenly she looked over at me. “Can I help you?”

My tongue corkscrewed down my throat like an escaping gopher. I opened my mouth, hoping appropriate words would leap out on
their own. They didn’t.

“Are you looking for someone? Did you leave something in this classroom earlier?”

I shook my head. For God’s sake, I was a thirty-year-old
woman, a fucking doctor of medicine. Besides, this was Gordon Moore’s ideal woman, the target of my visitation. “I was just
passing by. The discussion sounded interesting. I didn’t mean to disrupt your class.”

“On the contrary, we welcome disruption in this class. Don’t we, Evan?” She turned to the boy who’d made the pig squealing
noises. The class laughed. She turned back to me. “There are plenty of empty seats. You’re welcome to stay.”

I started to refuse. I think I was even bowing slightly as I retreated, imitating some kind of geisha. But I realized that
this was an opportunity. I’d come here to spy on her in order to figure some way to meet her and begin my campaign on Gordon’s
behalf. This would do. I entered the room and a few students applauded. “Thank you,” I said to Jackie Frears.

She didn’t respond. She stood up and began lecturing on the nature of sports films. “The problem with American sports films
is they can’t decide what moral they want to teach. On one hand, there’s always some warmhearted soul who blubbers about how
winning isn’t everything, yak, yak, yak. But the film almost always ends with the hero winning. Which suggests that the message
is that winning
is
everything, but the best way to win is to
pretend
winning isn’t everything. That’s like David Carradine in
Kung Fu
. He spends the whole show telling us that violence solves nothing, then kicks everybody’s ass and solves the problem. See,
Americans would
like
to believe that violence doesn’t solve problems, but they just can’t. Same with sports movies. They’d
like
to believe that winning isn’t everything, they just can’t bring themselves to. Nobody wants to live with the consequences
of their own philosophy.”

She continued lecturing, answering questions, drawing diagrams on the chalkboard. The students were attentive and she bantered
with them frequently. I found myself
caught up in her lecture and almost forgot why I was here. I forced myself to concentrate on the real matter at hand. What
was I up against? Her face was odd, mismatched parts—a thin, long nose, full lips, square chin—but they added up to an attractive
woman in her mid-thirties. Someone who could throw a baseball or an insult with equal velocity. No wonder Gordon had the hots
for her.

Poor Gordon. He didn’t have a chance.

It took me three weeks to set up the first date between Gordon and Jackie. The only catch was that Jackie didn’t know it was
a date.

“This is stupid,” she said. “I don’t play tennis. I ski, I jog, I play racquetball.”

“You play tennis,” I said, pulling a pair of athletic shoes from her closet. “Everybody plays tennis. Bogart played tennis.
So did Audie Murphy.”

“Bogart sailed. Audie Murphy flew planes.”

“But they wanted to play tennis.” I tossed the shoes to her. They landed upright and pigeon-toed.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed in white shorts and a red scoop-neck T-shirt that revealed full, freckled breasts.
She frowned at the shoes I’d thrown to her. “All right, I used to play tennis. But that was another life. Now I prefer racquetball.”

“Tough shit, you’re playing tennis. We need a fourth and you’re not doing anything today.”

“I was going to work on my script.”

“Your script sucks. Give it a rest.”

Jackie laughed and pulled on her tennis shoes. She had a deep, throaty laugh that made you stop what you were doing to listen
to it, as if it were an old song on the radio you used to love as a kid. Tim had that kind of laugh, and no matter what he
did wrong or how much you might hate him at a particular moment, when he let go with that laugh, instant forgiveness.

“I don’t have any tennis clothes,” she complained.

“I bought you some of those tennis panties with ‘Love Deuce’ embroidered across the rump.”

“I guess these shorts will do.” She slipped into her shoes.

The more I got to know Jackie, the more I understood why Gordon was so attracted to her. Aside from being physically gorgeous,
she had a brilliant mind that missed nothing and remembered everything. We’d walk to the coffee machine during a class break
and she’d comment on half a dozen snatches of overheard conversations and do a character analysis of the speakers we’d passed.
I’d heard nothing and barely even noticed the people whose clothes and futures she’d be describing. But more than her looks
and mind, she had an undertow of sexuality that made everything she did somehow seem daring. I always felt daring just being
with her, as if I were thinking about shoplifting. Yet she also reminded me of Carol: hardworking, dedicated, and funny. She
came to class prepared to teach and students respected her for it.

Immediately after that initial class I’d sat in on, I’d thanked her and she’d invited me to sit in again. So I did. I guess
that impressed her, because she started directing an occasional question at me. I’d always been a closet film junkie with
an illicit passion for obscure B movies, so I was able to answer many of her questions. (Tim used to tease me about my encyclopedic
knowledge of movies, but in a way that made me think he was secretly annoyed that I knew so much about something so useless.
Something that wasn’t medicine.) Sometimes Jackie would talk about a particular movie and I would be the only one in the class
to have seen it or even heard of it. Her face would light up and she’d continue talking about this film, looking directly
at me. Once she spent half an hour on
Sergeants 3
, the Western remake of
Gunga Din
, starring Frank Sinatra, Joey Bishop, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr.

We’d had coffee after class a few times, went to a few
movies together. We became friends. She was open about her life, willing to talk about anything. She’d been divorced twice,
once from a first cousin she’d eloped with when she was eighteen, and the second time from a famous Hollywood director whose
movies I admired. Now she was teaching part-time at five different colleges, trying to earn enough money to finish making
her film, which she’d written and was directing. She’d already shot twenty minutes of it, which cost her twenty thousand dollars,
and was slowly chipping away at the other fifty minutes. She always had a copy of the script with her in her oversized purse.
In the few minutes we would wait for our coffee or for the theater lights to dim and the movie to start, she’d pull out the
tattered script and start rewriting. Mostly she was looking for ways to save money. Finishing this movie was her obsession.
Then she could return to Hollywood, not as somebody’s wife whom producers were obligated to see, but as a bona fide filmmaker
with a finished product they were begging to see. That was her dream.

“I’m sure I can sell this to a distributor. Maybe first take it to all the film festivals for a year. Get noticed, make contacts.
If I can ever finance the damn thing. At this rate I’ll be editing it when I’m eighty.”

“What about your ex, the famous director?” I asked.

“How do you think I got the first twenty grand?”

I worked the conversation around to her romantic life. Her dedication to finishing her film had lately kept her from dating
much. “Guys take up a lot of time and they hate it when I’d rather work than go out with them. And dating other filmmakers
is no good. They’ve always got their own projects going, and I hate it when they’d rather work on their film than go out with
me.”

“Hypocrite.”

“Card-carrying. Anyway, I get laid when I need to, which is as much as I want right now—someone who goes hump in the night
and disappears with the dew in the morning.”

“Very poetic. That should be in your script.”

“It is,” she laughed.

Ironically, she was always trying to set me up with her male friends, other teachers or members of the San Francisco filmmakers
underground. I refused, having lost any interest in dating. I hadn’t even had any desire for sex since that night with Daryl,
and that whole attempt had been more for his sake than mine. Right now sex seemed like a strange ritual of animals one might
see on some nature documentary on TV, something like penguins swimming under the ice. Interesting concept, but nothing I’d
want to try. I’d called Daryl a couple times, just to say hi and not make him feel bad that our sex had gone so badly. He’d
called me a few times as well. Once when he called, Jackie was at my apartment and answered the phone because I was in the
bathroom. As soon as she yelled, “Some guy named Daryl St. James wants to talk to Susan,” I stopped in the middle of my pee,
yanked up my underpants and jeans, and bolted for the phone, still zipping myself up. I didn’t want Daryl telling her who
I was.

“I told him there is no Susan,” Jackie said, “but he recited the phone number and it’s yours.”

“Pet name,” I explained, taking the phone. Thank God, she’d misheard Season as Susan. Season might have triggered a memory
from the news.

Actually, I’d gotten to like Jackie quite a bit and was feeling terribly guilty for my subterfuge. In some ways, I was even
closer to her than I was to Carol. Maybe it was because I was just a created character with Jackie, not responsible for any
of my actions. Anyone who judged Grace Weiss was judging smoke and mirrors. Whatever the reason, we clicked. When the guilt
got too bad I’d call Carol and pretend I was in London or Florence or somewhere exotic and ramble on about all the exciting
day trips I’d taken and all the wonderful food I’d eaten. I had to remind myself that Carol was what was real and that
one day I would return home and pick up my life again. As much as I liked Jackie, she wasn’t a part of my real life. The person
she was friends with didn’t even exist.