Read Earth Angel Online

Authors: Laramie Dunaway

Earth Angel (9 page)

BOOK: Earth Angel
12.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

We got out of the car and I followed Daryl to an alley door which he unlocked and entered, holding the door open for me. We
walked through a small room with a bunch of stacked cardboard boxes and an old metal desk with papers in neat piles and a
large calculator. We passed through a beaded curtain, which made me smile. On the other side of the curtain was Gotham City,
Daryl’s business since dropping out of med school. Four aisles of wooden bins held the used record albums, while floor-to-ceiling
racks along the walls held the used comic books, each in a plastic bag. A couple of preteens browsed through the comic books.
A sharply dressed man in his mid-forties flipped through the albums. Available wall space was covered with giant posters of
Wolverine, the Punisher, the X-Men, the Joker, and others.

Daryl turned to me. “I ran out of here without leaving the keys so she can lock up.” He nodded toward the young black girl
behind the counter doing homework. “Just take me a minute and we’re outta here.”

“Daryl, don’t leave on my account. I appreciate your picking me up and everything. Honest, it was very sweet. But I’m fine.
I can grab a taxi to a hotel. I’ve got a flight out in the morning anyway.”

“Just take me a minute,” he said, ignoring my protestations. He went over to the girl, gave her a set of keys. She nodded,
occasionally stealing glances at me when she thought I wasn’t looking. She was about sixteen, thin and pretty with big eyes
and dark brown skin. As Daryl
walked away from her he said, “Any problems, call me at home.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said, and I could hear a tick of jealousy in her voice.

In the car I asked him if he was sleeping with her.

“Monica?” He seemed surprised. “She’s too old.” He laughed. “Jesus, Season, I didn’t realize you held me in such low esteem.”

I felt bad. What difference did it make to me who he slept with? I wasn’t the girl’s mother. He goes out of his way to pick
me up from the police station, never once asks what I was doing there, even though he knows what I told him on the phone is
bullshit, and I’m climbing up on my mountaintop to judge him. I made me sick.

“You can drop me off at any hotel, Daryl. A Holiday Inn or something.”

“I could,” he said. “But I’m taking you home, cooking you a meal, and maybe later Monica will drop by for a wild threesome.”
He looked over at me, grinning. “I’m kidding about Monica. She’s my niece. My older brother’s a high-school algebra teacher;
he married his African-American principal; and our family has been a model of interracial harmony ever since. Except my mother
doesn’t speak to him anymore, and my father divorced my mother because she tried to keep him from visiting his granddaughter.”

I rolled down the window and inhaled a deep breath of Chicago air. “What’s for dinner?”

He made his move after dinner. I was half expecting it, since Daryl had always had a little crush on me back in med school.
He’d never tried anything back then; everyone knew I was unofficially “engaged” to Tim—which meant Tim hadn’t asked me to
marry him, but it was expected we would stay together and probably marry one day if we
got religion, rich, or decided to have children. That status had been okay with me, I hadn’t been anxious to get married anyway.
But I liked the feeling of insulation I’d had by being toe-tagged as “Tim’s girl.” It meant I didn’t have to deal with a parade
of horny med students and aging doctors hitting on me. I didn’t know how to handle that bombardment of sexual attention, which
is why from the age my breasts began to be noticeable, I’d had steady boyfriends to guard me.

The remains of the dinner were spread out on the living room coffee table. Eggplant parmesan, garlic bread, green salad.
Entertainment Tonight
was on the TV but the sound was turned off. Counting Crows was playing on the CD player. We sat on the floor picking at stray
mushrooms and tomato wedges, sipping bitter wine.

“I’m surprised you have a CD player,” I said. “I figured you’d pull out some old bootleg albums from your store, blow some
dust off the vinyl, recite the history of the band and the significance of the record, then flop it on your stereo.”

He shrugged. “Just ’cause I work in the past doesn’t mean I live there. I’ve got a whole new life now, Season. I pay taxes
and do my laundry, just like an adult. I just don’t poke around in other people’s smelly orifices and charge them for it.”

I ignored that dig. Sometime during dinner he’d gone from peppy host to slightly glum. He’d cheered me up earlier so I tried
to do the same for him now. “What do you do for fun, Daryl? You still play tennis?”

“Sometimes. Not much.”

“You dating anyone special?”

He laughed. “That’s something my mom always asks me. ‘Daryl, you dating anyone special? Someone your father and I should meet?’
I think she’s worried that I’m gay. First, her one son marries a member of the African-American
persuasion. Then her other son smooches with men. She’s probably fingered her rosary to little nubs. Actually, I am seeing
a woman, but she lives in Cincinnati, so it’s not exactly a burning passion for either of us. We hook up every couple of months—she
comes here or I go there—and we spend the weekend going to restaurants, movies, and fucking our brains out. In between we
occasionally have phone sex with each other, which is sometimes better than the in-person kind. Love in the nineties. Go figure.”
He got up and started clearing away the dinner dishes.

I got up, loaded my arms with dirty dishes, and followed him into the kitchen. “Since you’re already in a depressed mood,
I might as well ask you why you dropped out of med school. You disappeared so fast, no one knew what happened.”

He dumped some leftover eggplant into the sink. “Well, Season, ever since I was a little tike on my trike, it had always been
my dream to sell old records and comic books so that we may never lose our link to the past. As the philosopher Santayana
said, ‘Those who do not learn from history are bound to relive it.’ ”

I set a plate down, hard on the counter. Actually, what George Santayana (1863–1952) had said was: “Those who cannot remember
the past are condemned to repeat it.” I didn’t mention that to Daryl. I just said: “Quit the bullshit, okay? Did you bring
me up here to show me your collection of spiritual scars? I’d rather be watching TV in the Holiday Inn.”

He was rinsing plates and stacking them in the dishwasher. He put his plate down and reached over and touched my hand. His
fingers were wet but warm from the water. “Sorry, Season.” But his look wasn’t sorry or contrite, it was sympathetic, as if
he’d just remembered there was something wrong with me, which made me mad, so I jerked my hand away, knocking a glass to the
floor.
It broke, but only in three pieces. I stooped to pick up the pieces.

He hopped up on the counter while I picked up the broken glass. “It would be so cool if you cut your finger on the glass.
Then I could play doctor, maybe give you a couple stitches, remember the heartwarming feeling of being in medicine, go back
to med school, and reemerge with a feeling of direction and dedication. Maybe work at the free clinic giving AIDS tests and
handing out condoms. A rectal thermometer in one hand, a tongue depressor in the other. Hope I don’t get them mixed up.”

I tossed the three pieces of glass into the trash and held up my hands. “Sorry, no cuts. Perhaps there’s a fungus between
my toes you could treat.”

He laughed. “All right, the truth of why I dropped out of med school is—dramatic pause—I hated medicine. I hated the smell
of the hospital, the smell of fear in the patients, the smell of the doctors’ colognes or perfumes, the smell of Tidy Bowl
in the toilets. I hated the floors, shiny as an open wound. I hated the body parts, the pale skin, the flabby limbs. I especially
hated the internal organs, the way they just keep working even when you sleep, like spies or assassins. I particularly hated
the pancreas. The pancreas is especially deceitful.”

I just stared at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I don’t know. You asked for my reasons, not that they make sense.” He sighed. “Going into the hospital each day was like
a claustrophobic entering an elevator he knew was going to get stuck between floors. Quitting was the second happiest day
of my life, the happiest day being seventh grade when Sharon O‘Connor spread her legs in music class and let me see her underpants
for the first time. Having actual sex with her two years later wasn’t nearly as memorable.”

I was starting to feel uncomfortable. Not about Daryl,
but about me, about what I was doing trying to play guardian angel by giving money away. How can you ever know if what you’re
doing is the right thing? Tim had always known he wanted to be a doctor, he couldn’t remember
not
wanting to be a doctor. I hadn’t been so lucky. After two years in college without a major, I’d taken a test at the Career
Center. I’d always gotten straight A‘s in school, but I hadn’t felt passion for any particular subject. When the test said
I had an aptitude for medicine, I was so relieved that I had any aptitude for anything, I became a doctor. But it had been
Tim’s dedication to medicine that had sucked me along, like a bicycle drafting behind a truck. I was good at it, just as I’d
always been good at everything I worked at. I just didn’t have any devotion for it. The arrival of the
New England Journal of Medicine
used to thrill Tim; to me it was just homework, something to read and memorize. I was a good doctor, but it wasn’t a calling.

Daryl hopped down from the counter and walked down the hallway. “I want to show you something,” he said from another room.
I heard some rustling papers, books thumping wood. Then he was back carrying a three-ring notebook. He opened it, began leafing
through the pages. “You asked why I left medicine. Why I dropped out. Remember that lecture we got from Dr. Carlisle about
the woman patient who was in the isolation tent for fifty-nine days? For fifty-nine days she was in plastic wrap without any
human hands ever touching her. You remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Here.” He handed the notebook to me. “This is why I dropped out.”

It was a poem. “When did you start writing poetry, Daryl?”

“That night, after seeing the film of that woman.”

I leaned against the counter, propped the notebook against my stomach, and began reading:

The Patient

Not quite alive, nor altogether dead

she struggles to twitch one stubborn eye

and does so—or dreams she does. She’ll try

again later to launch a dormant voice

she fears might be forgotten. The bed

refuses and choice.

It’s all been decided with charts. The red

line means heat, the blue line is cold, until

she’s no longer certain whether her tent still

protects her from the harsh Saharan sun, or if

an Arctic storm’s set in around her bed.

Her heavy arms are stiff

with hunger. Come dinner time, though, the trout

will swim along her veins and her legs will

throb beneath the tons of sleep like some primeval

thing that’s caught in mud and must shake free

now or sleep forever. Something in her throat

uncoils cautiously

like smoke from Apache camps that fear

discovery. Her folks are back again

with more gifts and get-well cards. They even send

old lovers in uniform to try to trick her

into life. But she waits until they’ve gone before

her eye begins to flicker.

I looked up into his face. He was staring at me with a strange intensity, as if my understanding of his poem would be a turning
point in his life. I felt dizzy from the expectation.

“Well?” he said.

I took a deep breath and spoke rapidly, never stopping for another breath. “I don’t understand poetry that well, but it sounds
as if the patient in this poem prefers her isolation to the life that awaits her back with her family
and old lovers. But she isn’t going to give into death. The ending suggests she wants to live, but on her own terms.” I inhaled.
“Right?”

“Sure, I guess,” he said. “But that’s not my point. My point is that after Carlisle’s lecture I went home and wrote this poem.
I struggled with it for two weeks, every day tinkering with the words, getting the rhythm just right, the rhymes subtle. Finally,
when I was finished, I realized I cared more about the poem than the woman who inspired it.” He smiled. “That’s why I dropped
out of medicine.”

I looked back down at the poem and read it again. That’s when I realized the poem wasn’t about the woman at all, but about
Daryl. When I looked up from it, Daryl’s face was coming at mine and suddenly he was kissing me and the notebook was gone
and my clothes were coming off.

CHAPTER SEVEN

S
O
I
LET HIM UNDRESS ME
.

We stood in the tiny kitchen under bright fluorescent lights. Dirty utensils, globs of tomato sauce, and glasses tinted with
red wine were scattered around the counters. Hunks of eggplant stuck to the sink like tumors scraped from a uterus. It felt
like an operating room. He pulled off my fisherman’s sweater and his fingers worked the buttons of my flannel blouse while
I stood there, a convalescent, neither helping nor resisting.

Maybe it was his poetry. Having a notebook full of poetry open on the counter elevated what was happening from a quickie affair
in a dirty kitchen to a romantic interlude. The smell of garlic and Italian dressing bumped it up another notch to operatic
melodrama. Will our heroine go through with it? Will she be able to embrace life once again after her terrible tragedy? Stay
tuned for her aria.

“Do you have a bedroom?” I asked. My blouse was hanging halfway open and my breasts felt terribly exposed, even covered by
my white bra. No man except Tim had seen these breasts, even bra-covered, in seven years. Much to my surprise, I felt my traitorous
nipples hardening inside
the cups. I didn’t want Daryl to see that under these bright lights.

BOOK: Earth Angel
12.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Mistress by Lexie Ray
Wildwood Road by Christopher Golden
Trial by Desire by Courtney Milan
Tropical Terror by Keith Douglass
Lethal Guardian by M. William Phelps
Flora's War by Pamela Rushby