Earth Angel (23 page)

“Sure. ‘Rinse and spit’ means ‘sell IBM, buy AT&T, don’t claim a home office as a tax deduction or the IRS will audit you,
and don’t go on a crash diet or the patients will think you have AIDS.’ ”

Annie laughed. “I wish my dentist were more like you. He’s more of the tedious golf-stories type, but he’s married to my niece,
so he’s cheap.”

I nodded. But I wasn’t really listening. I was looking at Annie’s left eye. The outer lining of the eyeball, the conjunctiva,
had formed a winglike thickness extending into the cornea. Hardly noticeable, no larger than the head of a small nail. The
condition is called pterygium, caused by prolonged exposure to bright sunlight, especially common in tropical regions. Unless
her vision is noticeably affected, it would be best to leave it alone. If it’s surgically removed, it may return even bigger
than before. I hoped she knew that.

Somebody said something and Annie laughed raucously, tossing her head back and closing her eyes. When she opened them again
I couldn’t see the white thickening in her cornea. It seemed to have disappeared.

* * *

David, Rachel, and Josh cleared the table while I went outside with Annie so she could smoke a cigarette. We stood on the
patio and watched David and the kids through the sliding glass door.

Annie struck a match to her Lucky Strike and inhaled deeply. “I only smoke when I come back to this country,” she said. “I
consider it rude to smoke in somebody else’s country.” She laughed. “That doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

“Sure it does. It’s like being tidy at work and a slob at home.”

“Okay, I’ll buy that.” She took another deep drag and blew the smoke toward the moon. She watched the smoke or the moon or
both for a long while, then turned to me and said, “Me and David, nothing for you to be concerned about.”

I was startled and embarrassed. “Pardon?”

“He and I sleep together on occasion, rare occasions. Maybe once or twice a year since his divorce. I fly in unannounced on
my way to or from someplace, stay over for the night, we sleep together. I’m off in the morning. So, like I said, nothing
to worry about. I think he does it out of politeness more than anything else. The boy has manners.”

“Really, Annie, I hardly know David. We just met two days ago.”

“You’ve slept together, though, right?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. Slamming hips in the back of a van, interrupted to break up a fight, is that ‘sleeping together’?
I shrugged, noncommittally.

“Whatever,” she said. “Point is, he likes you. I can tell. Has he told you about his leg yet, what happened to him with that
tribe?”

“No.”

“What about the Buddhist monastery, the reason they threw him out?”

“They threw him out?”

She laughed, smoke chugging from her mouth. “Oh, yes. Our David can be a naughty boy. He’s no Margaret Mead, honey. He doesn’t
just go into a culture and observe, take notes, study. Not the way the rest of us do. He goes in, learns as much as he can,
then throws a monkey wrench into the society to see what happens. He creates chaos and then writes about what the people do,
how they react, work with or against each other.” She shook her head and flicked an ash onto the grass. “It ain’t exactly
science, but it’s interesting as hell.”

I looked back through the sliding door, watched David scrape food into the trash, rinse dishes, stack them in the dishwasher.
“He looks harmless enough.”

“That boy can cause a Zen master to cuss.” She looked around for a place to stub her cigarette. She seemed like the kind of
woman who might just as easily grind the butt out in her own palm, or simply swallow the burning cigarette. Instead, she stooped,
tapped it against the patio until it was out and held the stub in her hand. “Anyway, whatever your intentions, Grace, I just
wanted to be straight with you. David and I are pals with an option to screw. Nothing more. Do what you want with that information.”

She turned away and rapped on the glass sliding door. “Where the hell’s dessert?”

“M
Y, MY, THIS IS ODD
,”
THE PSYCHIC SAID, RUNNING HER FINGERS
across my palm. She turned around and yelled over her shoulder to her daughter. “Heather, come take a look. Very unusual.”

Heather stepped into the hallway from the bathroom, brushing her thick, red hair. “Just a sec.”

“What is it?” I asked. “I’m not going to assassinate the President or anything?”

She laughed. “Goodness no. It’s just… hmmm…”

David switched on the light on his camera and we both recoiled at the sudden intrusion of brightness. “Sorry,” David said.
“Just checking the lighting before we start.”

The psychic pressed her thick finger into a crevice in my palm, as if she were cleaning grout. I winced. The woman was over
two hundred pounds and had a lot of hand strength. She slowly shook her head. “Unusual spur line. I’ll have to ask my teacher.”

I took back my hand and placed it on my lap. “You have a teacher?” I said.

“Sure. You don’t just pop open a tent and set out a crystal ball. You have to train. You’re a doctor, right?”

My throat slammed shut. I looked at her with wide eyes. Had she recognized me or was this some psychic hocus-pocus (which
I didn’t believe in anyway)?

“Dentist,” David said.

“Dentist, doctor, whatever,” she waved a dismissing hand. “Something with science and billing. I saw the billing. All those
little boxes to check, what’re they called?”

“Super bills,” I said. “For insurance.”

“Yes, that’s what I saw. The super bill.” She smiled. “Well, psychics are like doctors. Doctors see symptoms, they try to
figure out what the cause is. They diagnose. Dentists, too. You read X rays of teeth, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, sometimes you see a shadow, you think it’s one thing but could be another. You make a best guess, right?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“That’s what we do. Different psychics work differently. For me, I see a combination of patterns and shadows. Like looking
at a stucco ceiling and picking out familiar faces. You know, you see Robin Williams, then suddenly it’s Barbra Streisand.
It shifts. I see these shapes and try to make them out before they shift on me, try to find the pattern as it relates to my
client. I diagnose. Sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I see Robin Williams when I should see Barbra Streisand.
You make mistakes diagnosing, don’t you?”

“Sometimes.”

“Well, there you are.” She picked up her coffee mug with I Hate Mornings on it and sipped.

There I was. Sitting in the kitchen of a two-hundred-pound psychic wearing a too-tight lavender jogging suit while we waited
for her sixteen-year-old daughter to finish brushing her hair and applying makeup.

David had talked me into coming along to tape another rite of passage: a psychic teaching her daughter how to use her abilities.
“Like Chris Evert teaching her kid how
to play tennis,” he’d said when I’d expressed skepticism. He’d asked me last night just as I was leaving, after Rachel’s Sabbath
dinner and Annie’s little talk about David. Annie was still there when I’d left, though David did walk me to the car and kiss
me in a way that got my heart pumping. “Please say yes,” he’d said after kissing me. I did.

On the drive to Ventura, where the mother and daughter psychics lived, I’d said to David: “Tell me about Annie.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Did you sleep with her last night?” I surprised myself by asking, even more so by caring what the answer was.

“Yes,” he said.

There was some silence while I thought that over. I didn’t really have any right to feelings here, even if I knew what my
feelings actually were. I’d been lying to him since the first time we’d met. Now I was asking him a tough personal question
and he tells me the truth. He was the honest one, not me. Besides, I reminded myself, I’m only here temporarily, long enough
to complete my task. Dating David is how I would discover what they needed to make their lives better. It was only a means
to an end. Not the end itself.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Why? You’re not going to tell me you didn’t enjoy it, are you?”

“No.”

“She’s a terrific woman. I really liked her. Worse, I admired her.” He stared straight ahead with a miserable look on his
face. “I’m sorry. Really.”

I smiled at him, holding the smile rigid until he looked over from driving to see it and know that I didn’t care. “Nothing
to be sorry about. None of my business, really.”

“You get kind of an English accent when you get mad. Like you’re talking to a butler.”

“I’m not mad,” I said. “And you don’t know me well enough to pick out my habits.”

He didn’t say anything for a few miles. I turned on the
radio, fiddled with the tuner until I found something I liked. Joan Baez singing “Diamonds and Rust.”

“Annie was my teacher,” he said. “I told you that. Now we’re friends. She blows into town every so often and we talk and have
sex and she’s gone the next day. I’m not sorry I slept with her, I’m sorry I slept with her because I’d wanted to sleep with
you. That wasn’t fair to her or you or me.”

“David, don’t explain. I’m only on an extended vacation myself. I’m here for a few weeks, then I’ll be gone.”

He started to say something, stopped. He tapped his hand on the steering wheel, but out of time with the song.

“When did you two start your affair, in grad school?” I asked.

“No, she was married then. A brilliant physicist named Karl Stutz. Great guy. He used to take her classes for fun, even writing
the papers and taking the tests. Played blues harmonica and sang ‘Soul Man’ with a Swiss accent. He died of pancreatic cancer
when he was forty-eight. She loved him like crazy.” He nodded to himself. “That’s the best way to be loved.”

So Annie was a widow, too. Like me. Is this what widows did? We blew into town, fucked, and left before boring anyone.

Traffic was slowing and David pulled into the carpool lane, even though we weren’t yet at the broken lines signifying a legal
entrance. “I didn’t start sleeping with Annie until recently. I never cheated on my wife, that’s not why we divorced.”

“Why did you then?”

His cheeks puffed out and he released a long weary sigh. “Oh, Christ, a whole lot of reasons.”

I waited for him to mention her suicide. When he didn’t, I said, “Annie told me you were a troublemaker. You didn’t just live
with various cultures, you screwed with them to see how they would react.”

“Courage is grace under pressure, that’s what Hemingway said. Societies are the same way. People can be all neighborly and
governments can be benevolent and liberal as long as things are going well. Rain falls, crops grow. But what will people do
when the going gets tough?”

“Is this a sports question? The answer is: The tough get going, right?”

“That’s what I like to find out. It’s like the United States. How did we act when the AIDS virus hit?”

“We looked for someone to blame. Gays, prostitutes, druggies.”

He touched the tip of his nose to indicate the right answer. “It’s a national shame. But you never know what you’ll do under
pressure. Lots of guys go to war just to see if they are cowards.”

“That’s dumb.”

“Depends.”

I said, “Annie told me you got booted out of the Buddhist monastery. What’d you do, take all the monks to a brothel?”

“Something stupid. You don’t want to know. You’ll lose respect for me.”

“You used to worry that I’d stop thinking of you as godlike.”

“I’ve matured.” Something splattered the windshield and he turned on the wipers and smeared it away. He looked over at me
and frowned. “Love letters. That’s why I got booted. I pretended I was a woman and wrote anonymous love letters to the Buddhist
monastery.”

“In Japanese, no doubt.”

“I’m pretty good with some languages. Unfortunately, my only other talent is rock-scissors-paper.”

“Tell me about the letters. Were they obscene?”

“I pretended to be a young girl from the nearby town. Each letter proclaimed how handsome and virile the monk was, how he
inspired me to write poetry. How I understood
his vows of chastity, but that my own loins ached for him, only him, and despite the many suitors who pursued me only for
my beauty, I would not be with another man until I could be with him.”

“Your loins ached. Oh, brother.”

“It loses something in the translation.”

“I doubt it. Anyway, who’d you send it to, which monk?”

“That’s the point,” he said. “I didn’t address it to anyone. The perfumed letters would arrive, once a week at first, then
twice a week, until they arrived once a day. At first when the letters started, the monks were all amused and kidded each
other about who they were meant for. But then subtle changes occurred. A few of them started suspecting themselves of being
the object of affection. Petty quarrels developed over who would read the letter first. As the letters became more impassioned,
even erotic, these few monks started to leave the monastery more and more to wander through the town, each hoping to be personally
confronted by this gorgeous siren.”

“That just seems cruel,” I said.

“Buddhism is all about extinguishing the ego. I just fanned the embers a little. It was like a koan, the little enigmatic
sayings the Zen Buddhists use to teach lessons. You know, like ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ That sort of thing.”

“What is the sound of bullshit flying.”

He laughed. “There’s a famous story of an ancient Buddhist monastery. All the monks were in love with this local peasant girl
because of her beauty. It disrupted the whole monastery. The head of the monastery went to the village and brought back the
dead body of another young woman, also attractive, who had very recently died. He bathed the body in perfume and applied makeup
to the face, pampered her until she looked like a sleeping princess. Then he laid her naked body out in the courtyard. At
first, the
monks couldn’t help but come look, so enamored were they of her beauty. Did I mention she had huge knockers; monks love huge
knockers.”