California Angel Read online

  Normally Toy would have declined such an offer. She didn't like to interrupt her husband at his work. Most of what she had to say was trivial and could wait. "Get him, please, Karen," she said. "I'll hold."

  A few moments later, the woman's voice came back on the line. "I ... I don't know what to say. He doesn't want to talk to you. Maybe his procedure this morning went bad, and you should call back later.

  You know how he is. Sometimes he gets in these funks when things don't go right."

  "I don't think so," Toy replied, sighing deeply. He was being obstinate, trying to punish her for walking out last night, trying to reassert his control. "Look, Karen," she said, "I hate to get you involved, but I have to ask you to deliver a message for me. Tell Stephen I'm going away for a few days, that I love him and I'll miss him, but I think we both need some time apart." She paused and caught her breath. It was embarrassing to expose their personal problems to outsiders, but her husband had left her no choice. "Will you do that for me? I'd really appreciate it. We're having some problems right now, as you may have guessed."

  "Sure," the woman said. "Are you all right, Toy? Is there anything I can do?"

  "No," Toy answered, "I'm fine, but thanks anyway."

  Once she had hung up, she sat perfectly still on the edge of the bed, mourning what appeared to be the demise of her marriage. She'd have to go to the house during the noon break and get some of her things.

  Just then Simon padded into the room and leaped onto her lap. She picked the heavy cat up in her arms and held him in front of her face. "What I need is a big, fuzzy guy like you," she said, nuzzling her face against the cat's fur. "You wouldn't care how much money I spent, would you, Simon?"

  Sylvia's bulky form filled the doorway. Her hair was disheveled, her eyes puffy from lack of sleep, and her mouth open in a wide yawn. "Don't kid yourself," she told Toy a few moments later. "Simon here is no different than any other male. He'd want you to give all your money to the SPCA."

  "Well, Simon," Toy cooed to the cat, "I can handle the SPCA." Then she turned to Sylvia and smiled. "As long as he doesn't want a Mercedes, he's my kind of guy."

  "Did I hear you talking to Stephen?"

  Toy shook her head, placing the cat in the center of the unmade bed. "He wouldn't talk to me, but I left a message with his receptionist that I'm going away."

  "Praise the Lord," Sylvia said dramatically. "I was certain you were going to run straight back to him and leave me high and dry. I want you to go to New York with me. We can have a really good time." She fell silent and stared at Toy intently. "If you go back now,

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  he'll never let you live your own life. Now's the time to assert yourself, Toy, show him you mean business."

  Toy simply nodded. She was going to assert herself all right, she decided. She was going to assert herself right out of her marriage, end up in an ugly divorce. She knew her husband. He would fight her for every stick of furniture, every last dime they possessed. While Sylvia headed to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee, Toy brushed her tangled hair in the dresser mirror, her eyes going to the design on the navy blue T-shirt. California Angels, she thought, seeing the big ^4 with the halo emblazoned on the front of the shirt. Too bad it was only a baseball team, she thought sadly. Right now she could use a few angels.

  Then she grimaced at her reflection, dropping the brush on the bureau. Facing an impending divorce was a reality, and thinking of angels and magical creatures was only fantasy. Toy knew there were no angels. If they existed, they would have never allowed things to get this bad.

  All night long Raymond had remained awake staring at the ceiling, walking to the window and sitting on the window ledge, smoking, thinking. At four he had started painting, splashing paint on a huge blank canvas, then tossing it aside and starting over with a charcoal pencil. He sketched the face, the first face ever that was not the face in his dreams, the mysterious redheaded woman. Once the sun streaked through the windows of the loft, bathing it in a golden, hazy glow, he found the piece of paper Sarah Mendleson had given him the night before with her phone number on it.

  "May I speak to Sarah, please?" he said when a woman answered.

  '"Hold on, I think she's still asleep."

  A few minutes later, a voice, still groggy, picked up the phone. "Hello, this is Sarah."

  "Raymond Gonzales," he said. "Was that your mother?"

  "Oh." she said, laughing, her excitement at his calling noticeable in her voice. "No, that was one of my roommates."

  "You said last night that you'd pose for me. I'd like to see you."

  "Really? When 1 ?"

  "Now."

  "Now'?"

  "Now. Can you come to my loft?"

  "I ... I don't know. Where is it?"

  "In TriBeCa," he said.

  "I don't know." she said, slightly nervous. She didn't really know this man. Although intriguing, he was strange and dark, and his calling her this early in the morning frightened her. When anyone was too eager, it struck a chord of alarm. "Maybe I better not," she said. "Why don't we get to know each other a little better first?"

  "Take a taxi. I'll pay."

  -Really?"

  "Really."

  The line was silent while she thought. Finally she made her decision. A person had only one lifetime, and good-looking single men were hard to find. "Okay. Wait while I get a pencil and write down the address."

  When she rang the buzzer later. Raymond raced down the stairs and paid the cabdriver. Then they waited for the elevator. He didn't want her to smell the urine and filth in the stairwell, make her hike up the four flights of stairs to his loft. Normally he avoided elevators, though. He didn't like to be that close to people. "Where do you live?"

  "Queens," she said softly, somewhat nervous. "I rent a house with three other girls. That way we can afford the rent."

  "This is it."

  The elevator door opened directly into his loft. "It's wonderful." she said, walking straight into the center of the room and turning around in circles. Canvases lined the walls, some covered with vibrant images, some blank and expectant. She stepped up close to one and studied it. His style was different than anything she had ever seen. Although from a distance the woman in the painting appeared three-dimensional and lifelike, up close Sarah could see that she was constructed out of zillions of tiny dots of paint, all of them different colors, similar to a mosaic. If she stared at it long enough, she could see the colors swirling and moving on the canvas as if they were mysteriously infused with life. It reminded her of her biology class, studying cellular structure under a microscope.

  She was so fascinated, she tilted her head and tried to determine what exactly he was trying to accomplish. Realizing she was too close, she stepped back and saw that the woman looked as if she had wings. But the woman was like no angel Sarah had ever seen, and when studied carefully, she decided he had not intended to paint wings. The painstakingly blended dots of colors seemed to be depicting light, as if the woman was glowing from within.

  Stepping to the other side of the room. Sarah then saw a huge

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  board suspended by chains from the ceiling. At first she thought it was a piece of electronic equipment, that the small circles of brilliant colors that covered it were lighted dials. On closer inspection, however, she saw that it was actually an enormous pallet. What he had done, she assumed, was carefully blend various colors in every possible shade. On the floor next to the pallet were tubes of primary colors, but on the pallet were the most exotic hues imaginable.

  Then she saw the canvas on the easel, the one he had started working on that morning. The clunky black boots from the day before were gone, and on her feet were black ballet slippers. She stepped closer and closer in tiny baby steps, as if bracing herself for what she was about to see.

  For a long time she just stared at the canvas. All that was on it was the outline of a face, some other broad strokes where he thought the mov
ement would be, his initial concept. "Who is she? Is this your model?"

  "Yes," Raymond said, compelled to step up behind her, allowing his hands to do as they wished. They wished to find her waist, touch the fabric of her dress, feel the heat emanating from her body. "She's you, Sarah. Or at least she will be when I'm finished. Now she's just a ghost, a shadow. Soon she'll be real."

  Sarah put her hand over her mouth and leaned back against him, fully aware of what she was doing, aware that she was now touching him, his breath on her neck, his strong scent of paint, turpentine, and perspiration intoxicating and heady. She sucked it in, her heart racing. He was painting her. Most of the men she dated were arrogant animals, leaving her with nothing but unpleasant memories. This man, as different as he might be, was going to preserve her likeness for eternity.

  "I'm so flattered," she said. "I never dreamed . . ."

  Sarah was wearing a yellow-and-green-print blouse and black pants. Raymond was certain he could smell the printed flowers. Green. Yellow. Grass and squash. A mossy pond and a yellow field of sunflowers, van Gogh's sunflowers. His now, he thought. "Don't leave me," he said.

  She had the eyes of his angel. She had brought all the smells and colors with her, swirling around her head like a halo. "She was an angel. You look like her. Maybe you're an angel, too."

  "Not quite," she said, looking away, thinking his statement was rather strange. People had called her a lot of things before, but no

  one had ever called her an angel. "Do you have any champagne? Wine? Beer?"

  Although it was only ten o'clock in the morning, he didn't comment. To Raymond, days and nights were the same except for the light. He needed the light to paint. "I don't have champagne," he said, "but I have a bottle of wine." He crossed the floor to the refrigerator, brushing by her and carrying her scent now on his skin, in his clothes, along the shafts of his hair. All her odors had blended into one, and he instantly knew her. He knew just how her underarm would smell, the dark, moist place between her legs, the nape of her neck, the small of her back, the inside of her thigh. Green. She would smell green.

  Finding two glasses on the floor, he filled them both with wine and reached a long arm over to hand her a glass. Then he stood perfectly still and silent, watching as she drank, the bubbles and moisture beading up on her lips. They weren't ruby red today but russet brown. "Why only your lips?" he asked.

  "What?" she said.

  "Why paint only your lips?"

  "Oh," she said. "Why not? I like my eyes the way they are."

  "I like your eyes, too," Raymond said. "They're lovely."

  "Really?" she said, a pink tongue sliding across her bottom lip, retrieving the dots of moisture and bringing them back inside her mouth.

  "Don't you like your lips?"

  "Not as much." She held her glass out, both arms extended.

  He was several feet away, braced against the back wall. He leaned forward and filled the glass, immediately returning to his previous position. He was studying her, enthralled by her.

  "Why not?"

  "I don't know. Hey, that's enough questions. Tell me about yourself. How long have you been an artist?"

  "All my life. How long have you been beautiful?"

  She smiled a coy smile. "All my life."

  He didn't feel his feet moving or see her moving toward him. They simply met in space and he placed his forehead against her forehead. "May I touch you?"

  "Is that a little like asking me to dance?"

  "Could be."

  His arms encircled her waist and he pulled her close, burrowing his nose in her hair. It was dark, heavy, moist, slick. It reminded him

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  of his mother's hair, but hers was wood brown while Sarah's was almost blue-black. "Is your father Oriental?" he asked, never having seen hair like hers on a Caucasian.

  "He's from Argentina. My mother's family is English."

  "My parents are from Mexico."

  "Latin," she said, a little smacking noise coming from her mouth. "We're both Latin. That could be trouble, you know?"

  The talking had worn him out. He didn't want to hear her voice anymore or his own, or any sounds whatsoever but the ones generated by the colors swirling around her. Pushing her away, he turned to the canvas and picked up his brush. She didn't move. When he stared at her, narrowing his eyes, then dabbing his brush in the paint on his suspended pallet, Sarah tossed her head back and struck an alluring pose.

  Time passed, no sounds inside the loft except the traffic outside, the loud voices of people passing beneath them, the ticking of his alarm clock. One hour turned to two hours and then three hours. She moved. Her leg was cramping, she said. He set his brush down and stared at the canvas, knowing instantly that it was wonderful, had the potential to be his finest piece. The figure he had painted was ethereal, gorgeous, the slender young body, the small, perfectly shaped breasts, barely visible through her lightweight yellow-and-green blouse.

  "What are you going to call it?" she asked, her voice echoing in the large room.

  "I ... I don't know," he stammered, suddenly agitated and annoyed, the spell broken by the sound of her voice. His face twisting in a grimace, he moved his brush to the palette and swiped it back and forth across the canvas again and again in jerky, violent movements, covering the image he had so carefully created with slashes of black paint. He couldn't paint this woman. She wasn't his angel. She was just like all the others, a smelly, abrasive, loud-mouthed human being. What purpose would it possibly serve to immortalize her? There were millions of others just like her.

  **Why'd you do that?" Sarah said tensely, abandoning her pose and walking over closer to the canvas. "Now it's ruined. It was so pretty and I stood for so long." She turned around and faced him, waving her arms in the air. "Why? Tell me why?"

  "Leave me alone," Raymond snarled at her, mimicking her arm movements and speaking in a falsetto voice in order to express him-

  self. "It was my creation, not yours. If I want to destroy it, I'll destroy it."

  "What's wrong with you?" she said, bewildered. "Why do you copy me like that? You sound so silly. And why are you so moody?" She started walking toward him and then stopped, seeing the dark look in his eyes. "I mean, I know about artistic temperaments, but don't you think you're carrying it too far?"

  "Go home, Sarah Mendleson," Raymond said, the look in his eyes flat and unemotional. "There's nothing here for you. The place I'm in is not a place you can ever go."

  Tossing his brush to the floor, he threw himself face first onto the bed, overwhelmed with despair and anguish.

  "You're crazy," Sarah exploded. "You're not an artist, you're a lunatic."

  Raymond did not move or speak. He had crawled deep inside himself, where he felt safe and protected, where existing required no effort, where communicating wasn't necessary. In no time he was reliving that day in the Sunday school class, calling for the beautiful creature who had touched his life to come to him, help him, show him the way again. For weeks now he had felt himself falling into the black hole inside his mind. The glass prison beckoned and he was powerless to resist. It was too hard dealing with his illness, trying to become a part of a world that he couldn't understand, a world that seemed to accommodate every evil that existed, but could not accommodate a person like himself.

  Sarah stood and stared at him on the bed, shaking her head in confusion. Several times she glanced at the canvas, trying to see the remnants of her image, but with the black paint it was distorted and depressing. This strange young man had brought her to life and then erased her, obliterated her. He was too unpredictable, too frightening. Looking at the painting again, it was as if he wanted to destroy her, not just the image in the painting. In the slashes of black paint Sarah saw enormous anger and bitterness. She had made a mistake. She should have never come here. But at least it wasn't a mistake she couldn't rectify.

  Anxiously she grabbed her purse and left, leaving him to wrestle with his demons al
one.

  mallards, the fifty-two different birdhouses, all painted in different colors, dangling from the limbs of trees like lanterns.

  Pulling into the driveway and parking the car, Toy realized she had forgotten all about the stone angels. It was funny, she thought. Sometimes you looked at something so long, you forgot it was there. When she was a child, the neighborhood kids had all teased her, saying she lived in a cemetery. Some of the kids swore her parents were junk dealers. They were right about the angels, she thought, getting out and slamming the door on the Volkswagen. When they had put in a new housing tract on the other side of the freeway where the old cemetery used to be, her father had rented a truck and salvaged some of the discarded stone monuments. Like Toy, he didn't like to see things go to waste, even things he had no immediate use for.

  No wonder she had decided to dress up like a nun, she decided, laughing with relief. With the mission only a block away and the stone angels watching her every move, it was easy to see how she had developed this kind of fetish.

  She didn't go to the front door because she spotted her mother in the yard, bent over as she pulled weeds from around the base of one of the stone monuments. "Mom," she yelled, opening the gate and entering the yard. "You're going to break your back doing that. Why don't you use the weed eater I bought you?"

  "Oh," she said, standing and removing her gardening gloves, her face beaming, "I enjoy gardening. It's relaxing. I hate that noisy weed thing." She paused and then continued, studying her daughter's face. "How are you, baby? This is a pleasant surprise. We didn't expect to see you until next week."

  Toy looked into her mother's tired eyes, so like her own, and stepped into her arms. In her late sixties, she was still slender and attractive, but her hair was now snow white and her face deeply lined. "I'm fine, Mom," she said. "Where's Dad?"

  "Where else?" her mother shrugged, squinting in the sunlight. "In his workshop. Since he retired, he's been going at it like a madman. He insists he can sell the things he's making, but I'm not so certain."