“I would hardly call that a good deed!”
The cherub took Yvette to a little bistro. He wasn’t even sure what he was doing, taking this girl on a date! There were round mirrors on the wall like the windows of a ship. There were stains on the tablecloth. The menu was written in pretty handwriting on a chalkboard on the wall. Their knees were touching one another’s under the table.
She wanted to hear words of love. That was okay. That was what he spent all day doing. He had notebooks full of them. He had been coming up with inspired and ridiculous things for men to say for years.
“You are the girl that I have been waiting to meet my whole life. I feel like I’ve known you forever. I feel like you can read my thoughts and can understand me better than any other human being can.”
He was feeling a little sickened by his own words. He didn’t think they were good enough for her. He suddenly felt dishonest.
“Wow! You do have a way with words.”
“Thank you. I’ve been practising them for about a thousand years, but I’ve never had anyone to say them to.”
“I’ve heard all those lines before.”
“Of course you have, but only because I wrote them. I give them away. I want other people to be happy.”
“What is it you do for a living? Are you an artist?”
“I do play a mean trumpet.”
“You don’t! I adore music! I mean it. I’m really truly crazy about it.”
“Come, I’ll show you.”
He didn’t know why, but he felt like he really wanted to bowl this girl over. He knew that he already had her eating out of the palm of his hand, but it wasn’t enough. He wanted to impress her and impress her some more. He wanted to show her everything that he was capable of. He wanted to turn himself inside out for this girl.
He didn’t have any money though, so she picked up the check.
As they were walking down the street, he took out his trumpet. Because he was a cherub, he played different types of tunes than, say, a seraph might. Although impossible to put into words, his melodies sounded most like a baby cooing in its sleep, a girl laughing under the covers, a moan escaping from someone’s lips while making love. She clasped her hands together when he was done, in awe. The angel was out of line and he knew it. Humans aren’t supposed to hear angels playing while they are still on earth. They are supposed to experience it in heaven, as part of their welcoming reception, so to speak, as a reward for a lifetime of being truly good. But that was what the girl was. She had the biggest, truest heart that he had ever encountered and she deserved to hear all the songs in his repertoire. If she wanted, he would stand there and play them one after the other until the very end of time, when there was no more planet or any people on it.
“That was the most beautiful trumpet playing that I have heard. Really! And I’ve been to all the downtown clubs! You could go to America with playing like that. You could have your own record. You should be famous really.”
And if the angel were a human, he would have blushed. They walked down the street happily, arm in arm.
“I’m glad you haven’t enlisted. My father’s a major. He’s overseas, but we get letters from him all the time.”
When she mentioned her father, she took a tiny gold cross that was hanging on a chain underneath her sweater and gave it a little kiss. He supposed she thought that that would make her father safe. The sweet girl had no idea, did she? If she knew how many angels God had sent down to France that morning, she wouldn’t have much confidence in her little trinket.
What a day, what a day, what a day, the cherub thought. Even though he proudly considered himself above human concerns, he was momentarily taken aback by the sheer solemnity and horror of what was about to happen.
Well, he was certainly going to have a more pleasant time because the girl was clueless. She had never known any real hardship in her life. Because she had no idea what it felt like to grieve, her face was an unreservedly happy one. The sun was setting as they hurried back to her place. He hid in the alley behind her brick house until she leaned out the window and gave him the signal. A black cat rubbed up against his leg. Its tail waved, like the hand of a magician’s assistant exhibiting that there was nothing. Then, since Yvette had poked her head back inside, he opened his two wings, which were small like those of a dove, and they emerged through the slits in his jacket. He flew up to the landing of the fire escape and squeezed through the bedroom window to be with her.
As his wings folded themselves back into his jacket, the cherub paused for a second to take in the condition of the girl’s room. It was cramped and messy and had pink wallpaper and a skinny bed with a brass frame. There were some pairs of dirty stockings hanging off the bed frame like the arms of swimmers holding up their bodies on the side of a pool. There were postcards of Boris Vian stuck on the wall above her bed and an aquamarine blue record player at its foot. There were records lying everywhere with the faces of the singers on the covers, looking like they were crying out in pain, as if they were terrified of being stepped on. For a girl who was so tidy about her physical appearance, she certainly was a slob about other things.
She hopped from foot to foot, saying, “Shh! Shh! Shh!” Or else her mother would come in and kill them both.
Having sex was one of the few things that humans were good at. Lord, they made an entire production of it. He liked all the excitement. Her pulse was wild and she was acting as if it was a matter of life and death. He could tell that she didn’t even really love him but, rather, was just mad about the whole game. He could almost burst out in laughter about how much human beings liked sex. She went behind the closet door and came out with a black lace bra with little pink bows on it and a pair of underwear that almost matched, and a garter belt holding up a pair of nylon stockings that had a hole in one of the thighs. How did they come up with this stuff on their own?
She bent over the bed with her ass in the air and she asked him if he would spank her just a couple of times. He loved it. He loved it.
As Yvette and the cherub rolled off of one another and fell into a happy slumber, the sun was about to rise on the other side of the ocean, in France. The armada crossing the Channel from England was quite something to behold. The ships were like buildings with hundreds of little windows and doors and populated by cooks and janitors and doctors. They were like a whole little city that had somehow drifted off to sea. It was a lot like Noah’s Ark. Except there were no animals. Instead, two of every kind of young man had been piled onto each boat: two jokers, two jocks, two nerds, two ladies’ men.
Major Olivier was standing in the landing craft as it pushed out onto the water ahead of the fleet. He and his boys stood in two lines, as though they were children waiting to be let back in after recess in a schoolyard. He was thinking about how his daughter back in Montreal would go crazy for so many of the young men here. These boys were her age and she would be able to find something good about each one of them. She was so pretty that she attracted all the most popular boys, but she gave all sorts of kids the time of day. He once saw her waltzing around the ballroom with a skinny boy with a lazy eye. She found some lovely quality in them all.
Lately he found that he was seeing all the boys in his company through Yvette’s eyes. He laughed at all their jokes and each and every one of them broke his heart. It was terrible that some of them were going to die. Some of them were a pain in the ass and some of them weren’t his cup of tea, but none of them were anywhere close to being rotten. Not one of them deserved to live or die more than the other.
You could not ask why now, Major Olivier thought. You could not pause to think about the bigger questions while you were at war. You had had time enough as a child to do that.