Galatea (6/8)

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Spoilers: None. You can imagine this sometime during the second or third season. Your choice.

Disclaimers: The characters and situations of the television program "Charlie's Angels" are the creations and property of Spelling-Goldberg Productions and Columbia Pictures Television, and have been used without permission. No copyright infringement is intended. However, I retain the rights to the plot. You may download and distribute this story as long as my name stays on the by-line.

Rating: R

Summary: Flashback time! Alan muses on his relationship with Kelly.

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There was nothing left for me in New York after Sylvia left. Everything had changed. It was as if someone had come into my life and rearranged everything so that nothing was comfortable. Nothing was snug.

I was left standing in an apartment. The eviscerated space would laugh at me, mock me. My life had changed. I could not move forward, I certainly couldn't go back, so I had to turn aside.

Although I had lived on the East Coast my entire life, nothing would ever be the same here. My father was dead, my mother remarried and living in St. Louis. Sylvia was prowling the city. I decided to get as far away from all that pain as possible.

I moved to LA.

If New York was the big apple, then LA was the big nipple. The LA most people thought existed: Hollywood, Beverly Hills, the Sunset Strip; it was all an illusion. People think of soaring incomes, extravagant architecture, and chauffeur-driven poodle trips to the pet salon.

There is LA, the place. And there is LA, the worldwide symbol for movie-money wealth. Contrary to popular belief, the trees did not drip with money and the streets were not paved with gold. Sure, the raw beauty of the girls in Hollywood overpowered everything else and made you want to possess them… at least until avarice clouded their eyes.

The truth was that most people out here were all front and no back, like the sets and indifferent stage hand had painted. I suppose most Angelenos are used to it. Doug certainly was. I shacked up with him till I could earn enough money to get my own digs.

His apartment was south of city hall and west of Rodeo Drive. A hop, skip, and a jump away from ICM, CAA, and William Morris. The Big Three, the reps for anybody who was anybody. I knew this because Doug had gotten me a date with some air-headed starlet who had pontoons for breasts. I met her at one of the agencies, I forgot which, and we used her car.

That was the first and last date I went on with anyone remotely connected with show business. The sad thing was that to Doug, she was the only person who was even slightly interesting to talk to. At the time we were an oddity: two red-blooded, flamingly heterosexual men caught in the sexual revolution with standards. Not that they were even all that high. You couldn't fuck a brain, but you couldn't love a pile of silicone and plastic hooked on cocaine either.

I got a job with the LA Times through Doug's connections. By day I would draw editorial cartoons, by night I would help tend bar at Benny's. On weekends I'd get restless, I'd usually be out on the streets, looking for something to draw.

Hollywood and Vine, Venice Beach, they all seemed to be a mecca for subjects but I got tired of drawing eccentrics, posers, and Jim Morrison acolytes. I spent more and more time at the courthouses.

The only thing that can beat a courthouse for human drama is a hospital, and since I could hardly loiter around a hospital I spent most of my time drawing people at court. Faces bowed by grief, hands obsessed with revenge, eyelids closed in prayer for restitution and justice… I drew them all.

It was while I was preying on these unknowing people that I happened to take my sketchpad and pencils to a massive stock-fraud case. The woman on the witness stand captured my attention.

Pearls caressed her slender throat. Her back was straight, her face was turned toward the lawyers. Her hands were on her lap, her fingers holding conference with their brethren. Her legs were crossed at her silky knees but not at a provocative angle. She looked alert, sleek in her black suit, like a panther waiting to spring.

I was drawn to her, like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. It was synchronicity itself that Sabrina was not only in the courtroom but would have no trouble introducing us.

I took the hand she proffered after introducing herself as Kelly Garret. Her grip was strong and I found myself spitted by her eyes. Sylvia had eyes that were two soft and rounded, now concealing, now revealing. I couldn't trust eyes like that. But Kelly's were deep and dark, like a thundercloud. You could be held without desire or despair for all eternity in eyes like that.

We stood there for a moment, in an almost adolescent awkwardness. I tried to make polite social noises, but my palms were sweating and I was sure everyone could see the electrons writhing between us.

Sabrina and the woman named Kris had, in the infinite wisdom all women possessed, maneuvered us into a small diner near the courthouse.

In the sunlight filtering through the diner, I could see her sherry-colored lips, hair tinted by the sun and wind, her face delicate and fine-boned, her breath smoking the window on this cold spring morning.

Conversation came surprisingly easy after the first few obvious questions about jobs and interests. She liked to dance, I liked trying to dance. She loved Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper, I wanted my paintings hanging beside theirs. She loved to cook, I loved to eat. We both loved Audrey Hepburn (although for totally different reasons), Zinfandel, and listening to the LA philharmonic or a big jazz band. Neither of us could believe that I still didn't have a car.

Talking with her was like being in an open convertible on a freeway; autobiographical sentences swerved and veered off. We never reached the center of anything, but it was an enjoyable ride.

We must have talked for an eternity. I don't think either of us had talked to anyone in a long time, not anyone of much sensibility, anyway. We liked to talk to each other so much that we managed to beat the awkwardness.

"Now that you're convinced that I'm not some crazy…" I had said, trying to phrase the question properly. She was smiling. Sabrina and Kris had long since gone and the moon was high in the sky.

"I've been convinced?" she asked, one eyebrow elegantly creasing into an arch.

"Well, if it'll take a little more time, how about having dinner with me?" I asked, my mouth dry.

"Doesn't this count as dinner?" She teased, her eyes sparkling.

I let out a laugh and the tension ebbed. "You're not making this easy."

Kelly's shoulders lifted in an elegant shrug.

"You haven't been taking your eyes off me," she observed. "I could have picked your pocket nineteen times by now."

I must have been staring at her as if she were something cold to drink. "Only nineteen times? Tsk tsk tsk, what an amateur. I've already stolen your car."

She laughed, and I laughed with her. It was a warm, hearty laughter that was wonderful because it was honest. This woman wasn't laughing politely or faking interest. It wasn't even a great joke, and she laughed with me.

I wanted to walk with her then. I thought the most pleasant thing at that moment would be to walk in the evening drizzle, close enough for an unconscious brush of fingers. I cursed LA because it wasn't a walking city the way New York was. I cursed the fact that I didn't have a car and I didn't know how to drive, so I couldn't take her home.

"Listen, this was nice," she said as she got up and placed her business card in my shirt pocket. "I'll see you again."

"When?" I asked eagerly.

"Sometime."

"Anytime."

I called her the very next day. I had bribed Doug with visions of clean bathrooms and dishes for a month in exchange for seats at the Hollywood Bowl to watch Tony Bennett. I packed a picnic basket with the best Zinfandel I could find, and the best food at Benny's. I lifted the receiver, dialed her number, and her voice slipped inside my ear. I asked if she'd care to bring a warm blanket and join me.

Amazingly she said yes.

We picnicked in the park near the amphitheater. Kelly had a green scarf that seemed to hit me in the face no matter which side of her I walked on. It made her laugh so I didn't mind at all. We watched the people come and go, one or two couples were also killing time before the concert. Others were walking their dogs, talking to their lovers, watching their children… we made up stories about them. She was good at making up stories.

A pleasant sensitivity had built in my chest, almost a warmth… something that had nothing to do with the wine and everything to do with her. It was quieter than any sensation I had ever known. I felt alive. The city, for all its faults, seemed to glisten in the sunset.

Clouds crept between cliffs of burning skyline. In the distance we could hear the low roar of evening traffic out on the Hollywood Freeway. She sat beside me, tilting her head like a tulip to the dying sun. I leaned forward gently and tried to kiss her. She let me for a moment then drew her head back.

She straightened her head so suddenly that I was forced to look her full in the face. I have never in my life met such a direct look, in such an uncompromisingly honest face.

I remember hoping that she wouldn't find me wanting. I remember her lips, full and firm, and the sweet taste of them. The first shock of recognition when my mouth covered hers. The recognition that both of us enjoyed that first, chaste kiss.

Tony Bennett was at his best, he sang "Old Devil Moon," "It had to be you," "Autumn Leaves," "Dream a little dream of me"… Then at some point he segued into "What a Difference a Day Makes", by then the Zinfandel had long since been finished and was keeping us warm under the blanket. As the orchestra soared with Tony's voice, Kelly closed the imperceptible space between us, rested her head near my neck, with her nose touching my chin.

I snuck a look at her and her eyes were closed. I had been trying not to pay attention to her after the first kiss, knowing that if I started staring at her I would pay a lot of unwanted attention.

My right arm was around her shoulder, her left arm around my waist. I suddenly felt so fiercely protective of her, this woman who closed her eyes when the violins sighed.

She was still humming bars of music we pulled up in front of her house. I had insisted on seeing her home and catching a cab from there. Kelly had looked at me once more, very straight. It was a look that asked if I was going to feed her steak and try to fuck her before she had even got it digested. I guess she decided I wasn't dangerous and I momentarily felt insulted.

Her house was a cream-colored bungalow with an almost immaculate garden. She saw a weed and bent to pull it out with one stroke. She commented about grabbing them before they spread. I was still mesmerized by the swell of her breasts and the shape of her ass and her thighs as she bent down.

I stayed in the foyer as she used the phone to call me a cab. We sat outside in a little swing she had installed on her front stoop while waiting for the cab. The smog and haze were beginning to dissipate and the stars peeped out. We whispered the names of the evening stars as they opened in flower above us. She told me she had always loved the stars. They were the one thing that had stayed constant in her life. Always the same sky. It reminded her that what happened to us on earth is lost in the endless shine of eternity.

"I could never leave LA again," she told me.

"It's home." I replied.

"I suppose so," she continued. "I love this city, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, the way a car or a house on a street is."

"What are you saying?"

"I…" she paused. "I love it because it doesn't belong to me. I belong to it."

In that moment I wanted to belong to her and know she loved me. I took her hands in mine, and whether they shook from the cold or from desire I'll never know. But she tilted her face up to mine and I kissed her, smoothing the hair away from her face.

I was going to pull back, thinking that I might have overstepped my bounds, but she opened her mouth and I knew I had fallen for her like a suicide from the Pasadena bridge. I knew the first moment when I tasted the soft, sweet rush of her breath and felt her arms around me.

I suppose heroin addicts felt this way the first time they used— pleasure from the exquisite kick of it all but fear of becoming a total slave to something they can never again control.

My hands went to cradle her face, while hers had rested on my shoulders. I took her bottom lip between mine and tenderly began to explore what she offered me. I felt her sigh and hold me closer.

I don't think I've ever been kissed with such gentleness, with a growing desire that both of us were scared to acknowledge. She broke away first and the breeze seemed icy and cutting on my lips.

Kelly lowered her eyes, and my thumbs caressed her cheeks which were now reddening under my hands. Her calves were lying across my lap and her hands were resting on my chest.

"Does this mean I can see you again?" I asked hoarsely.

She gave me a tentative smile and looked toward the street, as if she could summon the cab through sheer will power.

"It's late," she said softly.

That was the first time I came up hard against Kelly's wall of self-discipline— a discipline born of hiding herself from herself. She extricated herself from my embrace and stood, turning her back on me.

"Have I done something wrong?" I asked.

"No," she said, so softly I almost missed it. "You've done everything right."

I rose and stood behind her. She was looking into middle distance, looking at nothing, and her arms were folded across her chest. Slowly I unwound the scarf from her neck and placed my hands on her hips, molding her body closer to mine. She let out a gasp which turned into a small, sharp cry as I moved her hair away and placed my lips on her nape.

I wanted to stay like this. My hand holding away her hair, my mouth lingering at her neck, her body soft in my arms. Then she turned in my arms and we found ourselves staring at each other. We stood there, close enough to kiss, the frigid air stealing our breath. One hand was now cupping her ass and the other resting on her slim shoulders.

It took everything I had not to take her right there, to make love to her on her front porch, hearing her cry out like that, to hear her call out my name. Somehow I knew I wanted more than a few slender nights: sweaty couplings on my bed, and then the slow end, the boredom and pettiness. Lovers in my arms pulling farther and farther away from me, as I lay indifferent. Or plunged in despair.

I told her right then that I wanted more than that. She looked frightened by my words, wary of my sincerity, and distrustful of the naked longing and new-born loyalty. That look was still on her face when I climbed into the cab.