Earth Angel

by Laramie Dunaway, Raymond Obstfeld

Genres: Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

The irreverent, outrageous novels of Raymond Obstfeld - written under the pseudonym Laramie Dunaway - five readers everywhere something to laugh about. Each book, his wisecracking, exuberant characters plunge head and heart first into grim modern realities that are twisted just enough to become a little bit naughty and a whole lot of fun.

Release date: October 14, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 376

Sample

The irreverent, outrageous novels of Raymond Obstfeld—written under the pseudonym Laramie Dunaway—give readers everwhere something
to laugh about. In each book, his wisecracking. exuberant characters plunge head- and heart-first into grim modern realities
that are twisted just enough to become a little bit naughty and a whole lot of fun.


Now writing under his own name, Obstfeld is better than ever with a tale about a bereaved young doctor who paves a bawdy,
brave, and uproarious path to hell with her good intentions.


EARTH ANGEL

In one freak, tragic instant, Season Gottlieb, M.D., finds out how quickly “having it all” can turn to absolute dog crap.
When her wedding to Tim, a hardworking fellow doctor, is only two weeks away, her would-be groom snaps. Before the cops gun
him down, Tim has sprayed her southern California clinic with bullets, leaving behind a half-dozen dead bodies and the wreckage
of Season’s world.


From its ashes arises her nutsy, well-meaning, deliriously inventive plan to put her life together again: Season will make
amends to the families of Tim’s victims by becoming their guardian angel.


The results are catastrophic, unexpected, and fiendishly funny—for Season as an angel is not what the doctor ordered. Her
attempts will get her black mailed, labeled a lunatic, and arrested. In fact, she’s nearly ready to quit when she arrives
at the Santa Barbara home of David Payton and his two adopted teenagers determined to change their lives, whether they want
them changed or not.


With a psycho serial-kidnapper loose in town and with Season’s secrets catching up with her, she’s on a roller-coaster ride
to thrills, chills, and big-time trouble… and thank heaven, she’s taking us along for the racy, joyous ride.


Raymond Obstfeld once again combines a maniacal imagination with a satirist’s savvy about modern America. And in EARTH ANGEL
he adds a warm and wonderful message about the healing power of both laughter—and love.


RAYMOND OBSTFELD is an associate professor of English at Orange Coast College in California. He is the author of over two dozen novels, including
Dead Heat, which was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award, and Doing Good, his book on comparative ethics and religion. He has also written numerous plays, screenplays, and a book of poetry, and
his short stories have appeared in several anthologies. Under the pseudonym Laramie Dun away, he has written three other contemporary
novels: Hungry Women, Borrowed Lives, and Lessons in Survival, all of which became international bestsellers.


“I READ SOMEWHERE,” CAROL SAID, KNEELING TO WIPE THE BLOOD from the floor, “that a couple years ago they had an auction in Paris where a guy bought Napoleon’s penis.”


I laughed. “Napoleon’s schlong?”

“I’m not kidding. They auctioned it off. All these guys in expensive suits and silk ties tugging their ears or scratching
their noses to bid for a severed dick. Does that seem weird or what?”


I removed my sweater, folded it on the examining table. “What, someone cut it off his corpse and dropped it in a pickle jar?”

“I don’t know, the article didn’t say. It wasn’t a whole article, more like, you know, filler after an article. All it said
was some guy bought it for seven thousand francs. How much is that in real money?”


“About fourteen hundred dollars.”

“That’s all? Jesus, that’s insulting.” Carol stood up and tossed the bloody paper towel into the waste can.

I plucked a paper towel from the dispenser and wiped up a drop of blood she’d missed. “In 1737, when Galileo’s body was being
shipped to Florence to be buried, a nobleman
named Anton Francesco Gori cut off three fingers from the corpse to keep as relics. Two are now in a private collection, but
Galileo’s middle finger is on display in Florence’s Museum of the History of Science.” I stood up and threw the paper towel
away. “It’s like Galileo is flipping the bird at us.”


“Those are fingers, Season. We’re talking manhood here.” She sighed. “Poor Napoleon, conquers half the world and his pecker
isn’t worth as much as a big-screen TV.”


“Inch for inch, most men’s aren’t as entertaining.”

She waved a dismissing hand at me. “You can afford to male-bash, you’re getting married to a seminormal guy whose only perversions
are his taste for the Bee Gees and that he loves you.”


I sang, “‘Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you…’”

“Urgent message from Galileo,” she said and gave me the finger. Carol Burke was a first-rate doctor whose dedication and compassion,
I was ashamed to admit, far outshone my own. But since her husband had walked out on her last year while she was in her ninth
month of pregnancy, she has been obsessed with the unlikelihood of her ever being loved or in love again. Though she’d been
out on a few dates since then, she was the first to admit she approached each new date as if she were an undercover cop setting
up a sting on a career felon. “How can I raise my daughter with a healthy attitude toward men?” she once asked me after another
disastrous date that ended with the guy wanting her to diagnose the cause of his ex-wife’s leg cramps. “I feel like a concentration
camp survivor asked to speak at the dedication of a Nazi memorial. Maybe I’ll get lucky and she’ll be a lesbian.” While I
admired Carol’s superiority over me as a kindly physician and loved her as a best friend, I thanked my stars every day that
I was
not her. Somehow, against all the odds, Tim and I had found each other when we were young and, though we’d endured a few rocky
times, had remained in love. Whatever else my shortcomings, I had that.


I pinched through my blouse to tug at my bra for the millionth time that day. It was new, a two-for-the-price-of one from
Victoria’s Secret that fit great in the dressing room, but now felt as if I had it on backwards. It’s not that I’m too top
heavy either, I have just enough to fill an eight-ounce measuring cup on each side. I mean that literally: Once, when I was
baking a pie, I stripped off my T-shirt and plopped my breast in the measuring cup, just to see what it would measure. It
came out powdered with flour, a bouncing and healthy eight-ounce boob.


Carol watched me tug my bra a couple more times. “You keep waving that tacky engagement ring in my face, I’m gonna saw your
finger off and see what it brings at an auction.” She turned and began scrubbing her hands in the sink.


“You shouldn’t do that, Carol,” I said, pointing at the floor where the blood used to be. “Leave it to maintenance. You know
the insurance rules.”


“It scares the patients to see blood on the floor. Anyway, that wasn’t much of an AIDS risk. This was from a nosebleed, some
sweet old Italian grandmother with a dachshund wearing a UCLA sweater. Probably hasn’t had sex since the invention of the
vagina. I shoved some cotton up her nose, she acted like I’d cured cancer. I thought she was going to slip me a fifty-cent
tip.”


“You’d have taken it, too.”

“I’ve got expenses, babe.” Carol unbuttoned her smock and shrugged out of it. She dropped it on the floor and did a furious
dance on it. “ ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I am free at last!’ ” She let out a deep sigh and hopped up
on the edge of the examination table. “I
need a cigarette, one fucking cigarette. I’m going to smoke a whole pack in the car. First I’m gonna smoke ’em, then I’m gonna
eat the butts.”


I wiggled my left-hand ring finger. “By the way, have you seen my engagement ring lately?”

She covered her ears. “Okay, okay. One month to your wedding and I promised not to smoke until afterward. I’ve got news, Season,
I’ve been cheating, okay? The truth is I smoke all the time, except around here and around my daughter. So I’m modifying my
original promise. All I can promise now is that I won’t blow smoke into the minister’s face during the actual ceremony. Take
it or leave it.” She webbed her fingers together and stretched her arms out until her knuckles cracked. “I took an informal
count last night.”


“Of what, the stretch marks on your thighs?”

She laughed. “Thank you, Dr. Bitch.”

“You’re welcome, Dr. Slut.”

She dug into the pocket of her slacks and pulled out a box of Butterfingers. “I went into my closet and counted the pairs
of shoes I have from being in weddings. I have twelve pairs of shoes dyed in every conceivable pastel color.”


“Except the right color.”

“Don’t worry, I already sent the new shoes off to be dyed mango-guava-kiwi, whatever the hell color my dress is. I swear,
this is the last wedding I’m going to be in unless I’m the fucking bride.”


I leaned toward the mirror over the sink and applied some lipstick. I was not very good at it and my bottom lip looked clumpy.
I blotted it with tissue.


“You suck at makeup, Season. Weren’t you ever a little girl?”

“Very briefly, during the run of the Bionic Woman. A week after they canceled the show I got my first period and started reading medical texts to see if there was a
connection. Suddenly I was in med school, living with Tim and two of his frat brothers. Makeup got lost in the shuffle.”


“And now you’re here, the end of the rainbow.” She held up her hands and gestured around the room like a game show host showing
off the grand prize. “Is it everything you’d ever hoped for?”


I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and snapped on a rubber band. “You’re in a shitty mood tonight,” I said. “Tough shift?”

“Nothing special. The high point was lancing some guy’s hemorrhoid while I hummed the theme to Deliverance. Poor bastard bit through my table. Look.” She pointed to definite teeth marks in the Naugahyde.


I laughed. “Gentle technique, Doctor.”

“Yeah, well, your night promises to be just as spiritually rewarding.” She picked up her smock from the floor, sniffed, made
a face, leaned toward me and sniffed again. “What’s that smell?”


I plucked my blouse and sniffed it. Then I picked up my sweater from the examining table and sniffed it. “Damn. Everything
I have on smells of cat piss. Blue is in heat and spraying everything like it was graffiti.”


“Ah, the graffiti of lust,” Carol said. “That’s kind of poetic, isn’t it?” She walked over to the closet, pulled out a clean
smock, and handed it to me. “Here, wear this. The patients appreciate the illusion of sanitation.”


I struggled with the smock as usual, until Carol held one sleeve for me to slip into. “I’m getting her fixed tomorrow.”

“Get her laid instead. Works for me.”

“I’m getting you fixed next.”

“Too late. My ex-husband fixed me for good. I pay alimony until he finishes law school.” She smiled wearily. “He screwed me
in court better than he ever screwed me in bed.”


This is an old conversation, so I ignored it. I sniffed myself again. “You still smell piss? Honestly.”


“Nope.”


“You’re lying.”

“Yup.”

“You’re fired.”

“From your lips to God’s ears.” She offered me a Butter-finger nugget. “Here, a couple of these will get you through the night.”

“No thanks. I gain any weight I won’t fit into my wedding dress.” I pushed the box away. “You know what Tim calls those things?
Satan’s turds.”


Carol bit one in half and chewed slowly. “Yum. Better than Communion.”

“Uh-oh, blasphemy.” I backed away. “You mind standing a few feet away from me until you leave? I don’t want to be near you
when the lightning strikes.”


She handed me the file folders for the waiting patients. Only three. “Nothing here worth a movie of the week. A cold. A sprained
ankle, which is getting X rayed right now. And a woman who, my bet is, is going to try to con you into a prescription for
amphetamines. Good luck.”


Carol unlocked a cupboard and pulled out her purse. She dug through, found a bottle of perfume, and dabbed some on her fingertips.
She rubbed her fingertips on my smock sleeves. “To kill the smell of piss.”


I inhaled. “Obsession?” I went into my Dr. McCoy impression: “For God’s sake, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a hooker.”


As always, she laughed. Carol was the only one who thought I sounded anything like him. Tim complained that I sounded more
like Yogi Bear. “Relax, doctor,” she said. “You’re not likely to meet anyone on the midnight-to-eight shift worth turning
on. Besides, half an hour from now you’ll smell of this place, longing for that sweet scent of cat piss.” She pulled her black
leather jacket with all the zippers out of the closet and draped it over her arm. The leather monstrosity belonged to her
ex-husband, which he’d been begging her to return since they split up. She
refused to give it to him, wearing it herself even though she hated it, just so he couldn’t sneak into her house and take
it. Carol walked beside me, the zippers rattling with each step. “How’s Tim? Hanging in there?”


I nodded. “He’s fine. That whole mess is probably for the best. Forced him to slow down a bit. For the past week he’s been
trying to learn about auto mechanics from a bunch of books he bought. He took the engine of his Miata apart and can’t get
it back together. He’s working out with weights every day, which he hasn’t done since college. He’s talking about us camping
again, doing all the stuff he hasn’t done BMS.”


“BMS?”

“Before med school. Anyway, I’m glad they’re making him take his vacation days. This week he’s going to slop around the house
and catch up on all the kung-fu videos he’s missed, and next week we head for Carmel for a weekend of…” I took a deep breath
and tried to think of the right word. I gave up and shrugged.


“Relaxation?” Carol offered.

I shook my head. “That word’s not strong enough. Something bigger, more embracing. Rehabilitation. Rejuvenation. Reorientation.
I don’t know. Try to get our rhythms in sync again before the wedding.”


“You mean some serious screwing.”

“Thank you for the technical term, Dr. Slut.”

“Glad to assist a colleague, Dr. Bitch.”

I walked Carol down the hall, passing the examining rooms where my patients were waiting for me. By now our physician’s assistant,
Helen Sagan, would have taken temperatures, pulses, and blood pressures. Time for me to pop in, look official, and prescribe
some fancy aspirins. We were just a twenty-four-hour walk-in medical care center located in the middle of a sleepy planned
community in Southern California. During my shift I treated mostly men in their forties who wake up in the middle of the
night with chest pains, think they’re having a heart attack, and have their wives race them over here in the Lexus, calling
ahead on the car phone. Usually it’s just gas. The real life-threatening emergencies went directly to the new hospital ten
miles down the road where Tim worked. Emergency Room. The one rotation I’d always hated for myself, what with all the crying
and yelling and life-and-death decisions that had to be made instantly. The whole time I worked ER, I had skin rashes on my
arms and chest and ulcerations in my mouth. Plus, my fingernails stopped growing and I rarely wanted to have sex. But Tim
loved the chaos, the screams, the pressure. He lived for the challenge of a severed limb or severe head trauma. That is, until
two weeks ago when they put him on a two-month forced vacation after he’d slugged a patient and broke his nose.


Carol stopped and pulled me into the coffee room, her face suddenly grim with concern. “You haven’t offered any information,
but I’m invoking my privilege as your maid of honor and asking anyway. How are you holding up?”


“Fine. Good.”

She made a face. “Don’t bullshit me, girl. Are you fine?”

She meant the miscarriage. Last month I’d spontaneously aborted Tim’s and my ten-week-old fetus. Carol herself had broken
the clinic regulations and performed the D&C the next day, working between my legs with her clamp, speculum, and curette like
a thief picking a stubborn lock. There had been no specific cause for my miscarriage—one out of five pregnancies just ends.
How many emptied mothers-to-be had I consoled with that unhelpful statistic. Sorry, it just happens. Don’t drive yourself
nuts trying to figure out what you did wrong. It wasn’t your fault. Or as one fossilized doctor in med school had once said:
“A miscarriage is Nature’s way of telling you these cookies are half-baked. You wouldn’t want to eat half-baked cookies, would
you? Heh, heh.” That same afternoon, someone had
let the air out of all four of his tires. For years I’d regretted it hadn’t been me. Then Tim told me he’d done it and I felt
better; at least I’d fallen in love with the kind of person who would do it.


A few months ago Tim and I had decided, what the hell, since we were getting married soon anyway, let’s throw away the sponges
and condoms and just go at it—bareback. Man a babe-o. And bam! Bull’s-eye, first try. A girl. Which we’d discovered at nine
weeks through a chorionic villus sampling. Tim had been so excited about my pregnancy that he’d arranged the CVS with a buddy
of his at the hospital. There I was in the pelvic exam position while the two of them chatted between my legs, their voices
bouncing off the inside skin on my upraised thighs like a canyon. The last time I’d seen this buddy, he’d spilled a beer can
on my sofa. They snipped a piece of the infant’s tissue from the fetal sac and checked the chromosomes for the sex. We’d both
become very excited, even went out and bought cute little outfits and darling baby furniture, looked at wacky wallpaper for
the baby’s room. Tim had begun a diary of things he wanted to teach Emily (yes, we’d made the classic mistake of naming her
too soon). He was always scribbling away in his little notebook: how to double-knot shoelaces, bait a hook, humane ways to
turn a boy down for a date. Then one Sunday we were lying on the living room floor reading the newspaper and watching Ronald
Coleman in A Tale of Two Cities. We took turns imitating him: “It’s a faaar, faaar better thing I do now, than I have eveeer done.” Suddenly, the bleeding
started, followed quickly by the miscarriage and a couple days later by Tim returning the cute baby clothes and darling furniture.
Just like that, it was over. As if we’d driven through a guard rail and were soaring over a cliff, listening to the rush of
air beneath us, watching the horizon rise. We still caught ourselves staring at other people’s babies, or stopping to smile
over some nifty baby clothes in the
Baby Gap window at the mall. But I’d pretty much gotten over it and looked forward to trying again next year when the timing
would be better anyway.


Afterward, friends kept asking me how I was doing and I’d be embarrassed to tell them I was fine and meant it. They seemed
either to admire me for bravely lying or else be disappointed in me for not suffering more. I had to admit I hadn’t been the
best pregnant woman ever. One morning I woke up and found Tim sitting on the edge of the bed smiling sweetly at me. “You’re
glowing,” he said. “I hate to be so clichéd, but you really are glowing.” Suddenly, I bolted out of bed and puked up in the
bathroom. I lifted my head from the toilet bowl rim and said, “Want to clean up the afterglow?”


It was Tim who really took the miscarriage hard. Losing Emily, combined with the usual pressures of the ER, had started to
fray him a bit. That affected me more than anything else that had happened. The miscarriage was at least natural, but Tim’s
depression was not. Tim was the kind of person born under a lucky star. Everything he did was successful, from high-school
football star to the top five percent of his med school class. He saved lives in ER that everyone else thought were hopeless.
How many times had we been out at a restaurant or movie and someone would come up and thank Tim for saving his or her life.
Tim was brilliant, decisive, and confident, knew what to do and did it without hesitation. I think that’s why he liked ER
so much. He was a bona fide miracle worker. He raised the dead. He used to joke that he turned water into whine (watery eyes
from despair into whining voices about the bill). Emily was the first thing he’d ever failed at, at least in his own eyes.
And he hadn’t felt lucky ever since. Then, when that realtor jerk in the ER started yelling that he wanted his sprained wrist
looked at immediately, yanking on Tim’s arm while Tim was rushing down the hall to
work on a woman in cardiac arrest, Tim just nailed the man in the nose, breaking it in an explosion of blood. The lawsuit
was inevitable; so was Tim’s suspension. Even gods are accountable to insurance companies.


Carol and I walked out into the waiting room. Three Asian men in business suits sat huddled together over the magazine table.
The magazines had all been removed and neatly stacked on the floor. One of them was drawing something on the back of one of
our four-color brochures detailing our services. The other two watched silently with intent expressions.


“What do you think he does with it?” Carol asked.

“Who?” I thought maybe she meant the man drawing on the brochure.

“The guy. The guy who bought Napoleon’s penis. What’s he do with it? Keep it on display in his living room and stare at it?
Make it into a paperweight? Take out his own and compare? I mean, it’s got to be old and shriveled by now. When did Napoleon
die?”


“How should I know?”

Carol snorted. “You shouldn’t. But you do.”

“Napoleon Bonaparte: seventeen sixty-nine to eighteen twenty-one.”

“His dick’s over a hundred and seventy years old. Yikes.”

“Almost as old as your bleach job.”

She yawned. “I owe you for that, harelip.”

I touched the tiny scar on the side of my lip, a white check mark from falling against a glass coffee table when I was six.

Carol batted away my hand. “Oh, come on. I’m not going to play if you’re going to get self-conscious on me.” She grabbed her
abdomen. “Yeow, my bladder suddenly feels like a water balloon. I’d better go to the bathroom now. See you tomorrow. Say hi
to Tim.” Carol spun and trotted off to the staff bathroom.



“Bye,” I called after her. But she was already gone. The three Asian men looked up at me for a moment, smiled, then returned
to their drawing. Were they waiting for someone or did one of them want to be treated?


I went through the door back into the medical area to ask Darlene. She was typing up an insurance form for a patient who was
leaving. Darlene’s uniform was too tight, binding her rolls of fat into wrapped layers like a coiled firehose. She’d already
lost twenty pounds on her diet, but she always got excited and bought clothes too small as incentive. She still had another
twenty pounds to lose to fit into that uniform. Over at the file cabinet was Lolita, five months pregnant but skinny as a
drinking straw everywhere but her middle, which barely bulged, as if she were a shoplifter smuggling a sweater out. She was
nineteen and had been married two years, and I just knew she would have an uncomplicated pregnancy and easy delivery and I
tried not to hate her for that. She had a sign on her desk that she’d made with red magic marker: NAME DU JOUR. Under that was a blue Post-it note that said Evan. Yesterday was a pink Post-it note that said Sheryl. We were expected to check in with our opinion on the possible names for her baby, the sex of which she didn’t want to know
until after it was born. She said knowing ahead would take the fun out of being pregnant.


“Evan’s good,” I said to her. “Strong, yet intelligent. A leader.”


“You think?” she said happily. “John thinks he’ll get beat up over it, but he thinks that about every name except Gregory. I like Evan better than Gregory. Greg. Greggy. Gre-gor-y. Sounds scary, like those things on old buildings, those monsters—”


“Gargoyles.”

“Right. I hate them. And it reminds me of that music, those chants. What do I want to say?”


“Gregorian chants.” Named after Pope Gregory, 540–604 C.E., who was credited with creating the list of Seven Deadly Sins.


“Those things are spooky.”

I was wondering if she meant the sins or the gargoyles when Helen suddenly appeared at my side, startling me. Helen was the
best physician’s assistant I’d ever seen. Very efficient, very dry sense of humor. Sometimes she affected an Irish brogue,
even though she was two generations removed from her immigrant ancestors. “What’s that smell?” she asked.


“Obsession,” I said.


“Smells like cat piss.” She hurried off, talking to me without turning around. “X rays are in on that sprain. No fractures.
I’d send him home with a lecture about skateboarding after dark. The cold’s a cold, nothing more. Wants an excuse not to go
to work tomorrow. Grown man looking for permission to play hooky. The woman’s your problem.” She disappeared around a corner.


I looked through the folders, glancing at medical histories. Two of the patients had been here before. The woman seeking amphetamines
was new. Thing was, Helen was usually right. All she needed was a few more years of schooling and she could have my job. She
did it as well as I did already. Anyway, this wasn’t where I wanted to be. Another year here and I’d have saved up enough
to open my pediatrics practice. By then Tim would be back working his miracles in the emergency room and we could try again
to start our own family. We had a proper schedule now.


The man with the cold sat on the examining table thumbing through an old People magazine. When I walked in he closed the magazine and slid it back into the plastic wall pocket. He was about thirty, my
age, with curly black hair and heavy five o‘clock shadow. “Hi,” he sniffled.



“Hello, Mr. Grieshum. Have a bad cold?”


“No, thanks, I already have one.” He chuckled, which turned into coughing. But it was a shallow, dull cough, nothing rattling
inside. “Sorry,” he said, holding up a hand and coughing again.


I checked him out, but there was nothing much going on but a cold. He talked a lot during the examination, filling me in on
the details of his life. Divorced. Systems analyst. A Jeep. First-baseman on a softball league. As I moved around him, he
kept giving me the once-over, which I pretended not to notice. Occupational hazard. I’m fairly young, moderately attractive,
and a medical doctor. In most guys’ fantasies that classifies me with waitresses and nurses as a “woman who would know how
to take care of her man.” Basically a service position. Tim and I had been together for eight years, but there was an eight-month
period right after med school when we had split up, during which I’d dated my fair share of guys who thought my being a doctor
meant I gave good massages—or enemas. I finished up with Mr. Grieshum and sent him out to see Darlene to pay his bill.


“Should I stay home, you think?” he asked as he walked backward down the hall. “I mean, so as not to infect others at work
and such.”


“Sure,” I said. Absolution didn’t cost me anything. “Might be a good idea.”

He nodded and hurried away.

I ducked into the X ray room, examined the X rays. No breaks, no fissures.

“What’s wrong with Tim?” Helen asked, scaring me again.

“Jesus, Helen, wear a bell or something.”

“What’s wrong with Tim?” she repea