The Tiger Catcher

Dante’s people called. The part of the narrator was hers if she wanted it. Could they send the contracts over to her agent? Could she start rehearsals the day after tomorrow? Things were looking up. She was never taking off the red beret. “But do you know what the producer said to me even as he was giving me the job?” Josephine said. “What took you so long to come out here, Miss Collins?” She stirred her coffee.

“I heard you tell him you were twenty-eight.”

“And he said exactly and hung up.”

Julian laughed. “Last month Ashton was on the phone, angling for a walk-through at CBS and the producer asked how old he was. Ashton said thirty-two, and the producer said, ‘Do you look thirty-two?’ Ashton was like, do I need to look younger than thirty-two for a set walkthrough on a cancelled sitcom?”

Josephine shook her head. “Everybody’s looking for eternal youth. Especially in this town.”

“Eternal something maybe.”

“So, is your friend a good guy?” she asked. “The truth now. Even if he is ornery and thirty-two. Should we introduce him to my Zakiyyah, see what happens?”

“Okay, Dolly, pipe down,” Julian said. “He’s not ornery. He’s taken.”

“Taken, shmaken. How attractive is his girlfriend?”

Julian took out his phone and showed her Riley.

Josephine acted unimpressed. She took out her phone and showed him Zakiyyah.

Julian acted unimpressed.

“She was Miss Brooklyn!” Josephine said.

“Riley was voted most beautiful in high school.”

“Did you not hear me say that Z was Miss Brooklyn?”

“Ashton doesn’t date beauty queens.”

“Obviously,” Josephine said, and they both laughed. “Is Riley in the business?”

Julian shook his head. “Ashton also doesn’t date actresses. He got burned a few times, and now says they can’t be trusted.”

“Really, he says that?” She eyed him with a twinkle. “What do you say?”

“I don’t know.” Julian eyed her with a twinkle. “I’ve never dated an actress.”

She fell silent, continuing to stare at Riley’s photo. “Do you like her?” she asked.

“I like her a lot, why? We’re good friends,” Julian said. “She’s wonderful entertainment. And she hates being teased.”

“And that makes you tease her all the more?”

“Naturally,” said Julian. “Every outing with her is a wellness summit. Sometimes to help me cleanse my spirit and align my chakras, she tells me to eat paper.” He couldn’t hide his genuine affection for Riley. “To rid herself of impurities, she eats on alternate days. On B days she drinks only lemon water flavored with maple syrup. She tells me to write in my newsletter that maple syrup is the perfect food and I tell her, yes, especially over waffles.”

Josephine snorted the strawberry shake through her nose.

They finished their red velvet pancakes with cream cheese frosting. Their elbows on the table, they slurped the last of the milkshakes through their straws. The tables around them were empty; only they were left.

They talked about the plays she’d been in (Danny Shapiro and his Quest for a Mystery Princess was Julian’s favorite). They talked about their favorite books (The Fight for him, Gone with the Wind for her), subjects they liked in school, comfort food, swimming pools, and then engaged in a crossfire over the Dodgers and the Yankees. (“You live here,” she said, “so maybe you have to pay lip service to this, but you do know in your heart of hearts that the Dodgers suck, right?”) After half an hour, the argument subsided unresolved. (“What, you’re offended?” she said. “That’s not a surprise, I’d be mad too if I rooted for the Dodgers.”)

They told each other their official stories. She was born and raised in Brooklyn, near the Verrazano Bridge, not quite Coney Island, not quite Bay Ridge, a small congested working-class community so removed from the rest of the world that she was ten before she set foot in New York City. She thought Luna Park on Coney Island was what all beaches looked like, and her concept of New Jersey was map-related, as in, it was a mythical place beyond Staten Island.

“New Jersey is mythical?” Julian said.

Her father ran a vaudeville joint called Sideshows by the Seashore, and she worked with him until he died, and the place changed hands. Her younger sister died of leukemia a few years later. To make her sister feel better, Josephine sang and played the piano, and her sister danced in time to her singing. She said that since then, that was how she thought of all children—in the image of frail girls dancing. Dying but dancing.

Josephine had a close but contentious relationship with her mother, less close and more contentious in recent years. Her mother worked for a private academy near their house and kept her job two decades so her daughter could go to an elite prep school for free. She wanted Josephine to attend Columbia, to become a professor, a doctor of letters. Josephine had other ideas. She got into the School of Performing Arts instead and felt vindicated—for two seconds. Then she realized she was in a school with five hundred kids just as talented as her. Someone else always danced better, sang better, recited louder. Acting was a zero-sum game, especially on stage. In middle school she’d been the unsinkable Molly Brown, the star in every play, but at Performing Arts she was barely the sidekick. After graduation it got worse. She didn’t get into Juilliard, but now competed for parts with everyone that had.

She found a steady job building stage sets at the Public Theatre while continuing to audition. Her not getting a college degree was the greatest disappointment of her mother’s life, and Julian, who knew something about disappointing mothers (and fathers), wanted to ask, even more than one of her daughters dying, but didn’t.

Julian revealed his own official story. He was raised in middle-class suburban Simi Valley, the fourth of six sons born to two teachers: Brandon Cruz, a third-generation Mexican, and Joanne Osment, a third-generation Norwegian.

The children: Brandon Jr. and Rowan, followed by Harlan, Julian, Tristan—Irish triplets, one born every ten months—and then Dalton, ten years later. His parents still lived in the same starter house they’d bought right out of college. His mother raised six kids in it while also running the guidance department at the high school, unstoppable “like a Viking.” His father had been head of the school district and was now president of a local college. As a kid, Julian read and watched sports. He went to UCLA. Ashton was his freshman roommate. They’d been friends ever since.

“Is that it?” she said.

“Pretty much,” he said.

“UCLA and that brings us to today? I know you’re not twenty. What did you major in?”

When he didn’t immediately reply, Josephine laughed. “I bet it was English.”

“My parents were paying for my room and board, what was I going to do?”

“Major in English and become a teacher, obviously.”

“Am I a teacher?”

“Yes—in your secret heart, Julian, I bet you are.”

“Trust me, Josephine, in my secret heart, the last thing I am is a teacher.” Julian squinted at her, the button-eyed waif, the vision with the long blowing hair, the teasing girl with the constant smile on her lips. It was hot, and as they chatted and she swirled the straw around the bottom of her shake, he debated if it was too soon to ask her to go with him to Zuma. It was a hefty drive to Malibu, but the sun would set as they swam. The beach was secluded, and at high tide the waves crashed hypnotically against the shore. Too soon?

Was it too soon to invite her to his apartment, a few blocks away, and watch Marlon Brando bring on the apocalypse in Vietnam? Was it too soon for a scenic drive on Mulholland? Comedy at the Cellar? Dinner at Scarpetta? Tea on his sofa? A walk to the jewelry store? Was it too soon to place his lips against her alabaster throat, God, what wasn’t too soon.

“Even superheroes need steady and loyal sidekicks,” he heard her say. The word superheroes rerouted him back to Sunset Boulevard and their small squat table. “In your formula, what am I?” Julian asked. “The superhero or the sidekick?”

“Maybe you’re the superhero and I’m your sidekick.”

“Or you’re the superhero and I’m your sidekick.”

Her grin was wide. “I bet Ashton’s right about you. You’re the superhero who pretends he’s the sidekick so no one notices his powers.”

“When did Ashton say this, and what powers might those be?”

“You tell me, Julian Osment Cruz.”

He narrowed his eyes at her animated face, trying to hide from her not his powers but his weakness. She was so fresh and funny, so red-lipped and delightful. He loved how to hear her, how to hear every sound that sprang from her mouth, he had to lean almost across the table. He loved that her every breath drew him closer to her. He loved her clean unpainted nails, her long fingers unadorned by rings. He wanted to touch them. He wanted to kiss them.

She was a wonderful audience. She had a great laugh. Was it terrible of him to want to do other things to her that he knew might delight her, to impress her with some of his other skills besides joking and finding great food in L.A.? What a brute he was. Making a girl laugh while fantasizing about other kinds of love. Wishing to give her pleasure in all ways, physical and metaphysical. The desire was strong and would not be bargained with. Lust and tenderness rolled around the crucible inside him, their mercury rendering him mute. At the Griddle Cafe!

He stared too long at her slender fingers, and in the shadows cast by Sunset, he thought he saw a white circular mark around her fourth digit. He blinked. Nope, nothing there but a trick of the light.

“Who are you, Josephine?” he murmured. I want to know you. I need to know who you are. I’m here. Do you want to know who I am? He nearly reached out and took her hand across the table.

She drew a breath—he wanted to say she drew a sexy breath, but that was the only way she knew how to draw it—and misunderstood him. He wanted real, she gave him fantasy.

“Maybe Mystique?” she said.

Happily he assented. “Yes. You are Mystique.”

“Yes,” she said, but less happily. “I’m the blue girl, and my body is a green screen. I disappear when I need to and turn up as someone else in another city, not this one, and not my own.”

Julian was about to pursue that analogy, but the annoyed hipster waiter informed them that the place was closing, “like forty minutes ago,” and could they please close out their check, because he was off shift “like forty minutes ago.” Julian checked his watch. It was after four! “What do you do to time,” he muttered, taking out his wallet.

“What do I do to time?” she said. “But it’s not too early to start thinking about dinner.”

“Agreed. I’m quite hungry myself.”

They were next to Rite Aid pharmacy. Rush hour traffic was heavy on Sunset. Across from them, up on a hill, stood the legendary Chateau Marmont. They both stared longingly at it.

“Where should we go?” she asked. “For dinner, I mean.”

He looked over her shorts, her boots.

“What, my outfit’s not good enough for dinner at the Marmont?” She did a hair flip. “Just kidding, I don’t want to eat there. John Belushi ate there and look what happened to him.”

“Um …”

“No such thing as coincidence,” she said. “Lessee, where else can we go where I don’t have to get dressed up?”

“The beach?” he said. “The restaurants there are pretty casual.” Was it too late for a swim and a sunset at Malibu?

“Beach is good.” Her eyes were half-hooded. “Anywhere else?”

He thought about it. “We could go to Santa Monica. Get some food truck grub, eat on the pier.”

“We could,” she said. “Or we could go to a Dodger game. Would you like that?” She winked.

He played it straight. “Dodgers are away this week.”

“Probably getting their asses kicked in New York,” she said. “Anywhere else?”

“You want to go to the movies?”

“Sure.” She sighed with slight exasperation. “Or … we could go to your place, Julian. Didn’t you say you live around here?”

“My place?” Julian repeated dumbly. “But there’s nothing to eat.”

She laughed. “Tell you what,” she said, “let’s go to Gelson’s. Buy some steak. Do you have a balcony? A grill on it perhaps?”

He didn’t know what to say.

He said okay. He did have a balcony. And a grill.

“I don’t have to come over if you don’t want me to,” she said.

“No, no.” We both know I want you—to.

“I can’t believe I had to invite myself over,” she said with a headshake as they waited for the light to change on Sunset and La Cienega. He had taken hold of her elbow to keep her from crossing against the light. “I just don’t know about you, Jules. Are you always this polite?”

Their eyes locked.

“No,” said Julian.

They stared into each other’s open faces. He slipped his arm around her lower back, touching the sheer fabric of her white blouse, her bare skin hot under his fingers. He drew her against him. Her breasts were at his chest.

Before the light turned green, he kissed her. He didn’t need Zuma Beach or the setting sun. Just a red light at an intersection, his palm on her back, his head tilted, her arms splayed.

“Are we moving too fast?” she breathed. “I’m afraid we might be.”

“Absolutely. Like meteors.”

Her arms swept around his neck. “Maybe we should go to dinner, go to a bar, get a drink, wait for night …”

“Josephine,” Julian said, his hands running up and down her back, his insistent lips at her warm, peach-scented, pulsing neck, “if you want some magic, you’ve come to the right city. We can Hollywood up anything around here, even daylight. We Hollywood it up real good. Come with me and I’ll show you. In L.A. it’s called day for night.”

They stumbled against the post and forgot to cross. The light changed, and changed again.

11

Duende

LOS ANGELES, THE CITY OF ANGELS, THE CITY OF DREAMS.

It’s easy to fall in love in Southern California.

If it’s so easy, the exquisite girl whispers, exquisitely naked on your bed, then have you fallen in love a thousand times before me?

Take two: It’s easy to fall in love in Southern California with her.

She likes your apartment. You keep it clean. Did you clean it, she asks, because you thought I might be coming? And you want to tell her the truth, that you keep it clean because it’s your nature, but instead you tell her the romantic truth. Yes, you say. I hoped you’d be coming. I cleaned it for you.

You have so many books, she says approvingly, standing by your wall of books and your black heavy bag hanging from a hook in the ceiling. Why do you have a punching bag, Julian? Is it for exercise?

Yes.

Well done. About the books, I mean. John Waters would be proud of you. Proud of me, rather.

Who?

John Waters. Her clothes thrown off, your clothes thrown off.

What does John Waters say? Like you even care. She is so beautiful. Your hand glides across her body.

He says, if you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.

Ah. Now you care.

Your heart reforms around the Aphrodite in your bed, the sun god’s daughter, naked and pulsing, her arms open, everything open and she moans and beckons to you to come to her, closer, closer.

You fall inside the throat of a volcano, inside the one space that has no inside and no outside. You sink into the pink-tinted, over-saturated world where nothing exists except her and you.

You kiss her clavicles, her eager mouth, you press yourself upon the raw softness of her body. Her lips are vanilla. She is honey and easy all over like pink cotton candy. And yet it’s you who feels like spun-out sugar, and when she places you on her tongue, you melt.

You draw the room-darkening shades and you pour her peach champagne. Now she has a real drink and there is no more day, just endless night.

Her body is beauty, in need of love, of care, of caress. She’s an acrobat, she twists and curves like a tumbling immortal. You’ve been turned inside out yourself. She can see your heart, it’s visible to her smile. And you can see her heart, it beats for you between her breasts.

After love she falls asleep and later says she wasn’t sleeping only dreaming.

We’re both inside the same dream, you whisper. You stole the show, Josephine. They don’t forgive that in the theatre.

The next morning and the next you write rhymes about mist rising from the satin sheets, recite sonnets for her on the sidewalks of Sunset while pressing her warm palm against your love-struck face. At Griddle Cafe, you devour red velvet pancakes and drink chocolate shakes and tell her the poems write themselves. The sidewalks of Sunset near the homeless camped out by Rite Aid have become your Elysian Fields.

If the sonnets write themselves, she murmurs, then have you fallen in love a thousand times before on this red velvety sidewalk?

No, beautiful girl. You haven’t fallen in love a thousand times before.

You’ve been on the prowl since your senior year in high school. You’ve been with quite a few women. You ask if that’s a strike against you. Does it make you less appealing?

No, she purrs. More.

You have a new two-bedroom with a balcony. And a wall of books. You both beam. You’ve made John Waters proud.

But that’s not a balcony, she says. It’s too small.

It’s still a balcony. It’s called a Juliet balcony.

Why, she asks.

Literally because of Juliet, you reply.

You get some love for that, for the poetry of it.

Julian, she whispers, her arms over her head, holding on to your headboard, did I explode in your heart.

Yes, Josephine, you exploded in my heart.

After love, when she is barely able to move, you tell her you also have a roof deck with a Jacuzzi and a view. You’re barely able to move yourself. Your bruised mouth can hardly form words. Funny how both love and a fight can wreck a body.

In the cool desert night, you slip naked upstairs and jump into the hot tub. She murmurs her approval of the spa, of the colored lights, of the champagne that goes with it, and of the man that comes with it, and in it and in her. But there’s hardly any view, she says, gazing at you over the foaming bubbles.

There is. If you look left, you can see the schoolyard across San Vicente.

I bet you can hear it, too, she says, crawling to you in the roiling water. At recess, the screaming kids. And if you can see them, can they see us? She straddles you, lifting her wet breasts to your wet mouth.

You wish someone could see you. You desperately need a witness to your bliss.

You give her the spare toothbrush, a pair of your boxer briefs, you share with her your shampoo, your soap, your shirts. She shares with you stories about Brighton Beach and making out with gropy boys under the bridge and about Zakiyyah looking for Mr. Right her whole life and instead finding loathsome Trevor. She tells you about the bright city and sharp loneliness.

She asks what color the lights were when you first saw her.

Red, you reply.

You watch Apocalypse Now, a romantic comedy if ever there was one. It takes you days to finish as you pause for love, for Chinese, for dramatic readings from Heart of Darkness, and she mocks you for having that wretched Conrad tome handy on your John Waters bookshelf. You pull The Importance of Being Earnest and act it out in your living room, laughing, naked, loud. She knows it better than you, which fills you with shame. You used to know it by heart but forgot. You inhale two bottles of wine as you roll around the floor and reenact Cecily and Algernon, slurry on the comedy, sloppy on the love.

You’ve lost all sense of the days, lost track of the hour. You sit and wait for her in your Volvo, gripping the wheel in your lovesick hands. You make some calls. Everyone you know is unhappy with you. Everyone except her. She is delighted with you.

Why didn’t you choose to live up in the Hollywood Hills? she asks. You could get a place anywhere. Why here, overlooking the back of some hotel?

You didn’t choose the Hollywood Hills, you explain in the wet afterglow with the jets purring low, because up there, a box to live in costs five times as much and the drive down takes forever.

You didn’t choose to live in the hills because of money?

And a long drive, you say, defending yourself, caressing her.

Where do you have to run to? she says. You work at home. You could sit all day in a tub on a roof deck on Mulholland that overlooks the ocean and wisecrack about vinegar.

Who’s wisecracking now? Believe me, I did the smart thing.

She smiles. But not the beautiful thing.

You want to drive into the mountains, Josephine? You offer her the hills, the canyons, Zuma Beach, and all the music other men have made if she will love you.

All she wants is your body.

Sometimes you act as if that’s all you’ve come for, you say in jest.

How do you know it’s not all I’ve come for, she says.

In jest?

She whispers she’s been starved for tenderness. There’s no time to waste.

You recall to her Ben Johnson’s lament over the brevity of human life. “O for an engine to keep back all clocks.”

She disagrees. There is nothing brief about you, she says, as she stands before you naked, her bouncy breasts to seduce you, her lips to relieve you, her hips to receive you and maybe one day to give you children (her joke, not yours, and you’re less terrified by it than you should be). She wants tenderness from you? You’re as gentle as your brute nature will allow. She wants the beast in you? Her wish is your command.

Julian, I barely know you and yet I feel like I’ve known you forever. How can that be?

You have no answers. You were blinded from the start. A comet has crashed to earth.

You forget to go to Whole Foods, forget your friends, the newsletters, the bills, the store, the lock-ups to scour, the trucks to rent. You forget everything. It’s like you left your past behind when you met her.

She is hungry? You feed her. She is thirsty? You give her wine. She wants music from you? You sing to her about Alfred’s coffee and sweet corn ravioli at Georgio Baldi. You kiss her throat. You’ve wanted to kiss her for so long, you say. She laughs. Yes, Jules, it must’ve felt like the longest twenty-four hours of your life.

You offer to take her to Raven’s Cry at Whisky a Go Go, but not before you buy her the best steak burrito on Vine, and she says how do you know so much about food and love and how to make a girl happy, and you reply, not a girl—you. You two stay in for love, you go out for food. So how about that Whisky a Go Go, Josephine? Ninth Plague and Kings of Jade are playing. Tino and the Tarantulas are going to rock the house. But she wants love from you, and she’d like it to the rhythm of the mad beat music. Are you going to make me feel it, she cries.

Yes. You’re going to make her feel it.

Oh, Jules, she says, her arms wrapped around you, pressing you to her heart. Beware the magician, we say in the sideshows, he’s here only as a diversion. Do not let him into your circle. Boy, you did some magic trick on me. You drew me in with your irresistible indifference, and now you’re like flypaper.

Who is indifferent? he says. She must mean a different Jules.

When did you first want to kiss me? she asks. You tell her it was when she revealed herself to you in the crimson footlights at The Invention of Love. You have not let the first day, the first hour, the first moment of meeting her come and go. You knew. You knew it from the start. Your soul lay open to her as she now lies open to you.