Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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First published by HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty Ltd in 2019

This edition in Great Britain 2019

Copyright © Paullina Simons

Cover design by HarperCollins Design Studio

Cover images: Couple by Mark Owen/Trevillion Images; Hollywood hills by Daniel Viñé

Garcia/Getty Images; palm trees by Cavan Images/Getty Images

Author photo by Paullina Simons

Paullina Simons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007441655

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780007441662

Version: 2019-05-02

Praise for Paullina Simons

Tully

“You’ll never look at life in the same way again. Pick up this book and prepare to have your emotions wrung so completely you’ll be sobbing your heart out one minute and laughing through your tears the next. Read it and weep—literally.”

Company

Red Leaves

“Simons handles her characters and setting with skill, slowly peeling away deceptions to reveal denial, cowardice and chilling indifference … an engrossing story.”

Publishers Weekly

Eleven Hours

“Eleven Hours is a harrowing, hair-raising story that will keep you turning the pages late into the night.”

Janet Evanovich

The Bronze Horseman

“A love story both tender and fierce”

(Publishers Weekly)

that “recalls Dr. Zhivago.”

(People Magazine)

The Bridge to Holy Cross

“This has everything a romance glutton could wish for: a bold, talented and dashing hero [and] a heart-stopping love affair that nourishes its two protagonists even when they are separated and lost.”

Daily Mail

The Girl in Times Square

“Part mystery, part romance, part family drama … in other words, the perfect book.”

Daily Mail

The Summer Garden

“If you’re looking for a historical epic to immerse yourself in, then this is the book for you.”

Closer

Road to Paradise

“One of our most exciting writers … Paullina Simons presents the perfect mix of page-turning plot and characters.”

Woman and Home

A Song in the Daylight

“Simons shows the frailties of families and of human nature, and demonstrates that there’s so much more to life, such as honesty and loyalty.”

Good Reading

Bellagrand

“Another epic saga from Simons, full of the emotion and heartache of the original trilogy. Summer reading at its finest.”

Canberra Times

Lone Star

“Another epic love story—perfect reading for a long, lazy day in bed.”

Better Reading

Dedication

For Tania, my last child, the joy of my life

Epigraph

A safe fairytale is not true to either world.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Praise for Paullina Simons

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue: The Transit Circle

Part One: The Ghost of God and Dreams

Chapter 1: The Invention of Love

Chapter 2: Book Soup

Chapter 3: Lonely Hearts

Chapter 4: Gift of the Magi

Chapter 5: Normandie Avenue

Chapter 6: Gwen

Chapter 7: Ashton and Riley

Chapter 8: The Red Beret, Take One

Chapter 9: Phantasmagoria in Two

Chapter 10: Griddle Cafe

Chapter 11: Duende

Chapter 12: The Four of Them

Chapter 13: Pandora’s Box

Chapter 14: Shame Toast

Chapter 15: Charlie’s Dead

Chapter 16: Fields of Asphodel

Chapter 17: A Rose by Any Other Name

Chapter 18: Lilikoi

Chapter 19: Mystique

Part Two: The Tiger Catcher

Chapter 20: Klonopin

Chapter 21: The Apothecary

Chapter 22: Waterloo

Chapter 23: White Crow

Chapter 24: The Question

Chapter 25: The Widow’s Daughter

Chapter 26: Great Eastern Road

Chapter 27: Red Beret, Take Two

Chapter 28: When We Were Kings

Chapter 29: Zero Meridian

Chapter 30: Notting Hill

Chapter 31: Time Over Matter

Chapter 32: A Boy Called Wart

Chapter 33: Dumbshow

Part Three: Medea

Chapter 34: Moongate

Chapter 35: White Lava

Chapter 36: Black River

Chapter 37: Dead Queen, Take One

Chapter 38: Chandlery

Chapter 39: Medea

Chapter 40: Lady Mary

Chapter 41: The Italian Merchant

Chapter 42: Fynnesbyrie Fields Forever

Chapter 43: The Boy and the Boatman

Chapter 44: Josephine and the Flying Machine

Chapter 45: Sebastian

Chapter 46: Consequences of Happiness

Chapter 47: The Coat

Chapter 48: Side Effects of Electrocution

Chapter 49: The Lady, or the Tiger

Keep Reading …

Author’s Note

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
The Transit Circle

I SHOULD HAVE KISSED YOU. JULIAN LAY NAKED ON HIS BED, clutching the red beret, staring at the ceiling. I should have kissed you the last time I saw you.

After half a night passed like this, he gave up on sleep, jumped up and began to get ready. He had a lot to do to be in Greenwich by noon. Don’t dawdle, the cook told him. You have very little time. You have a picosecond inside of a minute. And don’t get stuck. Where you’re going, the opening is wide enough for one man, but not for all men.

And what was Julian’s wise response to this?

“How long is a picosecond?”

“One-trillionth of a second,” the exasperated cook replied.

Julian dressed in black layers. He shaved. He slicked back his unruly brown hair and tied it up so it didn’t look like what it was—a bushy mane on a man who long ago stopped giving a damn. Julian was square-faced, square-jawed, straight-browed, granite-chinned, once. His hazel eyes looked gray today, huge, sunken into his gaunt cheeks, the dark bags under his eyes like somebody clocked him, the full mouth pale. He had lost so much weight, he had to punch a new notch in his belt; his jacket could’ve fit two Julians inside.

It took him a while to get out; he kept forgetting this, that. At the last minute, he remembered to text his mother and Ashton. Nothing too alarming—like I’m sorry—but still, he wanted to leave them with something. Jokes to make them think the old Julian wasn’t too far away. To his mom: “I used to feel like a guy trapped in a woman’s body. Then I was born.” To Ashton: “You can’t lose a homing pigeon, Ash. If your homing pigeon doesn’t come back, what you’ve lost is a pigeon.” But he did leave a separate note for Ashton on his dresser.

As instructed, Julian left his cell phone at the flat, his wallet, his pens, his notebooks. He left his life behind, including the words he had written just yesterday called “Tiger Claws.”

What do you ask of life

At night the world you can’t change

desire drunkenness rage

Flies by

While you lie flat on your back

Under claws and lizards

In the purple fields.

He brought four things: a fifty-pound note, an Oyster fare card for the tube, the crystal on a rope around his neck, and the red beret in his pocket.

At Boots at Liverpool Street, he bought a flashlight. The cook said he would need one. And then the trains were slow like he was slow. Julian waited forever for a change at Bank. At Island Gardens, he looked down into his hands. They had been clenched since Shadwell. Lately he’d been staggering, foundering, drowning. Without time, his wandering life had filled up with nothing but watery impressions, his days were without architecture, without frame or matter, a muddle, a madness, a dream.

But not anymore. Now he had purpose. Lunatic, foolish purpose, but hey, he was grateful something was being offered to him instead of nothing.

In Greenwich, the flat landscaped park below the Royal Observatory is lined with crisscrossing paths called Lovers’ Walks. Deep inside the park, on top of a steep hill with a wild garden, for centuries the British astronomers have studied the skies. Today, on a blustery day in March the garden was nothing but bare branches whipping about, blocking the view of what Julian was climbing to the top of the mountain to find.

He felt idiotic. Did he buy a ticket? Did he loiter until the appointed hour? The cook told him to find a telescope called the Transit Circle, but the Observatory was home to so many. Where was this enchanted spot where all impossible things became possible? Julian caught himself scoffing and felt ashamed. His mother taught him better than that, told him never to mock the thing you were about to fall on your knees in front of.

“Which way to the Transit Circle?” Julian asked the cashier behind the table.

The pretty girl smoothed out her hair. “George Airy’s Transit Circle? Right through there. I can take you, if you like. Will it be just one ticket for you?” She smiled.

“Yes,” he said. “And no, that’s fine, I’ll find it. Do you sell pocket watches?”

“Yes, in our gift shop. Do you need a compass, too? Maybe a tour guide?” She tilted her head.

“No, thank you.” He wouldn’t look up, wouldn’t meet her gaze.

With the girl hovering nearby, Julian bought a watch in an unopened box. She wanted to test it to make sure it worked, but he said no. He didn’t want her touching it, imprinting his brand-new timekeeper with her own spirit.

“You won’t be able to return it if something’s wrong with it,” she said.

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m not coming back this way.” Whatever happened, he wouldn’t be coming back.

“That’s a shame.” She smiled. “Where are you going?” When he didn’t answer, she shrugged, a friendly girl marking time. “Look around,” she said. “Take your time.”

Julian had almost nothing left from his fifty. He hid the remaining pound coins in a souvenir vase along with his Oyster card. Was that wrong, to hedge his bets? No, he decided. Even people who sought out miracles were allowed to be cautious. That was him—a cautious man seeking out a miracle. He had some time to kill so he wandered around killing it. It was only eleven o’clock. He tried to remember all the things the cook told him, but there had been so many. “At noon, the sun will pass through a pinhole in the glass crosshairs overhead,” the cook said. “A beam of light will strike the quartz in your hands. The blue chasm will open. You must hurry. The rest of your life awaits.”

It sounds difficult and complicated, Julian said. The cook stepped back from the grill and judged him up and down, a cleaver in his hands. “You think this part is complicated? Do you have any idea what you’re about to do?”

No. Julian had no idea. He knew what he had been doing. Lately, nothing. But way back when, he did things, like mark time with his baby down the road from his Hollywood dreams. Sun beating down on palm trees and lovers, Volvos parked in secluded corners. Windows open. Joy flying in, like wind. Julian wasn’t a skeptic then. Well, like he always said, there was a time for everything.

“Where’s the Prime Meridian?” Julian asked a gruff older guard inside one of the rooms in the pavilion.

“You’re on it, mate,” the guard replied. His name tag said Sweeney. He pointed to an enormous black telescope. “You’re in the Transit Room. And that’s the Transit Circle, right on the meridian line.” Over nine feet long, Airy’s telescope looked like a field gun aimed at the stars. It was flanked by a set of glossy black stairs, their base set into a square well slightly below the main floor.

Through the open door, pale sunlight. The brass line marking 0.0 longitude was riveted into the cobblestones in the courtyard. Julian watched the tourists hamming it up on the line, one foot in the east, one foot in the west, standing on each other’s shoulders, taking pictures, posing, laughing. He checked his new watch.

11:45.

His hands trembled. To steady himself, he grabbed the low iron railing that separated him from the telescope, the retractable roof open, the patchy sky above him.

He was so utterly alone.

A strange, vast, rainy, foreign city. London like another country unto itself. Julian glanced back at the guard. The portly man sat on a stool, an elbow on the wood table, indifferent to Julian, as was the whole universe. There was a window behind Sweeney, a glimpse of taupe leafless trees blowing about in the sharp wind. It had been so gusty in London the last few days, like an eyewall of a hurricane passing through.

11:56.

Reaching into his shirt, Julian pulled out the stone that hung on a leather rope around his neck. Leaving it in its silver webbing, he laid it into his shaking hand. In the gray light, the crystal didn’t sparkle or shimmer. Silent and cool, it lay in his open palm. Once the stone had been in her hands. There was sun then, a sparkling mist of dreamlike bliss, the beginning, not the end—or so he thought.

Was this the end?

Or was it the beginning?

“The crystal oscillates a million times a second,” the cook told him—a cook, a magician, a warlock, a wizard. “And you oscillate with it. You are the oscillator. You are the chain reaction, the chemical ignition, the voltage soaring through your own life. Go, Julian. The time has come for you to act.”

There is no other time.

Until the end of time.

Running out of time.

11:59.

Julian gripped the crystal. His vision blurred. The memory of pain is what causes the fear of death. The heart grows numb. There’s a sense of suffocation. As the lungs become paralyzed, the heart cannot breathe.

So it is with the memory of love.

O my soul and all that’s within me, the beggar cried, raising his palm to the sky.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s showtime!

In the picosecond before the clock struck noon, in the blink he still had between what was and what was yet to be, Julian asked himself what he was most afraid of.

That the inexpressible thing being offered to him was possible?

Or that it wasn’t?

There’ll be another time for you and me.

There’ll never be another time for you and me.

As the sun moved into the crosshairs at noon, he knew. He would do anything, sacrifice everything to see her again.

Help me.

Please.

I should’ve kissed you.

Part One
The Ghost of God and Dreams

“Like a ghost she glimmers on to me. And all thy heart lies open unto me.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“I love acting. It is so much more real than life.”

Oscar Wilde

1
The Invention of Love

“I’M DEAD, THEN. GOOD.” THOSE WERE THE FIRST WORDS SHE said to him.

Julian and Ashton flew to New York from L.A. with their girlfriends Gwen and Riley to see the star-studded adaptation of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love off Broadway. The play—with Nicole Kidman in the starring role!—about the life and death of British poet A.E. Housman, originally written for men, had been reimagined and restaged with all women, except for the part of Moses Jackson, Housman’s objet d’amour, which was played by some male newcomer, who was “ominous like a powder keg,” the New York Times had reverentially written.

At first, when Gwen had suggested going, Julian balked. He knew something about The Invention of Love. His unfinished masters, a papercut inside him, included Stoppard’s play as part of the assignment.

“Oh, you think you know something about everything, Jules,” Gwen said. She was always dragging him to cultural things. “But you don’t know about this. Trust me. It’s going to be fantastic.”

“Gwen, if we’re going all the way to New York, why don’t we see La Traviata at Lincoln Center instead?” Julian said. He wasn’t particularly a friend of the opera, but Placido Domingo was Armand. That was worth a cross-country trip.

“Did you not hear when I said Nicole Kidman is A.E. Housman? And Kyra Sedgwick is her sidekick!”

“I heard, I heard,” Julian said. “Is Ashton going to agree to this?”

“He will if you will. And what, you think Ashton would rather see Placido? Ha. We have to expand his horizons. And clearly not just his. Come on, Jules, don’t sulk, it’ll be fun. I promise.” Gwen smiled toothily as if her promises were stone-carved.

They made a weekend out of it. Ashton hung up his favorite sign on the door of his store: GONE FISHING (though he didn’t fish). The four of them like the musketeers often traveled together, spent weekends down in Cabo or up in Napa. They flew into JFK on Friday, had dinner at La Bernardin, where Ashton knew the owner (of course he did), and they got to eat for free. Afterward, they met up with a few friends from UCLA, went drinking in Soho and dancing in Harlem.

Hungover and slow, they spent Saturday afternoon at MOMA, did some window shopping on Fifth Avenue. When Saturday night rolled around, Julian was almost too tired to go out again. He had bought a fascinating little book at the MOMA gift store, The Oracle Book: Answers to Life’s Questions, and would have liked to order room service and leaf through it—looking for answers as the book suggested. He had opened it randomly to two provocative replies, answers to questions he wasn’t asking.

One: You’ve drawn the seven of cups. Is this what you really want?

What was this referring to in that sentence?

And two: A solar eclipse hints of an unexpected ending.

What ending was he expecting?

Dressed for a Saturday night on the town—the men in dark jeans, fitted shirts, and structured blazers; the girls made up and blown out, in high heels and open necklines—they had pre-theatre sushi at Nobu in TriBeCa, all but Riley because it was B day and Riley didn’t eat on B days, and cabbed it to the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village.

And wouldn’t you know it, Nicole Kidman had an understudy!

The sign on the board read: “Tonight, the part of A.E. Housman will be played by Ms. Kidman’s understudy, Josephine Collins.”

A loud unhappy hullaballoo rippled through the ticketholders. It was a Saturday night! Why would the star of the show be out without a word? “Did she fall down the stairs? Did she catch a contagious disease?” Gwen asked. No one knew. The box office was mum. The social media was quiet. Since the only name above the title of the play on the marquee was Tom Stoppard’s, refunds were out of the question.

Julian thought his girlfriend was going to have a polar icecap meltdown right on the pavement. Gwen was upset at the poor woman at the ticket window, as if Nicole’s absence was the woman’s fault. “But why is she out?” Gwen kept repeating. “Can’t you tell me? Why?”

Julian tried to make it better. Giving Gwen a small commiserating pat as they took their seats, he said, “Josephine Collins is a good stage name, don’t you think?”

Gwen glared at him. “You never say anything to actually make me feel better when I’m upset,” she said. “Like you don’t even care.”

Julian glanced at Ashton on his right. His friend was chatting with Riley, chuckling over some private joke, their blond heads together.

He tried again. “You did amazing, Gwen, really. These seats are incredible.” And they were. Third row center.

“Oh yes, they’re excellent,” Gwen said. “All the better to see the understudy from.”

Ashton elbowed him. “I keep telling you, Jules, in some situations, it’s best to shut the hell up. This most definitely is one of them.”

Julian stared straight ahead. After an interminable minute, the red curtain rose.

The understudy stood center stage in the footlights.

“I’m dead, then. Good,” she said to him, and swiveled her hips.

A slouching, heavy-lidded Julian sat up in his seat.

The play may have been fine. It may have been terrible. Gwen spent the moments during applause and the intermission in a ceaseless harangue against the understudy, so it was hard for Julian to form a coherent opinion about the play.

But he formed an opinion about the understudy.

The accidental girl was in front of Julian for over two unsuppressed hours.

She was remarkable. Though she was young and played an old man looking back on his life and finding it wanting, she brought melancholy and elegance to the stage, she brought wit and pain and outrage. She brought it all. Everything she had was left on the stage in front of Julian.

She might not have been as tall as Nicole Kidman, but she was just as sinewy, all long limbs and whiteout skin and bleached-out features. Unlike Nicole, she had brown eyes and a whisper of a breathy voice. She sounded like a teenager but with an earthy grownup exhale at the end of each sentence. The juxtaposition of her feminine self, sauntering about, playing a gruff professor had a powerful effect on Julian. The sturdy Housman verse coming from her barely audible, husky throat seduced him. Her swiveling hips seduced him. Love is but ice in the hands of children, she murmured in her impeccable British accent, standing on the banks of the River Styx, stretching out her slender arms to him. He fought the urge to leap up in his seat. How many tomorrows would the gods give me? she kept asking. How much time do I have? she cried.

And then, stepping out of Housman and into Chekhov, she said this from The Three Sisters:

Oh, where is it, where has it all gone, my past, when I was young? When I dreamed and thought with grace, when my present and my future were lighted up with hope? Why is it that when we have barely begun to live, we grow dull, gray, uninteresting, lazy, indifferent, useless, unhappy. The adults relieve the monotony of their days with gossip and vodka. Where is the artist, the scholar, the saint, where is the one who is not like all the others, who inspires envy, or passionate desire? What do you want, Julian? WHAT DO YOU WANT?

His mouth dropped open. Did he mishear? The Oracle Book was speaking to him out loud. Bewildered, he leaned forward. Ashton nudged him to sit back. Did the girl just call out to him by name?

“It was ghastly, wasn’t it?” Gwen said when it was over. “How pretentious was she? Oh, she thought she was all that. How in the world did she land such a complex role? Banging the producer, most likely, don’t you think?”

“How would I know?” Julian said. “Why are you asking me? I know nothing about her.” Was she really British? Surely you couldn’t fake an accent like that.

“Why are you getting defensive?” Gwen sighed, taking his limp hand. “I’m sorry, okay? You were right. We should’ve seen La Traviata. But honestly, what did you think? Ghastly, wasn’t it?”

That wasn’t quite what Julian thought.

Gwen wanted to stage door for Kyra Sedgwick’s autograph. “So the evening is not a total waste.” They squeezed in by the blue guardrail. “After this, we’re walking straight to Art Bar,” Gwen said. “First round’s on me. We will drink to forget.”

“There isn’t enough alcohol in all of New York,” Riley chimed in. “I also didn’t care for her, Gwennie. She rubbed me the wrong way, though I can’t quite put my finger on why.”

“What do you think, Jules?” Ashton said. “Is there enough alcohol in all of New York for you to forget her?”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

Ashton was teasing but not smiling. Julian turned his gaze to the backlit pink posterboard by the stage door.

“She grated on me,” Gwen continued to say to Riley. “It’s fine to bring something new to a role. But it can’t be a total departure.”

“She was a woman playing a man, how much more of a departure can there be?” Julian asked.

“She wasn’t manly enough. Did you hear her voice?”

“I heard her,” said Julian.

“I could barely. Plus she wasn’t tall enough. It was so distracting.”

“Were you distracted by her height, bro?” Ashton said, nudging Julian.

“Nope.”

“Well, pardon me for expressing my opinion,” Gwen said.

Julian pointed out that he, too, was expressing his opinion.

“Yes, but I’m making an intellectual argument against her lack of quality,” Gwen said. “What are you doing?”

Julian let it go. He didn’t know what he was doing.

It was a June summer night in New York, warm, overcast, windy, a crackle in the air of three million people alive in the street. People were pushy, the way people in New York sometimes are when they’ve spent a lot of scratch on tickets and feel it’s their due to get a signature on a playbill. They stand with demanding arms out, as if they’re doing the actors a favor and not the other way around.

The petty things Gwen continued to say about the understudy irritated Julian. He stepped away, letting other men and their dates wedge between him and his date. An echo of the girl’s words continued to ring in his ears and thump in his chest. I’m dead then, good; love like ice in the hands of children …

Kyra Sedgwick came out on the arm of Kevin Bacon, her skinny, youthful actor husband. A guy in the crowd loudly made a six degrees of Kevin Bacon joke. Kevin Bacon smiled as if he wanted to deck him. A few minutes later, the only man in the cast—the beefed-up, “explosive powder keg” who played Moses Jackson—strutted out. Julian didn’t catch his actual name and didn’t care to. A few steps behind Mr. Universe, the understudy followed. Julian’s breath caught in his throat.

The barricades grunted under the heaving mob; there was shouting, Kyra, Kyra. Kevin, Kevin. Julian liked that Kevin Bacon wasn’t even in the play, yet was signing. A measure of true celebrity, Julian thought with amusement. This was some superstar shit.

Even Mr. Universe signed a few playbills. Not Julian’s understudy. She stood to the side like the last unbought maiden at an Old West wench auction. No one recognized her with the blonde wig off and her wet hair pulled into a tight bun.

It started to drizzle.

Extending his hand with the playbill in it, Julian waved it around to get her attention. How do you act like a gentleman and not an asshole when you’re waving around a thing to be signed? But when she saw him making a fool of himself, she stepped forward, all breath and grateful smile. He held out the playbill for her in the palm of his slightly shaking hand, watching the top of her wet dark head as she signed her name, large, ornate, nearly illegible, Josephine Collins with a bold flourish.

Before Julian could tell her how good she was, how astonishing, the steroid with a mouth summoned her from afar. The only thing missing was a finger snap. She fled.

And that was that.

Back in L.A., Julian almost forgot her.

Ashton’s store was as busy as ever, three of Julian’s brothers were having birthdays, Father’s Day was coming up, a baptism, his mother was hosting an end-of-school party and needed Julian’s help finding a florist and a caterer, and Gwen was hinting at a romantic getaway to Mexico for the Fourth of July, hoping perhaps for an engagement ring in Cabo.

Every once in a while, Julian remembered the girl’s first line.

Not even remembered it. He dreamed it.

In visions of blazes and icy glades, her pale face would appear lit up against the black, and from the center stage in his chest her voice would sound, asking what he was waiting for, telling him that the soul had no borders.

2
Book Soup

A FEW WEEKS LATER JULIAN RAN INTO HER AT BOOK SOUP ON Sunset. Ran into her was probably a misnomer. He was in the poetry stacks, killing time before meeting up with Ashton, and she waltzed in.

Skipping up the short stairs, she headed for the black shelves by the windows, to the film and theatre section. From his hidden vantage point, his head cocked, Julian watched her scanning the spines of the books. It was definitely the same girl, right? What a coincidence to find her here.

She had on a blonde wig in New York and cocoa hair now, swept up in a messy, falling-out bun. She was wearing denim shorts, black army boots, and a sheer plaid shirt that swung over a bright red tank top. Her legs were slender, long, untanned. No doubt. It was her.

Julian didn’t usually approach women he didn’t know in bookstores. Plus he was out of time. He glanced at his watch, as if he were actually contemplating accosting her, or perhaps looking for a reason not to. Ashton in thirty.

His insane buddy wanted to go canyoneering in Utah! Julian’s job as a friend was to talk him out of it. So Julian had gone to Book Soup to buy the memoir of the unfortunate hiker who had also gone canyoneering in Utah. The poor bastard got trapped under a boulder for five days in Blue John Canyon and had to cut off his own arm with a dull pocket knife to survive. Over lunch of spicy soft-shell crab tacos, cilantro slaw and cold beer, Julian intended to read the salient passages to Ashton about how to save a life.

But before he could get to the life-saving travel section, Julian got sidetracked by the L.A. poems of Leonard Cohen and then by the hypnotic synth-beat chorus of Cuco’s “Drown” playing on the overhead speakers.

And there she was, bouncing in.

It was almost noon. Julian had just enough time to hightail it to Melrose to meet Ashton at Gracias Madre. At lunchtime, the streets of West Hollywood pulsed with hangry drivers. The girl hadn’t even seen him. He didn’t need to be sneaky. He didn’t need to be anything. Put Leonard Cohen down, walk out the open door onto Sunset. Stroll right on out. Throw a dollar into Jenny’s jar. Jenny the blind waif loitered outside the store at lunchtime by the rack of newspapers. The homeless needed to eat, too. Walk to your car, get in, drive away.

Without traffic, it would take him seven minutes. Julian prided himself on being a punctual guy, his Tag Heuer watch set to atomic time, Hollywood’s legendary lateness insulting to him.

Julian did not walk out.

Instead, casual as all that, he ambled across the store to the sunny corner by the window until he stood behind her, Leonard Cohen’s love songs to Los Angeles clutched in his paws.

He took a breath. “Josephine?”

He figured if it wasn’t her, she wouldn’t turn around.

She turned around. Though not exactly immediately. There was a delay in her turning around. She was makeup free, clear-skinned, brown eyed, neutrally polite. Everything on her smooth healthy face was open. Eyes far apart, unhindered by overhanging brow lines or furrows in the lids, forehead large, cheekbones wide, mouth pink.

At first there was nothing. Then she blinked at him and smiled politely. Not an invitation to a wedding, just a tiny acknowledgment that she was looking at a man whom she didn’t find at first glance to be overly repellent, and to whom she would deign, grace, give one minute of her life. You got sixty seconds, cowboy, her small smile said. Go.

But Julian couldn’t go. He had forgotten his words. Going up, it was called in the theatre. When everything you were supposed to say flew out of your head.

She spoke first. “Where do I know you from?” she asked, squinting. There was no trace of a British accent in her voice. “You look so familiar. Wait. Didn’t you come to my play in New York? The Invention of Love?”

“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “You remember?”

She shrugged. “Yours was the only playbill I signed.” Her voice—not just her stage voice but also her normal sing-song speaking voice—was gentle and breathy, a girl’s voice but with a naked woman’s lilt to it. Quite an art to pull that off. Quite a spectacle. “What are you doing in L.A.?”

“I live around the corner,” he said, ready to give her his street address and apartment number. “You?”

“I’m just visiting. Auditioning.”

“From London?”

She chuckled. “Nah, that was fake. I’m Brooklyn born and raised—like Neil Diamond.”

“Don’t you have a show to do?”

She shook her head. “Nicole came back.”

“Why was she out that night?” Gwen was still carrying on about it.

“You’re upset about that, too? The theatre got so many complaints.”

Julian stammered. “No, not me.”

“Would you believe it—Nicole’s driver took a wrong turn into the Lincoln Tunnel.” Josephine chortled. “He had a brain freeze. He drove to Jersey! I mean, Jersey is always the wrong turn, but then they got stuck behind an accident coming back, and—well, you know the rest.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. My contract ended a few days later,” she said. “They didn’t renew.”

“I’m not surprised,” Julian said. “Nicole must’ve been afraid for her job. You were fantastic.”

“Really?” She beamed.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “You stole the show. They don’t forgive that in the theatre.”

The girl thawed. She said some things, a thank you, and a you really think so? Julian barely heard her. His sight grew dim.

That night was the only night she took the stage.

In front of him.

Blinking, he came out of it. “Plus,” he said, “you couldn’t make up a better stage name than Josephine Collins.”

“How do you know I didn’t make it up?” She twinkled. “And what’s your name?”

“Julian.”

She shielded her eyes—as if from the sun, even though they were inside—and assessed him. “Hmm. You don’t look like a Julian.”

“No? What does a Julian look like?” He resisted the impulse to check his attire, as if he forgot what he’d put on that morning. “I’m no Ralph Dibny,” he muttered, not meaning to say it. It just slipped out. In the comic book universe, Ralph Dibny was an ordinary man in ordinary clothes who drank a super-potion that changed him into an extraordinary contortionist.

Josephine nodded. “Agreed, you’re no Dibny—unless you’re made of rubber. Julian what?”

“Julian Cruz. Did you say rubber? You know who Ralph Dibny is?”

“The Elongated Man? Doesn’t everybody?” she replied in her dulcet soprano.

Julian didn’t know what to say.

“Are you sure you’re not a Dibny?” Josephine stood clutching a book to her chest as if they were in high school. “Why else would you look like a geeky middle-school teacher?”

“I don’t look like a middle-school teacher,” Julian said, and the girl laughed at his on the fly editing, as he hoped she would.

“No?” she said, studying him.

Why did Julian suddenly feel so self-conscious? She reviewed his well-groomed square-jawed face, she assessed his hair—kept carefully trimmed—the crisp khaki slacks, the sensible shoes, the button-down, blue-checked shirt, the tailored blazer, the impeccably clean nails digging into the cover of Leonard Cohen. He hoped she didn’t notice his large, tense hands with their gnarly knuckles or his broken nose, or his light hazelnut eyes that were forcing themselves into slits to hide his interest in her.

“Okay, okay,” the girl said, her face lighting up in a smile. “I’m just saying, like Dibny, you look like you might have some hidden talents.” Teasing him suggestively, inviting him to tease back.

What happened then wasn’t much.

Except the skies opened up and the stars rained down.

“You don’t need to be Dibny,” Josephine added. “You can live up to your own rock star name, Julian Cruz.”

Julian Cruz the rock star forgot how to talk to a girl. Awkwardly he stood, saying nothing. Why did his earth-tone fastidiousness irk him so much today? He was normally so proud of it. He hid his face from her in a dazzle of tumbling stars.

“Listen,” Josephine said, “I’d love to stand and gab with you all day about our favorite superheroes, but I’ve got an audition at one.”

“Is that what the book is for?” He pointed to her hands. Monologues for Actors from Divine Comedy.

“No, the book’s for my 4:30.” She zeroed in on him, blinking, thinking.

Not knowing what to say, Julian took a step back and lifted his Leonard Cohen in a so long, Josephine.

“Here’s the thing,” she said, taking a step toward him. “I was gonna catch a cab, but they’re so hard to find around lunchtime, so I was wondering … is there any way you could help a girl out and drive me to the audition? It’s at Paramount, not too far.”

On the radio, Big Star were in love with a girl, the most beautiful of all the girls in the world. “Not a problem,” Julian said, flinging away Leonard Cohen.

“I don’t mean to impose,” she said. “New York’s so much easier, I just hop on the subway, but here without a car …”

“It’s no big deal.” Ashton who? Friend for how long? “So you live in New York?” he asked at the counter as they waited to pay.

“I do. Is that good or bad?” Cheerfully her dark eyes blinked at him. She was fresh faced, eager, sincere. She had a few freckles, a dimple in her small chin. There was something wonderfully animated and inviting about her open face, about her pink vivid mouth.

His car was parked by the Viper Room, a block up Sunset. “The audition is for Mountain Dew,” Josephine said as they hurried past the blind homeless Jenny, smiling as if she could see them. “But the 4:30 is for something called Paradise in the Park at the Greek Theatre. Have you heard of it? Apparently, they need a narrator for Dante and also a Beatrice.”

“Have I heard of what? Mountain Dew? Beatrice? The Greek?” Julian opened the car door for her. He’d been leasing a Volvo sedan the last couple of years. It was spotless inside.

She didn’t notice the car or the cleanliness, or if she had, didn’t care. She was starved, she said, she hadn’t eaten since the night before. He offered her a bite-sized Milky Way from the glove box, behind his seatbelt cutter, flashlight, and multi-tool—items she also ignored on the way to the chocolate. “I really need to start making some money,” she said, theatrically chewing the hard caramel. “This Milky Way tastes like it’s been there since Christmas. I’m not complaining, mind you. Mine is a beggar’s kingdom.” Flipping down the visor mirror, she took out a small bag from her hobo purse and started doing her makeup. “I didn’t know Ralph Dibny drove a Volvo.” So she did notice. She threw blue shadow over her eyes and some more shade at him. “What are you, fifty?”

“What? No—”

“Only married fifty-year-old men with kids drive Volvos.”

“That’s not true,” Julian said, “because I’m none of those things, and yet I drive one.”

“Hmm,” she said with a purr, casting him a sideways gaze. “You’re not a man?”

Julian turned off his phone. Switched it off cold. Last thing he needed was Ashton’s scolding voice coming through the car speakers, intruding on his Technicolor daydream. He just hoped Ash wouldn’t think Julian had been in an accident. Ashton wasn’t going to take it lightly, Julian blowing off lunch and a set walkthrough at Warner.

Well, hadn’t Julian been in a kind of accident? On an unremarkable day, a nothing day, a Tuesday, he was suddenly doing remarkable, out-of-character things. Standing up his friend. Approaching strange women. Giving them rides. The open-ended nature of life was such that on any day, at any moment, this was possible. But just because the world for others was free to these possibilities didn’t mean it was thus free to Julian. He lived his comfortable life mostly without impulse and therefore without miracles. He barely even believed in miracles, as Ashton never failed to remind him.

With the traffic on Santa Monica at a standstill, Josephine got antsy, while Julian became a praying man, don’t change, red light, don’t change, please. “So what do you do, shuttle back and forth between L.A. and New York?” he asked her. “Why not move out here?” Oh, just listen to him! He gripped the wheel.

“I tried that,” Josephine said. “I couldn’t make it. I don’t mean, I couldn’t get work. I mean I couldn’t live here. Hey, can you give me a heads-up before the light changes and you start driving? I’m putting liner on the inside of my eye.” She told him that to her, L.A. always carried a vague ominous quality. At first Julian thought she was joking. L.A. ominous? Maybe some parts. Parts he didn’t visit. “I don’t feel real when I’m here,” she said. “It feels like I’m in a dream that’s about to end. Hey, Julian, remember you were supposed to give me a heads-up? I could’ve poked my eye out.”

“Sorry.” He slowed down, like now that helped. “In a dream like a dream come true?” Smooth, Jules. Real smooth.

“No,” she said. “Like a walk-on part in someone else’s acid trip.”

He wanted to make a joke but couldn’t, he was too busy praying.

A few minutes to one, he pulled up to a Paramount side gate off Gower. The guard there knew him. “Hey, C.J.,” he called out to the smiling security man.

Josephine was impressed. “You’re on a first name basis with the guard at Paramount?”

“How you doin’, Jules,” C.J. said, peering inside the Volvo. “And where’s our boy Ashton today?”

“Who’s Ashton?” Julian said with a wink.

A smirking C.J. was about to lift the gate, but Josephine leaned over Julian to flick her audition pass into the open window. Julian smelled her meadowsweet musky perfume, verbena mint soap, and the chocolate Milky Way on her breath. Pressed against the back of the driver’s seat, he inhaled her and tried not to get lightheaded—or worse.

“You’re fine, young lady,” the guard said, waving her on. “You’re with him, go on through. Do you know where you’re going?”

“Do any of us really know where we’re going, C.J.?” Josephine said cheerfully. They drove past. “Who’s Ashton?”

“My get-into-Paramount card,” Julian replied, looking for her soundstage. “Also, Warner’s, ABC, CBS, Universal, Fox. Really my get-into-life card. Run, it’s right here. Or you’ll be late.”

At the gray door to Soundstage 8 marked “Auditions,” Josephine said sheepishly, “Um, do you think you could wait? I won’t be but a minute. Five tops. I’ll buy you lunch after. As a thank you.”

“You don’t have to do that,” he said.

“I want to. But also”—she coughed with a beseeching smile—“maybe after I buy you lunch you could drop me off at Griffith Park? The stupid Greek Theatre is so far. And then that’s it, I promise.”

After she disappeared inside, Julian texted a rushed half-sentence apology to Ashton, switching the phone off again before he could get an outraged reply.

3
Lonely Hearts

JOSEPHINE CAME OUT WELL OVER AN HOUR LATER, FELL INTO his Volvo, and said, “God, that took forever.”

“Did you get the part?”

“Who knows?” She was unenthusiastic. “One of the other girls said she knew Matthew McConaughey, Mr. Mountain Dew himself. I hate her.” Said without malice. “She’s got connections. What time is it? I’m starved, but the Greek is on the other side of town. Where can we grab something quick?”

He took her across Melrose to a place called Coffee Plus Food. It was almost closing time, so they were nearly out of coffee plus food. The joint was also blissfully empty of people. It was just the two of them and the cashier, a bored, unsmiling Australian chick. They sat at a round steel table by the tall windows. Josephine tried to pay, but Julian wouldn’t let her. She ordered three sausage rolls (“I told you I was famished”), an avocado salad, a coffee, and the last morning bun on the tray after he assured her that the morning buns were not to be missed, like an attraction at Disneyland.

“I’d like to go to Disneyland someday,” she said, devouring the pastry. Even Ashton’s Riley, who ate primarily kale, allowed herself the morning bun. It was crispy and caramelly, a cinnabun mated with a croissant and glazed with crunchy sugar. “It’s like love in a bun,” Josephine said, her happy mouth sticky. She said she’d have to come back for another one before flying back home, and Julian restrained himself from asking when such a hideous flight might take place.

“What do you do, Julian?” she asked as she started on the sausage rolls. “What do you teach?”

“Nothing, why do you keep saying that?”

She twinkled. “You left your house this morning dressed for school.”

Julian was going to tell her that he did indeed teach a story writing night class at the community college, but now wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. They were off for the summer anyway, so technically he wasn’t a teacher.

“Teaching is a noble profession,” she went on, the smile playing on her face.

“I know,” he said. “I come from a family of educators. I’m just not one of them.”

“So what do you do?”

“A bunch of things. I run a blog, I write a daily newsletter …”

“Ooh, a blog about what?” she said. “Teaching?”

Now Julian really didn’t want to tell her.

“Come on, what’s your blog called?” With buttery fingers, she took out her phone. “I’ll look it up.”

He wished he had named his blog, “Deep Thoughts from a Viking Lord.” Instead he was stuck with the truth. “From the Desk of Mr. Know-it-All.”

“I knew it! You tell other people how to live!” She laughed. “You have that look about you.”

“What look is that?”

“The fake-quiet-but-really-I-know-everything look.” She was delighted. “Is it like an advice column?” Grinning, she leaned forward. “Do people drown you in their suffering?”

Sometimes yes. “Mostly they write to ask how to get rid of birds that fly into their houses.”

“Not for advice on love, are you sure?”

He tried to keep a poker face. “It’s not that kind of blog. I’m not Mr. Lonely Hearts.”

“No?”

How could one maintain a poker face against such onslaught?

A few years ago, he started distilling his website into a daily newsletter. He picked a handful of questions, tied them up with a theme, and offered a handful of life hacks and pithy sayings to go along with them. The soul is a bird inside your house, Nathaniel West wrote. Better one live bird in a jungle than two stuffed birds in a library.

The young woman clapped. “I can’t wait to bookmark you,” she said. In her voice, even a word like bookmark sounded erotic. “Do you have advice for frustrated actresses?”

He wanted to impress her with his own inappropriateness by telling her to never go topless unless it was essential to the story. “Dress to the camera,” is what he said.

Flicking up the collar of her see-through blouse, she crossed and uncrossed her bare legs. “Done. Bring me my pasties and a fedora. What else?”

Did she just say pasties? Mon Dieu.

“Once,” Josephine said, “a casting director told me not to try so hard to be someone else. Just be yourself, she told me, and I’m like, you idiot. I’m auditioning for Young Nabby Adams on John Adams, isn’t the whole point to be someone else?”

Julian laughed.

“I get a ton of advice,” she went on, “especially after I don’t get the part. Don’t be so desperate, Josephine. Relax, Josephine. Have fun! Drop your shoulder! I’m like, where were you before my audition? If that’s all I had to do, I’d be winning a Tony by now.”

“How long have you been at it?”

“How old am I? Oh yeah—that long. I prefer stage to film,” she announced, like it was a badge of honor. “It’s more real. And I’m all about making it real.”

“So why do you come to L.A. then?” Not that Julian was complaining. But L.A. was a make-believe town.

“Why? For the same reason Bonnie and Clyde robbed banks.”

He laughed. “Because that’s where the money is?”

“Yes! It’s not acting I love, per se. I just love the stage. I like the instant feedback. I like it when they laugh. I like it when they cry.” She twirled a loose strand of her hair. “Do you like plays?” She batted her lashes. “Besides The Invention of Love.”

“Yes, that’s one of my favorites. Oscar Wilde is pretty good, too. I once played Ernest in high school.”

“I was Cecily and Gwendolen!” Josephine exclaimed with a thrill, as if she and Julian had played opposite each other. Grabbing his hands from across the table, she affected a stellar British accent. “Ernest, we may never be married. I fear we never shall. But though I may marry someone else, and marry often, nothing can alter my eternal devotion to you.”

The name Gwendolen made Julian stop smiling. Casting aside his enchantment, he politely drew his hands from her and palmed his coffee.

Josephine, puzzled at his sudden wane, pivoted and refocused. “Sorry, you were in the middle of telling me what you did for a living, and I interrupted you with myself. Typical actress, right? Me, me, me. You run a blog, you said? Sounds like a hobby, like it’s even less lucrative than acting. And trust me, there’s nothing less lucrative than acting.”

“I thought actors cared nothing for money, they just wanted to be believed?” At the Cherry Lane, she had made a believer out of him.

“That’s first.” She smiled grandly. “But being booked and blessed wouldn’t be the worst thing that happened to me.”

“Well, there’s money in blogging,” Julian said. “I get paid from Google ads, plus I run a pledge drive twice a year. Whoever sends me a few bucks gets my daily newsletter.”

“How many people pledge?”

“Maybe thirty thousand. And two million unique visitors to the website. That helps raise our ad rates.”

She became less casual. “Two million visitors? I may be in the wrong business. Who is our in that sentence? You and the famous Ashton?”

“Yes, the famous Ashton.” Who was probably calling in an APB on Julian at that very moment.

“Is he the other Mr. Lonely Hearts?”

Why did everything out of her mouth sound like she was playing with him? Playing with him like seducing him, not toying with him, though she may have also been toying with him. “He can’t be the other Lonely Heart,” Julian said, “because I myself am not one. But yes, we’re partners in everything. Enough about me.” No red-blooded male talked about himself while across from him sat no less than Helen of Troy. “What have you been in? Anything I can watch tonight?”

“I was in a national Colgate commercial a year ago. You could watch that.” She flashed her teeth at him. “Recognize me now?”

She did look incongruously familiar. Maintaining a calm exterior took tremendous effort.

She told him she was also Mary in The Testament of Mary. “You didn’t see that? Yeah, nobody did. It was well reviewed and was even nominated for a Tony but ran only three weeks. Go figure, right? Only on Broadway can you have both great success and abject failure in the same show.” She chuckled. “To increase Mary’s ticket sales, the producer told the director to shoot a commercial with a shot of the audience hooting it up, having a great time, and the director said, ‘You gotta be careful, Harry, you don’t want your actual audience jumping up in the middle of your show yelling, what the fuck were they laughing at?’” Josephine laughed herself, her face flushed and carefree.

Her flushed, carefree face was quickly becoming Julian’s favorite thing in the universe.

They’d been in the café for over an hour. Julian was still clutching his cold cup of coffee. Suddenly she sprung from her seat. “Oh, no, it’s almost four! How do you swallow time like that? Let’s go, quick!”

“I swallow time?” Slowly he rose from the table.

The traffic on Gower was of course at a standstill. “Can we make it?”

“No, Josephine, we can’t.”

“Oh, come now, Mr. No-at-All. I told you, I go on at 4:30.”

“Will never happen. We’re four miles away in heavy traffic.”

“Mr. Pessimist,” she said. “What did Bette Davis reply to Johnny Carson when he asked her how to get to Hollywood?”

“She said ‘Take Fountain,’” said Julian.

“Very good! So you do know some stuff. Follow Bette’s advice, Julian. Take Fountain.” She flapped open the book she had bought. “Look what you did, you kept me yapping so long, I forgot to prepare a monologue. I don’t know a single line for Beatrice.”

“Start with, In the midway of this, our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood …”

“And then?”

“That’s all I know,” Mr. Know-it-All said.

“What am I supposed to do with that?”

“Perhaps you can go off book on another line or two from your years in the theatre?”

“From Beatrice? From Divine Comedy?”

“So audition for the narrator,” Julian said. “You’d make a great Dante. You were a very good Housman.”

“Please don’t stare at me, drive,” she said. “Is this jalopy a car or a horse buggy?”

“The Volvo is one of the best, safest cars on the road,” Julian said, offended for his oft-maligned automobile.

“I’m thrilled you’re safe,” she said. “Can you be safe and step on it?”

“We’re at a red light.”

“I’ve never seen so many red lights in my life,” Josephine said. “I think you’re willing them to be red. Like you want me to be late.”

“Why would I want that?” Face straight. Voice even.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” Almost as an aside, she added, “You know, if I get this gig, I’ll have to stay in L.A. for the summer.”

Julian’s jalopy grew wings and in it he flew to Griffith Park, screeching into a parking spot seventeen minutes later. “Ashton is right, miracles really do abound,” he said. “I’ve never made it here in less than a half-hour.”

“Really, hmm,” she said. “How often do you do this, Speedy Gonzalez, take strange stranded women to the Greek?” Flinging open the door, she motioned for him. “Come in with me. You can be my good luck charm.”

The theatre was nearly empty except for a few dozen people sitting in the front rows. Built into the cliffs of the untamed Santa Monica Mountains, the open amphitheatre was a little disquieting with its spooky silence and vacant red seats, the shrubby eucalyptus rising all around.

At the side gate, a girl with a clipboard stood in Phone Pose—head down like a horse at the water—texting. Josephine gave her name—and then Julian’s! He pulled at her sleeve. The girl didn’t see his name on the call sheet. “Must be an oversight,” Josephine said. They began to argue. “Clearly someone has made a mistake,” Josephine said. “Go get your supervisor immediately.”

Thirty seconds later, they were taking their seats in side orchestra, him with a number and a sticker. “That’s a great hack I learned from the theatre life, Julian,” Josephine said. “Today, I give it to you for free. Never yell down to get what you want. Always yell up. You’re welcome.”

“Why did you do that?” he whispered.

“Shh. She wouldn’t have let you in otherwise. You saw how she wallowed in her petty power. You want to perform, don’t you?”

“I most certainly do not.”

Josephine gave his forearm a good-natured pinch. “You said you were Ernest in high school. You must know something from Wilde by heart. I did.”

“Am I you?”

“What you are is number 50. You have ten minutes. I suggest you start practicing.”

“Josephine, I’m not reading.”

She stopped listening. They sat next to each other, their arms touching, her bare leg pressed against his khaki trousers. She was mouthing something, while his mind stayed a stubborn blank. Anxiously he stared at the stage. He was nervous for her, not for himself. He knew that despite her shenanigans he wasn’t going up there, but he really wanted her to get the part. A large sweaty man with messy hair recited Dante from the first canto. After four lines he was stopped. A bird of a woman followed. A pair of identical sisters got seven lines in before they were shooed off the stage.

“If you can get through your monologue,” Julian said quietly, after watching the others, “you’ll be all right. Here’s a hack for you. You’re rehearsing, not auditioning. Act like you already have the part.”

“But I don’t have the part. How the heck do I do that?”

“You act,” he said.

Her number was called. “Number 49. Josephine Collins.”

“Wish me luck,” she whispered, throwing Julian her bag and jumping up.

“You don’t need it. You have the part.” Julian watched her let down her long hair and become someone else on the stage, someone who projected without a microphone into the 6000-seat amphitheatre, someone who didn’t speak in a breathy femme fatale voice, someone with a British accent. She stood tall, eyes up, chin up, her body in dramatic pose, and shouted up into the empty seats.

What power is it, which mounts my love so high,

That makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye?

The mightiest space in fortune nature brings

To join like likes and kiss like native things—

The casting crank in the front row stopped her. “Miss Collins, what is that you are reading for us?”

“Shakespeare, sir, from All’s Well that Ends—”

“This is an audition for Paradise in the Park. You’re supposed to be reading for either Beatrice or Dante.”

“Of course. I was showcasing my abilities. How about this”—she lowered her voice to a deep bass, looked up, beat her breast—“through me you pass through the city of woe, through me you pass into eternal pain—”

“Thank you—next. Number 50. Julian Cruz. Mr. Cruz, have you prepared some Dante for us?”

4
Gift of the Magi

BACK AT HIS CAR, THEY LINGERED. SHE CALLED HIM chicken for telling the director he had nothing prepared, and he agreed, not wanting to take her home. She tied up her hair and put away her fake glasses. She looked like herself again, simple and perfect. The ends of her sheer blouse swayed in the breeze.

“I wish it wasn’t so late in the day,” she said, glancing at the hills around the theatre. “We could take a walk up there. I could show you something.”

“Show me anyway,” he said. “Wait—up where?”

“What, you agreed too fast? No, no backsies. I’ll have to show you another day.”

“Okay—when?”

She laughed. They leaned against his gray Volvo, drinking from the same water bottle. Julian’s thoughts were racing. “What’s your favorite movie?”

“Dunno. Why?”

“Come on. What is it? Titanic?”

“Ugh, no, I don’t care for all that dying in icy water, don’t care for it one bit,” she said, peering at him through slitted eyes. “Apocalypse Now.”

Julian did a double take. “Apocalypse Now is your favorite movie?”

She stayed poker-faced. “Sure. Why is that surprising?”

“No reason.” He fake-coughed. “I’ve never seen it.”

Now it was her turn to do a double take. “You’ve never seen Apocalypse Now?”

“No. Why is that surprising?”

“Because it’s such a guy movie. We should watch it sometime.”

“Okay—when?”

She laughed. They lingered a bit longer.

“Listen—I gotta head back,” she said.

“I thought you were hungry,” Julian blurted. “What do you feel like eating? We can go anywhere. My treat. I may not know about Vietnam movies, but I know my L.A. food. Are you in the mood for a taco? Factor’s on Pico? A pizza? Marie Callender’s coconut pie?”

Her mouth twisted as she struggled with some internal thing. “Don’t think I’m nuts,” Josephine finally said. “But I feel like breakfast for dinner. Hash browns?”

“I know just the place. Best hash browns in L.A.”

“Am I dressed for it?”

“For IHOP? Absolutely.” Julian opened the passenger door.

“You know what they say,” she said, getting in. “When the guy opens the door for you, either the girl is new, or the car is new.”

“Ha,” Julian said. The girl was new.

“So who do you stay with when you’re in L.A.?” he asked. They were sitting across from each other, their second plate of hash browns half eaten between them on the blue table.

“My friend Z.”

Did Julian dare ask if Z was a Zoe or a Zachary? He dared. “Who’s Z?”

“My best friend Zakiyyah.”

“Ah.” An exhale. “Is she in the business, too?”

“She used to be.” Josephine drummed her fork against the table. IHOP on Sunset was empty, because what kind of fool came to IHOP at night.

“What’s her actual name?”

“Zakiyyah Job. Job as in Bible, not employment. And Zakiyyah like pariah.”

“You two have incredible stage names. You’re lucky.”

“You should talk, Julian Cruz,” she said. “Anyway, Z is lucky. Jury’s still out on me. Seven years ago, we moved out west, paradise is here, the whole thing. We set up house, started going to auditions. I thought we’d be all right—me being white and her being black and all—but with colorblind casting, the agents were bending over themselves to hire her, not me. Sometimes she was better. Sometimes I was better. It was hard to tell, because she always got the part, and it got between us.” She sighed. “One of us had to choose a different life if we were to stay friends. So we flipped for it.”

“I should think,” Julian said, “that first you’d want to flip on whether or not you wanted to stay friends.”

“Nah. We’re from the same hood. Z is like my sister.”

Julian knew something about flipping for it. When they first met Gwen and Riley, he and Ashton flipped for Gwen. Because tall, gorgeous, California girl-next-door Riley with glossy blonde hair and glowing skin looked too high-end for mortal man, even Ashton, who was no slouch himself in the looks department. Ashton said that no one who was that put-together on a Wednesday night happy hour at a local dive in Santa Monica would ever be easy on a man’s life. She looked and moved like a movie star. And Gwen looked like the movie star’s best friend. So they flipped for Gwen. Ashton lost. That was shocking. Because Ashton never lost anything.

“I was pretty confident,” Josephine continued, “because I never lose a coin toss or even a game of rock, paper, scissors. But Z won. I said, let’s play best of five. She won again. I said, best of seven. She won that, too.”

“Was this major life decision fueled by tequila by any chance?”

“A whole bottle full.”

“Thought so.”

“She won every time. Finally I said, okay, one last time, winner take all, sudden death. We fortified ourselves with the rest of the tequila. And guess what happened?”

“You won?”

“Why,” she said with a half-smile full of whimsy, “because you believe in the Willy Wonka philosophy on lotteries and life in general?”

Julian laughed. “I do, actually. You stand a better chance if you want it more.”

Josephine nodded in deep agreement. “And no one wanted it more than me. Yet I still lost. Sometimes, no matter how much you want it, you still lose.” She didn’t look upset, just philosophical. “After I threw up and calmed down, Z told me I could have it. She would become something else.”

Julian was impressed. After he won, he did not give dibs on Gwen to Ashton. “Why would she do that?”

“She said because ever since I was old enough to recite ‘Three Blind Mice,’ I stood on every table,” Josephine said. “I invented a stage everywhere I went.” She fell silent, poking the remains of the cold potatoes. “Of course, now Z is doing fantastic, and I’m still waiting for my big break.” Zakiyyah was an art therapist for the California public school system. She traveled to districts around the state and trained elementary-school art teachers how to apply their craft to the Special Ed curriculum to help troubled kids who could not be reached by conventional therapy methods. Julian thought Zakiyyah’s newfound career was an ocean away from the stage. One job: me, me, me. The other: you, you, you. How did one make a quantum leap like that?

“Why do I plow on, you ask?”

“I didn’t ask. I know why,” Julian said. “Because the theatre is all there is.” His throat tightened.

“Yes!” Josephine exclaimed, her bright eyes gleaming. “It’s not so much a career as a sickness. You gotta love it, otherwise there’s no good reason for being obsessed with something that offers rewards to so few.”

Julian agreed. “That’s good advice for many things, not just the theatre,” he said. “But you’ll get there.” He wanted to tell her that he had never in his life felt what he felt when she stood in front of him on the darkened stage at the Cherry Lane. Oh where is it, where has it all gone, my past, when I was young. “Besides, if it’s what you do, and you can do it, then you do it.” Julian set his jaw. “Because sometimes, you can’t do it. And then, there’s nothing worse.”

Josephine mined his face. “You know something about that?”

“Little bit. The irony is,” Julian said with a thin smile, “that after all that drinking and coin tossing, you didn’t stay in L.A. and your friend did.”

“That’s true. We came here together, and she, who said she couldn’t stand the constant sun and the fake life chose to stay, and I, who loved both, returned home instead.”

“Why didn’t you stay?”

“I told you, I couldn’t live here,” Josephine said. “Though of course, I didn’t know that when we flipped for it.”

“That’s the time shift paradox.” Julian was trying to find something to say to make her feel better. She looked as if she needed it. “The hindsight paradox. You can’t act on what you do not know and cannot know.”

“No, I’m fibbing, I knew it,” the young beauty said, her doleful voice echoing in the empty restaurant. “I felt it in my soul. I thought the heaviness inside me was because of tension between me and Z. It was only after she went back to school and I kept going to auditions and yet the pervasive sense of doom wouldn’t lift that I realized it wasn’t me and Z that was wrong. It was me and L.A. that was wrong.” Breezily she waved her hand around, la-di-da. “So six years ago I returned to the absurd delights of the New York stage life.” She smiled. “Every few months I fly out here, try out for a few things so I can keep my SAG membership. I visit my friend and get away from the theatre to see if I can live without it. And I can’t. I fly out to L.A.,” Josephine said, “so I can know who I am.”

5
Normandie Avenue

NORMANDIE AVENUE WHERE ZAKIYYAH LIVED WAS POORLY lit. The residential through street lined with tall scraggly palms and working-class homes was wide but sketchy.

“It’s all she can afford,” Josephine said.

“I said nothing.” A moment later: “Is it safe?”

“Well, it’s not as safe as your Volvo, but what is?”

In a minute she was going to leave his Volvo.

“Z and I haven’t had much trouble,” she went on. “If you don’t count that drive-by shooting last time I was here.”

“And who’d want to count that?”

“It happened in front of Z’s house. Cops blocked the road for hours. Z was at work, but I had a callback and couldn’t leave until they cleared the scene. Story of my life.”

“Why doesn’t she move?”

“Because I’m back in New York. When we were both paying rent, it was easier.”

“Why doesn’t she get another roommate?”

“Who’d want to live here, have you seen the neighborhood?” Josephine shrugged. “On the plus side, it’s cheap. It’s next to the freeway. Rosie the landlady is nice. She makes us enchiladas because Z works late and is often too tired to cook. Though she’s a really good cook.”

“What about you? Do you cook?”

“Oh, sure. I cook,” she said. “I make shame toast.”

“I like it already,” said Julian.

“Wait until you taste it. You’ll love it.”

“Okay—when?”

She laughed like he was the headliner at the Comedy Cellar.

Zakiyyah lived in a yellow house under a yellow streetlight. He pulled up to the curb and put the car into park. He debated turning it off. Julian wanted to come in. He wanted he didn’t know what.

“You’d like Zakiyyah,” Josephine said. “She’s in education, like you.”

“I’m not in education, Josephine. I’m in entertainment.”

“You literally teach people how to use vinegar. You call that entertainment? I’m in entertainment.”

“Anyone can make Oscar Wilde entertaining,” Julian said. “He did all the work for you. To make vinegar entertaining, now that takes talent.”

“Okay, so you’re an entertaining academic,” she said.

“See, where I come from, that would be considered a compliment.”

“Where I come from, too.” She stretched, her arms hitting the roof of the car. “Z and I are on the second floor. We have a balcony.” She pointed to the side of the two-story house. “We have flowers on it. Can you see them? Red azaleas. Yellow petunias.”

“You’re lucky someone doesn’t come up and steal them.” He glanced up and down the street.

She wasn’t offended. “I mentioned this about the balcony,” she said, “in case you wanted to stand under it and recite a life hack or a poem or something.”

Swaying from her, he had nothing in reply, nothing clever.

Slowly she picked up her bag from the footwell. “I’m just messing with you. Thanks for today. I had fun.”

“Me, too.”

She opened the door and turned to him. Julian was about to cry nonsense into the confused air, literally to open his mouth and pour forth on her his plans before getting lost, how much he had once wanted a different life, how it hurt to let it go, and how hard it was to make peace with it, but the upside-down longing for her that felt like plunging into orchards of roses, thorns and all, made it impossible for him to breathe and therefore to speak.

Her hand was still on the open door, her right foot already out.

Leaning across, she kissed him softly on the cheek, close to his mouth. She smelled of chocolate cherries, of palm trees, of fire. A sense of something helpless rose up inside him.

After he watched her wave and vanish, he sat in front of her house, staring at the crumbling yellow balcony with the wilting azaleas, his fists pressed into his chest. He opened the window so he could hear the Hollywood Freeway on the next block, lights of cars flying past, whooshing like a turbulent ocean. A mile north, at the end of the long, straight Normandie, rose the giant inky forms of the Santa Monica Mountains, and etched into them the HOLLYWOOD sign whitely lit against the high darkness. Normandie was a through street, and cars often sped by before climbing up the hill behind Julian and disappearing. Directly across from Z’s place stood a low apartment building behind a locked gate, like a halfway house, a cheap duplex, gated off. All the lights were on. It was loud. Barbed wire hung over the barred windows and the stucco balconies, draped down, dangled like icicle lights at Christmas.

Julian peered closer. No, it wasn’t barbed wire. How retro. How WWII of him. It was razor wire. That was the modern way, the L.A. way. When regular barbs weren’t deterrent enough, the straight-edge blades sliced your Romeo throat as you climbed up to sing a sonnet to your lover. Josephine, Josephine.

Why would a house need razor wire on its windows and balconies?

Julian didn’t want to think about his day. He wanted only to feel. When he was thirteen he had a mad crush on a girl in the schoolyard. The crush was so bad it had rendered him speechless. Every time he was within fifty feet of her, he would start to sweat and pant. In the middle of the school year she had open heart surgery and died on the operating table, and that was that. It was the last time Julian had felt this way. Since then, he kept in control of himself. None of the later women he was with, and some of them had been awe-inspiring, made him feel like that tongue-tied kid at recess. He tried to avoid it at all costs, the feeling of being out of control. It was so debilitating. He wanted a sane love life. He wanted a sane life.

And until today, that was exactly what he got.

6
Gwen

WHEN GWEN OPENED THE DOOR, AT TEN AT NIGHT, SHE stared at him like he was about to tell her someone had died.

Gwen was right to be worried. They had a weekly schedule from which they rarely deviated. They went out on Thursday nights, and she stayed over at his place. They went out on Saturday nights, usually with Ashton and Riley. The four of them had Sunday brunch together. On Wednesdays he and Gwen tried to grab lunch if Julian didn’t have meetings and she wasn’t swamped. She was a legal secretary for an entertainment law firm.

She lived in a ground floor apartment with two other girls. All three had been watching Desperate Housewives. The other two waved to Julian, annoyed by the interruption. “What’s wrong?” Gwen said. “Were we supposed to go out today?”

“No, no.”

“I didn’t think so. Tuesday is not our day.” She smiled.

“Can we talk?”

Gwen glanced at the couch where her roommates were waiting. “Can it wait till tomorrow, Jules? Because we have fifteen minutes left of our show and then I gotta hit the sack. I have to be in at eight. Contract crisis. Can it wait?”

“No.”

Gwen grimaced.

He didn’t want to talk in the kitchen, and Gwen was already in pajamas. There was no way he was getting her into his car for a distressing heart to heart. “Let’s go to your room.”

Smiling and misunderstanding, she took hold of his wrist. “Girls, finish without me.”

In her room, she fell on the bed, while he took a chair across from her, his hands tensely threaded.

“Why are you all the way over there?”

“Gwen …”

Sitting up, she cut him off. “No. Don’t start any conversation with Gwen. Jules, I’m so stressed at work, I never work fast enough or long enough. Tonight I was there till eight-thirty. If I’ve been off, it’s because I’m overworked.”

“You haven’t been off.”

“I’m so tired all the time. I can’t deal with any bullshit right now, Julian,” she said. “Can’t this wait until I have more energy?”

“It can’t. I’m sorry, Gwen. I don’t know how to say it. There’s never a good time for this.” He stiffened his spine, took a breath.

She squeezed her eyes shut, her hands together. “Julian … are you … breaking up with me?”

“Yes, I’m sorry. Please don’t be upset. Don’t cry.” He came to sit by her on the bed, tried to touch her. “You’re a great girl. You won’t be alone for a minute. And I hope we can stay friends—”

“You’re not serious!” she cried, slapping away his arm. “We can’t break up! We have brunch reservations at N/Naka this Sunday! We’ve been waiting three months for them!”

“About that—”

“And we’re going away to Cabo next month. You already booked the hotel.”

“About that …”

“Why are you doing this?”

What could he say? What could he say that would hurt the least?

“I did something wrong,” Gwen said. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m always having mood swings. It’s not you, Julian, it’s me. I have to take something. My therapist says I need something.”

He took her hand, held it despite her protest. “You’re not having mood swings. You don’t need to take anything. It’s not you. Honest. It’s me.” He took a breath. “I met someone,” Julian said. “And I don’t want to sneak around on you, or on her. I don’t want to end anything or begin anything like that. I’m sorry. I didn’t expect it, it’s not something I looked for, it’s not something I wanted.”

Wasn’t it, though? Wasn’t it something he looked for? As he meandered through the streets of Los Angeles, the city of angels, trying new bars, new cafés, new restaurants, new movie theatres, new stores, as he grazed the beaches and the boardwalks, sat outside eating and drinking al fresco, wandered the malls, the cemeteries, hotel lobbies, what was he looking for, what was he searching for? Yes, he was grabbing ideas for his newsletter, photographs, flowers, phantoms of life. But was that it, really? For ten years he’d been scouring L.A., in a roam not just of the body but of the soul. Was he searching for someone? Staring into the face of every woman he met, the question behind his eyes ever present. Was she the one?

One thing Julian knew for sure—and had known from the beginning. Gwen was not the one.

“We’ve been together so long!” Gwen said. “Don’t I deserve better than this?”

“You do,” Julian said. “Better than me.”

“But why waste three years of my life?”

“Sometimes,” Julian said, “when you’re on the wrong road, you have to get off, go back, start again.”

“You’re calling me the wrong road? Fuck you!”

“No. I’m the wrong road.”

“I thought your mother raised you better than this,” Gwen said.

“What am I doing?” Julian said. “I’m trying to do the decent thing, the honest thing.”

“The decent thing would be not to break up with me.”

“Not the honest thing.”

“The decent thing would be not to hook up with someone else!”

“I haven’t hooked up with anyone else. It’s brand new.”

“But you want to!”

“Yes,” Julian said. “I want to.”

7
Ashton and Riley

HAVING FALLEN OVERBOARD, JULIAN SWAM THE REST OF THE night in a sea of Josephine. His morning newsletter reflected this. It was a hodgepodge framed by an odd Joseph Conrad quote (was there any other kind?).

It was his turn to open the store, and Julian got to Magnolia Avenue before nine. To his surprise, Ashton was already up and inside. Usually on the mornings Julian opened, Ashton slept in. And granted, his friend looked barely awake and barely dressed, but still. Ashton kept a buzz cut so he wouldn’t have to fuss with his hair, but had not yet shaved, his dirty-blond stubble darkening his face.

Riley stood next to him. That was a bigger surprise. Riley tolerated the store like everything about Ashton—with fond resignation. But she didn’t show her face on weekdays when she had to be at work. Riley was the organic-produce regional supervisor for Whole Foods. Early morning was her busiest time.

Ashton and Riley both stood at the glass counter by the register, glaring at Julian, their arms crossed. Of course Ashton, who took nothing seriously, was glaring at Julian mock critically, and his arms were mock crossed. He was mimicking Riley to present a supposed united front and hiding from her his persistent yawning.

“What’s up.” Julian rattled his keys.

“Why don’t you tell us,” Riley said, her skirt suit without a wrinkle, her honey blonde hair blow-dried glass-straight, her makeup impeccable, her posture like a ballerina’s. She stood in fine contrast to her slumped, torn-tank-ripped-jeans-and-half-awake boyfriend. “Did you end it with Gwen last night?”

“Ah.” Julian should’ve known Gwen would call Riley immediately.

“Why did you do it?”

“Do I have to explain everything to you?” He was being glib. Gwen and Riley were best friends. He knew he’d have to explain himself. He just didn’t want to.

“Gwen’s very upset, Jules,” Riley said. “She says you wasted her time, made her believe things that weren’t true. She doesn’t understand what happened. She told me you were planning to propose in Cabo next month!”

Julian shook his head. That was Gwen wishcasting.

“Breaking up is bad enough,” Riley went on, “but why did you lie to her?”

“I didn’t lie—”

“Yes, you did. You told her you met someone.”

Ashton was shaking his head, too.

“What are you shaking your head for?” Julian said.

“Who could you possibly meet? I saw you Monday night, and you hadn’t met anyone,” Ashton said. “But suddenly yesterday you met someone?”

“That’s how it works,” Julian said. “That’s why it’s called meeting someone.”

“Yeah, ‘kay,” Ashton said. “Look, if you want to lie, fine, but why be so bad at it?”

Riley twisted to Ashton, her shoulder-length bob swinging. “Do you mean it would be okay for him to lie if he was better at it?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean, then?”

“Hey! This isn’t about me. He’s the one who’s lying and breaking up and shit. What are you getting on my case for?” Ashton threw Julian a wait-until-I-get-ahold-of-you glare.

Julian rubbed his chin with his middle finger in reply.

“Look, Jules,” Riley said. “I don’t have time for this. I was on the phone with Gwen until two in the morning and had to be at work today at seven. We have a shipment of uninspected cherry tomatoes coming in from Arkansas, and yet here I am with you instead of my tomatoes because of the mess you’ve made. Bottom line is, Gwen and I talked it over, and she said she’d be willing to make some changes—if that’s what you need.”

Julian shook his head. “It’s not what I need.”

“You know, Julian”—and here Riley used her slow, wise high-handed tone—“if you thought your relationship needed work, why didn’t you just talk to her? You two have been together a long time. You don’t think she deserved a conversation?”

“We had a conversation,” Julian said.

“But you didn’t have to make things up if all you wanted was to shake things up.”

“That’s not what I want, and it’s not what I did.”

“Really?” Riley stuck her hand on her hip in a kettle pose. “You didn’t lie when you told Gwen that you and Ashton flipped a coin—for her!—and you won? Why would you say a thing like that?”

“Yes, Julian,” Ashton said, now scowling for real. “Why the hell would you say a thing like that?”

“It’s not obvious why?” Julian said. “To make Gwen feel better.”

Riley swirled to Ashton. “Is it true, Ashton Bennett? That you and I only hooked up because you lost a coin toss? That I was your consolation prize? Because you know, sometimes that’s exactly how you treat me.”

“No, sunshine, of course it’s not true,” Ashton said, putting his broad arm around Riley’s shoulder and drawing her to him. Riley was tall, but Ashton was taller. “You heard him, he only said it to make Gwen feel better.” Icy blue glare from Ashton’s ice blue eyes. “Right, Jules?”

Julian swore under his breath. “Ash is right,” he said. “I only said it to make Gwen feel better.” He closed his fist around his sharp keys.

“Julian, you’ve always had trouble talking through things.” Riley was using her calm, psychoanalytical voice. “You’re a little broody, you keep your emotions bottled up. That’s not good. You keep acting like nothing’s bothering you …”

“Nothing is bothering me.”

“And then, instead of working things out, you tell Gwen you met somebody.”

“But I did,” Julian said, “meet somebody.”

“Shut up,” Ashton said. “Stop making everything worse with your talking.”

“I already told you, Gwen’s agreed to make changes,” Riley said. “While she doesn’t condone your passive-aggressiveness, she’s willing to do what needs to be done to re-commit to you.”

“Let me get this straight,” Julian said. “My breaking up with Gwen to her face is passive-aggressive, but her sending a proxy to discuss our relationship, that’s facing the matter head on?”

The unflappable Riley continued; she had a list to get through on her way to the cherry tomatoes. “Gwen says she’s willing to go to a boxing match with you in Vegas if that’s what you want.”

“That’s not what I want.”

“She will also,” Riley went on, “stop hassling you to get a real job.”

“That might be good advice not just for Gwen,” Ashton said.

Riley flipped up her exquisitely manicured hand to stop Ashton from speaking. “Excuse me,” she said. “I can’t deal with you right now. I’m trying to salvage their relationship.” She took an exasperated breath. “Gwen also said,” Riley continued, resuming her professional, no-nonsense manner, “that she’d be willing to do that other thing you want to do with her that she’s been saying no to.”

“That might be good advice not just for Gwen,” said Ashton.

“Ashton Bennett, this is not the time for your jokes! Jules, my opinion?” Riley airbrushed over her body. “It would help you spiritually if you had a mud bath. In the ocean flats at low tide, followed by apitherapy. Both will do wonders for your anxiety problem.”

Julian tried not to exchange so much as a blink with Ashton. “Apitherapy, Riles? Is that where I’m attacked by bees or where I’m stabbed by needles?”

“Not attacked,” she said defensively. “You are judiciously stung by bees to rid yourself of impurities, spiritual as well as physical.”

“I don’t need to be stung by bees,” Julian said. “I spend my days looking for hacks to prevent other people from being stung by bees. And also—I don’t have an anxiety problem …”

Julian’s cell phone rang. It was 9:07 a.m.

“Hello?” Josephine’s voice breathed into his phone. She could seduce the monks in all the missions in California with that liquored-up voice.

“Yes?” Julian kept it cool. He lifted his one-minute finger to Riley and Ashton—frozen in scolding poses by the counter—and turned his back on them.

“Who is this?” Josephine said.

“Who is this?” Julian said. “You’re calling me.”

“Well, I know I’m calling you,” she said, “but someone called your number from my cell phone at 4:49 p.m. yesterday and I know it couldn’t have been me because I was on stage. Yet there it is. Your number in my phone.”

What was Julian supposed to say?

“Good morning, Josephine,” he said quietly.

“Hi, Julian.” She giggled. “You could’ve just asked for my number. I would’ve given it to you. Listen, what are you doing right now?”

“Like today?” he said. “Or this minute?”

“Sooner. I have a situation. Can you come by? Hey, why are you talking so low?” She lowered her voice, too. “Who’s listening?”

Ashton appeared next to his shoulder. “What the hell? We’re not done.”

“Be right there.” Julian hung up and turned to his friend. The two men were alone in the store. “Where’s Riley?”

“She left,” Ashton said. “She couldn’t wait around for you to be done with your call. She said we weren’t finished with our conversation.”

“Oh,” said Julian, “of course not.” He jingled his keys. “Can you hold the fort for a bit? I gotta run out. Be back in a jiff.”

“How long is a jiff in Julian-speak, two days? It’s your day to open the store, remember? I’m supposed to be in bed. Slumbering. And why did you tell Gwen about the coin toss? What the hell, man. And who was that on the phone?”

“Tell you later. Move.” Julian tried to get around Ashton.

“Where are you going?”

“To see a man about a horse.”

Ashton didn’t budge. “Who was that on the phone?”

“Nobody. Move.”

“Make me.” Ashton bumped Julian.

Julian pushed him back, not hard. “Do you want me to make you?”

Ashton’s light blue eyes blinked merrily. He kept trying to grab the phone out of Julian’s hands. “You blew me off for lunch yesterday,” he said. “Was that when you met this somebody, who’s now calling you at all hours of the morning? Are you ever coming back, or do I have to call Bryce?”

Bryce was one of their college friends who thought he was Ashton’s other best friend. “Don’t threaten me with fucking Bryce,” Julian said. “I’ll be back.”

“By the intense horny look on your face, I don’t think you will, no.”

“Drama queen,” Julian said. “We have a wardrobe appointment at Warner.”

“Yes. At eleven.”

“Probably won’t be back by then,” Julian said. “Can you push it to this afternoon? Ashton—can you please—” They continued to bump and deflect, a well-rehearsed pantomime of friendly combat.

“Jules, please don’t tell me you met some chick yesterday and after one afternoon with her broke up with your long-time girlfriend and are now racing off like you’ve been summoned for a breakfast booty call.”

“So stop cockblocking me if you’re such a genius.”

“Wait!” Ashton said. “I have one very important question—”

Impatiently Julian waited.

“What does she look like?” Grinning, Ashton finally let Julian pass. “You know she’s only using you for your body.”

“I should be so lucky.” Julian didn’t glance Ashton’s way, not wanting his friend to see even a reflection of the wet impression the girl had left on the dry sponge that was his heart.

8
The Red Beret, Take One

AT NORMANDIE, JULIAN TOOK THE STAIRS TWO AT A TIME, though he still managed to glance at the maximum-security house across the street. It didn’t look right, even in daylight.

“Good morning, Julian,” Josephine said, opening the door. She’d just stepped out of the shower and was flimsily dressed in a tank and sleeping shorts. “Isn’t that what they say in Hollywood, no matter what time of day it is—good morning?”

“Yes,” he said, “but it’s actually morning.” They hid their smiles.

Zakiyyah’s apartment was small and clean—an open plan kitchen/living room with three half-open interior doors, one bathroom, two bedrooms. A small Formica round table, an old light beige sofa, a couple of bookshelves. A TV. A treadmill. A guitar in the corner. Magnets on the fridge, a stack of bills and magazines on the counter. The apartment of a working girl who was never home. It was sunny and quiet, except for the constant hum of the freeway.

“Who plays guitar?”

“Zakiyyah. I have a favor to ask you.” Josephine tilted her head.

Julian would’ve done it without the head tilt.

“So the good news is,” she said, “I got a callback for Dante. Shocking, I know, given yesterday’s Shakespearean debacle.” But the bad news was, the callback was for the part of the narrator, an old man in a historical wig and glasses.

“You’re an expert at the old man part,” Julian said. “Just channel your inner Housman.”

“It’s the wig that’s the problem. Callback’s at eleven. How do I become a gray-haired old dude in an hour?”

Looking over her pink scrubbed face, Julian agreed it was not the easiest of tasks.

She held out a can of aerosol. “Can you spray paint my hair?”

Shaking his head, he stepped back. He didn’t like to do things he’d never done.

“Come on, I need your help. You can do things other than sit in front of a computer, can’t you?”

“I do plenty of those.” He wished that hadn’t sounded as suggestive as it did.

“Is one of them color a girl’s hair?” She flung around her damp dark mane for him to see. It smelled of foamy coconut. “Do it, do it,” she said. “And afterward, I’ll take you to the top of the mountain to amaze the crap out of you.” Her body smelled freshly washed of foamy coconut, her arms and throat glistening with lotion. The muscles in Julian’s legs felt liquid.

He had another idea. “Why don’t we just get you a wig? Seems a lot simpler.”

“Audition’s in an hour.”

“I know a place.”

“I’m broke.”

“It’s free. Can you get dressed in five minutes?”

“What do you mean? I am dressed.”

No makeup, tiny shorts, ripped gray crop top, no bra (do not think about that) bare feet, hair all over the place. She looked dressed for after-sex waffles, not a callback. He said nothing.

“Okay, fine.” Two minutes later she emerged from door number two in denim shorts, boots, and a see-through white shirt over her crop top. Her bare stomach showed. “Better?”

He said nothing.

In the car as she did her makeup she told Julian Dante’s play paid real money! Rehearsals began in a few days. It ran a month. “Though I’ll have to memorize ninety-nine cantos. Doesn’t seem possible.”

“You can do it,” he said. “They’re such romantic cantos.”

She grunted. “Realms of the dead are romantic?”

“Sure,” Julian said. “Clad in weights, Dante searches for Beatrice in heaven and hell because he cannot find her here on earth. That’s not romantic?” He smiled.

“I dunno,” she said. “Does he find her? See, even Mr. Know-it-All is not sure. And the endlessly mutilated sowers of discord are definitely not dreamy. There’s a lot of damnation before Dante gets to Beatrice, is what I’m saying. Inferno, purgatorio. Why is it even called a comedy? How far’s the wig?”

“Almost there.” Magnolia Boulevard was just on the other side of Hollywood Hills.

“Magnolia … isn’t that where the vintage shops are?”

Julian pulled into a spot at the curb. “Yep. And here we are.”

They were parked in front of a large storefront whose cinnamon-colored awning read “THE TREASURE BOX.”

“The Treasure Box?” she said. “What kind of store is that?”

“The kind where you might find what you’re looking for. It’s Ashton’s. Well, mine and Ashton’s. But he does most of the work. I just count the money.”

“He’s got a wig?”

“He’s got a lot of things.” Julian switched off the engine.

“Really? Like what?”

“Anything. Everything.” He watched her apply red gloss to her lips. “About Ashton …”

“I need to be prepped before meeting him? Why, is he super cute?” She grinned.

“That’s not it.” How to explain Ashton to this innocent? “He likes to tease. A bit like you. Remember that and ignore him.”

“Like you ignore me?”

“Just like that.”

Ashton was on the phone behind the register. He had showered and shaved and was wearing pressed black jeans and a white shirt open at the collar. His leather shoes were buffed. The doorbell trilled as they walked in, and Ashton raised his head. He couldn’t drop his call when he saw Julian with Josephine but, by the expression on his face, really wanted to.

Josephine’s mouth dropped open, too. Even a grizzled cynic would have a hard time not fawning over the cornucopia of baubles and beads that was housed under Ashton’s expansive roof.

Real and fake furs, old lamps, figurines, designer bags, red carpet dresses, tuxedoes, movie memorabilia of all kinds were on sale and display. From Casablanca (the bar glasses) to Back to the Future (Marty’s Hoverboard), incredible real artifacts from imaginary places abounded. Ashtrays from Chinatown, a replica (not actual-size) of the Starship Enterprise, an actual-size Han Solo frozen in carbonite, Halloween costumes, shoes and hats, and all the bling in between, including signed framed photographs of the stars, including Ashton’s treasured possession, a poster of a joyous Bob Marley from 1981, signed by the man himself a few months before he died. There were albums, playbills, scarves, a wall of arcade games from PacMan to Donkey Kong, a wall of original art by local artists, and next to it a table with brushes, paints, and blank canvases for sale. There was a display of vital herbs and vitamins, a nod to the health-obsessed Riley. There was a red door bathed in black light and a neon sign above it that read, “Haunted House this way.” Yes, there was even a Haunted House, which ran year-round, and all the zombies and ghouls inside it were for sale. Ashton replaced them with new ghouls and zombies as needed. The Treasure Box was a store that no one but the treasure-hunting, adventure-seeking Ashton could’ve devised or imagined. Everything he was and everything he loved was in that store.

“This is the most amazing place I’ve ever seen!” Josephine said in a thrilled whisper. “Can we come back?”

“Maybe. Follow me.” Julian popped into one of the narrow side rooms and was relieved when he quickly found what he was looking for: a long-haired 18th-century wig made with real gray hair.

“Perfect,” she said. “This is fantastic, oh!—but expensive.”

Julian put a finger to his lips and sighed, hoping he could sneak her out before Ashton got off the phone. Alas.

Ashton barricaded the door to the small room, blocking the daylight with his tall frame. “Hey, Jules. Whatcha up to?”

“Not much,” Julian said. “We’re in a hurry.”

“Hurry? But you just got here. And who’s we?”

“Oh, sorry. Ashton, Josephine; Josephine, Ashton.”

“Nice to meet you, Ashton,” Josephine said, smiling over Julian’s shoulder.

“Yeah, you, too.”

“You have an incredible place here.”

“Thanks.” He stared at her and then blinklessly at Julian, who rolled his eyes, mouthing stop it. The three of them stepped out into the main area, where there was sunlight and windows and space to put between one another.

“Where do you get this stuff from?” Josephine asked, walking around, touching the dresses and the silk scarves.

“Here, there,” Ashton said. “Hot sets mostly. Before they shut production on a show, Julian and I walk the soundstages, mark what we want, and after they wrap, we return with my truck.”

“You take the furniture, too?”

“Why, do you need some furniture? A couch? A bed?”

“No, just curious.” She didn’t blink.

Ashton, stop it.

“We get the larger items for free,” Ashton said, “because that’s first to be hauled to the dumpster. Basically we sell other people’s trash.”

Julian wanted to knock his friend on the head. “Josephine, we have to go.”

“A teacher, a writer, and a small business owner?” Josephine said to Julian. “You sure wear a lot of hats, Jules.”

“Oh, you have no idea,” Ashton said, mouthing Jules? to Julian.

“I’m not a teacher,” Julian muttered. “Not really.”

“And people pay you guys money even for the big stuff?” she asked.

“Yes, in our business, trash is a collector’s item,” Ashton replied. “We have an entire room next to the Haunted House of sofas and tables from the sets of I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, Mork and Mindy, that sort of thing.”

“How fantastic! Can I see? After the Haunted House, of course. That’s first.”

“Another time,” Julian said, trying to shepherd her out. “Or you’ll be late.” It was like shepherding out water. Josephine was studying the props as if she couldn’t care less about the callback.

“Excuse me,” Ashton said to her, “but have we met before?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I could swear I’ve seen you somewhere. I never forget a face …” He tapped the counter. “New York! A few weeks ago. The Invention of Love. Weren’t you the understudy?” He peered at her.

“Yes! Oh wow! You were there, too?”

“Yes,” Ashton replied. “I was there, too.” Even his small smile vanished.

“Did you enjoy it?”

“Yes. Not as much as Julian—obviously—but I enjoyed it. It was out of the ordinary.”

“But not extraordinary?” Josephine grinned amiably as if she couldn’t care less whether Ashton liked the play or not.

Mutely Ashton stared at Julian, who was signing out the wig and wouldn’t return his friend’s pointed gaze.

“Ready to go, Josephine?” Julian said.

She didn’t reply, her eye spying something hanging on the wall behind Julian. “What’s that?” she exclaimed. It was a lambskin dark red beret. She pried it off the hook, turned it over once or twice, and put it on her head, stepping into the center of the store and smiling at both men. “What do you think, guys?”

One man suppressed a smile, the other had no hint of it on his somber face. Julian didn’t understand why Ashton was being so unfriendly. He elbowed Ashton, who did not elbow back.

“This thing’s fresh to death,” Josephine said, gazing in the mirror with approval at her own reflection. “Is it expensive?”

“No, it’s not expensive,” Ashton said. “It’s priceless. It’s vintage Gucci. From the forties. But it’s not for sale. It’s Julian’s. It’s his lucky hat.”

“It is?” Josephine stared in the beveled mirror. “Jules, where did you get this marvelous thing?”

“Yes, Jules,” Ashton said, “where’d you get it? Tell the girl.”

“I don’t remember,” Julian said.

“There you go,” Ashton said. “He doesn’t remember. So what do you say? Can she have the red beret you found somewhere and haven’t parted with in a decade?”

Like it was even a question.

Josephine nearly skipped in place. With a grateful smile, her adorned head tilted, her fingers splayed, she did a two-step, a shim-sham, twirled around, swiveled her hips, and sang a few lines of the chorus of “Who’s Got the Pain” from Damn Yankees.

Ashton, his light blue eyes dipped in indigo, gave Julian a long anxious stare soaked with question, unease, and, for some reason, despair.

“Let’s go,” Julian said, grabbing his keys.

Josephine looked Julian over as they got ready to walk out, at his starched gray-check shirt, gray khakis, black suede Mephistos, tailored greige sports jacket. “Julian, we’re going into the mountains after my callback.”

“Yes, so?”

“Well, you’ve put on your teacher uniform again, not your mountain climbing gear.”

“Oh, you’re adorable, Josephine, to think that’s a uniform,” Ashton said, stepping between her and Julian. Forcefully he shook his head to underscore his words. “That’s not a uniform, dear girl. It’s a costume.”

9
Phantasmagoria in Two

“ARE YOUR SHOES AT LEAST COMFORTABLE?” JOSEPHINE asked him in the Greek parking lot after the callback. Her outcries of woe killed it, she said—because of the lucky beret.

Julian didn’t know how to answer her. All his shoes were comfortable. Comfort was his MO. “Why, is it a long way where you’re taking me?”

“It’s up a mountain.” She poked him. “You want to back out?”

“Who said? No, I’m in. Maybe you should’ve asked Ashton. He loves to do that stuff.”

Josephine fell quiet as the sun played footsies with the sparkles on the rattlesnake weed. “I don’t think he would’ve said yes. He didn’t seem too friendly. I don’t think he likes me.”

“Of course he does.” Julian deflected since he wasn’t sure what had been up with Ashton. “He was off his game. He’s not a morning person.”

They began their uphill climb through the loamy sand in which juniper and spruce grew and eucalyptus was profuse. Josephine was in front of him. Flame trees turned everything to fire. The jacaranda and the pink silk trees looked and smelled like cotton candy and made Julian feel he was in a sweet blooming garden full of redbuds and desert willows and lemon-scented gums. He wanted to point out to her their bright and gaudy surroundings, but what if her response was, yes, sure a garden, but what kind of garden is it, Julian, Eden or Gethsemane?

What was wrong with him? Gethsemane!

As he was thinking of something less idiotic to say (frankly, anything would be less idiotic to say), there was a rock in his way, and he tripped over it. She was too fast for him. He could barely keep up, while she was practically sprinting through the peppergrass. It was hard to flirt walking up a steep hill on uneven terrain in a single file. He tried (not very hard) to keep his eyes off the smooth white backs of her slender thighs. His gaze kept traveling to her lower back, bared above the waist of her shorts. He wanted to dazzle her with his knowledge of blessed thistle and golden fleece, of Indian milkweed and fragrant everlasting, of the perennial live-forevers, but he couldn’t breathe and dazzle at the same time.

She returned to him, fanning herself with the red beret. “Julian Cruz,” Josephine said, one hand on her hip, “come on, a little more hell for leather. We have less than fifteen minutes.”

Hell for leather? “I didn’t know there was a deadline.”

“There’s always a deadline. You should know that, Professor Daily Newsletter. I know you’re a novice at walking …”

“I’m not a novice at walking.”

“We have until noon,” she said. “And then it will be gone.”

“What will? The sun? The mountains?”

“You think you’re clever, but you’ll see. If we miss it, that’s it. Tomorrow you’ll have a million things to do, and I have my Mountain Dew shoot. Yeah, they called while I was at the Greek. If I get this Dante gig, that’ll be two for two. I don’t know what’s happening,” she said. “I haven’t gotten two jobs in a row in like never.” The beret went back on her head.

“Maybe I’m your good luck charm,” he said. “Lucky hat, lucky Julian.”

“No time for chit-chat, Mr. Talisman—spit-spot.” In her combat boots, she disappeared up ahead, around a cottonwood.

“If we miss it, we could definitely come back another day,” he said after her. “I’m not saying we’re going to miss it—”

“We’re going to keep coming back day after day because you can’t hurry up today?” she called back. “What makes you think you’re going to be able to hurry up tomorrow?”

“I’m hurrying. I’m running uphill.”

“What you’re doing is called self-paced running,” Josephine said. “That’s another phrase for walking.” Ahead of him, she continued to scoff and mutter. “I can tell you work from home. People who work from home have absolutely no sense of urgency. They never have to be anywhere. It’s always dope-dee-doe.”

“I’m not dope-dee-doeing.” Julian huffed, wanting to tell her he didn’t only work from home, he also worked out. And drove all around L.A., loading and unloading trucks full of heavy things, and taught a class. Suddenly he wanted to tell her everything.

Josephine was barely flushed when they made it to the crest. “How you doing, cowboy? Hanging in there?” She smiled. She was flushed enough.

All he could do was pant. “Where are you taking me?”

“To show you magic.”

Pushing through the brush, they went off trail until they reached some scrubby silver dollar gums and a lonely laurel fig. She was happy, open-mouthed, panting, wiping her wavy hair away from her damp forehead. “It’s going to be amazing today, I can feel it,” she said. “Look how sunny it is.”

He saw. It was blindingly sunny. They swirled around in a 360, taking in the view. Miles of Los Angeles valley simmered below. They were high in the hills, floating in the shivering air, soaring above the vast spaces where people lived. The ocean in the westerly distance was in a mist, downtown L.A. a haze of matchbox towers. All the roads with a million white houses and a million palm trees led to the sea. Up here, the air was thinner, the oxygen weaker. It was time for nosebleeds and birds of paradise and whispering bells. The summer flora was blooming, the mustang mint and golden currant vivid in the high noon sun. There was a smile on her lips and thunder in his heart. He knew there was magic in these hills. All he wanted to do was kiss her.

She sucked in her breath, a bird of paradise herself, a whispering bell. “We’re standing above the fault in the earth called Benedict Canyon,” she said, rummaging in her hold-all until she pulled out a clear stone on a thin rawhide rope. Silver wire was braided and wrapped around the stone like a basket. She placed it in the palm of her hand. It was a chunky rough teardrop with sharp multi-faceted edges, translucent in part, occluded in part.

“What’s that?” He studied it with mild curiosity at first. But the stone tweaked something inside him, peaked his interest. Stirred some indefinable emotion. He felt an electric buzz through his body as he stared at it. The buzz wasn’t entirely pleasant.

“A quartz crystal.” Josephine lifted her arm to the sky. The crystal sparkled in the sunshine.

“Not a diamond?” Julian smiled.

“Ha. No. I’ve had it appraised, believe me.” She brushed her hair away from her face. “My grandmother gave it to me. It belonged to her cousin in the old country.”

“Old country where?”

“Not sure. Near Blackpool, maybe. Or Scotland.” As if the two were interchangeable. They walked a little farther until they reached a clearing, a hidden mesa in the sun encircled by chest-level exposed rock, a stony enclosure. “Jules, you’re standing in a cave of quartz!”

“Do I want to be standing in a cave of quartz?”

“Aha. Mr. Know-it-All doesn’t know everything. Yes, at certain times of the day, the quartz glitters like diamond dust. If you’re lucky, you might find yourself inside a rainbow.”

What man wouldn’t think himself lucky to stand next to beauty in girl form, rhapsodizing about magic diamond dust inside rainbows. He was motionless, catching his breath, interested, bedazzled, open to her, open to anything.

Their eyes flickered between the crystal in her hand and each other, the sandy desert hills falling away below them. In the valley, the outlines of Beverly Hills and Century City gleamed, farther west the yawning maw of the Pacific. Her flushed face was so near, all Julian had to do was move his head half a foot forward and kiss her open lips. His head slowly tilted sideways.

“How long till noon?” she asked.

He rocked back to check his Tag Heuer. “A minute.”

“Excellent.” Her palm faced up. “If you can think on your feet, you can make a wish. At noon, for a brief moment, the stars and the earth and the whole of creation will be so perfectly aligned that any wish asked for in faith can be granted.”

Clearly Julian wasn’t quick enough on his feet, or he’d be kissing her. “Why are you holding the crystal like that?”

“Trying to catch the sun with it.”

“You’re a sun catcher.” He gazed at her.

“I’m a wish catcher,” she murmured. “Around us are the oldest rocks in the Santa Monicas. Like forty million years old. You’re standing inside stone as old as time itself. You can touch time with your hands.” She took a breath. “Do you want to touch time with your hands, Julian?”

I want to touch you with my hands, he thought. His wish must have been apparent in his eyes. She blushed.

“What happens to the crystal when the sun hits it?” he asked. “Does it get hot?”

“Julian, I’ve led you up a mountain,” she said. “This is no time to be a cynic. We’re standing inside a volcano. The river beds below us have dried up, the land looks stern from here and is sometimes cruel, even ruthless, to weakness.”

“I know that all too well,” he said.

“Man, despite his fire and chaos, has made barely a ripple in these hills.”

With slight shame Julian thought that you could tell a lot about how he had chosen to live by his languor in the land of palm trees and summer, by how he had breezed through a decade of his chill life in which he made barely a ripple, and which had made barely a ripple on him.

“Is that what you’re going to do, Julian Cruz?” Josephine asked. “Be carried unfulfilled to the grave?”

Not anymore.

“All the colors of your world are about to disappear,” the ephemeral girl whispered.

A bright flash stopped Julian from speaking. The sun reached zenith. The rays hit the lucid gem in her hands. The light flared and dispersed through the prism, sparks of fire bounced off the glittering quartz of the cave. A moment earlier Julian and Josephine had stood amid green and sepia. Now they were dancing inside a kaleidoscope of purples and yellows, a phantasmagoria of color, an electrical unstoppable aurora. The hills vanished, so did the trees, and the valley below, and the sky. Everything was drowned out. Everything else was drowned out. Julian could barely see even her, and she stood right next to him. It almost looked as if she herself had dispersed, had broken into a million moving shards of the deepest scarlet. For half an inhale, the blinding red blanched his pupils, and she was gone.

He blinked, and she was gone.

In the reflection of the vanished world, with flames exploding in his eyes, Julian couldn’t say what he saw, but he felt so intensely that it took the breath away from him. He felt love, and pain that doubled him over, he felt crushing fear, and desperate longing, and deepest regret. He felt terror. He felt profound suffering. It hurt so much he groaned.

With a gasp, he blinked again, and there she was, restored to him, the crystal in her hands, dancing sunbeams around her. When he could breathe, the weight inside him shifted. Not lifted. Shifted.

The sun moved a quarter of a degree. The colors faded. The world returned to what it was.

Almost.

The pressure in his chest remained, the saturated heat of a punch in the heart.

He couldn’t speak. The lens through which he saw the world had become distorted, had lost focus in its very center.

Josephine took his hand. “Told you,” she said, squeezing and releasing him.

“What was that?” It was like waking up from a nightmare. For a minute you didn’t know where you were. Julian still didn’t know where he was.

“What did you wish for?” she asked.

“It’s not what I wished for. It’s what I saw.”

“What did you see?”

Julian didn’t know. He wasn’t sure. Something he didn’t want to see. He stared at her enthralled, yet unsettled.

Josephine dropped the stone back in her bag. “Sometimes,” she said with a melancholy tinge, “when I come here, I don’t know what to ask for because I don’t know what I want. I want so much to believe it’s all in front of me, and I wish for a break, or a role of a lifetime, for accolades, for applause. But sometimes it feels as if everything is already behind me.”

“It’s not,” Julian said, for some reason certain. “It’s all still up ahead.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said. “My biggest wish still hasn’t happened. I want to be in London, on the West End stage.”

“Why London?” he said. “It rains all the time. New York has great theatre, too.”

Longingly she smiled, imagining her perfect future. “We wish for what we don’t have,” she said. “I want to sell out the legendary Savoy.” She swiped her hand through the air. “Have my name above the marquee—Josephine Collins tonight at the Savoy!”

“I’ve never been to London,” he said. “Have you?”

“Only in my dreams.” She put her hand on her chest.

His heart still hurt.

“You know the same man who built the Savoy also built the most beautiful theatre in the world,” she said. “The Palace on Cambridge Circus.”

“I did not know this.”

She nodded. “He loved his wife so much he built her a theatre so she could attend the opera any time she wanted. Imagine that. The Palace Theatre is the man’s love for his wife made real.” She smiled.

“How do you know all this?”

“Because I adore the story of how much that man loved his woman,” Josephine said. “How do you not know this?”

Reluctantly, they started back downhill. “What did you wish for?” he asked.

“Today I asked to be in Paradise in the Park so I could stay in L.A.,” she said. “How about you?”

“Me, too,” said Julian.

10
Griddle Cafe

“WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO NOW?”

“What do you want to do now?”

“I’m starved.”

“I know just the place.”

Hours later they were still sitting across from each other at the Griddle Cafe on Sunset at a square table on the sidewalk, hot out, cars whizzing by. Julian perked up once he got some food in him. There had been something foggy and surreal about the minute with her at the top of the mountain, the floating evanescence mixing and churning with unfathomable emotion.

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.

You’re inventing some crazy love yourself so she doesn’t become bored of you.

Fat chance of that, the divine creature coos.

Rejoice, Josephine, you whisper, your head lowered, kneeling between her legs, for your name is written in heaven.

And for some reason, this makes her cry.

No, no, don’t stop, she says, wiping her face. Nothing’s wrong. But let’s put on some Tom Waits while you love me. He’s my favorite. Let’s listen to him sing time time time, but you don’t finish until he is finished, okay, Jules?

As long as it’s not the fifteen-minute live version, you’re fine with it, you say, always the joker, even then.

Afterward she sings to you about your endless numbered day for nights. Sometimes it sounds like she’s saying our endless day for nights are numbered.

At Whisky a Go Go, a drunk fool crawls into your empty bar stool, and as you come back from the men’s, you drop your shoulder and knock him to the ground and pretend it was an accident. Sorry, man, so crowded, didn’t see you, do you mind, this one’s mine. Julian! your girl croons, did you just knock that guy off the chair? I don’t know what you mean, you say. He fell.

Later, after she rushed you home because she had urgent need of you, in her dizzying voice she purrs that you have surpassed her expectations. You demur, you do the humblebrag. You’re pleased she’s pleased, you say with a faux shrug. You have a knack for selling without selling. You have nothing to prove. First you sell, then you deliver.

She says she thought you might be the Nightcrawler who has the appearance of a demon and the heart of a preacher. But that isn’t you. You have the appearance of a preacher and the heart of a demon.

And not just the heart of a demon, Julian.

Sometimes she stays with Z. And sometimes you haul your ass up and choke out a cheat sheet of advice even though you have no wisdom for anyone anymore, all your sayings swooshed into the trashcan icon on your laptop. Make a list of the things you thought you wanted and burn it—that’s your advice. Because where you are, there’s nothing but glory.

She makes you wish for a different car: a convertible, a dazzling two-seater with a chrome grille and suicide doors. You both love the beach at Zuma. You leave before sundown because the rings of hell are waiting for her at the Greek. But sometimes, if you are lucky, she makes love to you in the Zuma lot, her bikini thrown to the side. She straddles you in the backseat of your old man Volvo like you’re sixteen years old and just learned to drive.

Like you just learned to do everything.

The taste of her is always in your mouth.

The rehearsals for Paradise in the Park are at night. At the Greek, you wait for her in the sea of ghostly seats that look soaked in blood and watch her glide across the stage as the sun sets and it grows dark. Julian, she breathes, I may speak Dante, but I dream of you.

Everywhere you go, you stroll hand in hand. The beaches of Venice and Hermosa are worn out with your lovers’ walks. The flowers bloom. The nights are warm. The desert days are long.

This is the realest dream you’ve ever lived.

The Scurvy Kids and Slurry Kids play by the local hotel pool while the chairs are being cleaned for the guests to suntan in. There’s a pounding soundtrack of hip hop and jazz, of indie rock and big bands, of grunge and electric blues, of Buffalo Springfield and Wasted Youth in Los Feliz and Hollywood. L.A. has never sparkled like it does these summer nights when Voodoo Kung Fu and the Destroyer Deceivers squeeze out every last beat of joy down by Luna Park, the city has never been a more shimmering blinding work of art.

At Scarpetta on Sunday nights, you sit outside in the verdant courtyard overlooking Canon Gardens lit up like Christmastime. You drink Fortuna cocktails—pear Absolut, St. Germain, and peach puree—and make wishes to the stars, you wish for this, you wish for that. You order steak tartare, and ravioli, and foie gras. Have you told each other everything? There doesn’t seem to be much left to say, yet you talk and joke and argue, you never stop. You spend until three in the morning at the Laugh Factory on Sunset being singled out by some stand-up talent. “Look at you two, you got yourselves some white people love,” the comic mocks you in his high-pitched falsetto. “Oh, baby, am I hurting your arm?” “What you talkin’ ‘bout, honeycakes, you are my arm!”

You sleep and eat and live and love and lie entwined. Your souls are without borders because your bodies are without borders.

Or is it the other way around?

Oh, Jules, she whispers. There is nothing better than you.

In the book that is my life, you say, in the chapter when I first met you are the words and so begins my life anew.

I want my own book, she says, not just a measly chapter.

From Zuma to Agoura it’s easy to fall in love in Southern California.

You know what’s not easy to do?

Find the ideal spot to ask her to marry you.

Sure, she’s happy to be adored by you—for now—but does she understand that this thing between you isn’t something that begins and ends.

Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.

12
The Four of Them

JULIAN KEPT SUGGESTING THE FOUR OF THEM GO OUT. HE STILL had not met Zakiyyah. And Josephine met Ashton only once, if you didn’t count that other time (and who wanted to count it) at two in the morning when Ashton banged on his door like the KGB, and when Julian opened it—with Josephine half-naked behind him—he said, “Oh, so you are alive,” and stormed back down the stairs.

Josephine said why should we all go out.

So our two sidekicks can meet.

Why?

So they can approve of our union.

Why do you care if they approve? What if they don’t?

Why would they not approve?

People are strange, she said. Ashton doesn’t like me.

He’s just mad at me right now. Ashton will love you.

It’s not Ashton I’m worried about.

Z? But I’m a nice guy, Julian said. I shave, I don’t overpraise, I’m polite, I reply to invites. I can make a joke, take a joke. Why would Zakiyyah not like me?

I told you, Jules, people are strange.

One problem was their work schedules. Weekends Zakiyyah was off, but weekends were slammed at the Treasure Box, and Josephine was about to premiere in Paradise, narrating the adventures of Dante and Beatrice six nights a week and a matinee on Wednesday.

At the end of June, Julian finally managed to arrange a Sunday brunch for the four of them. He couldn’t get a reservation at the Montage in Beverly Hills, but they met nearby on an outdoor patio in cloistered Canon Gardens, at the cheap sandwich place across from the five-star luxury hotel.

Zakiyyah and Josephine arrived together. Josephine wore a loose lime-green beach cover-up and a bikini. She and Julian were off to Point Dume afterward. Under the red beret, her long hair was down. She wore minimal makeup and remnants of an arousing sunburn. She was a hipster goddess. She took his breath away. After she kissed him, she introduced him to Zakiyyah.

Josephine was right. Zakiyyah was attractive. But was she trying to turn herself down a notch? She had covered her well-developed body in a stiff blouse and a slightly frumpy too-long skirt. Her mass of corkscrew loopy black curls was poorly held back by a headband, leaving most of the emphasis on her glistening dark face, an unblemished face that needed no embellishment. And what a face it was, so symmetrically in balance, it looked fake. In her whole person, she was a sculpture of the idealized female form, carved out by an ardent lover of women: eyes big, brows arched, forehead high, cheekbones wide, lips full, body full, hair coiled and passionate. Upon introduction, Zakiyyah smiled the fake toothy smile of a beauty contest winner.

The smile faded rather quickly, though. Julian couldn’t tell if it was his imagination, but he sensed a hint of … tension? Disapproval? Almost as if the smile had been forcibly turned on and then switched off a moment too soon. After it was gone, there was no denying the plain truth: an unsmiling face was a less beautiful face, even Zakiyyah’s. Julian could put that life hack in tomorrow’s newsletter.

They ordered soft drinks and waited for Ashton by tackling the weighty topic of sunny weather, tackling it with such enthusiasm, you’d think heat and sun were unique to Southern California. Josephine told a silly joke (“what happens when an egg makes a yoke? It cracks up”), Julian gazed at her besotted—and caught Zakiyyah’s eye. You poor pathetic fool, the woman’s expression read.

“Never mind her, Jules,” Josephine said. “Z’s all soured on love.”

“Is that what I am?”

“Well, who wouldn’t be—with horrible Trevor as a boyfriend.” Josephine pinched Z’s arm.

“Yes, shame Julian can’t clone himself.”

“If you think my Jules is nice,” Josephine said, “wait till you meet his friend Ashton.”

“Josephine!” That was Julian.

“Yeah, Josephine.” That was Zakiyyah, unsmiling and unexclaiming.

“I’m kidding. I jest. Jeez, the both of you.”

The more Julian observed Zakiyyah, the more he was convinced that she never wanted anything less than a career in film or theatre. She seemed to be the opposite of Josephine. Despite her obvious physical assets, Zakiyyah wasn’t excitable, or whimsical, or seductive, she wasn’t quick with a joke, and not in speech or dress or demeanor did she show herself to be someone who wanted any attention, much less someone who lived for lights and applause, like his girl. It was odd. Didn’t Josephine tell him that the theatre had been their mutual dream?

Ashton finally arrived insultingly late and unforgivably underdressed. He wore ripped jeans and an unwashed navy T-shirt. He hadn’t shaved. And worst of all: he was sullen.

The man was usually impeccably outfitted and a charmer, especially when meeting new people, especially when meeting women. And he didn’t even apologize! He was cool toward Josephine, which wasn’t a surprise, but even cooler toward Zakiyyah. She looked up, he looked down, she half waved, he half nodded. The only empty chair was next to her, so he had no choice but to take it, but his body language said he wanted out. He held the fanned-out menu between him and Z. After they ordered, Ashton turned to Julian, and when he saw Julian silently judging his attire, he pointed out they were having ham sandwiches. “What could you possibly wear that’s too casual for a ham sandwich?” Ashton said. “A ham sandwich is something you have in bed with a chick while watching Entourage reruns.” That was the least offensive thing he would say all afternoon.

Having been at the table less than five minutes, Ashton, instead of charming the girls, decided on a different approach. He became as obnoxious as possible. Without meeting anyone’s gaze, staring either into his water glass or at the side of Zakiyyah’s neck, he brusquely asked Z what she did for a living and cut her off halfway through her answer. Minutes later he returned to her with a “Sorry, you were saying?” Never mind, said Zakiyyah. When Josephine prodded Ashton to tell her about his extreme adventures in the American West, he dismissed her by saying he had always hated the outdoors, which was not only the opposite of true but a conversation killer.

“Really?” Josephine said. “But Jules told me you love hiking.”

“Jules told you that, did he?” said Ashton. “It may be wishful thinking on his part. He’s the one who digs the outdoors.”

Fondly Josephine laughed. “Julian doesn’t like the outdoors, what are you talking about,” she said. “He hates the outdoors. Except for the beach. Otherwise, he is not one with nature.”

Ashton took a long swig of Coke, wishing perhaps it were something stronger. “Is that what he told you?” After a strained moment, Ashton barreled on. “Paraphrasing Milton, I myself hate the outdoors with a steadfast hate. My main issue, you see, is that I don’t enjoy any of the things that share the outdoors with me. If you saw my reaction to a tarantula or a snake, I can promise you, I would not be cool and I would not be manly. No, not since Julian’s little mishap with the outdoors have I liked it. I’d just as soon stay inside Tequila’s Cantina and drink all day. Drinking and being hungover is really the only exercise I get.”

Before Julian could speed on to another subject, “What little mishap?” a dumbfounded Josephine said.

“You drink?” said Zakiyyah. “That’s a surprise.”

“I drink now, sure,” Ashton said, “but not like before, in college. God, who could; right, Jules?”

She stared at Ashton with hostility and at Josephine with resentment. Why did you bring me here, she seemed to be saying and jumped up to use the ladies. Apologetically Josephine followed.

“Dude, what’s wrong with you?” Julian hissed as soon as the girls were out of earshot.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’re supposed to charm them, not make them hate you—and by extension me!”

“I’m being myself, Julian,” Ashton said.

“Really?” Julian said. “You feel this is how women usually react to you? Bolt and run? What if they don’t come back?”

Ashton’s gaze flicked to the sky as if to say please God. “They needed to powder their noses. How’s that my fault?”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I can’t be liked by everybody, bro,” the blond man replied philosophically. “Not my fault they have a problem with me. I’m the same. I’m not the one who’s changed.” The two friends sat in silence for a moment. Just as Julian was about to speak, Ashton nodded in the direction of the returning women.

“What mishap did Julian have outdoors?” Josephine asked as soon as she took her seat.

“Never mind,” Julian said, wanting to kick Ashton for opening his big mouth.

“Yeah, Josephine, never mind, Jules is right, it was nothing,” Ashton said. “We were hiking, and he got lost, that’s all. We couldn’t find him for a long time. We were sure he was dead. But then,” Ashton exclaimed, “we found him! Ah, yes, all’s well that ends well, don’t you agree? No use flailing about it now, when he’s right next to you. It’s great, by the way, how you two have hit it off. Sometimes these things go so badly.”

A piece of chewed food fell out of his mouth and onto his T-shirt. He flicked it off and continued eating.

Zakiyyah started to say something, but Ashton interrupted. “In college, I once went out with a girl who didn’t speak English,” he said, his mouth full of ham and bread.

“Was that before or after drinking?” said Zakiyyah.

“During,” Ashton replied. “Remember her, Jules? Maniki? Correction—Maniki did not speak good English, and that’s much worse than not speaking any English at all. The worst thing a person can be when they’re crap at something is to think they’re good at it.”

“Is that really the worst thing a person can be,” said Zakiyyah.

“Absolutely.” Ashton chewed. “It was one of the longest dates of my life.”

“I wonder how that must have felt,” Zakiyyah said, and Ashton guffawed and turned his attention to Josephine.

“How is Paradise in the Park?” he asked. Josephine smiled, got ready to tell Ashton something about it, but he cut her off with, “I meant, how long’s the play running for?”

“A month. I can get you tickets if you want.”

“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know when, though. Jules and I are supposed to fly down to Cabo for the Fourth. And to be honest, Dante’s not my thing. I prefer more stupid humor.”

“You don’t say,” Zakiyyah said.

“Don’t worry, Ashton, Dante is not that funny,” Josephine said. “Comedy may be a misnomer.”

“Give me a cat tied to a fan or a mediocre fart joke, and I’ll laugh till I cry,” said Ashton. “I’m not proud of it. It’s just how it is.”

Josephine squeezed Julian’s hand under the table. “Cabo?” she asked him quietly.

Julian shook his head, as in don’t worry. Another thing he had completely forgotten.

“So real life hasn’t broken through your little frat party yet?” Zakiyyah asked Ashton, barely turning her head to address him.

“Thank Christ for that.” He barely turned his head when he replied.

“Do you know what Gandhi says?” Zakiyyah said.

Ashton was still chewing. “Are you talking to me?”

“Yes,” Zakiyyah said, her glossy lips tight. “Gandhi says: our thoughts become our words, our words become our actions, our actions become our character, and our character becomes our destiny.”

“Hmm.” Ashton swallowed and loudly slurped his Coke. “Is your intellectual snobbery designed to belittle me? Because thoughts are most certainly not my destiny. I know that for a fact. I’d be in jail for the things I think. But let me tell you what Ashton says. Because you and Julian aren’t the only ones who can rattle off pithy sayings. I have a life hack, too. Want to hear?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“I call it Ashton’s two-minute rule.”

“Ashton, no!” That was Julian.

Unheeded, Ashton continued. “If you see something that needs doing and can be done in under two minutes, do it immediately.” He paused to let the words linger. “I also call it the Ashton Sex Rule.” He threw back his head and laughed.

A baffled Julian rubbed his eyes in the stony silence that followed. What was happening?

When the girls refused to react, Ashton baited them further. “The trouble with Julian and me being friends,” he said, “is that we’re opposites in many ways. Is that the same with you two? I bet it is. For example, Julian thinks he’s all about the funny, while I am way more cool. But to tell you the truth, I’d really like to be both, funny and cool.”

“I teach my kids,” Zakiyyah said, “that it’s always better to be realistic about your limitations.”

“Your poor kids,” said Ashton.

“I, on the other hand, don’t care at all about being cool,” Julian said, springing from the table and gesticulating wildly for the check.

“That’s because Jules can go all day,” Josephine said in a smoky voice. She pulled on his wrist, gazing up at him. “He doesn’t need to be cool.”

“And that’s why,” Ashton said, “Jules is funny.”

“So that was the famous Ashton,” said Zakiyyah, after Ashton—who had insisted on paying—tipped his backwards baseball cap, knocked over a chair, and split.

“He’s all right. No one likes to be put on the spot like that,” Julian said. “We should try again. Do something less stressful.”

“Less stressful than ham sandwiches?”

“We should go to Disneyland,” Julian said. “The four of us.”

Josephine clapped. “Yes, please! That would be fantastic.”

“Never,” said Zakiyyah. “I mean—no, thank you.”

“He wasn’t that bad,” Julian said. “He was trying too hard.”

“That was trying?”

Julian got defensive. “Look, it’s not how he is.”

“We are what we pretend to be,” the grim young woman said, “so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” She glared at Josephine, who took Julian’s hand under the table and did not return Zakiyyah’s scolding gaze.

13
Pandora’s Box

RIGHT AFTER THE FOURTH OF JULY, WHILE JOSEPHINE struggled in Paradise with hypocrites and thieves, Julian met up with Ashton for a drink at Tequila’s Cantina, their favorite hangout on Magnolia. Beer followed a plate of taquitos and some small talk. Well, small but pointed talk about Cabo, where Julian did not go, and where Ashton and Riley had gone by themselves instead.

Julian smiled anxiously. “Ash, I want to show you something.” He took out a black velvet box from his pocket.

Jumping off the bar stool, Ashton raised his hands. “Dude, no.”

“Will you look?”

“I said no.”

Julian’s hand was still proffered. With a great sigh, Ashton took the box, opened it, glanced inside, closed it, and stuffed it back into Julian’s pocket.

“What do you think?”

“Do you really want to know what I think?” said Ashton.

“As long as it’s ‘that’s incredible, Jules, congratulations,’ yes.”

Ashton was silent.

Julian waited. “Come on. I gotta go soon.” He didn’t want her waiting for him alone in that parking lot at the Greek. It wasn’t safe.

“You’re going to ask her to marry you?”

“I’m trying to find the perfect moment, but yes.”

“How about three years from now?”

“Not helping, Ashton.”

“What kind of help are you looking for? Do you want to practice your moves on me? Or do you want my advice?”

Julian studied Ashton’s face. They had spent so many years together, living and working together, drinking, traveling, meeting women together, that Julian didn’t need long to know how Ashton felt about anything. And most of the time, Ashton was the most chill, sunny guy despite coming from a disastrous childhood, the kind of childhood that made you question the point of existence itself. So when Julian saw the worry on his friend’s face, the tension around the normally relaxed mouth, the darkened indigo rings around the light eyes, when he caught sight of the long shadow of anxiety in Ashton’s expression, Julian couldn’t continue to press him. He was going to have a hard enough time with his family, considering they’d never met Josephine and thought he was still with Gwen.

“I just want you to be happy for me, Ash.”

“I know that’s what you want.” He said nothing else.

Sighing, Julian picked up his beer. “You don’t like her.”

“I don’t know her. That’s my problem.”

“You’re right. That’s your problem.”

“Not just mine.”

“I know her,” Julian said. “And you will get to know her. And when you get to know her, you’ll love her.”

“Yeah.”

“You think I’m moving too fast?”

“Among a thousand things. And I don’t think it. It’s fact.”

“What else?”

“Are you sure it’s love?”

“Excuse me?”

“Have you considered the possibility that it might be something else?” Ashton said. “Something as pleasing but more misleading.”

“Stop it.” Julian gulped his beer.

“Do you even know the difference between love and sex?”

“Do you?”

“I’m not getting hitched, am I?”

“You want to know what the difference is?” Julian said. “Nobody dies for sex.”

“Oh boy. It’s already like that, is it. Also not true. The male praying mantis dies for sex. That’s his whole life. Dying for sex.” Ashton tutted. “What do your parents think? I can’t imagine your mother approves.” He paused for Julian’s reply, in a way that suggested he already knew there wouldn’t be any. “Have they even met her?” There was another pause. “Sweet God, Jules, do they even know about her?”

Julian refused to return Ashton’s incredulous stare.

“Tell me, when were you planning to tell your mother?” Ashton said. “When she received your wedding invitation in the mail?”

“If you’re like this, how do you think she’s going to be?”

“What does that tell you?”

“That no one understands or cares about a single fucking thing.”

“Yes,” Ashton said, “that’s me.”

Julian regrouped, lowered his voice. “Okay, but then why are you being like this?”

“I can’t fathom,” Ashton said. “Have you told Riley?”

“You two just came back from Cabo! And I’m hardly going to tell her before you. Plus I know what she’ll say. She’ll tell me to eat more yellow food like bananas and pineapples to balance the fire in my life.”

“Maybe you should listen to her for once,” Ashton said. “What’s the rush, Jules? I don’t get it. Did you knock her up or something?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“So why not wait? If it’s real, it will stand the test of a few …”

“You want me to jump through your arbitrary hoops? And wait for what? You said stand the test of a few … few what?”

“Parsecs,” Ashton said. The stress in Ashton’s shoulders did not recede despite the joke. “What happened to being spooked by commitment?”

“It’s not the commitment,” Julian said. “It’s the girl.”

“Did no one tell this girl that if she wants to make it in show business, she should never get married?”

“I certainly hope not.”

“Where’s your common sense?” asked Ashton. “You didn’t always have it, but you got it the old-fashioned way. You bought it with your life.” He took a breath. “You’re careful, meticulous with time, reliable, trustworthy. You’re not impulsive. You don’t do things like this. It’s not you. It’s not even the old you.”

“Ashton, but she’s the one!”

All his friend said was, “The one what.”

Julian fell back on the bar stool. “Is that why you were such a jerk the other day?”

“Don’t know what you mean.”

“What I don’t get is why you were rude to her friend. What did she do?”

“I wasn’t rude, I was making small talk. What else were we going to talk about, you?”

They finished their beers.

“Have you lovebirds discussed where you’re going to live?” Ashton said. “Is she going to move to L.A.? What about her career? Theatre is my life and all that? Or are you the one making other plans, like a relocation to New York, perhaps?”

“I’m not going anywhere, Ash,” Julian said. “I promise.” Affection crept into his voice. “Is that what you’re worried about?”

“Who’s worried? But why the rush? To keep her from returning east? Is her visa expiring? You do know New York is still the United States of America,” Ashton said. “You can travel freely from coast to coast.”

Julian peered into his friend’s face. “Dude, what’s going on with you?”

Ashton stared into his empty beer glass. “I don’t know. I have a bad feeling, that’s all,” he said. “Even at Cherry Lane when I saw her perform, there was something about her that wasn’t right. And I’m not the only one who thought so. Look at Gwen and Riley’s reaction to her. Everybody’s but yours, frankly. I can’t explain it. Something’s off. Maybe she’s not the girl you think she is. Maybe what you’ve found is the Hollywood version of what you think you want. You think you’ve found day, but what you’ve really found is night.”

“You’re wrong,” Julian said. “She is the most open, heart on sleeve girl I’ve ever met. She lives her life out loud.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“She’s like a female you. Are you telling me you’re not the guy I think you are?”

Ashton didn’t answer. “She is trouble,” he said. “I can’t help it. That’s what I feel.”

“You’re wrong.”

“For your sake, I hope so.”

The men fell quiet, focusing on other patrons’ conversation, on the song playing on the jukebox, “Burn it Blue.”

“I know how you are,” Ashton said. “Quiet but ruthless. I know you won’t be talked out of anything unless you want to be talked out of it. When are you planning on popping the question?”

“Soon. Waiting for the right time,” Julian said.

“Oh, that’s wise.”

“I don’t have much of it, though.”

“Wisdom?”

“Time.” Julian leaned in. “The Brentwood Country Club has a cancellation four weeks from Friday!”

At first Ashton didn’t react. “Four weeks from which Friday?”

“Don’t be like that.” Julian rocked on his seat.

“You want to marry a girl you met five minutes ago, four weeks from this Friday?” Ashton’s stunned expression was priceless.

“I’m not crazy, Ashton.”

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