The Tiger Catcher Page 14

  With all my heart I know there’s no future for me if there is no you and me.

  Love,

  Mia

  ***

  Early the next morning there was a new phone message from her.

  “Jules, are you not picking up my calls? Come on, pick up. I told you I’d fix it. Fario came, and I told him everything. It was so hard, but now it’s over. Can we meet so I can explain? I know you’re upset, and you have every right to be, but I will make it better. I promise, no more secrets. Give me another chance. Meet me at noon, at our Coffee Plus Food. I just want to say . . . if you still want to marry me, I’m ready. I’m free. You were so upset yesterday, and I got scared and defensive, and didn’t say the things I should’ve said. Let me make it right today. Don’t be that mad at me, even though I deserve it. See you at noon, I hope. I’ll be waiting.”

  Julian didn’t know what to do. He called Ashton.

  “Are you crazy?” Ashton said.

  “I just want to hear her out.”

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  Julian became hostile right back. “What about the things you said yesterday?”

  “I said them to make you feel better. Also yesterday you didn’t tell me the additional shit you just told me.”

  “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know it.”

  “Exactly! So when facts change, we change our opinion. That’s what sane people do,” Ashton said. “Yesterday I had no idea that the worst case scenario would be true. Well, I suspected it might be, but I hoped it wasn’t. I thought she’d be a better liar. Not: yeah, Jules, it’s as bad as you thought it was. I’m really not who I say I am, and I really was deceiving you for months, and shacking up with another guy while I was shacking up with you and planning to marry this other guy while I was also planning to marry you.”

  “That’s not the worst case scenario,” Julian said. He was afraid she’d want to marry the other guy. That was the worst case scenario.

  “You can’t go back to how it was with her.”

  “And don’t want to,” Julian said. “I want to go forward, to how it’s going to be.”

  “Now that you know the truth, there is no future with her,” Ashton said. “No good future.”

  Julian didn’t speak.

  “I know you don’t want my advice,” Ashton said. “But you have to listen to me. I’m not your life hack. I read you this morning. The difference is, I’m the one who also must live with the consequences of your choices. With the consequences of all your choices. Just like in Topanga. I told you to wait for me, not to go on your own, and did you listen? Even then you thought you knew fucking everything. When are you going to learn? Don’t you understand? What you do affects me, too.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t fucking okay me. Don’t dismiss me.”

  “I’m going to hear her out, Ash. I owe her that. Listen to what she has to say.”

  “Yes, I know. All you want is to believe her desperate lies,” Ashton said. “That she loves you, blah blah, that there’s no one else, and never will be. Have you called Brentwood and cancelled?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Julian!”

  “First I will hear her out, Ashton.”

  “Why? You know what she’ll say. I’m sorry, Jules. It won’t happen again, Jules. It’s all bullshit. Wait for me,” Ashton said. “I’ll be over in twenty. We have an eleven o’clock walkthrough at the old sitcom warehouse at CBS. You know I can’t negotiate without your pessimism. You can stop me from bidding on the I Love Lucy crap I don’t need and can’t afford. We’ll go to Shutters for lunch. Marina Del Rey is offering a twofer sailing lesson at three. Let’s go learn to sail.”

  “No.”

  “It’s no good, Julian,” Ashton said. “She is no good. She can’t be trusted. If a woman can lie to you about this, she will lie to you about anything. Anything. Don’t you understand? You can’t be with someone like that. You certainly can’t marry her.”

  “You’re a fine one to talk about trust.”

  “Do you see me getting hitched?”

  “Can’t you think of something other than yourself?” Julian snapped.

  “What is with everyone?” Ashton said. “I’m not thinking of myself. I’m thinking only of you.”

  Julian didn’t know what to say. He feared his friend was right. He didn’t want to hear it. He hung up.

  At 11:30, Julian drove to the corner of Melrose and Gower, to Coffee Plus Food, where he parked and found a small metal table out in the street. He ordered two coffees, two morning buns, and a sausage roll. He took out his phone, went online for a bit, sat, waited.

  He wished to God he hadn’t called Ashton. His friend was right in the main, but wrong in the essence. Ashton’s argument was an intellectual argument, not an emotional one. This was different. No one knew what truly lived in the intimacy between human beings. What some people did was no indication of what other people would do. Past experience was not evidence of future events. Julian firmly believed that. Just because a girl did something untrustworthy once did not mean she could not be trusted in the future. That thinking was a logical fallacy and Julian’s mind easily refuted it, like swatting away a fly. The future was by definition unknowable.

  On an emotional level? Ashton’s argument didn’t even penetrate the first layer of skin. Julian couldn’t be without her, that’s all there was to it. Whatever steps he needed to take, he would take. Whatever deals he had to make with himself, he would make.

  End of argument.

  End of story.

  He couldn’t be without her.

  The coffee was getting cold. He didn’t drink it because he was waiting for her.

  Noon came and went.

  She was late.

  Three police cars, sirens on, screamed past him. Melrose Avenue was a busy street.

  After a few motionless minutes, Julian began to feel not so much worry as an unformed dread freezing him from the inside out.

  Did she blow him off? Change her mind? Decide not to come?

  Inexplicably he began to shake, even though it was L.A. ninety. What was wrong with him? He tried to return to surfing his phone. But his vision was blurred.

  He stood up, to stretch his legs, to focus on something in the distance—a life hack for those staring too long at things up close like computer screens and wedding bands—trying to get rid of the cold anxiety flooding his body.

  That’s when he saw Josephine walking toward him on Melrose. She had decided to walk from Normandie to meet him at the coffee shop. She was smiling, strolling, unhurried. Julian felt such relief, his legs couldn’t hold him. He took a step toward her and said, “God, where have you been?”

  “I’m right here,” the voice said.

  “I was getting so worried,” said Julian.

  From the next table he heard a man say, “You all right, homie?”

  Slowly Julian turned. “Why are you speaking to me?”

  “Cuz you fell down, brother.”

  Julian whirled toward where she had just been. There was nothing but empty sidewalk. Struggling to his feet, knocking over a chair, he yelled at the well-meaning stranger. “What did you do? What did you do?”

  “Whoa, man, just trying to help you out. You don’t look too good. Want me to call somebody?”

  Julian ran. He was in no condition to drive. It took him less than six minutes to run the straight flat mile in his Mephisto loafers down Melrose to Normandie. An ambulance raced past him, then another, three fire engines, a black and white. He didn’t have to turn the corner to see the emerging situation unraveling in front of Zakiyyah’s house. He felt it in his soul.

  And yet, the reality of the crowd, the flashing lights, the choking smoke doubled him over.

  The street was barricaded by cop cars and flares to stop the through traffic. An officer tried to grab him. To help him or halt him? I live here, Julian said, ripping away. I live in that house. Neighbors poured into the street. He pushed
past them, trying to get to where the crowd was thickest. He couldn’t see past the backs of the people. He ran too fast. He was wheezing.

  “Como esta, mio Dio, como esta?” an older woman was asking a young woman.

  “I don’t know, Mami, a shooting? An accident? No one knows. Maybe driver had stroke and rammed into tree? I was sure I heard gunfire. It’s terrible what’s happened to this neighborhood.”

  “Someone got shot? But why the car on fire?”

  Another woman spoke out of the corner of her mouth. No one wanted to turn their heads away from the crowded street.

  “Chica pobre! Qué pena!”

  “Chica pobre?” another woman cried. “Our Poppa W was shot!”

  “Mio Dio!”

  No one could see a thing.

  Excuse me please, Julian mouthed. Excuse me.

  “Whoever’s in that car not gon’ make it. They can’t put the fire out.”

  “The gas tank blew. Look at them flames.”

  “Was it an accident?”

  “It was murder, Mami, I’m telling you, cold-blooded murder!”

  Excuse me! Julian kept gasping. Excuse me.

  “That poor mamacita. Qué pena. Do you hear her?”

  There was wailing in the street. In the cloud of black smoke, a car was on fire. The sound of the water from the hydrant drowned out the gossip, the disbelief. Instead of sheltering in place, people left their homes and stood witness. Because it happened in broad daylight as they washed their cars and made lunches and walked to the corner bodega to buy their milk.

  Shock grinds down human beings. They can’t act, react, can’t speak, can’t feel. Sometimes they hear agony so unbearable that their minds block it out. You hear that sound, you know something terrible has happened. Someone has suffered an unsurvivable wound. Screaming like an uncontained blaze that obliterates everything. Sometimes you must close your ears and eyes to it, you must close your heart to it if you are to survive yourself.

  That’s what Julian had to do when he heard the soul-piercing cries of Ava McKenzie. She was held back by four officers who were trying to stop her from running out into the street and flinging herself to the pavement where a motionless Josephine lay, her red beret having rolled away, twisted in a pool of her own blood, her eyes open to the sky.

  Part Two

  The Tiger Catcher

  “As your days are, so shall your strength be.”

  Deuteronomy 33:25

  20

  Klonopin

  HELP ME, PLEASE. THAT’S WHAT JULIAN KEPT WHISPERING AS he crawled around the floor, desperately searching for a stray pill that might’ve gotten lost in a dark corner.

  The barely furnished room on Hermit Street he rented from Mrs. Pallaver was small—a sink, a twin bed, a dresser (a bathroom down the hall). The cross of Christ on the wall. The cross had fallen down; rather, it kept falling down despite the efforts of his chipper landlady who would arrive weekly, hammer in hand, and try to nail that pesky cross into the beam.

  Comedy or tragedy. It’s important to know what your life is. When the gods at last reveal the beast inside, will you be laughing or crying against the ominous skies? Are you smug or melancholy in your fatuous self-pity, craven or fearless, vivid or gray?

  Tonight, as he skulked on the floor, Julian concluded his life was a farce. He couldn’t even rise to the comic depths of fat and vain Falstaff. He was the bitter and brainless Lavache, the Bard’s least funny drunk. He was the anointed fool a writer swiped out of his final masterpiece. Case in point: he crept around the room, feeling blindly for a stray bit of dusty alchemy. That’s where his magic lay nowadays, in the floorboards. Instead of sleeping, nothing but a buffoon on his knees in the middle of the night in purgatory, in a ceaseless refrain, saying please, praying please.

  But then!

  He found one round beige pill with a big K carved out, tucked away near the iron leg of the bed frame. Julian cried out from relief. He chewed the pill dry, threw off his clothes, fell naked on the bed, and waited on his back, eyes to the ceiling, until it kicked in. It was impossible to ignore that he only found the tablet because he was down on his knees, his forehead to the floor.

  Klonopin.

  Amen.

  Finally he slept.

  And when he slept, he dreamed of Josephine.

  All clenched up, he sits in a chair at a bistro table on a wide sunny street. It’s a modern city, yet there’s something old in it. It’s not L.A. The time feels like half an hour past the rush of lunch. A cup of coffee stands on the table. The cup is full and cold. He hasn’t touched it. He never does.

  He sits and he waits.

  There she is. Gliding toward him.

  Her dress shimmers. In her swinging hands is a pink umbrella. The red beret is on her head, tilted to the side. She wears it rain or shine. Even when it clashes with her outfit, she wears it. She used to say that a red beret went with everything.

  Even a funeral, Josephine? he wants to ask.

  In the dream, she waves to him, her fingers splayed, a jazz hand. She floats forward, joyous and smiling, as if she’s got news she can’t wait to tell him.

  And despite what he knows, he can’t help himself, he smiles back and for a moment feels happy, even though he is so afraid it feels like he’s falling headfirst from the sky.

  She is wholly herself, as he had once known her. He can hear her heels click on the pavement, beats of time on his heart. The dream is so real, it feels almost like a memory. Everything in it is as it should be, and she is alive and bouncy walking beaming in another country.

  Julian thrashes about in what passes for real life.

  He wakes before she reaches his table.

  He always wakes before she reaches his table.

  He doesn’t know how it ends.

  The dream is all he has.

  ***

  In the morning the phone rang. It was Ashton. Julian was late for work because he had spent hours calling around for a new doctor.

  “Happy birthday, dude,” Ashton said. “You forgot to pick us up from Heathrow.”

  Julian stirred. “Really?”

  “It’s not even fun. Look up. The word ‘gullible’ is written on your ceiling. Relax. There was no way I was counting on you for pick-up in your current condition.”

  “What condition is that, Ash?”

  “Deranged. So listen,” Ashton said, “I prefer to surprise you with my exceptional party planning, but I’m afraid if I’m too coy, you won’t show up. Do you want to meet us at Trafalgar on King’s Road? It’s a beaut of a pub.”

  “Who’s us? You mean just you and Riley, right?”

  “What, if you don’t like my answer, you won’t come? Fuck you.”

  “Not the Trafalgar,” Julian said. “It’s too crowded on Thursday nights. And you can’t reserve a table.”

  “How do you know? Well, I tried reserving our usual spot at the Counting House but some asshole got there first. Any other ideas?”

  “The Blind Beggar on Cheapside. Or the White Crow in Covent Garden.”

  “White Crow. Seven sharp. And please—this time show up to your own fucking party.”

  Ashton hung up before Julian could defend himself with lies.

  It was true, last year when they flew in for his birthday he’d been wandering and lost track of time. “For an entire weekend?” Ashton had hollered.

  Longer than that, my friend. Longer than that.

  Built unplanned over two thousand years, London is seventy square miles of swampy flatlands sprawled across two banks of a great winding river. In the worn Mephistos he’d brought with him from West Hollywood where they received considerably less use, Julian has walked north and south, east and west— through Smithfields and the Strand, from Pimlico to Poultry, from Mansion House to Marble Arch, to all the gates, Aldgate to Newgate, Ludgate to Cripplegate, and every crevice and alley in between—looking for the café with a small round table and a metal chair at which he could sit and order coffee an
d wait for noon.

  He has been up and down the city so many times the geography of the streets has wound itself into his muscle memory. He is acquainted with every fish and chip shop and bookstore from Wapping to Westbourne Green. In Marylebone and Fitzrovia, the cafés look as if some of their windows might be tall enough to reflect a whole red bus in them. He has spent so long around Baker Street that the manager of Prét à Manger started greeting him by name. Every time Julian is on Baker Street, he wants to knock on number 2-2-1-B and inquire if for a small fee (or what was left of his life savings) a certain opium smoking gentleman might help him find what is missing.

  To disguise himself today, on the anniversary of his distant birth, Julian shaved off his beard—three months’ worth of mangy unchecked growth—for the first time since Ashton’s last visit. He dressed in something that looked chosen with care. Here was his dilemma. For the new doctor he needed to be dressed like a bum in need of help. But for a birthday bash thrown in his honor, he needed to look as if he wasn’t falling apart. Masquerade on all sides, yet only one man. But true to both versions of himself and hard to hide: whatever the cosplay, a strung-out Julian stumbled around like a zombie from Night of the Living Dead.

  Before, when he was mainlining Klonopin, nothing got through. The drug allowed him to get up and go to work and pretend to function. But in the last few months—as his supply was threatened and then dwindled—he started getting to work later, looking worse, taking more days off, writing fewer headlines, forgetting captions and display copy, noticing fewer missed commas, all his knotted-up Klonopin-(barely)maintained order uncoiling into madness.

  He would’ve taken today off, but though it was only March, he had no more days to take. And if he didn’t show up, he might be fired. Hard to maintain the fiction you’re doing fine if things are so out of control that you’re getting sacked on your birthday.

  He just needed a new script, and then he’d be fine.