The Tiger Catcher Page 3

  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 few 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?”

&n
bsp; 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 pe
tty 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.

  “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—