The Tiger Catcher Page 7

  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.”