The Tiger Catcher Read online

  “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 ou
t.

  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.