The Tiger Catcher. Paullina Simons
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.”
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