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“Would you believe it—Nicole’s driver took a wrong turn into the Lincoln Tunnel.” Josephine chortled. “He had a brain freeze. He drove to Jersey! I mean, Jersey is always the wrong turn, but then they got stuck behind an accident coming back, and—well, you know the rest.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. My contract ended a few days later,” she said. “They didn’t renew.”
“I’m not surprised,” Julian said. “Nicole must’ve been afraid for her job. You were fantastic.”
“Really?” She beamed.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “You stole the show. They don’t forgive that in the theatre.”
The girl thawed. She said some things, a thank you, and a you really think so? Julian barely heard her. His sight grew dim.
That night was the only night she took the stage.
In front of him.
Blinking, he came out of it. “Plus,” he said, “you couldn’t make up a better stage name than Josephine Collins.”
“How do you know I didn’t make it up?” She twinkled. “And what’s your name?”
“Julian.”
She shielded her eyes—as if from the sun, even though they were inside—and assessed him. “Hmm. You don’t look like a Julian.”
“No? What does a Julian look like?” He resisted the impulse to check his attire, as if he forgot what he’d put on that morning. “I’m no Ralph Dibny,” he muttered, not meaning to say it. It just slipped out. In the comic book universe, Ralph Dibny was an ordinary man in ordinary clothes who drank a super-potion that changed him into an extraordinary contortionist.
Josephine nodded. “Agreed, you’re no Dibny—unless you’re made of rubber. Julian what?”
“Julian Cruz. Did you say rubber? You know who Ralph Dibny is?”
“The Elongated Man? Doesn’t everybody?” she replied in her dulcet soprano.
Julian didn’t know what to say.
“Are you sure you’re not a Dibny?” Josephine stood clutching a book to her chest as if they were in high school. “Why else would you look like a geeky middle-school teacher?”
“I don’t look like a middle-school teacher,” Julian said, and the girl laughed at his on the fly editing, as he hoped she would.
“No?” she said, studying him.
Why did Julian suddenly feel so self-conscious? She reviewed his well-groomed square-jawed face, she assessed his hair—kept carefully trimmed—the crisp khaki slacks, the sensible shoes, the button-down, blue-checked shirt, the tailored blazer, the impeccably clean nails digging into the cover of Leonard Cohen. He hoped she didn’t notice his large, tense hands with their gnarly knuckles or his broken nose, or his light hazelnut eyes that were forcing themselves into slits to hide his interest in her.
“Okay, okay,” the girl said, her face lighting up in a smile. “I’m just saying, like Dibny, you look like you might have some hidden talents.” Teasing him suggestively, inviting him to tease back.
What happened then wasn’t much.
Except the skies opened up and the stars rained down.
“You don’t need to be Dibny,” Josephine added. “You can live up to your own rock star name, Julian Cruz.”
Julian Cruz the rock star forgot how to talk to a girl. Awkwardly he stood, saying nothing. Why did his earth-tone fastidiousness irk him so much today? He was normally so proud of it. He hid his face from her in a dazzle of tumbling stars.
“Listen,” Josephine said, “I’d love to stand and gab with you all day about our favorite superheroes, but I’ve got an audition at one.”
“Is that what the book is for?” He pointed to her hands. Monologues for Actors from Divine Comedy.
“No, the book’s for my 4:30.” She zeroed in on him, blinking, thinking.
Not knowing what to say, Julian took a step back and lifted his Leonard Cohen in a so long, Josephine.
“Here’s the thing,” she said, taking a step toward him. “I was gonna catch a cab, but they’re so hard to find around lunchtime, so I was wondering … is there any way you could help a girl out and drive me to the audition? It’s at Paramount, not too far.”
On the radio, Big Star were in love with a girl, the most beautiful of all the girls in the world. “Not a problem,” Julian said, flinging away Leonard Cohen.
“I don’t mean to impose,” she said. “New York’s so much easier, I just hop on the subway, but here without a car …”
“It’s no big deal.” Ashton who? Friend for how long? “So you live in New York?” he asked at the counter as they waited to pay.
“I do. Is that good or bad?” Cheerfully her dark eyes blinked at him. She was fresh faced, eager, sincere. She had a few freckles, a dimple in her small chin. There was something wonderfully animated and inviting about her open face, about her pink vivid mouth.
His car was parked by the Viper Room, a block up Sunset. “The audition is for Mountain Dew,” Josephine said as they hurried past the blind homeless Jenny, smiling as if she could see them. “But the 4:30 is for something called Paradise in the Park at the Greek Theatre. Have you heard of it? Apparently, they need a narrator for Dante and also a Beatrice.”
“Have I heard of what? Mountain Dew? Beatrice? The Greek?” Julian opened the car door for her. He’d been leasing a Volvo sedan the last couple of years. It was spotless inside.
She didn’t notice the car or the cleanliness, or if she had, didn’t care. She was starved, she said, she hadn’t eaten since the night before. He offered her a bite-sized Milky Way from the glove box, behind his seatbelt cutter, flashlight, and multi-tool—items she also ignored on the way to the chocolate. “I really need to start making some money,” she said, theatrically chewing the hard caramel. “This Milky Way tastes like it’s been there since Christmas. I’m not complaining, mind you. Mine is a beggar’s kingdom.” Flipping down the visor mirror, she took out a small bag from her hobo purse and started doing her makeup. “I didn’t know Ralph Dibny drove a Volvo.” So she did notice. She threw blue shadow over her eyes and some more shade at him. “What are you, fifty?”
“What? No—”
“Only married fifty-year-old men with kids drive Volvos.”
“That’s not true,” Julian said, “because I’m none of those things, and yet I drive one.”
“Hmm,” she said with a purr, casting him a sideways gaze. “You’re not a man?”
Julian turned off his phone. Switched it off cold. Last thing he needed was Ashton’s scolding voice coming through the car speakers, intruding on his Technicolor daydream. He just hoped Ash wouldn’t think Julian had been in an accident. Ashton wasn’t going to take it lightly, Julian blowing off lunch and a set walkthrough at Warner.
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 (#ulink_3b5c04f6-e65d-54b0-b271-1b911a91208d)
Lonely Hearts (#ulink_3b5c04f6-e65d-54b0-b271-1b911a91208d)
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 handful of 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?”
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.
