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“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 petty 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 the stage.
“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—
The casting crank in the front row stopped her. “Miss Collins, what is that you are reading for us?”
“Shakespeare, sir, from All’s Well that Ends—”
“This is an audition for Paradise in the Park. You’re supposed to be reading for either Beatrice or Dante.”
“Of course. I was showcasing my abilities. How about this”—she lowered her voice to a deep bass, looked up, beat her breast—“through me you pass through the city of woe, through me you pass into eternal pain—”
“Thank you—next. Number 50. Julian Cruz. Mr. Cruz, have you prepared some Dante for us?”
4 (#ulink_5e42a389-4506-559c-a7cc-cb04b7c7f908)
Gift of the Magi (#ulink_5e42a389-4506-559c-a7cc-cb04b7c7f908)
BACK AT HIS CAR, THEY LINGERED. SHE CALLED HIM chicken for telling the director he had nothing prepared, and he agreed, not wanting to take her home. She tied up her hair and put away her fake glasses. She looked like herself again, simple and perfect. The ends of her sheer blouse swayed in the breeze.
“I wish it wasn’t so late in the day,” she said, glancing at the hills around the theatre. “We could take a walk up there. I could show you something.”
“Show me anyway,” he said. “Wait—up where?”
“What, you agreed too fast? No, no backsies. I’ll have to show you another day.”
“Okay—when?”
She laughed. They leaned against his gray Volvo, drinking from the same water bottle. Julian’s thoughts were racing. “What’s your favorite movie?”
“Dunno. Why?”
“Come on. What is it? Titanic?”
“Ugh, no, I don’t care for all that dying in icy water, don’t care for it one bit,” she said, peering at him through slitted eyes. “Apocalypse Now.”
Julian did a double take. “Apocalypse Now is your favorite movie?”
She stayed poker-faced. “Sure. Why is that surprising?”
“No reason.” He fake-coughed. “I’ve never seen it.”
Now it was her turn to do a double take. “You’ve never seen Apocalypse Now?”
“No. Why is that surprising?”
“Because it’s such a guy movie. We should watch it sometime.”
“Okay—when?”
She laughed. They lingered a bit longer.
“Listen—I gotta head back,” she said.
“I thought you were hungry,” Julian blurted. “What do you feel like eating? We can go anywhere. My treat. I may not know about Vietnam movies, but I know my L.A. food. Are you in the mood for a taco? Factor’s on Pico? A pizza? Marie Callender’s coconut pie?”
Her mouth twisted as she struggled with some internal thing. “Don’t think I’m nuts,” Josephine finally said. “But I feel like breakfast for dinner. Hash browns?”
“I know just the place. Best hash browns in L.A.”
“Am I dressed for it?”
“For IHOP? Absolutely.” Julian opened the passenger door.
“You know what they say,” she said, getting in. “When the guy opens the door for you, either the girl is new, or the car is new.”
“Ha,” Julian said. The girl was new.
“So who do you stay with when you’re in L.A.?” he asked. They were sitting across from each other, their second plate of hash browns half eaten between them on the blue table.
“My friend Z.”
