Read the book: «The Tiger Catcher»
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published by HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty Ltd in 2019
This edition in Great Britain 2019
Copyright © Paullina Simons
Cover design by HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover images: Couple by Mark Owen/Trevillion Images; Hollywood hills by Daniel Viñé
Garcia/Getty Images; palm trees by Cavan Images/Getty Images
Author photo by Paullina Simons
Paullina Simons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007441655
Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780007441662
Version: 2019-05-02
Praise for Paullina Simons
Tully
“You’ll never look at life in the same way again. Pick up this book and prepare to have your emotions wrung so completely you’ll be sobbing your heart out one minute and laughing through your tears the next. Read it and weep—literally.”
Company
Red Leaves
“Simons handles her characters and setting with skill, slowly peeling away deceptions to reveal denial, cowardice and chilling indifference … an engrossing story.”
Publishers Weekly
Eleven Hours
“Eleven Hours is a harrowing, hair-raising story that will keep you turning the pages late into the night.”
Janet Evanovich
The Bronze Horseman
“A love story both tender and fierce”
(Publishers Weekly)
that “recalls Dr. Zhivago.”
(People Magazine)
The Bridge to Holy Cross
“This has everything a romance glutton could wish for: a bold, talented and dashing hero [and] a heart-stopping love affair that nourishes its two protagonists even when they are separated and lost.”
Daily Mail
The Girl in Times Square
“Part mystery, part romance, part family drama … in other words, the perfect book.”
Daily Mail
The Summer Garden
“If you’re looking for a historical epic to immerse yourself in, then this is the book for you.”
Closer
Road to Paradise
“One of our most exciting writers … Paullina Simons presents the perfect mix of page-turning plot and characters.”
Woman and Home
A Song in the Daylight
“Simons shows the frailties of families and of human nature, and demonstrates that there’s so much more to life, such as honesty and loyalty.”
Good Reading
Bellagrand
“Another epic saga from Simons, full of the emotion and heartache of the original trilogy. Summer reading at its finest.”
Canberra Times
Lone Star
“Another epic love story—perfect reading for a long, lazy day in bed.”
Better Reading
Dedication
For Tania, my last child, the joy of my life
Epigraph
A safe fairytale is not true to either world.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright
Praise for Paullina Simons
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: The Transit Circle
Part One: The Ghost of God and Dreams
Chapter 1: The Invention of Love
Chapter 2: Book Soup
Chapter 3: Lonely Hearts
Chapter 4: Gift of the Magi
Chapter 5: Normandie Avenue
Chapter 6: Gwen
Chapter 7: Ashton and Riley
Chapter 8: The Red Beret, Take One
Chapter 9: Phantasmagoria in Two
Chapter 10: Griddle Cafe
Chapter 11: Duende
Chapter 12: The Four of Them
Chapter 13: Pandora’s Box
Chapter 14: Shame Toast
Chapter 15: Charlie’s Dead
Chapter 16: Fields of Asphodel
Chapter 17: A Rose by Any Other Name
Chapter 18: Lilikoi
Chapter 19: Mystique
Part Two: The Tiger Catcher
Chapter 20: Klonopin
Chapter 21: The Apothecary
Chapter 22: Waterloo
Chapter 23: White Crow
Chapter 24: The Question
Chapter 25: The Widow’s Daughter
Chapter 26: Great Eastern Road
Chapter 27: Red Beret, Take Two
Chapter 28: When We Were Kings
Chapter 29: Zero Meridian
Chapter 30: Notting Hill
Chapter 31: Time Over Matter
Chapter 32: A Boy Called Wart
Chapter 33: Dumbshow
Part Three: Medea
Chapter 34: Moongate
Chapter 35: White Lava
Chapter 36: Black River
Chapter 37: Dead Queen, Take One
Chapter 38: Chandlery
Chapter 39: Medea
Chapter 40: Lady Mary
Chapter 41: The Italian Merchant
Chapter 42: Fynnesbyrie Fields Forever
Chapter 43: The Boy and the Boatman
Chapter 44: Josephine and the Flying Machine
Chapter 45: Sebastian
Chapter 46: Consequences of Happiness
Chapter 47: The Coat
Chapter 48: Side Effects of Electrocution
Chapter 49: The Lady, or the Tiger
Keep Reading …
Author’s Note
About the Author
By the same author
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
The Transit Circle
I SHOULD HAVE KISSED YOU. JULIAN LAY NAKED ON HIS BED, clutching the red beret, staring at the ceiling. I should have kissed you the last time I saw you.
After half a night passed like this, he gave up on sleep, jumped up and began to get ready. He had a lot to do to be in Greenwich by noon. Don’t dawdle, the cook told him. You have very little time. You have a picosecond inside of a minute. And don’t get stuck. Where you’re going, the opening is wide enough for one man, but not for all men.
And what was Julian’s wise response to this?
“How long is a picosecond?”
“One-trillionth of a second,” the exasperated cook replied.
Julian dressed in black layers. He shaved. He slicked back his unruly brown hair and tied it up so it didn’t look like what it was—a bushy mane on a man who long ago stopped giving a damn. Julian was square-faced, square-jawed, straight-browed, granite-chinned, once. His hazel eyes looked gray today, huge, sunken into his gaunt cheeks, the dark bags under his eyes like somebody clocked him, the full mouth pale. He had lost so much weight, he had to punch a new notch in his belt; his jacket could’ve fit two Julians inside.
It took him a while to get out; he kept forgetting this, that. At the last minute, he remembered to text his mother and Ashton. Nothing too alarming—like I’m sorry—but still, he wanted to leave them with something. Jokes to make them think the old Julian wasn’t too far away. To his mom: “I used to feel like a guy trapped in a woman’s body. Then I was born.” To Ashton: “You can’t lose a homing pigeon, Ash. If your homing pigeon doesn’t come back, what you’ve lost is a pigeon.” But he did leave a separate note for Ashton on his dresser.
As instructed, Julian left his cell phone at the flat, his wallet, his pens, his notebooks. He left his life behind, including the words he had written just yesterday called “Tiger Claws.”
What do you ask of life
At night the world you can’t change
desire drunkenness rage
Flies by
While you lie flat on your back
Under claws and lizards
In the purple fields.
He brought four things: a fifty-pound note, an Oyster fare card for the tube, the crystal on a rope around his neck, and the red beret in his pocket.
At Boots at Liverpool Street, he bought a flashlight. The cook said he would need one. And then the trains were slow like he was slow. Julian waited forever for a change at Bank. At Island Gardens, he looked down into his hands. They had been clenched since Shadwell. Lately he’d been staggering, foundering, drowning. Without time, his wandering life had filled up with nothing but watery impressions, his days were without architecture, without frame or matter, a muddle, a madness, a dream.
But not anymore. Now he had purpose. Lunatic, foolish purpose, but hey, he was grateful something was being offered to him instead of nothing.
In Greenwich, the flat landscaped park below the Royal Observatory is lined with crisscrossing paths called Lovers’ Walks. Deep inside the park, on top of a steep hill with a wild garden, for centuries the British astronomers have studied the skies. Today, on a blustery day in March the garden was nothing but bare branches whipping about, blocking the view of what Julian was climbing to the top of the mountain to find.
He felt idiotic. Did he buy a ticket? Did he loiter until the appointed hour? The cook told him to find a telescope called the Transit Circle, but the Observatory was home to so many. Where was this enchanted spot where all impossible things became possible? Julian caught himself scoffing and felt ashamed. His mother taught him better than that, told him never to mock the thing you were about to fall on your knees in front of.
“Which way to the Transit Circle?” Julian asked the cashier behind the table.
The pretty girl smoothed out her hair. “George Airy’s Transit Circle? Right through there. I can take you, if you like. Will it be just one ticket for you?” She smiled.
“Yes,” he said. “And no, that’s fine, I’ll find it. Do you sell pocket watches?”
“Yes, in our gift shop. Do you need a compass, too? Maybe a tour guide?” She tilted her head.
“No, thank you.” He wouldn’t look up, wouldn’t meet her gaze.
With the girl hovering nearby, Julian bought a watch in an unopened box. She wanted to test it to make sure it worked, but he said no. He didn’t want her touching it, imprinting his brand-new timekeeper with her own spirit.
“You won’t be able to return it if something’s wrong with it,” she said.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m not coming back this way.” Whatever happened, he wouldn’t be coming back.
“That’s a shame.” She smiled. “Where are you going?” When he didn’t answer, she shrugged, a friendly girl marking time. “Look around,” she said. “Take your time.”
Julian had almost nothing left from his fifty. He hid the remaining pound coins in a souvenir vase along with his Oyster card. Was that wrong, to hedge his bets? No, he decided. Even people who sought out miracles were allowed to be cautious. That was him—a cautious man seeking out a miracle. He had some time to kill so he wandered around killing it. It was only eleven o’clock. He tried to remember all the things the cook told him, but there had been so many. “At noon, the sun will pass through a pinhole in the glass crosshairs overhead,” the cook said. “A beam of light will strike the quartz in your hands. The blue chasm will open. You must hurry. The rest of your life awaits.”
It sounds difficult and complicated, Julian said. The cook stepped back from the grill and judged him up and down, a cleaver in his hands. “You think this part is complicated? Do you have any idea what you’re about to do?”
No. Julian had no idea. He knew what he had been doing. Lately, nothing. But way back when, he did things, like mark time with his baby down the road from his Hollywood dreams. Sun beating down on palm trees and lovers, Volvos parked in secluded corners. Windows open. Joy flying in, like wind. Julian wasn’t a skeptic then. Well, like he always said, there was a time for everything.
“Where’s the Prime Meridian?” Julian asked a gruff older guard inside one of the rooms in the pavilion.
“You’re on it, mate,” the guard replied. His name tag said Sweeney. He pointed to an enormous black telescope. “You’re in the Transit Room. And that’s the Transit Circle, right on the meridian line.” Over nine feet long, Airy’s telescope looked like a field gun aimed at the stars. It was flanked by a set of glossy black stairs, their base set into a square well slightly below the main floor.
Through the open door, pale sunlight. The brass line marking 0.0 longitude was riveted into the cobblestones in the courtyard. Julian watched the tourists hamming it up on the line, one foot in the east, one foot in the west, standing on each other’s shoulders, taking pictures, posing, laughing. He checked his new watch.
11:45.
His hands trembled. To steady himself, he grabbed the low iron railing that separated him from the telescope, the retractable roof open, the patchy sky above him.
He was so utterly alone.
A strange, vast, rainy, foreign city. London like another country unto itself. Julian glanced back at the guard. The portly man sat on a stool, an elbow on the wood table, indifferent to Julian, as was the whole universe. There was a window behind Sweeney, a glimpse of taupe leafless trees blowing about in the sharp wind. It had been so gusty in London the last few days, like an eyewall of a hurricane passing through.
11:56.
Reaching into his shirt, Julian pulled out the stone that hung on a leather rope around his neck. Leaving it in its silver webbing, he laid it into his shaking hand. In the gray light, the crystal didn’t sparkle or shimmer. Silent and cool, it lay in his open palm. Once the stone had been in her hands. There was sun then, a sparkling mist of dreamlike bliss, the beginning, not the end—or so he thought.
Was this the end?
Or was it the beginning?
“The crystal oscillates a million times a second,” the cook told him—a cook, a magician, a warlock, a wizard. “And you oscillate with it. You are the oscillator. You are the chain reaction, the chemical ignition, the voltage soaring through your own life. Go, Julian. The time has come for you to act.”
There is no other time.
Until the end of time.
Running out of time.
11:59.
Julian gripped the crystal. His vision blurred. The memory of pain is what causes the fear of death. The heart grows numb. There’s a sense of suffocation. As the lungs become paralyzed, the heart cannot breathe.
So it is with the memory of love.
O my soul and all that’s within me, the beggar cried, raising his palm to the sky.
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s showtime!
In the picosecond before the clock struck noon, in the blink he still had between what was and what was yet to be, Julian asked himself what he was most afraid of.
That the inexpressible thing being offered to him was possible?
Or that it wasn’t?
There’ll be another time for you and me.
There’ll never be another time for you and me.
As the sun moved into the crosshairs at noon, he knew. He would do anything, sacrifice everything to see her again.
Help me.
Please.
I should’ve kissed you.
Part One
The Ghost of God and Dreams
“Like a ghost she glimmers on to me. And all thy heart lies open unto me.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“I love acting. It is so much more real than life.”
Oscar Wilde
1
The Invention of Love
“I’M DEAD, THEN. GOOD.” THOSE WERE THE FIRST WORDS SHE said to him.
Julian and Ashton flew to New York from L.A. with their girlfriends Gwen and Riley to see the star-studded adaptation of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love off Broadway. The play—with Nicole Kidman in the starring role!—about the life and death of British poet A.E. Housman, originally written for men, had been reimagined and restaged with all women, except for the part of Moses Jackson, Housman’s objet d’amour, which was played by some male newcomer, who was “ominous like a powder keg,” the New York Times had reverentially written.
At first, when Gwen had suggested going, Julian balked. He knew something about The Invention of Love. His unfinished masters, a papercut inside him, included Stoppard’s play as part of the assignment.
“Oh, you think you know something about everything, Jules,” Gwen said. She was always dragging him to cultural things. “But you don’t know about this. Trust me. It’s going to be fantastic.”
“Gwen, if we’re going all the way to New York, why don’t we see La Traviata at Lincoln Center instead?” Julian said. He wasn’t particularly a friend of the opera, but Placido Domingo was Armand. That was worth a cross-country trip.
“Did you not hear when I said Nicole Kidman is A.E. Housman? And Kyra Sedgwick is her sidekick!”
“I heard, I heard,” Julian said. “Is Ashton going to agree to this?”
“He will if you will. And what, you think Ashton would rather see Placido? Ha. We have to expand his horizons. And clearly not just his. Come on, Jules, don’t sulk, it’ll be fun. I promise.” Gwen smiled toothily as if her promises were stone-carved.
They made a weekend out of it. Ashton hung up his favorite sign on the door of his store: GONE FISHING (though he didn’t fish). The four of them like the musketeers often traveled together, spent weekends down in Cabo or up in Napa. They flew into JFK on Friday, had dinner at La Bernardin, where Ashton knew the owner (of course he did), and they got to eat for free. Afterward, they met up with a few friends from UCLA, went drinking in Soho and dancing in Harlem.
Hungover and slow, they spent Saturday afternoon at MOMA, did some window shopping on Fifth Avenue. When Saturday night rolled around, Julian was almost too tired to go out again. He had bought a fascinating little book at the MOMA gift store, The Oracle Book: Answers to Life’s Questions, and would have liked to order room service and leaf through it—looking for answers as the book suggested. He had opened it randomly to two provocative replies, answers to questions he wasn’t asking.
One: You’ve drawn the seven of cups. Is this what you really want?
What was this referring to in that sentence?
And two: A solar eclipse hints of an unexpected ending.
What ending was he expecting?
Dressed for a Saturday night on the town—the men in dark jeans, fitted shirts, and structured blazers; the girls made up and blown out, in high heels and open necklines—they had pre-theatre sushi at Nobu in TriBeCa, all but Riley because it was B day and Riley didn’t eat on B days, and cabbed it to the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village.
And wouldn’t you know it, Nicole Kidman had an understudy!
The sign on the board read: “Tonight, the part of A.E. Housman will be played by Ms. Kidman’s understudy, Josephine Collins.”
A loud unhappy hullaballoo rippled through the ticketholders. It was a Saturday night! Why would the star of the show be out without a word? “Did she fall down the stairs? Did she catch a contagious disease?” Gwen asked. No one knew. The box office was mum. The social media was quiet. Since the only name above the title of the play on the marquee was Tom Stoppard’s, refunds were out of the question.
Julian thought his girlfriend was going to have a polar icecap meltdown right on the pavement. Gwen was upset at the poor woman at the ticket window, as if Nicole’s absence was the woman’s fault. “But why is she out?” Gwen kept repeating. “Can’t you tell me? Why?”
Julian tried to make it better. Giving Gwen a small commiserating pat as they took their seats, he said, “Josephine Collins is a good stage name, don’t you think?”
Gwen glared at him. “You never say anything to actually make me feel better when I’m upset,” she said. “Like you don’t even care.”
Julian glanced at Ashton on his right. His friend was chatting with Riley, chuckling over some private joke, their blond heads together.
He tried again. “You did amazing, Gwen, really. These seats are incredible.” And they were. Third row center.
“Oh yes, they’re excellent,” Gwen said. “All the better to see the understudy from.”
Ashton elbowed him. “I keep telling you, Jules, in some situations, it’s best to shut the hell up. This most definitely is one of them.”
Julian stared straight ahead. After an interminable minute, the red curtain rose.
The understudy stood center stage in the footlights.
“I’m dead, then. Good,” she said to him, and swiveled her hips.
A slouching, heavy-lidded Julian sat up in his seat.
The play may have been fine. It may have been terrible. Gwen spent the moments during applause and the intermission in a ceaseless harangue against the understudy, so it was hard for Julian to form a coherent opinion about the play.
But he formed an opinion about the understudy.
The accidental girl was in front of Julian for over two unsuppressed hours.
She was remarkable. Though she was young and played an old man looking back on his life and finding it wanting, she brought melancholy and elegance to the stage, she brought wit and pain and outrage. She brought it all. Everything she had was left on the stage in front of Julian.
She might not have been as tall as Nicole Kidman, but she was just as sinewy, all long limbs and whiteout skin and bleached-out features. Unlike Nicole, she had brown eyes and a whisper of a breathy voice. She sounded like a teenager but with an earthy grownup exhale at the end of each sentence. The juxtaposition of her feminine self, sauntering about, playing a gruff professor had a powerful effect on Julian. The sturdy Housman verse coming from her barely audible, husky throat seduced him. Her swiveling hips seduced him. Love is but ice in the hands of children, she murmured in her impeccable British accent, standing on the banks of the River Styx, stretching out her slender arms to him. He fought the urge to leap up in his seat. How many tomorrows would the gods give me? she kept asking. How much time do I have? she cried.
And then, stepping out of Housman and into Chekhov, she said this from The Three Sisters:
Oh, where is it, where has it all gone, my past, when I was young? When I dreamed and thought with grace, when my present and my future were lighted up with hope? Why is it that when we have barely begun to live, we grow dull, gray, uninteresting, lazy, indifferent, useless, unhappy. The adults relieve the monotony of their days with gossip and vodka. Where is the artist, the scholar, the saint, where is the one who is not like all the others, who inspires envy, or passionate desire? What do you want, Julian? WHAT DO YOU WANT?
His mouth dropped open. Did he mishear? The Oracle Book was speaking to him out loud. Bewildered, he leaned forward. Ashton nudged him to sit back. Did the girl just call out to him by name?
“It was ghastly, wasn’t it?” Gwen said when it was over. “How pretentious was she? Oh, she thought she was all that. How in the world did she land such a complex role? Banging the producer, most likely, don’t you think?”
“How would I know?” Julian said. “Why are you asking me? I know nothing about her.” Was she really British? Surely you couldn’t fake an accent like that.
“Why are you getting defensive?” Gwen sighed, taking his limp hand. “I’m sorry, okay? You were right. We should’ve seen La Traviata. But honestly, what did you think? Ghastly, wasn’t it?”
That wasn’t quite what Julian thought.
Gwen wanted to stage door for Kyra Sedgwick’s autograph. “So the evening is not a total waste.” They squeezed in by the blue guardrail. “After this, we’re walking straight to Art Bar,” Gwen said. “First round’s on me. We will drink to forget.”
“There isn’t enough alcohol in all of New York,” Riley chimed in. “I also didn’t care for her, Gwennie. She rubbed me the wrong way, though I can’t quite put my finger on why.”
“What do you think, Jules?” Ashton said. “Is there enough alcohol in all of New York for you to forget her?”
“I shouldn’t think so.”
Ashton was teasing but not smiling. Julian turned his gaze to the backlit pink posterboard by the stage door.
“She grated on me,” Gwen continued to say to Riley. “It’s fine to bring something new to a role. But it can’t be a total departure.”
“She was a woman playing a man, how much more of a departure can there be?” Julian asked.
“She wasn’t manly enough. Did you hear her voice?”
“I heard her,” said Julian.
“I could barely. Plus she wasn’t tall enough. It was so distracting.”
“Were you distracted by her height, bro?” Ashton said, nudging Julian.
“Nope.”
“Well, pardon me for expressing my opinion,” Gwen said.
Julian pointed out that he, too, was expressing his opinion.
“Yes, but I’m making an intellectual argument against her lack of quality,” Gwen said. “What are you doing?”
Julian let it go. He didn’t know what he was doing.
It was a June summer night in New York, warm, overcast, windy, a crackle in the air of three million people alive in the street. People were pushy, the way people in New York sometimes are when they’ve spent a lot of scratch on tickets and feel it’s their due to get a signature on a playbill. They stand with demanding arms out, as if they’re doing the actors a favor and not the other way around.
The petty things Gwen continued to say about the understudy irritated Julian. He stepped away, letting other men and their dates wedge between him and his date. An echo of the girl’s words continued to ring in his ears and thump in his chest. I’m dead then, good; love like ice in the hands of children …
Kyra Sedgwick came out on the arm of Kevin Bacon, her skinny, youthful actor husband. A guy in the crowd loudly made a six degrees of Kevin Bacon joke. Kevin Bacon smiled as if he wanted to deck him. A few minutes later, the only man in the cast—the beefed-up, “explosive powder keg” who played Moses Jackson—strutted out. Julian didn’t catch his actual name and didn’t care to. A few steps behind Mr. Universe, the understudy followed. Julian’s breath caught in his throat.
The barricades grunted under the heaving mob; there was shouting, Kyra, Kyra. Kevin, Kevin. Julian liked that Kevin Bacon wasn’t even in the play, yet was signing. A measure of true celebrity, Julian thought with amusement. This was some superstar shit.
Even Mr. Universe signed a few playbills. Not Julian’s understudy. She stood to the side like the last unbought maiden at an Old West wench auction. No one recognized her with the blonde wig off and her wet hair pulled into a tight bun.
It started to drizzle.
Extending his hand with the playbill in it, Julian waved it around to get her attention. How do you act like a gentleman and not an asshole when you’re waving around a thing to be signed? But when she saw him making a fool of himself, she stepped forward, all breath and grateful smile. He held out the playbill for her in the palm of his slightly shaking hand, watching the top of her wet dark head as she signed her name, large, ornate, nearly illegible, Josephine Collins with a bold flourish.
Before Julian could tell her how good she was, how astonishing, the steroid with a mouth summoned her from afar. The only thing missing was a finger snap. She fled.
And that was that.
Back in L.A., Julian almost forgot her.
Ashton’s store was as busy as ever, three of Julian’s brothers were having birthdays, Father’s Day was coming up, a baptism, his mother was hosting an end-of-school party and needed Julian’s help finding a florist and a caterer, and Gwen was hinting at a romantic getaway to Mexico for the Fourth of July, hoping perhaps for an engagement ring in Cabo.
Every once in a while, Julian remembered the girl’s first line.
Not even remembered it. He dreamed it.
In visions of blazes and icy glades, her pale face would appear lit up against the black, and from the center stage in his chest her voice would sound, asking what he was waiting for, telling him that the soul had no borders.
2
Book Soup
A FEW WEEKS LATER JULIAN RAN INTO HER AT BOOK SOUP ON Sunset. Ran into her was probably a misnomer. He was in the poetry stacks, killing time before meeting up with Ashton, and she waltzed in.
Skipping up the short stairs, she headed for the black shelves by the windows, to the film and theatre section. From his hidden vantage point, his head cocked, Julian watched her scanning the spines of the books. It was definitely the same girl, right? What a coincidence to find her here.
She had on a blonde wig in New York and cocoa hair now, swept up in a messy, falling-out bun. She was wearing denim shorts, black army boots, and a sheer plaid shirt that swung over a bright red tank top. Her legs were slender, long, untanned. No doubt. It was her.
Julian didn’t usually approach women he didn’t know in bookstores. Plus he was out of time. He glanced at his watch, as if he were actually contemplating accosting her, or perhaps looking for a reason not to. Ashton in thirty.
His insane buddy wanted to go canyoneering in Utah! Julian’s job as a friend was to talk him out of it. So Julian had gone to Book Soup to buy the memoir of the unfortunate hiker who had also gone canyoneering in Utah. The poor bastard got trapped under a boulder for five days in Blue John Canyon and had to cut off his own arm with a dull pocket knife to survive. Over lunch of spicy soft-shell crab tacos, cilantro slaw and cold beer, Julian intended to read the salient passages to Ashton about how to save a life.
But before he could get to the life-saving travel section, Julian got sidetracked by the L.A. poems of Leonard Cohen and then by the hypnotic synth-beat chorus of Cuco’s “Drown” playing on the overhead speakers.
And there she was, bouncing in.
It was almost noon. Julian had just enough time to hightail it to Melrose to meet Ashton at Gracias Madre. At lunchtime, the streets of West Hollywood pulsed with hangry drivers. The girl hadn’t even seen him. He didn’t need to be sneaky. He didn’t need to be anything. Put Leonard Cohen down, walk out the open door onto Sunset. Stroll right on out. Throw a dollar into Jenny’s jar. Jenny the blind waif loitered outside the store at lunchtime by the rack of newspapers. The homeless needed to eat, too. Walk to your car, get in, drive away.
Without traffic, it would take him seven minutes. Julian prided himself on being a punctual guy, his Tag Heuer watch set to atomic time, Hollywood’s legendary lateness insulting to him.
Julian did not walk out.
Instead, casual as all that, he ambled across the store to the sunny corner by the window until he stood behind her, Leonard Cohen’s love songs to Los Angeles clutched in his paws.
He took a breath. “Josephine?”
He figured if it wasn’t her, she wouldn’t turn around.
She turned around. Though not exactly immediately. There was a delay in her turning around. She was makeup free, clear-skinned, brown eyed, neutrally polite. Everything on her smooth healthy face was open. Eyes far apart, unhindered by overhanging brow lines or furrows in the lids, forehead large, cheekbones wide, mouth pink.
At first there was nothing. Then she blinked at him and smiled politely. Not an invitation to a wedding, just a tiny acknowledgment that she was looking at a man whom she didn’t find at first glance to be overly repellent, and to whom she would deign, grace, give one minute of her life. You got sixty seconds, cowboy, her small smile said. Go.
But Julian couldn’t go. He had forgotten his words. Going up, it was called in the theatre. When everything you were supposed to say flew out of your head.
She spoke first. “Where do I know you from?” she asked, squinting. There was no trace of a British accent in her voice. “You look so familiar. Wait. Didn’t you come to my play in New York? The Invention of Love?”
“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “You remember?”
She shrugged. “Yours was the only playbill I signed.” Her voice—not just her stage voice but also her normal sing-song speaking voice—was gentle and breathy, a girl’s voice but with a naked woman’s lilt to it. Quite an art to pull that off. Quite a spectacle. “What are you doing in L.A.?”
“I live around the corner,” he said, ready to give her his street address and apartment number. “You?”
“I’m just visiting. Auditioning.”
“From London?”
She chuckled. “Nah, that was fake. I’m Brooklyn born and raised—like Neil Diamond.”
“Don’t you have a show to do?”
She shook her head. “Nicole came back.”
“Why was she out that night?” Gwen was still carrying on about it.
“You’re upset about that, too? The theatre got so many complaints.”
Julian stammered. “No, not me.”
“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
Lonely Hearts
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.
“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?”
The free sample has ended.
