The Tiger Catcher

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?”