The Tiger Catcher

LOS ANGELES, THE CITY OF ANGELS, THE CITY OF DREAMS.

It’s easy to fall in love in Southern California.

If it’s so easy, the exquisite girl whispers, exquisitely naked on your bed, then have you fallen in love a thousand times before me?

Take two: It’s easy to fall in love in Southern California with her.

She likes your apartment. You keep it clean. Did you clean it, she asks, because you thought I might be coming? And you want to tell her the truth, that you keep it clean because it’s your nature, but instead you tell her the romantic truth. Yes, you say. I hoped you’d be coming. I cleaned it for you.

You have so many books, she says approvingly, standing by your wall of books and your black heavy bag hanging from a hook in the ceiling. Why do you have a punching bag, Julian? Is it for exercise?

Yes.

Well done. About the books, I mean. John Waters would be proud of you. Proud of me, rather.

Who?

John Waters. Her clothes thrown off, your clothes thrown off.

What does John Waters say? Like you even care. She is so beautiful. Your hand glides across her body.

He says, if you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.

Ah. Now you care.

Your heart reforms around the Aphrodite in your bed, the sun god’s daughter, naked and pulsing, her arms open, everything open and she moans and beckons to you to come to her, closer, closer.

You fall inside the throat of a volcano, inside the one space that has no inside and no outside. You sink into the pink-tinted, over-saturated world where nothing exists except her and you.

You kiss her clavicles, her eager mouth, you press yourself upon the raw softness of her body. Her lips are vanilla. She is honey and easy all over like pink cotton candy. And yet it’s you who feels like spun-out sugar, and when she places you on her tongue, you melt.

You draw the room-darkening shades and you pour her peach champagne. Now she has a real drink and there is no more day, just endless night.

Her body is beauty, in need of love, of care, of caress. She’s an acrobat, she twists and curves like a tumbling immortal. You’ve been turned inside out yourself. She can see your heart, it’s visible to her smile. And you can see her heart, it beats for you between her breasts.

After love she falls asleep and later says she wasn’t sleeping only dreaming.

We’re both inside the same dream, you whisper. You stole the show, Josephine. They don’t forgive that in the theatre.

The next morning and the next you write rhymes about mist rising from the satin sheets, recite sonnets for her on the sidewalks of Sunset while pressing her warm palm against your love-struck face. At Griddle Cafe, you devour red velvet pancakes and drink chocolate shakes and tell her the poems write themselves. The sidewalks of Sunset near the homeless camped out by Rite Aid have become your Elysian Fields.

If the sonnets write themselves, she murmurs, then have you fallen in love a thousand times before on this red velvety sidewalk?

No, beautiful girl. You haven’t fallen in love a thousand times before.

You’ve been on the prowl since your senior year in high school. You’ve been with quite a few women. You ask if that’s a strike against you. Does it make you less appealing?

No, she purrs. More.

You have a new two-bedroom with a balcony. And a wall of books. You both beam. You’ve made John Waters proud.

But that’s not a balcony, she says. It’s too small.

It’s still a balcony. It’s called a Juliet balcony.

Why, she asks.

Literally because of Juliet, you reply.

You get some love for that, for the poetry of it.

Julian, she whispers, her arms over her head, holding on to your headboard, did I explode in your heart.

Yes, Josephine, you exploded in my heart.

After love, when she is barely able to move, you tell her you also have a roof deck with a Jacuzzi and a view. You’re barely able to move yourself. Your bruised mouth can hardly form words. Funny how both love and a fight can wreck a body.

In the cool desert night, you slip naked upstairs and jump into the hot tub. She murmurs her approval of the spa, of the colored lights, of the champagne that goes with it, and of the man that comes with it, and in it and in her. But there’s hardly any view, she says, gazing at you over the foaming bubbles.

There is. If you look left, you can see the schoolyard across San Vicente.

I bet you can hear it, too, she says, crawling to you in the roiling water. At recess, the screaming kids. And if you can see them, can they see us? She straddles you, lifting her wet breasts to your wet mouth.

You wish someone could see you. You desperately need a witness to your bliss.

You give her the spare toothbrush, a pair of your boxer briefs, you share with her your shampoo, your soap, your shirts. She shares with you stories about Brighton Beach and making out with gropy boys under the bridge and about Zakiyyah looking for Mr. Right her whole life and instead finding loathsome Trevor. She tells you about the bright city and sharp loneliness.

She asks what color the lights were when you first saw her.

Red, you reply.

You watch Apocalypse Now, a romantic comedy if ever there was one. It takes you days to finish as you pause for love, for Chinese, for dramatic readings from Heart of Darkness, and she mocks you for having that wretched Conrad tome handy on your John Waters bookshelf. You pull The Importance of Being Earnest and act it out in your living room, laughing, naked, loud. She knows it better than you, which fills you with shame. You used to know it by heart but forgot. You inhale two bottles of wine as you roll around the floor and reenact Cecily and Algernon, slurry on the comedy, sloppy on the love.

You’ve lost all sense of the days, lost track of the hour. You sit and wait for her in your Volvo, gripping the wheel in your lovesick hands. You make some calls. Everyone you know is unhappy with you. Everyone except her. She is delighted with you.

Why didn’t you choose to live up in the Hollywood Hills? she asks. You could get a place anywhere. Why here, overlooking the back of some hotel?

You didn’t choose the Hollywood Hills, you explain in the wet afterglow with the jets purring low, because up there, a box to live in costs five times as much and the drive down takes forever.

You didn’t choose to live in the hills because of money?

And a long drive, you say, defending yourself, caressing her.

Where do you have to run to? she says. You work at home. You could sit all day in a tub on a roof deck on Mulholland that overlooks the ocean and wisecrack about vinegar.

Who’s wisecracking now? Believe me, I did the smart thing.

She smiles. But not the beautiful thing.