“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,