Josephine nodded in deep agreement. “And no one wanted it more than me. Yet I still lost. Sometimes, no matter how much you want it, you still lose.” She didn’t look upset, just philosophical. “After I threw up and calmed down, Z told me I could have it. She would become something else.”
Julian was impressed. After he won, he did not give dibs on Gwen to Ashton. “Why would she do that?”
“She said because ever since I was old enough to recite ‘Three Blind Mice,’ I stood on every table,” Josephine said. “I invented a stage everywhere I went.” She fell silent, poking the remains of the cold potatoes. “Of course, now Z is doing fantastic, and I’m still waiting for my big break.” Zakiyyah was an art therapist for the California public school system. She traveled to districts around the state and trained elementary-school art teachers how to apply their craft to the Special Ed curriculum to help troubled kids who could not be reached by conventional therapy methods. Julian thought Zakiyyah’s newfound career was an ocean away from the stage. One job: me, me, me. The other: you, you, you. How did one make a quantum leap like that?
“Why do I plow on, you ask?”
“I didn’t ask. I know why,” Julian said. “Because the theatre is all there is.” His throat tightened.
“Yes!” Josephine exclaimed, her bright eyes gleaming. “It’s not so much a career as a sickness. You gotta love it, otherwise there’s no good reason for being obsessed with something that offers rewards to so few.”
Julian agreed. “That’s good advice for many things, not just the theatre,” he said. “But you’ll get there.” He wanted to tell her that he had never in his life felt what he felt when she stood in front of him on the darkened stage at the Cherry Lane. Oh where is it, where has it all gone, my past, when I was young. “Besides, if it’s what you do, and you can do it, then you do it.” Julian set his jaw. “Because sometimes, you can’t do it. And then, there’s nothing worse.”
Josephine mined his face. “You know something about that?”
“Little bit. The irony is,” Julian said with a thin smile, “that after all that drinking and coin tossing, you didn’t stay in L.A. and your friend did.”
“That’s true. We came here together, and she, who said she couldn’t stand the constant sun and the fake life chose to stay, and I, who loved both, returned home instead.”
“Why didn’t you stay?”
“I told you, I couldn’t live here,” Josephine said. “Though of course, I didn’t know that when we flipped for it.”
“That’s the time shift paradox.” Julian was trying to find something to say to make her feel better. She looked as if she needed it. “The hindsight paradox. You can’t act on what you do not know and cannot know.”
“No, I’m fibbing, I knew it,” the young beauty said, her doleful voice echoing in the empty restaurant. “I felt it in my soul. I thought the heaviness inside me was because of tension between me and Z. It was only after she went back to school and I kept going to auditions and yet the pervasive sense of doom wouldn’t lift that I realized it wasn’t me and Z that was wrong. It was me and L.A. that was wrong.” Breezily she waved her hand around, la-di-da. “So six years ago I returned to the absurd delights of the New York stage life.” She smiled. “Every few months I fly out here, try out for a few things so I can keep my SAG membership. I visit my friend and get away from the theatre to see if I can live without it. And I can’t. I fly out to L.A.,” Josephine said, “so I can know who I am.”
NORMANDIE AVENUE WHERE ZAKIYYAH LIVED WAS POORLY lit. The residential through street lined with tall scraggly palms and working-class homes was wide but sketchy.
“It’s all she can afford,” Josephine said.
“I said nothing.” A moment later: “Is it safe?”
“Well, it’s not as safe as your Volvo, but what is?”
In a minute she was going to leave his Volvo.
“Z and I haven’t had much trouble,” she went on. “If you don’t count that drive-by shooting last time I was here.”
“And who’d want to count that?”
“It happened in front of Z’s house. Cops blocked the road for hours. Z was at work, but I had a callback and couldn’t leave until they cleared the scene. Story of my life.”
“Why doesn’t she move?”
“Because I’m back in New York. When we were both paying rent, it was easier.”
“Why doesn’t she get another roommate?”
“Who’d want to live here, have you seen the neighborhood?” Josephine shrugged. “On the plus side, it’s cheap. It’s next to the freeway. Rosie the landlady is nice. She makes us enchiladas because Z works late and is often too tired to cook. Though she’s a really good cook.”
“What about you? Do you cook?”
“Oh, sure. I cook,” she said. “I make shame toast.”
“I like it already,” said Julian.
“Wait until you taste it. You’ll love it.”
“Okay—when?”
She laughed like he was the headliner at the Comedy Cellar.
Zakiyyah lived in a yellow house under a yellow streetlight. He pulled up to the curb and put the car into park. He debated turning it off. Julian wanted to come in. He wanted he didn’t know what.
“You’d like Zakiyyah,” Josephine said. “She’s in education, like you.”
“I’m not in education, Josephine. I’m in entertainment.”
“You literally teach people how to use vinegar. You call that entertainment? I’m in entertainment.”
“Anyone can make Oscar Wilde entertaining,” Julian said. “He did all the work for you. To make vinegar entertaining, now that takes talent.”
“Okay, so you’re an entertaining academic,” she said.
“See, where I come from, that would be considered a compliment.”
“Where I come from, too.” She stretched, her arms hitting the roof of the car. “Z and I are on the second floor. We have a balcony.” She pointed to the side of the two-story house. “We have flowers on it. Can you see them? Red azaleas. Yellow petunias.”
“You’re lucky someone doesn’t come up and steal them.” He glanced up and down the street.
She
