could,” she said. “Or we could go to a Dodger game. Would you like that?” She winked.
He played it straight. “Dodgers are away this week.”
“Probably getting their asses kicked in New York,” she said. “Anywhere else?”
“You want to go to the movies?”
“Sure.” She sighed with slight exasperation. “Or … we could go to your place, Julian. Didn’t you say you live around here?”
“My place?” Julian repeated dumbly. “But there’s nothing to eat.”
She laughed. “Tell you what,” she said, “let’s go to Gelson’s. Buy some steak. Do you have a balcony? A grill on it perhaps?”
He didn’t know what to say.
He said okay. He did have a balcony. And a grill.
“I don’t have to come over if you don’t want me to,” she said.
“No, no.” We both know I want you—to.
“I can’t believe I had to invite myself over,” she said with a headshake as they waited for the light to change on Sunset and La Cienega. He had taken hold of her elbow to keep her from crossing against the light. “I just don’t know about you, Jules. Are you always this polite?”
Their eyes locked.
“No,” said Julian.
They stared into each other’s open faces. He slipped his arm around her lower back, touching the sheer fabric of her white blouse, her bare skin hot under his fingers. He drew her against him. Her breasts were at his chest.
Before the light turned green, he kissed her. He didn’t need Zuma Beach or the setting sun. Just a red light at an intersection, his palm on her back, his head tilted, her arms splayed.
“Are we moving too fast?” she breathed. “I’m afraid we might be.”
“Absolutely. Like meteors.”
Her arms swept around his neck. “Maybe we should go to dinner, go to a bar, get a drink, wait for night …”
“Josephine,” Julian said, his hands running up and down her back, his insistent lips at her warm, peach-scented, pulsing neck, “if you want some magic, you’ve come to the right city. We can Hollywood up anything around here, even daylight. We Hollywood it up real good. Come with me and I’ll show you. In L.A. it’s called day for night.”
They stumbled against the post and forgot to cross. The light changed, and changed again.
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.
