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.
You want to drive into the mountains, Josephine? You offer her the hills, the canyons, Zuma Beach, and all the music other men have made if she will love you.
All she wants is your body.
Sometimes you act as if that’s all you’ve come for, you say in jest.
How do you know it’s not all I’ve come for, she says.
In jest?
She whispers she’s been starved for tenderness. There’s no time to waste.
You recall to her Ben Johnson’s lament over the brevity of human life. “O for an engine to keep back all clocks.”
She disagrees. There is nothing brief about you, she says, as she stands before you naked, her bouncy breasts to seduce you, her lips to relieve you, her hips to receive you and maybe one day to give you children (her joke, not yours, and you’re less terrified by it than you should be). She wants tenderness from you? You’re as gentle as your brute nature will allow. She wants the beast in you? Her wish is your command.
Julian, I barely know you and yet I feel like I’ve known you forever. How can that be?
You have no answers. You were blinded from the start. A comet has crashed to earth.
You forget to go to Whole Foods, forget your friends, the newsletters, the bills, the store, the lock-ups to scour, the trucks to rent. You forget everything. It’s like you left your past behind when you met her.
She is hungry? You feed her. She is thirsty? You give her wine. She wants music from you? You sing to her about Alfred’s coffee and sweet corn ravioli at Georgio Baldi. You kiss her throat. You’ve wanted to kiss her for so long, you say. She laughs. Yes, Jules, it must’ve felt like the longest twenty-four hours of your life.
You offer to take her to Raven’s Cry at Whisky a Go Go, but not before you buy her the best steak burrito on Vine, and she says how do you know so much about food and love and how to make a girl happy, and you reply, not a girl—you. You two stay in for love, you go out for food. So how about that Whisky a Go Go, Josephine? Ninth Plague and Kings of Jade are playing. Tino and the Tarantulas are going to rock the house. But she wants love from you, and she’d like it to the rhythm of the mad beat music. Are you going to make me feel it, she cries.
Yes. You’re going to make her feel it.
Oh, Jules, she says, her arms wrapped around you, pressing you to her heart. Beware the magician, we say in the sideshows, he’s here only as a diversion. Do not let him into your circle. Boy, you did some magic trick on me. You drew me in with your irresistible indifference, and now you’re like flypaper.
Who is indifferent? he says. She must mean a different Jules.
When did you first want to kiss me? she asks. You tell her it was when she revealed herself to you in the crimson footlights at The Invention of Love. You have not let the first day, the first hour, the first moment of meeting her come and go. You knew. You knew it from the start. Your soul lay open to her as she now lies open to you.
You’re inventing some crazy love yourself so she doesn’t become
