The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  “You scared, boy reporter? That's Satan the Second and that's Satan Junior. They're my fellas,” Stark said.

  “I'm not scared,” I said. “Far from it. If I'm not mistaken, I saw your companion do Vanya, and — ” I indicated the other tiger I could see peering out of the dark “ — Satan Junior in an astonishing production of The Cherry Orchard that toured to Los Angeles in ’65.” I could see the tigers’ surprise. They were flattered. I'd done my research.

  “Any press is good press, isn't that right?” I asked Mabel Stark. “Don't you want to save Jungleland?”

  “Nothing will save Jungleland,” she said. “And if any press were good press, the lion would've granted you an interview about his love life, wouldn't he? I hear Leo's in breach of contract, but The Roar doesn't give a damn. The last customers we had were four kids who threw a Roman candle into the king's cabana.”

  I'd never been sneered at by an old lady before. The feeling was strangely refreshing. A hot breeze swept though the giraffes and I smelled their gimlets. I heard a creak and turned quickly. There was a bear on the diving board, looking grimly down into the brackish pool. A bighorn sheep was climbing a fence, and then turning around and climbing the other side.

  Stark clicked her tongue. “Some of them stay high all day,” she said. “A reprobate from Los Angeles gave a knapsack full of grass to the ruminants.”

  I decided to try one last time to get what I was looking for.

  “So what's your secret, Miss Stark?” I asked her, flattering her as best I could. “What keeps you here? Is it love? You could have been employed by any of the circuses and yet you stay here, in Thousand Oaks.”

  “Who do you write for again?” said the tiger lady.

  I told her. She held out her leather-gloved palm, and I hesitated for a minute before I passed her a few dead presidents. Bribery was part of the business. I opened my notebook and licked my pencil. She leaned in and whispered, but it was the kind of whisper meant to be overheard. Stark knew I wanted scandal and she would deliver.

  “The wedding cakes here at Jungleland had toppers that were different from the ones in the rest of the world, see? Years back, I went to a tailor and had him sew me into a wedding suit. Tailors are wasted on tailcoats and tuxedos. I asked for gold buttons down the front and each one to close tightly, but not so tightly they couldn't be unhooked by a cat with his claws out. I made sure the suit could be sponged clean. Jungleland's the only place nobody judges real live love.”

  This wasn't what I'd been expecting. I must've looked startled. Behind Stark, a tremendous orange and black shape was moving in the shadows.

  “That's one of my husbands,” she said, and laughed at the expression on my face. “I'd lost four human husbands before I married this fella. I used to be a hoochie-coochie dancer, and then I was a nurse, and then I married the tigers. Humans kept trying to tame me. Do I look tame to you?”

  She looked like a nice old lady, were it not for all the things about her that weren't nice. She was covered in stripes of scar wide as my fingers. Then there were her teeth. They seemed filed into points.

  “You don't tame me and you don't tame tigers,” Stark said with relish. “You don't tame lions either. It was a paradise here, kiddo, before the new owners took over. We had a tram and a little river with boats for the tourists, but the real show took place at night.”

  I'd come to Jungleland searching for a fresh take on the Forever Roar, but now I couldn't decide whether the place was a retirement home for aging actors, a rehabilitation clinic, or a brothel.

  “They're selling our home now,” Stark said, and sighed. “They've got the actors up for auction, like this is the Stone Ages. Leo'll pretend he's a free agent, but lions don't get the respect they deserve. The animals were promised a place in the sun. Everything's wrong.”

  She took a slug from her bottle.

  “I'm not going, kiddo. They'll have to bury me here,” said Mabel Stark, and then she would say no more.

  One of the tigers slipped me a cardboard box as I walked back to Leo's lair. I passed him ten bucks and a couple of cigarillos.

  “These had best not be made of rubber,” the tiger informed me, his accent soft and Russian. “This isn't a circus. We're a lost colony of great artists.”

  Later, I listened to the recording, an audio outtake from I'm No Angel. It was Mae West giving a monologue that had apparently gotten left on the cutting room floor back in ’33. The words were from the perspective of the tiger lady and the voice was unmistakable.

  “I let you maul me. You press your face against mine and we look into each other's eyes. ‘Why aren't you a tiger too?’ you asked me, and I said ‘I only like two kinds of men, domestic and imported, and you're a tiger, sonny, so you qualify.’”

  I stopped and looked out into the dark. There were eyes glowing back at me. Plenty of them. I turned up the volume and clicked the recorder on again. I was the one putting on a show now, it seemed.

  “If you were a tiger, I'd have to wear white, but I wasn't in love with the tiger. I was in love with you. On Sundays I put my head into your mouth. I twisted my fingers into your fur. If you were a tiger, I told them, I'd let you put your paws on my shoulders.”

  I went back, listened to those lines again. Maybe it was me, but it seemed like the voice had changed, that it wasn't Mae West but someone else. There was an accent, fairly thick, but all the words were intelligible.

  “If you were a tiger, I'd hide a bird in my jacket, and when our act began, I'd throw the bird into the air while you roared as a distraction. I'd tell the audience the bird was a rock and had been thrown so far that it went to the moon. If you were a tiger, I'd spin a shirt out of nettles and another out of needles. If you were a tiger, I'd leave one arm off the shirt so that you'd keep a paw, so that sometimes in the night you'd wrap your tiger's arm around me and hiss me in your sleep. But you're a lion, and lions don't do that act. Lions don't let a trainer perform with them. Lions roar. You're a lion, and you leave me lonely, Leo, you leave me lonely — ”

  “There are hundreds of recordings like that one,” someone interrupted, but I couldn't see who. One of the monkeys, maybe.

  The voice came from above me, up where the fake trees were thickest. “Clark Gable carrying on with one of the lionesses, Charlie Chaplin doing improv with the chimps — they all came to Jungleland to work on their craft and some of them fell in love. We're all actors, though they divide us. We won't be taken alive. Not even the horse. This place has turned into a zoo. The grandeur is gone.”

  A sad snapshot fluttered down. I picked it up: A photograph clearly torn from an album. Gable, grinning, dressed all in movie star white — a cardigan, a turtleneck — holding two lion cubs in his arms. It was him all right, the famous face, the mustache, the dimples.

  “That's from ’46. Those are his sons,” whispered the monkey.

  “The twins,” echoed something else. A snake, I thought. “A tragedy. He's dead now. Everyone's dying and we're all for sale.”

  After a while, I walked back to the lion's cabana and heard, as though an MGM film was rolling, the song of the Forever Roar. I ran along the edge of the pool, hoping he hadn't seen me, and I was in luck. Through a cracked window, I could see the lion alone at the microphone. His blondes were nowhere in sight.

  I sat down on the pavers and listened to his rendition of a torch song interspersed with quiet roars. He was singing like a radio hero, like a drive-in movie idol. He was singing a song that might make every lover on earth turn their head and kiss the one they were with. It was music to fly by, both feral and beautiful, though something told me the lion would never record it.

  The Forever Roar's voice, though aged, still sounded like he'd eaten a velveteen rabbit, and the song he sang was a heartbreaker of lost love and transgression.

  I inhaled and discovered that the air was full of cigarette smoke. He'd attracted everyone, from the hippos to the serpents
to the scarlet macaw, and they were, like me, entranced.

  As Leo sang, another voice joined his, and I stood up and looked in the window. There was a record player in the room with him, and he dueted with it. The woman singing was not any singer I knew, but I knew the lilt of that voice, singing a love song, and it occurred to me that the sound engineer had left gaps for the voice of The Roar. He filled them, crooning and purring into the microphone.

  I sat in the dark, listening to a voice the world hadn't heard since 1941.

  The film stars sang a duet.

  This was the secret of Jungleland, then, these relationships between the actors here and the actors there. This was the great collaboration.

  I thought about it as I listened. The night was balmy and the stars were out. There was a gentle splash in the pool as the bear swam a circle, and one of the leopards passed me and bared his teeth around a pipe.

  In the cabana the lion wooed and the recluse cooed, and I did not know how to write this story.

  I came back for the auction in October of ’69, though the world was marching elsewhere and my coverage of the braless and the blessed had given way to pieces about the war. I'd left the magazine and gone to work for a newspaper, but I flew into the City of Angels on my own nickel.

  The people of Thousand Oaks had been encouraged to pack picnics and the actors up for auction were displayed staked to cement pads and concrete trees. I saw a hippo and a tortoise rattling off a vaudevillian lament together. Later that day, the hippo would sell for $400, and the tortoise for $2500, among the 1800 other actors up for grabs. I felt ashamed of us all.

  One of the gibbons I'd met on my first visit sat atop his house, and when he saw me, he swore. They'd drained the pool and the peeling paint seemed especially painful in daylight.

  Mabel Stark was dead by now, overdosed on barbiturates. One of her Russian husbands had been shot trying to escape Jungleland, and when he died, she decided to die too, or so a puma told me. She wouldn't be the only casualty. A few months into ’70 I'd hear a rumor that Bamboo Harvester, otherwise known as Mr. Ed, had O.D-ed on tranquilizers.

  For now though, the auctioneer babbled in his staccato and people milled around, bidding on the actors. I was standing toward the front when Satan Junior came up for auction. He glanced at me and nodded gravely as he departed the stage, accompanied by a woman I recognized from Variety, a theater producer who'd bid $750. There was a production of The Seagull casting. I thought the tiger would be a fine Trigorin.

  I watched a series of lesser lions ($600) auctioned, (were any of them the offspring of Gable?) but I didn't see the Forever Roar on display. The blondes were both there, tearful over their lemonade, their cats-eye glasses tilted, their rhinestones smudged, and I saw some of the lion's various entourage, along with some of the activists who'd campaigned to get him sent off to the veldt. The lion himself remained hidden until nearly close of business. The auctioneer was visibly impressed by the quality of the actor he was auctioning, straightening his bowtie before he began to call for bids.

  “This is the Forever Roar, ladies and gents, you've seen him at the start of every gem of the cinema since you were knee high to grasshoppers, you heard me, this is Leo the Lion, and who's got a hundred dollars? One hundred, who's gonna give me two, two hundred, who's got three! I got three!”

  I am not ashamed to say that I was waving my paddle high in the air, even though it felt wrong to bid on the Forever Roar, even though my journalistic ethics were compromised. If the Roar was being auctioned, I'd do what I could do.

  “Twelve, who's got thirteen?”

  A woman in a stiff-brimmed black hat and veil, big sunglasses beneath that, raised her paddle. Half the people at Jungleland auction were hippies and the other half were circus folks, but she stood out. Her hair was shoulder-length and silver, and her gloves were ivory leather (was it in tribute to Stark, I wondered?) and stretched to her upper arms.

  “Thirteen, who's got fourteen?”

  I watched one of the veldt hippies consult with the rest, before tentatively raising his paddle.

  “I've got fourteen, who's got fifteen, fifteen hundred dollars for an icon of the cinema, for the roar that launched a thousand films, for the lion you've all been waiting for — ”

  The woman's arm was already in the air and she didn't bother to lower it through the next several rounds of bidding. I thought about how, ten years prior, it'd been rumored that she'd considered, gender be damned, the role of Francis of Assisi. I wondered if she'd planned it as a starring vehicle for them both.

  “Sold to the woman in black.”

  Rumor has it these days that Leo's buried on the property, but I know that to be false.

  I watched the woman in black walk the Forever Roar to her sedate black car and I watched Leo step into the passenger seat as though he'd known all along she was coming for him. It was a bright October day, and the sky was blue as Mabel Stark's eyes.

  I strolled out past the gates of Jungleland to smoke a cigarette, and as I did, the lion turned his head to look at me through the rolled-down window.

  He opened his mouth and let loose that famous roar, the one I'd waited for, the one his name was made of, and then I saw his companion, gloveless now, twist her hand into his mane. She smiled her famous smile at him as she stepped on the gas.

  I watched them look at one another for a moment and then, thirty miles over the speed limit, invulnerable, the lion and his lady were gone.

  Who Is Your Executioner?

  Five

  Since we were little, Oona's collected Victorian photographs. A certain subset of people love them, but I got a library book of them once, just before I met her, and I've never not been appalled. I don't know what a book like that was doing lost in our local library. It's exactly the kind of thing that would normally have been removed by a logical parent. The book was death images, yes, but worse than that. These were all dead children and babies dressed in their best clothes and propped up for the last family photo. Held in their parents’ arms, posed with their pets and toys, staring at the camera. It was like some sort of Egyptian funerary ritual, except much more hardcore. The thing about them was that everyone in them had to pose for a long time to make it through the film exposure. There's lots of accidental motion, lots of blur, and so the families look like ghosts. The dead children are the only ones who look alive.

  • • • •

  “Did you hear about Oona? Because if you did, and you didn't call me, I don't know who you are anymore,” the voice on the other end of the line says.

  The same rattle Trevor's had in his voice since we were seven, a sound like tin cans tied to the back of a wedding day junker. It's been a while since we've spoken. Since I've spoken to anyone, really. I tried to start over with new people, but I was still the same person and it never works the way you think it will.

  Trev and I faded out in a record shop a few years back, arguing over Kate Bush for reasons that are now difficult to recall. Kate Bush wasn't really the problem. The problem was the way friendship can tilt into more than friendship for one person, and less than friendship for the other. Trevor and I have a history of cheater's matinees in crappy un-airconditioned theaters. Back then, we watched superhero movies together, the three-dollar shows where no one we knew would be hanging out. Sometimes I reached over and put my hand in his lap, and sometimes he put his in mine. We were having an affair, but neither of us could commit to a bedroom. Instead, it was his fingers inside me, and my hand on him, both of us watching the latest incarnation of Spider-Man like nothing was happening below our waists.

  We were trying, as we'd been trying for years, to not be in love with Oona.

  “What about her?” She and I have history too, but not the history I wanted. Probably she's gotten married or is happy or had a baby or something. I'm expecting a New York Times announcement, her with something handsome beside her, a grinning, sports-playing something, and Oona, her yellow eyes an
d long red hair. She looks — has always looked — like a tree on fire. She's six foot two and covered with freckles. One time she and I were naked, and I drew the constellations on her with a Sharpie. All there. Next time I tried it, they were gone. There were new configurations but not the ones I'd mapped.

  It's getting to be time again for weddings and babies. This is the second round after the first marriages. Trevor's been divorced a couple years now, and I'm single again too after trying to settle for a woman in Georgia who got pregnant by sperm donor and then said, witheringly, “you always act like you're so smart, but you're not as smart as you think you are. You're fucked up. You're in love with her, and you should stop lying about it.”

  She was four months pregnant and I hadn't noticed. I didn't know she wanted to have kids with me, and she didn't, it turned out. She wanted to have kids without me. Now I'm back in the city, avoiding my roommate. My life, what there was of it, has dissolved like Kool-Aid in a cup.

  We're all thirty-seven, Trevor and Oona and me, and we've known each other since second grade. I haven't talked to Oona in years. Every time I see her name in my inbox, I delete it. After the last time I saw her, I'm better off alone. She messes with my head.

  “She's dead,” says Trevor, sounding astonished. “Oona finally died.”

  He says it like Oona's gone to India. I'm used to mishearing things like this. Every time I pick up the phone I think someone's going to announce a tragedy. I've been writing a lot of condolences, everyone of my parents’ generation fizzling out, and a fair number of mine too, suicides and cancers, car wrecks.

  “She did what? Who did what?” In my head, I'm looking frantically at a slideshow of the Taj Mahal.

  “Oona,” he says. “What the fuck? Oona died. Where are you?”