Hidden Bodies (19 page)

“Well, I see what you mean about the thrill of giving up control, but I feel like I give up enough control every time I walk out of my apartment. In the bedroom, I want to be in charge.
But I guess you figured that out.”

She pours coffee into chipped IKEA mugs that scream LOVE in all caps. Life is cruel and the word
love
shouldn’t be plastered all over the fucking place. She smells like cigars.
“You look like a black coffee guy.”

I nod even though I want cream. “Thanks.”

She looks out her window at the middle parts of the palm trees. “I do love this place though. And the baby is easy. He doesn’t know he’s an asshole yet.” She sighs.
“But the commute is awful. The family’s in Brentwood and Malibu and I was commuting from Eagle Rock so the dad was like, why don’t you stay here? You know how it is here, the way
people are either broke on unemployment or giving out free apartments.”

“Cool,” I say. And I need to know if Amy lives here or if she pulled this address out of a hat. “So, do you have a roommate?”

“Not since I was in college,” she says.

Amy picked this address randomly. And because of that bitch, I came here, got beaten, tied up, and forced to drink bitter coffee out of a cracked LOVE mug. I tell Nanny Rachel I have to go. I
don’t agree that we should exchange numbers
.
She looks crestfallen.

“Good luck with school,” she says.

“Thanks,” I respond. “Good luck with the rich folks.”

She laughs. “Thanks, Paul.”

I cross Franklin. I fucked up my chance at a brand-new life with Love and I take the long way around to avoid Calvin and I reach my building and Harvey’s not in the office. So there is a
God. But Delilah is standing at my door and her arms are crossed and her eyes are narrowed and then she says it:

“I know about your problem, Joe.”

So maybe there isn’t.

THIS
is not my lucky day. Delilah is pacing in my apartment. When I stood her up, I pissed her off. And unfortunately, she didn’t dive into a
quart of Ben & Jerry’s. Instead she went on a research mission. She’s been obsessing about that night I
stood her
up. She won’t say what she knows, but she is
building a case against me.

“Explain that,” she snaps. “We had
plans
.”

“I know,” I say, placating. “It was Calvin.”

“You’re a grown-up,” she snaps. “You’re not ten. Don’t talk to me about fucking Calvin.”

“You asked me what happened.” I will my forehead to stop sweating.

“Your answer can’t be Calvin,” she says. “You have to take responsibility for your actions, Joe. Your actions have consequences and you ditched me and that was
wrong.”

“I know it was.”

“Do you?” she asks, and here we go again.

She’s downloaded some app that will stop her from texting me in the future. But never mind about the app because
I’m
the one who led her on and she thinks there’s
something up
with me.

“There is nothing,” I protest. “I flaked.”

“You haven’t lived here long enough to use that excuse,” she says. “You’re supposed to be a New York guy.”

“Delilah,” I plead. “Can you please let this go?”

But she can’t. She has more to tell me. She knows that I told a bartender at Birds that I knocked up a girl. (I did but I didn’t.)

“It’s complicated.”

“That’s bullshit,” she barks.

“Delilah,” I say. “Can we not do this now?”

“Why?” she asks. “Do you have somewhere to be? Is it time for you to go freaking wander around the Pantry like a zombie?”

“I don’t wander around like a zombie.”

“Ask Calvin,” she says. “He’ll tell you otherwise.”

“You just said to leave Calvin out of this,” I remind her.

“Don’t change the subject.” She comes back at me, arms crossed. She says she found out from Calvin that I was at Henderson’s and that it was my idea to go to the party.
“I know you were there. I have proof.” She shows me a video on YouTube and there I am in Henderson’s fucking kitchen. I want to erase the Internet. “Calvin said one minute
you were there and the next minute you were gone. So where did you go, Joe?”

I forgot how small this apartment is, how thin the walls. She is trying to put me in a cage and I won’t let her. “Delilah, this is not cool.”

“No,” she says. “It isn’t cool to let me suck your dick and then turn around and shit all over me. That is not cool. And I wanted you to man up and explain to me why you
haven’t been to work in several
days
and why you were at Henderson’s party when you
told
me how much you hate him. But if you won’t do it, if you won’t
just tell me . . .” She trails off and takes a deep breath. She sits. She points at the floor.

I sit. “What?” I ask.

She rubs her hands together. She repositions, Indian style. She’s enjoying this. She wants this, whatever the fuck this is. “Look,” she says. “I know.”

I don’t say anything.

“I know.” She says it again and I don’t like it.
I know.

She knows I don’t like this and she reads me well. She really is an investigative fucking reporter and her hand goes on her chin and her chin lowers and I wish she would disappear, into
thin air. Poof. And depending on what she says next, I might have to make that happen.

She breathes in. “I know about your pill problem.”

Are you fucking kidding me right now? I exhale and unclench my fists and she has no idea she saved her own life just now. She sits by me and links her arm through mine and begins to act out some
sort of rehab
Rush
fantasy where she can save me from my addiction. She strokes my back and talks to me about Promises and halfway houses and the craziness of LA. “Dez told me how
many Percocets you’ve been buying,” she says. “And the way you disappear and wander, I mean, I put two and two together.” She blames the apartment. Brit Brit fell apart too
in here. She stares at the Kandinsky. “We can get you better,” she says. “We can. You just have to want it.”

I need her to think she’s right and I tell her I want to do this on my own. “I think I need some time,” I confess.
Ha.

She pats my leg, all business. “Do you have insurance?”

I tell her that I do and she says she has an idea and she leaves and returns five minutes later with a fucking board game. “Chutes and Ladders,” she says. “Sometimes you just
need to like be a kid again, you know?”

I don’t know but I push the spinner and feign interest in her tedious anecdotes about celebrities and about the time that George Clooney “sort of flirted” with her. She swishes
down another chute and the game is never ending and this is what you deserve when you fuck Don’t Fuck Delilah. I should have known it would come to this but I was a fool.

She wanted me to meet her mom and I should have gone and placated her. But stupid me, I thought I could fuck Delilah. I thought I understood her in a way that other morons in this building
don’t, that there was nothing to fear because she’s incapable of loving someone like me. She’s a star fucker and a gold digger and while she claims to put on her Band-Aid dresses
in the name of work, in the name of gossip, she is putting on these dresses because Nicolas Cage married a waitress, because Matt Damon married one too, because George Fucking Clooney promised his
dick to a hot lawyer
.

Even if I had shown up and met her mother and told her I loved her and bought her flowers for no reason and asked her to move in and started talking rings and babies, even then, it would never
last. She would continue “working” and squeezing into dresses and going to Golden Globes parties and trying to spill drinks on people like James Franco—this is how Calista
Flockhart got Harrison Ford—and she would leave me for James Franco if she got the chance.

But I did not see the whole picture. I was starved from not getting my dick sucked. I was paranoid because of Henderson and I was lonely and I didn’t see the loophole. There is something
that Delilah loves more than famous cock: research. And she doesn’t know the real story, but she knows too much.

“My mom says hi by the way,” she sniffs.

I push the spinner. “Tell her hi back,” I say and I wonder if Love is awake, if Amy is alive.

She checks her messages and says she might be getting into an Ed Norton premiere tonight. She wants me to beg her to stay. I don’t.

She runs her finger along a chute. “So how did you get into Soho House?”

I look at her. “Huh?”

“My friend Ethel saw you there.”

“Who is your friend Ethel?”

“Just a friend,” she says. “She knows who you are. She’s seen you at Birds.”

“That’s kind of creepy.” I am being stalked. This is
Fast & Furious
and Delilah has her own fucking team and does she think she can trap me into being her starter
husband, her pre-Franco fuck doll?

“Joe,” she says. “Where have you been these past few days? Were you on Skid Row?”

“No.”

“You need to tell me where you’re getting stuff,” she says. “I know it’s not just Dez because he didn’t hear from you these past few days either.”

“Delilah,” I say. “It’s not like that.”

“Then tell me who you were with.”

I look at the Kandinsky.

“Joe,” she says. “I’m trying to help you. But I can’t help you if I don’t know where you’re getting your drugs.”

She’s too smart. Technically, I should eliminate her. But if I were to bash Delilah over the head and go out and buy acid and reduce her body and dispose of it, I would attract the wrong
kind of attention. Her parents would miss her. She’s been asking around about me so I would be a suspect in her murder. And then, when I find Amy, I will have a harder time killing her
because I will be under suspicion. There’s no way around it: Delilah has to live. And the only way to get her off my back is to break her heart.

I pat the Chutes and Ladders board. “Delilah, I haven’t been completely honest with you. There’s someone else.”

She swallows. Her cheeks bloat or maybe they just turn red. I tell her I’m sorry. I tell her I went to Henderson’s party to see this other girl.

“But she’s enabling you,” she pushes.

I shake my head. “The pills aren’t for me.”

She pulls away. “Then who are they for?”

“This girl’s mom,” I say. “She has cancer. Esophageal.”

Delilah closes the board.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Whatever,” she says, turning her back on me. I tell her I’m horrible. I tell her she is beautiful. I tell her it’s my loss. I hold her. I tell her I am a terrible person
and I don’t deserve her. I tell her she is beautiful again. I tell her she is smart, she could run the world with her connections and her tech savvy. I tell her she is going to wind up with
someone
much
better than me and this is when she hugs me harder. This is when she forgives me, when I tell her, without a doubt, that I will be knocking on her door someday, when
she’s living in a big house up in the hills with marble floors and security. I’ll be wishing I was in there with her, but I won’t deserve to be.

“Okay,” she says. She shakes my hand. “Just do me a favor, don’t talk shit about me with Dez and Harvey and these other fucks. They’re all just horrible.”

“You got it,” I say. Delilah packs up her stalking devices—she
has
to go to the Polo Lounge to spy on someone—and when she’s gone, I find the YouTube video
with me at Henderson’s. I look through the comments.

User AA212310 writes:

Murderer in the house right there

User AA212310 does not respond to any of the many people who have asked what she means about
murderer.

Thought it wuz suicide

Do u know something????

Was he killed?

Thought it was orgy

I will not fixate on the fact that the username contains the initials
AA.
AA means Alcoholics Anonymous and AA could be anyone and it’s absurd to think it’s Amy when
Henderson has millions of fans, many who are deranged, possibly in the AA program with time to spare to go on YouTube and comment. I will not think about Delilah reading these comments, wondering,
investigating. I will not fall down the rabbit hole. I did not get caught. I am fine. I am free. The only thing I ever got caught doing is jaywalking.

Then my phone buzzes and I get something I’ve never gotten before. A Facebook message from Love:
Ok I am a total stalker but I found you here. I’m going to Malibu. It’s too
hot and I think it would be wrong of me to leave you here in this heat. So this is my good deed of the day. In?

It’s like she knew about my day, my Village nightmare. Like she sensed that all I wanted was a way out, a break. I write back all caps
YES
. She responds:
Literally in front of
your building. #psychokillercesquase

She writes again:
My French spelling sucks but my French kissing is good hahha

I write back:
Nothing about you sucks.

And of course it’s the truth.

I pack a bag and think about Delilah’s vacuum mouth and Amy’s hungry-hungry-hippo, all-hands-on-deck enthusiasm. I will not be getting my dick sucked in Malibu but I won’t have
to deal with Delilah. I bring my clothes and my underwear and my computer. I picture Harvey explaining to some new Angeleno that this apartment is cursed. The first girl took off, jettisoned her
furniture. The next guy, one day he was here and the next day he was popping pills (allegedly) and then poof, gone. Still, I can’t be too needy; I take out a few pairs of jeans.

Outside, I search for Love’s Tesla but it’s not here. I hear honking and she’s down the street, waving from a Ferrari. I walk to her and she smiles when I get in. She
isn’t mad that I bailed on her this morning because of a
work thing
. She doesn’t see it that way at all. “I know you have a life,” she says. “We were in the
zone. I had to send like a million e-mails this morning so believe me. I get it. Did you get your shit done?”

“Yep,” I say.