Hidden Bodies (2 page)

I smiled. “Only if you promise not to call it yard-sale-ing.”

Amy smiled. The way she saw it, if she was going to work here, she was going to
make a dent.
She wanted us to travel uptown to estate sales and hunt library clearances and jam our hands
into empty boxes on the street. She wanted to
work together
and this is how you get to know someone so well, so fast. You descend into musty vacated rooms together and you rush outside
together to gulp the fresh air and laugh and agree that the only thing to do now is get a drink. We became a team.

An old woman pushing a walker looks up at me. I smile. She points at the violets. “You’re a good boy.”

I am. I thank her and keep walking.

Amy and I started dating a few months ago while we were on the Upper East Side in a dead man’s parlor. She tugged on the lapel of the navy blazer she had bought for me—five
bucks—at a tag sale. She pleaded with me to drop
seven hundred
on a signed, wrinkled edition of
The Easter Parade.

“Amy,” I whispered. “Yates isn’t big right now and I don’t see a resurgence on the horizon.”

“But I love him,” she begged. “This book means everything to me.”

This is women; they are emotional. You can’t do business like this but you also can’t look at Amy with her big blue eyes and her long blond hair out of a Guns N’ Roses song and
say no to her.

“What can I do to change your mind?” she wheedled.

An hour later, I was the owner of an overpriced
Easter Parade
and Amy was sucking my dick in a Starbucks bathroom in Midtown and this was more romantic than it sounds because we
liked
each other. This was not a blowjob; this was
fellatio
, my friends. She stood and I pulled her boyfriend jeans to the floor and I stopped short. I knew she didn’t like
to shave; her legs were often bristly and she’s all about
water conservation
. But I did not expect a bush. She kissed me. “Welcome to the jungle.”

This is why I smile as I walk and this is how you get happy. Amy and I, we are sexier than Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo on the cover of
The Freewheelin’
and we are smarter than Tom
Cruise and Penélope Cruz in
Vanilla Sky
. We have a project: We are amassing copies of
Portnoy’s Complaint.
It’s one of our favorite books and we reread it
together. She underlined her favorite parts with a Sharpie and I told her to use a more delicate pen.

“I’m not delicate,” she said. “I hate delicate.”

Amy is a Sharpie; she’s passionate. She fucking loves
Portnoy’s Complaint
and I want to possess all the dark yellow copies ever made and keep them in the basement so that
only Amy and I can touch them. I’m not supposed to overstock a title, but I like fucking Amy near our yellow wall of books. Philip Roth would approve. She laughed when I told her that and
said we should write him a letter. She has an imagination, a heart.

My phone rings. It’s Gleason Brothers Electricians about the humidifier but it can wait. I have an e-mail from BuzzFeed about some list of
cool indie bookstores
and that can wait
too. Everything can wait when you have love in your life. When you can just walk down the street and picture the girl you love naked on a mound of yellow
Complaint
s.

I reach Mooney Books and the bell chimes as I open the door. Amy crosses her arms and glares at me and maybe she’s allergic to flowers. Maybe violets suck.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, and I hope this isn’t it, the beginning of the end, when the girl becomes a cunt, when the new car smell evaporates.

“Flowers?” she asks. “You know what I want more than flowers?”

I shake my head.

“Keys,” she says. “A guy was just here and I could have sold him the Yates but I couldn’t show it because I don’t have
keys.
”

I toss the flowers on the counter. “Slow down. Did you get a number?”

“Joe,” she says, tapping her foot. “I love this business. And I know I’m being a dumb girl and I shouldn’t tell you how into this I am. But please. I want
keys.”

I don’t say anything. I need to memorize it all, lock it away for safekeeping, the low hum of the music—the Rolling Stones’ “Sweet Virginia,” one of my
favorites—and the way the light is right now. I don’t lock the door. I don’t flip the open sign over. I walk to the other side of the counter and I take her in my arms and I dip
her and I kiss her and she kisses me back.

I’VE
never given anyone a key. But this is what’s supposed to happen. Your life is supposed to expand. Your bed is supposed to have enough
room for someone else and when that someone comes along, it’s your job to let her in. I seize my future. I pay extra to get ridiculous theme keys, pink and flowery. And when I place these
pink metallic things in the palm of Amy’s hand, she kisses them.

“I know this is huge,” she says. “Thank you, Joe. I will guard these with my life.”

That night, she comes over and we watch one of her stupid movies—
Cocktail
, nobody is perfect—and we have sex and order a pizza and my air-conditioning breaks.

“Should we call someone?” she asks.

“Fuck it,” I say. “It’s Memorial Day coming up.”

I smile and pin her down and her unshaven legs scratch against mine and I’m used to it now. I like it. She licks her lips. “What are you up to, Joe?”

“You go home and pack a bag,” I say. “And I’m gonna rent us a little red Corvette and we’re gonna get out of here.”

“You’re insane,” she says. “Where are we going in this little red Corvette?”

I bite her neck. “You’ll see.”

“You’re kidnapping me?” she asks.

And if this is what she wants, then yes. “You have two hours. Go pack.”

SHE
shaved; I knew she had it in her. And I did my part. I really did rent a red convertible. We are
those assholes
and we’re cruising
through the woodsy part of Rhode Island. We are your worst nightmare. We are happy
.
We don’t need you, any of you. We don’t give a fuck about you, what you think of us, what
you did to us. I am the driver and Amy is the dream girl and this is our first vacation together. Finally. I have love.

The top is down and we sing along to “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” I picked this song because I’m taking it all back, all the beautiful things in the world that were corrupted
by my tragically ill girlfriend Guinevere Beck. (I see now that she suffered from borderline personality disorder. You can’t fix that.) Beck and her horrible friends ruined so much for me. I
couldn’t go anywhere in New York without thinking of Beck. I thought I’d never listen to Elton John again because his music was playing when I killed Peach.

Amy taps my shoulder and points at a hawk in the sky. I smile. She isn’t the kind of asshole who needs to lower the volume on the music and discuss the bird and read into it. God, she is
good. But no matter how good it gets, it is always there, the truth:

I forgot to take the mug.

That fucking mug haunts me. I understand that there are consequences. I am not unique; to be alive is to have a mug of urine out there. But I can’t forgive myself for screwing up, like
some girl “forgetting” a cardigan after a one-night stand. The mug is an aberration. A flaw. Proof that I’m not perfect, even though I’m usually so precise, so thorough. I
haven’t hatched a plan to retrieve it, but Amy makes me wish I had. I want the world clean for us, Lysol fresh.

Now she offers me her scratched sunglasses. “You’re driving,” she says. “You need them more than I do.”

She is the anti-Beck; she cares about me. “Thanks, Ame.”

She kisses my cheek and life is a fever dream and I wonder if I’m in a coma, if all this is a hallucination. Love fucks with your vision and I have no hate in my heart. Amy is taking all
of it away, my healer, my Bactine beauty. In the past, I had a tendency to be intense; you might even call it obsessive. Beck was such a mess that in order to take care of her, I had to follow her
home and hack into her e-mail and worry about her Facebook and her Twitter and her nonstop texting, all the contradictions, the lies. I chose poorly with her and suffered the consequences. I
learned my lesson. It works with Amy because I can’t stalk her online. Get this: She’s off the grid. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, not even an e-mail address. She uses burner
phones and I have to program her new number into my phone every couple of weeks. She is the ultimate analog, my perfect match.

When she first told me, I was flabbergasted and a little judgmental. Who the fuck is offline? Was she a pretentious nutcase? Was she lying? “What about paychecks?” I asked.
“You have to have a bank account.”

“I have this friend in Queens,” she answered. “I write my checks over to her and she gives me cash. A lot of us use her. She’s the best.”

“‘Us’?”

“People offline,” she said. “I’m not alone here.”

Cunts want to be snowflakes. They want you to tell them how nobody in this whole world compares to them. (Apologies to Prince.) All the little fame monsters on Instagram—look at me, I put
jam on my toast!—and I found someone different. Amy doesn’t try to stand out. I don’t sit alone and scroll through her status updates and home in on her misleading photographs of
staged joy. When I’m with her, I’m with her, and when she leaves me, she goes where she said she was going.

(Of course I’ve followed her and I occasionally look in her phone. I have to know that she isn’t lying.)

“I think I smell salt air,” Amy says.

“Not yet,” I tell her. “Couple more minutes.”

She nods. She doesn’t fight about stupid shit. She’s no angry Beck. That sick girl lied to the people with whom she was closest—me, Peach, her fucking fellow
writers
in school. She told me her father was dead. (He wasn’t.) She told me she hated
Magnolia
just because her friend Peach hated it. (She was lying. I read her e-mail.)

Amy is a nice girl and nice girls lie to strangers to be polite, not to people they love. Even right now, she’s wearing a threadbare URI tank top. She didn’t go to URI; she
didn’t go anywhere. But she always wears a college shirt. She got a Brown shirt for me, just for this trip. “We can tell people that I’m a student and you’re my
professor.” She giggled. “My
married
professor.”

She digs up these shirts at various Goodwills all over the city. Her chest is always screaming
Go Tigers! Arizona State! PITT
. I tend to the stacks and eavesdrop as people who come into
the shop try to connect with her—
Did you go to Princeton? Did you go to UMass? Do you go to
NYU?
—and she always answers yes. She makes nice with the women and she lets
the dudes think they have a shot. (They don’t.) She likes a conversation. She likes a story, my little anthropologist, my listener.

We are nearing the road that takes us to Little Compton and just when I think life can’t get any better, I see flashing lights. A cop is coming at us. Hard. His lights are on and his
sirens are blaring and the music is gone. I brake and I try to keep my legs from shaking.

“What the fuck?” Amy says. “You weren’t even speeding.”

“I don’t think so,” I say, keeping my eyes on the rearview mirror as the cop opens his door.

Amy turns to me. “What did you do?”

What did I do?
I murdered my ex-girlfriend Guinevere Beck. I buried her body in upstate New York and then pinned it on her therapist, Dr. Nicky Angevine. Before that, I strangled her
friend Peach Salinger. I killed her less than five fucking miles from here, on a beach by her family’s house, and made it look like a suicide. I also did away with a drug-addled soda jerk
named
Benji Keyes.
His cremated body is in his storage unit, but his family thinks he died on a bender. Oh, also. The first girl I ever loved, Candace. I put her out to sea. Nobody knows I
did any of these things so it’s like that if-a-tree-falls-in-the-woods question.

“I have no idea,” I say, and this is a fucking nightmare.

Amy rummages around the glove box for the rental’s registration, takes it out, and then slams it shut. Officer Thomas Jenks doesn’t take off his sunglasses. He has round shoulders
and his uniform is slightly too large. “License and registration,” he says. His eyes burrow into on my chest, the word brown. “You heading back to school?”

“Just going to Little Compton,” I say. And then I cover. “Eventually. Taking my time.”

He doesn’t acknowledge my passive-aggressive defense. I was not fucking speeding and I am not a Brown asshole and this is why I don’t wear college shirts. He studies my New York
driver’s license. A century passes, and then another.

Amy coughs. “Officer, what did we do wrong?”

Officer Jenks looks at her, then at me. “You didn’t signal when you turned.”

Are you kidding me, motherfucker?
“Ah,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

Jenks says he needs “a few minutes” and he plods back to his car, breaking into a jog and he shouldn’t be jogging. He also shouldn’t need “a few minutes.” As
he opens the door to his cruiser and slips inside, I think of my prior offenses, my secret activities, and my throat closes up.

“Joe, relax,” Amy says, putting her hand on my leg. “It’s just a minor traffic violation.”

But Amy doesn’t know that I killed four people. I am sweating and I’ve heard about things like this. A guy gets pulled over for a minor infraction and somehow, through the sadistic
magic of computers and system, the guy is pinned for all kinds of other shit. I could shoot myself.

Amy turns the radio back on. Five songs play and twenty minutes tick by and Officer Thomas Jenks is still in his automobile, holding my personal information. If he’s issuing me a simple
ticket for failing to signal, if that’s all there is to this, then why is he on the phone? Why does he keep pushing buttons on the computer? Does my freedom end at the beginning of
the
season
when my iPhone shows sun and the sky above is swollen with rain? Because I do know a cop in this state. His name is Officer Nico and he thinks my name is Spencer. What if he saw my
picture in the computer? What if he recognized me and called
Jenks
and said,
I know that guy.
And what if—