Hidden Bodies (25 page)

“You don’t want to valet?” she asks.

“I’d rather park myself,” I say.

She huffs. “Look, if you need cash for the valet, I have it.”

Milo bites his lip and if this scene winds up in anything he ever writes, I will kill him
.
Monica is still ignoring all of us, choosing the people in her phone. I veer into a spot, like
the scrappy, rough-around-the-edges villager that I am. Love yelps, overreacting, lurching. Oh,
please.
Love can’t get out of the car fast enough and I tell Monica it’s time to
go and she is confused.

“We’re here?” she asks.

Love smiles at me like I’m a third cousin she hasn’t seen in years. “So,” she says. “You must be excited to reunite with your friends from the neighborhood. Or
wait, are they all stuck working?”

“They wouldn’t be into this kind of thing,” I say.

She links her arm through mine, halfheartedly. “I might be able to get some SRO tickets,” she says. “That means Standing Room Only.”

I pretend to sneeze and pull my arm away. “I know what it means,” I say. “I’m from New York.”

“Oh, I know,” she says. “There’s no forgetting that.”

We walk in silence. And I won’t be seeing my four fucking
friends
. I learned online that they’re all pretty busy. Calvin got a DUI and he’s working crazy hours. Harvey
Swallows got throat cancer and he’s trying to embrace the humor and the irony. Dez is having a party for his dog, Little D. Delilah is doing
on-air
coverage for some wannabe
Entertainment Tonight
kind of show on a network I’ve never heard of.

We are almost at Franklin when Love tugs on my arm. “Are you mad at me or something?”

“No,” I say.

“Then why were you such a dick in the car?”

“Why was
I
a dick?”

“Don’t make it about the word,” she says. “You know what I mean.”

“Love, you’re the one being a dick.”

“Very mature,” she says. “Look, something is just fucked up and you’re shutting down and it’s bullshit and I can’t take it right now.”

“So don’t,” I say.

“You’re still gonna try and tell me you’re not being a dick.”

I shrug. Forty’s up ahead on the corner, waving to us.

She sighs. “I don’t have time for this.”

“For me,” I say. This is happening so fast and her eyeliner looks like war paint.

“Joe,” she says. “This isn’t good.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means I have so much pressure on me right now and you’re adding to it instead of helping me.”

“I’m adding to it,” I repeat. I want to throw her over my shoulder but she doesn’t want that anymore. She doesn’t want me anymore.

“After the show, we need to talk,” she says. And that is how you know it’s over. Need is not want. Your girlfriend wants to talk to you but the girl who doesn’t love you
just needs to talk to you and I guess I should have known. She picked me up so quick, so smooth. Now she’ll drop me, so quick, so smooth.

I tell her to go and she says
whatever
and runs to her brother and Milo and the three of them start talking
Boots and Puppies
. Monica is here now, too late.

“What’s up?” she asks. I can’t deal with her generic shit right now.

“Nothing,” I say. My heart hurts.

“Cool,” she says. “I have been so crazy getting ready to jam, you know? My temp agency is not very cool about people going away and stuff. They need to chill.”

“Where are you going?”

She is puzzled. But she is always puzzled. “Location,” she says, like I should know. “Aren’t you coming too?”

I look at her. I don’t know about
location.
And this is how I know what Love needs to talk to me about. She needs to tell me that it’s over, that she’s not bringing me
to
location.

Monica bites her lip. “Oops,” she says. “I assumed Love told you. Forty asked me to go yesterday. Dude, don’t get all worked up. Let’s have fun!”

But I can’t have fun. I am too good for this shit. I want to end this first, beat Love to the punch. I want to smash all her fucking tennis racquets into the grass court until they
splinter. We spent the whole summer together and she doesn’t even have the decency to
not
invite me. She doesn’t look back as we round the corner and her new jeans are so
tight, I hope she gets a yeast infection.

She links arms with Milo and they greet Seth Rogen and his wife, air kisses, hugs. She isn’t motioning for me to come over. And now I have to have a reunion with
Calvin.
He has
the night off and he’s here, hugging me. There’s a new small potbelly underneath his Henderson shirt and I’d like to think that Love is watching me reunite with him, wishing that
I would make an introduction, but I know better. Her friends are famous. She doesn’t need me. Calvin cracks a tasteless joke about how I hit the
jackpot
and I don’t laugh.

Monica checks the time on her Google wristwatch. Calvin grabs her arm. She giggles. “It’s a present,” she says. “I could never, like, get this.”

“From your boyfriend?” he asks.

She nods. But she flirts. “He saw it on my Pinterest. He can be really sweet when he wants to be.”

Calvin looks at me. “Where’s your watch, JoeBro?”

I tell him it’s in the shop and he starts to hit on Monica and they’re talking surfboards and eBay and it’s increasingly obvious they’re going to fuck. There is so much
change, too much change, and everything I built is falling apart and Calvin is programming Monica’s number into his phone. I should have left when Love said we
need to talk
. She is
laughing too hard at James Franco’s jokes as Milo accepts congratulatory hugs from Justin Long. This is supposed to be a tribute to a dead man and instead it’s a bunch of boy-men in
moth-eaten T-shirts laughing at their own jokes, cocky fucks who get paid to make jokes, get pussy because they get paid to be funny. I can’t breathe.

It’s time to go inside. I don’t sit with actress Love. She’s in the Important People Section directly across from me with the James Franco people, between Milo and Forty. Milo
is wearing the Four Seas Ice Cream T-shirt he was wearing the first night at Chateau. I bet they went there after he popped Love’s cherry. Everyone around me is going on
Insta
and
Twitter and Vine to share snapshots of the people across from us, the
celebs.

Monica elbows me. “Grab and pass,” she says.

I grab and pass and it’s a single sheet of paper with the lyrics to “Coming Up Easy” by Paolo Nutini, a hipster Scotsman who fucks models and makes cool music. I look at
Monica. “It was Henderson’s favorite song,” she says. “We’re all gonna sing along. He made a joke about it once, like he wanted a singing thing. Amazing,
right?”

It’s bullshit and Henderson’s favorite song was either “Oh What a Night” or “Sherry” and I want to tell them they’re all wrong. I knew him best because
I killed him. His tastes were more in line with middle-aged Americans who drive Buicks and buy Disney vacation packages on Expedia and I am so sick of this city, everyone pretending to be cool,
even in death.

The lights go down and the “tribute” begins with Milo jogging onto the fucking stage. Monica finds Calvin on Facebook and Love claps for Milo onstage. He waves for more applause
instead of telling everyone to stop and Love hoots and everything is ending. I don’t know her anymore and we don’t
need to talk
. I’m not dead or blind. I see her cheering
for him, choosing him. This black box cage is real and I barely recognize her anyway with her hair. It’s ending, our relationship, the applause.

“Welcome, friends and fans,” Milo begins. I hate the word
fan.
It’s almost as bad as follower. He raises the sheet of paper with the lyrics. “We’re gonna
start this night out the right way,” he says. “The way Henderson would want it, in song.”

The screaming. I think my ears are broken. Love laughs at Milo’s bad jokes and Monica whispers that Twitter is
blowing up
and Love is going to dump me after the show. She’s
lost interest in me. She became an actress. Or maybe she was always an actress, like Amy was. Maybe I got stupid the second I got
aspirations.
I cringe to think of the movies I wrote, the
way I jumped into business with Forty. Fuck it. Fuck all of it.

The house lights flicker, the show’s about to start, and Love licks her little lips, the ones that never met my cock. I clench my program. In that book
A General Theory of Love
,
the good relationships are defined by two chairs, side by side. Love and I are facing each other and yet she is not looking at me. Instead she’s leaning into Milo. Her shoulders are relaxed
and she was probably dying for this moment. She’s got her movie. She’s got her
director.
She doesn’t need me now. Milo elbows her to look at something in his phone and
she laughs at it, whatever it is. I don’t know. I’m too far away.

We need to talk.
No, we don’t, Love. You want to ice me out and make me sit on the other fucking side of the room while you look in Milo’s phone and let him put his hand on
your thigh? Fine. Have it your way. Love takes Milo’s hand as she sings along to “Coming Up Easy” and I bury my face in my hands. Monica asks what’s wrong.

“Nosebleed,” I say.

“Yikes,” she says. “I told Forty his coke is not as good as he thinks it is. Calvin says you guys have a pretty good hookup here.”

I’m too depressed to discuss Dez’s talent as a drug supplier and I tell Monica I have to go and she says
cool
and the Villagers are irritated as I squeeze by. It’s
tight as an airplane and my dick is in all their faces and when I get outside onto the street, I send Love a text message:
I got a nosebleed. I’m gonna go to the Pantry and get a coffee.
I miss you. I don’t know what happened.

iMessage relays that the message has been read but Love doesn’t write back. Silence received. That’s it. The end. I don’t know what I did wrong, but I know what she did wrong;
it all goes to hell when they want to be actresses.

I
yank the door to La Poubelle. It’s cool and dark and fairly empty—everyone is worshipping Henderson or waiting for the after party at
Birds, in honor of his old stomping ground—but at the bar, there is one girl in a Band-Aid dress nursing a glass of vodka and trying to flirt with the disinterested bartender. I’ve
never wanted a blowjob so bad in my life.

“Delilah,” I call out. She turns. She smiles.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in.” She pats the empty seat beside her. I order a vodka double. No mixers. No time for that.

Delilah introduces me to the new bartender as her
old friend, Joe.
And this means that Delilah still wants me. I refresh the Google search on Dr. Nicky when she goes to the bathroom. A
feminist blogger has picked up the story. She’s calling for Change.org to remove his petition and GO FEMINISTS GO! They are all horrified at the idea that this
murderer
who was in a
position to help people is trying to use a patient as a scapegoat. They think it is misogynistic to speak ill of Guinevere Beck, who was a thriving and intelligent woman, a writer, an MFA
candidate, a
happy, well-adjusted New York woman.
They want Dr. Nicky to shut up. They want his wife to seek counseling. They want the police department to accept that desperate men like
Dr. Nicky do things like invent patients named
Danny Fox.
Thank you, feminists, and fuck you, Love, and hello, Delilah, sidling up to the bar, patting my leg, telling me I look good, tan,
smacking her blowjob lips together, unabashedly hungry. I am hard. I smile. “You look good too.”

If all my suffering has a purpose, and I don’t yet know that it does, then the purpose can be boiled down to this: Delilah’s vacuum cleaner mouth inhaling my cock on the loading dock
in back of the Pantry. She said I was weird for wanting it here. It’s dirty, it smells like trash, it’s
a grocery store parking lot ewww.
But I know what she likes and I told
her to get on her knees and suck it and the miracle of life, the sperm reaches the egg, the tennis ball teeters and falls to one side, not the other, Delilah did it. She sucked me the way I like,
the way I want. I missed that. I needed that. Love is not all you need.

Fuck Love. Fuck love.

Don’t Fuck Delilah and I are walking back to my place and she’s grateful to be with me and I like this better, the way she clings. As we fall in step together, it becomes possible
that this could be my life, that it could be one of those classic love—
fuck that word
—stories where the right girl was upstairs all along. In this quarter-mile trek, Delilah
holds on tight to my hand and describes an argument she had at Oaks Gourmet with a guy who was rude to her about asking for ketchup. She is funny, all worked up, and this could be us together. We
reach my building, her building, our building.

There is a brand-new door at Hollywood Lawns. “Yeah,” Delilah says. “Someone got fucked up and fell into the door.”

Home trash home and I unlock the door and Delilah takes charge and throws me against the wall of mailboxes. She feels my dick underneath my pants. She licks my neck. “Now,” she says.
“I want you inside of me now.”

I unlock the door to my apartment and she tears off my shirt and I shred her Band-Aid dress and this is
fucking.
Rage mixed with sex and I wonder what set her off and at the same time I
don’t care. It works. She wants me and I want her and I need to fuck the love out of my system. I pull on Delilah’s hair and I bite her nipples and smack her ass hard and she scratches
my back and this is Hollywood fucking. You can’t get mad in Malibu, not really.

Delilah salivates over my balls and she is not a cheater like Love, Love who gets to act in a fucking movie without trying to act, Love who gets to star in a fucking movie without suffering
through auditions, without waitressing or striving or watching the Oscars on a futon, burning with desire to be there, spending night after night at the UCB trying to learn, to hone a craft. Fuck
Love. I like Delilah and I try to be a gentleman. I stay in bed with her when it’s over. I feign interest.