Hidden Bodies (26 page)

“So how was your summer?” I ask.

“My summer was my summer.” She shrugs. “Not really any such thing as summer in LA, you know? Only difference is some of the parties are at beach houses, but what a pain, going
out to the beach. Ugh. East Coast water is so much better, right?”

“Fuck, yes,” I say. Delilah may think she didn’t have a summer but she is wrong. She did. There is something more settled about her. Something changed inside of her and she
doesn’t seem as tormented. She’s like the kitten that got neutered. She’s calm. She isn’t as sick with aspirations now that she’s
moonlighting for this
pseudo–
Entertainment Tonight
show.
We lie in my bed, gazing at the ceiling that used to get on my nerves, the bubbling, lowly barricade that once seemed so literal, a roadblock
to a higher life. It all doesn’t seem as bad as I thought. I forgot how nice it is to be contained. I know the boundaries here. I know what’s mine. I don’t have to feel like
I’m eating someone else’s Frosted Flakes and I don’t have to say thank you all the time.

“I’m hungry,” I say.

“Wanna order a pizza?” Delilah asks.

No. I want to dive under the covers and kiss her thighs and lick her and feel her hands in my hair. I do this and she reacts the way I want her to react. She calls out my name. Her legs shake.
She sounds like she’s crying and laughing at once. She sounds like an animal, like she found the
afikomen
. I am good enough for Delilah. She treats me like her Milo, telling me how
great I am, how big I am, how much she missed me. She does not mention her mother and she does not try to parlay this romp into future meetings like some desperate ne’er-do-well at a
blackjack table trying to make it all back. She has learned a thing or two and I could do anything to her in this bed. She gives me her ass, her fingernails, her vigor.

Afterward, we order in chicken and French fries and we watch
Hannah and Her Sisters
. I pay for the chicken and I hold the remote and we don’t need a screening room. We don’t
need an ocean out the window. We just need my forty-two-inch TV, my dick, my futon.

Delilah scratches my chest. “What’s it like?”

“What’s what like?”

“The Quinn mansion,” she says. “I’ve only seen pictures on
Curbed LA
. Is there really a bowling alley?”

It was the wrong question. I close the box of chicken. She’s supposed to be basking. She’s supposed to be fantasizing about our future. She is not supposed to be
reporting
and I don’t like the way she sits, on her side, elevated, like she’s doing yoga, like she’s Molly Ringwald in
The Breakfast Club
, so blasé.

She wants to know about Love and I deflect. I tell her that it’s complicated but over—and she wants to know where we met and when. I tell her I don’t want to talk about it and
she says she needs it in order to move on, have a fresh start. She says she has been seeing someone this summer too and she will tell me
anything
I want to know about that and now I
remember everything wrong with Delilah, with Franklin Village, and I check my phone. Still nothing from Love but Monica wrote to say Love got wasted. They all passed out at Milo’s house. She
says Love is mad at me. I remind Monica that I
told
Love I was sick. I am waiting for a response from Monica when Delilah starts in again on Love, like a fat kid trying to get another
cookie.

“Please,” she says. “I’m a big girl and this is not about feelings. I just like to know these things. Tell me where you met her. Where does someone like Love Quinn hang
out?”

“She came into the shop,” I lie.

Monica texts:
Passing out everything will be fine Love is out cold Forty is high as shit and Milo is

Her phone must have died because that’s it. Delilah prods me. I put my phone down. “What?” I ask.

“The bookstore?” she says. “You’re trying to tell me that Love Quinn came into that
bookstore
?”

“Yeah,” I say, defensive. “She reads.”

She pulls her hair back and looks away.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says. “It’s just that I think you actually met her at Soho House.”

I have nothing to hide. “I did,” I say. “I don’t know why I’m being weird. I feel weird talking about her to you.”

She says I don’t have to feel weird and she tells me about the guy
she’s
been seeing and she can’t tell me his name but he’s an
actor
and he’s
someone I would have heard of and he has something you can’t buy with all of Love’s money. Her words, not mine.

“He’s famous,” she says. “Like, legit famous. And it’s good but sometimes he freaks out and pulls shit like he did tonight and stands me up.”

“You were waiting for him at La Pou?”

She nods and this is why she changed. She didn’t evolve. She didn’t grow. She didn’t forsake her aspirations for a healthier outlook on life. She got some famous dick inside of
her and some famous dick called her back. Between us we have no money, no fame, no power, no butler, no boxes of Frosted Flakes that just appear without having to go to the grocery store, no
elevated lawns under starry skies. Between us we just have negativity. We both got dumped, fucked over.

I tell her I’m exhausted and she asks if she can stay. We both check our phones and we’re both still losers. I don’t need to be on this futon alone, so I tell her it’s
fine. We don’t spoon. We’re both too wounded and I fall asleep wondering if there will be more angry sex in the morning.

WHEN
I wake up at five
A.M.
I’m still a loser, and there is no message from Love. I sigh but as long as I am here, I
could go for another blowjob. I roll over. I’m ready to go and I reach for Delilah. But she’s not here. I rub the sleep out of my eyes and head toward the bathroom and there she is, in
a bra and panties, like some drug-addled victim of human trafficking, hunkered down in my bathroom.

And in her hand is a reusable Pantry bag,
my
reusable Pantry bag, the one I brought to Henderson’s.

“DELILAH,”
I say. My heart gets loud in my throat. What the fuck is she doing?

She whips her head around. “Joe,” she says, her eyes wide. “I was looking for toilet paper.”

“There’s a roll on the counter.” I step toward her.

She cowers. She hunches forward, as if she’s praying. “Is there?” she asks, nervous, insincere.

“There is,” I say. “I don’t see how you could have missed it.”

“Oh, you know,” she says. “Guys, a lot of the time, you don’t have toilet paper.”

I don’t like the high pitch of her voice and she turns around and scoots backward, as if she can cover the Pantry bag, as if she can backflip into my tub and escape through the drain. She
went through my things. She is a self-destructive fiasco of a person. She couldn’t just stay in the bed with me. She couldn’t be content to suck my dick and cheat on her not-a-boyfriend
boyfriend. Nope. Like an addict who loads the syringe even after she knows the batch is bad, that it killed a bunch of people, Delilah got out of my bed and went into my closet, where she
doesn’t belong. She is an addict. And you can’t go to rehab for what has stricken her, a star-fucking disorder where she risks her own life and security and happiness to find out what
Love Quinn’s home looks like.

“What are you looking for?” I ask again. I taunt the cat. I poke the tiger.

“Nothing,” she says. “It’s okay.”

“You said you were looking for toilet paper,” I remind her. Dumb girl. Can’t keep her own story straight. “Did you find any toilet paper in there?”

She stands up. “I think I should go.”

“I think you should stay.”

She stands in front of the Pantry bag, as if her legs are cover. “Find anything good in there?” I ask.

“Joe,” she says. “I am not like that. I was just looking for toilet paper.”

“Delilah,” I say. “I don’t think you’re telling the truth.”

It’s always the same with these fucking people, bad people when they’re caught. They try to sell you. In Delilah’s case, she actually tells me that she knows people who could
make a
documentary
about all this. “Like
Serial
,” she pitches, as if this is what I want. “I mean, I’m not going to jump to conclusions about this bag and
the way you were at Henderson’s and all the ways things are adding up but, Joe, this could be very interesting.”

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“Let’s just talk about it,” she says.

“Get in the tub.”

She whimpers. “Please no. I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

I point. “Get in the fucking tub.”

She cries and I had a feeling this would get loud and she yammers again. “I know people,” she says.

“No,” I remind her. “You fuck people.”

I knock her back into the tub and she falls. I use some of the tape from the bag to seal her mouth shut and tie her arms together. I close the bathroom door and block the doorknob with a chair.
I turn on some music—Journey’s greatest hits—to drown out her muffled cries and I tear the Kandinsky off the wall. She doesn’t know art. She doesn’t know anything but
celebrities and she is an empty person, a mean person. She will never be happy. She won’t stop shooting for the stars, sucking them off, trying to pull them down to her futon, to her chicken
bones.

I am not going to kill her just because she knows I killed Henderson, because she’s crying about it in my bathroom, as if this is the path to freedom. No. I’m also going to kill her
because there is no happy ending for a star-fucking girl like Delilah, a girl who actively refuses to embrace her talents, celebrate her insides, lead with her brain. After this
“famous” guy, whoever he is, finishes with her, she’ll go tramping for someone else until one day she realizes she’s too old to be taken seriously by these motherfucking
pricks. And then she’ll either spend her savings on surgery or pop pills or move away and try to sell her secrets to a publisher.

Oh, the sadness of the Angeleno with a bank account dwindling, a forehead creasing, a self-esteem level deflating. I wish Delilah were a little more like me. I wish she were more confident. I
wish she never stopped believing in herself, like her tattoo, but she did. She thought she needed someone famous in order to feel worthy. She could have settled down with Dez or Calvin or me or any
of the guys she met. But she wanted fame more than love. She will never be happy, and really, I’m doing her a favor. She will never find what she’s looking for. I pull an orange Rachael
Ray knife out of the butcher’s block. LA kills women. It’s a shame that Delilah moved here. She should have gone back to New York. You don’t belong here unless you’re tough,
beautiful, or talented. What I am doing is a kindness, a mercy killing. I am putting her out of her misery.

I open the bathroom door and she’s cowering in the tub, on her knees. Sad cat. Poor kitten. Her face is a wad of chewed-up gum. All the joy is gone. Somewhere along the way she broke her
own heart and without a heart, you can’t get better.

“I know,” I say. “I know how sad you are. I know how sick you are. But it’s over.”

Steve Perry’s unmistakable voice crescendos and Delilah hyperventilates. She cries and cries, and how badly she needed this. How much more of this there would be for her were she to stay
on this long and lonely road ahead. The girl who paid someone to inscribe words on her thigh, words that she could not live by, words she did not understand. The key is not just to continue
believing, after all, but the key to life is to believe in something that matters, something big and beautiful, something more profound than fame, money.

I grab her extensions and smash her head into the tub and that’s it. No more tears. Blood trickles down her forehead. I was right. She isn’t beautiful. She was pretty. And I
don’t feel sorry for her. It’s like they say about everything in this world. You can’t feel sorry for yourself. A lot of girls, they would have loved to be so pretty.

IT’S
a good thing I brought that giant duffel bag to LA. I don’t know how else I’d get her the fuck out of here. But first I have to
get dressed and find my keys and run all the way up to Tuxedo Terrace and get my car. I throw on sweatpants and a shitty old T-shirt I wore when I worked at the bookstore. It’s cold. My lungs
hurt. And when I get to my car, it’s all fogged in and I don’t have time for this. This is LA, there shouldn’t ever be any bullshit with the weather. My teeth chatter as I defrost
the windshield and Henderson is a bad luck charm, even dead.

When I reach Hollywood Lawns, I put on my hazards and put the car in park. I jog up the steps, back inside, and get my giant empty duffel bag out of the closet and unzip it and the zipper is
loud, stuck, no. I yank.
No.
I know for a fact that I don’t have any trash bags big enough to hold her and I pull again and I cut my finger but the zipper behaves. I lift Delilah out
of the tub and set her inside the bag. She looks like she’s being swallowed by a giant black flower and I pull the zipper over her feet, covering her legs, past her Journey tattoo
.
I
zip more, obscuring her cheap panties and her cheaper bra and her too-short neck and her too-big mouth and her closed eyes and her rounded forehead and her hair. She never needed extensions.

I try to lift the bag but I’m going to have to drag it—and fast. This is a crowded neighborhood and everyone wants to be skinny; soon there will be exercisers. I carry the bag out to
my Prius and Wolfe is fucking right. You can’t go home again. Not if you live in an apartment building.

I
haven’t been in the Donzi alone. A few weeks ago, we were at this bar in the Marina and I ran down to the dock to get Love’s sweater and
I remember standing on the boat thinking about how different it is being alone than it is being with other people.

I wanted to take the boat out and push it. I wanted to drive it to Japan. I had this moment. The cover band inside was doing Toto—that “Africa” song—and I was so fucking
happy. It was enough to choose Love inside on the dance floor over the great sea, the unknown. And then there’s also the fact that I don’t have a fucking license. Love’s family
can get out of anything; I know this. But Love has warned me not to take the boat out on my own.