Hidden Bodies (4 page)

So fuck it.

I grab Amy and throw her over my shoulder and she screams and the Salingers glare, jealous of us, young, poor, in
love.
I carry her toward the water, the same water where I disposed of
Peach, the same shore where she washed up months later after her tragic so-called suicide. Amy wraps her legs around me and envious Salinger men watch, wish, drink. We stay like this, glued in
Peach’s ocean grave and by the time we get out of the water, most of the Salingers have retreated into the house. It’s colder now and we put on sweaters and Amy reaches into her beach
bag and pulls out a children’s book called
Charlotte & Charles.
“This was my favorite,” she says. “Can I read it to you?”

“Of course.”

She leans into me and the story goes like this: Two giants, a man and a woman, live on a desert island. The woman is lonely but the man feels safe. Humans arrive and while the woman is excited,
the man is hesitant. The last time humans were there, everything went to shit. The humans tried to kill them. Charlotte wants to try again and Charles complies, but sure enough, the humans are
ringing bells, the sound of which will kill Charlotte and Charles. But Charlotte and Charles wear earplugs to protect themselves.

There’s an earthquake and Charlotte and Charles help the humans, then swim away to a new island. The second to last page of the book is a picture of the giants on an island together at
night. Several years have passed. They look at the stars and Charlotte wishes that more people would come. Charles says that the people would do the same fucking thing and screw them over.
Charlotte concedes that this is possible. But she also reminds him that he could be wrong. And in the corner of the page, there is a ship. People are coming.

Amy closes the book and smiles up at me. “Well?”

“That’s one dark fucking book.”

She smacks my leg. “You can’t swear at
Charlotte and Charles
.” She spins to face me. “Tell me what you think.”

“I liked it,” I say.

She nudges me. “Come on. What did you
think
?”

This feels like a test and it’s supposed to be a vacation. I shrug. “I want to let it sit awhile. I don’t like this culture of reading a book and spitting out an immediate
reaction.”

She tilts her head like a schoolteacher with a slow kid. “I see that,” she says. “I’ve read it a hundred times and I’ve had my whole life to think about it.”
She shivers.

“Are you cold?”

She shoves the book into her bag and we leave the beach. I failed to retrieve the mug and I failed to understand
Charlotte & Charles
and walking on sand is just no fun. Ever.

Back at the hotel, we shower together, I put my Charles in her Charlotte, and she helps me write back to the BuzzFeed guy. We bring Cajun scallops and buttery lobster rolls and cannolis to our
room. We eat in the bed and we fuck in the bed and we laugh in the bed and we wake up bloated, happy.

I fuck Amy in the shower and in the
soaking
tub and on the balcony—her favorite, she tells me during what she calls
blueberries in bed
—and I fuck her on the sofa
and then I fuck her on the love seat. I memorize her face, her trembling lips,
Oh Joe
, her legs quivering, clinging. She opens her mouth, my little seal. I pop a blueberry into that hole
in her face, the one that takes my dick in a way that no mouth ever did before.

She winks. “Good shot.”

We live here now, in this room, in these sheets, like a fucking John Mayer song come to life. We joke that they will cordon off this room when we go because nobody will ever occupy it the way we
did. I love her more now than I did five minutes ago, more than I did five hours ago. I break the rules and tell her this because she is not like other girls.

“I know,” she says. “Isn’t it weird the way most people only get
more
annoying and you only get
less
annoying.”

I jab her with a pillow. “I’m not annoying.”

She shrugs teasingly and we bash each other with pillows and she pins me down and drops blueberries into my mouth and I plant my mouth on hers and we eat together, one mouth. I ask her about
Charlotte & Charles
and she tells me to forget it and I mark her body all over with my pulpy blue kisses. They’ll have to throw away these sheets and when she comes, she screams
and she throws a pillow across the room. It goes out the window, over the balcony.

She giggles. “So I guess that was what you call a one-pillow orgasm.”

For a brief moment, I see Beck, the way she humped a green pillow. I smack Amy’s ass. “By the end of the day, there won’t be any pillows left in here,” I say, ready to go
again.

But she puts her hand on my chest. “Whoa,” she says. “Joe, we do
have
to go out.”

“We don’t
have
to do anything,” I say, and it must have been so much easier in the dark ages, before restaurants, when there was no fucking
Little Compton Coupon
Guide
designed with the explicit purpose of interfering in our fuckfest.

“Here,” she says, flipping through the coupon guide. “Scuppers by the Bay. They have a band.”

“Do they deliver?” I try, and it’s a waste of time.

She’s out of bed telling me that I’ll be thanking her after I’ve had a good meal. And that’s how you know you’re in love. You put on
slacks
and feign
excitement over oysters and
live light rock
and you grab the keys and leave.

Scuppers by the Bay is overstuffed with assholes. The lot is jammed and the valets look stoned. There’s a sixteen-thousand-piece cover band tooling away in the back—murdering Tina
Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It”—and the clamor in the kitchen is matched by a screaming spoiled baby at a nearby table with spoiled parents fussing over
skewered scallops. We don’t have a reservation and the coupon is not valid tonight and we are told to wait at the bar for one hour, maybe two.

I suggest we go but Amy nods toward a couple at the bar. They’re overdressed, he’s swishing his wine in his glass and she’s drinking something blue. I don’t want to talk
to them but when Amy whispers to follow her lead I start to get hard. She dabs gloss on her lips. “Okay,” she says. “We’re gonna pretend to be other people and we’re
gonna glom onto them.”

“Seriously?”

Her eyes flash. “You be Kev and I’ll be Lulu.”

We really are the same. I like fake names, but I’m used to it being a means of survival or escape, like when Officer Nico believed that I was Spencer Hewitt because of my Figawi hat.

“I don’t know, Amy,” I say, fucking with her. “Lulu sounds pretty fucking made-up.”

She claps, excited, and we decide to be Kev and Mindy from Queens. “I’m a chef and you’re an aspiring actor.”

“An actor?” It stings. Why not a director? Or doctor?

She cups my chin in her hand. “Well, you’re too hot to do anything else, honey.”

I would like to take her into the handicap bathroom and fuck her brains out but she has already started in on the
nice
couple. When a woman wants to socialize, no penis in the world can
replace meaningless conversation about iPhone autocorrects—
ducked! Hahahaha
—and rental car
snafus.
So we pair off with Pearl and Noah Epstein. They’re also from
New York—
that’s so crazy!!!
—and they’re both lawyers and they’re actually likable, funny. When we shake hands, Noah says, “Hi, that’s Pearl,
I’m Noah and we’re what Grammy Hall would call real Jews.”

We talk about Woody Allen and then we also meet Harry and Liam Benedictus. Harry is short for Harriet—yawn—she’s a financial planner and he’s a broker. They have
two
under three
and they’re uptight, but they’re also full of compliments. Liam
freaking loves movies
and wants to hear about my career. We talk small—
how funny is
it when your mom texts?!
—and I make up shit about my kooky mom sending me Crock-Pot recipes. Amy talks about how
her
mom thinks LOL means Lots Of Love, and our new friends think
we’re
so freaking funny.

The conversation drifts to terrible places at times, the ups and downs of the NASDAQ, but we survive. In this bar, lying to these strangers, there has never been more honesty between us. We are
closer with every lie, undercover together, fusing. Amy talks about her imaginary father, the one who sends her articles about Rachael Ray. She is vulnerable and we needed this, pretending to be
people with parents, parents who text and call and love and ask for help with attachments. The hostess says we can sit now if we’re all willing to squeeze into a booth and I want to squeeze
my dick into Amy and she is clapping. She
loves
booths. All women love booths.

On the way over, Amy whispers, “Wasn’t I right?”

“Yes,” I say. “This is a fucking blast.”

I get to sit beside Amy, our legs pressed together. She raps her knuckles on the table and starts a game. “Okay, okay,” she says. And every man in this restaurant would trade his
woman for Amy. “Favorite movie sex scene. I go first.
The Town.
”

I’ve heard this all before, how much Amy likes Ben Affleck and Blake Lively together
.
I slide a hand underneath her skirt and she doesn’t object and I move that hand
underneath her panties, onto her ass cheek.

Noah worships that British newsy from HBO—how surprising—and sends the undercooked scallops back to the kitchen and Pearl knocks over her
Chablis
and says it’s because
she has
schpilkas
. Harry
crafts
jewelry and sells it on Etsy. The waiter returns with scallops and I take the first bite and I nod. “They’re ducking
perfect.”

Everybody in our party cackles at my stupid, easy joke and we could be friends in real life. It would be a long Swiffer commercial with dogs and potlucks in Park Slope. I start to wish they
didn’t think of me as an aspiring actor named
Kevin.
But then if they knew that we were both high school graduates who never went to college, if they knew we worked in
retail
, these people wouldn’t be friends with us anyway. I squeeze Amy’s thigh; that’s what’s real, my take-home.

Amy says I’m
for sure going to make it as an actor
and Pearl says I have
one of those faces.
Her husband laughs and Amy’s eyes glisten and she got a little too much
sun today. I wish I could hit pause and stay here in this moment, with the light fading. This is what all the love songs are about, the moment when you find your own way forward with someone and
there is no turning back.

Amy winks at me and gets out of the booth to request a song— “Paradise City” by Guns N’ Roses—and the band doesn’t know it and she’s pouting while our
new fake friends are discussing the menu. I kiss her cheek. “You’re sweet.”

“What’s that for?”

I stroke her thigh and move my hand up to where the jungle used to be. “I get it.”

She is puzzled. “Huh?”

“‘Paradise City,’” I say. “Guns N’ Roses, like the first time, when you welcomed me to the jungle.”

Her face is blank. Pearl wants to know if we prefer calamari or clams casino and Amy says
both
and she doesn’t remember our Guns N’ Roses connection. She’s not as
smart as I am, but maybe it’s better that we’re a little different.

When it’s time to deal with the check, Amy pulls the valet ticket out of my pocket. She excuses herself to go to the bathroom and then I pretend to get a phone call and step outside. We
latch onto each other and the valet delivers the ’Vette and we’re gone and it’s like we were never even there.

“I do feel kind of bad,” I say. I liked Pearl & Noah & Harry & Liam.

“Oh please,” she sighs. “When you split a check like that, it’s almost easier if half the people disappear, you know?”

When we get back into the room, she brings her blueberries into the bed and she fellates me with her superfruit mouth and I smush blueberries on her tits. I want to talk about our lies and our
parents and
Charlotte & Charles
but she says we should sleep because of the drive back tomorrow. I know she’s right but at the same time, I can’t stand the idea of being
asleep and missing one second of our life together.

While Amy snores, I walk out on the deck and see the lights on upstairs at the Salinger house. Fuck that mug. It doesn’t scare me anymore. I have a partner now, and this time, I’m
leaving it behind on purpose.

THE
ride home is always different from the ride out. We’re both a little burned out, a little hungover. We don’t want to stop at
Del’s for slushies and we agree that lemon ice is precisely the sort of thing that sounds great when you start the vacation, but not what you want on the way home. We hit traffic. We laugh
about our fake friends and we forgot to find out the brand of the sheets at the hotel. She holds my hand randomly, as if to say,
I can’t believe you’re real.
This is love, this
is Sunday, and when we get back into the city, she strokes my neck.

“Will you hate me if I just kind of want my own bed?”

“I could never hate you,” I respond.

We make it to her street and I signal with my blinker and she laughs and that will be a running joke for us, that time we rented that red Corvette and got pulled over for not using a fucking
blinker
. I can’t wait to be old with her. I put the car in park. She kisses me.

“Thank you,” she says. “I hope you know how wonderful you are.”

I hold on to her and breathe her in. Someone behind us honks. I wave the asshole around and Amy climbs out. At the rental joint, the guy asks me if I had any trouble with the car. It is with
great pleasure that I tell him
we
had absolutely no trouble at all. He looks at me like I’m crazy and it’s okay because I am. I am crazy in love.

The next morning, I can’t get to the shop fast enough. I can’t wait to see Amy. I can’t wait to tell her that I found Pearl & Noah & Harry & Liam online. I
can’t wait to find out if she watched
F@#k Narcissism
last night and if so what she thought of Kevin Hart. I wonder what panties she’s wearing today and I’m excited to
see if this shaving business continues.