Hidden Bodies (42 page)

“I mean, I guess I
do
kind of like acting,” she admits. “But I still don’t want to do it professionally.”

“What did they do?” I ask. “What did you even say?”

“I told them I was Peach’s lover, of course,” she says. She is proud. Our calamari arrives. She grabs a tentacle, pops it into her perfect little mouth. “I did a whole
monologue about our secret love and New York and all this stuff about the way she wouldn’t let me meet her family or come out for real and I mean I went
off
and told them I knew she
didn’t kill herself. I knew she’d
never
kill herself and if you ask me, it was that fucking titty tease Guinevere Beck.”

“You did not say titty tease.”

She dips squid into cocktail sauce. “Maybe I did,” she says. “Maybe I didn’t. I mean I was so
in it
, you know?”

“Jesus,” I say.

I have yet to eat any calamari and Love licks her fingers and tells me how
amazingly uptight New England Puritanical bullshit
it was. “This is where I am such a Cali girl to the
bone,” she says. “We don’t care, you know? We’re like, do whatever. Chill out. Be gay. Be straight. I mean, what is the big deal? We’re all gonna die anyway, you know?
Who wants to spend their precious life hating?”

I understand now the depth of Love’s love for me. I have unlocked some cauldron of confidence inside of her. No longer is she content to sit low in a dark room and watch the monitor. Love
is
alive
and she feels more connected to me than she does to her brother. Listen to her talk about her scam and there is not
one
mention of Forty and she credits me with this
newfound freedom, here in the Greek restaurant.

The rest of our food arrives. We eat it. All of it.

Love continues her story. She says she dug deep. Her inspirational performances were Rosalind Russell in
Auntie Mame
and Goldie Hawn in
The First Wives Club.
“I knew one
thing,” she said. “These people, who hate gay people and who essentially hated their own
family member
for being gay, they don’t want to think about her grinding on me.
They don’t want to think about
any
of it. I mean, maybe they go to a benefit once a year and tolerate it, but they don’t want this fucking
preppy lesbo
in their house
crying over Peach’s beautiful body.”

She drinks her water and continues. She told them to let it go, all of it, because you can’t prosecute the dead. She said that Peach was
incontrovertibly in love with Guinevere
Beck
and that Beck for sure killed her.

“See,” she says. “The magic of this is that they won’t even
breathe
a word to anyone, because they don’t want Peach to be gay, let alone be murdered by a
gay chick, you know?”

“That’s kind of brilliant,” I say.

She nods.

Our baklava arrives. I dig in and give her the first bite. “Mm,” she says. And she is happy. “You should have seen their faces, Joe. I was like, ‘I just need to go
upstairs and be in our bed for a moment.’”

“
Our bed.
”

She nods. She opens her mouth. I stuff flaky Greek pastry inside of her and I can’t wait to fuck her. “That’s also pretty brilliant.”

“And then, obviously, I knew there was no
way
any one of them was coming upstairs to see what the preppy lesbo was doing up there, so I went room to room and I found the mug and
tucked it into my Kate Spade purse and then I went downstairs and offered to make a statement to the police about my relationship with Peach.”

I choke. “Holy shit,” I say. “That’s hysterical.”

“Yes,” she says. “They almost lost it, then helped me leave out the
back door
and asked if I wouldn’t mind going back to my car from the public parking lot. You
know, so it can feel like none of this ever happened.”

“Brilliant,” I say. “But there’s one problem.”

She wipes her cheeks with her napkin. “What’s that?”

“When
Boots and Puppies
comes out . . .”

She rolls her eyes. “You mean when it’s dumped on Netflix.”

“Either way,” I say. “They’re going to recognize you.”

“Who the fuck cares? I never said who I was or how I knew Peach, and I can say I am bi or something. I don’t care. The girl is dead and we were secret lovers. What can you ever do
about that?”

There is no more baklava left and I get a Google alert and the Salingers are preparing to ask the Little Compton Police Department to stop the investigation for
personal family reasons that
have come to light.
There is light, fluttering Greek guitar on the stereo and the goblets on all the tables are New England blue. My belly is full. My love is real.

“We should talk baby stuff,” I say. “I don’t know the first thing.”

“You seem to know how to make ’em pretty good.”

I know what she wants and I want it too and we pay the check and sneak into the bathroom and it’s the strongest sex we’ve ever had.

Outside, we pass the Brown Bookstore and college kids walk and we are so lucky to be older. They are all either drunk or nervous and I can’t imagine having
homework.
I put my arm
around Love and she pulls me tighter.

“Should we get one of those
What to Expect
books?” I ask.

Love says yes but holds up a finger. Her dad is calling. “Hi, Daddy,” she says, and it hits me. Someday my child will call me and say that,
hi, Daddy.

The crosswalk turns white. It’s our turn to go. But we don’t go. Love trembles. “Daddy, Daddy, wait,” she says. “One second.” She puts her hand over the
phone. She looks like she’s had a stroke and her face is a battlefield. Her muscles spasm.

“Are you okay?”

“Joe,” she says. “They found him. They found Forty! He’s alive!”

I hear her dad faintly coming through the phone,
Love! Love!

And now I feel like I’m having a stroke, but I have to fake it or else I’ll seem like a psycho and I grin and pull her into a hug. “Yes!”

We run back to the car, no books for us, no time. Forty’s alive. Alive! I may as well be back in that bathroom hurling my body at the door. He’s alive.
How?
I picture a
couple of shrooming college kids imitating
Boyhood
and roaming the desert, finding the hot springs.
He’s alive.
I picture one spotting the body, unsure if it was a
hallucination or if the body was real.

She tells me it’s a miracle. “Some girl found him and he’s in a hospital in Reno and he’s fine.” She smacks her lips. “He’s fine. This is
so
Forty, just like the time he disappeared in
Russia.
”

“Reno?” I say.

Love nods. “Apparently this girl found him in the desert, I don’t know where. She picked him up, he was passed out, dehydrated, and she brought him to the hospital and they put him
on an IV and he’s gonna be fine.”

It’s the worst diagnosis in the world. And I am not gonna be fine. I am fucked. I think of my acting manuals. I must not ask questions. Love unlocks the car. “The guy has nine
lives,” she says. “And I mean
phew
.”

“I can’t wait to talk to him,” I say.

“Well, you will,” she says. “My dad says he’s talking up a storm.”

“That’s crazy,” I observe, in my peppiest voice.

“Right?” she asks. “I mean, of course he doesn’t remember a damn thing about how he got there and his last memory is at the Bellagio but, you know, that’s my
brother.”

We drive to the airport. We don’t talk about our baby. We just gush over Forty. And this is my fault. I did not check for a pulse
.
I did not finish my job. In spite of everything
I’ve learned from the mug of piss, I didn’t put that knowledge into action. I’m like an asshole in a sitcom who learns the same fucking lesson every week and this is my
life.

My phone buzzes. It’s Forty:

See you soon, Professor.

IT’S
a long flight to Reno. I pretend to read
Mr. Mercedes
and we talk intermittently about the baby but mostly it’s all about
Forty. Love shares the good news on Facebook and writes back to various worried friends. Love e-mails with her mom about whether or not he needs rehab. The answer is no. Ha.

I don’t mention Roosevelt; it’s like our conversation never happened. It is unbearable, the way she smiles about him surviving, the way he sits in a room in Reno, conscious, aware
that I am the one who put him there, who left him in the hot water to die.

We arrive in Reno and there is a car waiting for us at the airport and the driver says it won’t be long until we get to the hospital and I pray for a crash or an earthquake on the inside
and I deserve an Oscar because I’m so good.

Love says we shouldn’t tell anyone about the baby just yet and I say okay and my prayers are unanswered when we reach the fourth floor. The building doesn’t crumble or shake and I
can already hear him in the room, loud, cognizant, on the phone. “Reese is interested? That’s bananas!”

I smell hand sanitizer and chicken broth as we walk toward his room. Love squeezes my hand. “Yay!”

“Yay!” I say.

Dottie steps into the hallway and does a double take. “Lovey!” she says.

Love runs to her and they hug and I stand in the hall trying not to stare into the room where an old man screams
help me.
Dottie whistles. I hug Dottie as Love disappears into
Forty’s room. My heart pounds. “You feel hot,” Dottie says. She puts her hand on my forehead. “Are you sick?”

“No,” I say. “It’s just the desert, I guess.”

“Well,” she says, linking her arm through mine. “We
have
to talk. Forty has the most wonderful idea about what we can do with you.”

Murdermefeedmealivetodogstrapmedrown­meinapoolintheocean­tiemeupstarveme

“Really?” I say. “What, um, what did you two have in mind and, my God, how is he?”

“Come see for yourself,” she says, and leads me into Forty’s room. Music plays and trays of food abound and Ray must have brought his own chair because he’s in a recliner
and Forty sits up in bed laughing with Milo, who sits in the other bed.

I walk toward Forty Quinn and he meets my eyes and he smiles. “There he is,” he says. “Good to see you, Old Sport. Have a seat if you can. Settle in for story hour.”

Ray stands, yawns. “I don’t think I need to hear it again,” he says. And whatever the story is, it’s bullshit and Ray would rather leave than go on indulging his son.
Dottie takes the recliner and Love joins Forty in his bed. I sit in a shitty, hospital-issued folding chair.

“Well,” Forty says. “The first thing you guys have to understand about me, going forward, is that I’m a
writer
.”

I might vomit. “Okay.”

Forty takes a pompous breath. “What this means, is that writers write. We shut off our phones. We take off. We get lost in the
narrative.
You guys, I know I have pulled some crazy
shit in the past, but that was then. This is now. Now I’m a working writer, which means I didn’t wanna fucking stay in LA and rest on my laurels and pat myself on the back. I wanted to
hunker down in a quiet hotel room and
think
and
do
and
make.
”

Dottie moans. “Sweetie, I’m on your side and I love you. But you could have called.”

Love: “Mom!
Enough
.”

Forty: “And next time I will call. I was just dying to start in on a new script because that’s how this town is. You’re only as good as what you’ve got coming
up.”

Milo now with an
amen, brother.
I might faint.

“What were you writing?” Love asks.

He looks at me now, intently. He smiles. “Another kidnapping story,” he says. “I pretty much sold it in the room at Paramount a while back, but they got cold feet and now that
I’m a thing, you know, they want in again. So I promised them I’ll have a script soon.”

Love is perplexed. “Well, how the hell did you wind up in the desert? Mom says you’re starting to remember more? That a girl found you?”

My heart pounds. He looks up at the TV. “I went on a walkabout,” he says. “I needed to do research. Sometimes, you just have to get out there and see shit if you want to write
about it, you know? If you want to write about the outer reaches of the desert, where there’s nobody around, you have to see it.”

Maybe I could get a nurse to kill him and why can’t anyone ask what we all want to ask: Where is the new script? He can’t explain what happened to his computer or his notes because
he didn’t bring notes and a computer. He brought cash and coke.

My brain hurts. My palms sweat. “Who found you?”

He smiles. “That’s the thing, Old Sport,” he says. “It’s all kind of a blur. One minute, I’m sitting in the buffet, giving five grand to a couple of newlywed
kids who look like they can’t afford to eat in a real restaurant”—FUCKING LIAR—“and the next minute, boom”—MOTHERFUCKING LIAR—“I’m in the
desert and this blond girl.” He sighs. He fails. “I just got a flash of her.”

Dottie runs across the room. “What did you see?”

“A sweatshirt
,
” he says.

Dottie pleads with Forty—
try, try to remember
—but he can’t remember anything. All he can see is the girl, her shirt.

“And then I woke up here,” he says. “Splat.”

Love kisses his hand. “We need to give
her
five thousand dollars.”

“We can’t,” Forty says. “She’s gone. The nurses say she took off. She didn’t even come in. They found me outside.”

Dottie starts to cry and Milo puts an arm around her. Love asks Forty how the staff has been here and he says
it’s not the Ritz
and he looks at me and asks how
I’ve
been.
I look him dead in the eye: “Worried about you,” I say.

“We were
so
scared,” Dottie says, and she stands. A nurse appears and says she can come back later when everyone is gone and Love runs after her and it’s just me and
Milo and Forty and Dottie, who is pacing, worked up, wrung out, hands on hips. Imagine how well I would have done had I had a mother like this, the kind who cares, the kind who is here, no makeup,
bags under her eyes from worrying. “Well, remember this,” she says. “You can’t write
anything
if you’re dead and your father and I need to know where you
are.”