Hidden Bodies (44 page)

I have a life partner, the mother of my child. She harasses me to take vitamins and tells me to brush my teeth. She sucks my dick and falls asleep before
Cocktail
is over and ignores
her brother’s calls when she
just can’t deal.
I know the code to our alarm system and I am more comfortable driving in LA all the time. I find that it’s easier to start
the day by going
down
a hill than it is going
up
a hill and I tell this to Jonah Hill at a party and he laughs and says
don’t tell that to my fucking date, guy.

Love was serious about ditching her acting career and she is different now and it’s hard to know the source of her power. She glows. She says it’s because of me. I say it’s
her. We decide it’s
us.
The baby.

I meet up with Calvin for beers in the old neighborhood that hasn’t changed. He and Monica only went out for a few days; he doesn’t know what became of her, doesn’t care. He is
being crushed by debt from his DUI. He is defeated now; he keeps telling me he was in jail for twenty-eight hours. He’s gained a few pounds and he doesn’t check Tinder. He says he might
move home. I tell him to get his iPad and we work together on the
Ghost Food Truck
outline.

“Well, well, well,” he says. “This is
good
.”

“It sure is,” I tell him. “And you know what? Just go for it already.”

“JoeBro,” he says. “I feel like I’ve been kind of a dick.”

“You weren’t a dick.”

“Well,” he says. “I got caught up in shit. Anyway, I think we should pitch
GFT
together.”

I drink my beer. I tell him not in a million years. “It’s your concept, Calvin,” I say. “You came up with it and you’ve worked it over a million times and you will
be the one to make it happen.”

He pats me on the back. He wants to know what I think about Delilah disappearing. “I think LA is a hard place, Calvin. I think it wishes we would all disappear and it’s more of a
miracle when people don’t.”

“Deep,” he says.

We watch a commercial for automobile insurance. Calvin says his is
crazy expensive
because of his DUI. I enjoy the taste of the beer, the music in the bar—“Take It to the
Limit,” the Eagles, melodrama that only sounds good in a bar, when someone else puts it on—and when we’re done, I drive
up
to the hills to go home and I enjoy that
too.

At home, Love is making veal Parmesan. “Babies for the baby,” she says. “You know, because veal are babies. Oh God. That came out wrong. Sorry, little, innocent cows. Tomorrow
we’ll have old, bitter chickens.”

She is the one.

I hug her and kiss her.

She breaks pasta into a pot of boiling water. “How go the books?”

“They go,” I say, and we are happy.

I track down Harvey. He’s in hospice. I bring him flowers and chocolate cake and Eddie Murphy DVDs and he thanks me. He asks me if I saw Henderson last night. I get the chills. The nurse
says he gets confused like this. I tell him he’s gonna be fine.

“Am I right or am I right?”

His face contorts. I want to believe it’s a smile. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m scared.”

I sit with him until his ex-wife returns and she hugs me and she cries. When I get home to Love, I cry. Love sends them a TV. She says the TVs in those places are never big enough.
Harvey’s ex-wife calls. She loves the TV. Harvey does too.

I don’t go see Dez; drug dealers can all fuck off.

Every Sunday we drive out to Malibu to see Love’s parents. Sometimes Forty is there and sometimes he isn’t. But I see him regularly. Twice a week we meet at the Taco Bell in
Hollywood.

Today I am first. I slide into a booth and when he arrives he is visibly fucked up.

“Let me get you a Coke,” I say.

He grabs my hands. “Thank you,” he says. “Old Sport, Professor, whatever you are, thank you so fucking much for what you did. Do you know how gold this is? I mean, I read what
I wrote and I swear, I think being left in the desert is the best fucking thing that ever happened to me.”

I get the Coke. He knocks it over. I go for napkins and he stops me. “They have people who do that.”

“Forty, help me out here.” I haven’t seen him this fucked up since Vegas and I forgot how annoying it is. And at the same time, I want to save him; Love rubs off on me.

“I mean, a job’s a job,” he says. “You spill, they wipe.”

I look at his swollen face. “You don’t hate me, do you?”

“Hate you?” he says. “How could I hate you? Dude, Amy Adams is gonna do
The Mess.
”

Will that name ever leave me? No. “Great,” I say. “Congrats.”

“It’s not for sure,” he backtracks. “But it looks
good.
Amy Fucking Adams. How could I hate you? I mean, you don’t even know the level of ass I am getting.
Unpaid pussy, my friend. How could I
hate
you?”

I remember when I thought it would be a terrible thing to be a dog and now I fetch the chalupas and the hot sauce and the tacos and the gorditas.
Woof
!

Love wins another award for her charity work and I write a speech for her. On the way home, she says maybe we could have a winery. After the baby, of course. I can’t believe this is my
life, where the possibility of periodically stomping on grapes and owning a vineyard is real.

I call Mr. Mooney on his birthday and tell him about Love, about meeting Jennifer Aniston and choosing books as Professor Joe. He asks if I’m getting my dick sucked then tells me
he’s still in Florida. He has an orange tree and the oranges look nothing like the ones in New York. “They’re mottled,” he says. “Like the jelly beans with the flecks
in them, never mind, I’m boring myself.” He sighs. The conversation dwindles and I go find Love. She’s outside, in her favorite float, the one with arm rests and drink holders and
she’s wearing sunglasses. I jump into the pool and push the raft over. She screams again, and falls into the water. She comes up laughing, saltwater kisses. We float.

“Sam is at it again,” she says.

“Sam the work bitch?”

“Yeah,” she says. “We’re getting interns and she said we have to check to make sure they’re not on Pinterest because she says people on Pinterest are all
stupid.”

“She’s stupid.”

“I know,” Love says.

“If you hate her so much why don’t you just fire her?”

Love rolls over onto her side and reaches out for me. “Because I don’t hate anyone,” she says. “I really don’t. It’s just not worth it.”

We hear her phone ringing, we hear my phone ringing.

Love runs to her phone and she answers. “Mom?” she says. And then seconds later, she drops her phone. I go to her.

She stares at me. She is different. She is frozen. My first concern is the baby but how could that be? It wasn’t the doctor on the phone.

“It’s Forty,” she says.

He went to the cops. That fucker. That louse. I’ll kill him. “What happened?” I ask.

And then she starts crying. It’s primal and terrifying and whatever that fucker did, he will pay for this. I grab the phone.

“Dottie?” I say, and I try to hug Love. And she’s shaking. Her whole body is convulsing and this cannot be good for our baby. “Dottie, are you there?”

“My boy,” she sobs. “My boy is dead.”

My body goes slack. “Forty is dead?”

When Love hears me say it, she lets out another scream and I tell Dottie I have to go and I don’t know if the baby will survive, but I know we will. I hug Love, I hold on to her. I wish I
could make it better. But I can’t. Forty’s dead.

☺

FORTY
didn’t overdose on Xanax or gorditas. He didn’t get cancer and he didn’t drown in the saltwater of the Pacific or the
chlorinated water of the hotels he loved so much or the saltwater that his parents collected for him. A car hit Forty Quinn while he was crossing the street in Beverly Hills. The girl who hit him
wasn’t drunk—God is not
that
trite—and she was driving a Honda Civic. She only just moved here. Her name is Julie Santos. The people in back of her were honking.
Angelenos, particularly those on the Westside, don’t like to wait. Julie Santos says the guy in back of her had been riding her tail and honking. Her roommate told her that it’s
basically legal
to take a left-hand turn after the light turns red because otherwise, nobody would ever get anywhere.

Forty was sober; there were no drugs in his possession or inside him. He was going to Nate ’n Al’s alone to gorge on corned beef and French fries, according to the waiter who says
Forty came in alone a lot over the years. We never knew that, any of us. Julie, who seems like a gentle, unsteady person, the kind who will never get over this accident, she wanted to see the
Pretty Woman
hotel and she knows it’s silly and it’s not even called the
Reg Bev Wilsh
anymore but . . . she cries. I resist the urge to make a joke about Forty and
hookers, how even when he’s not blowing money on them, they’re in his domain, good old Julia Roberts.

A review of the security footage shows that Forty was jaywalking. Love’s teeth chatter. She tells me he got
eight jaywalking tickets.
Forty didn’t like to wait either; he
wanted it
now
, his career, his Oscar, even the goddamn crosswalk
.
There will be charges filed against Julie Santos and she says she’s going to move back to Boston. She says
she never wants to drive again and it feels like a bad thing, to move somewhere and kill someone immediately.

Nobody can believe it. I can’t believe it. I think about Julie Santos a lot. I find her on Facebook and Twitter and I could start a religion around her and God
does
have a sense
of humor; her last name is
saint.
I did not pray for this but I am allowed to rejoice in this. Nobody will ever know about what happened between us in the desert. Nobody will ever know
about our Taco Bell deals, his malfeasance. I am in Neiman Marcus and there are
two
tailors working on me at once because when you’re rich and someone you know dies, you go to
Neiman’s and you get a new suit.

Love sits in a chair with her legs crossed. She isn’t crying anymore.

“Is it awful if I say you look hot?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “You say whatever you need to say.”

She nods. I ask the tailors to give us a moment and they oblige and I go to her and mirrors surround us and everywhere I look, I see us. Just us. The third twin is gone. “I love
you.”

“I love you too,” she says. “I promise I’m gonna come out of it.”

“Take your time.”

“It’s just weird.” She stares at her Kleenex. “I don’t know how to not worry about him.”

“I know.”

“It’s, like, my go-to place,” she says. “What do I do? I worry about Forty. I mean, it’s not even so much about drugs, even though it seems that way, it’s
about being a
twin.
”

I tell her again to take all the time she needs and I promise to be here no matter what and she stops shredding her Kleenex and looks instead at me. “What would I do without
you?”

“Irrelevant,” I tell her. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She hugs me and she cries again and one of the numerous pins in my suit pricks me and I bury the pain and I savor the pain. He’s dead. Julie Santos killed him. After all this time, I
finally got a little fucking help from the man upstairs and I squeeze my girlfriend and I count my blessings. She pats my back. The tailors return and Love dries her eyes.

“You really do look hot,” she says.

The suit will be ready in time for the funeral. Milo is too sad to write a eulogy and Ray is in shock and I am the loyal boyfriend so I step up and I don’t just jot down some bullshit
about his sense of humor and his big, fat heart. Fuck, no. I write the fuck out of this eulogy and it’s right up there with
The Third Twin
and my kidnapping script, the one
I’ll volunteer to finish, now that he can’t because he’s dead.

Love and I emerge from the limousine and the carpet leading into the Beverly Hills Hotel is pink and green. Love says this was their favorite place when they were kids and they had their sweet
sixteen party here and she is crying again and I hold her.

“I’ve never been,” I say.

“Well,” she says. “We stopped coming here a while ago, I don’t even know why. We practically grew up in here. They have this soda fountain and we used to get
cheeseburgers and then we would stay in a villa and sneak out and run around in the garden.”

“You’re adorable,” I say, and I mean it. When we first met, I was uncomfortable. I thought all this shit with the palm fronds and the multiple bathrooms mattered. But childhood
fucks you up, no matter what it looks like. I see that now. The closer we get to having the baby, the less hostility I feel toward my parents. I don’t resent my mom for dumping me at Key
Foods anymore because I found warmth there. Poor Forty couldn’t find the warmth in here, this pink and green paradise, this
Beverly Hills Hotel.

Memories are all the same at their core; it’s just us trying to keep each other alive, the best parts anyway. We’re all pretending that Forty was a wonderful person and Love is
saying something about
Beverly Hills 90210
, abut Brandon and Brenda Walsh, how they used to call Forty the anti-Brandon.

Everyone who’s anyone is here. Agents, executives, producers,
Joaq
, and I am the one who Love holds on to, the one who has held it together, the one who will eulogize the man who
was like a brother to me. The lights dim. A video begins, a tribute to Forty and “The Big Top” by Michael Penn plays, the song that closes
Boogie Nights
, and there are pictures
of sober Forty and clips of drunk Forty and there is Forty skiing on the water and skiing on the mountains and he is laughing and he is a child and then he is an adult and then he is a child
again.

Life.

I cry. It’s important that I show emotion, I realize this, but it’s also genuine. The song has always moved me, the circus sounds, the applause, the blunt sadness and the fatality of
life, the way the song doesn’t end so much as it peters out. And now it’s
his
funeral song so it can’t be mine. Or maybe it can; maybe funerals are different from
weddings and people don’t remember them and talk about them, blow by blow. The Michael Penn orchestral dirge slows down and the song slips into silence. The lights come up. It’s my
turn. Love kisses me. I step toward the podium.