Hidden Bodies (46 page)

I clap my hands and that’s when I see a flash of white linen, a bright yellow shirt and I realize the dog isn’t alone. The puppy yelps and the human throws something, an electric
green tennis ball. The human whistles and the human is female. I see her hair in the mist—blond, tangled—and I see her sharp shoulders and two long legs and

Amy?
Amy. Amy? Amy?

She scoops the puppy that was going to belong to me and Love into her arms. She kisses the puppy and then she looks up. She startles.

“Joe?” she says. She looks terrified, guilty. Time stops. I am in shock.

She holds the puppy too hard and the puppy fights and the puppy has claws and the puppy wins. She drops the puppy and it runs and she stands there, frozen, and this bitch fucked me. Stole from
me. Tricked me. Lied to me. Used me. She wronged me and the nice people in Rhode Island—Liam & Pearl & Harry & Noah—and I loved her. I loved her but she didn’t love
me.

Amy?
Amy.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, and she thinks she’s pretty and clever, tucking her hair behind her ear, pretending to trust me, but people don’t change and I see
her bracing to run. She doesn’t get to run away from me now the way she did then, not after what she did. She turns, hair flying, and instinct takes over. I spring forward. She runs but
I’m faster and I knock her to the ground. She screams and I clamp my hand over her mouth and look into the eyes I know too well.

She knees me in the groin and I react, loosening my grip, but I manage to grab her by the hair and pin her down in the sand. I cover her mouth again and she thrashes like a marlin and I
can’t believe that after all these months, Amy is here.

Her face has changed from all this sun, more freckles, smoother skin, longer hair, crusty mascara around her eyes, she was out last night. She is who I used to love. Who I used to covet. Who I
used to want to kill, but who I forgot to worry about after I fell in love with Love.

She kicks me again and I smack her face. “Don’t scream,” I say. “Understand?”

She says yes with her eyes. They are as bright as I remember, even in the mist. I take my hand away.

“Jesus, Joe, what are you doing?”

“Shut up,” I command. I clamp my hand over her mouth. “You are not to yell. Do you understand?”

She nods emphatically. “Joe, please,” she begins.

I’m still getting reacquainted with her face, how crazy human faces are, how noses are all so different, some bulbous, some pointy. Amy’s is aquiline. I used to love her nose. I used
to kiss her nose. Now I love Love’s nose.

“Joe,” she says. “About the money . . .”

“The money?” I can’t help it. It’s been so long, but it all washes over me again. The humiliation I felt when I found my computer in the cage, the keys I made for her,
the note in
Charlotte & Charles
. “How can you think this is about money?”

“Cuz I lifted the books,” she pants. “I can pay you back.”

“I don’t want your fucking money, Amy,” I say. “I’m not like you. I don’t give a fuck about
money
.”

“I get it, okay? I suck. But please, let me go,” she begs.

I hold her down. “You do suck. You’re a vicious empty cunt.”

“You’re acting crazy,” she says. “Let me go.”

I spit at her. She blinks. “Fuck you,” I say.

“Joe,” she says. “Please stop it.”

I tighten my grip on her neck. I should get it over with. I should squeeze the life out of her for all the things she
did
do. Instead I am allowing her to speak, to rail on about what
she did. “I took some books,” she confesses. “And it sucks and I know it. And I know it must have been terrible for you to find out. But you know, Joe. You knew I was in it for
myself. I know you knew.”

I didn’t know. And this is what hurts. I loved her and she did not love me. She doesn’t think it was real, she never did. My cheeks turn red. I need to kill her because she says
things like
we were just fucking
and
it was summer
and
I didn’t rip you off. I ripped off the shop.
She wasn’t in love with me and every time she promises she
can get me the money I know I have to kill her. She wasted my heart, my time. She begs me to let her go and she can get a
cash advance
and she can
get you anything you want
and
she is house-sitting and there is
art I could sell, like, a lot of art
and she is a commercial beast.

Beck never loved me either and if Love knew about this, the dark humiliating truth of it, that I love women who don’t love me back, I don’t know how I could look her in the eye. I
don’t know if I could go on, because the real horror of my life is not that I’ve killed some terrible people. The real horror is that the people I’ve loved didn’t love me
back. I may as well have been masturbating in the cage, telling the books about the girls because all the girls before Love, they were not there with me, not really, especially this one, this tall
blond cunt begging for her life and promising me that she can give it all back to me
every last penny.

“You don’t get it,” I tell her. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“Let me go,” she pleads, she squirms.

Everything in her tone and her language and her eyes seems confused. She’s acting like I’m some guy she knew and I’m looking at her like she broke my heart. But she’s
just talking about what a pain it was to sell books online. Does she really think this is about
Portnoy’s Complaint
, about Yates?

“What about everything you wrote in
Charlotte and Charles
?”

She swallows. “What?”

“
Charlotte and Charles
,” I snap. “You read it to me on the beach and a day later you run out on me and write me a letter in it and I want to know why.”

“’Cause it was in my bag from the beach when I went back to the shop,” she exclaims, and that is not what I was asking about.

“You read the book to me on the beach and you left me a note in the book and now you want to tell me you don’t
remember.
”

“Joe,” she says. “I told you. You were looking in my phone. I mean, you didn’t trust me either.”

“Why did you leave that book for me?” I ask.

She asks me to let her go. I ask her to tell me about the book. The air is cold and loud off the water and she groans again. “Because you’re so sad and lonely!” she says.
“Jesus, if this is it, fuck it. I give up.” She smacks her lips. She clears her throat. “Get off me,” she says. “Get off me and I’ll tell you.”

“No,” I say. “Tell me now.”

“I left you that book because I
did
feel bad,” she says. “You’re sad and lonely and you should be better at being alone. You’re just so fucking
depressed
and you wear it like a badge the way you sit in that shop alone and you’re so obviously desperate for someone to come in and change your life and it’s fucking
annoying. Like, take care of your shit. Pull yourself together. Stop being so self-conscious about your music and every little thing you say. I gave you that book because those giants are pathetic,
the way they can’t fucking deal with themselves and they expect everyone to be as decent as they are. They have no right to be shocked when the humans gang up on them. Like, that’s
fucking life. Get over it. You can’t go around expecting everyone to be like you. That’s the point.”

Her words sting. “If I’m so depressed and pathetic, then why did you date me?”

She rolls her eyes. “Joe,” she says. “The day we met, I was using my ex-boss-boyfriend’s credit card and you didn’t call the cops.”

“I’m not judgmental.”

“You have to see things as they are,” she says. “I mean, I didn’t try and fool you or anything. And you know, I was like, okay, this guy, he’s so cool with my shady
shit. He obviously has his own shady shit. There’s no way around it.”

“I am nothing like you.”

I hurt her, finally, and she shifts. “Well, congratufuckinglations,” she says. “Can I go now? I mean, come on. This is ridiculous. What are you gonna do,
kill
me?”

Amy Adam has no idea about me. She thinks I’m a lonely sad person with poor reading comprehension skills. She used me. She isn’t smart enough to love me or know me and suddenly I
feel sorry for her. She doesn’t understand that
Charlotte & Charles
is about the resilience of the human spirit, that happy people get fucked over and swim to another island and
buck up and go on again.

Amy is not a con artist and she’s not a conniving thief. She’s a sad, lonely girl. She carried a book around that she didn’t even understand and she wants the world to be like
a Richard Yates book, with sad endings. The only Philip Roth book she ever finished is
Portnoy’s Complaint.
She isn’t the girl I thought she was, talking to me now about her
boss, her dog-sitting, and I am not going to kill her.

In a strange way, Amy Adam is right. I
am
incapable of killing anyone right now. I have Love. I’m going to be a father. I have changed. I move off her completely and she wipes the
sand off her arms, off her shirt. She shakes her legs.

“Only thing about the beach,” she gripes. “Sand.”

From her end this was a lover’s quarrel and so we do what all former lovers do: We revisit our past together. But our memories are so different. I bring up that last night in Little
Compton.

“Remember our new best friends, Noah and Pearl and Harry and Liam?” I ask.

She is aghast. “You remember their
names
? How do you remember their names?”

She is not like me, not like Love. She is not burdened with a sensitive heart. Hers just beats. She laughs. “Remember when I busted you looking in my phone?”

I get a ripple of humiliation in my stomach. “Uh huh,” I say. “You were mad.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Paranoid. I had already put a couple books online and looked for a sublet out here. I was like
fuck
he found out.”

“Wow,” I say, and I think of
Match Point
, where Woody Allen reminds us that all the best tennis players are also lucky. Amy had a lot of Safari windows open on her phone
that day. I only saw the one with Henderson. If she had to wait in line, if she’d washed her hands more thoroughly, if she’d put on lipstick, I would have found those other windows. I
had bad luck with her. But then again, without her, I never would have found Love.

“I know,” she says. “I mean, I pitched a fit because I thought you knew what I was up to and you were gonna wanna
talk
and all that.”

She asks me what I’m doing in LA and I tell her I moved here because it was something to do, because it was time to get out of New York. She says she might move to Austin. I tell her it
seems like a lot of assholes talk about moving to Austin. She laughs. “You are funny,” she says. “You still got it, Goldberg.”

I feel nothing. I don’t yearn for what we had, the way all we could do was mock everyone else. I gaze at the ocean but I can’t see through the mist. She pulls her hair over her left
shoulder. Her neck is bruised, proof of my violence, a new mug of piss. My heart starts to beat fast and maybe I do have to kill her. I hurt her. I did this. And if I do away with her, I will never
have to worry about her ever again. She won’t be a loose end, another
mugofurine.
I could do it
.
She draws in the sand with her finger. That could be her last act as a
human. But then the tide creeps up on us and recedes, and the line vanishes, just like the redness on her neck will. Nature is an inherently forward beast; footsteps disappear, past hurts fade. I
won’t kill Amy. I will not remove life from this planet while Love and I are in the process of bringing life into this world. I’ve already confessed my past to Love and I don’t
want to confess my present.

I stand and I offer Amy a hand but she stands up without my help.

She asks if I’m sure I don’t want money for the books. I tell her I’m good and she smiles then turns and walks back into the mist. She keeps her head down and her arms crossed.
I sit back down in the sand where she lay, cool and wet, and I feel the weight go, as if she’s passing out of me every time I breathe, every time I blink.

I can’t tell you the specific moment that I can’t see her anymore, because she disappears in segments. First the mist takes her bare feet, then the back of her yellow shirt. Her hair
comes back to me for a brief spell, blond, tangled
,
and then it’s gone and then she’s gone, all of her, into the mist, almost like she was never here at all.

IT’S
so different being at Taco Bell with Love. She already has pregnancy cravings and wanted to pig out on enchiladas and gorditas.
Twins.
But we don’t order everything on the menu, just gorditas and two chicken tacos. She wants soda even though she feels bad about the sugar and I tell her we’ll start a
better diet tomorrow.

She asks me to pick a booth and I choose one by the window, far from the one where I always sat with Forty. She fills up our cups with ice and mixes a little root beer into our Cokes. “I
kind of love this,” she says.

“Me too,” I say. “Maybe we should get married here.”

“Did you just propose to me in Taco Bell without a ring?”

I nod. She laughs. She thinks she peed her pants and I tell her you don’t get to pee your pants when you’re a few
weeks
pregnant. We hold hands across the table. “So
will you?” I ask.

“Yes.” She smiles. “But don’t make me a ring out of a straw or anything, okay?”

“Deal,” I say.

We wait for the feast and we talk about the baby’s room and where to live and when to tell people. I tell her I think I want to write something, maybe even this idea I’ve been
kicking around about a ghostwriter called
Fakers
. She says she likes the title—fucking right, she does—and she says Forty could tell I was a writer the day we met.

We watch the cars go by on the PCH and we rehash the funeral and she says my eulogy was the greatest thing ever and she wants to watch the video tonight. “Is that weird?” she
asks.