Hidden Bodies (21 page)

“You ever have anything produced?” Forty asks.

“No,” I say, and it would be socially inappropriate to pull Milo by his shirt into the water and drown him. Instead, I play along. I tell Forty about an idea I have, where you would
show that part of
Love Actually
where Liam Neeson tells his stepkid that they need Kate and Leo.

“And then,” I say, hoping that Love can hear me, that she’ll leave Milo to see what she’s missing. “Then, they’re on the couch, only instead of showing that
scene from
Titanic
, you show the scene from
Revolutionary Road
where Kate and Leo are fucking in the kitchen.”

Forty cackles. Love doesn’t notice.

“That is genius. Old Sport, you need to make that.” Forty looks to see if Barry Stein has been eavesdropping but he hasn’t.

I shrug. “It’s just something I think would be funny.”

“You gotta think, it’s something that
will
be funny, Old Sport.”

And then Forty has to go
field some calls
and he leaves. Love comes over and sits on my lap. “You having fun?”

“Yes,” I say, and I am. With Love on my lap, I am calmer. I can love it here now that she’s not talking to Milo. The light in Malibu has power that you can’t buy on
Instagram. Everyone looks more alive than they did at Chateau, clearer yet grainier. The Aisles isn’t a home; it is a village and I wonder if any of the people who work at the Pantry know
about this place and if they want to get together and storm the gates. I can picture them all shrieking,
WE DON’T WANT LOVE
—
GIVE US MONEY!

Dottie says we’ve got to get ready for dinner and I didn’t realize time was passing. Love says that happens in Malibu. “Beach brain.”

Forty returns, iPad in hand. “Check it out, Old Sport,” he says.

And it’s like Calvin redux. I recognize the Funny or Die logo and I groan but Forty promises this is
gold.
The opening titles roll, followed by Liam Neeson and son in
Love
Actually
and my heart rate quickens—that’s my idea—and they’re on the couch, watching Kate and Leo in
Revolutionary Road
—my idea!—and the screen
rolls black and I see words I like, words that belong together, the way happily married people do:

Written and Directed by Joe Goldberg

Love is laughing and clapping and I hug Forty and shake his hand and thank him but he tells me not to thank him. “This was all you, Old Sport!”

“But I didn’t do anything,” I protest. “I just had an idea.”

“Bullshit,” he says. “You had an ending. Everyone has a beginning, but you are the guy who knew how it ended.”

He hands off
my film
to Barry Stein. A new life is possible for me and I see how it is possible to become infected with aspirations. I might be
discovered
like Mark Wahlberg in
Boogie Nights
before he fucks it all up. But Barry Stein calls my video
cute.
I seethe. Once upon a time in New York I was

Different, hot

And in Malibu according to that dirty old fucker, a purveyor of hokey, dated, prefab rom-comedies, I am

Cute.

It’s a buzzkill. The conversation drifts away from
my movie.
Barry Stein taps his cigar, then hands them out to Ray, Forty, and Milo. He doesn’t offer one to me. Forty picks
mint leaves out of his teeth and runs his hands through his hair. He is hurt; he didn’t like
cute
either.

“So I have this idea,” Forty says, and Barry says he needs to use the restroom and Milo needs to find his sun block and Love needs to help her mom.

I look at Forty. “Cute my ass.”

Forty smiles. “Right on, Old Sport, right on.”

He starts telling me about a script he’s working on and I want to believe in us and I want to believe this is the start of something. But Forty’s idea is terrible. In the
irredeemable, maybe-he-needs-a-shrink kind of way where you know there is no possibility of him ever having any kind of success as a storyteller. Love was right when she said their ideas are
terrible. This “idea” is called
The Third Twin.

“Not me and Love,” he says. “Two guys, identical, they both have tattoos on the backs of their hands from when they were babies and their mom couldn’t tell them
apart.”

It’s a special thing, when someone who can’t tell a story tries. First the twins are in their mid-twenties and they’re in Los Angeles and then he’s describing a scene on
a dark street in New York.

“And the title card smashes, boom,” he shouts. “
The Third Twin
.”

Oh God, we’ve only just begun
.
Love and Milo head out to the tennis courts and I am in the right place, in the wrong place. “I think you mean triplets,” I say.
“There can’t be three twins, but there can be triplets.”

“But that gives the whole plot away,” he gasps.

He runs his hands through his hair and somehow the screenplay moves forward and
we’re in Vegas
and
The Hangover
walks into Scorsese’s
Casino.
“You
feel me, Old Sport?”

No wonder Forty has never sold a script. I glance at his iPad where he has drawings and notes. Not all messy people are geniuses. Some are just messy. My heart breaks. “Vegas,” I
say. “Who’s getting married?”

He stands. He hoots. “You know it! Psychic! Instincts! Professor Old Sport!”

He looks around to see if Barry Stein is watching and Barry Stein is still not watching. On the court, Love allows Milo to drink out of her water bottle. Forty keeps talking and the
third
twin
emerges out of nowhere in the desert to kill the twin who’s driving to Vegas, trying to save his brother’s life and then we backtrack again. Forty forgot a
critical
scene.

“Joe,” says Forty. “Picture this. The third twin”—and JUST CALL IT A FUCKING TRIPLET—“dives into a swimming pool and we stay with him as he sees the
brightness above, the pool party, the music soaring from eight-tracks.”

“I thought the movie was set in the present?”

He doesn’t miss a beat. “Sometimes,” he says. “And other times we’re in the future. Or the seventies. It’s a nonlinear narrative.” Love whispers
something in Milo’s ear. “So the third twin emerges from the pool reborn. And this is when it gets scary. You ready for this?”

Dottie rings a cowbell and Love waves at me to come but she doesn’t wait for me when Milo prods her to go inside. I tell Forty we should follow and he looks at me.

“Dude,” he says. “I got cut.”

I raise my eyebrows. “You’re not in the episode?”

“My mom digs a celebration,” he says. “Everybody’s stoked. They’ll watch it, they’ll think they missed me. Everybody wins. I mean, I read for it, I could have
nailed
it but it’s just as well. First agent I ever had, he warned me. As a writer, it can fuck up your shit if you act.”

Dottie rings the bell again and Forty promises we’ll be there in
two minutes.
He says we have to run out to pick up a prescription for me and Dottie says we can send someone to do
that and Forty says it’s a
new drug
and Dottie sighs. “Be fast, boys.”

Forty and I walk to the embankment where the cars are all tossed around like hungover partiers. Forty says
eenie meenie minie mo
and he settles on his Spyder.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

He grabs the keys and revs the engine. “Mexico, Old Sport.
Meh. Hee. Ko.
”

We leave.

OF
course, Forty was being hyperbolic and we’re not
actually
going to Mexico. We are leaving a paradise of canapés and fish
tacos and
caipirinhas
to go to Taco Fucking Bell.

I picture everyone back at the Aisles in the screening room. I hope Love isn’t sitting on Milo’s lap and why does there always have to be a Benji, a Henderson, a Milo? Milo is going
to be a problem and when I Google him, it’s a string of irritating things, screenwriting awards, contributions to
Vanity Fair
, his
psychotically eligible bachelor
status in
Nylon
. I hate knowing that Milo
made it in Hollywood
and anyone who says he doesn’t get jealous is lying. We pull into Taco Bell and Love texts:
Are you on the way
back?

I read it out loud to Forty.

“Tell her we hit beach traffic.”

I look at the open road. “Seriously?”

“You’re right,” he says. “Tell her I’m being an asshole. She’ll know what that means.”

“Forty,” I say. “Maybe you should text her.”

“I’m driving,” he says as he pulls into a spot and turns off the engine. “Seriously, tell her I’m being an asshole. She’ll know what that means. It’s
all good, Old Sport.”

So I tell Love that Forty is being an asshole and she writes back
ughghhghhhghg
and says she will cover and we get out of the Spyder and amble across the parking lot into Taco Fucking
Bell. Inside, we sit at a booth and Forty tells me about his other script,
The Mess.
“It was on the Blacker List,” he says. “That’s a more top secret list than the
Black List.”

I look at him. “What’s the Black List?”

He laughs. “The best unproduced scripts in town,” he says. “And the
Blacker List
is the even better scripts. Only like
ten
producers get the Blacker List and
The Mess
made it.”

“Cool,” I say, and I wonder if schoolteachers in LA ever try to instill modesty in their kids.

Forty tells me that
The Mess
is about a kidnapping.

“Wow,” I say. “I’ve been working on a kidnapping story too.”

“No shinola?” he asks. He’s trying so hard, all the time.

I tell him we should read each other’s stuff and he says this is an
epic
idea and forwards me
The Mess
and
The Third Twin.
I scroll through my own stories in my
phone, the ones I write when I can’t sleep, when I think about her, about what the fuck happened, when I make like Alvy Singer and try to correct it all with my imagination. I tell Forty
about one of my favorite Amy stories, where we go away together and use fake names. Only in this version, I catch her in the cage while she’s stealing the books. I lock her up in there and
force her to become my slave.

Eventually she falls back in love with me and we keep using those fake names. We become friends with the people we ripped off in Little Compton, Noah & Pearl & Harry & Liam. Forty
calls it Stockholm Syndrome but he’s wrong; she was
hoping
to get caught.

“Ah,” he says. “Naughty girl. Nice again.”

This is why people like writing. You visit old friends without having to go on Facebook and see what they’re up to and deal with what idiots called FOMO. You make them into what you want
them to be, the people they could be if only they were braver, smarter.

“What’s this script called?” he asks.

“
Fakers
,” I say. “But at this point it’s really more of a description of a story than a story. I haven’t worked it all out.”

“Every story begins as a story,” he says, as if this makes any sense.
Hollywood.
He tells me to check out
The Mess
. “Great minds,” he says.
“
The Mess
is very much on theme with your
Fakers
.”

“You want me to read it now?”

“Send me your
Fakers
,” he says. He pops a pill. “I’m in no rush to go back to the fucking Aisles. Believe me, we’re not missing anything.”

“
Bueno
,” I say, because that’s what a dickwad successful LA writer like Milo would say.

We read. We both agree that our respective works are
genius
. Forty is
blown away
by my vision in
Fakers
and I give it right back to him. I claim to be impressed by
structure in
The Mess
even though
The Mess
is incoherent nonsense.

And this is when I know I’ve caught aspirations. Nothing good can come from them. I knew this before I moved here. Already, I have violated Mr. Mooney’s advice. I am not getting my
dick sucked. I fucked an actress. I swam in a pool. But I also know the way it felt to see those words on the screen of Forty’s iPad:
Written and Directed
by Joe
Goldberg.

I need Forty to get my foot in the door and show
Milo
how it’s done. I sure as hell need more than a
cute
Funny or Die video to put that pompous fucker in his place and I
read enough acting manuals to know that you don’t get anywhere here unless you know someone. Now I do. I know Forty Quinn. I tell him we could combine
The Mess
and
Fakers
and his eyes bulge.

“Super script,” he says. “Fuck yes. The bones are there.”

“Let’s do it,” I proclaim.

“Should we get our agents on the horn?” he asks.

Instead of admitting I don’t have an agent, I tell him we should wait. “Let’s make sure we have something great first,” I say. “We only get one shot
here.”

He slaps my back. “Wise move, Professor.”

We agree to wait until the scripts are
in the hopper
until we tell anyone, Love, agents, anyone, everyone. I don’t want anyone to tell Milo that I’m
trying
to do
anything. I want to tell that fucker that I
did
something. Also, Hollywood is stupid, so if our scripts don’t sell, then it will be like we never failed.

Forty slaps my back and we head to the counter. “Make it real with a meal,” he says, and I take in the menu: Doritos Locos tacos, gorditas, something called a
quesarito
that
was not concocted by an
abuela
in Mexico City but by a corporate scientist in the middle of America.

Forty starts talking
chalupas
with the stoner at the register. Then we go into the kitchen so he can introduce me to his
amigo supremo
, Chef Eduardo. Forty orders a ton of
food—
dos
loaded potato grillers and
tres gorditas
, one beefy five-layer burrito, and
all the fire sauce that you can spare.
While we wait for the bill, he reaches
into his pocket and takes a bump of blow and I am officially living in
Less Than
Zero.