Hidden Bodies (27 page)

“It’s infinitely easier to deal with boat cops if Forty or I are there,” she said. “And if we’re not, you know, it’s harder.”

I am on my way back to shore after burying Delilah at sea, watching the weighted-down bag make its way to the center of the Pacific, far from the world she couldn’t quite fit into. I will
always think of her kindly, her unfulfilled potential, how she extended her arm for that blender that was just out of reach. She embodied the danger of aspirations and I will always wish she
hadn’t turned into a menacing fame monster.

I feel bad for her parents. I feel terrible for all the guys who genuinely offered their hearts. Mostly, I feel terrible for her. I picture Harvey showing someone Delilah’s apartment full
of her things and I sit. This one hurt. It did. LA consumes people. Able-bodied, intelligent people like Henderson and Delilah move here and turn into oversexed monsters and it didn’t have to
be this way. They both could have been a little kinder
.
I don’t feel so bad anymore. My body count in LA: one star and one star fucker.

I slide into the Marina at the thirty-degree angle. I don’t turn too early or too late. I learned so much this summer. I am a boater, a writer. The Donzi is in the slip. And then I hear
someone calling my name.

Love.

She is wrapped up in her hooded bathrobe. I am in last night’s clothes and it’s a good thing I’m already parked because now my adrenaline is going and my body is shaking. She
is not smiling and I have no idea how long she’s been here, if she saw me go out to sea with my bag, and return with nothing.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she demands. “You bail on me and go out on my fucking boat?”

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “I just went for a ride,” I say.

“Alone?” she asks. And fuck. My eyes scan the floor for blood but I’m good; no mug of piss here, nothing to see, folks.

“Obviously,” I answer. “Do you see anyone else here?”

I can tell by her demeanor that the answer is no, she does not see anyone now; she did not see anyone when there was someone to see. She doesn’t know what I did, that I cheated, that I let
Delilah into my bed, onto my body, that I put her out to sea. More secrets, more bad things, but I am safe.

“I’m kind of surprised to see you,” I say, and turn the tables.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” she says.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I wrote to you. I didn’t hear back.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I didn’t write back to you because I don’t write back to people who treat me like shit. I’m not a doormat, Joe.”

“Me neither,” I snap. “Did you have fun with your little friend Milo?”

“You mean my director?” she asks. “Because that’s what he is, Joe. My director. He’s not my boyfriend and he’s not the enemy and we’re in
business
together. Business that matters to me, goddamn it. Business you walked out on. Business that is
mine
.”

She trembles and I know. She didn’t fuck him and she didn’t dump me and
fuck
I overreacted. I fucked up. The Donzi shimmies and what I wouldn’t give to be on land.
Instead I’m on this boat, this vessel that belongs to her family. She gets to be the steady one, on the dock, entitled, land ho, and fuck me.

Love folds her arms. “Just throw me the fucking line,” she says, my teacher, my boss. I toss it to her and she ties a knot fast, so smooth, such a rich girl. I climb off the boat,
clumsy as all fuck. She stomps along the dock and onto the beach and I follow her onto the sand. Me, the follower.

“Love,” I say. “Let me just say I’m sorry. I know I have no excuse.”

“Joe, when something good happens to me and you
shit
on it . . .”

“I’m sorry,” I proclaim. I reach for her. She backs away. I say it again. “I’m sorry, Love.”

“It’s not enough,” she says. “You were
such
a dick, Joe. The second we got the green light, you turned into one of those dickhead guys who doesn’t like it
when his girlfriend gets attention.”

She continues to blast me. She says I let her down. I should have been a man and I should have congratulated her and I should have meant it. I should have expressed interest in the script and I
should have been up front about my
obvious jealousy issues
. I should have called her instead of texting her because that was
a bitch move
and I should have hung around the
neighborhood and waited for her after the show. All the things I should have done and we can’t go back in time.

“I know,” she says. “But do you get it? Do you get that it’s not going to be like this?”

“Yes,” I say, and I’ve never loved her as much as I do right now and I want the chance to be the good guy, the best guy, the talking guy. I want to clean my dick and scrub my
skin and start over. I love her too much to let this be the end.

“Love,” I say. “I am so sorry. You have to understand. You are right. I acted like a fucking douche.”

She looks at me. I beg her with my eyes and my hands and I am as strong as she is. I apologize again and again and something transforms inside of her and my hands and my eyes did the work that I
was unable to do with my dirty mouth. Love nods.

“Okay,” she says. “We’re okay.”

And somehow we are hugging and we kiss, just one kiss, a make-up kiss, a no-sex-yet kiss, and then we flop into lounge chairs. The fight is over and she tells me about Seth Rogen’s weed
and her costume fitting and that she has news.

“More news?” I ask.

“Forty and Monica broke up,” she says. “This was almost a record for him though. I mean, girls are like shoes for him, you know?”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She shrugs. “I know this will sound dumb but I really thought it was gonna stick. Because of the stupid
Friends
thing.”

“It’s not stupid,” I say. “It’s sweet. You want the best for him.”

She nods and checks her watch. “We should go get packed. The jet leaves at noon.”

I look at her. “
We
have to pack?”

She rolls her eyes. “Joe, come on. What do you mean? You think you’re not going?”

“You didn’t invite me.”

“Didn’t invite you?” She balks. “We’ve been seeing each other the whole summer and we practically live together. I don’t have to
invite
you. You
should know you’re invited.”

“Well, Monica said that Forty invited her.”

She rolls her eyes. “So? We have our own way of talking and our own thing. Why don’t you get that, Joe?”

I don’t know and Love says it’s going to be intense in Palm Springs. We won’t last unless I
communicate
.

So I try. “Okay. I guess I also wasn’t sure because of Milo.”

She sighs and now she explains her dynamic with Milo. They are best friends, to an extent. She uses the phrase
third twin
and she says it’s hard to talk about because it’s
friendship steeped in guilt. “I’m closer with him than I am with
Forty
,” she whispers. “I mean, do you know how wrong that is?”

“You can’t help who you love.”

“Milo and I both want the best for Forty. So when you see us together or whatever, I mean, no guy I ever dated liked it. I get it. It sucks. But we’re just friends.”

Love is essentially asking me to tolerate her bond with another man, a good-looking fucker she’s known for longer than she’s known me. It’s impossible, like snow in Malibu.
Absurd. But what can I do?

She takes my hand. “I wish we could stay here all day,” she says.

I want to fuck her in the sand but she says we have to pack. She stretches and pulls her robe tighter and I know her well enough to know that she is closing a door on this fight, that the war
between us was transitional.

Love blows a kiss to the sea. “Good-bye, ocean,” she says.

I stay for a moment longer, staring at Delilah’s giant blue grave. It would be impossible to find my bag in there and the permanence of decisions made at sea is bigger than all of us. The
wind whips, waves crash, and I head inside.

Summer is over.

BOOTS
and Puppies
is already on IMBD:
Best friends and former lovers Harmony and Oren are both engaged to other people. They
spend forty-eight hours together trying to learn from the past, live for the present, and decide on their future.
But
Boots and Puppies
isn’t a movie—it’s a FUCK YOU
to me and Love, a ninety-five-page torture chamber of increasingly graphic love scenes between Oren (Milo) and Harmony (Love). Spoiler alert: Harmony and Oren—the only characters in the whole
fucking movie—finally decide to get married when Harmony realizes that she needs to let go of the
white puppy
she rescued who keeps chewing on all her boots. FUCK YOU, MILO. Harmony
runs to Oren, who knew she would come to her senses. FUCK YOU, MILO.

On the jet to Palm Springs, Love asks what I think of the “script.” I deflect. I ask her when Milo finished writing it.

“This summer,” she answers. “He hit it out of the park, right?” I contain my rage. I will not let him win. Not when I’ve just gone to war for my relationship.
“Love,” I say, pointing to the script. “You’re not even a little offended by this?”

“Joe,” she says, definitive, as if she’d been preparing for this. “If you’re going to tell me that you think you’re a
puppy
, then I’m going to
tell you that you need a shrink. I am not Harmony any more than you are a puppy. Milo is not Oren. This is a
story.
A made-up story.”

“I know I’m not a puppy.”

“You are
not
a puppy.” She sighs. “And anyway, Milo started this script ages ago. He’s been rewriting it for a while. You know, Jake Gyllenhaal was going to play
Oren, up until the very last second. That’s how good the script is.”

I do not remind Love that he
finished
it after meeting me and I do not call bullshit on Jake Gyllenhaal. We land and I try to focus on the positive. Our fight is behind us, and
I’ve been wanting to go to Palm Springs. The desolate road from the airport snakes through a desert where the houses are giant UFOs from the sixties, spread apart, like dice rolled onto a
craps table.

“We’re shooting here and living here?” I ask.

“Yep,” she says. “How gorgeous is this house?”

“Striking,” I say, and I mean it in a bad way. The house is midcentury, ice cold, plastic and pink and orange and white, like a ceramic bowl of sherbet left in the middle of the
desert during an atomic meltdown, empty as Forty’s mind. We park and she knows I am disappointed and she pushes me.

“Sorry,” I say. “I just thought we were going to Palm Springs.”

“We are,” she says, her voice fresh with indignant attitude that only comes from being cast as a
lead
and studying a
screenplay
in a
jet
. “Milo is
amazing, getting us this house, right?”

I am sick of hearing that Milo is amazing. He isn’t. And this house sucks. We’re several miles from the hotels and the stores and the stuff I read about in
Less Than Zero
,
the stuff I wanted to see. My head started pounding the second we walked into this cold house and we’re only
three hours
into the day
.
I get the chills. It’s so hot
outside and it’s so cold inside. There is no ocean, no relief, no shabby chic sectional, no sand on the floor of the kitchen, no crunch, no texture, no depth.

But we
had
to shoot here because Milo is desperate to get footage of some something he calls “Indoor Coachella
.
” Coachella is a festival fashion show where people
dress up like hippies and pretend that Passion Pit is as good as the Rolling Stones. So the idea of taking that mess and shoving it inside a casino is loathsome to me.

Barry Stein nixes it right away. He says Coachella is too big of an insurance risk and Milo pleads with him. “I just need a night there,” he says. “I’ll go in guerilla
style, Barry. I just want those jagged lights, the feel of it. We
need
that flashback. And it’s not Coachella for real.”

“Yeah,” Barry says. “It’s more of a shit show. No is no.”

Milo sulkily moves on, and we “shoot” all day, every day. Milo karate chops the air at the end of every take, as if he never saw a Ben Stiller movie, as if he doesn’t know that
chopping the air is an asshole thing to do. I wish Ben Stiller were here. I wish anyone with a brain would come and take over.

While we shoot, I have to sit in
video village
, another misnomer; video village is not a village. It’s just a bunch of folding chairs shoved together in front of the monitors. I
have no purpose. When we move locations and relocate the village, I’m not even allowed to move my chair because I’m not
union.

It’s day four and “Harmony” and “Oren” are fighting because Harmony’s puppy ate Oren’s boots and then making up because they hate fighting and Love
kisses Milo
again and again.
I hate set. There’s too much clapping, and bullshit with nicknames. They call the second to last shot “The Abby” and the last shot “The
Martini” and the level of self-importance is unbearable. When my scripts get the green light, I won’t spend all my days on set. And when Milo begs to visit, I’ll say yes and then
I’ll “forget” to give his name to security.

“Cut!” Milo yells after they finish kissing for the thirtieth time. He grabs Love’s hands. “That felt
good.
Did that feel good?”

“That felt
great
!” she says. She bounces and I die.

It’s the little things that make you want to kill someone, the way Milo drinks
Diet Dr Pepper
and ties his Jewfro in a
bun
and lifts his shirt to show off his stomach and
wipes his glasses down even though they’re not dirty. Yes, Milo got glasses, and seafoam green Topsiders, and a navy blue Polo-style shirt with a popped collar, and didn’t I already
kill this guy when he was schilling Home Soda and fucking Guinevere Beck?

Milo calls
action
again and kisses Love. My muscles tighten. All I can do is eat and wait, eat and watch—and this is day four of
twenty-eight days
—and they’re
improvising the dialogue—bite me—because he just wants to mount her.