She doesn’t dial 911. She looks at me. “But it’s not like they’re going to resolve anything. They’ll just throw you in jail and let you out a day later.”
“True,” I say. “But then, when you fuck up like I did, you deserve a night in jail.”
She still does not dial 911. I’m becoming human, becoming Paul. Her allegiance is shifting. “I know I should call,” she says. “As a citizen.”
In a neighboring apartment “Shooting Star” by Bad Company comes on, blasting. A moment later it disappears as suddenly as it started. We both laugh.
“Every morning,” she says. “Alarm clock.”
“That’s one hell of a way to start the day,” I say. “He lives alone, I presume?”
“He’s a she,” she says, and I’ve got her now; she’s opening up. I can see it happening. “Anyway, you’re right,” she says, and it’s an important sentence.
“I’m gonna call 911,” she promises, but no she isn’t. “This isn’t about you or me,” she rationalizes. “This is just what you have to do in these situations.”
“Yes,” I declare, unafraid. “It’s the right thing.”
She slides the unlock button on her phone. I watch her fingers, unpainted short nails. She enters her passcode. I listen to the neighbor trudge. She hits the number nine. She hesitates. I go in for the final swoop. “Don’t feel bad,” I say. “Believe me, I know I got myself into this.”
She stops pushing numbers. “What is your deal?” she asks.
And I win. Now I launch into my elaborate story. I tell her that a few months ago, my girlfriend cheated on me. During my first year of law school, which has been very stressful.
“Where do you go to law school?” she asks, and God bless women, curious, mysterious creatures, mutating from one mood to another.
“UCLA,” I answer, and now I get to the good part. I tell her that I was devastated and depressed and I went on Casual Encounters on Craigslist. “That’s where I met Lydia,” I explain. “And Lydia and I had coffee and she had this fantasy where she wanted me to show up and surprise her in her bed.”
“Ew,” she says. She sits on her sofa. “Does she live in this building?”
“She did,” I say. “Or I got the address wrong. But I would have to look at my phone. She had said that she only locks her door when she’s with someone, that I was welcome any time. Anyway, I know it all sounds disgusting. But your door was unlocked and I thought this was the place.”
She springs. She can’t believe she forgot to lock her door and she blames herself now. She hits her head with her phone. “I need to get better at living here,” she says. The air changes now. She’s all about herself, her own failure to lock the door after this guy left. She isn’t afraid of me anymore. She’s afraid of what would have happened if someone truly dangerous had shown up here. She tosses her phone on the sofa again and picks up her scissors.
“Hold still.” She cuts the resistance bands that bind my arms together and now we get to know each other. Rachel is a nanny. She was the head of the rape crisis center in college and she still teaches self-defense to women. I caress my wrists. “That explains your moves.”
Rachel works for a rich family and this apartment belongs to them, which is the real reason she didn’t call the cops. “They’re so paranoid,” she says. “If I called the cops and the cops called them, I mean, it would be a whole thing.” She puts down her scissors. “They’re kooky LA zillionaires,” she says. “You can tell how completely sexist and backward they are by all this Marilyn Monroe shit and all the fluffy rugs. It’s what an old man thinks a young woman wants, you know?”
“Well said,” I agree, still her prisoner, her yes man. “Are they famous?”
She says they are but she winces. “I signed a nondisclosure,” she reveals. “I can’t talk to friends or tabloids or anyone. My mom doesn’t even know who I work for.”
“Wow,” I say. “That’s crazy.”
“Eh,” she says. “Hopefully I’ll be outta here soon. Anyway, are you gonna call the Lydia girl?”
I don’t understand women in Los Angeles. The fearlessness. I could be anyone. I could have been lying—I am lying. I could be a pervert, one of the rapists she is trained to combat. Why is she smiling at me and coyly asking about my imaginary Craigslist hookup? How did she recover so completely, to the point of flirting?
“No,” I say. I rub my wrists. “I think this is a sign that I should lay low.”
“Right,” she says. “You’ll get out there when the time is right. I went to this amazing seminar on solitary expansion last month. Life-changing stuff.” She is such an alum; she graduated ten minutes ago and thinks everything can be solved by rallies and communication and banners and hope. She beams. “Coffee?”
I don’t want her to call the cops so I say that I want coffee. She directs me to sit on the sofa while she pours coffee grinds into an old-fashioned coffeemaker. She starts talking about herself. In addition to being a nanny and a self-defense instructor, she is an SAT tutor and she doesn’t understand rape fantasies.
“I did Women’s Studies at UCLA,” she says. “So many of the women who study that shit are crazy into rape fantasies. Explain it to me while I freshen up.”
She walks past me into her bedroom and she does not close the door all the way. I can see her as she moves around her room, trying on Victoria’s Secret PINK sweatpants and kicking them off and slipping into jeans and getting out of those too. And here I sit, waxing fake intellectual about rape fantasies and control issues and Craigslist. Nanny Rachel emerges in a tiny black cotton skirt and big fat UGG boots and a tiny gray half T-shirt. She’s wearing lip gloss. Lots of it. She brushed her hair. She sprayed perfume. She got dressed up for me. I broke into her home and found her in bed and she got dressed up for me.
“Well, I see what you mean about the thrill of giving up control, but I feel like I give up enough control every time I walk out of my apartment. In the bedroom, I want to be in charge. But I guess you figured that out.”
She pours coffee into chipped IKEA mugs that scream LOVE in all caps. Life is cruel and the word love shouldn’t be plastered all over the fucking place. She smells like cigars. “You look like a black coffee guy.”
I nod even though I want cream. “Thanks.”
She looks out her window at the middle parts of the palm trees. “I do love this place though. And the baby is easy. He doesn’t know he’s an asshole yet.” She sighs. “But the commute is awful. The family’s in Brentwood and Malibu and I was commuting from Eagle Rock so the dad was like, why don’t you stay here? You know how it is here, the way people are either broke on unemployment or giving out free apartments.”
“Cool,” I say. And I need to know if Amy lives here or if she pulled this address out of a hat. “So, do you have a roommate?”
“Not since I was in college,” she says.
Amy picked this address randomly. And because of that bitch, I came here, got beaten, tied up, and forced to drink bitter coffee out of a cracked LOVE mug. I tell Nanny Rachel I have to go. I don’t agree that we should exchange numbers. She looks crestfallen.
“Good luck with school,” she says.
“Thanks,” I respond. “Good luck with the rich folks.”
She laughs. “Thanks, Paul.”
I cross Franklin. I fucked up my chance at a brand-new life with Love and I take the long way around to avoid Calvin and I reach my building and Harvey’s not in the office. So there is a God. But Delilah is standing at my door and her arms are crossed and her eyes are narrowed and then she says it:
“I know about your problem, Joe.”
So maybe there isn’t.
22
THIS is not my lucky day. Delilah is pacing in my apartment. When I stood her up, I pissed her off. And unfortunately, she didn’t dive into a quart of Ben & Jerry’s. Instead she went on a research mission. She’s been obsessing about that night I stood her up. She won’t say what she knows, but she is building a cas
e against me.
“Explain that,” she snaps. “We had plans.”
“I know,” I say, placating. “It was Calvin.”
“You’re a grown-up,” she snaps. “You’re not ten. Don’t talk to me about fucking Calvin.”
“You asked me what happened.” I will my forehead to stop sweating.
“Your answer can’t be Calvin,” she says. “You have to take responsibility for your actions, Joe. Your actions have consequences and you ditched me and that was wrong.”
“I know it was.”
“Do you?” she asks, and here we go again.
She’s downloaded some app that will stop her from texting me in the future. But never mind about the app because I’m the one who led her on and she thinks there’s something up with me.
“There is nothing,” I protest. “I flaked.”
“You haven’t lived here long enough to use that excuse,” she says. “You’re supposed to be a New York guy.”
“Delilah,” I plead. “Can you please let this go?”
But she can’t. She has more to tell me. She knows that I told a bartender at Birds that I knocked up a girl. (I did but I didn’t.)
“It’s complicated.”
“That’s bullshit,” she barks.
“Delilah,” I say. “Can we not do this now?”
“Why?” she asks. “Do you have somewhere to be? Is it time for you to go freaking wander around the Pantry like a zombie?”
“I don’t wander around like a zombie.”
“Ask Calvin,” she says. “He’ll tell you otherwise.”
“You just said to leave Calvin out of this,” I remind her.
“Don’t change the subject.” She comes back at me, arms crossed. She says she found out from Calvin that I was at Henderson’s and that it was my idea to go to the party. “I know you were there. I have proof.” She shows me a video on YouTube and there I am in Henderson’s fucking kitchen. I want to erase the Internet. “Calvin said one minute you were there and the next minute you were gone. So where did you go, Joe?”
I forgot how small this apartment is, how thin the walls. She is trying to put me in a cage and I won’t let her. “Delilah, this is not cool.”
“No,” she says. “It isn’t cool to let me suck your dick and then turn around and shit all over me. That is not cool. And I wanted you to man up and explain to me why you haven’t been to work in several days and why you were at Henderson’s party when you told me how much you hate him. But if you won’t do it, if you won’t just tell me . . .” She trails off and takes a deep breath. She sits. She points at the floor.
I sit. “What?” I ask.
She rubs her hands together. She repositions, Indian style. She’s enjoying this. She wants this, whatever the fuck this is. “Look,” she says. “I know.”
I don’t say anything.
“I know.” She says it again and I don’t like it. I know.
She knows I don’t like this and she reads me well. She really is an investigative fucking reporter and her hand goes on her chin and her chin lowers and I wish she would disappear, into thin air. Poof. And depending on what she says next, I might have to make that happen.
She breathes in. “I know about your pill problem.”
Are you fucking kidding me right now? I exhale and unclench my fists and she has no idea she saved her own life just now. She sits by me and links her arm through mine and begins to act out some sort of rehab Rush fantasy where she can save me from my addiction. She strokes my back and talks to me about Promises and halfway houses and the craziness of LA. “Dez told me how many Percocets you’ve been buying,” she says. “And the way you disappear and wander, I mean, I put two and two together.” She blames the apartment. Brit Brit fell apart too in here. She stares at the Kandinsky. “We can get you better,” she says. “We can. You just have to want it.”
I need her to think she’s right and I tell her I want to do this on my own. “I think I need some time,” I confess. Ha.
She pats my leg, all business. “Do you have insurance?”
I tell her that I do and she says she has an idea and she leaves and returns five minutes later with a fucking board game. “Chutes and Ladders,” she says. “Sometimes you just need to like be a kid again, you know?”
I don’t know but I push the spinner and feign interest in her tedious anecdotes about celebrities and about the time that George Clooney “sort of flirted” with her. She swishes down another chute and the game is never ending and this is what you deserve when you fuck Don’t Fuck Delilah. I should have known it would come to this but I was a fool.
She wanted me to meet her mom and I should have gone and placated her. But stupid me, I thought I could fuck Delilah. I thought I understood her in a way that other morons in this building don’t, that there was nothing to fear because she’s incapable of loving someone like me. She’s a star fucker and a gold digger and while she claims to put on her Band-Aid dresses in the name of work, in the name of gossip, she is putting on these dresses because Nicolas Cage married a waitress, because Matt Damon married one too, because George Fucking Clooney promised his dick to a hot lawyer.
Even if I had shown up and met her mother and told her I loved her and bought her flowers for no reason and asked her to move in and started talking rings and babies, even then, it would never last. She would continue “working” and squeezing into dresses and going to Golden Globes parties and trying to spill drinks on people like James Franco—this is how Calista Flockhart got Harrison Ford—and she would leave me for James Franco if she got the chance.
But I did not see the whole picture. I was starved from not getting my dick sucked. I was paranoid because of Henderson and I was lonely and I didn’t see the loophole. There is something that Delilah loves more than famous cock: research. And she doesn’t know the real story, but she knows too much.
“My mom says hi by the way,” she sniffs.
I push the spinner. “Tell her hi back,” I say and I wonder if Love is awake, if Amy is alive.
She checks her messages and says she might be getting into an Ed Norton premiere tonight. She wants me to beg her to stay. I don’t.
She runs her finger along a chute. “So how did you get into Soho House?”
I look at her. “Huh?”
“My friend Ethel saw you there.”
“Who is your friend Ethel?”
“Just a friend,” she says. “She knows who you are. She’s seen you at Birds.”
“That’s kind of creepy.” I am being stalked. This is Fast & Furious and Delilah has her own fucking team and does she think she can trap me into being her starter husband, her pre-Franco fuck doll?
“Joe,” she says. “Where have you been these past few days? Were you on Skid Row?”
“No.”
“You need to tell me where you’re getting stuff,” she says. “I know it’s not just Dez because he didn’t hear from you these past few days either.”
“Delilah,” I say. “It’s not like that.”
“Then tell me who you were with.”
I look at the Kandinsky.
“Joe,” she says. “I’m trying to help you. But I can’t help you if I don’t know where you’re getting your drugs.”
She’s too smart. Technically, I should eliminate her. But if I were to bash Delilah over the head and go out and buy acid and reduce her body and dispose of it, I would attract the wrong kind of attention. Her parents would miss her. She’s been asking around about me so I would be a suspect in her murder. And then, when I find Amy, I will have a harder time killing her because I will be under suspicion. There’s no way around it: Delilah has to live. And the only way to get her off my back is to break her heart.
I pat the Chutes and Ladders board. “Delilah, I haven’t been completely honest with you. There’s someone else.”
She swallows. Her cheeks bloat or maybe they just turn red. I tell her I’m sorry. I tell her I went to Henderson’s party to see this oth
er girl.
“But she’s enabling you,” she pushes.
I shake my head. “The pills aren’t for me.”
She pulls away. “Then who are they for?”
“This girl’s mom,” I say. “She has cancer. Esophageal.”
Delilah closes the board.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Whatever,” she says, turning her back on me. I tell her I’m horrible. I tell her she is beautiful. I tell her it’s my loss. I hold her. I tell her I am a terrible person and I don’t deserve her. I tell her she is beautiful again. I tell her she is smart, she could run the world with her connections and her tech savvy. I tell her she is going to wind up with someone much better than me and this is when she hugs me harder. This is when she forgives me, when I tell her, without a doubt, that I will be knocking on her door someday, when she’s living in a big house up in the hills with marble floors and security. I’ll be wishing I was in there with her, but I won’t deserve to be.
“Okay,” she says. She shakes my hand. “Just do me a favor, don’t talk shit about me with Dez and Harvey and these other fucks. They’re all just horrible.”
“You got it,” I say. Delilah packs up her stalking devices—she has to go to the Polo Lounge to spy on someone—and when she’s gone, I find the YouTube video with me at Henderson’s. I look through the comments.
User AA212310 writes:
Murderer in the house right there
User AA212310 does not respond to any of the many people who have asked what she means about murderer.
Thought it wuz suicide
Do u know something????
Was he killed?
Thought it was orgy
I will not fixate on the fact that the username contains the initials AA. AA means Alcoholics Anonymous and AA could be anyone and it’s absurd to think it’s Amy when Henderson has millions of fans, many who are deranged, possibly in the AA program with time to spare to go on YouTube and comment. I will not think about Delilah reading these comments, wondering, investigating. I will not fall down the rabbit hole. I did not get caught. I am fine. I am free. The only thing I ever got caught doing is jaywalking.
Hidden Bodies Page 14