Hidden Bodies

by Caroline Kepnes

  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.

  25

  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. H
e 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.

  The guy at the counter smiles. “That’s thirty-nine dollars and eighty-two cents.”

  “Thanks, bro,” Forty responds. “Don’t forget our fire sauce.” He whistles. “Eduardo!” he hollers. “You gotta tell the brass that they need a tip option here. How am I supposed to tip you boys?”

  Eduardo laughs. “You funny, Mr. Forty.”

  Eduardo is probably Forty’s closest thing to a true friend and Forty takes out a hundred dollar bill and crumples it and pretends to sneeze and throws the hundred over the counter. The guy at the register has seen this before and he laughs and says what Eduardo said, what Forty likes to hear: “Thank you, Mr. Forty.”

  Forty nods and we go back to our booth and treat The Third Twin like it’s redeemable even as I kill his ideas and re-create it from scratch.

  “Take it to the desert,” I say. “The third twin is an interloper who shows up and fucks it all up for the twins.”

  Forty nods, hooked. You can tell he goes back and forth between thinking of Milo and himself as the third twin and I am suddenly so happy I am an only child.

  “Now, the twins have their lives set but this fucker messes with everything,” I go on. “He screws their women and messes with their jobs and yet it’s all fucked up because he betrays both twins and it turns out they’re not as close as they thought they were.”

  “Ah,” he says. “Act Two.”

  “And then eventually, the twins find a way to trust each other. They’re sure that it’s them, the originals, so they make a plan and they bring the third twin to Vegas.”

  Forty pounds the table. “Location shoot. I love it.”

  “But they don’t get there,” I tell him. Idiot. “They pull off the road and they knock out the third twin and leave him for dead.”

  “Fuck,” he says. “That’s dark.”

  “But then.” I grin. “Last shot of the movie, high above, you see the car pull over, and a body is thrown onto the side of the road.”

  Forty’s eyes gleam. “The third twin fucked them both.”

  I nod. “There’s your movie.”

  Forty says this could work and he tears into a packet of fire sauce and squirts it into his mouth. “Next up,” he says. “The Mess.”

  He thinks it’s Tarantino meets Nora Ephron in a classic kidnapping caper but I’ve read it and Forty isn’t a writer. He just likes to put names together. Of course it’s a Vegas story—Forty will do anything to go to Vegas—but the characters are all over the place and sometimes the kidnapper is the guy and sometimes it’s the girl and it jumps around. (Drugs.) But I can fix this; I’ll just replace it with my Fakers.

  He clicks his jaw and leans back in his seat. “Oh boy,” he says. “There is one thing I didn’t think about.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “Can we do what happens in the booth stays in the booth?”

  I nod. “Fuck, yes.”

  “Love got pissed about The Mess last time around. She thought it was about her.”

  Now I’m listening. I wipe my mouth. “Why did she think it was about her?”

  Forty sighs and pulls back the curtain. He explains that Love’s a relationship girl and she’s incapable of being single, which is why she married young and fast, married again. “And then after the Doc died.” He shakes his head. “Man, she was a wreck. Like, worried that she was toxic. If she’s not divorced she’s widowed and all she wants is to be with someone.”

  I don’t think she’s like that. Maybe she was. But she’s not anymore. “Uh huh.”

  “Anyway,” he says. “She swore she would never go out with anyone again unless it was gonna last forever. So I used to joke that the next time she meets someone we just gotta like tie him up and trap him in the Aisles so he can’t go away, can’t pull bad shit, can’t go to the doctor and find out he’s got cancer.” He laughs. “So anyhow, that’s sort of an inspiration point for The Mess.”

  “Wow,” I say.

  He smiles. “You’re freaking out.”

  “In the good way,” I say. And it’s true. I feel special. Love was hunting for something real and she found it and it’s me and it’s early and absurd and we’ve known each other a few days but fuck it feels good to be wanted. “This is all good by me,” I say. “I’d just as soon never date anyone but Love again, but please don’t tell her I said that.”

  “Of course not,” he says. “I would never. And I mean that both ways. I would never settle down in my thirties and I would never tell Love that I told you that she wants to settle down.”

  “So Milo . . .” I say, the itch that can’t be scratched. “There’s really nothing between them? I mean, nothing recent?”

  Forty sighs. “It’s all so boring,” he says. “You have to understand my sister. She is deeply, profoundly, erotically, supremely, wholly sexual.”

  I nod. “Okay.”

  “So if you mean to ask did they ever hook up, well, obviously, yes,” he says. “Back east, a hundred years ago, when we were babies. But I assure you, Old Sport, the girl does not love the boy.” He leans in and burps. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but Love only likes guys who are rough around the edges, ya know, wrong side of the tracks.”

  I can’t believe people still use that expression but before I can respond, Forty claps his hands. “Back to the good stuff.” Meaning business and he says that Plan B is all over him for a new draft of The Mess and this is LA where everyone is always making everything up, but I like the idea of being one degree of separation away from Brad Pitt.

/>   The food comes and the burritos smell like the gorditas smell like the grillers taste like the chalupas and I don’t know why we got so many different things when Forty’s intention was to smother all of it in fire sauce, an unsophisticated simple heat that drowns out whatever meats and cheese and veggies were defrosted and packed into these tortillas. The only saving grace is that we’re facing the Pacific Ocean.

  Forty eats like a starving orphan, giant bites that make his cheeks flare. He never makes eye contact while he describes, in vivid detail, his bungalow at the Bellagio, his gift for counting cards, his passion for the moment, and his adoration of the ’70s. It’s a truth that most people never want to own up to that some people were born at the wrong time. Forty would have been better off in the seventies, before AIDS and Twitter, when it might have been enough to have cool jeans and a great coke connection and a slight resemblance to Hopper, Nicholson, fucking DeVito. I feel extremely sorry for Forty because without a time machine, he will never be happy.

  We finish gorging and head outside to the Spyder. Forty doesn’t start the car.

  “Here’s the thing, Old Sport,” he says. He pops the glove box and pulls out an envelope. “I met a very kind black jack dealer this past week.” He lowers his voice. “I am flush and I am on deadline to get The Third Twin to my guys at Sony. And I can’t have you slowed up because of that day job you have.”

  He hands me the envelope. It’s full of cash. “I’m okay,” I say. I don’t want his charity.

  “It’s nothing,” he says. “It’s ten K I honestly forgot about.”

  He left ten thousand dollars in the glove box. Rich people. Stupid people.

  “Love is going to wonder where it came from,” I point out.

  He has an answer for that. “You’re dealing in books,” he says. “You’re a noble small businessman with an admirable work ethic and a solid start-up business. You are, therefore, the farthest thing in the world from a gold digger.”

  I’ve been waiting for him to use that phrase and I was going to keep working anyway because I am not a fucking gold digger. “I get it,” I say. “Right.”