Hidden Bodies

by Caroline Kepnes

  I take the bottle. I can’t do it myself. I can’t reach my back. The thing about a true sunburn is there is no quick fix. I lie on my belly and Love puts a sheet over me and kisses the back of my head. She says she’s gonna go change.

  “Change?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I have a meeting.”

  “About your charity?”

  She scruffs my hair. “About a movie.”

  “The one you and Forty were working on?” I ask, and I don’t like this.

  But she doesn’t have time to change her clothes or her attitude or answer my question because Milo is here, whistling, in a Black Dog Martha’s Vineyard T-shirt and it’s like he knows New England is my hate place, where Beck was born, angry and unsolvable, where Amy fooled me with Charlotte & Charles, where Love lost her virginity to Milo, undoable and indelible, a cherry popped on old sand.

  “You sick, buddy?” Milo asks as he hugs my girlfriend.

  “He forgot to put on sunblock,” Love says. “Also you’re early, Mi.”

  “Sorry,” he says, and he looks at me and winces. “Hey, you should put some aloe on that.”

  “I did,” Love says. “But it’s that burn where all you can do is wait.”

  They’re both standing over me and even though it hurts, I have to tear the sheet away and sit upright on this fucking chair. My own skin burns me, a localized panic attack on my largest organ. “It’s not so bad,” I say. “What’s up, Milo? Where’s Lorelai?”

  “Lorelai’s on her way to New York to go to a wedding in the Hamptons,” he says.

  Love nudges him with her foot. “You should go,” she says. “She seems like a good one.”

  “She is a good one,” he says. “And I had every intention of accompanying her. Who doesn’t love a Hamptons wedding?”

  Me, fucker, and Milo pulls something out of his pocket. It’s a piece of paper folded up into a tiny triangle. He passes it to Love, who takes it and laughs. “This is so old school,” she says. “This is how we used to pass notes.”

  Milo eye fucks her as if I’m not here. Shameless interloper, and I imagine a pack of black dogs ripping into him, eating him alive.

  Love unfolds the note and she is quivering and I remain invisible. “Omigod omigod omigod!”

  “I take it that’s a yes.”

  She runs to him barefoot and straddles him and he’s spinning her around and I’m sitting here in splitting pain and somehow Forty is sleeping through all this. I refuse to ask to be let in on the conversation and Love pats Milo’s back and he puts her down.

  She comes to me and takes my hands. “Joe,” she says. “Joe Joe Joe Joe Joe.”

  And then she kills me. The news is disgusting. Milo got funding to direct a feature he wrote and he’s going play the lead opposite Love.

  “What’s it called?”

  “Boots and Puppies!” she announces.

  “Ah,” I say, because I am too shocked to say actual words. All this time she was searching for news about Milo’s movie. She loves boots and she loves puppies but she loves Milo’s movie more. Milo is the Third Twin, smug as fuck. I wonder if he got her first husband thrown in jail and I wonder if he was in a wetsuit, waiting underwater to murder her cancer-stricken doctor husband. Forty is waking up, yawning, going for the Veuve. Milo is a bad guy. And wait. Love is an actress.

  “I’m so confused,” I say. “You’re gonna act?”

  Milo lights a cigarette and relocates his Wayfarers to the top of his blond Jewfro. “Love is an amazing actress,” he says. “But she’s not for sale, you know? We know she’s too good for that. But this is our baby. Boots and Puppies is ninety-five pages of straight-up sex and conversation. It’s gonna change movies. It’s a horror movie without any blood. It’s about the sanctity of the human heart. It’s the kind of stuff they used to make movies about. Barry Stein says it’s like The Big Chill only in this case, the dead body is sort of us, you know, as a society. ”

  The level of bullshit, and I look at Forty—our movies have plots—but he’s on Team Milo. He plays along and very quickly I know why. Forty says he had no idea that he would be brought on as a producer and he high-fives Milo and Milo says the script wouldn’t be as good as it is without his insights and I want to kill everyone and my skin, on top of all this, my skin. Love wraps up in a beach towel, as if she needs to cover up suddenly. Already she is different, self-conscious, a simpering actress, overthinking her words, pursing her lips. My Love sounds like a fucking asshole as she simpers, “Our perfect little baby.”

  “Where are we gonna shoot?” Forty asks, clapping his hands.

  “We nabbed a great house in the Springs,” Milo says.

  Forty says nice and Love is awestruck. “It’s real,” she says. “It’s really real.”

  My skin burns and my heart burns and the three of them talk more about the movie as if I asked. Milo started writing it when they were at Crossroads and you can love someone all you want, but you can’t go into her past and become a part of her formative years. Boots and Puppies is the baby Love and Milo are going to make together while I sell old books.

  Monica appears, hair blown out same as ever, stomach taut, same as ever. Forty tells her the good news and she is predictably stoked. She and Forty pop two bottles of champagne and Forty is also stoked for his buddy and it’s a celebration and I’m relieved that I’m sick. At least I don’t have to fake it. Love feels my forehead.

  “I think you have a fever, baby,” she says. “Classic sun poisoning. You should go lie down.”

  Love the girlfriend would want to go with me; Love the actress wants me out of here. Forty offers me some Vicodin and Milo agrees with Love, saying I should get out of the sun. He means that I should get out of this world, their life.

  Love is impatient with me, leading the way up the stairs, prattling on about her identity, how she’s not an actress-actress and the movie’s not a movie-movie. “It’s the kind of story nobody in Hollywood tells anymore,” she says. “A really small love story.”

  Love story. “Great,” I say.

  She crosses her arms, classic California cold. “You don’t seem all that happy for me.”

  “Of course I’m happy for you, but right now mainly, I feel like I’m gonna puke.”

  She winces. “Don’t hate me, but it would be so great of you to do that in the bathroom,” she says. “This guy puked in my old bed once and the smell never really went away.”

  I’m gonna let that one slide. I promise to vomit in the toilet and she tells me to rest and take a cold shower if I can stand it. She says she’ll check on me in a little while when I’m not Sick Boy, the debilitated obligation upstairs. I listen to her trot down the stairs. A few minutes later, Boots and Puppies arrives in my inbox, a readonly PDF, and the party outside begins and the first song to start it all is “Boys of Summer.” I can’t read Boots and Puppies in this frame of mind and I have another new e-mail: a Google alert for a holy fuck, no article in the Boston Globe. Everything is falling apart at once, my skin, my life, my love, and I am prostrate on a bed I don’t own.

  I open the link and there’s a picture of Dr. Nicky Angevine. Prison agrees with him. His hair is short and he’s a little thin, but toned. Dr. Nicky tells the reporter that his work as a therapist prepared him for incarceration—bite me—and the article goes into great detail about his ongoing pursuit of an appeal. Dr. Nicky says the authorities have tracked down all his patients except for one man whose name they can’t print in the paper for reasons of confidentiality and fuck me. They’re looking for me. Well, they’re looking for Danny Fox, the name I used when I went to talk to Dr. Nicky in his beige office and sat on his beige couch. But it’s me all the same. I read on.

  The facts are disturbing: NYPD cannot locate this former patient. Dr. Nicky tells the paper that Patient X was a good kid, a real kid, late twenties. But he also says some cunty shit about me. He says I was obsessed with a young woman. And then I read the worst sentence I have ever read in any newspaper:r />
  Dr. Angevine concedes that he is not a detective. “But I do wonder,” he says. “Did Patient X find me through Guinevere Beck? In my gut, I think he did.”

  Dr. Nicky—the paper can fuck off, he’s not a real doctor, he’s an MSW—has done pretty well for himself. A lot of his patients are getting together online, trying to find Patient X, convinced that Dr. Nicky is innocent. His ex-wife is on his side too, telling some bullshit story about how Nicky “nurtured” tomato plants in their garden upstate and never could have killed someone. Fuck you, wife.

  And fuck doctor-patient confidentiality, because in the thirty-two comments below, some asshole named Adam Mayweather reveals that Patient X went by the name Danny Fox. And this, this is why you have to kill people. If you don’t, they don’t learn anything. They just reemerge, more muscled, more manipulative, more hell-bent on taking you down, maneuvering reporters into furthering their agenda. Fucking Boston Globe and fucking Danny Fox, I should have refused to give a last name. I leave the computer and run into the bathroom and splash cold water on my face. I vomit. I stay there, slumped. Love comes into the bathroom and kneels down behind me.

  “Poor, sick baby,” she says.

  “Nah,” I manage. “I’m fine. Just a sunburn. How are you?”

  “Is it awful if I say I’m great?” she asks. Her voice is different and I don’t like it. There’s more Kardashian in there. “I just feel like yes, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I say. And this is how summer love crumples. How it deflates like a helium balloon in a hospital.

  She kisses the back of my head then retreats. She says she doesn’t want to get sick, as if I’m contagious, as if you can catch a fucking sunburn. “You have to feel better by tomorrow,” she says. “There’s a tribute to Henderson at the UCB and we have to get people hyped on Boots and Puppies. Do you feel like you’ll feel better by then?”

  My girlfriend Love would have wanted me to feel better because generally, if you love someone, that’s what you want. But actress Love is like the fashionable cunt Andrea who drinks the Kool-Aid in The Devil Wears Prada. I don’t like this new Love. Do you feel like you’ll be better by then? Fuck that question. Fuck the way she’s standing in the doorway instead of stroking my back. I vomit.

  28

  I insist on driving to Henderson’s memorial. Love fights me. She wants us to have a driver but I say I want to take my car and of course I need a car. Oh, there’s more good news. Fucking Milo is with us because they’re bonding because of Boots and Puppies. As if they aren’t already bonded, as if she didn’t lose her virginity to this fucktard sitting with his legs spread in the backseat. They’re both back there, as if I’m a Lyft driver, as if I’m the servant, and every time I glance at them in the rearview mirror his knee is a little bit closer to hers.

  Monica’s riding shotgun. She’s psyched and I can’t imagine her enjoying UCB humor, getting any of the jokes. She wears too much makeup and she’s too athletic for the Franklin Village UCB crowd, where the idea is that girls have messy hair and patterned leggings and long tongues they stick out in pictures for Instagram. I don’t miss the Village. I don’t want to go back. Everything is wrong and I ask Monica why she didn’t ride with Forty.

  “He had to do some stuff,” she says. “And I needed to get ready.”

  She always needs to get ready and Forty had to pick up drugs and Monica sprays foundation onto her cheeks and Love bonds with Milo and the car smells like Monica’s makeup. Everything is wrong. To think of Dr. Nicky amassing an army behind bars in Rikers and me, escorting this group to a goddamned Henderson tribute. I crack my window to get a little air and Love asks me to roll it up.

  “Hang on,” I reply.

  Milo chimes in. “Joe, it’s really windy back here.”

  I want to ram this car into a truck. “Hang on,” I say, fussing with the button.

  “I’m good with whatever,” Monica says. Typical valuable fucking contribution.

  Love laughs a new laugh, her actress laugh. “Well, I have fall hair.” She giggles. “Joe, please shut it now.”

  “Your hair does look cute,” Monica rejoices. Monica’s hair looks the same as always and the three of them are in it together now, talking about hair.

  I finally get the window shut. Love doesn’t thank me. She looks at Milo. “You don’t think it’s too done? I feel like it’s an obvious blow-out.”

  “I feel like she might have gotten a blow-out,” Milo responds.

  Monica nods. “I feel like it could go either way, like you can do that yourself if you follow directions from Allure or something. I can send you some videos!”

  They’re all idiots and Milo says he’s gonna do character breakdowns of the characters’ favorite books and magazines and Monica loves the idea and Love says it will be fun and I am the quiet one, the silent driver, I may as well be wearing a fucking chauffeur cap. Milo slyly manages to cut Monica out of the conversation by running over the game plan for pimping the movie tonight and I wish I could think of anything to say to Monica but she’s already taken off into her phone, chatting, and I can’t think of a fucking thing to say to her anyway.

  I’m not going to survive this ride and I turn on the radio and Love asks me to turn it off. “Sure,” I say. “No problem.”

  “Joe,” she says. “Are you pissed about something?”

  “Not at all,” I say.

  Milo: “You know you didn’t have to drive.”

  Love: “He insisted. I don’t know why.”

  “I like driving.” I catch Love’s eye in the rearview. She has on so much eyeliner. She looks like a stranger.

  Milo squeezes Love’s knee. “It’s okay,” he says. “We all got this. Right, Joe?”

  I almost want to laugh. But instead I just smile, big and juicy. “You know it, Milo.”

  We hit traffic and I will not let any of it get to me. Los Angeles is a giant high school cafeteria sometimes and I survived real high school. Surely I can deal with my girlfriend morphing into a mystery bitch and icing me out.

  It’s not like I want to participate in their conversation anyway, the two of them droning on about how sick of Malibu they get every year, how they can’t wait to get back to civilization and restaurants and awards show seasons and steakhouses and shows at the Roxy and the UCB. But if Monica had manners, she would stop texting and engage with me. She would quell the pervasive atmosphere of rejection overwhelming me in this fucking car and then maybe if I were lost in conversation with her, Love would get jealous and want to join our conversation. But no. Monica fucking texts. Love and Milo talk and I interrupt them and tell Love that I have some great Pantry playlists but she says she’s gonna turn on some Steve Miller Band through her Bluetooth.

  “Why Steve Miller Band?” I ask. “It seems so random, like someone passionately demanding a grilled chicken sandwich.”

  Nobody laughs at my joke and Love says she loves grilled chicken sandwiches and there’s a scene in 2012 when Amanda Peet is in a grocery store during an earthquake and the floor splits and this is how that is. Love is more distant with every eighth of a mile. No wonder the divorce rate in this industry is so high.

  Soon we pull off and we’re on Franklin and it’s the same old gas station and there is the same old Scientology Celebrity Centre and there is the same old Franklin Village and Love pouts when I hang a left onto Bronson and drive toward the canyon.

  “You don’t want to valet?” she asks.

  “I’d rather park myself,” I say.

  She huffs. “Look, if you need cash for the valet, I have it.”

  Milo bites his lip and if this scene winds up in anything he ever writes, I will kill him. Monica is still ignoring all of us, choosing the people in her phone. I veer into a spot, like the scrappy, rough-around-the-edges villager that I am. Love yelps, overreacting, lurching. Oh, please. Love can’t get out of the car fast enough and I tell Monica it’s time to go and she is confused.

  “We’re here?” she asks.

&nbs
p; Love smiles at me like I’m a third cousin she hasn’t seen in years. “So,” she says. “You must be excited to reunite with your friends from the neighborhood. Or wait, are they all stuck working?”

  “They wouldn’t be into this kind of thing,” I say.

  She links her arm through mine, halfheartedly. “I might be able to get some SRO tickets,” she says. “That means Standing Room Only.”

  I pretend to sneeze and pull my arm away. “I know what it means,” I say. “I’m from New York.”

  “Oh, I know,” she says. “There’s no forgetting that.”

  We walk in silence. And I won’t be seeing my four fucking friends. I learned online that they’re all pretty busy. Calvin got a DUI and he’s working crazy hours. Harvey Swallows got throat cancer and he’s trying to embrace the humor and the irony. Dez is having a party for his dog, Little D. Delilah is doing on-air coverage for some wannabe Entertainment Tonight kind of show on a network I’ve never heard of.

  We are almost at Franklin when Love tugs on my arm. “Are you mad at me or something?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Then why were you such a dick in the car?”

  “Why was I a dick?”

  “Don’t make it about the word,” she says. “You know what I mean.”

  “Love, you’re the one being a dick.”

  “Very mature,” she says. “Look, something is just fucked up and you’re shutting down and it’s bullshit and I can’t take it right now.”

  “So don’t,” I say.

  “You’re still gonna try and tell me you’re not being a dick.”

  I shrug. Forty’s up ahead on the corner, waving to us.

  She sighs. “I don’t have time for this.”

  “For me,” I say. This is happening so fast and her eyeliner looks like war paint.

  “Joe,” she says. “This isn’t good.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “It means I have so much pressure on me right now and you’re adding to it instead of helping me.”

  “I’m adding to it,” I repeat. I want to throw her over my shoulder but she doesn’t want that anymore. She doesn’t want me anymore.