Roosevelt was a puppy they had when they were babies. Forty named him. She didn’t know why then, doesn’t know why now. “He’s weird that way,” she says, as if he’s still alive. “I mean, what six-year-old calls a puppy Roosevelt? And also, it’s not like he was precocious and into politics or whatever. He just liked the word Roosevelt.”
“It’s a good name,” I say.
She ignores me. “Anyway,” she says. “Roosevelt disappeared. And we looked everywhere and put up signs and all that. But then Forty woke me up in the middle of the night and he took me outside and showed me that Roosevelt wasn’t missing. He was dead.”
“Oh dear.”
She looks at me. She holds my hands. Now she is the one who’s not blinking, staring at me directly. “He tied Roosevelt to the wall,” she says. “He was mad at him because he kept wanting to sleep in my room instead of Forty’s. So he punished him. He starved him and muzzled him.”
“Love,” I say. I’ve never harmed an animal; I can’t imagine being that sort of monster. “Jesus Christ.”
She takes her hands away. “You have no idea what it is to be twinned with someone who does things like that.”
Her voice quavers when she says things like that and Roosevelt is not alone; there are other crimes, I’m sure. “Love,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”
“So it’s like this,” she says. “I love that fucking sicko. I know he is demented and I know he tied a dog to a wall but you know what? I didn’t tell anyone. And you know what else? Fuck that dog for ignoring him. Fuck that Monica for bailing on him for that loser friend of yours and fuck all the girls who act like there’s something defective about him, who don’t even pretend they want his money. Fuck my parents for not even pretending to think he’s talented and fuck Milo for being better at everything. Fuck everyone who’s, like, who was born first, you or Milo and fuck people who are never surprised when I’m like, I was born first because they’re like, of course you were, you seem so together. Fuck everyone, Joe. I mean, I will defend my fucked-up brother all day long because life isn’t fair. It isn’t. Roosevelt cried when Forty tried to hold him and Forty was the one who wanted Roosevelt in the first place. Who makes a world like that? Where you can’t hate anyone because ultimately everyone has some god-awful fucking thing they put up with and you have no way of knowing what it is exactly. I mean he’s got to be Forty but I’ve got to be his fucking sister. Who has it worse?” She shakes her head. “Tell me. Who has the right to hate anyone?”
Love is breathing heavily. It’s clear she’s never talked about this to anyone; you know when someone is opening up a box so private that there isn’t a key.
She looks at me. “All I know is how to love,” she says. “So I can deal with you.”
“Ouch.”
She takes my hand. “That’s a compliment,” she assures me. “This is why I hate it when people keep getting married like it’s so simple. It’s not. Finding someone who gets you is special.”
I kiss the back of her hand. “What kind of dog was it?”
“Golden,” she says. “Roosevelt was a golden.”
“I love you, Love.”
“I love you,” she says.
I flinch when a car brakes outside, the screech. I’m still nervous, still can’t quite believe it.
She smiles. “Look, Joe, I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t know that it might be bad.”
“Bad,” I repeat.
She squeezes my hand. “This is it for me. In this messed-up way, I feel like this will work. You did all those awful things, but you also fell in love with a person who can forgive you.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I say, and I think of six-year-old Love staring at that dead puppy.
“Joe,” she says, and my name belongs to her now. There’s more. She says she knew when Trey died that if she ever found anyone again, it would be forever and she looks at the floor and then she looks at me. “I’m pregnant.”
Did I hear that right? “Pregnant?”
Yes, I heard that right. “Pregnant!”
Now there is permanence between us and it means her forgiveness is whole. True. If she were afraid of me on any level, she would have run out of this room and never told me about the baby, our baby.
And then it hits me. We’re gonna have a baby! We’re laughing and I’m kissing her belly and she’s telling me about taking the test—it’s early—and she had to come tell me in person and she’s glad she did.
“Me too,” I say. This baby is great equalizing force between us, the definition of the future. No matter what I did, a part of me is inside of Love. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world and Love and I are fixed, locked together, our genes intertwining, a little human, part me, part her, wholly triumphant. Watching Love doze off, I feel love like I have never have before.
“Sweet dreams,” I say, and I kiss the place between Love’s slumbering breasts, the hardness above her heart.
I go into the bathroom and turn on the shower and the cramped stall feels larger to me somehow. The whole world feels bigger now that someone else knows everything, someone who loves me. I understand why Peach Salinger was in such a dark place. Beck knew her. She did not love her.
I turn off the shower and tear the curtain aside, but I when I try the door, it is stuck. I didn’t lock it and it locks from the inside and I don’t understand. I push the door but it won’t budge. Alarm bells go off and I try the knob again but the door is clearly blocked from the outside. I panic. I bang on the door. I call out to Love and hurl my body against the door. No answer. She trapped me in here and she probably invented Roosevelt and our baby and all that empathy just so she could safely get away from me. It worked.
49
I am a monster now. I live in the white, tacky bathroom and I am a monkey on steroids. I know I can’t get out but still I pound into the door. I use my body and I am bruised. I am blue. I am black. I am swollen. When my ribs won’t stop stinging I use my feet. I kick. I have broken the shower stall and I have torn the lid off the toilet. I have screamed help and it’s a shitty motel and someone must hear me. The people below, if there are people below, they don’t care. I run the shower and the water and when it’s cold it stings my wounds and when it’s hot it scalds me. There is no love for me in Little Compton and I knew this going in and that’s the thought that drives me to my feet, which are streaked with blood. I slam into the door. Bad Joe. Gently, Joseph, Mr. Mooney used to caution me when I was a boy, when there was hope. Was there ever hope?
I don’t know. Bam goes my torso and that time I think an organ moved. I will not use the shattered glass from that shitty mirror to kill myself. I want to go out with a BANG and I drive my other side into the door. The door is my enemy, stronger, more powerful, always ready for me, always locked, always hard, always NO. I breathe. I do cry.
There is no baby. I know that now. The Corinthians tell you that love is patient and kind, but Love is also smart. She is older, wiser. She was married twice. She knows things. She knows men. She knew how to win my trust. And now she is with the police.
I’m stupid. I teach and I teach and I test and I test, and yet I’m the one who never learns. I choose wrong every time. I see my mother in her Nirvana shirt, the one Beck is buried in, and somehow it is there, the way you can do that in a dream, in a nightmare. BAM. I hurl myself into the door and my mother is only betting five dollars at the five-dollar minimum blackjack table in Florida, New Jersey, does it matter where? She is laughing and she likes Forty and he is laughing and I did this. I came here. I told Love all of it and now I don’t get to have love and I don’t know how to stand. My feet don’t work. Bad feet. Bad Joe. Gently, Joseph. I jiggle the handle. I slap the handle. I can’t break the handle. I try. I pull. I push. I fall back and hit the toilet and I flush it and I listen to the water go away and come back and I am not like that. I am not coming back from this.
I breathe and I see Beck, in the ground, smiling, clawing her way out, the Mona Lisa,
smiling, can a skeleton smile? Does it matter? She says to Amy omigod I need a drink, that was so crazy, I need to tweet that shit now. She is gone into the woods and I am here in the bathroom. The ceiling has a yellow stain. I can’t reach it. I tried.
I am not going to leave the bathroom. I am not going to be a dad. I am going to die in here because I was dumb. I believed her. Don’t date an actress, Mr. Mooney said, and Love is an actress. I wonder if she recorded me and I wonder how I sound and I wonder how long it takes to die and I liked it better when I was BAM going into the door but there is so much pain now and it’s hard to move. My skin is the sky in a storm, squalls of black and blue and white, and the red is hot and I know it’s the end of the world. I close my eyes. I bleed for Little Compton. I am nobody’s father. I am a killer and I’m going to jail and there is no love in my life, not anymore.
Will they let me watch The Third Twin and The Mess in prison? Will Mr. Mooney give me advice? Will they let me choose where I see my time? Will they put me in the electric chair and will the food be as bad as it looks in Locked Up on CNN? Will I work out or get scrawny? Will I be in Wikipedia? Will they give me a nickname in the media? JoeBro? TaxiDriver? Old Sport? The Professor? Loverboy?
Will there be a trial that drags on for months and will Dez bury his bricks under his bed and take his Dodgers cap off and shake his head and quiet Little D and tell Dateline that I was kind of shady, not a bro? Will Harvey be on IMDb if he’s on Deadline talking about how I was never late with rent? Will Calvin cry alone in his bed but laugh about it with other people and use his connection to me as way to seduce Tinder whores?
I cry out: “Help!” I punch the door. My hand bleeds.
Will the LAPD send someone on the inside to beat the life out of me? Will my Love Actually Revolutionary Road directorial debut on Funny or Die go viral now that my name will be out there? Will I be famous?
Will Officer Nico be on the local news in front of the bullshit coffee art house with his spandex crew in the background, telling them all about running into me here and our drive to the hospital in Fall River last winter? Will the doctor who treated me at the hospital last winter see it all on the news and shake his head in disgust? Or will he not even remember me because of how many patients he sees every day, because I was just some guy, it’s not like I was someone he knew, someone he cared about. I drive my body into the door again and again I get nowhere.
It goes without saying that Milo is, by now, on a jet headed out this way, wearing a Wianno T-shirt and watching an early cut of Boots and Puppies and speculating on how much time needs to pass before he puts the moves on Love. Is he drinking or is he so fucking happy to have me out of the picture and be the knight in fading pastels that he doesn’t even need to drink?
Will Dr. Nicky’s wife take him back when they let him out of prison? Will he disclose details of our therapy sessions? I charge the door, elbows and ribs. Nothing but pain.
Love. Will I ever be inside her again? Will Love ever love and trust again or will her open heart and her beating vagina be the worst casualties of my capture? The worst loss?
I bring my ear to the door. A new sound. I am still. A plastic keycard unlocking the door. The door closing. My heart is too loud. Fuck the question. Fuck the police. Fuck Love. I will plow. When this door opens, no other door will close on me ever again and I stand guard. I prepare. I have my hand on the doorknob. When the cops so much as even start to unlock, I will pull back. I will fight. I will go.
I hear them take away the bureau that Love used to keep the door closed and they are here. This is it. I feel the doorknob start to turn and I pray to God that he is with me—this is how that happens, how you find God in jail—and I roar and I yank the door and it’s . . . Love. I stop.
She covers her mouth. “No,” she says. “What happened to you?”
I swallow. “I fell.”
“You fell hard, huh?” She steps toward me and kisses my chest. She looks up at me and I was wrong.
I think I smile. I don’t know. My face hurts. My body pulsates in different places. “You locked me in.”
“I know,” she says. “I’m so sorry. I just knew you would try to stop me and I wanted to make sure you were safe. And, well . . .” She trails off.
And that’s when I notice how different she looks, like Halloween, with painted pink lips and Jennifer Lopez hair pulled back in a high bun. She wears her trench coat and beneath, a dress with every pastel color in the rainbow smushed together, overlapping in flowers. Then she reaches into her coat and she is a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It’s the mug from the Salinger house. It’s bluer than I remember and I would know it anywhere and it’s dry and it’s in my hands, my freedom, the traces of my urine grainy and visible in the interior.
50
I wanted to get the fuck out of Little Compton and I do have a morbid curiosity about Brown University because of Guinevere Beck and it’s so strange, to speak openly of these things. Love parks near campus and it looks like you’d think, like an Ivy League school, an idyllic setting with trees and old buildings. On Thayer Street, the main drag on this campus, there are a few bars, a University Bookstore, an Urban Outfitters, and a fucking Starbucks—America is America is America—and we duck into a Greek restaurant that is more New England charm than it is Orthodox baklava. Love orders chicken and salad and I’m starving. I feel like I just got out of prison. I order calamari and spanakopita and leg of lamb and moussaka and Love laughs. “Do you need to order some food with your food?”
I swat her hand. “Watch it, Mom.”
She does a happy dance and says her mind is blown and I tell her we have to talk about our baby but first she wants to tell me how she got the fucking mug.
“All right,” she says. Deep breath and she begins, so much more articulate than her brother. Her first order of business was to do a drive-by and stake out the Salingers to get their vibe. She then drove all the way to a boutique in Newport for new clothes. “I needed a Lilly Pulitzer dress,” she says.
“What’s that?”
“That pink-and-green thing I was wearing,” she explains.
Love then beat it back to Little Compton and parked at the Salinger house and put on big fat Chanel sunglasses and stormed past reporters, past cops. She burst in the Salinger house. She started sobbing.
“I mean, I guess I do kind of like acting,” she admits. “But I still don’t want to do it professionally.”
“What did they do?” I ask. “What did you even say?”
“I told them I was Peach’s lover, of course,” she says. She is proud. Our calamari arrives. She grabs a tentacle, pops it into her perfect little mouth. “I did a whole monologue about our secret love and New York and all this stuff about the way she wouldn’t let me meet her family or come out for real and I mean I went off and told them I knew she didn’t kill herself. I knew she’d never kill herself and if you ask me, it was that fucking titty tease Guinevere Beck.”
“You did not say titty tease.”
She dips squid into cocktail sauce. “Maybe I did,” she says. “Maybe I didn’t. I mean I was so in it, you know?”
“Jesus,” I say.
I have yet to eat any calamari and Love licks her fingers and tells me how amazingly uptight New England Puritanical bullshit it was. “This is where I am such a Cali girl to the bone,” she says. “We don’t care, you know? We’re like, do whatever. Chill out. Be gay. Be straight. I mean, what is the big deal? We’re all gonna die anyway, you know? Who wants to spend their precious life hating?”
I understand now the depth of Love’s love for me. I have unlocked some cauldron of confidence inside of her. No longer is she content to sit low in a dark room and watch the monitor. Love is alive and she feels more connected to me than she does to her brother. Listen to her talk about her scam and there is not one mention of Forty and she credits me with this newfound freedom, here in the Greek restaurant.
The rest of our food arrives. We eat it. All of it.
Love continues her story. She says she dug deep. Her inspirational performances were Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame and Goldie Hawn in The First Wives Club. “I knew one thing,” she said. “These people, who hate gay people and who essentially hated their own family member for being gay, they don’t want to think about her grinding on me. They don’t want to think about any of it. I mean, maybe they go to a benefit once a year and tolerate it, but they don’t want this fucking preppy lesbo in their house crying over Peach’s beautiful body.”
She drinks her water and continues. She told them to let it go, all of it, because you can’t prosecute the dead. She said that Peach was incontrovertibly in love with Guinevere Beck and that Beck for sure killed her.
“See,” she says. “The magic of this is that they won’t even breathe a word to anyone, because they don’t want Peach to be gay, let alone be murdered by a gay chick, you know?”
“That’s kind of brilliant,” I say.
She nods.
Our baklava arrives. I dig in and give her the first bite. “Mm,” she says. And she is happy. “You should have seen their faces, Joe. I was like, ‘I just need to go upstairs and be in our bed for a moment.’”
“Our bed.”
She nods. She opens her mouth. I stuff flaky Greek pastry inside of her and I can’t wait to fuck her. “That’s also pretty brilliant.”
“And then, obviously, I knew there was no way any one of them was coming upstairs to see what the preppy lesbo was doing up there, so I went room to room and I found the mug and tucked it into my Kate Spade purse and then I went downstairs and offered to make a statement to the police about my relationship with Peach.”
I choke. “Holy shit,” I say. “That’s hysterical.”
“Yes,” she says. “They almost lost it, then helped me leave out the back door and asked if I wouldn’t mind going back to my car from the public parking lot. You know, so it can feel like none of this ever happened.”
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