The nurse cuffs him. Blood pressure. Not real cuffs. I wish. “What’s that?” she chirps.
“I’d like for you, when you have time, to take all of these flowers and all of these balloons and disperse them to all the people on this floor who have no family around.”
She looks at me. “Could you just die?” she asks. “This family is the best, right? If they’re not bringing in sushi for us then they’re showering the whole floor with flowers.” She puts a thermometer in Forty’s mouth. “I hate to say this, but I wish you could stay with us forever.”
“Me too,” I say.
Forty looks at me. The nurse says he has no temperature and he’ll be out of here in a jiffy and Love and Milo and Dottie and Ray return and the party continues. Forty reminds his mother about their plan for me and she says that they want to start a book club at the Pantries. “You’ll choose one book a month to spotlight,” she says. “We can even use you in the signage.”
Love squeezes my hand. “I love this idea,” she says. “Don’t you love this?”
“I love it,” Forty says. “Dad, do you love it?”
Ray nods. “Professor Joe,” he says and now the Quinns are debating what the first book should be and Love elbows me and says it should be The Easter Parade and I cringe and I should not have told her that detail about Amy. I do not want her referencing Amy, ever. Forty says it should be Misery and Ray thinks that’s a good idea and Dottie only ever saw the movie and Milo says the book and movie are both great and this is my life now. Or it is until Forty’s memory miraculously comes back. He could do that to me at any moment, turn me in, take it all away. And I can’t kill him, not now that Love knows what I am, not when she could suspect me. He’s my new mug of piss, alive and well and wiping his nose. Love may have forgiven me for everything else, but she would never forgive me for hurting her brother. Professor Joe would be a terrible moniker for a serial killer.
IN the hotel room that night, Love is moody, slamming drawers. I ask her what’s wrong.
She sits on the bed. “Well,” she says. “Why should I even bother? I mean, do you know what the nurse says really happened?”
Fuck fuck fuck. “No,” I say. “I thought he can’t remember.”
Love sobs. I hold her. It goes on like this for hours. She says her father told her Forty burned through a hundred thousand dollars in a few days.
“Jesus, Love. I don’t know what to say.”
She looks out the window at Reno, which looks like Vegas and yet also looks nothing like Vegas. It’s lesser, smaller, worse. “It’s never going to end,” she says. “My mom is going to sit there and act like he’s clean and my dad is gonna run away grumpy and I don’t know.” She wipes her eyes and looks at me. “How do you think he even wrote those screenplays if he’s so fucked up to the point of winding up in the desert coked out of his mind?”
“I don’t know.”
“And who is this girl?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think she’s even real or do you think maybe drug dealers fucked him up?”
“I doubt he owes anybody any money.”
Love looks out the window. “Michael Michael Motorcycle said he’s the kind of guy people just want to hurt.”
“Michael Michael Motorcycle is in prison,” I remind her. “You and me, we’re gonna take care of Forty. And . . .”
She nods. “Believe me,” she says. She brushes her hand over her belly. “This is saving me.”
I look out at the lights and I see my future—arf arf—and how I will clap for Forty when his movie gets cast, when it goes into production, when he gets nominated, when he wakes us up with a phone call—I did it!—and Love and I will dress up to go to the premiere and we will be the writer’s family. I will smile and I will meet all the people who love my work and I won’t be able to accept their love. I won’t be able to tell the story of how I came to write The Mess or The Third Twin or the kidnapping story due soon.
Love pats my leg. “I’m so tired,” she says. “My brother, God love him, but sometimes I think he literally drains me.”
She undresses. She throws her panties into the empty trash can. She is too tired to fuck me and I am too tired to sleep.
My career is over. I will live a lie, like so many people in LA. At least there will be truth where it matters, in this bed, in so many beds. And I’ll find a way to make myself known someday. I’ll be a good dad; I’ll raise my kids so they won’t be stuck like this. Like so many great writers, I won’t be appreciated until after I’m dead and Love finds a key to a safety deposit box with a letter inside explaining how I came to write all her brother’s movies.
Eventually, I sleep.
52
IT’S true what they say about happiness. If you approach life from a place of gratitude, you’re more apt to enjoy things. I am whole. I don’t need fame; I never wanted that and I did not move here because of aspirations. It’s enough for me to write and know that I did the best I could. I enjoy my life. Our life. Our baby! And I love that our baby is a secret.
We go to a premiere and meet Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux and I eat guac with them and we talk about Cabo. They are both narrow and kind and they treat me like an equal and the whole experience is surreal. The best part of it is what happens when the party ends and Love and I are in bed discussing it all and talking about Jennifer Aniston’s hair.
I go to Milk Studios and a photographer shoots me for the Professor Joe promotions. They aren’t going to use my picture because I don’t want to be a public figure—Ray can respect that—but they are going to model the mascot on my likeness. Dottie loves that.
The first book will be Portnoy’s Complaint and Love is chopping lettuce and she points the knife at me. “Now that’s a good fuck-you to that Amy girl,” she says. “I hope she sees the signs the day they’re out.”
I have a life partner, the mother of my child. She harasses me to take vitamins and tells me to brush my teeth. She sucks my dick and falls asleep before Cocktail is over and ignores her brother’s calls when she just can’t deal. I know the code to our alarm system and I am more comfortable driving in LA all the time. I find that it’s easier to start the day by going down a hill than it is going up a hill and I tell this to Jonah Hill at a party and he laughs and says don’t tell that to my fucking date, guy.
Love was serious about ditching her acting career and she is different now and it’s hard to know the source of her power. She glows. She says it’s because of me. I say it’s her. We decide it’s us. The baby.
I meet up with Calvin for beers in the old neighborhood that hasn’t changed. He and Monica only went out for a few days; he doesn’t know what became of her, doesn’t care. He is being crushed by debt from his DUI. He is defeated now; he keeps telling me he was in jail for twenty-eight hours. He’s gained a few pounds and he doesn’t check Tinder. He says he might move home. I tell him to get his iPad and we work together on the Ghost Food Truck outline.
“Well, well, well,” he says. “This is good.”
“It sure is,” I tell him. “And you know what? Just go for it already.”
“JoeBro,” he says. “I feel like I’ve been kind of a dick.”
“You weren’t a dick.”
“Well,” he says. “I got caught up in shit. Anyway, I think we should pitch GFT together.”
I drink my beer. I tell him not in a million years. “It’s your concept, Calvin,” I say. “You came up with it and you’ve worked it over a million times and you will be the one to make it happen.”
He pats me on the back. He wants to know what I think about Delilah disappearing. “I think LA is a hard place, Calvin. I think it wishes we would all disappear and it’s more of a miracle when people don’t.”
“Deep,” he says.
We watch a commercial for automobile insurance. Calvin says his is crazy expensive because of his DUI. I enjoy the taste of the beer, the music in the bar—“Take It to the Limit,” the Eagles, melod
rama that only sounds good in a bar, when someone else puts it on—and when we’re done, I drive up to the hills to go home and I enjoy that too.
At home, Love is making veal Parmesan. “Babies for the baby,” she says. “You know, because veal are babies. Oh God. That came out wrong. Sorry, little, innocent cows. Tomorrow we’ll have old, bitter chickens.”
She is the one.
I hug her and kiss her.
She breaks pasta into a pot of boiling water. “How go the books?”
“They go,” I say, and we are happy.
I track down Harvey. He’s in hospice. I bring him flowers and chocolate cake and Eddie Murphy DVDs and he thanks me. He asks me if I saw Henderson last night. I get the chills. The nurse says he gets confused like this. I tell him he’s gonna be fine.
“Am I right or am I right?”
His face contorts. I want to believe it’s a smile. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m scared.”
I sit with him until his ex-wife returns and she hugs me and she cries. When I get home to Love, I cry. Love sends them a TV. She says the TVs in those places are never big enough. Harvey’s ex-wife calls. She loves the TV. Harvey does too.
I don’t go see Dez; drug dealers can all fuck off.
Every Sunday we drive out to Malibu to see Love’s parents. Sometimes Forty is there and sometimes he isn’t. But I see him regularly. Twice a week we meet at the Taco Bell in Hollywood.
Today I am first. I slide into a booth and when he arrives he is visibly fucked up.
“Let me get you a Coke,” I say.
He grabs my hands. “Thank you,” he says. “Old Sport, Professor, whatever you are, thank you so fucking much for what you did. Do you know how gold this is? I mean, I read what I wrote and I swear, I think being left in the desert is the best fucking thing that ever happened to me.”
I get the Coke. He knocks it over. I go for napkins and he stops me. “They have people who do that.”
“Forty, help me out here.” I haven’t seen him this fucked up since Vegas and I forgot how annoying it is. And at the same time, I want to save him; Love rubs off on me.
“I mean, a job’s a job,” he says. “You spill, they wipe.”
I look at his swollen face. “You don’t hate me, do you?”
“Hate you?” he says. “How could I hate you? Dude, Amy Adams is gonna do The Mess.”
Will that name ever leave me? No. “Great,” I say. “Congrats.”
“It’s not for sure,” he backtracks. “But it looks good. Amy Fucking Adams. How could I hate you? I mean, you don’t even know the level of ass I am getting. Unpaid pussy, my friend. How could I hate you?”
I remember when I thought it would be a terrible thing to be a dog and now I fetch the chalupas and the hot sauce and the tacos and the gorditas. Woof!
Love wins another award for her charity work and I write a speech for her. On the way home, she says maybe we could have a winery. After the baby, of course. I can’t believe this is my life, where the possibility of periodically stomping on grapes and owning a vineyard is real.
I call Mr. Mooney on his birthday and tell him about Love, about meeting Jennifer Aniston and choosing books as Professor Joe. He asks if I’m getting my dick sucked then tells me he’s still in Florida. He has an orange tree and the oranges look nothing like the ones in New York. “They’re mottled,” he says. “Like the jelly beans with the flecks in them, never mind, I’m boring myself.” He sighs. The conversation dwindles and I go find Love. She’s outside, in her favorite float, the one with arm rests and drink holders and she’s wearing sunglasses. I jump into the pool and push the raft over. She screams again, and falls into the water. She comes up laughing, saltwater kisses. We float.
“Sam is at it again,” she says.
“Sam the work bitch?”
“Yeah,” she says. “We’re getting interns and she said we have to check to make sure they’re not on Pinterest because she says people on Pinterest are all stupid.”
“She’s stupid.”
“I know,” Love says.
“If you hate her so much why don’t you just fire her?”
Love rolls over onto her side and reaches out for me. “Because I don’t hate anyone,” she says. “I really don’t. It’s just not worth it.”
We hear her phone ringing, we hear my phone ringing.
Love runs to her phone and she answers. “Mom?” she says. And then seconds later, she drops her phone. I go to her.
She stares at me. She is different. She is frozen. My first concern is the baby but how could that be? It wasn’t the doctor on the phone.
“It’s Forty,” she says.
He went to the cops. That fucker. That louse. I’ll kill him. “What happened?” I ask.
And then she starts crying. It’s primal and terrifying and whatever that fucker did, he will pay for this. I grab the phone.
“Dottie?” I say, and I try to hug Love. And she’s shaking. Her whole body is convulsing and this cannot be good for our baby. “Dottie, are you there?”
“My boy,” she sobs. “My boy is dead.”
My body goes slack. “Forty is dead?”
When Love hears me say it, she lets out another scream and I tell Dottie I have to go and I don’t know if the baby will survive, but I know we will. I hug Love, I hold on to her. I wish I could make it better. But I can’t. Forty’s dead.
☺
53
FORTY didn’t overdose on Xanax or gorditas. He didn’t get cancer and he didn’t drown in the saltwater of the Pacific or the chlorinated water of the hotels he loved so much or the saltwater that his parents collected for him. A car hit Forty Quinn while he was crossing the street in Beverly Hills. The girl who hit him wasn’t drunk—God is not that trite—and she was driving a Honda Civic. She only just moved here. Her name is Julie Santos. The people in back of her were honking. Angelenos, particularly those on the Westside, don’t like to wait. Julie Santos says the guy in back of her had been riding her tail and honking. Her roommate told her that it’s basically legal to take a left-hand turn after the light turns red because otherwise, nobody would ever get anywhere.
Forty was sober; there were no drugs in his possession or inside him. He was going to Nate ’n Al’s alone to gorge on corned beef and French fries, according to the waiter who says Forty came in alone a lot over the years. We never knew that, any of us. Julie, who seems like a gentle, unsteady person, the kind who will never get over this accident, she wanted to see the Pretty Woman hotel and she knows it’s silly and it’s not even called the Reg Bev Wilsh anymore but . . . she cries. I resist the urge to make a joke about Forty and hookers, how even when he’s not blowing money on them, they’re in his domain, good old Julia Roberts.
A review of the security footage shows that Forty was jaywalking. Love’s teeth chatter. She tells me he got eight jaywalking tickets. Forty didn’t like to wait either; he wanted it now, his career, his Oscar, even the goddamn crosswalk. There will be charges filed against Julie Santos and she says she’s going to move back to Boston. She says she never wants to drive again and it feels like a bad thing, to move somewhere and kill someone immediately.
Nobody can believe it. I can’t believe it. I think about Julie Santos a lot. I find her on Facebook and Twitter and I could start a religion around her and God does have a sense of humor; her last name is saint. I did not pray for this but I am allowed to rejoice in this. Nobody will ever know about what happened between us in the desert. Nobody will ever know about our Taco Bell deals, his malfeasance. I am in Neiman Marcus and there are two tailors working on me at once because when you’re rich and someone you know dies, you go to Neiman’s and you get a new suit.
Love sits in a chair with her legs crossed. She isn’t crying anymore.
“Is it awful if I say you look hot?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “You say whatever you need to say.”
She nods. I ask the tailors to give us a moment and they oblige and I go to
her and mirrors surround us and everywhere I look, I see us. Just us. The third twin is gone. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” she says. “I promise I’m gonna come out of it.”
“Take your time.”
“It’s just weird.” She stares at her Kleenex. “I don’t know how to not worry about him.”
“I know.”
“It’s, like, my go-to place,” she says. “What do I do? I worry about Forty. I mean, it’s not even so much about drugs, even though it seems that way, it’s about being a twin.”
I tell her again to take all the time she needs and I promise to be here no matter what and she stops shredding her Kleenex and looks instead at me. “What would I do without you?”
“Irrelevant,” I tell her. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She hugs me and she cries again and one of the numerous pins in my suit pricks me and I bury the pain and I savor the pain. He’s dead. Julie Santos killed him. After all this time, I finally got a little fucking help from the man upstairs and I squeeze my girlfriend and I count my blessings. She pats my back. The tailors return and Love dries her eyes.
“You really do look hot,” she says.
The suit will be ready in time for the funeral. Milo is too sad to write a eulogy and Ray is in shock and I am the loyal boyfriend so I step up and I don’t just jot down some bullshit about his sense of humor and his big, fat heart. Fuck, no. I write the fuck out of this eulogy and it’s right up there with The Third Twin and my kidnapping script, the one I’ll volunteer to finish, now that he can’t because he’s dead.
Love and I emerge from the limousine and the carpet leading into the Beverly Hills Hotel is pink and green. Love says this was their favorite place when they were kids and they had their sweet sixteen party here and she is crying again and I hold her.
“I’ve never been,” I say.
“Well,” she says. “We stopped coming here a while ago, I don’t even know why. We practically grew up in here. They have this soda fountain and we used to get cheeseburgers and then we would stay in a villa and sneak out and run around in the garden.”
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