Hidden Bodies (33 page)

He looks like he might start crying again. But it’s wrong of him to use his badge to harass celebrities and it’s downright disgusting of him to ditch his legitimate police work to go
down to Cabo and meet Megan Fox. I don’t feel bad for this fucker. You get a job, you do the job. No slash. The end.

He pounds the glass and his words bleed together, merging into a whiny plea. “Let me the fuck out of here! This is wrong! You are sick and I want out—I want out now!”

“I can’t do that,” I say. “You’re a bad cop. You know where all these famous people are, but you didn’t try to find Delilah.”

He stares at me. “You sick dick,” he rails. “You won’t get away with this.”

“Of course I will,” I say. “If you were a better cop, you’d realize that by now.”

He kicks and he is trapped and he is still correcting his fucking shirt when it gets stuck, still self-conscious about his appearance, still convinced that his appearance matters. Fucking
Angelenos. I need a laugh. A break. I kick back and scroll through his Rolodex and I flip over
Efron, Zac.
I smile. He hits the glass.

“Okay, Robin,” I begin.
Robin
, not
Officer.
“I want to know, when you pulled Zac Efron over because his left rear tire looked flat, did you seriously choose
to do that because you thought you guys look enough alike that you could play his father in a movie?”

He does not nod this time. He does not yell obscenities. And maybe I should have started with a different celebrity, maybe
Unknown, Rihanna
(driving without a seat belt) or
Nicholson, Jack
(flickering headlight). Then, I might have gotten to hear the details behind Robin Fincher’s life of celebrity stalking. But there’s so much I’ll never
know because Robin Fincher is so angry at me, the person holding the Rolodex with all the celebrities he wanted so badly to know, so angry at himself, that he becomes a bull. He becomes a zombie.
You can see what brains he had evaporate as his eyes shine. His skin is raw, red. He runs headlong into the glass, like a football player whose brain is already gone. He spatters against the walls
and falls back, dead.

IT
turns out that I have a talent for landscape design. Someday, when Love and I have a place together, I’ll oversee the yard. Sure, we’ll
have workers doing a lot of it, and maybe even a professional designer, but I’ll have the final say. I am good at this, at knowing what belongs where. I never would have known this if I had
stayed in New York. You don’t really get to go to the park and relocate a tree. You don’t get to take nature into your hands when you live in concrete. But I did great today. I took
that fucking cactus that didn’t belong out front and I brought it in the back to the Zen garden. I dug a hole. I went deep. I sweated. I liked it. I miss work. And digging a hole for Fincher
doesn’t make me feel the way digging a hole for Beck did. He never broke my heart. He was just a bad cop.

I finish and I return inside to the cool air in the panic studio. I drag Fincher’s body outside and toss him into this hole and I am sweating so much now. I bury him, his Rolodex too, both
of them so deep, deeper than Beck. And then the fun part. I plant the cactus above Fincher and his Rolodex. The cactus belongs here. It works here and unifies the space, establishes it somehow,
more green, less brown. It’s the right size for this garden and there are other cactuses nearby, so it doesn’t look so lonely and idiotic anymore. It doesn’t stand out the way it
did in front.

I drink water and look around this yard and at this cactus, with fat pads and its proud, confident stance. I like it. I swear the thing is even smiling at me. I think it knows that I brought it
home. I give it one last look and turn to go. I have so much to do. I have to clean up the mess Fincher made when he killed himself. I have to get back to Love and act like a guy who went for a
run. And I will do all this and I will do it soon, but I think it’s important to give yourself time and space to celebrate the work you do.

I think that’s why people in LA fall apart, why they get so needy, so desperate for validation, for their cars, for their body parts, for their talents. They forgot that the sweetest thing
in life is to be alone, as you were born, as you will die, soaking in the sun, knowing that you put the cactus in the right place, that you don’t need someone to come along and compliment
your work, that someone who did that would, in fact, just be getting in the way. I am at peace here. Fincher is too.

THE
rest of Cabo passes in a blur of tequila and boat rides and waiting for news from Forty’s agent, and soon we are back in the States but I am
still in foreign territory: Love’s home. I’ve never been but it’s like I’ve lived here all my life. It’s new and old in all the right places, with customized red
appliances and lush, gargantuan part-leather, part-fur sofas. It’s just where you want to be when you fly back to America after burying a dead cop, unlike my apartment, which is so dated and
tarnished.

It sucks to know that Dez sold me out, but then, a friendly neighborhood drug dealer is, at the end of the day, a drug dealer, out for himself. I can’t even hate him for it. I’m just
happy to be in Love’s home instead of mine. I could sit here for hours, just looking at her same old Instagram photos: “Love in an Elevator,” “I Just Called to Say I Love
You.”

She smiles. “I like this one because of the old school curly blue phone cord.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Old school.”

She says no more pictures. She’s tired of her face. I obey her wish and toss my phone on another part of this voluminous sectional. Oh, to breathe, to know that I did it. I got rid of
Fincher.

Love leaps off the couch. “Come on,” she says. “I want you to see everywhere.”

And I do want to see everywhere, I want to sit everywhere. This is a dream house with neon signs like the ones in the Pantry. Love has a
playroom
with board games and a PlayStation and
a karaoke machine and a stage, instruments flung about. The neon sign here says
SEX IS BETTER WHEN YOU
’
RE IN LOVE
and she says every room has a
sign. The kitchen is
MADE WITH LOVE
and the dining room is
LET LOVE RULE
and her bedroom door is closed and the neon above the frame reads
AND IN THE END
. . . Then she opens the door and her bedroom is the perfect hybrid of our intimate squeaky cell in Palm Springs and the too-big luxury of Cabo and the
oceanfront seasonal breeze of Malibu.

Love flops onto her bed and I look at the art above it, John Lennon’s lyrics in neon, the ones he famously misquotes from Paul McCartney.

It is a miracle that she is not a vapid nitwit and this is the rest of my life, under the covers, where we could be in a shitty rat-infested walk-up in Murray Hill or anywhere. It doesn’t
matter.
We found love
and then out of nowhere, the lights go out.
Homeinvasionearthquakeendofworld.
But then music blasts and Love grabs my hands. “Surprise!”

It’s my song, my
Pitch Perfect
pool mash-up, and she remembered when I mentioned this way back when we first met, in her Tesla, that first ride. When you are in love you listen.
Strobe lights come up and Love starts running and she is tearing off her top and she is slipping out of her skirt and she is unsnapping her bra and she is opening a sliding door onto the patio and
she is naked and she is running into the pool and I am naked, following her. Splash. Skinny-dipping, making the pool our own. I am inside of Love in her pool and my song bleeds into her song,
bleeds back into her song, and this is perfect and there is nothing but our songs and our bodies and our water and our future and the lemon trees, the orange trees. We fuck and we talk, our songs
are on a loop, our life is on a loop, and suddenly my favorite word in the English language:
We .

Love has plans for us.
We’re
going to go to Chateau—she is dying for those truffle fries—and
we
are going to watch
Pitch Perfect
—she
hasn’t seen it in a while—and
we
are going to go to my apartment and get my things, assuming it’s not too much too fast.

I kiss her. “God, no.”

Then there is a loud sound in the house; the pop of a bottle of Veuve.
Forty.
Love calls out to him and he doesn’t answer and then he comes running, fat feet padding, and he
cannonballs into our pool and he doesn’t belong here.

Love squeals. He emerges from the water.

“Forty, this isn’t really the best time,” I say, looking at my naked girlfriend, who elegantly swims to the stairs and reaches for her bikini and covers herself with the ease
of a Bond girl. I can do no such thing. My shorts are far away, on a fucking chaise.

Forty flops like a sea lion and Love looks at me and I shrug. He swims to the other side of the pool and picks up a waterproof remote control and now a projection screen begins to open on the
far wall. I look at Love. “We watch movies here,” she says.

Forty fumbles with the remote. I think he’s on a fair amount of cocaine. His fingers jitter. But he is able to find his destination:
Deadline.com

And there, on the front page, on the giant screen, a headline:

FORTY SELLS TWO: MEGAN ELLISON
’
S ANNAPURNA TO PRODUCE TWO ORIGINAL SCRIPTS BY DEBUT SCREENWRITER FORTY QUINN

I rub water out of my eyes and force myself to stay calm. It’s just a headline. A mistake. That’s all. We’ll call the paper or the website or whatever the fuck it is and
they’ll change the headline, put my name in it.

I motion for the remote and he tosses it to me. I refresh the page, because maybe Forty already took care of that. Maybe he thinks they already fixed things, got my name in there. The remote is
slow. The world is fast, loud. Love and Forty scream and splash each other and I can’t be in this fucking pool waiting right now and my stomach is whirling and I get out of the pool and I
streak across the Spanish tile floor and grab my shorts and get into them. I get my phone and I drip on it and I have to protect it. I shiver. My nipples are hard. I turn away from Love and Forty
and I go to Deadline but it’s the same shit and then the article itself loads and it gets worse. The article reports that both scripts are written by Forty Quinn and there is no mention of
brilliant newcomer Joe Goldberg anywhere. I read the first paragraph over and over, as if my name might be buried in there in some sort of cryptogram
Da Vinci Code
bullshit but no. I
scroll down and scan the screen for the words
Joe
and
Goldberg
but again, no. I am breathing fast, like I’m running, like I’m fucking and I’m fucked. He stole my
scripts and fucked me.

“Joe?” It’s Love, my girlfriend, the one whose twin brother fucked me. He fucked me. I clutch the phone.

I turn back around. Love is on the deck, squeezing her hair. Forty is still in the pool, treading water. I want a harpoon. I want to end him. Love clears her throat. At some point in the last
thirty-five seconds, she put on a hooded bathrobe and picked up her iPad.

“Go on, sister girl,” Forty says. He sucks Veuve out of the bottle. “Let me hear it. Come on, Lovey.”

“And I quote,” she begins. “‘Megan Ellison tells Deadline that she has discovered a
major talent
in Quinn and plans to fast track
The Third Twin
and
The Mess
and . . .’” Love squeals. “‘The bidding war, which lasted all summer—’” Love balks. She stares at Forty. He laughs.

“You always think the worst of me,” he says.

“Every time you disappeared I assumed you were holed up at the Ritz,” she says.

Forty laughs. “Well, not
every
time, but sometimes women can prove to be very inspirational.”

Love reads to us about the
hot property
and summarizes the comments. People are saying that Barry Stein is a fool; he’s washed up. He could have had these scripts early on but he
has no eye for talent anymore. Not that anyone would ever choose to team up with Stein over Megan Ellison. Megan Ellison is
the best
and they’re saying Forty Quinn is
the
best
and apparently there’s a murder scene in the desert that will
make you see the world in a whole new way
and Forty Quinn has been
pitching for years
and it’s
one of those situations where
talent and hard work and perseverance
pay off and you can’t
make it in Hollywood without all three
and I am rubbing my eyes again and they
sting.

Love strokes my head. “Are you okay?”

“The chlorine hit me hard,” I say.

“It’s a saltwater pool,” she says. She kisses my head. “Maybe you should go inside and wash up?”

All I want is to get away from Forty but I know what I have to do first. I have to put on a fucking show. I have to stand up and walk over to the pool and I have to extend a hand to him. I have
to shake his damn, wrinkled hand.

“Congrats, my man.”

“Thanks, Old Sport,” he says, and tears off his sunglasses. “The best news is, this is only the beginning.” I think he winks. I don’t know. Maybe that’s his
resting face and I never noticed it. I blame my aspirations, the ones I fed every time I sat down at Intelligentsia to write. Fucking
idiot
I am. I am so much better than this. I should
have spent my summer writing a
book
and Forty lowers his voice. “Megan says we have a big future together.
Huge.
”

The pronouns are discombobulated.
We
as in
he and Megan.
I am not in the
we
even though their
we
could not exist without me.
ME.
Megan Ellison. My
skin crawls. “That’s awesome,” I manage. “You did it.”

He nods. Slow. “Yes,” he says. “
I
fucking did it.”

Love squeals. “You guys, it’s on
Variety
now!”

The news is everywhere and I am nowhere and Love doesn’t know it but she is celebrating my demise. I go inside but I don’t go to one of the seven bathrooms to wash up. No. I go to
Forty’s knapsack where I find his iPad and pull up his Gmail. I read the e-mails, so many e-mails, between Forty and his agent, this dumb fucker who thinks Forty
grew into his voice. I
don’t know what you did this summer, but whatever it is, it worked. Well done, 40. Here’s to 40 more.