Hidden Bodies (14 page)

She explains that their parents used to be obsessed with tennis, watching it more than playing it. Love doesn’t play much (yes!) and Forty isn’t much of a jock (who cares?).
It’s funny what girls think you want to know. We walk through the main room and she waves hello to random people. Love is a passport; she’s Ray Liotta in
Goodfellas
and
Julianne Moore in
Boogie Nights
, a hostess, a leader. With her, I can go anywhere. She looks at me before she opens the door marked screening room
.

“Bear with me,” she says. “Forty can be a
lot
.”

She’s not kidding. The room reeks of cigars and lobster. Forty’s on the phone and he motions for us to be quiet while he
humors his agent.
Contrary to popular belief, Philip
Seymour Hoffman is not dead; he’s alive and well, camping out in Forty Quinn. Forty is bowlegged and blond, in madras shorts, a Steve Miller Band T-shirt, with a giant boy smile. Love tells
me they’re twins but Forty looks a hundred years older. His skin is leathery from sun, cocaine, and court-ordered community service. His hair is the opposite of his skin, shiny to the point
of silken, possibly transplanted from a doll, yellow and conditioned and parted in the middle.

“He’s intense,” she whispers.

“Are you guys close?” I ask.

“We’re twins,” she says. She didn’t answer the question and she tucks her hair behind her ears and begins organizing his mess. We only ordered two cheeseburgers and Forty
ordered everything on the menu. I try not to react to this mess of wasted food. I will not fuck this up.

Forty has a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and he pops the cork off a bottle of Dom. “I did
not
feel the Groundlings girls,” he says into the phone. “I need more
heart in a woman, you know? Nancy is going to hear from me because I specifically told her
do not
bring me funny unless you bring me honey.”

He hangs up, growling, and Love reels him in. “Forty,” she says in a kindergarten teacher tone. “Calm down. It’s gonna be fine.”

“It’s
not
fine,” he says. “We didn’t find her.”

“We will,” she says. “But right now, Forty, this is Joe. Funny Joe.”

Forty puts down his bottle, stubs out his cigarette, and claps. “Old Sport. You fucking cracked me
up.
”

I extend a hand and I like this guy not because he is complimenting me, because he is right. I am funny. I am talented. I am
Old Sport.

The three of us settle into
club
chairs and talk about the actresses and it’s oddly easy. All my life I’ve struggled to fit in. I can’t stomach Calvin’s wannabe
posse and I can’t sit with Harvey and listen to him work out his bits and I could never go through life as Delilah’s plus one. But this feels easy.

Love leaves to pee and Forty throws a crumpled napkin at me. “Just be good to her.”

“Hell, yes,” I say. “So, you guys are from here?”

He looks at me like I’m insane. “Are you serious right now?”

I look at him like he is sane. “Yes.”

He cackles. He claps. “Dude,” he says. “I love you for not knowing where you are right now. That is fucking epic.” His eyes darken. “Unless you’re full of
shit.”

“God, no,” I say. “I came here looking for someone and I bumped into your sister. That’s it.”

Love returns and asks what she missed. Forty throws another crumpled napkin at her. “You missed the part where my heart was made whole again,” he says. “The part where I
learned that your new friend Joe has
no idea
who we are.”

Love crosses her arms. “Forty,” she says. “Come on.”

“It’s fine,” I say. “I’m not with the government.”

Forty laughs too hard and Love picks up the napkin and throws it away even though she doesn’t need to do that. “You have to forgive my brother,” she says. “He’s
deluded sometimes and he thinks we’re famous. But we’re not.”

“But we are,” he says. “Joe, you ever hear of the Pantry?”

“Best grocery store ever,” I say. “There’s one right by my house.”

“In Brentwood?” he asks.

“No,” I say.

“Santa Monica?” he asks.

“No,” I say.

“Dude, you full time it in the ’Bu?” he asks.

“I live in Hollywood,” I say. “In an apartment building.”

Forty steps back and it’s like at school when they find out you get free breakfast and lunch. “Cool,” he says. “Holly would if she could, right, bro?”

“Our parents own the Pantry,” Love says, and my mind is blown and I don’t try to hide it. “Which does
not
make us famous.”

Everything is hazy as Love and Forty squabble over whether or not they’re famous. I can’t believe Love owns the Pantry, my special place, my haven. Ray and Dottie have been trying to
send me their
love
since the day I got here
.

“So, will you be joining us and the moms and the pops at the big C?” he asks.

I look at Love and she smiles at me. “We’re going to Chateau,” she says. “Will you come?”

“Sure,” I say, and it was on my list of places to go but I don’t want to act like a fucking tourist.

Forty strokes his chin and stares at me and Love asks what his problem is and he sighs. “I’m gonna guess that our new friend doesn’t have a jacket and I’m gonna suggest a
pit stop along the way to amend this unbearable injustice. Yes?”

I look at Love. I say yes.

I’M
at home in Love’s Tesla and I was born for this. We pull out of Soho House and I show her my Pantry playlists in my phone, my Shazam
search history too. She wants to see
my
most played songs and she is perplexed. “This is a lot of stuff from
Pitch Perfect
,” she says. “Do you have a
girlfriend?”

I tell her she’s funny and I make up some shit about watching it on Netflix in the middle of the night and liking the swimming pool mash-up. Then I bring it back to us, to the Pantry
playlists. “I just can’t get over it,” I say. “I
love
those playlists. I go in there just for the music.”

She gets all excited and her knees bump and she drums her elbows on the wheel. “You don’t understand how I am about to blow your mind,” she says. “I
make
those
playlists.”

And she’s not kidding. My mind is blown. Love is the
music designer
and she is the person letting “Valerie” by the Zutons melt into Gregory Abbott.

“Nobody ever notices,” she says. “And I mean I
think
about this music, I
obsess
over this music. I think it’s because of my name, but I have like, ten
thousand pictures of me posing in love songs, like ‘Stop! In the Name of Love,’ you know, me in front of a stop sign.”

I think it’s okay to touch her and I pat her knee. “Don’t worry. Your dorky little secret is safe with me and I’m not gonna jump out of the car.”

She has so many different smiles. This one is impish. “You can’t,” she says. “You’re locked in.”

“Good,” I say. She put me in a cage already. I tell her I love the funny names the Pantry has for each section.

“I
named
those when we rebranded,” she says. “I came up with Procrastination Nation when I was in college freaking out about my thesis.”

“I can’t believe this,” I say.

I ask if she studied drama in college and she tells me she’s not an actress. “I mean, I don’t think you grow up here without thinking about it, but I have a charity called Swim
for Love, where we give lessons to at-risk kids. That’s my main focus. These movies Forty and I try to make never come together, which is fine. But I’d rather do that than
audition
. Wasn’t it so sad?”

I tell her my zombie-aspirations theory, that fame is the antidote, the issue of supply and demand. She says I sound like a writer and I say I’m a bookseller. But enough about me.
“Tell me about the Pantry. Everything.”

She says her great-grandparents helped build California—one Pantry to start an empire—and now they own dozens of
markets
in California. They own acres of land and malls and
holy shit, the girl is loaded.

“I’m not telling you to tell you,” she says. “I mean, I’m not bragging.”

“I know,” I say. “And I mean it when I say I would be excited if you only had the one store. I love it there.”

She laughs. “I’m starting to get the picture. And we have to thank your friend, the one who auditioned.” She taps my shoulder. “The reason we met.” Love is bold;
Love is horny. “We should send her flowers. Or candy. What was her name again?”

“Nice try,” I say. “I’m not telling.”

She slaps the wheel. I laugh. “I still can’t believe the way your parents have been telling me about you and I had no idea.”

“Well, that
send our love
thing, that was my dad’s idea,” she says. “My parents, they’re kind of grossly in love. And after I was born—after
we
were born—my dad was like, ‘Let’s spread the love. Let’s make that a part of our every day.’”

“I think it’s sweet. My parents hated each other and our grocery store had fucking
rats
.”

She has a loose high laugh. She says that Ray and Dottie are middle school sweethearts. Dottie’s father was a butcher. Ray’s father owned the Pantry. They fell in love as children,
stayed in love as teenagers, and they’re still
nauseatingly in love
now. I laugh. Love says that I won’t be laughing in an hour when we’re all at Chateau together.
“It’s just not normal,” she says. “It’s like they never got over each other. They act like they’re in high school.”

“That’s unusual.”

Love says it kind of sucks and sighs and says she believes in laying it all out there. She blames her parents’ happiness and her given name on her proclivity for relationships. She’s
been married twice.

“Twice?” I ask. I hold my phone up to the window; my service is bad and I want to Google her.

“Use my iPad,” she says. “The password is Love.”

The password is Love
and I pick up her iPad and she tells me about her husbands. She met Michael Michael Motorcycle in Vegas—
total asshole
—and she was young and
stupid and resentful
and on blow.
They lasted eleven months.

“Eleven months?” I say. “That’s impressive.”

“You gotta try,” she says and sometimes I can’t tell if she’s being earnest. She married her second husband, a black doctor named Dr. Trey Hanes, eight years ago.
“He was my heart.”

I go into Safari and look at her search history:
boots puppies boots snow boots puppies Labs chocolate labs black dog booties over the knee boots yellow labs.

I don’t see how this can be it. Maybe it’s some rich person privacy setting where no matter what you look up, it just says
boots puppies
, because the girl searching for
boots and puppies can’t be the insightful woman here in the Tesla, the one telling me about her marriage to Trey. “We were both twenty-seven,” she says. “We were crazy in
love.”

Boots and puppies.
“Uh huh.”

“But then he got sick. Cancer,” she says. “People always talk about the fight but Trey didn’t get to fight. We didn’t get to, you know, I didn’t have the
chance to clean him up after chemo or shave my head to go along with his.”

“He died that fast,” I say. And maybe
boots
and
puppies
are a defense mechanism. “That’s horrible.”

“It wasn’t cancer. He drowned when we went surfing, right after he got diagnosed.” She grips the steering wheel more tightly. “My mom would
kill
me if she could
see me right now. She says I talk about this stuff way too early. But you know how your brain has sort of a baseline resting thought, a thing you talk about with yourself?”

MugofUrineCandaceBenjiPeachBeckHendersonMugofUrine.
“Yeah.”

“Well, mine is always about Trey,” she says. “I think he killed himself. I think he felt so bad about me having to watch him die that he killed himself. And not in a coroner
poison kind of way. I mean, did you ever read
Flesh and Blood
?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Well, you know the guy who’s gay and he can’t deal with it and he swims out to die?”

“Yes,” I say again and I can’t believe
Boots and Puppies
is talking to me about Michael Cunningham.

“Well, I think that’s what Trey did,” she says. “He couldn’t handle the idea of me and my family dealing with it. My parents are all about
good
things. But
bad things . . .” She shakes her head. “Is this too much? Should I put on some music or something?”

I hold her hand on its way to the dash. “No,” I say. “So, is your brother married?”

“Ha,” she says. “That’s our family joke. I was married
twice
by thirty and my brother can’t even date one girl for more than five minutes. The best role
models can be the worst role models.”

Love tells me that it’s impossible to live up to Ray and Dottie’s relationship. She doesn’t even know why they
had
kids, they’re so in love with each other.
“You hear about moms being like, fuck my husband, I love my babies now,” she says. “And my mom, I mean she loves us, but she loves my dad so much more. Are your parents together?
You said they fought, but some people, that’s just how they communicate.”

Ah, rich girls. “No. My mom left. They weren’t a model for anything.”

“If only you got to choose your model,” she says. “But we get what we get.”

Love is thirty-five now, which will make her the oldest woman I’ve ever slept with, and I realize how badly I do want to sleep with her. She uses her blinker
.
She is kind. She
says she’s
sort of also
from New York. “We have a couple places there,” she says. “But I never last more than a few months. It sounds lame, but I think I’m
just too sensitive.”

“How so?” I ask.

Love grew up
mostly in Malibu
but was homeschooled, with biology trips to the Galápagos and immersion semesters in public schools and she loves Los Angeles. She used to want to
be a lawyer.

“This is a problem we have,” she says. “A family thing. My dad is like, ‘I got these two kids and one wants to make movies and one wants to defend the bad guys and nobody
wants to run the shop.’”