“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.’”
“Is that how he really sounds?”
She slaps my leg. “You’ll see.”
Love doesn’t believe in bad people or good people; she believes in people. Her September 11th goes like this: Love was in her first year of law school at NYU. “And in all honesty, I hated it,” she says. “I wasn’t getting along with anyone, you know? I was in my room watching Legally Blonde, wanting it to be more like that, and I mean the bad part, when Elle Woods doesn’t even have any friends. I was miserable.”
“Weren’t you a little young?” I ask. Love is five years older than I am, many years older than Beck and Amy. But she is not that old. “Well,” she says. “Remember, I was schooled independently and my dad, well . . .” Her voice trails off and I suspect a lot of her stories have holes filled by money. “So I was up all night at this divey bar whining to my friends about how I wanted a sign.”
“A sign?” I ask.
“You know,” she says. “A sign that it was okay to leave law school.” She honks at someone who tries to pass her. “And then we’re still fucked up, just walking it off, and it begins. The Towers, the hell, and the world goes insane, and my friends are like, holy shit. There’s your sign.”
“Wow,” I say. I will not judge her. Instead I think about her nipples.
“Please be horrified,” she says, mind reader. “I realize how assholey that all sounds, to say it was my sign. It sounds stupid and selfish and solipsistic to say that September Eleventh was my get-out-of-law-school-free card.”
“That’s harsh.” Beck had to look up solipsistic in the dictionary. Amy did not own a dictionary.
“But when you’re young, you need all that validation and you read your horoscope and you say things like, ‘If the guy at the bar gives me two cherries and not one it means I’m supposed to leave this bar and go somewhere else.’”
“I get it.”
Love wants to know where I was on September 11 and we are stuck in the shitty part of Sunset where it’s all strip malls. I tell the truth: I got in trouble at work. Mr. Mooney locked me in a cage in the basement. I missed it. By the time I got out, the smoke was clear.
“Wow.” She drums on the steering wheel. She says she loves eccentric people. She loves old people. She loves a good story. She says we have really good September 11th stories and that we could make a good movie out of them. She likes the idea of a New Yorker who missed New York. She asks how old I was.
“Sixteen,” I say. Too quickly.
She laughs. I want to eat her candy pussy. “Joe,” she says. “One thing about me, I don’t give a shit about age. I am not one of those girls. You can be younger than me all y
ou want.”
Her mother calls and Love talks to her about tennis balls and Net Jets. I can tell that Love likes me by the melody of her voice, by the way she tells her mother she’s bringing someone.
When Love finishes up with her mother, she zips into the valet at Hollywood & Highland. “Will you think I’m a horrible princess if I say I can’t deal with this traffic and I’m dying for a drink and I would rather just get you a jacket somewhere here?”
I don’t think Love is a horrible princess and I don’t let her pay for my clothes at Lucky or the Gap.
“Almost ready?” Love asks.
“Almost,” I say.
When I emerge from the dressing room, Love is wearing new clothes too, a tiny little white dress with slits on both sides. “Wow,” she says. “I can’t believe that jacket’s from the Gap.”
I can’t believe she’s wearing a nightie to dinner, but I rip off the tag like she asks. My mom always said, the rich are different.
18
I live here now, at this particular table, on this particular night, at Chateau with these particular people, my people, the Quinns. I am born again a Quinn, unofficial son-in-law of Dottie and Ray—the Dottie and Ray who send me their love at the Pantry!—and they know how to hug, how to talk. They are round, happy people and we talk current events and they don’t understand the hoopla about Henderson. “I’m old school,” Love’s father declares. “Give me Johnny Carson or Jay Leno at his desk. Hell, I’ll take Jimmy Fallon because the kid dresses well but don’t give me this punk on his couch.”
“Dad, don’t be so harsh,” Love admonishes.
“No,” I say. “I see where he’s coming from. I think Henderson was poisoning us all. There’s honor in asking people questions. There’s honesty in it. Curiosity. It’s intellectual. Earlier generations, they were more comfortable as listeners and Henderson promoted an idea that we could all be the center of attention all the time. But if everyone is onstage, who’s in the audience?”
Everyone stares at me, and this has happened a couple of times tonight, when I questioned the value of organic vegetables and expressed my opinion on kale. But I own them and I win again when Ray claps. “You are a breath of fresh air, Joe.”
Dottie beams. “So smart.”
Love rubs my thigh. And she is right; Ray and Dottie do seem in love and they love me. Ray wants to know if I like boats and Cabo because he’s got a new Donzi he’s dying to get in the water and a place in Cabo. “La Groceria,” he says, enthralled with his terrible accent. “The neighbors, they thought we were nuts, but I like a good name. Why shouldn’t I call it La Groceria? Everything sounds better in Spanish.”
I Google Donzi. It costs around $500,000.
Ray and Dottie insist I eat and drink whatever I want. “Your first time at Chateau is a special thing,” according to Ray. “Lives are made here, Joe. This is the mother ship. This is our family tradition and when you’re with us, you’re family. You understand?”
Love laughs him off but he is right. Chateau Marmont is a country that doesn’t allow extradition, a safe zone, a haven, and everybody cares about me. Is my chair soft enough? Is my drink to my liking? Is it too hot? Too cold? Do I need a heat lamp? Do I eat shellfish? I have never been so nurtured and Love whispers—my parents, not so bad, right?—and I have a new respect for aspirations because this is a great way of life.
Forty breezes in and hugs me like we’re best friends. Ray huffs. “You see all those girls today for your audition but somehow your sister is the one who comes away with a new fella.”
Forty brushes it off. “She’s got the love, Pops.”
“Your father and I just want to see you happy,” Dottie adds.
“I know, Mom,” Forty says. “And I assure you, when I finish casting and finalize the rewrites and get my agent the bio he needs for that pilot shooting in Sedona and get him the rewrites he needs for that other pilot shooting in Culver, I assure you, dearest parents, I will meet a very nice girl and get married and pop out two perfect children. Maybe even twins.”
Love laughs. “You’re horrible.”
But Forty’s not done. “Because it’s very easy to meet available beautiful babes while I’m heading up five projects at once.” He knocks back a shot of tequila. “But tonight, to Mom and Dad, on Dad’s half birthday.”
In my navy blazer over a plain T-shirt, I pass as one of these people at Chateau. Ray tells stories about the good old days, running around the first Pantry, working doubles for pennies—his parents gave him nothing, that was a different time—and Dottie says the past is the past. She says you can’t pretend you have nothing when you have so much. She squeezes my arm. “See, his father was the owner and my dad was the butcher so it’s only because of me that he knows what it was to be poor.”
“I understand,” I say.
“Of course you do,” she says. “You’re from New York.”
Love keeps her hand on my inner thigh. This is a family and Ray and Dottie like me because I work for a living. I could live like this but Westward Ho! is, by definition, about expansion and our party is larger all the time. Friends come by this half-birthday party and Love has to go be nice. Forty slaps an arm on my back.
“You don’t work in the business, right?” he asks.
“No,” I confirm. “I get a kick out of it though.”
“Your notes were of value,” he says. He tears into three packets of artificial sweetener. “Which is precisely what this business needs.”
He wants a high five and I’m there and he’s talking about Almost Famous and he vents. “People here don’t like to think. They’re afraid of it, like if they do it there’s no turning back. But you’re a thinker. You’re like that statue. I can tell. I see that.”
“Thanks,” I say.
Ray leans in. “He’s a professor.”
Forty nods. And this is a nickname I can handle, The Professor, and Love returns, dangles her arms over me, and whispers in my ear, Professor.
“No,” I say. “It’s The Professor.”
Ray claps and here comes our unofficial guest of honor, producer Barry Stein. Everyone rises for Barry Stein, and then Bradley Fucking Cooper—Chateau!—is hugging him, inviting him to sit. And now, Barry is coming for us. He’s so West Coast that he could have been in Ocean’s Eleven. He wants us to sit. He doesn’t smile. He’s too cool to smile. Dottie is devastated that he’s come on his own.
“The wife and nanny are in the dumps over Henny,” he says, and that’s a new one, Henny. He switches gears, not unlike Delilah, and slings an arm around Love. “But Dottie, if it pains you to see me all alone, I’ll gladly take this one right here.”
Fucking pig but Love’s father laughs and Love excuses herself for the ladies’ room with a kiss on my cheek. Stein sighs. “All the good ones are taken.”
Dottie smiles. “This is Lovey’s new friend Joe. He’s brilliant.”
Ray endorses me too. “This kid’s got the goods, Barry.”
Barry says it’s nice to meet me and I don’t like him and I don’t like the rich, blond motherfucker approaching this table. His hat says VINEYARD VINES and his T-shirt says FOUR SEAS ICE CREAM and when I wanted to come here in a T-shirt and jeans, we had to go shopping. Love returns from the restroom and hugs this man. “Milo, it’s so good to see you.”
The waitresses makes room for him and Dottie kisses him and invites him to dinner and Forty elbows me. “Don’t waste your time turning green,” he says. “Milo is just our brother from another mother.”
I tell Forty I’m fine and then I’m on my feet, extending my hand. Milo opens up for a hug. “Fuck that,” he says. “Bring it in.”
Milo’s eyes are too big, his smile pandering. He’s overly gracious with the waitresses, too complimentary of the cake that Dottie got for Ray. He’s a fucking liar to the bone. He’s a television producer. “By trade,” he says. “But my heart is in the theater.”
I want to know if his dick has been in Love and she says that he’
s way too self-deprecating. All people have a blind spot. Love’s is Milo. She doesn’t understand that he deliberately undersells himself so that she will gush over him. “Milo is amazing,” she raves. “Unlike me, he stayed in law school.” He looks down bashfully and immediately I know that they were fucking on September 11th. Love goes on. “And Milo isn’t just a producer, he’s the producer. He’s the reason New Blood, Connecticut won all those awards. He just knows so much.”
Milo smiles. “The lady doth exaggerate. Please, be a friend, tell me about you.”
But Love cuts me off. “Joe,” she says. “Milo is also a fantastic writer. He’s just back from Martha’s Vineyard where his movie played at the festival, right?”
“Actually it was Nantucket,” he says. “And I think Uncle Barry might have had a hand in that. And it’s just a short.”
I look at Barry Stein, who just shakes his head. “All I did was watch the movie, officer. I swear.”
We all laugh as if this is funny and it isn’t and Milo tells everyone about his short fucking film and Love pays attention to him, not me. I am not involved in this conversation and I slip away to find out a little bit more about this fucker. I go online and learn that Milo is Barry Stein’s godson, not his nephew. I learn that he and Ben Stiller posed for photos together less than twenty-four hours ago. I learn that his short is a based-on-fact retelling of the most searing event of Milo Benson’s childhood, when his older brother shocked Darien, Connecticut, by murdering Milo’s father, hedge fund owner Charles Benson, in cold blood.
Fucking Republicans. They kill each other over money and then the liberal boy left over takes all the cash and makes a career out of repurposing this one event from his childhood, first into a book of drawings and then into a Vanity Fair essay and then into his TV show.
I head back to the table, where Milo and Forty fight for the attention and approval of Barry Stein, who says Milo’s ideas have tremendous potential but pats Forty on the back and tells him that his ideas need work. These are two very different statements, which is idiotic because at the end of the day, either you have something or you don’t. Milo orders an açai bowl and Forty orders a Patrón double. I nudge Forty and tell him that last idea sounded good.