I lean on the balcony rail and turn on my phone. When it finally boots up, it proceeds to buzz like it’s having a heart attack from trying to keep up with all these texts from Delilah.
Hey! What do you think about tomorrow?
My mom says hi LOL
My mom loves Dan Tana. Seems good, right?
Hey
Joe?
Asdjkasdkasdsda
Hey are you ok? Harvey says you never came home. Calling hospitals.
My mom is only here til Monday . . . this is fucked.
Going to Birds?
Going to Birds. See you there?
Asdbsjkdaskd yes?
Knock knock
La Poubelle?
At La Pou!
FUCK OFF
Hey Joe are you ok? Look I know I shouldn’t have asked you to meet my mother but it’s not what you think. She’s cool. I didn’t mean it in a meet the parents kind of way. So you don’t have to disappear on me.
There’s a picture of Delilah’s tits, real, pert. There’s another text:
If you’re not dead, I’m never speaking to you again. I don’t need this. I have a lot of great things in my life and a lot reasons to be happy and I don’t need you blowing me off like this. So do me a favor and just leave me alone. Okay? Okay.
And now it’s Calvin’s turn. He wrote to me, just eighteen minutes ago: Dude. Hot chick in store. She’s got a Portnoy’s Complaint. Book not screenplay.
I thought I was done, that it was over, but my beating heart and shaking hands tell me it’s not. Amy. Finally. I write back: Hold her. On my way.
Calvin writes back: How?
He wants to be a writer but he can’t come up with a fucking plan to make a girl wait twenty minutes? I send my orders: Tell her that your supervisor is in yoga and you have to wait for him to get out so you can get his approval.
Calvin writes back: Cool.
He should have said smart and with shaking hands, I scribble a note for snoring Love—Gotta run, be back soon—and I nearly fall over trying to get out of the fucking robe and into my clothes. I shut the door and step into the hallway, into reality—I don’t have a key, this isn’t my suite—and I kick a discarded room service tray. Lazy, unhungry fucks tossing out lukewarm, high-end pancakes and I don’t belong here, I had a purpose and a goal and I need closure and FUCK.
I hail a cab on Sunset. The world is uglier than it was before and I feel hungover even though I wasn’t drunk. Calvin texts: She asked what kind of yoga. I said hatha. FYI.
I write back: I’m close.
And I am. This is it. I am queasy and the cab is fast and we are here. Across the street, I see her in the shop flirting with Calvin. Cunt. The crosswalk is flashing red but fuck it. This is Fast Five and I have my target in the crosshairs. I will risk another jaywalking ticket. I get out of the cab, I run. I make it to the double lines before the driver wails on his horn.
“You need to pay me!” he screams.
I forget to pay because I’m so used to Uber and technology is killing our instincts. I look into the shop. Amy and Calvin must have heard the horn because they look up, and Amy’s eyes widen. The driver wails on the horn again and now the light is green and more people are honking. Range Rovers want me out of the fucking way and a woman in a Prius enjoys laying on her horn, taking out all that rejection rage on me. Even if I did run out on this cabbie, which I can’t—the mug of piss—I would miss Amy. She’s out the door and she’s on foot. She’s around the corner, into a waiting car, a passenger, not a driver, and she’s gone.
I don’t get hit by a car but if I did I don’t think it would matter. My nerves are shot. I’ve gone from the high of Love to the adrenaline of Amy to the crash, to forking wrinkled tens out of my wallet to pay this cabbie as he bitches about you kids and your Ubers and to know that I was so close. All the nights I spent in this Village waiting. That bitch knew. She had to have known. The cabbie goes, disgusted, as if his shitty day compares to mine.
I walk east to the corner of Franklin and Bronson and wait for the crosswalk to turn white. I plod across the street and into the bookshop and Calvin looks like a different person. He shaved. His hair is short. He’s wearing a #IWasThere T-shirt.
“Dude,” he says. “I did everything I could, but she had to jam. She said she’ll be back.”
I don’t bother telling him how wrong he is. I just slump into a chair behind the counter.
“So where’ve you been?” he asks.
“I was in West Hollywood,” I explain, and I can’t believe I missed her.
“Did you have a meeting?” he asks, as if that would matter, as if I didn’t move here to kill Amy, to find Amy. I tear into one of Calvin’s thinkThin bars.
“Yeah,” I say, deflated.
“A two-day meeting?” he asks, all hopped up now, as if this might mean he gets to ride along. “Delilah said you haven’t been around.”
Delilah and I sigh. “Yeah,” I say. “A friend in town, a meeting, no big deal.”
Calvin picks up his iPad. “She was filthy hot,” he says. “The Amy chick.”
“Yeah,” I say, but Love is prettier and softer and Amy has fucked me over again. I groan. Love does not know my phone number and never seeing her again is possible. I ran out on her and this is what Amy did to me and Love might think I used her for her body and her bed and her truffle fries. Life is better when it’s simpler. If I could just kill Amy, I wouldn’t have to worry about her. She wouldn’t get in the way of things. If Amy were dead, I would know Love’s phone number.
Calvin rubs his forefinger and pointer finger on his iPad, the way he always does when he sees a hot girl on Tinder. He smiles. “You can almost see her nips,” he says. “Wanna see?”
I don’t want to look at nips but he pushes the iPad at me and these nips I do want to see because they are Amy’s nips. “How did you get this?”
“I pretended I was taking a selfie and I got a picture of her,” he says. And Calvin missed his calling. I could hug him.
“Did you get anything else?”
“Don’t be pissed,” he says, holding up his hands.
“Okay . . .” I say slowly.
“Well, I tried to tell her that the owner was coming back.” He laughs. “The hatha yoga shit, but then I said something about kundalini and she caught onto my bullshit and she was like ‘What are you really trying to do here?’ and I was like, ‘I’m trying to get to know you’ and she was hot for me, Joe. I’m sorry but you know, it was like some classic sitcom shit where the friend tries to get the girl to stay for the friend but then the girl likes the friend.”
My heart beats again. I toss the thinkThin bar in the trash. “Did you get her number?”
“No,” he says. “But I did get her address. I told her I would send her a flyer for this show I’m doing.”
“You got her address?”
“Yeah,” he says.
I reach for his iPad and he pulls back. “And this show, it’s called Back in the Day and we’re totally analogging it, you know? We’re gonna, like, not promote on Facebook or Twitter or—”
“Calvin,” I barge in. “What’s her address?”
He squirms. “Can I say something?”
Fucking A. “Sure.”
“I kind of can’t.”
“Why the fuck not?” I snap.
“It’s property of my improv group and technically she gave it to the group.”
I take a deep breath. I will not lose my mind. “That’s cool,” I say. “But you know, I won’t tell her how I got it.”
“Yeah,” he says. He smoked an ounce of weed today. Fucker. “But like, I’ll know that I gave it to you and I’ll feel shitty about that.”
Calvin, who Tinder bangs one girl after another, Calvin, who won’t look Delilah in the eye when he runs into her at Birds, Calvin, who won’t watch Enlightened because he just can’t get into a series with so much chick voiceover, this guy is now gonna talk to me about boundaries? Keep me away from Amy Fuc
king Adam? God, she’s a manipulative beast. But I’m better. I hop off my chair.
“Smoothie?” I offer.
“Always,” he says. “Kale.”
I go next door and order the kale smoothie and I go into the bathroom and crush three more of Dez’s Percocets. Twenty minutes later, Calvin passes out. At last. I reach into his pocket for the password cheat sheet he keeps in his wallet and I get into his iPad and into the database for his improv group and boom.
The building is around the corner on Bronson and Amy did settle into this neighborhood. Maybe she got a wealth hangover and maybe she’s still the girl who tells the guy she’s using that she misses her own bed and maybe she’s back in it right now, freaking out about seeing me, eating frozen chicken and waiting for the truffle oil to evacuate her pores and ooze out of her body.
I go to the Pantry and buy violets—the painted ones. Then, I go to Bronson and buzz apartment 326. Nothing. I buzz apartment 323. Nothing. I buzz 101 and 101 is female and 101 is awake.
“Hello?” she says, husky.
“Flowers!” I say.
The girl in 101 doesn’t ask who they’re for because everyone likes to get flowers. Woody Allen knows this; Anjelica Huston gets murdered in Crimes and Misdemeanors because she wants flowers and lets a stranger into the building. My breath quickens when I enter the lobby and I have to dart into the stairwell because apartment 101 is just a few feet from the front door. In the stairwell, I freeze. I am shaking. The flowers rattle, swish swish. I don’t have to do this. So Amy is harassing me. So what? I could just slip out of this building and run back to Love. I prefer Love. She’s sweeter. She knows music and she’s ready for me. So what am I doing in this stairwell, jeopardizing my future with Love?
“Fucking closure,” I mutter. If only Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were a real thing and it’s such an asshole Angeleno thought to have, unoriginal and bratty. I can’t erase my memories of Amy. But I can stop her from fucking around with my future.
I begin my ascent toward her apartment. This stairwell is concrete and white and every time I step it echoes. Everyone in this building is sleeping; Angelenos need beauty sleep. They need energy to make storyboards for web series and hike and talk about movies they’ll never make and walk their dogs that hate them. My heart pounds and I reach the third floor and I turn the doorknob and it squeaks and I flinch and I bet nobody was ever murdered here before.
I jimmy the “lock” of 326—nothing is built well anymore—and the front door opens directly into the living room, which is awash in bras, bowls of cereal, empty bottles of Corona Light, and US Weeklys. There is one sofa, covered in frayed blankets, and a small TV. To the left is a galley kitchen with a sad little countertop meant to facilitate socializing.
The TV is off and the apartment is quiet, but there’s an open box of Cocoa Krispies on the counter, like someone just made a bowl of cereal and wandered away. I pass the counter and walk past the Pier One barstools into a narrow hallway. The walls are white and there is a bathroom at the end of the hall and the door is open. A closet door to my left is ajar, which means that the door to my right leads to the bedroom. Amy’s bedroom.
This is it. I put my hand on the doorknob and push. The room is small and dark. Marilyn Monroe hovers above the bed, a breathy beacon in white, immortalized on the wall (why, hello, Joe). Beneath her is a rumpled comforter, covering the faint outline of a body. Hair peeks out from those covers, blond, greasy. My breath is short. I count down. I flex. I clench my jaw. And in one fell swoop I peel away the blanket.
There’s a shriek and a kick and a little ninja, a foot shorter than Amy in a black tank and black panties, springs up as I fall onto my back. The floor is hard. Wood. Her foot is a weapon and she knows it. She kicks me in the crotch. I scream and roll to my side and that foot gets my kidney. I fold into myself and now she gets my tailbone and I retreat and now that fucking foot jabs me in my belly.
“Stop!” I beg.
She kicks me again. Harder. And I deserve this because I didn’t find Amy, because I don’t know Love’s number, because my balls have been kicked into my intestines.
She jumps on the bed and stands in karate chop mode. She yelps, “Don’t move.” As if I could turn over. As if my body isn’t a collection of throbbing, busted places. I breathe. This was supposed to be Amy. That was supposed to be me on the bed, in control. I open my eyes. She perceives my eyes as a threat and she jumps off the bed and kicks me in the head. Everything goes away now, the pain and the fear and the anger and the lukewarm blood.
Blackout.
21
“DON’T move,” the girl says again.
I can’t move. She’s being redundant. While I was out cold she went to work on me. She tied my limbs together with resistance bands. I’m a mermaid flat on her white shag area rug. I can’t talk. A resistance band is wrapped around my head, cutting through my mouth and jamming my tongue. The girl paces. She grips her cell phone and I wonder when she called the cops, what’s taking so long, how bad this is going to get. Fuck these fucking resistance bands and I have only one move.
I cry.
In the big way. For everything bad, the starving kids and the way Harvey refreshes his YouTube videos, for Calvin’s body, how confusing it must be, the pot and the coke, the acting and the writing. I cry for Mr. Mooney and his eggs and for Marilyn Monroe, framed here too; she is everywhere and yet she is dead. My captor picks up a pair of scissors and kneels beside me. Ferberizing a baby is no easy thing. She pulls the band from my cheek and cuts it.
“Enough!” she screams.
I blubber. I work my lower lip. I drool. “My God, thank you.”
She grabs a hand towel and wipes my face. “Stop it.”
“I—I’m sorry,” I stammer. “I won’t move, I promise. I know the cops are coming.”
Her eyes flash to the left and she did not call the cops. She grunts, throws the hand towel on the floor, and she is still holding her scissors and her phone. “I said stop it.”
I nod. “Sorry.”
She paces and there is a reason she did not call the cops. Anyone would call the cops. That mysterious reason is all I have and I wish I knew what it was because if it goes away I’m fucked. “Sometimes they’re slow,” I assure her. “But they’ll be here.”
She stops moving. “I said, stop it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop talking.”
“I will,” I say. “There’s just something I want you to know before they get here.”
She groans. She looks at me.
I blurt, “I was looking for my girlfriend.”
“You broke in.”
“No,” I say. “The door was open.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Go look,” I plead. “I swear to you. The door was open, just like Lydia said it would be.”
The girl storms across the rooms, her thighs are hard, shiny. She opens the door. She examines the knob. She slams it. I do know how to pick a fucking lock. She returns to me. “Well, who the hell is Lydia?”
“Do the cops have your code?” I ask. I am #TeamGirl. “You should call 911 and make sure they know the access code.”
“They have it,” she lies. She grimaces. She gets a text and she reads and types and it’s probably her best friend, who is like call the cops and this girl is like I got this and the friend is worried like you need to call the cops sweetie this is cray. I can smell the dynamics and I know I have a shot at freedom.
This girl doesn’t want to bring in male authority figures; look how many resistance bands she has in her possession. She was training for something like this. This girl is a vigilante, like the renegade hotel manager in Red Eye. I can’t make sense of the Marilyn Monroe pictures and the West Elm furniture; they don’t match up with her rock-hard thighs, her resistance. But I do know that she would rather have me tied up in her possession than in a holding cell in a part of town she doesn’t like. She could have rolled my unconscious body out the
door and onto the street. She could have done a lot of things but she knew how to beat me without breaking me. She tosses her phone onto the sofa.
“Is everything okay?” I ask, subtly instructing her that we are equals, with each other’s best interest at heart.
She doesn’t like it and she comes at me and jams the scissors toward my face, stopping a few inches away. “I’ll ask the questions, fucker.”
“Okay, yes,” I say. “You’re in charge.”
She crouches over me. I wish she would put on some fucking pants. “Who are you?”
This matters, what I say to her. I have to be someone she wants to set free. This is the most important question I will ever answer and I swallow. “I’m Paul,” I begin, my mind whirring.
“Okay, Paul. What else?”
“I swear to you, I am not a sicko. I didn’t come here to hurt you.”
“You didn’t bring a weapon,” she concedes. She pulls the scissors back, the tiniest bit.
I nod. “I’m a mess right now.” Girls want men to be messy.
She takes the scissors away. I sigh. “I’m taking a semester off from law school. I want to be a prosecutor.”
“Uh huh,” she says. “Is your girlfriend in law school too?”
“I don’t have a girlfriend,” I answer.
She raises her scissors. I was too quick. I fucked up. “You said you were looking for your girlfriend. You specifically said that. Lydia.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m freaking out here.”
She purses her lips. She puts down her scissors and picks up her phone. “I should call the cops.”
I nod, like a Republican promising to lower taxes before a live national audience. “You should,” I agree. I play hard. “I don’t blame you if you do. I would have called the second you knocked me out. I show up in your bedroom. It’s a fucking nightmare. I can’t believe I went to the wrong place. If I were you, I mean, I would have done the same thing. And I’d call the cops. I mean this is fucked, I know it.”