“Of course.”
She leans into me and the story goes like this: Two giants, a man and a woman, live on a desert island. The woman is lonely but the man feels safe. Humans arrive and while the woman is excited, the man is hesitant. The last time humans were there, everything went to shit. The humans tried to kill them. Charlotte wants to try again and Charles complies, but sure enough, the humans are ringing bells, the sound of which will kill Charlotte and Charles. But Charlotte and Charles wear earplugs to protect themselves.
There’s an earthquake and Charlotte and Charles help the humans, then swim away to a new island. The second to last page of the book is a picture of the giants on an island together at night. Several years have passed. They look at the stars and Charlotte wishes that more people would come. Charles says that the people would do the same fucking thing and screw them over. Charlotte concedes that this is possible. But she also reminds him that he could be wrong. And in the corner of the page, there is a ship. People are coming.
Amy closes the book and smiles up at me. “Well?”
“That’s one dark fucking book.”
She smacks my leg. “You can’t swear at Charlotte and Charles.” She spins to face me. “Tell me what you think.”
“I liked it,” I say.
She nudges me. “Come on. What did you think?”
This feels like a test and it’s supposed to be a vacation. I shrug. “I want to let it sit awhile. I don’t like this culture of reading a book and spitting out an immediate reaction.”
She tilts her head like a schoolteacher with a slow kid. “I see that,” she says. “I’ve read it a hundred times and I’ve had my whole life to think about it.” She shivers.
“Are you cold?”
She shoves the book into her bag and we leave the beach. I failed to retrieve the mug and I failed to understand Charlotte & Charles and walking on sand is just no fun. Ever.
Back at the hotel, we shower together, I put my Charles in her Charlotte, and she helps me write back to the BuzzFeed guy. We bring Cajun scallops and buttery lobster rolls and cannolis to our room. We eat in the bed and we fuck in the bed and we laugh in the bed and we wake up bloated, happy.
I fuck Amy in the shower and in the soaking tub and on the balcony—her favorite, she tells me during what she calls blueberries in bed—and I fuck her on the sofa and then I fuck her on the love seat. I memorize her face, her trembling lips, Oh Joe, her legs quivering, clinging. She opens her mouth, my little seal. I pop a blueberry into that hole in her face, the one that takes my dick in a way that no mouth ever did before.
She winks. “Good shot.”
We live here now, in this room, in these sheets, like a fucking John Mayer song come to life. We joke that they will cordon off this room when we go because nobody will ever occupy it the way we did. I love her more now than I did five minutes ago, more than I did five hours ago. I break the rules and tell her this because she is not like other girls.
“I know,” she says. “Isn’t it weird the way most people only get more annoying and you only get less annoying.”
I jab her with a pillow. “I’m not annoying.”
She shrugs teasingly and we bash each other with pillows and she pins me down and drops blueberries into my mouth and I plant my mouth on hers and we eat together, one mouth. I ask her about Charlotte & Charles and she tells me to forget it and I mark her body all over with my pulpy blue kisses. They’ll have to throw away these sheets and when she comes, she screams and she throws a pillow across the room. It goes out the window, over the balcony.
She giggles. “So I guess that was what you call a one-pillow orgasm.”
For a brief moment, I see Beck, the way she humped a green pillow. I smack Amy’s ass. “By the end of the day, there won’t be any pillows left in here,” I say, ready to go again.
But she puts her hand on my chest. “Whoa,” she says. “Joe, we do have to go out.”
“We don’t have to do anything,” I say, and it must have been so much easier in the dark ages, before restaurants, when there was no fucking Little Compton Coupon Guide designed with the explicit purpose of interfering in our fuckfest.
“Here,” she says, flipping through the coupon guide. “Scuppers by the Bay. They have a band.”
“Do they deliver?” I try, and it’s a waste of time.
She’s out of bed telling me that I’ll be thanking her after I’ve had a good meal. And that’s how you know you’re in love. You put on slacks and feign excitement over oysters and live light rock and you grab the keys and leave.
Scuppers by the Bay is overstuffed with assholes. The lot is jammed and the valets look stoned. There’s a sixteen-thousand-piece cover band tooling away in the back—murdering Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It”—and the clamor in the kitchen is matched by a screaming spoiled baby at a nearby table with spoiled parents fussing over skewered scallops. We don’t have a reservation and the coupon is not valid tonight and we are told to wait at the bar for one hour, maybe two.
I suggest we go but Amy nods toward a couple at the bar. They’re overdressed, he’s swishing his wine in his glass and she’s drinking something blue. I don’t want to talk to them but when Amy whispers to follow her lead I start to get hard. She dabs gloss on her lips. “Okay,” she says. “We’re gonna pretend to be other people and we’re gonna glom onto them.”
“Seriously?”
Her eyes flash. “You be Kev and I’ll be Lulu.”
We really are the same. I like fake names, but I’m used to it being a means of survival or escape, like when Officer Nico believed that I was Spencer Hewitt because of my Figawi hat.
“I don’t know, Amy,” I say, fucking with her. “Lulu sounds pretty fucking made-up.”
She claps, excited, and we decide to be Kev and Mindy from Queens. “I’m a chef and you’re an aspiring actor.”
“An actor?” It stings. Why not a director? Or doctor?
She cups my chin in her hand. “Well, you’re too hot to do anything else, honey.”
I would like to take her into the handicap bathroom and fuck her brains out but she has already started in on the nice couple. When a woman wants to socialize, no penis in the world can replace meaningless conversation about iPhone autocorrects—ducked! Hahahaha—and rental car snafus. So we pair off with Pearl and Noah Epstein. They’re also from New York—that’s so crazy!!!—and they’re both lawyers and they’re actually likable, funny. When we shake hands, Noah says, “Hi, that’s Pearl, I’m Noah and we’re what Grammy Hall would call real Jews.”
We talk about Woody Allen and then we also meet Harry and Liam Benedictus. Harry is short for Harriet—yawn—she’s a financial planner and he’s a broker. They have two under three and they’re uptight, but they’re also full of compliments. Liam freaking loves movies and wants to hear about my career. We talk small—how funny is it when your mom texts?!—and I make up shit about my kooky mom sending me Crock-Pot recipes. Amy talks about how her mom thinks LOL means Lots Of Love, and our new friends think we’re so freaking funny.
The conversation drifts to terrible places at times, the ups and downs of the NASDAQ, but we survive. In this bar, lying to these strangers, there has never been more honesty between us. We are closer with every lie, undercover together, fusing. Amy talks about her imaginary father, the one who sends her articles about Rachael Ray. She is vulnerable and we needed this, pretending to be people with parents, parents who text and call and love and ask for help with attachments. The hostess says we can sit now if we’re all willing to squeeze into a booth and I want to squeeze my dick into Amy and she is clapping. She loves booths. All women love booths.
On the way over, Amy whispers, “Wasn’t I right?”
“Yes,” I say. “This is a fucking blast.”
I get to sit beside Amy, our legs pressed together. She raps her knuckles on the table and starts a game. “Okay, okay,” she says. And every man in this restaurant would trade his woman for Am
y. “Favorite movie sex scene. I go first. The Town.”
I’ve heard this all before, how much Amy likes Ben Affleck and Blake Lively together. I slide a hand underneath her skirt and she doesn’t object and I move that hand underneath her panties, onto her ass cheek.
Noah worships that British newsy from HBO—how surprising—and sends the undercooked scallops back to the kitchen and Pearl knocks over her Chablis and says it’s because she has schpilkas. Harry crafts jewelry and sells it on Etsy. The waiter returns with scallops and I take the first bite and I nod. “They’re ducking perfect.”
Everybody in our party cackles at my stupid, easy joke and we could be friends in real life. It would be a long Swiffer commercial with dogs and potlucks in Park Slope. I start to wish they didn’t think of me as an aspiring actor named Kevin. But then if they knew that we were both high school graduates who never went to college, if they knew we worked in retail, these people wouldn’t be friends with us anyway. I squeeze Amy’s thigh; that’s what’s real, my take-home.
Amy says I’m for sure going to make it as an actor and Pearl says I have one of those faces. Her husband laughs and Amy’s eyes glisten and she got a little too much sun today. I wish I could hit pause and stay here in this moment, with the light fading. This is what all the love songs are about, the moment when you find your own way forward with someone and there is no turning back.
Amy winks at me and gets out of the booth to request a song— “Paradise City” by Guns N’ Roses—and the band doesn’t know it and she’s pouting while our new fake friends are discussing the menu. I kiss her cheek. “You’re sweet.”
“What’s that for?”
I stroke her thigh and move my hand up to where the jungle used to be. “I get it.”
She is puzzled. “Huh?”
“‘Paradise City,’” I say. “Guns N’ Roses, like the first time, when you welcomed me to the jungle.”
Her face is blank. Pearl wants to know if we prefer calamari or clams casino and Amy says both and she doesn’t remember our Guns N’ Roses connection. She’s not as smart as I am, but maybe it’s better that we’re a little different.
When it’s time to deal with the check, Amy pulls the valet ticket out of my pocket. She excuses herself to go to the bathroom and then I pretend to get a phone call and step outside. We latch onto each other and the valet delivers the ’Vette and we’re gone and it’s like we were never even there.
“I do feel kind of bad,” I say. I liked Pearl & Noah & Harry & Liam.
“Oh please,” she sighs. “When you split a check like that, it’s almost easier if half the people disappear, you know?”
When we get back into the room, she brings her blueberries into the bed and she fellates me with her superfruit mouth and I smush blueberries on her tits. I want to talk about our lies and our parents and Charlotte & Charles but she says we should sleep because of the drive back tomorrow. I know she’s right but at the same time, I can’t stand the idea of being asleep and missing one second of our life together.
While Amy snores, I walk out on the deck and see the lights on upstairs at the Salinger house. Fuck that mug. It doesn’t scare me anymore. I have a partner now, and this time, I’m leaving it behind on purpose.
5
THE ride home is always different from the ride out. We’re both a little burned out, a little hungover. We don’t want to stop at Del’s for slushies and we agree that lemon ice is precisely the sort of thing that sounds great when you start the vacation, but not what you want on the way home. We hit traffic. We laugh about our fake friends and we forgot to find out the brand of the sheets at the hotel. She holds my hand randomly, as if to say, I can’t believe you’re real. This is love, this is Sunday, and when we get back into the city, she strokes my neck.
“Will you hate me if I just kind of want my own bed?”
“I could never hate you,” I respond.
We make it to her street and I signal with my blinker and she laughs and that will be a running joke for us, that time we rented that red Corvette and got pulled over for not using a fucking blinker. I can’t wait to be old with her. I put the car in park. She kisses me.
“Thank you,” she says. “I hope you know how wonderful you are.”
I hold on to her and breathe her in. Someone behind us honks. I wave the asshole around and Amy climbs out. At the rental joint, the guy asks me if I had any trouble with the car. It is with great pleasure that I tell him we had absolutely no trouble at all. He looks at me like I’m crazy and it’s okay because I am. I am crazy in love.
The next morning, I can’t get to the shop fast enough. I can’t wait to see Amy. I can’t wait to tell her that I found Pearl & Noah & Harry & Liam online. I can’t wait to find out if she watched F@#k Narcissism last night and if so what she thought of Kevin Hart. I wonder what panties she’s wearing today and I’m excited to see if this shaving business continues.
I quicken my stride and I reach the shop but the music in my head ends abruptly. The door is slightly ajar. If Amy came in early she would have closed the door and Mr. Mooney hasn’t been to the store in years. I yank the door open and step inside. I see dust particles in the air and my nose adjusts to the shop, the way a place smells different when you return after a few days. My senses are on fire and we’ve been robbed and I don’t want this kind of distraction after such a good weekend.
The violets I bought Amy are on the floor, scattered, dry, the vase in pieces. There are papers everywhere, books tipped over. My laptop is gone. I tip-toe around the counter and quietly remove the machete from my hiding spot below the main entrance. I haven’t held it in a while and it’s heavier than I remember.
I am not calling the cops—they are not all Jenks and I’ve learned my lesson. I creep toward the back of the shop, checking the stacks to my left, to my right. I move past fiction and biography and at the back of the shop, the basement door is ajar too. The silence of the shop bears down on my brain. They are long gone, I think. But if they are still here I’m slicing their throats. I clench the machete as I descend the stairs slowly, soundlessly. When I reach the bottom step, I gasp and drop it. I don’t need it anymore.
There is nobody here, but someone was here all right, someone who eats superfruits. There’s a bowl on the floor next to the gaping hole where the yellow wall of Portnoy’s Complaints used to be.
Amy.
She stole every last copy, didn’t even leave one for me. She took the Yates first edition too, the one she blew me for, the one that started it all. There’s a blueberry-stained copy of Charlotte & Charles on the floor, right next to my computer and the pink keys, the ones I made for her. I grab my phone and call her and of course this number is now dead, out of service, gone, just like all the others.
I drop to my knees and scream. She left me. She stole from me. I bought that bullshit about her needing her own bed and she must have come here right after I dropped her off. I throw her superfruits at the wall. Supercunt.
I pick up Charlotte & Charles. I understand the meaning of that fucking book now. Don’t trust women. Ever. I open it and there is a message scribbled inside:
Sorry, Joe. I tried. But we really are the same. We both hold back. We both lose control. We both have secrets. Be good to you. Love, Amy.
I haven’t made a comprehensive list of everything she took, but so far, I estimate $23,000 in rare books. She knew what she was doing the day she walked in here, and I fell for it. I should be dragged into a field and shot for being so fucking stupid, dick-blind, cock-sucked. We’re the same, she said. Fuck me. Fuck her.
She pulled the wool over my eyes with her latex gloves and her dick-sucking eyes. This was never love, not on the beach in Little Compton, not in this cage, not in my bed. The bitch came here to trick me, to rob me, and I made her fucking keys.
I grab the laptop and get the fuck out of this fucking cage and I lock it—a little late, asshole—and I trudge up the stairs and I lock the basement door—what a fucking asshole
I am, I should lock myself in the basement—and that’s when I see another mess. Amy ransacked my least favorite section of the shop: drama. She stole acting manuals:
An Actor Prepares
10 Ways to Make It in Hollywood
How to Make Them Call You Back
Monologues for Women Volume IV
Are you fucking kidding me, you lying thieving hairy-legged beast? My head spins. Amy was not an untrained sociologist, wearing college paraphernalia to experiment on human behavior. She was not lying to Noah & Pearl & Harry & Liam. She was acting. Why else would she steal those manuals?
I sit down at the counter and wake up the laptop. She claims to be so off the grid and above this computer shit, but she managed to erase the recent search history. My cheeks sting at the idea of her on that floor, trying to block me, trying to clear the search she conducted on my computer. Well, she should have learned a little bit more about how these machines work, what they can do for me. Chrome isn’t that simple. She only cleared the last hour of her time on my computer, not the whole fucking history. I know my recent searches—rare books and motels in Little Compton—and it’s not exactly difficult to shine the light on her key fucking words:
UCB, cheapest headshots, free headshots, UCB classes cheap, Ben Affleck, top dollar used books, selling rare books, Philip Roth price, auditions, casting calls, blond girl next door audition, sublet Hollywood
She also didn’t clear her fucking downloads and I bring up her application to an Improv 101: Improv Basics class at Upright Citizens Brigade and a script for some short fucking film with a cover page that references a Craigslist ad. So the bitch has run away to try to make it in Hollywood. Making It in Hollywood is the most disgusting phrase in the English language. It’s more disturbing than prolific serial killer and rare terminal illness. I can’t wait to catch her and tell her what a deluded loser she is.