“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.
17
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.