The next morning, on the way back to Malibu, I worry that Love is a better person than I am. I am quiet and grumpy and pick a fight about Milo, the fact that he’s texting her, that he’s at the Aisles waiting for us to get home.
“Joe,” Love says. “I can’t ever get mad at anyone for needing a break from Forty, okay? Milo is here because we need him. Because I need him. Please don’t be jealous. He’s dating a really nice girl named Lorelai right now and you have nothing to worry about.”
“I’m not jealous.”
“Look,” she says. “Forty is drawn to everything bad. It’s like whether it’s people or writing or his drugs or anything, you know, he has the worst instincts of anyone. I don’t know what’s gonna happen to him.”
I want so badly to tell her that Forty is going to be fine because he’s discovered a talented writer. I want to tell her that I am The Third Twin and that she makes me want to be kind too. I know we’ll have to take care of Forty. I know he’s never going to get by on his own. I know he’s insecure and unhappy and negative. And I see the way Love cares for him.
“Listen,” I say. “I know you keep putting off going to Phoenix and visiting the charity volunteer coordinators. Why don’t you go tonight? I’ll hang with Forty.”
Love smiles and texts Milo to go home and she mounts me when we get back to the Aisles. She doesn’t wait until we park. She presses on my leg for me to brake and she attacks me in the car, in the driveway. She thanks me for staying with Forty and I tell her it’s no big deal and she raises her eyebrows. “It’s Thursday,” she cautions me. “It’s summer.”
Love was right. Forty is demanding and drunk at Matthew McConaughey’s, where nobody really wants to say hi to him. He is rude to a bartender who’s doing the best she can. I apologize to her when she’s on her break and she says it’s totally cool.
“Dude,” she says. “You look spent.”
I tell her about Forty and she does that California thing where she waits for her turn to talk and then tells me her name is Monica and she’s housesitting in a place near the Aisles and bartending and surfing. She asks me if I surf and it’s a question that offends me but I don’t even get to finish the boring conversation because the other bartender is tapping my shoulder.
“Are you the one with the wasted friend?”
That’s me, and my wasted friend is looking for me. The surfing girl bartender tells me to lighten up. “Try and find the fun,” she says. “It’s, like, all you can do.”
The Californian refusal to accept that sometimes things just fucking suck—like getting into the car with high Forty and making our next stop an S&M hooker who lives on a ranch up in Topanga. I sit on a couch near too many dogs barking and try not to listen to him fuck her or call her Mommy. It is the darkest, longest night of my life and knowing that Love has had countless nights like this makes me love her so much more. A lot of girls, they would have left by now.
When I have to drag him out of his Spyder and into his house, his slumbering body is so dense and unresponsive that I worry he might be dead. But he isn’t and something has to change. I need to find a babysitter for this kid, someone who will put up with his shit, someone mellow and needy.
The next day, while he sleeps it off and my girlfriend teaches the children to Swim for Love in Phoenix, I prowl the beach looking for the bartender who told me to find the fun. She’s where she said she would be, on all fours, scrubbing her stupid board. She’s different when she’s off-duty, more stripperish, with one of those decorative bandanas wrapped around her head and a necklace glistening around her waist. Her body parts are taut and brown; she is a stereotypical LA girl and she’s too hot for Forty, but anyone who gets this dressed up to scrub a surfboard is blank and hungry. She looks over her shoulder constantly. She’s perfect. I go to her. I wave.
27
AS Love says, Monica might be the most chill girl in the world and I’m so glad I recruited her. Monica is unflappable and calm. As Love says, you could punch her in the face and she would just keep smiling. She eases into a relationship with Forty automatically, which means Love and I are off the hook. Monica is super common, with brown hair that is always parted on the left and bangs that fall into her eyes, bangs she is constantly fingering, licking, pushing aside. I want to take a razor and shave them the fuck off but I would never do any such thing. Monica is my savior, Forty’s pacifier. He pets her. He likes her consistency. He tries to talk to me about her open mind in the sack but I tell him I don’t want to know about her lack of nerve endings. I’m still trying to forget what he said last week: “You can pee on her, Old Sport! On her face!”
Monica is a severe Californian, a Beach Boys kind of girl who smiles all the time and follows Forty around trying to get him to drink coconut water. I picture her alone in the middle of the night cutting her inner thighs, but it’s possible that I’m wrong, that some people are just free of demons. She is always exactly the same and she doesn’t bloat or get moody or crave burritos instead of sushi. Everything is chill and one night we are all nestled on floats in the pool, watching a movie outside—this is how it is here, you live in an Esquire spread and you are the star—and Love gasps.
“It just hit me,” she says. “We’re Friends. You guys, you’re Monica and Chandler and we’re Rachel and Ross.”
Monica hasn’t ever seen a whole episode of Friends but she says that sounds cool and Forty says he stopped listening to Love talk about Friends several years ago and I dive off my float and swim over to Love and let her celebrate her epiphany.
Love’s parents go off to Europe and Milo goes off with his Lorelai chick who lives in Echo Park, and Forty hires a housesitter to cover for Monica, which means she’s here all the time. These are the last four weeks of summer and we couple up and do things, big things. We take a helicopter to Catalina and we hop a jet to Vegas and we eat in the pool and we swim in the pool and Monica brings home veggies from the farmers’ market and Love calls them vegetables and I wish this was it, indefinite.
But then Robert Frost wasn’t fucking around and there is a new nip in the air, an increasingly noticeable one. The beach isn’t quite as densely crowded as it was yesterday and motherfuckers at Intelligentsia are starting to trickle in wearing scarves. It’s a sign. There is change ahead. Our heavenly summer is going to end.
The days are getting shorter and Love is wrapped up in blankets, looking at Boots and Puppies online but now there are actual boxes of boots arriving every day, piling up in the kitchen, in the bedroom, on our grass patio. Love tears into the boxes and tries on the boots but she doesn’t wear them, the way she doesn’t adopt any actual puppies.
She says this is her favorite time of year, when she puts “Boys of Summer” on all the Pantry playlists. I remind her that it’s kind of absurd in California, where it’s not going to start snowing. She looks at me and tells me I’m getting a little red. She is critical lately. I tell her I already put on lotion and the sun doesn’t feel as strong. There’s friction between us now that wasn’t here a day ago and I don’t know if I’m a summer fling.
“Joe,” she says. “You need to put on more lotion.”
“I really think I’m okay.”