She rolls her eyes. “But you’re not,” she says. “The sun stays strong here.”
“I’m fine,” I insist.
An hour later, I am a fool. I am crisp and cold and hot and burnt and my skin has been destroyed. She doesn’t say I told you so but she does cross her arms and wear a floppy hat. We move to the shaded area of the pool and she says if I had put on the lotion I wouldn’t have gotten burned. I did put on the fucking lotion but clearly someone left it out in the sun and all the protective power of it was destroyed. I am not going to fight with her. This is the Summer of Love and I have to believe in the Fall of Love even though it has an ominous tone. I look at Forty, asleep in the chair; Monica is inside getting ready, as if you need to get ready to lie by the fucking pool.
“Too hard,” I say when Love rubs aloe on my red shoulders.
“Sorry,” she says, and she lightens her touch but that hurts too and I flinch. “Joe,” she says. “Maybe you should do this yourself.”
I take the bottle. I can’t do it myself. I can’t reach my back. The thing about a true sunburn is there is no quick fix. I lie on my belly and Love puts a sheet over me and kisses the back of my head. She says she’s gonna go change.
“Change?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I have a meeting.”
“About your charity?”
She scruffs my hair. “About a movie.”
“The one you and Forty were working on?” I ask, and I don’t like this.
But she doesn’t have time to change her clothes or her attitude or answer my question because Milo is here, whistling, in a Black Dog Martha’s Vineyard T-shirt and it’s like he knows New England is my hate place, where Beck was born, angry and unsolvable, where Amy fooled me with Charlotte & Charles, where Love lost her virginity to Milo, undoable and indelible, a cherry popped on old sand.
“You sick, buddy?” Milo asks as he hugs my girlfriend.
“He forgot to put on sunblock,” Love says. “Also you’re early, Mi.”
“Sorry,” he says, and he looks at me and winces. “Hey, you should put some aloe on that.”
“I did,” Love says. “But it’s that burn where all you can do is wait.”
They’re both standing over me and even though it hurts, I have to tear the sheet away and sit upright on this fucking chair. My own skin burns me, a localized panic attack on my largest organ. “It’s not so bad,” I say. “What’s up, Milo? Where’s Lorelai?”
“Lorelai’s on her way to New York to go to a wedding in the Hamptons,” he says.
Love nudges him with her foot. “You should go,” she says. “She seems like a good one.”
“She is a good one,” he says. “And I had every intention of accompanying her. Who doesn’t love a Hamptons wedding?”
Me, fucker, and Milo pulls something out of his pocket. It’s a piece of paper folded up into a tiny triangle. He passes it to Love, who takes it and laughs. “This is so old school,” she says. “This is how we used to pass notes.”
Milo eye fucks her as if I’m not here. Shameless interloper, and I imagine a pack of black dogs ripping into him, eating him alive.
Love unfolds the note and she is quivering and I remain invisible. “Omigod omigod omigod!”
“I take it that’s a yes.”
She runs to him barefoot and straddles him and he’s spinning her around and I’m sitting here in splitting pain and somehow Forty is sleeping through all this. I refuse to ask to be let in on the conversation and Love pats Milo’s back and he puts her down.
She comes to me and takes my hands. “Joe,” she says. “Joe Joe Joe Joe Joe.”
And then she kills me. The news is disgusting. Milo got funding to direct a feature he wrote and he’s going play the lead opposite Love.
“What’s it called?”
“Boots and Puppies!” she announces.
“Ah,” I say, because I am too shocked to say actual words. All this time she was searching for news about Milo’s movie. She loves boots and she loves puppies but she loves Milo’s movie more. Milo is the Third Twin, smug as fuck. I wonder if he got her first husband thrown in jail and I wonder if he was in a wetsuit, waiting underwater to murder her cancer-stricken doctor husband. Forty is waking up, yawning, going for the Veuve. Milo is a bad guy. And wait. Love is an actress.
“I’m so confused,” I say. “You’re gonna act?”
Milo lights a cigarette and relocates his Wayfarers to the top of his blond Jewfro. “Love is an amazing actress,” he says. “But she’s not for sale, you know? We know she’s too good for that. But this is our baby. Boots and Puppies is ninety-five pages of straight-up sex and conversation. It’s gonna change movies. It’s a horror movie without any blood. It’s about the sanctity of the human heart. It’s the kind of stuff they used to make movies about. Barry Stein says it’s like The Big Chill only in this case, the dead body is sort of us, you know, as a society. ”
The level of bullshit, and I look at Forty—our movies have plots—but he’s on Team Milo. He plays along and very quickly I know why. Forty says he had no idea that he would be brought on as a producer and he high-fives Milo and Milo says the script wouldn’t be as good as it is without his insights and I want to kill everyone and my skin, on top of all this, my skin. Love wraps up in a beach towel, as if she needs to cover up suddenly. Already she is different, self-conscious, a simpering actress, overthinking her words, pursing her lips. My Love sounds like a fucking asshole as she simpers, “Our perfect little baby.”
“Where are we gonna shoot?” Forty asks, clapping his hands.
“We nabbed a great house in the Springs,” Milo says.
Forty says nice and Love is awestruck. “It’s real,” she says. “It’s really real.”
My skin burns and my heart burns and the three of them talk more about the movie as if I asked. Milo started writing it when they were at Crossroads and you can love someone all you want, but you can’t go into her past and become a part of her formative years. Boots and Puppies is the baby Love and Milo are going to make together while I sell old books.
Monica appears, hair blown out same as ever, stomach taut, same as ever. Forty tells her the good news and she is predictably stoked. She and Forty pop two bottles of champagne and Forty is also stoked for his buddy and it’s a celebration and I’m relieved that I’m sick. At least I don’t have to fake it. Love feels my forehead.
“I think you have a fever, baby,” she says. “Classic sun poisoning. You should go lie down.”
Love the girlfriend would want to go with me; Love the actress wants me out of here. Forty offers me some Vicodin and Milo agrees with Love, saying I should get out of the sun. He means that I should get out of this world, their life.
Love is impatient with me, leading the way up the stairs, prattling on about her identity, how she’s not an actress-actress and the movie’s not a movie-movie. “It’s the kind of story nobody in Hollywood tells anymore,” she says. “A really small love story.”
Love story. “Great,” I say.
She crosses her arms, classic California cold. “You don’t seem all that happy for me.”
“Of course I’m happy for you, but right now mainly, I feel like I’m gonna puke.”
She winces. “Don’t hate me, but it would be so great of you to do that in the bathroom,” she says. “This guy puked in my old bed once and the smell never really went away.”
I’m gonna let that one slide. I promise to vomit in the toilet and she tells me to rest and take a cold shower if I can stand it. She says she’ll check on me in a little while when I’m not Sick Boy, the debilitated obligation upstairs. I listen to her trot down the stairs. A few minutes later, Boots and Puppies arrives in my inbox, a readonly PDF, and the party outside begins and the first song to start it all is “Boys of Summer.” I can’t read Boots and Puppies in this frame of mind and I have another new e-maiclass="underline" a Google alert for a holy fuck, no article in the Boston Globe. Everything is falling apart at once, my skin, my life, my love, and I am prostrate on a bed I don’t own.