Delilah salivates over my balls and she is not a cheater like Love, Love who gets to act in a fucking movie without trying to act, Love who gets to star in a fucking movie without suffering through auditions, without waitressing or striving or watching the Oscars on a futon, burning with desire to be there, spending night after night at the UCB trying to learn, to hone a craft. Fuck Love. I like Delilah and I try to be a gentleman. I stay in bed with her when it’s over. I feign interest.
“So how was your summer?” I ask.
“My summer was my summer.” She shrugs. “Not really any such thing as summer in LA, you know? Only difference is some of the parties are at beach houses, but what a pain, going out to the beach. Ugh. East Coast water is so much better, right?”
“Fuck, yes,” I say. Delilah may think she didn’t have a summer but she is wrong. She did. There is something more settled about her. Something changed inside of her and she doesn’t seem as tormented. She’s like the kitten that got neutered. She’s calm. She isn’t as sick with aspirations now that she’s moonlighting for this pseudo–Entertainment Tonight show. We lie in my bed, gazing at the ceiling that used to get on my nerves, the bubbling, lowly barricade that once seemed so literal, a roadblock to a higher life. It all doesn’t seem as bad as I thought. I forgot how nice it is to be contained. I know the boundaries here. I know what’s mine. I don’t have to feel like I’m eating someone else’s Frosted Flakes and I don’t have to say thank you all the time.
“I’m hungry,” I say.
“Wanna order a pizza?” Delilah asks.
No. I want to dive under the covers and kiss her thighs and lick her and feel her hands in my hair. I do this and she reacts the way I want her to react. She calls out my name. Her legs shake. She sounds like she’s crying and laughing at once. She sounds like an animal, like she found the afikomen. I am good enough for Delilah. She treats me like her Milo, telling me how great I am, how big I am, how much she missed me. She does not mention her mother and she does not try to parlay this romp into future meetings like some desperate ne’er-do-well at a blackjack table trying to make it all back. She has learned a thing or two and I could do anything to her in this bed. She gives me her ass, her fingernails, her vigor.
Afterward, we order in chicken and French fries and we watch Hannah and Her Sisters. I pay for the chicken and I hold the remote and we don’t need a screening room. We don’t need an ocean out the window. We just need my forty-two-inch TV, my dick, my futon.
Delilah scratches my chest. “What’s it like?”
“What’s what like?”
“The Quinn mansion,” she says. “I’ve only seen pictures on Curbed LA. Is there really a bowling alley?”
It was the wrong question. I close the box of chicken. She’s supposed to be basking. She’s supposed to be fantasizing about our future. She is not supposed to be reporting and I don’t like the way she sits, on her side, elevated, like she’s doing yoga, like she’s Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club, so blasé.
She wants to know about Love and I deflect. I tell her that it’s complicated but over—and she wants to know where we met and when. I tell her I don’t want to talk about it and she says she needs it in order to move on, have a fresh start. She says she has been seeing someone this summer too and she will tell me anything I want to know about that and now I remember everything wrong with Delilah, with Franklin Village, and I check my phone. Still nothing from Love but Monica wrote to say Love got wasted. They all passed out at Milo’s house. She says Love is mad at me. I remind Monica that I told Love I was sick. I am waiting for a response from Monica when Delilah starts in again on Love, like a fat kid trying to get another cookie.
“Please,” she says. “I’m a big girl and this is not about feelings. I just like to know these things. Tell me where you met her. Where does someone like Love Quinn hang out?”
“She came into the shop,” I lie.
Monica texts: Passing out everything will be fine Love is out cold Forty is high as shit and Milo is
Her phone must have died because that’s it. Delilah prods me. I put my phone down. “What?” I ask.
“The bookstore?” she says. “You’re trying to tell me that Love Quinn came into that bookstore?”
“Yeah,” I say, defensive. “She reads.”
She pulls her hair back and looks away.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says. “It’s just that I think you actually met her at Soho House.”
I have nothing to hide. “I did,” I say. “I don’t know why I’m being weird. I feel weird talking about her to you.”
She says I don’t have to feel weird and she tells me about the guy she’s been seeing and she can’t tell me his name but he’s an actor and he’s someone I would have heard of and he has something you can’t buy with all of Love’s money. Her words, not mine.
“He’s famous,” she says. “Like, legit famous. And it’s good but sometimes he freaks out and pulls shit like he did tonight and stands me up.”
“You were waiting for him at La Pou?”
She nods and this is why she changed. She didn’t evolve. She didn’t grow. She didn’t forsake her aspirations for a healthier outlook on life. She got some famous dick inside of her and some famous dick called her back. Between us we have no money, no fame, no power, no butler, no boxes of Frosted Flakes that just appear without having to go to the grocery store, no elevated lawns under starry skies. Between us we just have negativity. We both got dumped, fucked over.
I tell her I’m exhausted and she asks if she can stay. We both check our phones and we’re both still losers. I don’t need to be on this futon alone, so I tell her it’s fine. We don’t spoon. We’re both too wounded and I fall asleep wondering if there will be more angry sex in the morning.
WHEN I wake up at five A.M. I’m still a loser, and there is no message from Love. I sigh but as long as I am here, I could go for another blowjob. I roll over. I’m ready to go and I reach for Delilah. But she’s not here. I rub the sleep out of my eyes and head toward the bathroom and there she is, in a bra and panties, like some drug-addled victim of human trafficking, hunkered down in my bathroom.
And in her hand is a reusable Pantry bag, my reusable Pantry bag, the one I brought to Henderson’s.
30
“DELILAH,” I say. My heart gets loud in my throat. What the fuck is she doing?
She whips her head around. “Joe,” she says, her eyes wide. “I was looking for toilet paper.”
“There’s a roll on the counter.” I step toward her.
She cowers. She hunches forward, as if she’s praying. “Is there?” she asks, nervous, insincere.
“There is,” I say. “I don’t see how you could have missed it.”
“Oh, you know,” she says. “Guys, a lot of the time, you don’t have toilet paper.”
I don’t like the high pitch of her voice and she turns around and scoots backward, as if she can cover the Pantry bag, as if she can backflip into my tub and escape through the drain. She went through my things. She is a self-destructive fiasco of a person. She couldn’t just stay in the bed with me. She couldn’t be content to suck my dick and cheat on her not-a-boyfriend boyfriend. Nope. Like an addict who loads the syringe even after she knows the batch is bad, that it killed a bunch of people, Delilah got out of my bed and went into my closet, where she doesn’t belong. She is an addict. And you can’t go to rehab for what has stricken her, a star-fucking disorder where she risks her own life and security and happiness to find out what Love Quinn’s home looks like.