“Fuck you.”
“That’s why Ken Jeong tried to break into the business the old-fashioned way, the honest way,” I explain. “He quit being a doctor to become an actor. You’re a cop. These people in here, they all have talent. You don’t.”
He looks like he might start crying again. But it’s wrong of him to use his badge to harass celebrities and it’s downright disgusting of him to ditch his legitimate police work to go down to Cabo and meet Megan Fox. I don’t feel bad for this fucker. You get a job, you do the job. No slash. The end.
He pounds the glass and his words bleed together, merging into a whiny plea. “Let me the fuck out of here! This is wrong! You are sick and I want out—I want out now!”
“I can’t do that,” I say. “You’re a bad cop. You know where all these famous people are, but you didn’t try to find Delilah.”
He stares at me. “You sick dick,” he rails. “You won’t get away with this.”
“Of course I will,” I say. “If you were a better cop, you’d realize that by now.”
He kicks and he is trapped and he is still correcting his fucking shirt when it gets stuck, still self-conscious about his appearance, still convinced that his appearance matters. Fucking Angelenos. I need a laugh. A break. I kick back and scroll through his Rolodex and I flip over Efron, Zac. I smile. He hits the glass.
“Okay, Robin,” I begin. Robin, not Officer. “I want to know, when you pulled Zac Efron over because his left rear tire looked flat, did you seriously choose to do that because you thought you guys look enough alike that you could play his father in a movie?”
He does not nod this time. He does not yell obscenities. And maybe I should have started with a different celebrity, maybe Unknown, Rihanna (driving without a seat belt) or Nicholson, Jack (flickering headlight). Then, I might have gotten to hear the details behind Robin Fincher’s life of celebrity stalking. But there’s so much I’ll never know because Robin Fincher is so angry at me, the person holding the Rolodex with all the celebrities he wanted so badly to know, so angry at himself, that he becomes a bull. He becomes a zombie. You can see what brains he had evaporate as his eyes shine. His skin is raw, red. He runs headlong into the glass, like a football player whose brain is already gone. He spatters against the walls and falls back, dead.
IT turns out that I have a talent for landscape design. Someday, when Love and I have a place together, I’ll oversee the yard. Sure, we’ll have workers doing a lot of it, and maybe even a professional designer, but I’ll have the final say. I am good at this, at knowing what belongs where. I never would have known this if I had stayed in New York. You don’t really get to go to the park and relocate a tree. You don’t get to take nature into your hands when you live in concrete. But I did great today. I took that fucking cactus that didn’t belong out front and I brought it in the back to the Zen garden. I dug a hole. I went deep. I sweated. I liked it. I miss work. And digging a hole for Fincher doesn’t make me feel the way digging a hole for Beck did. He never broke my heart. He was just a bad cop.
I finish and I return inside to the cool air in the panic studio. I drag Fincher’s body outside and toss him into this hole and I am sweating so much now. I bury him, his Rolodex too, both of them so deep, deeper than Beck. And then the fun part. I plant the cactus above Fincher and his Rolodex. The cactus belongs here. It works here and unifies the space, establishes it somehow, more green, less brown. It’s the right size for this garden and there are other cactuses nearby, so it doesn’t look so lonely and idiotic anymore. It doesn’t stand out the way it did in front.
I drink water and look around this yard and at this cactus, with fat pads and its proud, confident stance. I like it. I swear the thing is even smiling at me. I think it knows that I brought it home. I give it one last look and turn to go. I have so much to do. I have to clean up the mess Fincher made when he killed himself. I have to get back to Love and act like a guy who went for a run. And I will do all this and I will do it soon, but I think it’s important to give yourself time and space to celebrate the work you do.
I think that’s why people in LA fall apart, why they get so needy, so desperate for validation, for their cars, for their body parts, for their talents. They forgot that the sweetest thing in life is to be alone, as you were born, as you will die, soaking in the sun, knowing that you put the cactus in the right place, that you don’t need someone to come along and compliment your work, that someone who did that would, in fact, just be getting in the way. I am at peace here. Fincher is too.
39
THE rest of Cabo passes in a blur of tequila and boat rides and waiting for news from Forty’s agent, and soon we are back in the States but I am still in foreign territory: Love’s home. I’ve never been but it’s like I’ve lived here all my life. It’s new and old in all the right places, with customized red appliances and lush, gargantuan part-leather, part-fur sofas. It’s just where you want to be when you fly back to America after burying a dead cop, unlike my apartment, which is so dated and tarnished.
It sucks to know that Dez sold me out, but then, a friendly neighborhood drug dealer is, at the end of the day, a drug dealer, out for himself. I can’t even hate him for it. I’m just happy to be in Love’s home instead of mine. I could sit here for hours, just looking at her same old Instagram photos: “Love in an Elevator,” “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”
She smiles. “I like this one because of the old school curly blue phone cord.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Old school.”
She says no more pictures. She’s tired of her face. I obey her wish and toss my phone on another part of this voluminous sectional. Oh, to breathe, to know that I did it. I got rid of Fincher.
Love leaps off the couch. “Come on,” she says. “I want you to see everywhere.”
And I do want to see everywhere, I want to sit everywhere. This is a dream house with neon signs like the ones in the Pantry. Love has a playroom with board games and a PlayStation and a karaoke machine and a stage, instruments flung about. The neon sign here says SEX IS BETTER WHEN YOU’RE IN LOVE and she says every room has a sign. The kitchen is MADE WITH LOVE and the dining room is LET LOVE RULE and her bedroom door is closed and the neon above the frame reads AND IN THE END . . . Then she opens the door and her bedroom is the perfect hybrid of our intimate squeaky cell in Palm Springs and the too-big luxury of Cabo and the oceanfront seasonal breeze of Malibu.
Love flops onto her bed and I look at the art above it, John Lennon’s lyrics in neon, the ones he famously misquotes from Paul McCartney.
It is a miracle that she is not a vapid nitwit and this is the rest of my life, under the covers, where we could be in a shitty rat-infested walk-up in Murray Hill or anywhere. It doesn’t matter. We found love and then out of nowhere, the lights go out. Homeinvasionearthquakeendofworld. But then music blasts and Love grabs my hands. “Surprise!”
It’s my song, my Pitch Perfect pool mash-up, and she remembered when I mentioned this way back when we first met, in her Tesla, that first ride. When you are in love you listen. Strobe lights come up and Love starts running and she is tearing off her top and she is slipping out of her skirt and she is unsnapping her bra and she is opening a sliding door onto the patio and she is naked and she is running into the pool and I am naked, following her. Splash. Skinny-dipping, making the pool our own. I am inside of Love in her pool and my song bleeds into her song, bleeds back into her song, and this is perfect and there is nothing but our songs and our bodies and our water and our future and the lemon trees, the orange trees. We fuck and we talk, our songs are on a loop, our life is on a loop, and suddenly my favorite word in the English language: We .