“What about everything you wrote in Charlotte and Charles?”
She swallows. “What?”
“Charlotte and Charles,” I snap. “You read it to me on the beach and a day later you run out on me and write me a letter in it and I want to know why.”
“’Cause it was in my bag from the beach when I went back to the shop,” she exclaims, and that is not what I was asking about.
“You read the book to me on the beach and you left me a note in the book and now you want to tell me you don’t remember.”
“Joe,” she says. “I told you. You were looking in my phone. I mean, you didn’t trust me either.”
“Why did you leave that book for me?” I ask.
She asks me to let her go. I ask her to tell me about the book. The air is cold and loud off the water and she groans again. “Because you’re so sad and lonely!” she says. “Jesus, if this is it, fuck it. I give up.” She smacks her lips. She clears her throat. “Get off me,” she says. “Get off me and I’ll tell you.”
“No,” I say. “Tell me now.”
“I left you that book because I did feel bad,” she says. “You’re sad and lonely and you should be better at being alone. You’re just so fucking depressed and you wear it like a badge the way you sit in that shop alone and you’re so obviously desperate for someone to come in and change your life and it’s fucking annoying. Like, take care of your shit. Pull yourself together. Stop being so self-conscious about your music and every little thing you say. I gave you that book because those giants are pathetic, the way they can’t fucking deal with themselves and they expect everyone to be as decent as they are. They have no right to be shocked when the humans gang up on them. Like, that’s fucking life. Get over it. You can’t go around expecting everyone to be like you. That’s the point.”
Her words sting. “If I’m so depressed and pathetic, then why did you date me?”
She rolls her eyes. “Joe,” she says. “The day we met, I was using my ex-boss-boyfriend’s credit card and you didn’t call the cops.”
“I’m not judgmental.”
“You have to see things as they are,” she says. “I mean, I didn’t try and fool you or anything. And you know, I was like, okay, this guy, he’s so cool with my shady shit. He obviously has his own shady shit. There’s no way around it.”
“I am nothing like you.”
I hurt her, finally, and she shifts. “Well, congratufuckinglations,” she says. “Can I go now? I mean, come on. This is ridiculous. What are you gonna do, kill me?”
Amy Adam has no idea about me. She thinks I’m a lonely sad person with poor reading comprehension skills. She used me. She isn’t smart enough to love me or know me and suddenly I feel sorry for her. She doesn’t understand that Charlotte & Charles is about the resilience of the human spirit, that happy people get fucked over and swim to another island and buck up and go on again.
Amy is not a con artist and she’s not a conniving thief. She’s a sad, lonely girl. She carried a book around that she didn’t even understand and she wants the world to be like a Richard Yates book, with sad endings. The only Philip Roth book she ever finished is Portnoy’s Complaint. She isn’t the girl I thought she was, talking to me now about her boss, her dog-sitting, and I am not going to kill her.
In a strange way, Amy Adam is right. I am incapable of killing anyone right now. I have Love. I’m going to be a father. I have changed. I move off her completely and she wipes the sand off her arms, off her shirt. She shakes her legs.
“Only thing about the beach,” she gripes. “Sand.”
From her end this was a lover’s quarrel and so we do what all former lovers do: We revisit our past together. But our memories are so different. I bring up that last night in Little Compton.
“Remember our new best friends, Noah and Pearl and Harry and Liam?” I ask.
She is aghast. “You remember their names? How do you remember their names?”
She is not like me, not like Love. She is not burdened with a sensitive heart. Hers just beats. She laughs. “Remember when I busted you looking in my phone?”
I get a ripple of humiliation in my stomach. “Uh huh,” I say. “You were mad.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Paranoid. I had already put a couple books online and looked for a sublet out here. I was like fuck he found out.”
“Wow,” I say, and I think of Match Point, where Woody Allen reminds us that all the best tennis players are also lucky. Amy had a lot of Safari windows open on her phone that day. I only saw the one with Henderson. If she had to wait in line, if she’d washed her hands more thoroughly, if she’d put on lipstick, I would have found those other windows. I had bad luck with her. But then again, without her, I never would have found Love.
“I know,” she says. “I mean, I pitched a fit because I thought you knew what I was up to and you were gonna wanna talk and all that.”
She asks me what I’m doing in LA and I tell her I moved here because it was something to do, because it was time to get out of New York. She says she might move to Austin. I tell her it seems like a lot of assholes talk about moving to Austin. She laughs. “You are funny,” she says. “You still got it, Goldberg.”
I feel nothing. I don’t yearn for what we had, the way all we could do was mock everyone else. I gaze at the ocean but I can’t see through the mist. She pulls her hair over her left shoulder. Her neck is bruised, proof of my violence, a new mug of piss. My heart starts to beat fast and maybe I do have to kill her. I hurt her. I did this. And if I do away with her, I will never have to worry about her ever again. She won’t be a loose end, another mugofurine. I could do it. She draws in the sand with her finger. That could be her last act as a human. But then the tide creeps up on us and recedes, and the line vanishes, just like the redness on her neck will. Nature is an inherently forward beast; footsteps disappear, past hurts fade. I won’t kill Amy. I will not remove life from this planet while Love and I are in the process of bringing life into this world. I’ve already confessed my past to Love and I don’t want to confess my present.
I stand and I offer Amy a hand but she stands up without my help.
She asks if I’m sure I don’t want money for the books. I tell her I’m good and she smiles then turns and walks back into the mist. She keeps her head down and her arms crossed. I sit back down in the sand where she lay, cool and wet, and I feel the weight go, as if she’s passing out of me every time I breathe, every time I blink.
I can’t tell you the specific moment that I can’t see her anymore, because she disappears in segments. First the mist takes her bare feet, then the back of her yellow shirt. Her hair comes back to me for a brief spell, blond, tangled, and then it’s gone and then she’s gone, all of her, into the mist, almost like she was never here at all.
55
IT’S so different being at Taco Bell with Love. She already has pregnancy cravings and wanted to pig out on enchiladas and gorditas. Twins. But we don’t order everything on the menu, just gorditas and two chicken tacos. She wants soda even though she feels bad about the sugar and I tell her we’ll start a better diet tomorrow.
She asks me to pick a booth and I choose one by the window, far from the one where I always sat with Forty. She fills up our cups with ice and mixes a little root beer into our Cokes. “I kind of love this,” she says.