“So which two did you pick?” I ask.
“Ha,” she deadpans. “No. I told her I was gonna call the cops and her parents if she got on the plane.”
“And did you make those calls?”
“Hell no,” she says. “She flew back the next day and I picked her up and took her to Baskin-Robbins and let her cry.”
I go to the kitchen and find the blender in the cabinet above the fridge. She looks me up and down. “So do you have a name?”
“Joe Goldberg,” I say. “Do you?”
“I told you,” she says.
“I know,” I say. “But what’s your real name?”
“Ugh,” she says. “Melanie Crane. But not anymore. Melanie Crane is the girl who fucked up her master’s in journalism by falling in love with a married guy at the New York Times.” She shudders. “That feels like a century ago. That’s what I love about LA. It’s all new. I’m an undercover reporter and a ghostwriter now. It’s possible here to literally leave your past behind.”
They all think this, these girls—Amy—that they can leave your past behind. Don’t they know it’s not that simple? It’s not the past if it’s not finished.
“You should give me your number,” Delilah says as she cleans the blender. “I get so many invites to parties. You can be a plus one sometime, get off the block.” She points at me. “Warning: You have to get off the block. People live here and they go to Birds and La Pou over and over again and there is so much more to this city.” She sighs. “I mean it’s important to get out there.”
She explains that Birds is a bright, friendly dive bar and La Poubelle is a dark, hip French bar and that everyone in the Village skews one way or the other. I am reminded of the Office episode where B. J. Novak says he does not want an identity at work. And then he burns a pizza bagel and he has one: “Fire Guy.” I am not a Birds guy or a La Pou guy, but I type my number into Delilah’s phone. I may need her.
Delilah laughs. “I am being a bit of a hypocrite,” she says, and I wonder if people in LA think out loud about themselves the way New Yorkers do quietly, in our heads. “I mean, I go to Birds almost every night and I even have a tattoo inspired by this song they play there. But the thing is, I go late night, after I’ve been other places, you know?”
She bends forward and rolls up her dress and encourages me to come closer so I can see her leg—close shave, self tanner—and there are words engraved on her inner thigh. Journey lyrics. As if they need to be on her thigh after they’ve been used in The Sopranos and Glee and every bar in America.
“I know it’s lame,” she says and she pats my head, ordering me to stand. “But you can’t live here unless you believe.”
Delilah is almost special, and it’s a hard thing for a girl to be, not beautiful enough to be beautiful, not smart enough to be smart. Amy has it easy; she’s taller, hotter, smarter. There’s something so unsure about Delilah and she would never be friends with someone like Amy, who gets to cross her legs and eat blueberries with her greasy hair. Delilah is a girl who tries. Amy is a girl who takes. At the end of the day, trying is better. I know that now.
There’s a quiet moment where Delilah and I could run away together and our dynamic would be set: I would inspire her to let go of the aspirations that are holding her down, marking her body. She would get me off Amy. But I want revenge and Delilah wants her blender. She waves. She goes. The end.
I download Journey. I picture Delilah’s thigh pressed against my face and I jerk off on my pink futon. Afterward I shower and put on jeans—I refuse to wear shorts—and a T-shirt. I throw away Brit Brit’s food (diseases, cocaine residue) and I stop by Harvey’s office. He is taking a selfie and the trash can he didn’t bring back is sitting there. This is so different from New York. I could go months without seeing a neighbor in my old building. But Harvey’s office is a glass box. Everyone here wants so badly to be watched, noticed. And the upside is that the desire to be watched is a blindfold. Harvey doesn’t even notice me as I walk by the door and begin my hunt for Amy.
9
THE self-serving sociopathic greedy little bitch wouldn’t go a fucking day without her superfruits, so my first destination is the neighborhood grocery store, the Pantry. But this is not a grocery store. It’s a modern art museum, part neon, part busted fender metal, and part repurposed wood signs. The floor is spongy and the font on the price tags is curly and the lighting is nonfluorescent. The music is louder than it is in a normal grocery store and the songs are all over the place, a true mixtape—Donny Hathaway and Samantha Fox and the Everly Brothers and DMX—and I Shazam it all because I want a record of this.
This is a grocery store if Cameron Crowe made grocery stores and the lighting is good, dim and clubby. Every aisle has a funny name. There’s an aisle of books (BEFORE THEY WERE MOVIES), snacks (BAD THINGS ☺), spices (ROSEMARY & THYME), and processed cakes and cookies (SCRUMPTIOUS EMPTY CALORIES). The pet food aisle is jamming and that’s called UNCONDITIONAL LOVE and the baby food aisle is called SEMI-UNCONDITIONAL LOVE.
Most of the girls here are like Amy, tall and scraggly with messy hair and baskets full of superfruits. This is where I’m going to find her. I know it. But I don’t find her in the organic produce section (because me) or the section of cheaper produce (because rent). Fatboy Slim’s “Talking ’Bout My Baby” comes on and when the hell do you hear that in a grocery store? I don’t think you could ever get annoyed in here and maybe I could like LA, or at least this one part of it.
The flower section (I’M SORRY/I LOVE YOU) is a desert and maybe nobody loves anybody in LA. There are orchids and roses and then I see violets, more electric and purple than the ones I got for Amy.
A little rotund Mexican woman in a pale blue smock smiles. “They are painted, sir.” She laughs. “God doesn’t make these.”
Of course He doesn’t; these flowers are the botanical equivalent of breast implants. I thank her and move on and everyone in here is so happy.
My phone buzzes. Six consecutive texts, all of them images, all of them from Delilah. I open them one by one, screen grabs of invitations to Hollywood parties, complete with home addresses, parking instructions, corporate-sponsor logos, and dates and times. One of these parties is at Henderson’s house. Henderson! I will kill the broken part of my brain that wishes I could tell Amy about this. I text Delilah: Thanks. I’ll let you know.
She texts back: Have fun with Calvin. ☺
I stop moving. This isn’t right. I didn’t tell her where I’m working. I type: Huh?
She writes back: We’re buds. I saw him on the way to work. He’s cool. Have gun!
She deliberately left the typo so she could text me again ten seconds later: Have gun. Ha. FUN. I love autocorrect.
Ugh. I don’t write back to Don’t Fuck Delilah. I walk to freezer burn, the aisle where they keep the single people servings and the yuppie flash frozen vegetables, and standing there in front of the premade meals is Adam Scott. It’s my first celebrity sighting and I fucking love him in Stepbrothers and Burning Love and Friends with Kids and my palms get damp and maybe I really am becoming an Angeleno because this actually feels important to me.