So fuck it.
I grab Amy and throw her over my shoulder and she screams and the Salingers glare, jealous of us, young, poor, in love. I carry her toward the water, the same water where I disposed of Peach, the same shore where she washed up months later after her tragic so-called suicide. Amy wraps her legs around me and envious Salinger men watch, wish, drink. We stay like this, glued in Peach’s ocean grave and by the time we get out of the water, most of the Salingers have retreated into the house. It’s colder now and we put on sweaters and Amy reaches into her beach bag and pulls out a children’s book called Charlotte & Charles. “This was my favorite,” she says. “Can I read it to you?”
“Of course.”
She leans into me and the story goes like this: Two giants, a man and a woman, live on a desert island. The woman is lonely but the man feels safe. Humans arrive and while the woman is excited, the man is hesitant. The last time humans were there, everything went to shit. The humans tried to kill them. Charlotte wants to try again and Charles complies, but sure enough, the humans are ringing bells, the sound of which will kill Charlotte and Charles. But Charlotte and Charles wear earplugs to protect themselves.
There’s an earthquake and Charlotte and Charles help the humans, then swim away to a new island. The second to last page of the book is a picture of the giants on an island together at night. Several years have passed. They look at the stars and Charlotte wishes that more people would come. Charles says that the people would do the same fucking thing and screw them over. Charlotte concedes that this is possible. But she also reminds him that he could be wrong. And in the corner of the page, there is a ship. People are coming.
Amy closes the book and smiles up at me. “Well?”
“That’s one dark fucking book.”
She smacks my leg. “You can’t swear at Charlotte and Charles.” She spins to face me. “Tell me what you think.”
“I liked it,” I say.
She nudges me. “Come on. What did you think?”
This feels like a test and it’s supposed to be a vacation. I shrug. “I want to let it sit awhile. I don’t like this culture of reading a book and spitting out an immediate reaction.”
She tilts her head like a schoolteacher with a slow kid. “I see that,” she says. “I’ve read it a hundred times and I’ve had my whole life to think about it.” She shivers.
“Are you cold?”
She shoves the book into her bag and we leave the beach. I failed to retrieve the mug and I failed to understand Charlotte & Charles and walking on sand is just no fun. Ever.
Back at the hotel, we shower together, I put my Charles in her Charlotte, and she helps me write back to the BuzzFeed guy. We bring Cajun scallops and buttery lobster rolls and cannolis to our room. We eat in the bed and we fuck in the bed and we laugh in the bed and we wake up bloated, happy.
I fuck Amy in the shower and in the soaking tub and on the balcony—her favorite, she tells me during what she calls blueberries in bed—and I fuck her on the sofa and then I fuck her on the love seat. I memorize her face, her trembling lips, Oh Joe, her legs quivering, clinging. She opens her mouth, my little seal. I pop a blueberry into that hole in her face, the one that takes my dick in a way that no mouth ever did before.
She winks. “Good shot.”
We live here now, in this room, in these sheets, like a fucking John Mayer song come to life. We joke that they will cordon off this room when we go because nobody will ever occupy it the way we did. I love her more now than I did five minutes ago, more than I did five hours ago. I break the rules and tell her this because she is not like other girls.
“I know,” she says. “Isn’t it weird the way most people only get more annoying and you only get less annoying.”
I jab her with a pillow. “I’m not annoying.”
She shrugs teasingly and we bash each other with pillows and she pins me down and drops blueberries into my mouth and I plant my mouth on hers and we eat together, one mouth. I ask her about Charlotte & Charles and she tells me to forget it and I mark her body all over with my pulpy blue kisses. They’ll have to throw away these sheets and when she comes, she screams and she throws a pillow across the room. It goes out the window, over the balcony.
She giggles. “So I guess that was what you call a one-pillow orgasm.”
For a brief moment, I see Beck, the way she humped a green pillow. I smack Amy’s ass. “By the end of the day, there won’t be any pillows left in here,” I say, ready to go again.
But she puts her hand on my chest. “Whoa,” she says. “Joe, we do have to go out.”
“We don’t have to do anything,” I say, and it must have been so much easier in the dark ages, before restaurants, when there was no fucking Little Compton Coupon Guide designed with the explicit purpose of interfering in our fuckfest.
“Here,” she says, flipping through the coupon guide. “Scuppers by the Bay. They have a band.”
“Do they deliver?” I try, and it’s a waste of time.
She’s out of bed telling me that I’ll be thanking her after I’ve had a good meal. And that’s how you know you’re in love. You put on slacks and feign excitement over oysters and live light rock and you grab the keys and leave.
Scuppers by the Bay is overstuffed with assholes. The lot is jammed and the valets look stoned. There’s a sixteen-thousand-piece cover band tooling away in the back—murdering Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It”—and the clamor in the kitchen is matched by a screaming spoiled baby at a nearby table with spoiled parents fussing over skewered scallops. We don’t have a reservation and the coupon is not valid tonight and we are told to wait at the bar for one hour, maybe two.
I suggest we go but Amy nods toward a couple at the bar. They’re overdressed, he’s swishing his wine in his glass and she’s drinking something blue. I don’t want to talk to them but when Amy whispers to follow her lead I start to get hard. She dabs gloss on her lips. “Okay,” she says. “We’re gonna pretend to be other people and we’re gonna glom onto them.”
“Seriously?”
Her eyes flash. “You be Kev and I’ll be Lulu.”
We really are the same. I like fake names, but I’m used to it being a means of survival or escape, like when Officer Nico believed that I was Spencer Hewitt because of my Figawi hat.
“I don’t know, Amy,” I say, fucking with her. “Lulu sounds pretty fucking made-up.”
She claps, excited, and we decide to be Kev and Mindy from Queens. “I’m a chef and you’re an aspiring actor.”
“An actor?” It stings. Why not a director? Or doctor?
She cups my chin in her hand. “Well, you’re too hot to do anything else, honey.”
I would like to take her into the handicap bathroom and fuck her brains out but she has already started in on the nice couple. When a woman wants to socialize, no penis in the world can replace meaningless conversation about iPhone autocorrects—ducked! Hahahaha—and rental car snafus. So we pair off with Pearl and Noah Epstein. They’re also from New York—that’s so crazy!!!—and they’re both lawyers and they’re actually likable, funny. When we shake hands, Noah says, “Hi, that’s Pearl, I’m Noah and we’re what Grammy Hall would call real Jews.”