The phone rings once and she doesn’t pick up and I see my son in the arms of some pervert who played the Injustice System and got a job at Disneyland. The phone rings again and I see my son with half his face torn off by a Rottweiler—Love trusts bad dogs, I don’t—and the phone rings a third time and I don’t know where my son is right now. Did he just crawl out of an open window in a high-rise in New York City and are my tears from heaven? Did he die without ever getting to meet his own father?
“Well, hello,” she says. “I thought you’d be sleeping.”
“Is Forty all right?
“Aw, I’m good, Joe. Thanks for asking.”
“Is he sick?”
“I think I have new allergies, but I don’t have it in me to get tested. All those needles…”
The level to which I did not miss the sound of her voice… I cut her right off. “Don’t fuck with me. Is my son okay? Yes or no.”
“Joe… He’s fine.”
“Thank God.”
“Well, okay, but maybe more like thank me because I’m the one who actually takes care of him…”
“What’s going on, Love?”
“I sent you an email. I bought you a plane ticket and you’re coming to L.A. tomorrow.”
I say nothing because that’s what she deserves: nothing.
“All right,” she says. “It’s simple, Joe. I need to see you. We need to see you. So I bought you a plane ticket.”
If I ask her to wait until Monday she might hang up on me. I want to see my son. I want to be with you, Mary Kay. My neurons are being torn in half.
“Joe?”
“I’m here.”
“Good. And you’ll be here tomorrow because if you’re not… Well… you’re doing so good with your girlfriend and her daughter. I mean I know you’d hate for them to find out about the family you left behind…”
She knows. How does she know? And she’s doing it again, twisting all the facts, and I want to climb into the phone and choke her out and it’s twenty-fucking-twenty-one and WHY CAN’T WE TELEPORT? I am steady. Breathe, Joe, breathe. “I didn’t leave you, Love.”
“Oh yes you did,” she says. “You got into a car my parents gave you and you drove to a house my parents bought for you and those are the facts. I’m sure you’ve twisted it all in your head to make yourself some kind of victim slash martyr… but I know things. And if you want me to keep my mouth shut… Well, I’ll see you tomorrow. Today actually. So you better go back to bed. The car will be there soon.”
She hangs up on me and I can’t move, I can’t breathe, I just die underneath and she is the shark inside my shark. She cut me open and extracted all my secrets. I puke off the side of the deck and I look upstairs and the lights are still out in our bedroom.
I get in my car—a car my parents gave you—and I call Oliver and I get voicemail and I text Oliver—911—and I call again and it’s soothing in some demented way, like knitting while the person you love is in surgery. Finally he picks up. Groggy. “Joe, it’s a little late.”
“What did you tell her?”
“What did I tell who?”
“Love called me, Oliver. She sent me a plane ticket. And we had a fucking deal.”
“Slow down.”
“I bought every piece of art you wanted and you said you had my back. You said you’d keep the Quinns out of the picture.”
“Joe.”
“What?”
“Are you calm?”
“Am I calm? She bought me a fucking plane ticket.”
“And what did you do before that?”
“Oliver, you’ve been stalking me and watching my every fucking move and you know I did nothing.”
He sighs. “First of all, I don’t know anything about a plane ticket.”
“Bullshit.”
“Second of all, if my ex-girlfriend who is the mother of my child was both well-heeled and… well… a little dramatic, I think I’d think twice about bragging about my brand-new fucking make-a-family on a public forum.”
“I did not post a picture of Mary Kay. I only post books.”
But he railroads. “I wouldn’t let the whole world know that I’m in love with a woman and I wouldn’t want my ex to see me playing dad with another family because I’d be smart enough to know that my ex wouldn’t like that, my friend.”
“Oliver, for fuck’s sake, I didn’t post a goddamn thing about Mary Kay.”
“Ah,” he says. “But your MILF did.”
I take the hit and Oliver laughs and I hear Minka in the background. “See,” he says. “Minka says this is a double fuckup because your lady friend tagged you. Which makes it seem like you thought you were being coy, ya know, posting without posting.”
It’s no use fighting him because Oliver is right and Minka is right and I never should have let you throw us to the wolves. But I did let you do it, didn’t I? It’s not your fault for wanting to post a fucking selfie but it’s my fault for going along with it. You make me so happy that I got stupid. I did this to myself and I was doing so good. I did not kill Melanda. I did not kill Phil. I did not kill Ivan.
But I might have just killed us, Mary Kay.
The call ends and I can’t feel my feet and my eyes are twitching. I walk upstairs to our bedroom. You’re still sleeping but in the morning you’ll wake up and I won’t be here. I pick up a notepad on my nightstand. I grab one of your tchotchke pencils. Virginia Woolf’s head in place of an eraser. The absurdity of this moment. The horror. I don’t know what to tell you and my flight is in a matter of hours and I just promised to be here. With you. I scribble lies on a notepad—my bullshit words are sticks that will hurt you—and the last two are stones.
Love, Joe.
You know I love you, but you don’t know that I can’t avoid Love Quinn. I pull the covers back. I get into bed and you are in a deep sleep, but even in this state, you are drawn to me, moving into me as you make room for me. Such a good fit. The only true fit I’ve ever known. I hate that you’ll wake up tomorrow and realize that RIP Melanda was right all along, that men always let you down, that they bail on you because men do fucking suck. But so does Love, Mary Kay. So does love.
41
Bon Jovi said that true love is suicide and he was right. Love is trying to kill us, Mary Kay. I got off the plane and I got into the black car she sent for me and now I’m at the door to a honeymoon suite at Commerce Fucking Casino. She’s in the room. She’s listening to my George Harrison—Hare Krishna, Hare Forty—and I knock on the door like an ABC prime-time Bachelor-brained loser, like I want her rose. She opens the door and she is thin, thinner in person than she is on Instagram and she’s wearing a Pixies T-shirt, as if she likes the Pixies, and see-through panties. I smell kombucha and salad water and matcha and did I really love this creature or did I only love what it felt like to be inside this little creature?
She doesn’t kiss me. “Come on in, Joe.”
There are rose petals on the California king bed and the bathtub is full of Veuve and she thinks we can go back to that first night we fucked, in the tub full of pissy bubbles and I didn’t want that then, I don’t want that now, and I hate rose petals. I hate overpriced champagne and she doesn’t get me, not the way you do, and that’s when I feel something dig into my back.