“Yes,” I say.

“Well, you know the guy who’s gay and he can’t deal with it and he swims out to die?”

“Yes,” I say again and I can’t believe Boots and Puppies is talking to me about Michael Cunningham.

“Well, I think that’s what Trey did,” she says. “He couldn’t handle the idea of me and my family dealing with it. My parents are all about good things. But bad things . . .” She shakes her head. “Is this too much? Should I put on some music or something?”

I hold her hand on its way to the dash. “No,” I say. “So, is your brother married?”

“Ha,” she says. “That’s our family joke. I was married twice by thirty and my brother can’t even date one girl for more than five minutes. The best role models can be the worst role models.”

Love tells me that it’s impossible to live up to Ray and Dottie’s relationship. She doesn’t even know why they had kids, they’re so in love with each other. “You hear about moms being like, fuck my husband, I love my babies now,” she says. “And my mom, I mean she loves us, but she loves my dad so much more. Are your parents together? You said they fought, but some people, that’s just how they communicate.”

Ah, rich girls. “No. My mom left. They weren’t a model for anything.”

“If only you got to choose your model,” she says. “But we get what we get.”

Love is thirty-five now, which will make her the oldest woman I’ve ever slept with, and I realize how badly I do want to sleep with her. She uses her blinker. She is kind. She says she’s sort of also from New York. “We have a couple places there,” she says. “But I never last more than a few months. It sounds lame, but I think I’m just too sensitive.”

“How so?” I ask.

Love grew up mostly in Malibu but was homeschooled, with biology trips to the Galápagos and immersion semesters in public schools and she loves Los Angeles. She used to want to be a lawyer.

“This is a problem we have,” she says. “A family thing. My dad is like, ‘I got these two kids and one wants to make movies and one wants to defend the bad guys and nobody wants to run the shop.’”

“Is that how he really sounds?”

She slaps my leg. “You’ll see.”

Love doesn’t believe in bad people or good people; she believes in people. Her September 11th goes like this: Love was in her first year of law school at NYU. “And in all honesty, I hated it,” she says. “I wasn’t getting along with anyone, you know? I was in my room watching Legally Blonde, wanting it to be more like that, and I mean the bad part, when Elle Woods doesn’t even have any friends. I was miserable.”

“Weren’t you a little young?” I ask. Love is five years older than I am, many years older than Beck and Amy. But she is not that old. “Well,” she says. “Remember, I was schooled independently and my dad, well . . .” Her voice trails off and I suspect a lot of her stories have holes filled by money. “So I was up all night at this divey bar whining to my friends about how I wanted a sign.”

“A sign?” I ask.

“You know,” she says. “A sign that it was okay to leave law school.” She honks at someone who tries to pass her. “And then we’re still fucked up, just walking it off, and it begins. The Towers, the hell, and the world goes insane, and my friends are like, holy shit. There’s your sign.”

“Wow,” I say. I will not judge her. Instead I think about her nipples.

“Please be horrified,” she says, mind reader. “I realize how assholey that all sounds, to say it was my sign. It sounds stupid and selfish and solipsistic to say that September Eleventh was my get-out-of-law-school-free card.”

“That’s harsh.” Beck had to look up solipsistic in the dictionary. Amy did not own a dictionary.

“But when you’re young, you need all that validation and you read your horoscope and you say things like, ‘If the guy at the bar gives me two cherries and not one it means I’m supposed to leave this bar and go somewhere else.’”

“I get it.”

Love wants to know where I was on September 11 and we are stuck in the shitty part of Sunset where it’s all strip malls. I tell the truth: I got in trouble at work. Mr. Mooney locked me in a cage in the basement. I missed it. By the time I got out, the smoke was clear.

“Wow.” She drums on the steering wheel. She says she loves eccentric people. She loves old people. She loves a good story. She says we have really good September 11th stories and that we could make a good movie out of them. She likes the idea of a New Yorker who missed New York. She asks how old I was.

“Sixteen,” I say. Too quickly.

She laughs. I want to eat her candy pussy. “Joe,” she says. “One thing about me, I don’t give a shit about age. I am not one of those girls. You can be younger than me all you want.”

Her mother calls and Love talks to her about tennis balls and Net Jets. I can tell that Love likes me by the melody of her voice, by the way she tells her mother she’s bringing someone.

When Love finishes up with her mother, she zips into the valet at Hollywood & Highland. “Will you think I’m a horrible princess if I say I can’t deal with this traffic and I’m dying for a drink and I would rather just get you a jacket somewhere here?”

I don’t think Love is a horrible princess and I don’t let her pay for my clothes at Lucky or the Gap.

“Almost ready?” Love asks.

“Almost,” I say.

When I emerge from the dressing room, Love is wearing new clothes too, a tiny little white dress with slits on both sides. “Wow,” she says. “I can’t believe that jacket’s from the Gap.”

I can’t believe she’s wearing a nightie to dinner, but I rip off the tag like she asks. My mom always said, the rich are different.

18

I live here now, at this particular table, on this particular night, at Chateau with these particular people, my people, the Quinns. I am born again a Quinn, unofficial son-in-law of Dottie and Ray—the Dottie and Ray who send me their love at the Pantry!—and they know how to hug, how to talk. They are round, happy people and we talk current events and they don’t understand the hoopla about Henderson. “I’m old school,” Love’s father declares. “Give me Johnny Carson or Jay Leno at his desk. Hell, I’ll take Jimmy Fallon because the kid dresses well but don’t give me this punk on his couch.”

“Dad, don’t be so harsh,” Love admonishes.

“No,” I say. “I see where he’s coming from. I think Henderson was poisoning us all. There’s honor in asking people questions. There’s honesty in it. Curiosity. It’s intellectual. Earlier generations, they were more comfortable as listeners and Henderson promoted an idea that we could all be the center of attention all the time. But if everyone is onstage, who’s in the audience?”

Everyone stares at me, and this has happened a couple of times tonight, when I questioned the value of organic vegetables and expressed my opinion on kale. But I own them and I win again when Ray claps. “You are a breath of fresh air, Joe.”

Dottie beams. “So smart.”

Love rubs my thigh. And she is right; Ray and Dottie do seem in love and they love me. Ray wants to know if I like boats and Cabo because he’s got a new Donzi he’s dying to get in the water and a place in Cabo. “La Groceria,” he says, enthralled with his terrible accent. “The neighbors, they thought we were nuts, but I like a good name. Why shouldn’t I call it La Groceria? Everything sounds better in Spanish.”

I Google Donzi. It costs around $500,000.

Ray and Dottie insist I eat and drink whatever I want. “Your first time at Chateau is a special thing,” according to Ray. “Lives are made here, Joe. This is the mother ship. This is our family tradition and when you’re with us, you’re family. You understand?”