The Californian refusal to accept that sometimes things just fucking suck—like getting into the car with high Forty and making our next stop an S&M hooker who lives on a ranch up in Topanga. I sit on a couch near too many dogs barking and try not to listen to him fuck her or call her Mommy. It is the darkest, longest night of my life and knowing that Love has had countless nights like this makes me love her so much more. A lot of girls, they would have left by now.

When I have to drag him out of his Spyder and into his house, his slumbering body is so dense and unresponsive that I worry he might be dead. But he isn’t and something has to change. I need to find a babysitter for this kid, someone who will put up with his shit, someone mellow and needy.

The next day, while he sleeps it off and my girlfriend teaches the children to Swim for Love in Phoenix, I prowl the beach looking for the bartender who told me to find the fun. She’s where she said she would be, on all fours, scrubbing her stupid board. She’s different when she’s off-duty, more stripperish, with one of those decorative bandanas wrapped around her head and a necklace glistening around her waist. Her body parts are taut and brown; she is a stereotypical LA girl and she’s too hot for Forty, but anyone who gets this dressed up to scrub a surfboard is blank and hungry. She looks over her shoulder constantly. She’s perfect. I go to her. I wave.

27

AS Love says, Monica might be the most chill girl in the world and I’m so glad I recruited her. Monica is unflappable and calm. As Love says, you could punch her in the face and she would just keep smiling. She eases into a relationship with Forty automatically, which means Love and I are off the hook. Monica is super common, with brown hair that is always parted on the left and bangs that fall into her eyes, bangs she is constantly fingering, licking, pushing aside. I want to take a razor and shave them the fuck off but I would never do any such thing. Monica is my savior, Forty’s pacifier. He pets her. He likes her consistency. He tries to talk to me about her open mind in the sack but I tell him I don’t want to know about her lack of nerve endings. I’m still trying to forget what he said last week: “You can pee on her, Old Sport! On her face!”

Monica is a severe Californian, a Beach Boys kind of girl who smiles all the time and follows Forty around trying to get him to drink coconut water. I picture her alone in the middle of the night cutting her inner thighs, but it’s possible that I’m wrong, that some people are just free of demons. She is always exactly the same and she doesn’t bloat or get moody or crave burritos instead of sushi. Everything is chill and one night we are all nestled on floats in the pool, watching a movie outside—this is how it is here, you live in an Esquire spread and you are the star—and Love gasps.

“It just hit me,” she says. “We’re Friends. You guys, you’re Monica and Chandler and we’re Rachel and Ross.”

Monica hasn’t ever seen a whole episode of Friends but she says that sounds cool and Forty says he stopped listening to Love talk about Friends several years ago and I dive off my float and swim over to Love and let her celebrate her epiphany.

Love’s parents go off to Europe and Milo goes off with his Lorelai chick who lives in Echo Park, and Forty hires a housesitter to cover for Monica, which means she’s here all the time. These are the last four weeks of summer and we couple up and do things, big things. We take a helicopter to Catalina and we hop a jet to Vegas and we eat in the pool and we swim in the pool and Monica brings home veggies from the farmers’ market and Love calls them vegetables and I wish this was it, indefinite.

But then Robert Frost wasn’t fucking around and there is a new nip in the air, an increasingly noticeable one. The beach isn’t quite as densely crowded as it was yesterday and motherfuckers at Intelligentsia are starting to trickle in wearing scarves. It’s a sign. There is change ahead. Our heavenly summer is going to end.

The days are getting shorter and Love is wrapped up in blankets, looking at Boots and Puppies online but now there are actual boxes of boots arriving every day, piling up in the kitchen, in the bedroom, on our grass patio. Love tears into the boxes and tries on the boots but she doesn’t wear them, the way she doesn’t adopt any actual puppies.

She says this is her favorite time of year, when she puts “Boys of Summer” on all the Pantry playlists. I remind her that it’s kind of absurd in California, where it’s not going to start snowing. She looks at me and tells me I’m getting a little red. She is critical lately. I tell her I already put on lotion and the sun doesn’t feel as strong. There’s friction between us now that wasn’t here a day ago and I don’t know if I’m a summer fling.

“Joe,” she says. “You need to put on more lotion.”

“I really think I’m okay.”

She rolls her eyes. “But you’re not,” she says. “The sun stays strong here.”

“I’m fine,” I insist.

An hour later, I am a fool. I am crisp and cold and hot and burnt and my skin has been destroyed. She doesn’t say I told you so but she does cross her arms and wear a floppy hat. We move to the shaded area of the pool and she says if I had put on the lotion I wouldn’t have gotten burned. I did put on the fucking lotion but clearly someone left it out in the sun and all the protective power of it was destroyed. I am not going to fight with her. This is the Summer of Love and I have to believe in the Fall of Love even though it has an ominous tone. I look at Forty, asleep in the chair; Monica is inside getting ready, as if you need to get ready to lie by the fucking pool.

“Too hard,” I say when Love rubs aloe on my red shoulders.

“Sorry,” she says, and she lightens her touch but that hurts too and I flinch. “Joe,” she says. “Maybe you should do this yourself.”

I take the bottle. I can’t do it myself. I can’t reach my back. The thing about a true sunburn is there is no quick fix. I lie on my belly and Love puts a sheet over me and kisses the back of my head. She says she’s gonna go change.

“Change?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I have a meeting.”

“About your charity?”

She scruffs my hair. “About a movie.”

“The one you and Forty were working on?” I ask, and I don’t like this.

But she doesn’t have time to change her clothes or her attitude or answer my question because Milo is here, whistling, in a Black Dog Martha’s Vineyard T-shirt and it’s like he knows New England is my hate place, where Beck was born, angry and unsolvable, where Amy fooled me with Charlotte & Charles, where Love lost her virginity to Milo, undoable and indelible, a cherry popped on old sand.

“You sick, buddy?” Milo asks as he hugs my girlfriend.

“He forgot to put on sunblock,” Love says. “Also you’re early, Mi.”

“Sorry,” he says, and he looks at me and winces. “Hey, you should put some aloe on that.”

“I did,” Love says. “But it’s that burn where all you can do is wait.”

They’re both standing over me and even though it hurts, I have to tear the sheet away and sit upright on this fucking chair. My own skin burns me, a localized panic attack on my largest organ. “It’s not so bad,” I say. “What’s up, Milo? Where’s Lorelai?”

“Lorelai’s on her way to New York to go to a wedding in the Hamptons,” he says.

Love nudges him with her foot. “You should go,” she says. “She seems like a good one.”

“She is a good one,” he says. “And I had every intention of accompanying her. Who doesn’t love a Hamptons wedding?”