iMessage relays that the message has been read but Love doesn’t write back. Silence received. That’s it. The end. I don’t know what I did wrong, but I know what she did wrong; it all goes to hell when they want to be actresses.

29

I yank the door to La Poubelle. It’s cool and dark and fairly empty—everyone is worshipping Henderson or waiting for the after party at Birds, in honor of his old stomping ground—but at the bar, there is one girl in a Band-Aid dress nursing a glass of vodka and trying to flirt with the disinterested bartender. I’ve never wanted a blowjob so bad in my life.

“Delilah,” I call out. She turns. She smiles.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in.” She pats the empty seat beside her. I order a vodka double. No mixers. No time for that.

Delilah introduces me to the new bartender as her old friend, Joe. And this means that Delilah still wants me. I refresh the Google search on Dr. Nicky when she goes to the bathroom. A feminist blogger has picked up the story. She’s calling for Change.org to remove his petition and GO FEMINISTS GO! They are all horrified at the idea that this murderer who was in a position to help people is trying to use a patient as a scapegoat. They think it is misogynistic to speak ill of Guinevere Beck, who was a thriving and intelligent woman, a writer, an MFA candidate, a happy, well-adjusted New York woman. They want Dr. Nicky to shut up. They want his wife to seek counseling. They want the police department to accept that desperate men like Dr. Nicky do things like invent patients named Danny Fox. Thank you, feminists, and fuck you, Love, and hello, Delilah, sidling up to the bar, patting my leg, telling me I look good, tan, smacking her blowjob lips together, unabashedly hungry. I am hard. I smile. “You look good too.”

If all my suffering has a purpose, and I don’t yet know that it does, then the purpose can be boiled down to this: Delilah’s vacuum cleaner mouth inhaling my cock on the loading dock in back of the Pantry. She said I was weird for wanting it here. It’s dirty, it smells like trash, it’s a grocery store parking lot ewww. But I know what she likes and I told her to get on her knees and suck it and the miracle of life, the sperm reaches the egg, the tennis ball teeters and falls to one side, not the other, Delilah did it. She sucked me the way I like, the way I want. I missed that. I needed that. Love is not all you need.

Fuck Love. Fuck love.

Don’t Fuck Delilah and I are walking back to my place and she’s grateful to be with me and I like this better, the way she clings. As we fall in step together, it becomes possible that this could be my life, that it could be one of those classic love—fuck that word—stories where the right girl was upstairs all along. In this quarter-mile trek, Delilah holds on tight to my hand and describes an argument she had at Oaks Gourmet with a guy who was rude to her about asking for ketchup. She is funny, all worked up, and this could be us together. We reach my building, her building, our building.

There is a brand-new door at Hollywood Lawns. “Yeah,” Delilah says. “Someone got fucked up and fell into the door.”

Home trash home and I unlock the door and Delilah takes charge and throws me against the wall of mailboxes. She feels my dick underneath my pants. She licks my neck. “Now,” she says. “I want you inside of me now.”

I unlock the door to my apartment and she tears off my shirt and I shred her Band-Aid dress and this is fucking. Rage mixed with sex and I wonder what set her off and at the same time I don’t care. It works. She wants me and I want her and I need to fuck the love out of my system. I pull on Delilah’s hair and I bite her nipples and smack her ass hard and she scratches my back and this is Hollywood fucking. You can’t get mad in Malibu, not really.

Delilah salivates over my balls and she is not a cheater like Love, Love who gets to act in a fucking movie without trying to act, Love who gets to star in a fucking movie without suffering through auditions, without waitressing or striving or watching the Oscars on a futon, burning with desire to be there, spending night after night at the UCB trying to learn, to hone a craft. Fuck Love. I like Delilah and I try to be a gentleman. I stay in bed with her when it’s over. I feign interest.

“So how was your summer?” I ask.

“My summer was my summer.” She shrugs. “Not really any such thing as summer in LA, you know? Only difference is some of the parties are at beach houses, but what a pain, going out to the beach. Ugh. East Coast water is so much better, right?”

“Fuck, yes,” I say. Delilah may think she didn’t have a summer but she is wrong. She did. There is something more settled about her. Something changed inside of her and she doesn’t seem as tormented. She’s like the kitten that got neutered. She’s calm. She isn’t as sick with aspirations now that she’s moonlighting for this pseudo–Entertainment Tonight show. We lie in my bed, gazing at the ceiling that used to get on my nerves, the bubbling, lowly barricade that once seemed so literal, a roadblock to a higher life. It all doesn’t seem as bad as I thought. I forgot how nice it is to be contained. I know the boundaries here. I know what’s mine. I don’t have to feel like I’m eating someone else’s Frosted Flakes and I don’t have to say thank you all the time.

“I’m hungry,” I say.

“Wanna order a pizza?” Delilah asks.

No. I want to dive under the covers and kiss her thighs and lick her and feel her hands in my hair. I do this and she reacts the way I want her to react. She calls out my name. Her legs shake. She sounds like she’s crying and laughing at once. She sounds like an animal, like she found the afikomen. I am good enough for Delilah. She treats me like her Milo, telling me how great I am, how big I am, how much she missed me. She does not mention her mother and she does not try to parlay this romp into future meetings like some desperate ne’er-do-well at a blackjack table trying to make it all back. She has learned a thing or two and I could do anything to her in this bed. She gives me her ass, her fingernails, her vigor.

Afterward, we order in chicken and French fries and we watch Hannah and Her Sisters. I pay for the chicken and I hold the remote and we don’t need a screening room. We don’t need an ocean out the window. We just need my forty-two-inch TV, my dick, my futon.

Delilah scratches my chest. “What’s it like?”

“What’s what like?”

“The Quinn mansion,” she says. “I’ve only seen pictures on Curbed LA. Is there really a bowling alley?”

It was the wrong question. I close the box of chicken. She’s supposed to be basking. She’s supposed to be fantasizing about our future. She is not supposed to be reporting and I don’t like the way she sits, on her side, elevated, like she’s doing yoga, like she’s Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club, so blasé.

She wants to know about Love and I deflect. I tell her that it’s complicated but over—and she wants to know where we met and when. I tell her I don’t want to talk about it and she says she needs it in order to move on, have a fresh start. She says she has been seeing someone this summer too and she will tell me anything I want to know about that and now I remember everything wrong with Delilah, with Franklin Village, and I check my phone. Still nothing from Love but Monica wrote to say Love got wasted. They all passed out at Milo’s house. She says Love is mad at me. I remind Monica that I told Love I was sick. I am waiting for a response from Monica when Delilah starts in again on Love, like a fat kid trying to get another cookie.