“Okay,” she says. “We’re okay.”

And somehow we are hugging and we kiss, just one kiss, a make-up kiss, a no-sex-yet kiss, and then we flop into lounge chairs. The fight is over and she tells me about Seth Rogen’s weed and her costume fitting and that she has news.

“More news?” I ask.

“Forty and Monica broke up,” she says. “This was almost a record for him though. I mean, girls are like shoes for him, you know?”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She shrugs. “I know this will sound dumb but I really thought it was gonna stick. Because of the stupid Friends thing.”

“It’s not stupid,” I say. “It’s sweet. You want the best for him.”

She nods and checks her watch. “We should go get packed. The jet leaves at noon.”

I look at her. “We have to pack?”

She rolls her eyes. “Joe, come on. What do you mean? You think you’re not going?”

“You didn’t invite me.”

“Didn’t invite you?” She balks. “We’ve been seeing each other the whole summer and we practically live together. I don’t have to invite you. You should know you’re invited.”

“Well, Monica said that Forty invited her.”

She rolls her eyes. “So? We have our own way of talking and our own thing. Why don’t you get that, Joe?”

I don’t know and Love says it’s going to be intense in Palm Springs. We won’t last unless I communicate.

So I try. “Okay. I guess I also wasn’t sure because of Milo.”

She sighs and now she explains her dynamic with Milo. They are best friends, to an extent. She uses the phrase third twin and she says it’s hard to talk about because it’s friendship steeped in guilt. “I’m closer with him than I am with Forty,” she whispers. “I mean, do you know how wrong that is?”

“You can’t help who you love.”

“Milo and I both want the best for Forty. So when you see us together or whatever, I mean, no guy I ever dated liked it. I get it. It sucks. But we’re just friends.”

Love is essentially asking me to tolerate her bond with another man, a good-looking fucker she’s known for longer than she’s known me. It’s impossible, like snow in Malibu. Absurd. But what can I do?

She takes my hand. “I wish we could stay here all day,” she says.

I want to fuck her in the sand but she says we have to pack. She stretches and pulls her robe tighter and I know her well enough to know that she is closing a door on this fight, that the war between us was transitional.

Love blows a kiss to the sea. “Good-bye, ocean,” she says.

I stay for a moment longer, staring at Delilah’s giant blue grave. It would be impossible to find my bag in there and the permanence of decisions made at sea is bigger than all of us. The wind whips, waves crash, and I head inside.

Summer is over.

32

BOOTS and Puppies is already on IMBD: Best friends and former lovers Harmony and Oren are both engaged to other people. They spend forty-eight hours together trying to learn from the past, live for the present, and decide on their future. But Boots and Puppies isn’t a movie—it’s a FUCK YOU to me and Love, a ninety-five-page torture chamber of increasingly graphic love scenes between Oren (Milo) and Harmony (Love). Spoiler alert: Harmony and Oren—the only characters in the whole fucking movie—finally decide to get married when Harmony realizes that she needs to let go of the white puppy she rescued who keeps chewing on all her boots. FUCK YOU, MILO. Harmony runs to Oren, who knew she would come to her senses. FUCK YOU, MILO.

On the jet to Palm Springs, Love asks what I think of the “script.” I deflect. I ask her when Milo finished writing it.

“This summer,” she answers. “He hit it out of the park, right?” I contain my rage. I will not let him win. Not when I’ve just gone to war for my relationship. “Love,” I say, pointing to the script. “You’re not even a little offended by this?”

“Joe,” she says, definitive, as if she’d been preparing for this. “If you’re going to tell me that you think you’re a puppy, then I’m going to tell you that you need a shrink. I am not Harmony any more than you are a puppy. Milo is not Oren. This is a story. A made-up story.”

“I know I’m not a puppy.”

“You are not a puppy.” She sighs. “And anyway, Milo started this script ages ago. He’s been rewriting it for a while. You know, Jake Gyllenhaal was going to play Oren, up until the very last second. That’s how good the script is.”

I do not remind Love that he finished it after meeting me and I do not call bullshit on Jake Gyllenhaal. We land and I try to focus on the positive. Our fight is behind us, and I’ve been wanting to go to Palm Springs. The desolate road from the airport snakes through a desert where the houses are giant UFOs from the sixties, spread apart, like dice rolled onto a craps table.

“We’re shooting here and living here?” I ask.

“Yep,” she says. “How gorgeous is this house?”

“Striking,” I say, and I mean it in a bad way. The house is midcentury, ice cold, plastic and pink and orange and white, like a ceramic bowl of sherbet left in the middle of the desert during an atomic meltdown, empty as Forty’s mind. We park and she knows I am disappointed and she pushes me.

“Sorry,” I say. “I just thought we were going to Palm Springs.”

“We are,” she says, her voice fresh with indignant attitude that only comes from being cast as a lead and studying a screenplay in a jet. “Milo is amazing, getting us this house, right?”

I am sick of hearing that Milo is amazing. He isn’t. And this house sucks. We’re several miles from the hotels and the stores and the stuff I read about in Less Than Zero, the stuff I wanted to see. My head started pounding the second we walked into this cold house and we’re only three hours into the day. I get the chills. It’s so hot outside and it’s so cold inside. There is no ocean, no relief, no shabby chic sectional, no sand on the floor of the kitchen, no crunch, no texture, no depth.

But we had to shoot here because Milo is desperate to get footage of some something he calls “Indoor Coachella.” Coachella is a festival fashion show where people dress up like hippies and pretend that Passion Pit is as good as the Rolling Stones. So the idea of taking that mess and shoving it inside a casino is loathsome to me.

Barry Stein nixes it right away. He says Coachella is too big of an insurance risk and Milo pleads with him. “I just need a night there,” he says. “I’ll go in guerilla style, Barry. I just want those jagged lights, the feel of it. We need that flashback. And it’s not Coachella for real.”

“Yeah,” Barry says. “It’s more of a shit show. No is no.”

Milo sulkily moves on, and we “shoot” all day, every day. Milo karate chops the air at the end of every take, as if he never saw a Ben Stiller movie, as if he doesn’t know that chopping the air is an asshole thing to do. I wish Ben Stiller were here. I wish anyone with a brain would come and take over.

While we shoot, I have to sit in video village, another misnomer; video village is not a village. It’s just a bunch of folding chairs shoved together in front of the monitors. I have no purpose. When we move locations and relocate the village, I’m not even allowed to move my chair because I’m not union.

It’s day four and “Harmony” and “Oren” are fighting because Harmony’s puppy ate Oren’s boots and then making up because they hate fighting and Love kisses Milo again and again. I hate set. There’s too much clapping, and bullshit with nicknames. They call the second to last shot “The Abby” and the last shot “The Martini” and the level of self-importance is unbearable. When my scripts get the green light, I won’t spend all my days on set. And when Milo begs to visit, I’ll say yes and then I’ll “forget” to give his name to security.