Harvey digs up the keys to my new home and tells me that Delilah is just sweet and friendly and I know this means desperate and slutty and he says a lot of the guys in the building are crass. “It’s kinda like I’m the talk show host and everybody comes into my office to work out their bits,” he says. Why must everyone want to be Henderson? “So you come by anytime, work stuff out. It’s like a Seth MacFarlane vibe in here, ya know, Broseph?”
“Sounds great,” I lie.
“Am I right or am I right?” he asks, as if he has a contract with himself to spew out his own catchphrase at least twice an hour.
My apartment smells like rotten oranges and chicken and it’s full of pink furniture, girl furniture. The former tenant Brit Brit moved out suddenly, against her will.
“Her parents showed up here all upset,” Harvey says, turning on a pink bubble-shaped lamp and illuminating a Kandinsky poster. “She spent half the money they gave her on a nose job and the rest on nose candy and then she wound up in a hospital cuz her nose bled.” He shakes his head and pats the hot pink futon. “I know there’s a joke in there. Funny things come in threes. I’m gonna find it, I swear. Anyhoo, the good news is you scored, Broseph. The futon, the chicken in the freezer, the TV, it’s all yours. Her parents wanted us to dump it.”
At least I don’t have to go to IKEA. “Great.”
Harvey picks up the trash can. “I know one thing you don’t want is old chicken. BRB, Broseph!”
It’s the first almost funny thing he’s said. I pull a Rachael Ray knife out of the new knife block on the counter. These are useful, sharp, though I wish the handles weren’t orange. I flop onto the futon and the cover is stained, Sriracha and semen. That taped-up Kandinsky makes me miss New York. I miss sex. There is a knock at the door and then a girl barges in. She is like one of the girls I saw on the street. Full makeup and a bandage spandex dress that’s one size too small. She is hot but not as hot as she thinks. I want her on my team, possibly on my dick.
“Relax,” she says. “I’m Delilah and I’m just here for the blender.”
I almost tell her that her nickname is Don’t Fuck Delilah, but she is talking too much for me to get a word in edgewise. She is late to work—gossip reporting—and she lives directly upstairs—apologies for noises you hear in the future, the walls are paper thin—and that fucking coke whore promised her a blender. She’s opening the closets, slamming them.
Delilah is full of rage. Maybe she knows there is a building ordinance against her vagina. She points at the Kandinsky. “Technically that’s mine too,” she says. “But I think you’ll appreciate it. You look like you might even know who that is.”
“Andrew Wyeth,” I say.
She nods. “Nice,” she says. “Brit Brit had no idea who that was. Did Shut-Up Harvey tell you about her?”
Everyone has a nickname. “A little,” I say. “Sounds like a sad story.”
Delilah tells me that Brit Brit came here to act and wound up hooking. “She would go to Vegas with guys and come back messed up,” she says. “And she kept trying to get me to go with her, talking about how amazing these guys are and how you don’t have to pay for anything and you stay at the Cosmo and have the time of your life.”
“Hmm.”
“Exactly,” she says. “So I pack a bag to go with her. I mean, I know I’m not actually going but I wanted to see them all at the airport in case there was anyone famous in there, anyone I could write about. And at the airport, in one breath, she’s like, ‘Oh, by the way, you have to fuck at least two of them but you get to pick which two and it’s not bad I swear!’”
“So which two did you pick?” I ask.
“Ha,” she deadpans. “No. I told her I was gonna call the cops and her parents if she got on the plane.”
“And did you make those calls?”
“Hell no,” she says. “She flew back the next day and I picked her up and took her to Baskin-Robbins and let her cry.”
I go to the kitchen and find the blender in the cabinet above the fridge. She looks me up and down. “So do you have a name?”
“Joe Goldberg,” I say. “Do you?”
“I told you,” she says.
“I know,” I say. “But what’s your real name?”
“Ugh,” she says. “Melanie Crane. But not anymore. Melanie Crane is the girl who fucked up her master’s in journalism by falling in love with a married guy at the New York Times.” She shudders. “That feels like a century ago. That’s what I love about LA. It’s all new. I’m an undercover reporter and a ghostwriter now. It’s possible here to literally leave your past behind.”
They all think this, these girls—Amy—that they can leave your past behind. Don’t they know it’s not that simple? It’s not the past if it’s not finished.
“You should give me your number,” Delilah says as she cleans the blender. “I get so many invites to parties. You can be a plus one sometime, get off the block.” She points at me. “Warning: You have to get off the block. People live here and they go to Birds and La Pou over and over again and there is so much more to this city.” She sighs. “I mean it’s important to get out there.”
She explains that Birds is a bright, friendly dive bar and La Poubelle is a dark, hip French bar and that everyone in the Village skews one way or the other. I am reminded of the Office episode where B. J. Novak says he does not want an identity at work. And then he burns a pizza bagel and he has one: “Fire Guy.” I am not a Birds guy or a La Pou guy, but I type my number into Delilah’s phone. I may need her.
Delilah laughs. “I am being a bit of a hypocrite,” she says, and I wonder if people in LA think out loud about themselves the way New Yorkers do quietly, in our heads. “I mean, I go to Birds almost every night and I even have a tattoo inspired by this song they play there. But the thing is, I go late night, after I’ve been other places, you know?”
She bends forward and rolls up her dress and encourages me to come closer so I can see her leg—close shave, self tanner—and there are words engraved on her inner thigh. Journey lyrics. As if they need to be on her thigh after they’ve been used in The Sopranos and Glee and every bar in America.
“I know it’s lame,” she says and she pats my head, ordering me to stand. “But you can’t live here unless you believe.”
Delilah is almost special, and it’s a hard thing for a girl to be, not beautiful enough to be beautiful, not smart enough to be smart. Amy has it easy; she’s taller, hotter, smarter. There’s something so unsure about Delilah and she would never be friends with someone like Amy, who gets to cross her legs and eat blueberries with her greasy hair. Delilah is a girl who tries. Amy is a girl who takes. At the end of the day, trying is better. I know that now.
There’s a quiet moment where Delilah and I could run away together and our dynamic would be set: I would inspire her to let go of the aspirations that are holding her down, marking her body. She would get me off Amy. But I want revenge and Delilah wants her blender. She waves. She goes. The end.
I download Journey. I picture Delilah’s thigh pressed against my face and I jerk off on my pink futon. Afterward I shower and put on jeans—I refuse to wear shorts—and a T-shirt. I throw away Brit Brit’s food (diseases, cocaine residue) and I stop by Harvey’s office. He is taking a selfie and the trash can he didn’t bring back is sitting there. This is so different from New York. I could go months without seeing a neighbor in my old building. But Harvey’s office is a glass box. Everyone here wants so badly to be watched, noticed. And the upside is that the desire to be watched is a blindfold. Harvey doesn’t even notice me as I walk by the door and begin my hunt for Amy.