Love sobs. I hold her. It goes on like this for hours. She says her father told her Forty burned through a hundred thousand dollars in a few days.

“Jesus, Love. I don’t know what to say.”

She looks out the window at Reno, which looks like Vegas and yet also looks nothing like Vegas. It’s lesser, smaller, worse. “It’s never going to end,” she says. “My mom is going to sit there and act like he’s clean and my dad is gonna run away grumpy and I don’t know.” She wipes her eyes and looks at me. “How do you think he even wrote those screenplays if he’s so fucked up to the point of winding up in the desert coked out of his mind?”

“I don’t know.”

“And who is this girl?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think she’s even real or do you think maybe drug dealers fucked him up?”

“I doubt he owes anybody any money.”

Love looks out the window. “Michael Michael Motorcycle said he’s the kind of guy people just want to hurt.”

“Michael Michael Motorcycle is in prison,” I remind her. “You and me, we’re gonna take care of Forty. And . . .”

She nods. “Believe me,” she says. She brushes her hand over her belly. “This is saving me.”

I look out at the lights and I see my future—arf arf—and how I will clap for Forty when his movie gets cast, when it goes into production, when he gets nominated, when he wakes us up with a phone call—I did it!—and Love and I will dress up to go to the premiere and we will be the writer’s family. I will smile and I will meet all the people who love my work and I won’t be able to accept their love. I won’t be able to tell the story of how I came to write The Mess or The Third Twin or the kidnapping story due soon.

Love pats my leg. “I’m so tired,” she says. “My brother, God love him, but sometimes I think he literally drains me.”

She undresses. She throws her panties into the empty trash can. She is too tired to fuck me and I am too tired to sleep.

My career is over. I will live a lie, like so many people in LA. At least there will be truth where it matters, in this bed, in so many beds. And I’ll find a way to make myself known someday. I’ll be a good dad; I’ll raise my kids so they won’t be stuck like this. Like so many great writers, I won’t be appreciated until after I’m dead and Love finds a key to a safety deposit box with a letter inside explaining how I came to write all her brother’s movies.

Eventually, I sleep.

52

IT’S true what they say about happiness. If you approach life from a place of gratitude, you’re more apt to enjoy things. I am whole. I don’t need fame; I never wanted that and I did not move here because of aspirations. It’s enough for me to write and know that I did the best I could. I enjoy my life. Our life. Our baby! And I love that our baby is a secret.

We go to a premiere and meet Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux and I eat guac with them and we talk about Cabo. They are both narrow and kind and they treat me like an equal and the whole experience is surreal. The best part of it is what happens when the party ends and Love and I are in bed discussing it all and talking about Jennifer Aniston’s hair.

I go to Milk Studios and a photographer shoots me for the Professor Joe promotions. They aren’t going to use my picture because I don’t want to be a public figure—Ray can respect that—but they are going to model the mascot on my likeness. Dottie loves that.

The first book will be Portnoy’s Complaint and Love is chopping lettuce and she points the knife at me. “Now that’s a good fuck-you to that Amy girl,” she says. “I hope she sees the signs the day they’re out.”

I have a life partner, the mother of my child. She harasses me to take vitamins and tells me to brush my teeth. She sucks my dick and falls asleep before Cocktail is over and ignores her brother’s calls when she just can’t deal. I know the code to our alarm system and I am more comfortable driving in LA all the time. I find that it’s easier to start the day by going down a hill than it is going up a hill and I tell this to Jonah Hill at a party and he laughs and says don’t tell that to my fucking date, guy.

Love was serious about ditching her acting career and she is different now and it’s hard to know the source of her power. She glows. She says it’s because of me. I say it’s her. We decide it’s us. The baby.

I meet up with Calvin for beers in the old neighborhood that hasn’t changed. He and Monica only went out for a few days; he doesn’t know what became of her, doesn’t care. He is being crushed by debt from his DUI. He is defeated now; he keeps telling me he was in jail for twenty-eight hours. He’s gained a few pounds and he doesn’t check Tinder. He says he might move home. I tell him to get his iPad and we work together on the Ghost Food Truck outline.

“Well, well, well,” he says. “This is good.”

“It sure is,” I tell him. “And you know what? Just go for it already.”

“JoeBro,” he says. “I feel like I’ve been kind of a dick.”

“You weren’t a dick.”

“Well,” he says. “I got caught up in shit. Anyway, I think we should pitch GFT together.”

I drink my beer. I tell him not in a million years. “It’s your concept, Calvin,” I say. “You came up with it and you’ve worked it over a million times and you will be the one to make it happen.”

He pats me on the back. He wants to know what I think about Delilah disappearing. “I think LA is a hard place, Calvin. I think it wishes we would all disappear and it’s more of a miracle when people don’t.”

“Deep,” he says.

We watch a commercial for automobile insurance. Calvin says his is crazy expensive because of his DUI. I enjoy the taste of the beer, the music in the bar—“Take It to the Limit,” the Eagles, melodrama that only sounds good in a bar, when someone else puts it on—and when we’re done, I drive up to the hills to go home and I enjoy that too.

At home, Love is making veal Parmesan. “Babies for the baby,” she says. “You know, because veal are babies. Oh God. That came out wrong. Sorry, little, innocent cows. Tomorrow we’ll have old, bitter chickens.”

She is the one.

I hug her and kiss her.

She breaks pasta into a pot of boiling water. “How go the books?”

“They go,” I say, and we are happy.

I track down Harvey. He’s in hospice. I bring him flowers and chocolate cake and Eddie Murphy DVDs and he thanks me. He asks me if I saw Henderson last night. I get the chills. The nurse says he gets confused like this. I tell him he’s gonna be fine.

“Am I right or am I right?”

His face contorts. I want to believe it’s a smile. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m scared.”

I sit with him until his ex-wife returns and she hugs me and she cries. When I get home to Love, I cry. Love sends them a TV. She says the TVs in those places are never big enough. Harvey’s ex-wife calls. She loves the TV. Harvey does too.

I don’t go see Dez; drug dealers can all fuck off.

Every Sunday we drive out to Malibu to see Love’s parents. Sometimes Forty is there and sometimes he isn’t. But I see him regularly. Twice a week we meet at the Taco Bell in Hollywood.

Today I am first. I slide into a booth and when he arrives he is visibly fucked up.

“Let me get you a Coke,” I say.

He grabs my hands. “Thank you,” he says. “Old Sport, Professor, whatever you are, thank you so fucking much for what you did. Do you know how gold this is? I mean, I read what I wrote and I swear, I think being left in the desert is the best fucking thing that ever happened to me.”

I get the Coke. He knocks it over. I go for napkins and he stops me. “They have people who do that.”