Love and Other Wounds (9 page)

Aaron looks up at Green and Caroline. Grins.

“See you around,” Aaron says as Caroline runs past Green and out the door. She holds in the sobs until she hits the door
way. The three of them stand still as her crying fades into the night. Sarah looks at Green. The look in her eyes. UNSAID: I don't have to ask if this is wrong.

Green holds the look. He'd done worse for less.

Aaron lights a cigarette as he tries to talk Sarah into staying. Actors are the last smokers left in Los Angeles. It keeps them thin. Green walks her out. They walk down a garden path toward the pool.

“I need a shower,” Sarah says.

“It won't help,” Green says. “But I know what will.”

They follow the sounds of laughter to the outdoor bar. All these beautiful people. Green and Sarah find a table near the swimming pool. The drinks are eighteen dollars apiece. They have several. They charge them to Aaron's room. It's paid for by a studio, the one producing the animated film in which Aaron plays a love-crazed warthog. He's supposed to be doing press all weekend.

The landscaping rustles around them. Rats, Sarah says. They live in the plants around the hotel. They run wild in the Hollywood Hills. This afternoon she saw one fall out of the palm trees while a
Vanity Fair
writer interviewed Aaron. The thing lay dead for the full three hours of the interview. The staff didn't want to clean it up, afraid they'd draw attention to it.

“Smart,” Green said. “It's the cover-up that gets you.”

“It's getting me,” she says. Her smile is real. Some of the thing they're carrying lifts off them then.

The waiter comes by to let them know it's last call. Sarah tells Green that the studio bought a second room for the night, sort of a green room for the press people. The other room is full of booze and food. Shame to let it go to waste. Green fol
lows her to the room. He tries to remember how long it's been. A long time.

They drink. They swap stories. She tells him about getting a pedicure with the assistant of a reality star. The reality star is making a series about her upcoming wedding. Sarah tells Green how the girl told her there were cameras everywhere all the time, and the star and her fiancé never spoke to each other when the cameras were off. Nobody ever said anything about it. She tells Green how the Vietnamese ladies at the nail salon put their feet in bowls of tiny fish, tiny fish that fed off the dead skin of their feet. How the assistant watched the little fish nibble her toes while she said to Sarah, “I'm losing touch with reality. I don't even know what's real anymore.” How the girl had been near tears. How the wedding show had been a hit.

Green tells her a story from the nineties, one of his first jobs in L.A. He worked a case for T
, back when he was still a name, before the drugs got him by the neck and took him down. T
was the type of guy who figured that anyone with tits on their chest was woman enough to give him a blow job, no matter what they happened to have dangling between their legs. Green spent one hot and endless night cruising tranny row with T
while the actor did lines of coke off the dashboard and lectured Green about twelve-step recovery. “What you need, Green,” T
had told him between coke shivers, “is to take a moral fucking inventory of yourself.”

Green and Sarah both know about famous men who secretly died jerking off with belts around their necks. Autoerotic asphyxiation. It happens more often than you think. Green says those jobs are easy. Everyone will help the cover-up. Even cops. Cops find a guy with a belt around his neck and his cock in his hand, they hide the belt and call it an accident. Or at least they call it a
suicide. David Carradine caught a bad break by dying in Bangkok, far away from the safety nets.

She pours. She talks. Nothing left UNSAID. She takes a moral fucking inventory. She tells him how she got her break as a scripty on a big sitcom. How the women on the set had a special place, a closet behind the craft services table. “What's it for?” she'd asked the PA who'd shown her around the set. “It's where we go to cry,” the PA said. Sarah tells him that she'd laughed at that, thinking some women were weak. Some women gave the rest of them a bad name. Until the day one of the show's stars yelled at her for eight minutes because she'd brought the wrong cup for his coffee. She found the right cup. Then she found her way to the special place.

She tells Green about how she'd moved into PR, got a job at a big firm with offices on Wilshire. Three weeks into the new job her boss, a woman with cigarette-stained hands and an acid-peeled face, told her to give a blow job to a movie star they were handling. The woman told Sarah the star needed to relax before a press junket. It was part of the job, the woman had said. Sarah tells Green about the gleam in the woman's eyes. How some people get an evil done to them and they can't wait for their chance to pass it on to the next person in line.

Sarah had done what the woman asked of her, in a closet, on her knees. Sarah tells Green how it made her feel, like something hollow, like something you might keep your hats and umbrellas in. The star had texted with a buddy while she did it. He rested the phone on her head. Word got out. She got labeled. So she'd moved over. Switched to black-bag PR. A month later she met Green.

She tells Green about her last few months. She'd turned one actress's botched tit job into a struggle with cancer. A meth-
fueled freak-out turned into exhaustion. She'd done a lot. But she'd never gotten back down on her knees.

She's quiet. UNSAID: it's your turn. Time for your moral inventory.

Green couldn't. Not yet.

She understands. She drains her glass. She comes across the room and she kisses him. He kisses back. He pulls away.

“Why me?” he asks her.

“Because,” she says, “you're as scared as I am.”

He knew she was different. She is the only one who has ever been able to tell.

They undress quickly. Everything else, slow. They are gentle with each other. They know they're both so bruised.

She gets up first. Green pretends to sleep as she crawls naked out of bed. He watches her dress through half-closed eyes. She is so beautiful, even now, hungover, her hair hanging in her face.

Back at his apartment he watches bad teevee in the dark. He orders pizza. He wonders if he should call her. He wonders where that would go. Could go.

He watches cable. An action movie from twenty years back. Oh yeah, movies. Somewhere right now in this town, grips move lights. Prop guys dig through their trailers looking for just the right prop. Actors do vocal exercises and learn their lines. Writers type. Scripties time scenes. The place where that happens seems a million miles away from Green. He is in a place in a faraway corner of that world, one of the places marked
Here Be There Dragons
on old maps.

He doesn't call Sarah. Not then, and not ever before it becomes too late. Sleep comes and the next day he is normal again.
He goes back to work. It's award show season. They always keep him busy.

Oscar night. Late. The helicopters have quit their endless loops above the intersection of Hollywood and Highland. Victor calls him. Victor says, “Cleanup on aisle seven.”

“Okay,” Green says.

“Can you handle some heavy stuff?”

Victor has never asked him that before.

“Yeah,” Green says.

Green enters one of the Hollywood hotels. He takes the elevator to the eleventh floor. He goes to room 1103. He knocks. He listens. He takes gloves out of his pockets. He puts them on. He opens the door. He smells spilled champagne and something else, something wet and sharp and rich. His heart climbs into his throat and starts kicking. He turns on the light.

A body.

A skull-print scarf in a pool of blood, red on red.

Sarah's head is split open. Her eyes, once blue flowers, are now gray dull mushrooms. Her nails broken. The arms slashed. She fought. Fought hard.

Crisscross welts on her legs.

A mad pattern to the violence.

He cleans the scene as best he can. He wipes down surfaces. He tries not to look at her. But she's everywhere he turns.

While he cleans, he thinks. He makes a plan. He doesn't think Sarah would approve of it. But one thing he knows: he's done worse for less.

Green knows Aaron will be someplace he feels safe. He chases a hunch. He makes a call to confirm it. He drives to the Grotto.
He street-parks. He goes in the delivery entrance. He walks to the bungalow. He knocks.

“Yeah?”

“Let me in,” Green says.

Aaron unbolts the door. He blinks at Green. Recognition comes slow.

“You're the guy,” Aaron says. “The cleanup guy.”

Aaron opens the door. He's wearing jeans and a T-shirt. His tuxedo lies crumpled on the floor.

“We've got to get you cleaned up,” Green says.

“Why?”

“You know why.”

Aaron smiles. It is flawless, charming, and Green cannot see the demon underneath.

“What do we do?” he asks Green. Green pokes his head into the bathroom, as if he's looking for hiding witnesses. He checks the shower. He yanks on the bar that holds the shower curtain up. It's solid. Five-star construction.

“Take a shower,” Green says. “Take the shower of your life. I'll clean up around here. Leave your clothes out here so I can trash them.”

Aaron strips in front of him, smiling.

“Do you want to know why?” he asks Green.

“I know why. She wouldn't get down on her knees for you.”

“Not the way I'd put it,” Aaron said. “But whatever. I want to know why you're here.”

“I haven't picked my number yet,” Green says. “But I want enough so I don't have to do this anymore.”

“Doable,” Aaron says. He goes into the bathroom. Green waits five minutes. He breathes slow. He thinks about Sarah and her scarf made out of skulls. Then he removes Aaron's belt from the pants he left on the floor. He tugs on the belt. Tests it.
It does not break. He takes off his shirt. He picks the belt back up. He pushes the belt through the buckle. He holds the loop open with one hand, keeping it open, keeping it big enough to fit over a man's head.