God-Shaped Hole (20 page)

I never saw Jacob again that evening. He wasn’t at the apartment when I got back from the party, and he didn’t come home the next day, or the next day, or the day after that. I worried myself into a frenzy, and I had no idea what the hell to do about it. I ended up fretting around without being capable of accomplishing a thing. I didn’t sleep, I barely ate, I couldn’t work. I was like a truck driver on speed. All I did was motor around town staring at street people, expecting to find Jacob hunched beside a garbage can with a beard, no shoes, and dirt all over his face.

I didn’t hear from Jacob for five days. That’s when he decided to call and say hi. He left a message explaining he was at a place called the Sage and Cedar Motel, somewhere outside of Needles, California. I didn’t even know where Needles was. I had to look it up. It’s past the Mojave desert, right at the Arizona border, out in the middle of nowhere.

Jacob rambled on like a crazed schizophrenic away on a business trip.

“Trixie, I totally lost track of time, otherwise I would have called sooner…It’s so fucking hot here…I drove eight miles on the old Route 66 yesterday. It was really cool and weird. You would’ve liked it…I swam in the Colorado river…I saw a ghost town…Indian hieroglyphs…Now I’m just holed up in this dump, writing a shitload of thoughts. Thoughts are king, Trixie. King,” he said.

He left his number and asked me to call him. “I need you. I need to hear your voice.”

I pressed the delete button. There was no way I was calling him back.

He phoned every day for the next week but I never answered. I refused to play the dutiful wife. When I thought about Jacob, I wasn’t worried about his safety anymore, if he was eating enough, or getting enough rest, if he was happy. I just pictured him on a big vacation, hanging out at some crappy bar, drinking beer that tasted like piss, spewing all his withering-soul philosophies while women swooned and begged for the chance to mend his broken heart. He’d get too wasted to see straight and go home with some voluptuous barmaid named Rosalita. She’d have shiny skin and a flirty Mexican accent, and when she asked him if he had a girlfriend, he’d just laugh.

“
No se preocupes
,” he’d say, in his half-assed high school Spanish. “She’s far away.”

Maybe he would promise to take Rosalita to Memphis, too. Maybe he was already on his way there.

I began to hate Jacob. I couldn’t think about anything else, just hate.

This is the kind of stupid shit my mother must have gone through while she waited up for my father, I thought. Like the times she pretended she wasn’t tired, even though she could barely keep her eyes open, because she wanted to be in the living room, right in his face, when he tried to sneak in quietly in the middle of the night. Sometimes she’d still be there in the morning, as if she’d just dozed off watching TV. Those were the mornings we didn’t ask questions, and she didn’t look us in the eyes because she couldn’t. When I thought about those days, it made me feel sorry for my mother. Then I felt sorry for myself, for allowing myself to be in a position to identify with her. I swore I’d never do that.

Jacob was gone for a total of fifteen days. When he came home, he waltzed in the apartment like nothing was wrong, like he’d been down at the market picking up a carton of milk. He told me he’d left Needles and from there had gone to Big Sur, where he sat on a cold, stony beach and pondered the meaning of his life.

“Big Sur isn’t anywhere near Needles,” I said.

“I know. Here, I brought this for you.”

He handed me a magnet. It was a cartoon of a wave overtaking the words Big Sur, with a thermometer attached to the right side. It was seventy degrees in our apartment.

That same morning, there was a TV show filming on the street outside of our building. The monotonous noise of their trailers and generators below the window more than got on my nerves, and gave a slow, insipid rhythm to our whole conversation. Once in a while I’d hear “Action!” or “Cut!” But mostly it was just those damn motors.

“We were supposed to go to Big Sur together someday,” I said.

Jacob told me he was sorry. He was looking for Henry Miller’s grave. He couldn’t find it.

“He wasn’t buried there,” he said. “Or if he was, nobody would tell me where. Did you know Henry Miller’s first wife’s name was Beatrice?” Jacob seemed to think that had some momentous significance in our lives. “Did you?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

He didn’t even seem drunk, so he had no excuse for walking around in such a thick fucking fog.

“Trixie, this is important, you’ll get a kick out of this. Henry Miller was healthy and happy when he lived in Big Sur. For years and years. And then you know what happened? He moved to Pacific Palisades and he
died
. He came to Los Angeles and it
killed
him.”

Yeah, about twenty years later, I thought. It’s not like he dropped the day he arrived or anything. He was old.

“Jacob, I don’t care about Henry Miller right now.”

“
Okay
.”

It had been a while since I heard him say that. I pretended it didn’t move me at all.

There was a quick hammering noise on the set below us. I tried to walk past Jacob, to look out the window and see what they were building, but he pulled me over to where he stood. He slid his hand up my shirt.

“I missed you so much,” he said.

His mouth was on mine and his tongue was slowly, gently trying to break through. I kept my lips locked tight and wondered if he kissed Rosalita like that. I pushed him away.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

For the first time since he walked in the door, he sat down. He kept flipping the Big Sur thermometer upside-down and then right-side up again, as if it were an hourglass. He waited for me to speak.

I heard the assistant director outside calling for the actors. Three times he said, “First team to the set, please!”

I rehearsed in my head what I was going to say. I didn’t know why I was going to say it, but at the time I didn’t think I had a choice. I hadn’t convinced myself it was the right thing to do, but I was scared. I made up my mind that it was my only option. To save myself from the pain.

I wished for a sudden, catastrophic earthquake. One big enough to tear the building off its foundation and toss us like corn kernels in hot oil, popping about the room, ending everything right there. Jacob and I would have died synchronously and been together for all of eternity.

I thought the magnet was wrong. It seemed much warmer than seventy degrees in our living room.

Outside, someone said, “Roll camera!” Another guy yelled, “Speed!” Then the director called, “Action!”

“Trixie, what’s wrong?’ Jacob said.

“
What’s
wrong
?” I said. “How can you ask me that? How can you not know what’s wrong?”

“Well, you’re obviously upset, and—”

“I want you to leave. Now. You need to go.” I turned my back so that I couldn’t see his face.

“Go? I just got back. What’s the matter with you?”

I spun back around and said, “
Me?
What the fuck is the matter with
you
? You think you can just disappear for a couple weeks and then come back here and be my boyfriend and act like nothing’s happened? I’m sorry but it doesn’t work that way.”

“I had a lot of thinking to do. I needed to get my shit together. I didn’t want to be a drag.”

“Jacob, I’m supposed to
help
you get your shit together. That’s part of the job description of a girlfriend, whether you’re in Big Sur or Needles or Timbuktu.” I paused. “Then again, God knows where the hell you
really
were.” What I actually meant was, God knows who you were with.

“Hey,” he said. “You do. You know where I was because I told you. And anyway, I called you a million times but you never called me back.”

“Why didn’t you take me with you?”

“Beatrice, you’re the one who kept telling me how fucking busy you were. I was trying to do you a favor by getting out of your way.”

“Give me a break. How stupid do you think I am?”

“
What?
”

“You were gone for over two weeks. Am I supposed to believe you weren’t out fucking around, having a grand old time?”

That made Jacob mad. Irrationality always pissed him off. “Yeah, actually, you are supposed to believe that! Is
that
what this is about? Were you really concerned about me at all, or did you just think I was off fucking someone else?”

“Can you prove to me that you weren’t?”

“I shouldn’t have to! God, Trixie, you can be so fucking warped sometimes!”

“You’re one to talk,” I said. I had a quick childhood flashback. I pictured the time my father said he was going to Chicago for business in the middle of winter, then came home with a tan.

The little devil on my shoulder whispered: Jacob
does
look more golden than usual.

He did. He looked like he’d been frolicking around the beach with some cheap trollop.

“It’s over,” I said.

Jacob didn’t know whether or not to believe me. I had to repeat myself, simulating conviction. “It’s
over
,” I said again. “I mean it. The end.”

The light in Jacob’s eyes dimmed. “Trixie…,” he whispered, “why are you doing this?”

“…And cut!” the director yelled. “Let’s go one more time!”

“I won’t let you walk all over me, that’s why. I won’t sit here and be made a fool of.”

“Oh,
okay
. Are you talking to me or your father?”

“Get out!”

Jacob sat on the couch with his head in his hands and looked at the floor. He rubbed his face. “What about Memphis?”

I thought he must have gone off the deep end to ask me a question like that after the way he’d behaved.

“Memphis? What
about
Memphis?” I said. “How can we move to Memphis when you don’t even talk to me anymore? When you’re never here, and when you are, you just float in and out like this is some weigh station where you stop to sleep and shower and fuck once in a while. No wonder you didn’t know Nina was on heroin. I probably could’ve shot up right in front of your face and you wouldn’t have seen me!”

Jacob told me I was being selfish and cruel, that I didn’t understand what he’d been dealing with, and that I didn’t even try. “I’m sorry about running off, Trixie. I’m
sorry
. But I had some really serious stuff I needed to sort out. In case you forgot, my father fucking
died
, all right? And one of the reasons I left was because you were making me feel like an inconvenience. Like I was in your way or something. You didn’t want to deal with me any more than I wanted to deal with myself.”

“Oh, so it’s my fault?”

“It’s no one’s fault.”

“Don’t act like I gave you license to abandon me.”

“I didn’t abandon you!” He got up and held me by the shoulders. “Listen, you have to stop assuming that every man who says he loves you is going to run off and disappoint you someday.”

“Every man who’s said he loves me
has
run off and disappointed me.”

That hurt him, I could tell. But that’s why I said it. I wanted him to hurt. I wanted to get even with him for hurting me.

Jacob was supposed to get down on his knees, right then and there, and promise to put the shattered pieces back together. He was supposed to reject my command to leave, drag me into the bedroom, and order me to start packing. We’re leaving right away, he’d tell me. Forget California once and for all, it’s tearing us apart. I’ll sell the book from Memphis, it will all be
okay
. Graceland is waiting, my love. Los Angeles killed Henry Miller but it won’t kill us. We’re gone!

That’s what was supposed to happen. Instead, Jacob said, “You know, I’m not so sure you ever really understood me at all.”

That’s when I told him I didn’t love him anymore.

“You don’t mean that,” he said.

He was right, I didn’t mean even an ounce of it, but I wouldn’t take it back. I didn’t want to go through all the shit anymore—the feeling of being so fucking in love every single day that it hurt like a gunshot in your gut. Who the hell would want to feel like that for the rest of their life?

“You promised you wouldn’t leave,” Jacob said quietly. “Remember? You promised.”

“I’m not leaving. You are.”

Someone outside yelled, “That’s a wrap.”

“Please don’t do this, Trixie. Please.”

“By the way, my name’s not Trixie.”

Jacob didn’t say anything else after that. He just stormed into the bedroom, grabbed a handful of clothes, a couple of notebooks, threw them into a bag, and left. It was that easy. He didn’t even say good-bye. And I had to elicit the aid of every power source in my body to resist the crushing urge to run after him. Because when I caught him, I would have told him the truth—I would have told him that when he came in, all I wanted to do was rest my head in the curve between his shoulder and his neck, breathing in his scent, listening to him chant his crazy dreams in my ear.

But I didn’t move a muscle.

My feet were glued to the floor by the past and there wasn’t a prayer in hell that was going to pry them loose.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I stayed up and watched the news, because there’s nothing like watching the local news in Los Angeles to cheer a person up. I saw a story about a woman named Lucille who had been car-jacked somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. Lucille was in the backseat with her son, James, while her friend Nancy drove. Nancy was on TV, too. She had a perm.

The afternoon of the crime, Nancy made a pit-stop at a pharmacy. She went in to pick up a prescription and, in the meantime, some sixteen-year-old thug with a handgun hopped into the driver’s seat of her car and took off with Lucille and James along for the ride. Lucille screamed and begged the guy not to hurt her baby. But, this is the kicker, she had the wherewithal during the whole ordeal to secretly dial 911 on the cell phone laying at her feet. She cried directions into the phone, things like: “Mr. Carjacker, sir, please don’t hurt us. Just pull over into that Whole Foods parking lot right next to the Ford dealership there on the corner of Ventura and Canoga and let us out!”

From her prattling, the police were able to locate the car, speed to Lucille’s rescue, and save her life and the life of her son. After Lucille told the whole story in vivid detail, I thought, Hell, that’s pretty quick for a woman with Lee press-on nails. But then the news anchor had to go and ask her how in the world she thought to call 911 and talk like that in such a time of crisis. You know what she said?

God.

That’s right, that’s who got all the credit.

“God gave me divine grace to be strong and think fast. God saved my life and the life of my son,” she said. “It was all part of his plan.”

I was insanely jealous of Lucille. More jealous than I’d ever been of anyone in my entire life. Because she truly meant it. All I could think was, why can’t I be as stupid as Lucille? Why can’t I blame all my successes and all my failures on The Lord Jesus Christ Almighty? I would be so fucking happy if I lived like that. I could have said God told me to break up with Jacob, and if God told me to do it, it must have been the right thing. I would have been able to fault God for taking Thomas Doorley away from Jacob. And for letting Jacob go to Big Sur without me. And it would have definitely been all God’s fault that Jacob hadn’t sold his book yet, because if God has the power to let wide receivers on one team score touchdowns against the apparent sinners on the other side like they seem to think he does, surely God could have made Simon and Schuster stand up and take notice of how brilliant a writer Jacob was.

My true point of view goes like this:
If there really was a God, Jacob and I would be in Memphis right now.

Meanwhile, if Lucille’s God heard her yapping, I’m sure he laughed his ass off. He laughed so hard, he peed his big, God pants. Because if, between the billions of people God had to baby-sit, he happened to be in the Rite-Aid parking lot in Woodland Hills, California, just in time to whisper commands of salvation into Lucille’s perky ears, then God needed to get a fucking hobby.