God-Shaped Hole (21 page)

Sara called me a few days after Jacob left and told me he was staying with them, in case I was worried.

“I’m not,” I said. I was lying. Again. I’d become quite a master prevaricator.

Sara wanted to know if there was anything she could do to help.

“Is Jacob there now?” I said.

“No, he went to Chez Jay’s with Pete and Odie. To watch the Dodger game. Why don’t you stop in and see them?” Chez Jay’s was a bar that happened to be about a mile from my apartment. I told her I couldn’t go.

“I’m really busy,” I said. I would have bet my life that Jacob had asked Sara to call.

“This is stupid, you two belong together,” she said. “Jacob’s really getting his head back on straight. Everything will work out. I know it will.”

“I’m glad one of us is optimistic.” I asked her what Jacob had been doing all day, if he’d gone back to work or what.

“No,” she said, “he’s just been sitting around reading and fiddling with Pete’s guitars. Can I tell him I spoke to you, Beatrice? Can I tell him you want to see him?”

“Please don’t do that, Sara.”

I said good-bye to her so she didn’t try to change my mind.

Jacob started phoning me every day. I had to screen my calls.

“Trixie, you have to call me back. Please. I’ll be around all afternoon.”

He always talked to the machine like it was a real person.

“Listen, why don’t you just come over when you get home. We’ll take a long walk on the beach and we’ll figure all this out. I’m not going anywhere tonight. I’ll wait until you get here.”

The next day, he said, “Trixie, you should have come over last night.”

Once he called just to say he hoped I was keeping up with my journal.

“Remember to write what you feel. And don’t read it over too much. Don’t make corrections.” He was referring to the time he caught me rewriting. He’d been looking over my shoulder and thought I’d written the wrong date at the top of the page, until I told him I was fixing an old entry; you know, revising punctuation, spell-checking. He said you weren’t supposed to do that.

Another time, Jacob sang to me.

“Listen to this.” I heard him put the phone down and start strumming on a guitar. “I’ve been practicing,” he said. “I used to know how to play pretty well. I’m a little rusty, but Pete taught me a few songs. This one’s about us.”

I only heard the first verse because the machine cut him off. It was the story of some barfly who was really smart, who could build things, and could seemingly grasp every riddle in life except why his girl had left him.

It was just another fucked-up love song, but Jacob turned it into the truth. His truth. Jacob was the only person I’d ever met, besides myself, who believed music was a cosmic language that spoke directly to our souls—to ease our pain, and to remind us we weren’t alone.

“A good song can save your life, Trixie. Don’t ever forget it.”

He was going to write a book about it someday.

After the serenade failed to win me back, Jacob made one last attempt to reach me. That’s when he said he wasn’t going to call anymore.

“I get the hint,” he said. “I’m coming over tomorrow to get my computer. I’ll be there around noon. I’d really like to see you.”

I made sure I was gone all day. And I left Jacob a note asking him to leave me his key. When I got home late that night, I knew Jacob had been there—even before I looked in the office to see if his computer was gone, because I smelled remnants of him in the air.

He’d left the key on the desk.

When I tried to spell out the whole mess for Kat, she told me that even if I was unhappy with Jacob, which we both knew was a big, fat, juicy lie, it couldn’t be any worse than what I was without him. She spat me the hocker of advice I usually spit at everyone else.

“Blanca, you can’t commit suicide so as not to be murdered,
right
? That’s the worst way to die,
right
?”

It drives me crazy when people know me well enough to remind me what I believe. Kat said I had a future with Jacob. “And you’re fucking it up for no other reason than you’re a stubborn idiot who’s afraid to be happy. But if you want to be a baby about it, so be it. I didn’t want you to end up in Dogpatch or Tallahassee or wherever the hell you wanted to go anyway.”

“Dude, where’s Henry been? I haven’t seen him in a while.”

Greg was standing in the middle of the hallway, barefoot, when I walked out my door. His feet looked like he’d been dancing in coal. He was the last person in the world I felt like talking to. I prayed to my non-existent God for the elevator to arrive as quickly as possible.

“Henry’s on assignment in Borneo. He’s writing an article on albino orangutans.”

“Right on,” Greg said. I pushed the Close Door button a dozen times. Greg’s voice echoed down the shaft. “You look really nice, by the way.”

I didn’t want to hear that. I didn’t want to look nice for the pathetic evening I was in store for—the one I blamed all on Kat. I guess you could have called it a date, but I didn’t. It was only
dinner
. I was having
dinner
with some friend of Gopal’s that I met at a cocktail party. After scheming in the corner with Kat for half the evening, the bloke walked right up to me and wouldn’t stop talking. I refer to him as a bloke because he was English, but not the cool, working-class Englishmen you see in independent films. This one talked like he hadn’t taken a shit in days. He told me all about his consulting firm, and how he liked to walk Nigel, his Rottweiler puppy, to the dog park in Laurel Canyon. He also informed me that he was allergic to penicillin. He took it once when he was a kid and his throat swelled up like a balloon.

“I almost died. Fortunately, my mother was a nurse. She gave me a shot of something, and things turned out brilliantly.”

Lucky me, I thought. Why couldn’t his mother have been a telephone operator?

“Give him a chance,” Kat said. “He’s cute. He looks like royalty. Maybe he’s a lord or something.”

“I don’t see it.”

I went home feeling so unbearably alone I actually thought there was a possibility I could drop dead before the night was over.

Without consultation, Kat gave the lord my phone number. He called me the next day and asked me out for dinner. I told him I’d just been diagnosed schizophrenic. He didn’t fall for it.

“Katrina said I couldn’t take no for an answer.”

I had two choices: dinner with the royal pain-in-the-ass or sit at home and proofread my journal.

“Come on, a free meal with a cute limey won’t kill you,” Kat said.

That was debatable.

His name was Steven, and rest assured, he was no lord. He arrived at my door wearing a white shirt that he’d buttoned all the way up to the collar, and pleated khaki pants. The fact that he was dressed for a Jordan family photo was the first red flag. Jacob wouldn’t have been caught dead in that costume. Nor would Jacob have combed his hair like Steven combed his, neatly to one side. Jacob would have never driven a car that smelled like baby powder either. Or listened to bubble-gum pop music. As a matter of fact, Jacob would have probably rather been shot by a firing squad than made to listen to bubble-gum pop crap.

If the car hadn’t been moving, I’m sure I would have jumped out. As we drove down my street, I hoped Jacob had been stalking me. I kept an eye out for his dirty Land Cruiser. I waited for it to pull up behind us. I wanted a chase to ensue. I wanted Jacob to try and run Steven off the road. I wanted Steven to speed down the freeway, bank a turn, roll his car and break an arm, or maybe crack his snotty British nose. Nothing life-threatening, just enough to immobilize him and allow me to escape. I would have jumped into Jacob’s car and we would have driven off, never stopping until we reached the Memphis city limits.

Steven took me to an Italian restaurant on Rodeo Drive. He asked me what I was going to have, and when I told him I wanted the spaghetti pomodoro, he ordered it for me. What I mean is, the waiter came over and asked if we’d decided on dinner, and Steven proceeded to say, “The lady will have…” I could tell by his asinine smirk that he thought he was being impressively chivalrous, but in all actuality, he’d just hammered the final khaki-colored nail into his bubble-gum pop crap coffin.

If only I’d had some penicillin, I could have ended it real quick.

I called Kat the minute I got home. I told her to shove Lord Steven up her ass. Then I spent the rest of the night writing in my still-nameless diary. I filled an entire page with a sentence I remembered from
Hallelujah
. It was one of my favorite lines in the book:

Our love became a casualty of my family tree.

I wrote it ninety-three times, until there was no more room on the page.

On the next sheet of paper I wrote every possible version of my name if I would have married Jacob.
Beatrice Grace
. That sounded good.
Beatrice Jordan Grace
. Also good, but I knew I wouldn’t keep my maiden name if I got to pick up a lovely new one like Grace.
Beatrice Casimir Grace
. I crossed that out. Casimir is my middle name. I don’t use it because it’s my mother’s maiden name, as well as Chip’s real first name. In Poland, it’s loosely translated as “One who makes peace.” Go figure.

I wrote my nickname, too.
Trixie Grace
. That kind of looked like the name of a stripper, but in Tennessee it might have gone unnoticed. How about the kids?
Madeline Grace
.
Simone Grace
.

It would have been perfect.

Dawn makes a sound. If you listen closely, right as the sun starts to come up, you’ll hear it. It’s like the echo of birth: silence, followed by a gentle push, followed by moans, then the sloppy deluge of new life. On good days I like it because it reminds me that I’m alive. On bad days it makes me feel like dust.

Los Angeles without Jacob made me feel like dust. Los Angeles without Jacob was a giant mortar and pestle that ground me down finer and finer until I started to become nothing but powdery particles about to float off into a vacuum.

To put it in plain English: I was highly unproductive after Jacob and I split. I still went to the studio every morning and tried to work, but my heart and my hands refused to cooperate. Kat called constantly to check up on me. Anytime she thought I sounded like I was about to jump off a tall building, she’d con me into coming over.

“Get your ass down here, my salesgirl called in sick again.”

I always went. And not so much because Kat was good at cheering me up. I just didn’t have the energy to do much else.

“Beatrice, telephone,” Shelly said. Shelly was my pony-tailed little assistant. She was supposed to help me make jewelry, not play secretary, but I don’t like to talk on the phone when I’m gloomy. I’m distrustful of people when I can’t see their faces.

I pretended to be busy drawing rings. “Who is it?”

“It’s Jacob,” she whispered.

He’d stopped calling me exactly fourteen days and sixteen hours earlier, and we hadn’t spoken or seen each other since the day we broke up. I desperately wanted to talk to him. As a matter of fact, I’d called Pete and Sara’s apartment a dozen times in as many days intending to admit what a fool I’d been, but every time someone said hello, I’d get scared and hang up.

With pangs of regret, I shook my head. That meant Shelly was supposed to tell Jacob I wasn’t around, even though I’m sure he’d heard my voice.

“He wants you to call him,” Shelly said. “He said it’s
really
important
.”

I could tell, by the tone of her voice, that she was on his side.

I picked up my purse. “I’m going to Chick.”

I walked into the store and told Kat she had to help me make a list of all the reasons why it would have sucked to live in Memphis. She started to itemize immediately.

“Number one: It’s humid in Memphis.”

“No,” I said, “that’s no good.”

“What do you mean? It gets
hot
in Tennessee.”

“I know. But that was a positive for us.”

“Why?” She cringed, anticipating a ludicrous response.

“Sweaty sex,” I said.

“Oy-vey, Blanca!”

Kat felt sorry for me and said I could work the cash register for the rest of the day. Then she had an idea. “Let’s pretend we’re one of those uppity Beverly Hills stores that give poor people dirty looks when they walk in. Like the way they treated you in Gucci.”

I was always treated like trash when I went into fancy stores. I didn’t dress rich enough. The last time I’d gone to Gucci I was with Kat and Gopal. He needed to pick up a pair of shoes, and he had on one of their suits so they were nice to him. I was wearing hand-me-down pants from the Army/Navy store, along with Jacob’s Love Motel T-shirt. I didn’t look like I had a pot to piss in. The sales girl, who I swear had a fishing pole up her butt and chicken cutlets in her bra, followed me around like I was going to steal something. Kat begged me to pull a
Pretty Woman
maneuver and buy up the place, but back then I still thought I was moving to Memphis, and what kind of shithead wears Gucci in Memphis?

Kat wanted to conduct an experiment based on that incident. “We’ll fawn all over the scrubby-looking people, and treat the ones who think they’re important like they have leprosy.”

As for celebrities, it went without saying that most of them got the shitty treatment, no matter how they were dressed—they cared too much and we didn’t like them for that. Credible musicians were our one exception.

“Because we respect them,” Kat said.

“This is reverse discrimination,” I told her. “And lucky for you, I’m in the right mood to go along with it.”

“New number one,” Kat said. She was still working on the Memphis list. “Did you really want to live in the same state as Dollywood?”

There was no arguing with her on that.

A lanky supermodel wearing a crushed-velvet hat walked in not long after we’d decided to torture patrons such as herself. Kat said hi to her as a test. She returned neither a word nor a smile.

After examining the jewelry case for a few minutes, the girl spoke to me without looking up. “Can I see that necklace? The one with the pink and purple stones.”

They weren’t pink and purple stones, they were amethyst and rose quartz.

“Excuse me,
Miss
?” she said a little louder.

I pretended I was deaf and didn’t even raise my head. The model chick sashayed out, more confused than offended.

“Should I call him?” I said to Kat. I picked up the phone, then I put it down quickly and shook my head. “No, I can’t.”

Kat started lecturing me. “
Call
him already. I mean really, do you think you’re ever going to find a guy more perfect for you than that freak? Someone who loves you like he does? He’s fucking whipped. And you’re doing exactly what you talked me out of doing to Gopal. Why is it that you can con me into keeping a decent relationship going, but you can’t hold on to your own, huh? What would Oprah say about them apples, Blanca?”

A skinny little girl with diamond stud earrings bigger than her ass walked in. She asked me for help finding a pair of jeans in her size.

“Try the pre-teen department at Sears,” I said.

Kat went back to her mannequin and the list. “Number two: Inbreeding,” she said. “Number three: Ducks in the hotels.”

“Did you say
ducks
?”

“It’s true. Gopal told me there’s some hotel in Memphis that lets a bunch of ducks march through the lobby, like, once a day or something. They hop into a fountain, take baths, then march back out.”

“Back out to where? Where do they live?”

“How the hell would I know?”

Fixated on the clicking of the cash register buttons, I thought about Jacob and rang up a phantom purchase costing sixty-nine dollars and sixty-nine cents. I was adding on the tax when I asked Kat one more time if I should call him.

“Not going to be necessary,” she said.

I glanced up. Jacob was standing right in front of me. He looked unbelievably happy. Maybe he hadn’t missed me at all, I immediately thought, because he looked better than I’d seen him look since his father died. He was wearing a new shirt. It was too big for him, like everything in his closet, with short sleeves, buttons down the front, and a paisley design that made me think of sperm. He’d had his hair cut, too. The thick locks that used to brush his collar were gone, making him look cleaner and younger. And he had the most ridiculous coyote grin on his face.

“Let’s go,” he said. He grabbed my purse off the counter.

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said indignantly, just to give him a hard time.

“You have no choice. You either get up willing, or I’m going to pick you up and drag your ass out of here.”

“Oh my God, that would be just like
An Officer and a Gentleman
,” Kat cried. “Pick her up, Grace! Do it!”

I sat there, arms crossed, and stared at him. I could be a real bitch when I wanted to, even when I wasn’t trying that hard.

“Come on, Trixie. An hour of your time is all I ask. Then you never have to see me again if you don’t want to.”

Funny, that struck me as the most horrible thought imaginable—to never see Jacob again.

“I’m counting to three. One…Two…” He started around the counter for me.

“All right!” I stood up and took my purse from him, trying my hardest to act annoyed. “Where are you taking me?”

“It’s a surprise,” he said.