God-Shaped Hole (23 page)

I took a bite of the cornbread. It tasted like yellow birthday cake. Jacob was right about the food, but I still didn’t understand the significance of our visit to Chef Lulu’s. And I knew there had to be significance. Jacob would have never orchestrated something so specific without significance involved.

“This ain’t no game,” the Texan said, explaining the finer points of reeling in a fighting bass. He yelled at his Billy Bob cohort. “Pull back! And keep your tip up,” he said. “Set the hook! Set the hook!” He could barely talk around the big wad of chew in his mouth.

“Jacob, why are we here?” I said. “Why did you bring me all the way out to this place to talk? And why now?”

“Why? Because this is the best soul food in Los Angeles, that’s why.” Then, acting like what he was about to say was completely beside the point, he continued, “And because I want you to get used to the kind of food you’ll be eating if you come to Memphis with me next month. We probably should’ve ordered something barbequed. They’re big on that down there. They char everything. Especially pork. I don’t even like pork, to tell you the truth. We’re going to have to buy a grill. Do you like pork, Trixie?”

He crammed a giant forkful of collard greens into his mouth and tried not to smile.

“
What did you say?
”

“I don’t know about you, but come next month, I’m outta here,” he said smugly.

I wish I knew how to explain the phenomenon that came over me after his words sunk in. If he said he was moving, it could only mean one thing.

He’d sold the book.

My entire body became paralyzed. I’m not exaggerating, I couldn’t feel my arms or my legs, only the rushing of blood through veins.

“Jacob?” I stuttered slowly, “Did you…”

He grinned like a proud papa.

The idea of the book finally being sold, the possibility of what it promised, was almost too much for me. When I regained control of my motor skills I stood up, probably to make sure I still could. I didn’t say a word. I just walked out the door. I needed air.

There was an old, run-down house across the street from the restaurant. Half of the building was lopsided, it had plastic paper flapping where the front windows should have been, and most of the yard was covered with rusty car parts. To the left of the door was a tiny flower box filled with dandelions. Nine out of ten people walking by would have called them weeds. They were the most breathtaking bunch of yellow weeds I’d ever seen, as if the sun had given birth to a dozen babies.

I sat down on the curb and burst into tears.

A moment later I felt Jacob’s hands on my shoulders.

“Hey,” was all he said. He lifted me up, turned me around, and engulfed me in his arms.

That made me cry even harder. I put my lips to his lips. To say I kissed him would be inaccurate. I tried to consume him.

“Control yourself,” Jacob said. “According to you we’re not even dating, remember?”

I buried my face in his chest and inhaled. I’d missed the smell of him almost more than I’d missed anything.

“Our food’s going to get cold,” he said.

I asked him to give me a minute. I wanted to look around. I wanted to take notice of everything. All of a sudden, I felt the need to completely absorb the place in which I stood.

Before he went back inside, Jacob handed me a piece of paper. It was folded up into a cube, the size of a square inch. On it he’d written me a note:

Dear Trixie,

Will you come to Memphis with me?

A) Yes

B) No

C) I’d go anywhere with you because you fuck like a goddamn fire hose.

D)You’re an asshole and I never want to see you again.

Circle ONLY ONE and give it back to me when you’re done eating.

Love, J

When I went back inside, Chef Lulu was spying on us from her window. She saw me wiping away the tears. She shook her head. “See what my food does to people? Makes ’em fools,” she said.

I sat down, next to Jacob instead of across from him, and made him give me all the details of the book sale. He explained how Adrenaline ended up getting two separate publishers to vie for it.

“And then something called ‘a floor’ got going,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“I’m still not exactly sure. It’s
fabulous
though,” he said. “I think it’s something like an auction maybe, but different. One of the interested publishing houses throws out a bid, and if that bid isn’t upped by the other house then they get the book. I think that’s what happened. All I know is that she finalized it yesterday. It’s done. There’s no turning back now.”

We were in the middle of eating the sweet potato pie when the waiter brought us our check. I asked him if I could borrow his pen. I unfolded Jacob’s note, circled my answer, and handed it to him. Jacob looked at it but manifested no reaction. He just nodded like a judge reading a verdict, feigning indifference.

“You ready to go?” he said.

On our way out of the restaurant, Jacob pressed his body against mine, lowered his voice and said, “Speaking of fire hoses…”

We considered stopping at the Exxon across the street for a quickie, but Jacob feared the smell of a service station bathroom would compromise the purity of my enjoyment.

We made it home in record time.

“I hope you’re ready,” Jacob said as we wrestled with each other’s clothes. He felt the need to apologize beforehand, predicting the imminent session wasn’t going to take very long.

“Contrary to what you seem to think,
Rosalita
, it’s been a while for me.”

Jacob was making breakfast when I woke up the next morning. The sight of him standing over a frying pan with bed-head wearing nothing but a pair of baggy shorts made me feel like Mary Magdalene the day after Jesus’s resurrection.

We ate banana pancakes and made a list of all the things we had to do before we left. There were myriad minor details to iron out, a lot of loose ends to tie up, and not all that much time to do them. One month—that’s the window we gave ourselves. We wanted to be ex-residents of California by mid-November. No, I take that back, it wasn’t simply that we
wanted
to be, we
had
to be. Once our exodus was imminent, it was all we could do not to get in the car and go.

“Beatrice,” Jacob said. I knew he meant business if he was calling me by my real name, “why haven’t you ever left before? I mean I had self-imposed mind games, not to mention financial constraints, keeping me here. You could’ve gone a long time ago. How come you didn’t?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I never really believed it was an option. And I didn’t want to go alone.”

Jacob smiled impishly. “What do you say we leave everything we can’t fit in the back of the car and take off now. Today,” he said, barely able to keep still. I watched him doodle over his pancakes with syrup. First he drew a bird, then he smeared that with his fork into a sticky Rorschach blot and tested me.

“What do you see?” he said. “I see B.B. King. Do you know B.B. King has a bar in Memphis? Come on, what do you see?”

“I see a Herman Miller ball clock.”

He turned his plate sideways, entertaining that possibility, then he nodded and looked up. “So, what do you think? You wanna go tonight?”

“Jacob…” I said. I hated to burst his beautiful little bubble of joy, but one of us had to be practical. We had commitments, work to finish, people to say good-bye to. We couldn’t just
go
. Once I finally convinced him of that, he said, “
Okay
then, let’s leave a few days before my birthday. That way we can take our time driving across the country and still be in Memphis by the end of the month. How’s that?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

We called everyone who cared and told them the good news.

Pete and Sara decided to throw us a big going-away party the Saturday before we left.

Kat told me I was the best friend she’d ever had. Then she freaked out. “Y’all have a good time now,” she said in a pissy voice, and hung up. Jacob called her right back.

“Hey, butt-face,” he said. “We’re not going into the witness protection program, you know. We’re just moving.”

“This is all your fault, Grace. Don’t think I don’t know it.” Click.

Joanna congratulated us and promised she’d visit as soon as we got settled.

My mother wanted to know why we couldn’t wait until after the holidays to move. “Nobody moves
during
the holiday season,” she said.

I told her we’d waited long enough.

Jacob and I got back into bed with his beat-up road atlas and started planning our drive.

“Can we camp the whole way?” Jacob said.

“Camp? You mean like sleep outside?”

“No, I mean dress in drag,” Jacob said sarcastically.

“I guess,” I said. But I was skeptical. I’d never been camping before. Certain aspects of it concerned me. “Won’t it be cold?”

“Not if we bring the right gear.”

“Where do we go to the bathroom?”

“In the woods. I’ll dig you holes.”

“Holes?”

“Come on, don’t you want to make love under the stars?”

He didn’t have to ask me twice. Fucking under the stars more than made up for having to shit in a hole.

Jacob planned on showing me where he stayed in Needles, which was sort of on the way. He wanted me to get a good look at the barmaid there.

“To ease your mind,” he said.

I pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about. Moving on, we’d go through Kingman, Arizona; make a fleeting stop in Flagstaff; from there we’d keep heading east to Albuquerque, speed through Amarillo and Oklahoma as fast as possible, then hit the fringes of Dixieland. Little Rock, Arkansas, would be the last real city we’d see before finally glimpsing the banks of the Mississippi river framed by the Memphis skyline. Depending on how much time that took, we were planning a quick detour down to Montgomery to spend Thanksgiving with Cole and Toren. I called Cole and he said we were more than welcome to stay with them as long as we wanted. He thought we might even like Montgomery enough to live there.

“We have our hearts set on Memphis,” I said.

Jacob and I decided to pack up most of our stuff. Then we’d have movers store it for us until we found a house. That way we wouldn’t have to lug a U-Haul across the country. Jacob was going to sell his car, and we’d keep my Jetta for the drive.

We surfed the Internet to get an idea of housing prices in the Memphis area. According to the real estate website we browsed, there was a two-story Victorian fixer-upper waiting for us. It had three bedrooms, a vaulted ceiling, a living room, charm, and “other features” that included hardwood floors, a fireplace, and the symbol of freedom itself—a porch. It was everything we wanted. But the best part was, the mortgage would be
half
of what we currently paid in rent.

“Hell, people spend more on cosmetic surgery in Los Angeles than we’re going to spend on a whole
maison
full of charm,” Jacob said. He was looking at my journal. “Still haven’t named it yet, huh? It’s been almost a year.”

“I’ll probably be done with it by the time I think of one.”

Jacob went through journals faster than I did, obviously because he wrote more. And he bought those small composition books. I had the four-subject, college-ruled mother. I’d finished English, science, and math, but still had all of history to fill up. Jacob’s current journal, which he pulled out of his coat pocket and handed to me, was called
La Corbeille.

“It means ‘trash can’ in French,” he said.

La Corbeille
contained most of what he’d penned while we were apart. “Read it when you get a chance. So you know how much unnecessary pain you caused me.”

“Shove it,” I said.

Jacob stumbled across the page in my book where I’d scribbled my current and potential surnames, along with the names of our kids. I saw him chuckle.

“Hey!” I said. I tried to grab it from him, but he spun around and held it above my reach. “Did I say you could look at that?”

“This is
so cute
, Trixie.”

I flung myself down onto the bed and hid my face. Jacob put the book aside, knelt down on the floor, and waited until I looked up. He didn’t say anything, he just kept his eyes fixed on me. It reminded me of the day I met him, when I sat down at the table in Fred’s diner and he stared at me for two minutes straight without talking. I thought he was a total nut job, and I’m sure it was in those 120 seconds that I first fell in love with him.

“What?” I said. “What are you looking at, you shithead?”

He glanced at me sideways. “Do you want to get married?”

“Jacob…” I sighed. “What the hell is
that
?

“What?”

“I mean, is it a question or a proposal?”

He laughed. “It’s only a question. I just want to know for future reference. If it was a proposal I’d be more prepared. You know, maybe a ring and what not,” he said. “So, do you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you?”

“I like the way your name looks with mine.”

Jacob and I both agreed that marriage was something we’d neither planned on nor longed for all our lives like some people did, yet we weren’t outlandishly opposed to it anymore.

“Deep down,” Jacob said, “I know that calling you my girlfriend for the rest of my life is never going to do our relationship justice.”

I concurred with him on that point.

“Maybe after we get settled we should consider making this thing legit,” he said.

We both wanted a small ceremony. In a cotton field or on the Mississippi river shore. Then we’d go off to Paris for a honeymoon. We’d eat Brie and baguettes and stare at Rodin sculptures by day, and lick
mousse au chocolat
off of each others toes by night.

It was as if the Red Sea had parted and was about to lead us to the Promised Land. That’s what we started referring to Memphis as—our promised land. Rand McNally was Moses.

The first article of business I took care of was giving notice on the apartment. We’d been going month to month for a while, so it was no problem getting out of the lease. I was going to lose a bit of my deposit by not providing the required sixty-day heads-up, but I wrote that off. Getting even half of the deposit back would pay our Memphis mortgage for a couple months. Jacob took care of arranging for the cessation of our phone, gas, and electric services. The only other thing I had left was to close down operations at work. I finished up what I’d been working on, filled the last of my orders, and moved out of the studio. I told all my vendors and private customers that I wouldn’t be debuting anything again until spring. I wanted my next collection to be a reflection of my new surroundings, and of the perspective I would have once I began to see the world through the eyes of Memphis, Tennessee. Taking a few months off would also give me extra time for all the home improvement projects Jacob and I envisioned in our little Victorian charmer.

I still couldn’t believe it was really going to happen. If someone would have asked me then, I might have slipped and said maybe there was a God after all. Maybe there was a slim chance he did exist, and he’d started to feel sorry for me and Jacob. He was finally willing to give us a break. Hell, it wasn’t as if we’d been asking to rule the world, or anything diabolical like that. We didn’t want to be presidents, or astronauts, or Bill Gates. We had pathetically simple dreams: to do meaningful work that we could be proud of, to be together, and to be happy. That certainly wasn’t too much to ask.

Or was it?

Jacob spent the entire month leading up to our impending departure awash in
Hallelujah
responsibilities. He was either on the phone with his editor, or at the computer re-tooling and perfecting his masterpiece. I ran out of things to do after a week, and spent most of my time with Kat and Sara, planning the big bash. We opted to have a barbeque, in honor of the alleged River City staple, at Sara and Pete’s house. They lived on the bottom floor of a white-washed duplex in Venice, one with a small, grassy front yard. Their whole block was closed to cars, only a few streets over from the beach. We booked an ex-con named Ronnie the Rib Tickler to come and cook for us. I was worried about all the noise we might make, but Sara said as long as we offered the neighbors some food we could hang out all night, be as loud as we wanted, and nobody would call the cops.

Jacob thought it was mean that I wouldn’t invite my mother, or Chip and Elise, to the party. In my defense, I knew my mother wouldn’t have stepped one toe in Venice, especially for a barbeque. Even if I had convinced her to come, she would have been paranoid about bugs, thinking they were crawling on her all night. She doesn’t like to be outside unless she’s lounging by the pool in her over-exterminated backyard. As for Chip, he would have spent the evening asking people if they were in the movie business, bragging about his latest box office gross. We didn’t need that kind of crap permeating the mood of the celebration. I made plans for us to have dinner with all of them the night after the party. It was simpler to say good-bye on their own turf.

“What about Greg?” Jacob said. We were trying to make sure we hadn’t forgotten to invite anyone.

“Don’t even think about it.”

Fifteen minutes later Jacob looked up from his crossword puzzle and said, “Trixie, don’t you think you should call your father?”

“You want me to invite my father to the party? Are you
high
?”

“Not to invite him to the party. Just to call him and tell him you’re leaving. To say good-bye.”

“No,” I said. But truth be told, the thought had crossed my mind. I didn’t want to leave Los Angeles with bad karma. I had visions of, maybe a decade later, the phone ringing in the middle of the night. Chip or Cole would be on the other end, waking me out of a deep sleep, in the arms of my charming husband, in my charming house, in the promised land of Memphis, to tell me my father was dancing with the grim reaper and I’d never see him again. Maybe I’d even helped kill him. Maybe he was so distraught over not having me in his life that he couldn’t take it anymore. I know I said I hated him, but I still, for some curious reason, found solace in the idea of him. I mean I
had
a father. Even if he was useless. Even if I refused to talk to him. Even if he caused me inexcusable angst, it was still nice to know he was there. I told Jacob all of this.

“I hear ya,” Jacob said. “But you made me see Thomas Doorley.”

“Yeah, and look where that got us.”

“Trixie,” Jacob said, “I distinctly remember you telling me the night of my birthday last year that if I called my father, you would call yours. I kept up my end of the bargain.”

“I recall saying no such thing.”

“I’ll call him for you,” Jacob said. He picked up the phone.

I grabbed it from him and put it back on the receiver. “You can’t call him. He’s
my
father.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“What’s your point?”

“How about this,” Jacob said. “I’ll call him to tell him we’re moving. I’ll suggest that maybe he invite us over before we leave. I’ll tell him you don’t even know I’m asking. Then, if he calls back, we go. If not, fuck him and you never have to see him again.”

I sat there nervous and worried. I knew exactly where the conversation was going to end up.