“With star sapphires,” she said. “I don’t care how much they cost, I just want my accessories to be as unique as this dress.”
“It’ll be a challenge,” I said. “But I’m sure I can whip something up.”
Chip and Elise had a cook and a servant, and we ate in the dining room on the good china: roasted chicken, garlic mashed potatoes, romaine lettuce with rosemary vinaigrette, and fancy Italian wine. Jacob told Chip it was the best wine he’d ever had, and my brother immediately went off on a ten minute-long tangent about the year it was bottled, the region it came from, how rare it was, and how much the local hot spots charged for it when you ordered it there.
“I ship it in, right from Chianti,” Chip said, mistakenly assuming he was impressing Jacob. “You’re only allowed to bring in a certain number of bottles a year, you know, so consider yourself lucky.” Chip’s gruff, I’m-better-than-you snort shook the table. Jacob laughed along with Chip in a fake, Great Gatsby, old-money sort of voice, obviously mocking my brother. I was the only one who picked up on it, and I had to put my napkin in front of my mouth to hide my amusement. When Jacob took another gulp of his wine, I had visions of him squirting it like a fountain through his teeth. I’d seen him do that in the shower—he had quite a projectile range. I was disappointed when he swallowed.
Dessert was a heavenly concoction of ginger-flavored crème brûlée—the highlight of the evening—and I contemplated sneaking a ramekin of it into my purse—an idea motivated by the quick fantasy I had that centered around my new roommate spreading it all over my body, then licking it off. The way in which Jacob slowly lapped it from his spoon told me he was thinking the same thing.
We were having coffee and brandy in the living room when my mother asked Jacob about his family.
“Tell us more about the Graces,” she said.
I was about to order her not to pry into his life when Jacob cut me off and proceeded to give my mother a spiel I didn’t follow at all. Apparently when he’d told her his last name that afternoon, she’d asked him what his father’s first name was. He said Thomas, and my mother assumed that meant his father’s name was Thomas Grace. What she didn’t know was that Jacob went by his mother’s last name. He was no relation to this Thomas Grace guy, a man whose social calendar my mother followed by reading Town and Country and W. Evidently, Thomas Grace was some big Internet mogul, owned a Renoir, attended every important gala in New York City, and had been recently divorced.
“Where is Thomas Grace now?” my mother asked Jacob.
“Oh, he’s off on his yacht, cruising around the Greek isles for the next few months,” Jacob said.
He was making the whole damn thing up, of course, and I assumed I finally knew why my mother liked him so much. She thought he was a dot-com kid. She thought I’d hit the jackpot.
“Why did you do that?” I asked Jacob on our way home.
“It was funny,” he said.
“It was not funny.”
“Then why are you laughing?”
I tried to curtail my level of entertainment. “How am I going to explain this to her, Jacob? Now she really is going to hate you.”
“Tell her my father and I had a falling out and we don’t speak anymore. That’s not exactly a lie. By this time next year, we’ll be gone and she’ll never know the difference.”
“Oh, yes she will. You don’t know my mother. She’s going to hound you until you invite her to the weekend spread in the Hamptons, trust me on this. And what if she meets your mother some day?”
“My mother will go along with it. She’s a good sport.”
I couldn’t wait to meet Jacob’s mother.
“I’m going to have to call her tomorrow and tell her the truth,” I said.
“Why do you have to burst her bubble?” He was still chuckling.
“Jacob, I’m serious.”
“This from a woman who once told a lover that her parents helped put Nelson Mandela in prison.”
“The reason I told him that was because I wasn’t planning on him being around long enough for it to matter and—” I froze. That thought gave me pause: what if this whole thing—what if I—was a big joke to Jacob? What if he was the best actor in the universe and I meant nothing to him? What if he had no intention of taking me any further south than Anaheim?
Jacob knew what I was thinking. He looked my way to try and get a reading on my expression, and almost swerved into the median.
“Watch the road, Slick.”
“Do you think I think that?” he said. “Trixie, answer me. Do you think you won’t be around long enough for it to matter?”
I didn’t say anything. I just tried to look mopey.
“I have a surprise for you,” he said. “Look behind me.”
I reached under his seat and found something wrapped in aluminum foil. It was a dish of crème brûlée.
“Jacob, did you steal this?”
He howled. “No! God, ye of little faith. Elise gave it to me. I told her it was our first official night living together, that we wanted to celebrate. She thought it was romantic.”
It was. It was fucking romantic as all hell. And I was an idiot.
Jacob called my mother the next day. He apologized to her and confessed that he was from Pasadena.
“I’m nothing but trailer trash,” he said with pride.
He gave my mother the whole rigamarole about how his father deserted him when he was a baby, probably for sympathy points. And he kissed up to her a little more by claiming he only said he was related to Thomas Grace because of me.
“What you think is really important to Beatrice,” he said. “She just wanted you to like me.”
When he got off the phone, he said my mother laughed and thanked him for telling her the truth. She was still being nice to him.
“Her doctor must have her back on Valium,” I said.
TWELVE
All Jacob needed was a place to write. I gave him the spare bedroom in our apartment, and you would have thought he’d been crowned lord and master of the world, he was so happy. He’d just sold a story to a big travel magazine, loosely based on the time he spent in Costa Rica, and with the money he made on that he was able to retire from the Weekly, at least for a couple months, and work on his book full-time. I was at my studio during the day so he had the place to himself.
When Jacob was working, he had the dedication of a trained monkey. I would leave the house around nine and he’d already be at his computer. He kept his right elbow on his desk and his head in his hand, trance-like, unless he was typing. He typed like a monkey, too. When he was on a roll, it sounded like he was shelling out a thousand words a minute. I expected to see nothing but jumbled letters when I looked at the screen after one of his typing marathons, but I always found coherent sentences. He was the real deal.
When I came home, at six o’clock or so, he’d still be sitting there, either letting it pour like mad, or in fierce combat, desperately battling with wherever his words came from, to spit out something he deemed worthy. His hair would be even messier than normal, and there would be a random bowl, a browning apple core, or a bag of potato chips on his desk. That was the only evidence I had that he’d moved all day. Sometimes he’d stay like that late into the night, forgetting to eat, to change his clothes, or to shower. I felt like I actually spent less time with him once he moved in, but I could live with the fact that I didn’t see him all day long, or barely speak a word to him. I knew he was there and that’s what counted. For such a small human, Jacob’s presence filled a hell of a lot of space.
Occasionally, Jacob left the house when he was done working. He’d wake me up and ask me if I wanted to steal around town with him.
“I need some fucking air,” he’d say.
Sometimes I went, other times I just let him wind down by himself. If he felt like company and I was too tired, he’d
call Pete. Pete was always good for a late-night drink and a game of pool. But Jacob’s favorite place was the beach. More often than not, he came back wet, although he claimed he never actually planned on going in the water, he would just find himself there and not be able to help it.
A couple months after we’d been living together, I was lying on the couch, captivated by a Jeffersons marathon on Nick-at-Nite, when Jacob came out of the office. It was past midnight and he’d been working all day. I heard him take a quick shower, then he moseyed into the living room. His eyes were bloodshot, his face was vacant. He looked like a rag that had been submerged in water and wrung out until every drop of liquid had been drained from its fabric.
“Are you okay?” I said.
He rubbed his face and sighed. “Nine hours, and all I have to show for it are three lousy fucking pages of shit.”
He disappeared into the kitchen. I heard him open a few jars and slam a few drawers. Five minutes later he came back with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a bottle of beer. After he ate, he lay down next to me. He buried his head in the curve of my neck and held me like his life depended on it. He smelled like soap and sweat and Skippy, and I could have died happy right there. I begged for us to be beamed up. A space-age Ascension. Heaven without the pain of passing on. God, if, by some slim chance, you actually exist, I thought, prove it to me by carrying us away because it can’t get any better than this.
I stroked Jacob’s hair while I watched George nag his neighbor, Helen. He was on her case about being married to a honky. It was the third episode I’d seen that night. I remember getting ready to comment out loud that Lenny Kravitz didn’t look anything like his mother when Jacob started mumbling. His eyes were closed. My eyes were on Weezie. She was telling George to shut up and leave Helen alone. George acted like he wore the pants in the family, but he knew better than to mess with Weezie.
“Trixie?” Jacob said.
“Hmm?”
“Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For understanding. For space. For not bitching at me because we haven’t left the house together in a week.”
I kissed the top of his head. “Don’t mention it.”
He repositioned his face up a little. Then he clung even tighter to me, opened his eyes, and outlined my profile with his finger. His lips barely touched my ear.
“I love you,” he whispered. He said it so quietly I wasn’t sure I was meant to hear it at all.
I wanted to say it back. Obviously, I felt it. I think I’d felt it since Day One. But I couldn’t say it. I didn’t want to jinx anything. I’d said “I love you” to boyfriends before, only I don’t think I ever really meant it. It rolled off my tongue too easily, too unaffected to have come from any real, subterranean emotional region. Everything was different with Jacob. But I was afraid that if I told him how I really felt, he would go away—and I didn’t mean leave—although that was part of it—I meant disappear. Vanish. Cease to exist. I hadn’t forgotten the prophecy of that damn fortune-teller who cursed me when I was twelve. Not that I believed her, but it was a good excuse to feed my wimpy, once-abandoned heart. If I recognized Jacob as The One, who knew what might happen to him.
“Here’s the thing,” Jacob continued,“I feel like we grew in the same womb or something. Like we’ve been connected from the beginning by blood and veins. Siamese soul lovers, if there could ever be such a thing.”
I looked down at him, wide-eyed and speechless.
“I know,” he said. “That’s weird as hell, I know.”
It was the coolest thing anyone had ever said to me.
I opened my mouth—I was going to try to get the words out, I really was, but Jacob put his hand over my lips.
“You don’t have to say anything. Just know how I feel, okay?”
He turned onto his side and watched the screen.
“Hey, The Jeffersons,” he said. “You know, Lenny Kravitz doesn’t look anything like his mother.”
THIRTEEN
Based on past experience, I held steadfast to the notion that mothers of my boyfriends gave me the willies. I assumed they were too judgmental, like when they looked at you they knew you were having sex with their kid, and that’s what went through their minds. They saw it. They saw their darling little boys, the ones they used to change diapers for, just pounding away on some idiotic girl who came along to steal their baby; hogging his penis, his time, and everything else. That had to make a mother a little leery. Or maybe it was just me. But when I finally met Joanna Grace, I got a completely different impression. We’d spoken over the phone a few times, and talking to her was like talking to someone my age. She used the word “cool” and didn’t sound like some hag trying to be hip. And I could tell she liked me even before she met me, just by her tone of voice. Jacob must have told her about some good character traits he thought I had, otherwise there would have been no reason for that.
Jacob and I drove to Pasadena to a neighborhood that was filled with tiny Arts and Craft–style homes. Joanna’s was painted the color of a canary. When we walked in, she hugged Jacob for a good thirty seconds, even though she’d just seen him a few days before. It was obvious that she adored the hell out of him. After getting a closer look at her, I surmised she’d had Jacob very young—there was no way she was a day over fifty. And they only vaguely resembled each other, Joanna and Jacob. Her complexion was much darker than his, her face rounder. She wore her hair in a bun on top of her head like a ballerina. As soon as Jacob introduced us, Joanna hugged me too, with real gusto, and gave me a kiss. My own mother never greeted me like that. Not once in my whole life.
Then again, I don’t think my mother ever really wanted kids, she just had nothing else to do. She tended to get pregnant every time my dad got a new girlfriend. She thought that would be some kind of lightning bolt to his dick, like it would make him come to his senses and love her or something. I guess after giving birth to three of his offspring, she finally figured out that was never going to happen. That’s when she began investing all her emotions in Gucci.
Joanna touched my cheek and told me I had beautiful skin. “Like you’ve never seen the sun,” she said.
She took my hand and led me into the kitchen, where she was making angel hair pasta, salad from spinach that she grew in her backyard, and a batch of cinnamon cookies still in the oven.
Throughout dinner, I quizzed her on Jacob. I wanted to know what he was like as a kid, and any other dirt she felt like digging up.
“Jacob was a daydreamer,” Joanna said. She showed me a picture of his little league team and asked if I could pick him out of the group. It was easy. Even as a ten-year-old he had that intense, Jacob gaze—as if his river ran deeper than the oblivious tykes he was sitting next to.
“Jacob used to lose things all the time,” Joanna said. “He was a selectively absent-minded young man. He could recite entire chapters from his favorite books in the middle of dinner, but ask him to stop at the market and grab a box of cereal on his way home from school, you could just forget about it.”
After dinner, Joanna burned lavender incense. She told me she’d named her son Jacob because she loved Bob Dylan. She’d met Jacob’s father at a Bob Dylan concert.
“And Bob named his son Jacob,” she said. “But I think he spells it with a k.”
I wanted to ask Joanna more about Jacob’s father, since she brought him up, but I just wasn’t sure he was an appropriate topic of conversation. Whenever Jacob talked about the man, which was rarely, it was always with a dark pain in his eyes, like he’d just stepped from sunlight into shade. He tried to mask it, I could tell. And not for my sake either, for his own, so I tried not to torment him with questions. But later on, Joanna showed me a photo album and there he was. I thought it was an old picture of Jacob until Joanna pointed to it and said, “That’s Jacob’s father.”
His name was Thomas Door
ley. And if Joanna had told me that she’d cut the man’s head off and sewn it onto Jacob’s neck, I would have believed her. It was almost eerie, the resemblance between father and son. They had the same eyes, the same hair, the same smile. Thomas couldn’t have been much older than twenty when the picture I saw was taken. In it, he was sitting on a grassy hillside with a cigarette between his fingers, wearing a denim shirt and a sweet grin on his face. He looked like a harmless little hippy poet, his head tilted to one side, just like Jacob tilted his when he was thinking about something serious.
I learned that Thomas Doorley was a writer—a published writer of three novels and one book of short stories who had enjoyed mediocre, if not somewhat cult-like success, in the seventies. He lived in Northern California, somewhere outside of San Francisco, but they hadn’t heard from him in a couple of decades. I pondered out loud why Jacob never told me his father was a writer.
“I don’t know, I guess I don’t really feel like I know enough about his life to talk about him.”
“Why don’t you use his last name?”
“Because I don’t want it. I don’t want anything from him, including his fucking name.”
When we got home from dinner, we ran into Greg in the lobby. I’d seen him a dozen times since Jacob moved in, but never when we were actually together. Greg looked stoned.
“Hi Bea. Hi Henry,” he said.
We made it into the elevator before we burst into laughter.
“You know, I’ve never read any of my father’s books,” Jacob confessed before we fell asleep that night.
“Would you mind if I read one?”
“Go ahead. There’s one on the shelf. I’ve just never opened it.” He cleared his throat and curled up around me. “Let me know if it’s any good.”
FOURTEEN
Jacob and I had a date at the Getty Center. I was supposed to meet him there at one o’clock to see a visiting exhibit that made him foam at the mouth. Some front-line war photographer named Robert Capa.
God-Shaped Hole Page 7