We eventually came to a compromise with her on what we were going to wear. It was futile trying to convince her how queer everyone would look if we all wore the same things, especially khaki, but we managed to talk her into black pants and white shirts. As long as the shirts were long sleeved, because, she said, “Too much skin is vulgar in a portrait.”
When Jacob walked out of the bedroom the next morning, I was glad we were going for a photo. He needed to be captured on film in his chosen outfit. He had on his black Levi’s, paired with a white shirt he got in Costa Rica. It was long sleeved, per mother’s command, with a sort of lattice embroidery on opposite sides of the buttons, like one of those shirts the old president of the Philippines used to wear in press photos—the guy whose wife had all the shoes. Jacob also wore the necklace I’d given him, and a funky bowler hat that made the sides of his hair flip up like wings. He looked like a cab driver.
“The hat will never make the final cut,” I said.
“Sure it will,” Jacob said. “I’ve got Diane wrapped around my finger. She’ll let me wear whatever I want.”
“Wanna bet?”
“The usual?” Jacob said.
We shook on it.
I wore black slacks, black boots, and a fitted white cashmere turtleneck. Jacob told me I looked like I should be editing Vogue magazine. Somehow this turned into a sexual role-playing game.
“You can be my fare and I’ll be your cabbie. Except this cabbie carries handcuffs.”
“Cool your jets, Ferdinand. We have to go.”
I was sweating my ass off in the sweater, and I contemplated changing before we left, but my mother hates turtlenecks. I figured a little suffering would be worth the thrill of annoying her.
“I don’t know why you have to torment her all the time,” Jacob said.
“She wears me out.”
Chip, Elise, and Chad were all dressed and ready when we arrived. They had on matching Armani outfits and looked like doormen from the Mondrian hotel. I picked up a weird vibe between Chip and Elise as soon as I walked in. While the photographer fiddled with the lights, Elise went outside and I followed her. I asked her if everything was okay. I barely had the question out of my mouth when she began a discourse, feigning the detachment of a court-appointed arbitrator, regarding the humiliating state of her marriage. Evidently, over the course of a few months, she’d been getting suspicious of Chip. All the stereotypical signs: lack of interest in sex, short temper, unexplained late nights out. So she did what everyone in Hollywood who thinks their spouse is cheating does: she hired someone to tail him. Elise had pretty much come to the conclusion that Chip was having an affair and, strangely enough, I sensed she was willing to accept that.
“I mean, if it was an actress or something, I would understand,” she said.
Elise thought that if a person was famous that meant they were better than she was, and why wouldn’t Chip deserve to fuck someone better than his nobody wife? Much to her dismay, however, Elise discovered that once a week Chip booked a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, where he stopped in to meet up with some high-class call girls.
“How long has all this been going on?” I said.
“Probably close to a year.”
I told her to divorce him and she laughed as if I’d made a joke.
“Divorce him?” she said.
“Like father, like son,” I told her. If Elise didn’t get out fast, she was going to end up like my mother. Except this was worse. At least my father didn’t have to pay for his bimbos. Not by the hour anyway.
“What are you going to do?” I said.
“Look on the bright side, I have an excuse not to have sex with him anymore.” She saw my face drop. “Don’t look at me like that, Bea. You’re in love now so you don’t understand. But I was in love once too, you know.”
This was a thirty-four-year-old woman with an eight-year-old son talking as if she were standing on the pitcher’s mound watching the batter rounding third and heading home. The ball was in her hand but she had no intention of throwing it to the catcher. As if life and love just weren’t worth the out.
The way I saw it, if Chip wanted to screw hookers, that was his problem. It was Elise’s disconnection and selflessness that infuriated me.
“Committing suicide so as not to be murdered is the worst reason I’ve ever heard of to die,” I said.
I walked away.
My mother showed up for the photo in a long black skirt, a white blouse with gold buttons, and a pair of black and gold earrings that looked like satellite dishes hanging off of her ears. Jacob used those earrings as leverage when negotiating for his hat, but to no avail.
“Jacob, please,” my mother said. “You’re starting to sound just like Beatrice.”
“Better start warming up that tongue,” I said to him.
“Sit and spin, baby.”
When Cole came in I almost didn’t recognize him. I hadn’t seen my little brother in almost three years and everything about him seemed different. He didn’t look so Republican anymore. He hadn’t even worn a tie. And I immediately identified the smell of his deodorant. It was Regular Scent Speed Stick—the same deodorant Jacob used. That won Cole bonus points right off the bat. Jacob thought Cole and I looked alike. “Except for the eyes,” Jacob said. Cole was the only Jordan kid who got my mother’s blue eyes. Last I’d heard, Cole was planning a career as a congressman. He’d done a complete turnaround since then. He told us about the job he’d just accepted in Montgomery, Alabama, working for a non-profit law firm famous for fighting hate crimes. This from a man who used to think Richard Nixon was the greatest president of the twentieth century.
The change in him was overwhelming and I credited a lot of it to his fiancée, Toren. She was a natural blond from Massachusetts who worked at the Smithsonian Institute and had a tattoo of a beetle on her arm. Luckily she’d brought a sweater with her. My mother would have had the photo airbrushed if the tattoo had been showing. Toren told me she loved my hair and wanted to know if I could recommend a place for her to get a trim while she was in town. I called Sara and made an appointment to take her to the salon, then lunch and shopping the next day. We told Cole he could join us, but the plans didn’t seem to thrill him. He liked Jacob’s invitation better. Jacob and his new pal, Greg, had a date with the waves at the crack of dawn.
“I don’t know why you bad-mouthed your brother,” Jacob said when we all met up for sushi the following night. “I like him.”
“I take it back,” I said. “I like him, too. And not because he’s my brother but in spite of it.”
I sat next to Cole during dinner and for the first time in our lives, we related to each other not only as adults, but as brother and sister. We talked about our childhood, our parents, our significant others. Cole told me how much he liked hanging out with Jacob all day.
“I approve,” he said.
I didn’t know my brother cared enough to approve and I told him so. He laughed and said, “I always knew you were going to end up with a guy like that.”
I asked him about his wedding. He and Toren had been engaged since Christmas and were getting married the following summer on Martha’s Vineyard.
“Promise me you’ll come,” my brother said.
Jacob swore we’d make plans to be there.
I once saw an actor on TV doing press for a movie. I don’t remember the question he was asked, but I remember his answer, word for word.
“You wanna know how to make God laugh?” he said. “Tell him your plans.”
“Boy, did he turn out to be a real prick,” Cole said after I told him about Chip and the hookers. But here’s where Cole and I differed: Cole didn’t judge Chip. He didn’t judge our father either. Neither of my brothers had cut off contact with our father like I had. Cole was even spending the rest of the weekend with him in Malibu. But Cole was like Joanna, so willing to l
et go of the past. I wished I could be like that. It’s easy to say all it takes is a little forgiveness, but forgiveness is a concept I’ve always had a hard time grasping. First of all, you need faith for forgiveness, and as far as I knew, I had very little of that. Second, why should you excuse someone who’s hurt you deeply? I mean sure, it’s great in theory. If someone is fifteen minutes late for dinner, or borrows your car and brings it back with a dent in it, okay, I can see where a little understanding is in order.
But there’s a limit to how long you can starve a hungry person before they’re going to bite your leg off. Even if I did decide to forgive my father, and we became best friends, would that erase all the years he was off gallivanting with some worthless floozy instead of being at home helping me with my homework, or some other Norman Rockwell bullshit like that? I assumed I’d need amnesia to have a relationship with my father after the debauchery he’d made of my youth. I’d have to be like one of those heroines from daytime television who gets hit over the head with a big rock, hard enough to knock me out for a few months, maybe years, so that when I woke up I wouldn’t remember a thing. Then, when I came to, the nurses would tell me all about how my father had stayed by my bedside day and night, reading me The Giving Tree, holding my hand, and trying not to cry. When they let me out of the hospital, we’d all go to Dad’s breezy chateau de la plage to lounge around in our flip-flops. We’d barbeque hamburgers and hotdogs on the grill, put our arms around each other and rattle on about how lucky we were to have such a great family.
It was weird talking so honestly with Cole. It gave me an urge to grab his hand and tell him I loved him. I’d never told him that before, but I held back. I knew if I said it I would have started bawling in front of everyone.
“All right, enough deep conversation, you two down at the end of the table, it’s time to let the games begin,” Pete yelled. “But first I have an announcement to make!”
Once Pete had our attention, he said Sara wasn’t allowed to play Roe-Sham-Bo, and, as a matter of fact, in case we hadn’t noticed, she didn’t eat any raw fish either, because her doctor told her pregnant women weren’t supposed to eat raw fish.
Sara blushed and glowed and giggled.
“Holy shit, you did it!” Jacob said, cheering his friends.
We all screamed and applauded them. Jacob took Pete’s head in his hands and planted a big wet kiss on his forehead, slapping his face. “I told you your little guys were fighters.”
The baby was due in February. “We’ll be in Memphis by then,” Jacob said. “But we’ll come back to meet him as soon as he’s born.” Jacob put his face near Sara’s belly and whispered something to the little embryo.
“Maybe it’s a she,” I said.
“Not according to Pete.”
“All the men in my family have sons,” Pete said. “My grandfather had two sons, my father had two sons, that’s just the way it goes.”
Sara said Pete wanted to name the kid Blaze. She thought that sounded like a race horse. “I’m going to call him Nicholas,” she said.
Between the baby news and bonding with Cole, I was completely distracted during the game. I paid absolutely no attention to what I was doing and lost almost every round. In the end it came down to me and Pete, and that was no contest. I had to eat all but one of the leftovers, including something that looked like a soggy almond on a bed of rice. It tasted like spoiled milk, and was some kind of fish organ, only I’m not sure which one because no one would tell me. Whatever it was made me sick. I threw up as soon as we got home and beige mucus dripped out of my nose.
Jacob wiped my face and made me drink Ginger Ale on the bathroom floor.
“You may be a lousy player, but you’re a hell of a good sport,” he said.
THIRTY-ONE
“Die mother-fucker, die!”
There was a bug on the windshield of my car and I was trying to end its life with a parking ticket. I figured the City of Los Angeles deserved a dead bug in the mail for giving me the damn thing in the first place. My meter ran out less than thirty seconds before I got back to my car, but the parking Nazi who wrote up the violation completely ignored me as I stood there pleading with him.
“Look, I have two quarters right here,” I said. He didn’t even look up from his clipboard. “Hello? Sir? Hello?”
He was short, had tiny hands, and a wide, bulbous nose.
“Hey, Napoleon,” I said, once I was safe inside my car. “It’s okay, I understand. I’d be hostile too if I were a meter maid.”
Between the heat of the midday sun and the pagan glitter of tinsel town, I couldn’t tell if the bug was inside or out. Luckily, the car was barely moving, otherwise I’m sure I would have swerved hysterically into one of the oncoming lanes. I turned on the wipers to discover the truth, and the guts of the innocent insect, thick and green, told me all I needed to know.
Needless to say, I was in a highly agitated state of mind as I inched my way down Sunset Boulevard. Between the traffic, the bug, the ticket, and the general vibe of The Strip, it was enough to make me stop my car in protest. I actually pulled over, got out, and walked the rest of the way.
“This will never happen in Memphis!” I screamed to the sky, and to whoever else was listening as I marched down the street.
I was on my way to a boutique called Tracy’s in West Hollywood. I’d been to Tracy’s before. It was one of Kat’s favorite haunts until she opened Chick. The last time we’d stopped by, some curvy bimbo with long fuchsia nails stole the T-shirt I wanted. It was white and it said Emily didn’t search to belong, she searched to be lost on the front of it. If ever a T-shirt was fated for someone, that one was mine, only Playmate of the Year got to it faster than I did. Obviously, she was a big liar. She didn’t deserve the shirt—she absolutely looked like a woman who searched to belong, when all I wanted was out of there.
Tracy was also the name of the shop owner. She had seen my jewelry on one of her customers, tracked me down by way of Kat, and asked me if I would drop by to show her some of my new pieces. She was interested in my latest line of rings. I started making them because of all the compliments Jacob got on the one I’d given him the summer before—the chunky silver band with the irregular-shaped black opal in the center. Black opals, in the right light, look a bit like mood rings, except they don’t change color with the temperature of your skin, they just stay a trippy shade of ebony, so I called them Bad Mood rings. I also made a more petite version, with a more traditional-colored opal. I called those Good Mood rings. Photos of them turned up in a local magazine. After that they were the rage about town. The best part of the ring was, naturally, the part nobody noticed. If you flipped it over, it said Grace in a dark, Medieval font. I showed Tracy that little distinguishing mark. She thought it was cool, the word Grace. But I didn’t tell her why I put it there. Some things I liked to keep to myself.
Tracy wanted to know if she could sell the rings exclusively from her store. After I made sure Kat wasn’t going to feel ripped-off, I accepted her proposal.
Word of the rings spread faster than the legs of a struggling starlet, as word does in Los Angeles, and a national fashion magazine ran a little snippet about how Julia Roberts was seen wearing one of them. Tracy started getting calls from all over the country, and I had to hire an assistant to help me keep up with the demand. It was my most successful creation to date and, of course, I credited it all to Jacob.
THIRTY-TWO
I knew Jacob was home from work. I saw his car in the garage when I pulled in, but he wasn’t upstairs when I got there. I figured he walked to the market or down to the Coffee Bean for a pre-dinner pick-me-up. I changed into a pair of jeans, sorted colors from whites, and threw a load of laundry into the washer. I checked to see if anyone had called and there were three messages on the machine. The first one was from Mike, Jacob’s friend from the Weekly. He called to say the staff meeting the following day had bee
n changed to ten o’clock. The second message was from Uncle Don in San Francisco. He asked Jacob to call him as soon as possible. The last message was from Joanna.
“Honey, please call me,” she said. “I know you spoke to Don. I hope you’re okay.”
Uncle Don and Joanna both sounded peculiar. I tried to phone Joanna back but she didn’t answer. I looked up Uncle Don’s number in San Francisco and got him on the line. I asked him if something was wrong.
“Ta…ta…Thomas Doorley died,” he said.
“What?”
A heart attack, Uncle Don explained. He’d read about it in the paper. Only fifty-two years old. What a shame. Uncle Don said Jacob had seemed pretty shaken by the news.
“I’m sorry I had to…to…to be the one to tell him.”
I got off the phone with Don and racked my brain trying to figure out where Jacob could have gone. Then I realized, if I knew Jacob like I thought I did, there was only one place he’d be—the place he always went to either amplify his happiness or to wallow in misery.
I put my shoes back on and ran to the beach, crossing the overpass and bolting down the steps like a madwoman.
I stopped to catch my breath when I saw him. He was sitting on the sand, spitting distance from the water, his arms wrapped around his legs. The wind had blown his hair forward and he was sustaining an apocalyptic focus on the line where the water met the sky. “The threshold of the sea.” That’s what Jackson Grayson called the horizon in Hallelujah.
When I got close enough to touch him, I heard him humming. It took me a few bars to figure out what song it was: Bob Dylan’s “If You See Her, Say Hello.” An unusual choice, I thought at first, upon the death of one’s father. But really, it’s a song about loss. And regret. I’m sure it made perfect sense to Jacob.