God-Shaped Hole

  I tried to keep my eye on Jacob while he was gone. I liked to observe him when he didn’t know I was watching, even though I got the impression he always knew when I was. I saw a girl approach him—an attractive girl in a tank-top and a pair of studded jeans that seemed laminated to her legs. She bumped right into Jacob and tried to pretend it was an accident. I saw her touch his shoulder and attempt a joke. She tossed her hair around when she laughed like the glamorous android slut monster I knew she was. Jacob would never give the time of day to a girl like her, I told myself. Be that as it may, I focused on the ceiling panel above her head. I tried to will it loose. I wanted it to crash down and squash her like a villain in a cartoon. And I’m a pacifist.

  Jacob, unfazed by the glamazon, walked back my way with a beer bottle in each hand, one for himself and one for Pete. Kristen stomped over to Odie and I heard her mention my name. I couldn’t make out everything she was saying, but it sounded like she was mad because he’d been standing so close to me. She wanted to know what we’d been talking about. I think she even accused him of flirting. Odie hadn’t flirted with me at all, still, I got a cheap thrill out of Kristen being jealous, since she was the future cover girl and everything. But then I felt sorry for her. She proved my point that beauty means nothing without the right attitude. Besides, why would she think I’d be interested in her boyfriend? He had Spicy Tuna Roll breath and Jacob was The Everything.

  We stayed at Hearts for another half-hour. Pete said we couldn’t leave until we heard “Stairway to Heaven.”

  Once that song was over, Jacob slipped his hands down into my hip-slung trousers and said, “What do you say we fucking blow this hotdog stand?”

  EIGHT

  Jacob spent the next five nights with me. He came over in the evenings, we watched Jeopardy, made dinner, and fucked like rabbits. Except for when we went to work, we only left the house twice all week. The first time, we walked to the Promenade to catch a movie, but a detour in the bookstore cost us an hour and we missed it. The second time we had to go to a party for my friend, Katrina. And we only went to that because she would have killed me if I’d flaked on her. Literally, that’s what she told me.

  “I swear, I’ll kill you if you flake on me, Blanca.”

  Katrina had a habit of saying that she and I were friends at first sight, but that’s not entirely true. We studied art together in college. I met her the first day of school. Kat’s a tall, broad-shouldered girl. At the time, she had electric-blond hair that was dyed black at the tips, like upside-down matchsticks, and she walked into the room wearing a shirt that she’d ripped the sleeves off of. Written on it were the words Damn, I’m good in what, to this day, she swears to me was blood. She sat down beside me, smelling like Fracas, and didn’t say anything as we waited for the class to begin. I got bored and took out a book, some philosophical lexicon I was reading at the time. I think it was during my Ayn Rand phase. She peered at the book, then at me.

  “So you’re not as dumb as you look,” she said. “Neither am I.”

  We’ve been friends ever since, even though we’re polar opposites. She goes club-hopping almost nightly, only listens to music made by DJs, and thinks Los Angeles is the greatest city on the planet. Her father used to let his friends have sex with her when she was a kid, so she’s not the most emotionally functional person I know, but she has a good therapist and despite the childhood in Hades, she’s doing okay—which was why she was having a party—she’d just opened a trendy little boutique on Robertson Boulevard called Chick. Besides selling women’s clothing and accessories, she got first dibs on all my new jewelry.

  When she called to remind me about the party, or really, to make sure I’d be there, I was still in bed. Jacob answered the phone in the kitchen.

  “I think she’s still sleeping,” he said. “Can I take a message?”

  Fifteen seconds into the conversation, I knew it was Kat he was talking to.

  “This is Jacob. Who’s this?”

  “My last name? My last name’s Grace.”

  “Yes, it’s my real name.”

  “No, I’m not Jewish.”

  “I don’t know why you’ve never heard of me, maybe because Trixie and I really haven’t known each other for very long…Sorry, I mean Beatrice…I met her through the Weekly…She answered my personal ad…Yeah, I’m completely serious.” Jacob chuckled.

  I picked up the phone in the bedroom. “Buzz-off, Kat.”

  “See you later,” Jacob said. After he hung up, Kat yelled, “Blanca, you’re dating someone you met through a personal ad? Are you on crack?”

  “It’s not what you think,” I said.

  Kat and I talked about Jacob in our private code.

  “Are you baking cookies yet?” she said. That was standard for: have you fucked?

  “Oh, yeah. We’ve made a couple dozen by now.”

  “What kind?” In other words, was Jacob any good.

  “Chocolate-chip,” I said. “And he not only likes to bake them, he likes to eat them, too.”

  “Congratulations.”

  I promised Kat that Jacob and I would sacrifice a few hours of our newlywed-like, hermit existence to attend her soiree. Before we hung up, she told me to try and make myself look presentable.

  “Wear the Chloe, okay?”

  She was referring to a dress she made me buy months before. It cost eleven hundred dollars and I still hadn’t worn it yet. Kat was a bad influence. Normally, I would never spend that much on an article of clothing. Because that’s what my mother does. She hasn’t looked at a price tag in twenty-five years. I try to do the reverse of whatever my mother does. But when I was with Kat, I found myself in the dressing room wearing the pricey item, and soon thereafter at the counter, handing over my credit card.

  “You can’t take it with you, and I know you’re not leaving it to me so you might as well spend it.” That was Kat’s theory.

  The night of the party, I was grateful to her for making me buy the damn dress. It was the sexiest thing I had in my closet—a cap-sleeved, black silk number that hit just below the knee; fitted, not so tight that I looked like a hooker, but tight enough to see some curves. The neckline was made of lace and fell to the middle of my chest in a V. It was hot, but in a good way, not in the Notice-Me-Please-Mr. Hefner style that permeates the L.A. smog.

  When I came out of the bedroom, Jacob made a deep, moaning noise. It was the same noise he made when he was hungry.

  “That’s a badass little dress,” he said.

  Jacob’s idea of dressing up was a clean pair of pants, and any shirt that had buttons on it. He wore a pair of dark trousers, and his usual white T-shirt under a fuzzy, green, vintage cardigan that looked exactly like something my grandfather might have owned in his youth. On our way out the door, Jacob checked himself in the mirror. He ran his fingers through his hair, then flattened it back down with his palms. But he didn’t need any more adornment than that; he had cheekbones.

  We were late getting to the party because there was an accident on the freeway. A big-rig carrying enough spring water to fill a Great Lake had overturned and shut down the two left lanes. When we finally did arrive, it took us another fifteen minutes to find a place to park.

  “Hey, this used to be Big Al’s Brake and Alignment,” Jacob said when we got to Chick.

  The store was nothing more than a renovated old garage. The floors were cement, and there were oil stains all over the place, but Kat and I had dolled it up by painting the walls pink, bringing in fresh flowers, and throwing creamy shag rugs around the room.

  As soon as I stepped through the door, the pungent aroma of the crowd made me want to vomit. Imagine a synthetic fusion of each and every fashionable perfume in existence, then mix that with hair spray, champagne, and cigarette breath. Not a good medley for a delicate nose, but definitely Hollywood at it’s finest.

  The first per
son I saw when I walked in was a bald-headed man who was standing near the door, talking into the cell phone wire that hung from his ear. He yelled into thin air and waved his arms around as if he were trying to hail a cab. He kept rubbing his head with his palm, like he was checking to see if any hair had grown back. He looked like a complete fool but I could tell he thought he was the coolest guy in the room. He winked at me when he walked by and, for kicks, I almost tripped him, but I held back. I didn’t want Jacob to think I was mean.

  The second person who caught my eye was a girl I recognized from a movie. She’d played some sort of spy, but she couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag. She had ashen hair, eyes like a mantis, and she was wearing a leopard-print miniskirt that wrapped her hips like cellophane. She also had one of my leather chokers around her neck. She made it look cheap. I had a vision of ripping it off of her and running back to the car, but I contained that urge, too. I was good at containing most of my negative urges. As long as I breathed through my mouth, so as not to be suffocated by the stench, I knew I’d be all right.

  Kat came running up to us as soon as she saw me. “You wore the Chloe, thank God! You look fabulous!” she said, as she twirled around to show me her new look. “What do you think? Is the hair too suburban?”

  “It looks good,” I said.

  The last time I’d seen Kat, her hair had been strawberry blond. That night it was the same shade as a cup of espresso. It was a different color almost every time I saw her. Along with the crochet-knit dress, the platform-heeled boots, and the three layers of eye makeup she had on, the effect was well over-the-top. Kat always wore too much eye makeup, but she never listened to me about it so I stopped bothering to tell her. I introduced her to Jacob. She gave him a glass of champagne, then immediately dragged him off to the jewelry case. I saw her pointing out my work, close-talking into his ear. They were gone for quite a while, and every time I looked over, Kat’s mouth was moving. Jacob saw me and smiled. I prayed that Kat wasn’t telling him about the time we were on Space Mountain at Disneyland, when she made me laugh so hard I peed in my pants. She liked to tell that story to the men I was dating.

  “Everybody is raving over Blanca’s jewelry!” she said when she brought Jacob back. He had no idea who she was talking about.

  “She means me,” I explained. “I’m Blanca. Apparently no one likes my real name.”

  “Why do you call her Blanca?” Jacob said.

  “Look at her, she’s the color of a cadaver. Although you’re not exactly the Coppertone girl yourself, Grace.”

  Later on, when Jacob was off talking with some journalist he knew, Kat hauled me into a dressing room to gossip.

  “Did you see who’s here? Tom Hanks’s wife…over there, the one with the curly hair. She said she’s coming back tomorrow to buy the tourmaline ring.”

  “Doesn’t she have a name?” I said, thinking it highly unfair that the seemingly lovely woman who liked my ring was known only as someone’s wife.

  “I don’t remember her name. Mrs. Hanks, how’s that? Anyway, never mind her, what’s the scoop on Grace? I want all the details.”

  Before I got a word out, Kat shouted, “Rita!”

  “What?”

  “Her name. Tom Hanks’s wife. Her name’s Rita. Sorry, go ahead. About Grace. Amazing Grace. Can we call him that? Is he amazing? Go on, you were saying…”

  Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see

  Amazing Grace. Of course. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

  “Hello? Earth to Blanca? You were saying?”

  “I wasn’t saying anything.”

  “Don’t be shy,” Kat said.

  “What? I like him, okay?” I was unable, for some reason, to verbalize anything else, though I felt so much more. “You spent fifteen minutes with him. What did you think?”

  “He’s so you,” Kat said.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “He talks funny. Spirit this, soul that. Like he learned how to chat by reading Deepak Chopra books.”

  “He doesn’t read Deepak Chopra books.”

  “Does he bathe?”

  “Kat!”

  “I’m kidding. He’s darling, I mean it. Sweet as pie and he can’t take his eyes off you.”

  On our way home, I apologized to Jacob for Kat’s moderately overbearing personality.

  “She’s a good girl who just needs a lot of attention,” I said.

  “Kind of like the female version of Pete.”

  By the time Friday came around, Jacob said he needed to write. He was getting behind on his work.

  “You’re like a Siren, Trixie. You keep luring me in. I know I have to go home but I just can’t stay away.”

  We resolved to spend the weekend apart. Jacob was going to nail himself to his computer for forty-eight hours, and then we’d reconvene on Monday, ready to start the cycle again. I was so used to sleeping next to him that I tossed and turned all night long. When I finally did drift off, I had a horrible nightmare. Jacob and I were in a hot tub, a fancy one, in the backyard of what looked like a hideously swank Hollywood mansion. We were kissing and relaxing and everything was fine. But then a strange gypsy woman materialized out of nowhere. She stood above us and shook her head, and I recognized her immediately as the fortune-teller who I’d met when I was a kid. In a flash she vanished as fast as she’d appeared, and when I looked back down, the hot tub had become a whirlpool. The swank mansion was a jungle. I fought my way to the edge of the water and climbed out. I screamed for Jacob to grab my hand. He just smiled at me and swam straight to the center of the vortex.

  He was about to be sucked under when the phone woke me up.

  “Are you okay?” Jacob said. “You sound like you’ve been wrestling.”

  I told him I’d had a bad dream.

  “Can you meet me for breakfast?” he said. “I need to talk to you about something really important.”

  “What about spending the weekend apart?”

  “Fuck spending the weekend apart.”

  NINE

  We met at Anastasia’s Asylum an hour later. Jacob ordered a turkey sandwich on sun-dried tomato bread, a bowl of vegetable soup, chips, and a double cappuccino. After surveying his meal, I felt the need to point out that, to me, it seemed more like lunch than breakfast.

  “Anything eaten before noon counts as breakfast, no matter what the content,” Jacob explained.

  “Culinary wisdom from a man who ate a taco on his way to work last Wednesday.”

  “You know,” he said, pointing at me, “you’re a bit of a food snob. Tacos are very nutritional. They contain all four food groups. I don’t understand why you won’t eat them.”

  “It’s not that I won’t eat them, it’s more like I can’t,” I said. “They make my hands smell like they’ve been shoved up someone’s ass. Who wants hands that smell like that?”

  Jacob sniffed his fingers, as if the days-old scent of a Taco Bell Grande still lingered. “You’ve almost got me convinced,” he said.

  All I ordered was a glass of orange juice. I was nervous about whatever it was Jacob wanted to talk to me about. I sat and watched him eat, all the while wishing we were back at my apartment. That’s when I came to the pathetic conclusion that almost everything about Jacob made me think of sex. Even fairly prosaic things—the way his lips puckered into a pout when he bit into his sandwich, the way he said certain words—minor words, like the abbreviated oll korrect, also known as okay. I don’t know what it was about that word, but he uttered it with a kind of needy resignation, a newly canonized saint irrevocably giving in to temptation. When he pronounced the last syllable, it sounded like ice smashing on concrete. I purposely asked him questions I knew he would answer okay to, just to hear it come out. And sometimes he would say it when I least expected i
t, or at a completely inopportune time, like right before we left for work, and I’d have to start reciting the alphabet to keep focused.

  Funny thing was, the more sex I had, the more I thought about it. You would assume it would be the other way around. You know, the less you get, the more you want. Not with me. Everything I do is ass backwards. For a small instant, I actually contemplated the possibility that the whole Jacob affair was based on nothing but sexual attraction, that the spiritual connection I thought I felt was simply my imagination justifying it for me. Only I knew that couldn’t be the case. I concluded it was a direct result of the fact that there was so much more than desire to our relationship that my lust flourished.

  My lust never flourished arbitrarily.

  Life had never been that easy for me.

  I asked Jacob what he wanted to talk to me about, and I had knots in my stomach anticipating his response. I was positive he was going to say the last week had all been a big mistake and he never wanted to see me again. Thinking about it made me wonder what scared Jacob. He looked serenely brave almost all the time. Even in my dreams, when he was being vacuumed into the depths of the sea, he looked like a hero.

  Jacob finished the last of his coffee and was about to say something when I cut him off. “What are you afraid of?” I said.

  He raised his brows, which meant I should repeat the question.

  “What are you afraid of?” I said again. “You know, what scares you? Spiders, heights, girlfriends, small spaces, commitment. What?”

  “Are you okay?”

  I pretended I didn’t understand, so he’d say it again.

  “Are you okay?” he repeated. “You seem edgy.”

  Jacob reached across the table, grabbed my glass, and took a big swig of juice while I asked him, point-blank, if he was breaking up with me. He laughed so hard that orange pulp came out of his nose. The lopsided table where we were sitting had a chair on one side, and a tiny red couch on the other. I was on the couch. Jacob came over and squeezed in next to me. He lifted my legs on top of his and pulled me close, so that we were perpendicular to each other.