God-Shaped Hole (15 page)

“We can’t spend our last night in San Francisco all cooped up like a couple of chickens,” Jacob said. He got claustrophobic when he was stressed out. If we’d been at home, he would have wanted to go to the beach. Luckily, the bay was too cold for a midnight swim.

“Let’s go grab a beer,” he said. He already had his coat on.

We went back to the bar on Valencia. There was no Ryan Chuck outside, and no live band inside, just a crummy DJ who spun a load of half-assed pop songs from the early eighties. Jacob neither cared nor noticed. He hadn’t gone for the tunes. We were barely through the door before he had a seat at the bar and a bottle in his hand. He ordered us both beers, even though I said I didn’t want one, and we sat there like a couple of lonely sots. I tried to get him to dance but he was unequivocally glued to his chair. He finished his beer in five big gulps, had two quick shots of tequila, then started drinking from my bottle.

“Thirsty?” I said. He ignored me. “Jacob, why don’t we just go back to the hotel?”

“I don’t want to go back to the hotel,” he snapped. “If I go back there, all I’m going to do is sit around and think about it.”

I assumed
it
meant his father, as well as the brother he never knew he had. He sucked on my beer and gazed at his reflection in the frosted mirror behind the bar. He stared straight into his own eyes, and I can’t say for sure what he saw, but I would have bet my inheritance he wasn’t looking at himself. I found it funny that he thought going back to the hotel was going to make him think of
it
, because there he was, sitting on a barstool, thinking so hard on
it
that he couldn’t even recognize his own goddamn face.

I spun my chair around and watched the small crowd dance. When the DJ took a break, everyone swarmed the bar for refills.

A guy in crisp blue jeans and a bomber jacket stepped between me and Jacob, and ordered a rum and coke.

“Omar?” I said.

The guy did a double-take. Jacob looked over to see who I was talking to.

“Beatrice?” Omar said. “Are you kidding me? What are you doing here?”

I stood up and he threw his arms around me.

Omar’s girlfriend, Valerie, and I were roommates our last year of college. We stayed friends for a while after graduation, until he and Valerie moved up to the Bay Area and I lost touch with them. Omar was a dark, lanky theater actor with a dusty presence. I always had a crush on him.

“You look great,” he said. “How are you?” He kept his arm around me.

“Good,” I said. I introduced him to Jacob and the arm came down.

Omar gave Jacob a quick overview of our past, explaining how long it had been since we’d seen each other. Jacob vacantly acknowledged Omar and never really tuned in to the conversation.

“He had a bad day,” I said.

There were no empty seats at the bar. Omar had to stand close in front of me as we talked. I saw Jacob watching him in the mirror, as if there were some imaginary line in the floor Omar had mistakenly crossed. Jacob was being unusually rude but, like I said, he’d had a bad day; I wasn’t going to hold it against him.

Omar told me he was working with a theater company up the street and was considering moving to New York. I asked him about Valerie. They’d broken up a few years ago, he said. She was married now and lived in Boise.

“You know, I still have that ring you made me,” he said.

Back when Omar and Valerie thought they were going to live happily ever after, they had me make them a set of rings. It was my final project in metalsmithing; I got all the materials for free.

Omar wanted to know what Kat was up to. As I filled him in, the DJ started spinning again.

“You guys want to dance?” Omar said. “Come on Beatrice, I know how much you like to dance.”

“How much does she like to dance?” Jacob mumbled.

Jacob and I had never gone dancing. It was hard in L.A. The older I got, the less tolerant I became of establishments with bouncers at the door and C-grade celebrities as the main attractions inside.

I invited Jacob to join me but he said no. He told me to go with Omar. His eyes were getting glassy, and I asked him one last time if he wanted to leave.

“No. Have a good time. I’m fine.”

“Just for a few minutes,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I followed Omar to the middle of the crowd. After the first song ended, I said I’d had enough. He pleaded with me.

“One more,” Omar said. “Come on, I haven’t seen you in years.”

The next song was slow. Omar wrapped his arms around me and started whispering in my ear. His neck smelled like a citrus tree.

“You know, I never told you this before,” Omar said, “but I really had a thing for you back when you lived with Valerie. Did you know that?”

“No,” I said, which was a lie. Of course I knew, I just never acknowledged it. I felt the same way and didn’t want to get into trouble. Believe it or not, I have boundaries. Valerie was my friend.

“It started when we all went up to Tahoe together,” he said. “I was driving and you were sitting right behind me. Everyone else was asleep and you gave me a shoulder massage. Do you remember that?”

“I remember that you had to throw your jacket over your lap so I wouldn’t see the bulge in your pants.”

Omar laughed. “You haven’t changed at all, Beatrice.” Little did he know. He kept pulling me closer. Too close, I thought, but I didn’t pull away. “What’s the deal with you and that guy?” he said.

Omar slid his palm down the curve of my lower back. He was a centimeter away from having my ass in his hand. I realized what was going on and I stepped back. I hadn’t been that close to another man since I met Jacob, and the truth is, I would have had to use a calculator to count how many times, over the course of the year I lived with Valerie, that I’d thought about what Omar’s dick looked like, or what kind of cereal he’d offer me for breakfast if I ever spent the night with him. I used to walk around the apartment wearing black lace bras under thin white T-shirts, just to give him a glimpse of what he was missing. And oddly enough, if it had been any other time prior to meeting Jacob, I probably would have taken Omar home, fucked his brains out, then ended up dating him for a year or so before he would have realized what a head case I was and dumped me.

I turned around to check on Jacob and didn’t see him above all the people. I walked back to where I’d left him. He was gone.

I asked Omar to look for Jacob in the men’s room. When he came back to report the search futile, I darted out to the car. Omar followed. Before I got in, he tried to kiss me. After a brief hesitation, I pushed him away.

“Keep in touch, okay?” he said.

Compared to Jacob, Omar’s
okay
sounded like a violin getting run over by a lawnmower.

I sped back to the hotel in a panic. I felt like a heel. Jacob needed me and I’d let him down. I’d gone off and danced and flirted while he wallowed in misery and as a result, he was
wandering
. Margaret said he wasn’t supposed to
wander
.

I took the elevator up to our floor and ran down the hallway. As soon as I got to the door, I realized Jacob couldn’t be there—he didn’t have the key. And he rarely carried identification. I’m not even sure he had identification. I knew he had a credit card and an ATM card, but I’d never seen his driver’s licence. In the inebriated state I knew he was in, I highly doubted the hotel would have kindly unlocked the door for him on his word alone.

Our room was pitch dark. I turned on the lights, sat down on the bed, and contemplated what to do. I considered going out to look for Jacob, but I wanted to be there when he got back. I stayed up as long as I could by writing in my diary. I don’t know how long it was after that, I was awakened by the sound of my name being called. At first I thought it was someone at the door. Once I sat up, I realized it was coming from outside the window. I pushed the curtains aside and looked down into the hotel courtyard.

Jacob was in the pool. He was shirtless, but still in his jeans and boots. I saw his jacket and his T-shirt bunched up on a lounge chair near the shallow end. I remember wondering why he’d bothered to take off his shirt but not his boots. He had a few other shirts to wear, but he’d only brought that one pair of shoes. They were going to be wet for the rest of the trip.

“Trixie! There you are. I’ve been waiting for you, Trixie!”

He looked so small from where I was. “Shhh!” I said. “People are sleeping.” It was two o’clock in the morning.

“Why won’t you swim with me, Trixie?” he said. “Why won’t you ever swim with me?”

By the time I made it downstairs, the concierge on duty, a dapper lad named Simon, had somehow managed to get Jacob out of the water. Jacob was sitting on the edge of a hot tub—it was right next to the pool—dangling his boots in the warm current. His teeth were chattering.

“Get away from there,” I said, and yanked him to his feet.

Simon gave me a weak smile and handed Jacob a towel. I’d never seen a man with posture more perfect than Simon’s. His spine must have been shaped like a ruler. He was completely vertical.

I pushed Jacob in the direction of our room.

“I’m really sorry about this,” I said to Simon. “He thinks he’s Keith Moon.” I was trying to be funny, but Simon’s blank face told me he had no idea who I was talking about.

Jacob was still shivering when we got upstairs. I turned the shower on hot and told him to get in. When I tried to help him undress, he shoved me aside and slammed the bathroom door in my face.

He came out a few minutes later wearing a pair of shorts. He just fell into bed. I tried to curl up next to him but he turned his back to me. When I touched my feet to his, he jerked them away.

“Jacob…”

“Don’t talk to me, Beatrice. You’re the last person I want to fucking talk to right now,
okay
?”

Fifteen minutes earlier he’d wanted to swim with me. It took a quick shower to make us mortal enemies.

I had the dream again that night. The one where Jacob got caught in the whirlpool. Only this time I
saw
him get pulled under. He had that same weird look on his face, where he was smiling, but his eyes were filled with panic. I bolted upright in bed and purposely made a lot of noise around the room. I like to live by the rule that if I’m not sleeping, nobody’s sleeping. Especially if it’s the person indirectly responsible for keeping me awake. I turned on the TV, then I ordered a large pot of coffee and a basket of pastries from room service. After it arrived, I filled two cups, one for Jacob and one for myself. I didn’t usually drink coffee in the morning, but the Ritz served what Jacob called “the good shit.” It was creamy and sweet, and I sopped it up with a croissant, imagining that’s what Anais did at breakfast while she was in Paris screwing Henry Miller.

Jacob drank his coffee in silence. He looked like he’d been hit by a truck. After he checked his watch—twice, to make sure he was seeing it right—he rubbed his eyes and said, “Why, pray tell, did you wake me up at such a ridiculous hour?”

It was a little after six.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I said.

The TV was tuned to The Weather Channel. There was a huge storm over North Carolina, and a high pressure system in the northeast.

“Did you have fun last night?” Jacob said, running his hands through his ransacked hair.

“Oh yeah, I had a ball. You?”

“Fuck you, Trixie. I went to Tosca last night.”

“You did? Why?”

“Why do you
think
? I thought maybe I’d run into him. I figured we’d get along better if I leveled the playing field a little, you know, if I was drunk out of my mind.”

“Well, you definitely accomplished that goal.”

He gave me a look that said he’d just about had it with me.

The anchorwoman in the tweed pantsuit and the perfectly coiffed up-do said there was a chance of thunderstorms in the southeast. I-85 between Greensboro and Atlanta could be dangerous. A flood warning had been issued.

“Jacob, I was worried about you.”

“Oh, really? You could’ve fooled me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You were too busy hanging all over that
Oh-mar
guy to be worried.”

“I wasn’t hanging all over him.”

“Beatrice, you could’ve picked your feet up off the ground and not fallen down. That’s how all-fucking-over-him you were.” Jacob slammed his spoon onto the table. It crashed into the porcelain cream pitcher and made a horrible clanging noise. He got up and stood by the window.

The weather lady said it was partly sunny and unseasonably humid in the western half of Mississippi. I wondered if Jacob heard that—if he was thinking what I was—perfect weather for sweaty sex in the middle of the night.

“Did you fuck him, Trixie?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Come on, be serious. He’s just an old friend.”

“A pretty good friend, I imagine. When I left he practically had his hands down your pants and his tongue in your ear. Not that you seemed to mind.”

“I didn’t fuck him.”

“Not last night, I mean ever.”

“No.”

“Did you want to?”

I thought about my answer before I gave it.

“No,” I said. “A long time ago I did, but not now. Not last night.” I got up and stood next to him. I pushed his bangs off his face. “I’m sorry. I should have never left you last night.”

He wouldn’t let me kiss him.

Prissy-pants on TV said, “Stay tuned for your local forecast,” as if it were the prize we’d been waiting for all hour.

“I feel like shit,” Jacob said. “I need some aspirin or something.” He reached for his jeans and grimaced. “Why the fuck are my pants wet?”

“You don’t remember being in the pool last night?”

“I was in the pool last night?” He hesitated, trying to recall the hour he was missing. “Damn.” He shook his head and cracked a tiny smile.

I took the jeans from him, let them drop to the floor, and got back in bed. “It’s too early to put pants on. Come here,” I said.

“No.”

“Please…”