Authors: Tiffanie DeBartolo
“Don’t think this means I’m not still pissed at you,” he said when he finally gave in. I pulled the covers up over our heads, to pretend it was still dark, and got as close to him as I possibly could. I apologized a few more times. Then I told him about the rest of the night, everything from Omar trying to kiss me to Simon’s posture. I even confessed to the face-off with Margaret, and the reoccurrence of the whirlpool dream. I made him promise me he’d never wander into another hot tub.
“You don’t really believe that stuff, do you?” he said.
“No. But just in case.”
He crossed his heart and swore over his mother. No more hot tubs.
“Speaking of impending doom,” he said. “I saw him at the bar last night. I saw my father.”
“And?”
“And nothing, really. We drank half a dozen Irish coffees and talked about books. That’s it. We just sat at the bar, shooting the shit on books. I think he was jealous when I told him I used to gamble with Bukowski.” Jacob seemed pleased that he’d impressed the man.
“So, that’s something, right? At least it was civil.”
“I suppose. It’s just that…” He took a deep breath. “I didn’t feel like I was sitting with my
father
. Not what I thought it would feel like anyway.”
“What did you expect?”
“I don’t know,” he said mournfully. “An apology would have been really nice.”
He toyed with the buttons on my shirt—his shirt, actually—that I’d worn to bed. “And you know what else? I always thought if I ever met him, that we’d have some kind of a bond, that I’d feel a connection to him. I didn’t. We were like two strangers who happened to be sitting next to each other.”
“A connection takes time. At least you have a memory of him now.”
“Cold comfort,” he said. “Don’t have a father, just
imagine
that you do.”
“It’s the first step,” I said. “You never know.”
Jacob nodded, like he craved that to be the truth, but frankly, I highly doubted Thomas Doorley would ever come around.
The local forecast told us to expect another cold, windy morning filled with lots of sun.
“Hey,” Jacob said, “no more talk about asshole fathers for the rest of the day,
okay
?” He unbuttoned my shirt and reached for the handcuffs on the bedside table. “Happy Birthday…”
It was during what they called the rainy season when Jacob finally finished
Hallelujah
. The year’s rainy season in Los Angeles was, of course, one particular week of spring when all the thirsty plants turned green for a few days, all the houses near the water braced for floods, all the hillside highways closed due to rock slides, and all the native Californians drove their cars like blind men.
Jacob and I had officially been together a little over a year and the book was, at last, complete. I remember when Jacob and I met, he said then that he was almost finished with it. Almost finished must mean a year to go on the internal clock of a writer.
One might accuse me of bias, as I automatically categorize anyone whose semen tastes like lemon meringue pie as extraordinary, but sex aside, I was wholly impressed. Of course, I knew Jacob was talented. I’d read the articles he wrote, the short stories, but he never let me near the book until it was done so I had no idea what to expect. It was funny, that was the first big surprise; although it shouldn’t have been because Jacob was funny—not nearly as funny as he thought he was sometimes—still, his wit translated well onto the page.
Thematically, however,
Hallelujah
was a bleak, solemn story, probably even more so for me. I likened it to a kind of autobiography of spirit for Jacob. The circumstances and the characters were completely made up, but the truth was there in the emotional undercurrent. It was like getting a little glimpse into the darkest corner of Jacob’s soul, into some parallel universe where his name was Jackson Grayson, and he was a seventeen-year-old trumpet player living in a tenement building in Hollywood, with a mother who wanted to be a Vaudeville singer; an alcoholic father who wanted to be a Brooklyn Dodger; and a neighbor he was in love with who faked her Southern accent and went by the name of Scarlett O’Hara, even though her mail came addressed to someone named Eleanora Schwartz. Meanwhile, there was a drought going on, and all Jackson wanted in the world was to see it rain.
It was a story about people with dreams. Dreams that never come true.
Jacob pretended he was watching television all weekend long while I read in the bedroom. Whenever he heard me chuckle at something, he came in to see what page I was on.
“You really think that’s funny?” he’d say.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Halfway through the book I had to lock him out so I could read in peace.
To me,
Hallelujah
was more than just a novel, it was the catalyst for our future. Jacob and I were explorers and the book was the
Nina,
the
Pinta
, and the
Santa Maria
, all rolled into one, and it was going to carry us to the new world. As I read, I allowed myself to daydream about what our life was going to be like: would we have the kind of summer storms where warm mist rises off the pavement, and the thunder and lightening make you think the earth is going to crack in two? Will cotton grow wild in our backyard? Will we have fireflies? How about a peach tree? Jacob loved peaches.
“Well?” he said late Sunday afternoon when I finished.
I knelt down to match his eye-level on the couch and kissed him as slowly and as deeply as I could. I was at a loss for words so I tried to speak with my body instead. And, interestingly enough, Jacob heard what I was saying. After the long lip-lock, he said, “You
really
liked it?”
I nodded. I felt myself getting teary over the whole thing, but I did my best not to act too girly. “Are you going to dedicate it to me?”
“You’ll see,” Jacob said. Light oozed from behind his eyes. “But tell me the truth. Are you
sure
you liked it?”
“Jacob, I loved it, I swear. And you know it’s good so don’t give me that phony-ass, doubt-infested face of yours.”
He did know it was good. He just wanted to hear it come out of my mouth. One thing Jacob never truly questioned was the quality of his work. He was well aware of his skill as a writer, so if he poured his heart into something, and then other people didn’t like it, he thought it no fault of his own. To Jacob, the act of critiquing art was essentially imprecise. That’s why he didn’t read reviews on anything he liked, be it a book, a movie, or a record. He believed that any work an artist puts forth which contains the truth as he or she sees it is worthy of consideration, and any commentary of the work beyond that is nothing more than pure individual opinion and should not be considered relevant to the work itself.
I bet I could recite that damn speech backward, Jacob delivered it so often.
“Pack your bags,” I said in my best southern drawl. “Joe-ja, here we come.”
“Tennessee.” He pulled me onto the couch and beamed. “Tennes
see
.”
Originally, Jacob had been all gung-ho over Mississippi, but after much research he’d decided, once and for all, that we had to live in Tennessee. For a few reasons. First, he was supposedly born in Gallatin, a small town outside of Nashville. Both Joanna and Thomas Doorley were from New York, but they left there after she got pregnant. They roamed around the country before finally arriving in Southern California. Jacob hadn’t been back to Tennessee since he was a few months old.
Second, Jacob said the music was better in Tennessee than it was anywhere else in the South.
“Memphis is practically the birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll. We’ll be able to wander down to Beale Street any night of the week and be
inspired
,” he said. “Plus, they have casinos nearby, a zoo, and, as far as I know, the only civil rights museum in the country.”
According to Jacob, we were going to live somewhere near Graceland. But not because of Elvis, mind you. Neither of us were fans of The King.
“Supposedly, there are signs all over town that lead to Graceland,” he said.
This entertained his imagination, being that his name was Grace.
“How can you not feel like you belong in a place where your name is all over the goddamn town?” he said.
Jacob sent
Hallelujah
off to his agent the next day, and she took us to dinner to celebrate its completion. Jacob’s agent was a sixty-one-year-old ex-editor originally from Long Island. Her name was Ardelene Gladstone, but Jacob affectionately called her Adrenaline because she talked faster than an auctioneer, and almost louder than Pete, if that was possible. She thought the book was fabulous.
“I mean posi
tively
fabulous,” she said.
To Adrenaline, everything was fabulous, so the word kind of lost meaning for me halfway through the salad course. The Caesar was fabulous. My necklace was fabulous. The shoe department at Barney’s? You guessed it. And Jacob, of course, that went without saying, but she said it anyway.
“
Fabulous
.”
Adrenaline surmised that with Jacob’s credible list of published work, she’d be able to negotiate a price for the book somewhere in the mid five-digit range. Nothing that was going to make him a millionaire, but more than enough to put a down payment on a house and get us out of town.
Adrenaline promised us that Los Angeles County would be a memory by the fourth of July.
“Have I ev-a let you down, Jacob?”
He told her no, she hadn’t. And she damn well better not start now, I thought.
“Do you sweat more when you’re having your period?” Kat said.
She stood next to me, her face an inch away from the compact mirror in her hand, and rubbed her armpit in between re-application of the maroon eyeliner she was putting on her lower lids. Kat had bleached her hair again, and the crimson make-up made her look like a polar bear dipped in Kool-Aid. I’d spent three days with her, working at Chick in the afternoons while one of her sales associates was out sick, and it seemed as if each night, instead of taking off her make-up and reapplying it the next day, she just kept adding to it. It never faded, it just got more vivid. A Lite-Brite face.
Working in the store was enthralling for the first five minutes. I’d begged for the job of ringing people up—Kat had one of those old-fashioned cash registers, the wooden ones with the heavy buttons and bells, and I thought it would be fun to play with. But the novelty of servitude gets old fast, especially when you have to wait on snot-faced rich people like my mother, or celebrities who think they deserve special treatment above and beyond the common man just because they emote somebody else’s words and ideas in front of a camera. I’d be happy to give special treatment to a dedicated school teacher, or even someone like William Faulkner if he was still alive, because despite the fact that an exegesis of his prose completely eluded me, I had to admit, especially when Jacob held me down and made me say it, that the guy was a kick-ass architect of the ever-elusive sentence. But some silly TV star? I don’t care how much money they make, I won’t bend. More than one customer had complained to Kat about my attitude. Both times she yelled at me right in front of them, screaming, “You’re fired!”
Behind their backs, she egged me on and gave me an air five.
“I don’t know why, but I sweat more when I’m having my period,” she said.
“It’s probably hormonal,” I told her. “I think estrogen makes you sweat. Do you smell bad?”
She took a whiff of her pit and grimaced. “I smell like cumin. Gopal says it smells yucky in India and no wonder. Those wretched spices seep through your pores. In that heat, forget about it.”
Kat and Gopal had, miraculously, managed to hold their relationship together for over six record-breaking months. He cooked for her, he brought her flowers once a week, he even watched
The Brady Bunch
on a regular basis, only he thought it was a modern TV show. Syndication was a concept he didn’t yet grasp. All the positive attention started to drive Kat crazy. She began to hate him for it.
“When he lathers up his face in the morning, before he shaves, he puts the foam over his mouth as well as where the hair actually grows. He ends up shaving his lips,” she said. “It’s like kissing a girl. A girl who smells like curry.”
“You belong on a talk show,” I said. I occasionally watched late night reruns of
Oprah
, so I knew. Oprah had a guest on once who lectured for half an hour about women being pussies with men who are assholes, and then being assholes with men who are decent. I tried to get Kat to watch that one, thinking she’d learn something, but Kat’s idea of self-improvement is a good bikini wax. I’d even been tempted to write to Oprah about Kat. I had it all planned. Oprah would have had Kat on her show, and the theme would have read something like this: Women Who Hate the Men Who Love Them. We would have all been there in the audience—Jacob and I, and some of Kat’s other friends, like an intervention. Kat would have told her whole life story, all the stuff about her father pimping her out to his poker buddies, and her mother putting pot brownies in her lunch box. Everyone would have felt sorry for her, and all the attention would have made her realize how lucky she was to have people in her life who really loved her. She’d finally appreciate Gopal, except she’d be devastated when it dawned on her that she blew it because by the time I got all this shit to happen, she would surely have dumped his ass. Gopal, however, would have been hip to my master plan. He’d have been in Chicago too, hiding in the Green Room. At the end of the show he would have run onto the stage with an engagement ring and made everyone in the audience cry. Even Oprah would have cried.
“If I’m going to smell like cumin for the rest of my life, this relationship is doomed,” Kat said. “Think I should dump him, Blanca?”
“Kat, what would Oprah say?”
The store was quiet during lunch. While Kat did inventory, I tried to finish beading a set of bracelets that she’d promised a customer I’d have done by the end of the day. A woman had come in and noticed the one I was wearing on my wrist. She bought it right off my arm and asked me to make two more.
“My daughters will go mad for them,” she said.
The total cost for materials was about thirty-five bucks. There was little intensive labor involved. Kat told the woman they’d be $150 each.
“They’re special order one-of-a-kinds,” Kat explained.
The real reason Kat charged her so much was because the woman was wearing cowboy boots. Kat was prejudiced against people who wore cowboy boots as a fashion statement. “I don’t have a problem with them on a ranch or something, but you know, not in
El Aye
. Only Heavy Metal people wear cowboy boots in
El Aye
.”
“What are you going to do when I leave?” I said. “Who’s going to make bracelets on command for you? Who’s going to harass your customers? Admit it, you’re going to miss me.”
Kat didn’t like it when I talked about leaving town. Every time I brought it up, she thought of something new to worry about. Her worries were hilarious. So hilarious, in fact, that I started to write them down.
“Blanca, promise me harder than you’ve ever promised me anything that you’re not going to start saying
y’all
, okay?”
I grabbed my new spiral notebook out of my purse—I’d taken up Jacob’s habit of carrying one around with me—a Bantam 3x5 size, just in case something struck me as worth remembering.
“Why the hell does your note pad say
mango
on it?” Kat said.
I still hadn’t named my daily journal, but my portable one had been christened upon purchase. I took a Sharpie to it and wrote the word
mango
in thick black letters.
“You really want to know?”
“I do now,” Kat said.
The day I bought it I’d had to leave the apartment early in the morning to put in a few hours at the studio and then be at Chick by noon. I’d sliced up a mango for breakfast, and Jacob was awake but still in bed. I carried the dish into the bedroom to see if he wanted a piece. I fed him a sliver and he said something corny about how the sweet stickiness of the fruit turned him on.
“It reminds me of something,” he said.
He tried to get me back into bed, but I had to decline the offer. I was already showered and dressed, and I didn’t want to walk around the rest of the day with gooey underwear.
“How much time do you have?” he said.
“About five minutes.”
“
Okay
, then just keep eating the mango exactly like you’re doing. But not too fast.”
I sat down next to him and, as seductively as possible, I kept eating and sucking and letting Jacob lick the juice as it ran down my fingers. I felt kind of silly about the whole performance, but Jacob didn’t seem to notice. He watched me, and while he watched he jacked off. Come shot up across his chest, far enough that it almost hit the wall behind him.
“Have you ever tried to get that in your mouth?” I said.
“Uh,
no
…” He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “
No
.”
Before I left, I cleaned him up with a paper towel. For the rest of the day all I could think about was that precious fruit. The mango, that is.
“So, Grace is a shooter?” Kat said.
“Mm-hmm.”
“What in the name of God does that have to do with your pad of paper?”
“Nothing.”
“You know, if you think you’re going to get fresh, sexy mangos in Tallahassee, you’ve got another thing coming.”
“Tennessee,” I said. “Not Tallahassee.”
“Whatever. Same thing. I can’t believe you’re going to leave California for some crummy hick town.”
Kat was one of those people Uncle Don preached about. He would say there was something wrong with her because she couldn’t comprehend a person not liking L.A. Of course, he’d be right. There was something wrong with her.
“Grace sell his book yet?” Kat said.
“Not yet, but he will.”
It had been almost three months since Adrenaline began shopping the book, and there had been no takers. Since she originally told us it would be sold by the fourth of July, which at that point was right around the corner, I determined she’d exaggerated a little.
“Nothing to be concerned about,” she said. “It’s not going to happen overnight.”
Jacob was concerned, naturally, but he’d gone back to work at the
Weekly
so he was too preoccupied to dwell on it. Oddly enough, I wasn’t worried at all, I was just impatient. Days feel longer when you know there’s something beyond the eternal here and now of Los Angeles to look forward to, even longer than if there’s nothing to look forward to, because at least then you’re not biding valuable time. That’s why I always thought if I ever had to go to jail, I’d rather get thrown in for life as opposed to say, thirty years. With life, you just sit back and chill and get on with whatever it is you do inside of a prison for the remainder of your days. Thirty years, and you’re counting the years by the months, the months by the days, and the days by the minutes. That’s what I’d been doing and trust me, it fucking took forever.
I left Chick early that day. I had an appointment at Helen Nail’s. My monthly ten dollar pedicure.
“Listen, Trixie,” Jacob said to me not long after we moved in together. “I wouldn’t trust a place that doesn’t understand how to correctly form the possessive of a noun.”
Helen Nail’s was right down the street from our apartment. That particular day, I had them paint my toes a shiny lavender shade that matched the underwear I had on. The color was called
Fetish
. Just the sight of that word spelled out on the bottle brought flashbacks of the mango episode. On my way home, I took a detour to the market for another one. I was excited as hell until I walked through the front door of our apartment and my joy came to a screeching halt.
Greg was sitting on the living room floor with a cheeseburger in his hands and ketchup on his chin. Jacob was across from him on the couch, stuffing french fries into his mouth. They were chatting away like long lost brothers.
“What the
hell
is going on here?” I said.
Apparently it went down like this: Jacob was coming in that afternoon just as Greg was heading out to ride the mid-day waves. He asked Jacob, or Henry, as he still called him, if he wanted to come along. Jacob had never been much of a surfer, and figured, What the hey, if you’re going to learn, you might as well learn from a pro, even if that aforementioned pro used to use his massive shlong to bonk your woman.
“You should’ve seen me,” Jacob said. “I was riding the waves, baby. I was
flying
.”
“Dude, Henry’s a natural,” Greg said. I’d never noticed it before, but Greg looked like a frog. A blond-haired, imbecilic frog. I wanted him to get out of our apartment immediately. But since he didn’t look like he was leaving, was too stupid to pick up on how annoyed I was by his presence, and because Jacob got a kick out of provoking me by keeping him there, I was the one who had to go. First, though, I made a trade with Jacob—the mango for the rest of his fries.
“Nice toes,” Jacob said.
“They match my underwear,” I whispered. “I’m going to take a nap. Wake me up when he’s gone. And bring the mango.”
Jacob clamored after me with his mouth full. “Oh, hey Trix, your mom called this morning. We’re having a family portrait taken tomorrow. Call her back before six.”
“Her mom?” I heard Greg say. “Isn’t her mother dead?”