God-Shaped Hole

by Tiffanie DeBartolo

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  He didn’t even seem drunk, so he had no excuse for walking around in such a thick fucking fog.

  “Trixie, this is important, you’ll get a kick out of this. Henry Miller was healthy and happy when he lived in Big Sur. For years and years. And then you know what happened? He moved to Pacific Palisades and he died. He came to Los Angeles and it killed him.”

  Yeah, about twenty years later, I thought. It’s not like he dropped the day he arrived or anything. He was old.

  “Jacob, I don’t care about Henry Miller right now.”

  “Okay.”

  It had been a while since I heard him say that. I pretended it didn’t move me at all.

  There was a quick hammering noise on the set below us. I tried to walk past Jacob, to look out the window and see what they were building, but he pulled me over to where he stood. He slid his hand up my shirt.

  “I missed you so much,” he said.

  His mouth was on mine and his tongue was slowly, gently trying to break through. I kept my lips locked tight and wondered if he kissed Rosalita like that. I pushed him away.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said.

  For the first time since he walked in the door, he sat down. He kept flipping the Big Sur thermometer upside-down and then right-side up again, as if it were an hourglass. He waited for me to speak.

  I heard the assistant director outside calling for the actors. Three times he said, “First team to the set, please!”

  I rehearsed in my head what I was going to say. I didn’t know why I was going to say it, but at the time I didn’t think I had a choice. I hadn’t convinced myself it was the right thing to do, but I was scared. I made up my mind that it was my only option. To save myself from the pain.

  I wished for a sudden, catastrophic earthquake. One big enough to tear the building off its foundation and toss us like corn kernels in hot oil, popping about the room, ending everything right there. Jacob and I would have died synchronously and been together for all of eternity.

  I thought the magnet was wrong. It seemed much warmer than seventy degrees in our living room.

  Outside, someone said, “Roll camera!” Another guy yelled, “Speed!” Then the director called, “Action!”

  “Trixie, what’s wrong?’ Jacob said.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. “How can you ask me that? How can you not know what’s wrong?”

  “Well, you’re obviously upset, and—”

  “I want you to leave. Now. You need to go.” I turned my back so that I couldn’t see his face.

  “Go? I just got back. What’s the matter with you?”

  I spun back around and said, “Me? What the fuck is the matter with you? You think you can just disappear for a couple weeks and then come back here and be my boyfriend and act like nothing’s happened? I’m sorry but it doesn’t work that way.”

  “I had a lot of thinking to do. I needed to get my shit together. I didn’t want to be a drag.”

  “Jacob, I’m supposed to help you get your shit together. That’s part of the job description of a girlfriend, whether you’re in Big Sur or Needles or Timbuktu.” I paused. “Then again, God knows where the hell you really were.” What I actually meant was, God knows who you were with.

  “Hey,” he said. “You do. You know where I was because I told you. And anyway, I called you a million times but you never called me back.”

  “Why didn’t you take me with you?”

  “Beatrice, you’re the one who kept telling me how fucking busy you were. I was trying to do you a favor by getting out of your way.”

  “Give me a break. How stupid do you think I am?”

  “What?”

  “You were gone for over two weeks. Am I supposed to believe you weren’t out fucking around, having a grand old time?”

  That made Jacob mad. Irrationality always pissed him off. “Yeah, actually, you are supposed to believe that! Is that what this is about? Were you really concerned about me at all, or did you just think I was off fucking someone else?”

  “Can you prove to me that you weren’t?”

  “I shouldn’t have to! God, Trixie, you can be so fucking warped sometimes!”

  “You’re one to talk,” I said. I had a quick childhood flashback. I pictured the time my father said he was going to Chicago for business in the middle of winter, then came home with a tan.

  The little devil on my shoulder whispered: Jacob does look more golden than usual.

  He did. He looked like he’d been frolicking around the beach with some cheap trollop.

  “It’s over,” I said.

  Jacob didn’t know whether or not to believe me. I had to repeat myself, simulating conviction. “It’s over,” I said again. “I mean it. The end.”

  The light in Jacob’s eyes dimmed. “Trixie…,” he whispered, “why are you doing this?”

  “…And cut!” the director yelled. “Let’s go one more time!”

  “I won’t let you walk all over me, that’s why. I won’t sit here and be made a fool of.”

  “Oh, okay. Are you talking to me or your father?”

  “Get out!”

  Jacob sat on the couch with his head in his hands and looked at the floor. He rubbed his face. “What about Memphis?”

  I thought he must have gone off the deep end to ask me a question like that after the way he’d behaved.

  “Memphis? What about Memphis?” I said. “How can we move to Memphis when you don’t even talk to me anymore? When you’re never here, and when you are, you just float in and out like this is some weigh station where you stop to sleep and shower and fuck once in a while. No wonder you didn’t know Nina was on heroin. I probably could’ve shot up right in front of your face and you wouldn’t have seen me!”

  Jacob told me I was being selfish and cruel, that I didn’t understand what he’d been dealing with, and that I didn’t even try. “I’m sorry about running off, Trixie. I’m sorry. But I had some really serious stuff I needed to sort out. In case you forgot, my father fucking died, all right? And one of the reasons I left was because you were making me feel like an inconvenience. Like I was in your way or something. You didn’t want to deal with me any more than I wanted to deal with myself.”

  “Oh, so it’s my fault?”

  “It’s no one’s fault.”

  “Don’t act like I gave you license to abandon me.”

  “I didn’t abandon you!” He got up and held me by the shoulders. “Listen, you have to stop assuming that every man who says he loves you is going to run off and disappoint you someday.”

  “Every man who’s said he loves me has run off and disappointed me.”

  That hurt him, I could tell. But that’s why I said it. I wanted him to hurt. I wanted to get even with him for hurting me.

  Jacob was supposed to get down on his knees, right then and there, and promise to put the shattered pieces back together. He was supposed to reject my command to leave, drag me into the bedroom, and order me to start packing. We’re leaving right away, he’d tell me. Forget California once and for all, it’s tearing us apart. I’ll sell the book from Memphis, it will all be okay. Graceland is waiting, my love. Los Angeles killed Henry Miller but it won’t kill us. We’re gone!

  That’s what was supposed to happen. Instead, Jacob said, “You know, I’m not so sure you ever really understood me at all.”

  That’s when I told him I didn’t love him anymore.

  “You don’t mean that,” he said.

  He was right, I didn’t mean even an ounce of it, but I wouldn’t take it back. I didn’t want to go through all the shit anymore—the feeling of being so fucking in love every single day that it hurt like a gunshot in your gut. Who the hell would want to feel like that for the rest of their life?

  “You promis
ed you wouldn’t leave,” Jacob said quietly. “Remember? You promised.”

  “I’m not leaving. You are.”

  Someone outside yelled, “That’s a wrap.”

  “Please don’t do this, Trixie. Please.”

  “By the way, my name’s not Trixie.”

  Jacob didn’t say anything else after that. He just stormed into the bedroom, grabbed a handful of clothes, a couple of notebooks, threw them into a bag, and left. It was that easy. He didn’t even say good-bye. And I had to elicit the aid of every power source in my body to resist the crushing urge to run after him. Because when I caught him, I would have told him the truth—I would have told him that when he came in, all I wanted to do was rest my head in the curve between his shoulder and his neck, breathing in his scent, listening to him chant his crazy dreams in my ear.

  But I didn’t move a muscle.

  My feet were glued to the floor by the past and there wasn’t a prayer in hell that was going to pry them loose.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I stayed up and watched the news, because there’s nothing like watching the local news in Los Angeles to cheer a person up. I saw a story about a woman named Lucille who had been car-jacked somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. Lucille was in the backseat with her son, James, while her friend Nancy drove. Nancy was on TV, too. She had a perm.

  The afternoon of the crime, Nancy made a pit-stop at a pharmacy. She went in to pick up a prescription and, in the meantime, some sixteen-year-old thug with a handgun hopped into the driver’s seat of her car and took off with Lucille and James along for the ride. Lucille screamed and begged the guy not to hurt her baby. But, this is the kicker, she had the wherewithal during the whole ordeal to secretly dial 911 on the cell phone laying at her feet. She cried directions into the phone, things like: “Mr. Carjacker, sir, please don’t hurt us. Just pull over into that Whole Foods parking lot right next to the Ford dealership there on the corner of Ventura and Canoga and let us out!”

  From her prattling, the police were able to locate the car, speed to Lucille’s rescue, and save her life and the life of her son. After Lucille told the whole story in vivid detail, I thought, Hell, that’s pretty quick for a woman with Lee press-on nails. But then the news anchor had to go and ask her how in the world she thought to call 911 and talk like that in such a time of crisis. You know what she said?

  God.

  That’s right, that’s who got all the credit.

  “God gave me divine grace to be strong and think fast. God saved my life and the life of my son,” she said. “It was all part of his plan.”

  I was insanely jealous of Lucille. More jealous than I’d ever been of anyone in my entire life. Because she truly meant it. All I could think was, why can’t I be as stupid as Lucille? Why can’t I blame all my successes and all my failures on The Lord Jesus Christ Almighty? I would be so fucking happy if I lived like that. I could have said God told me to break up with Jacob, and if God told me to do it, it must have been the right thing. I would have been able to fault God for taking Thomas Doorley away from Jacob. And for letting Jacob go to Big Sur without me. And it would have definitely been all God’s fault that Jacob hadn’t sold his book yet, because if God has the power to let wide receivers on one team score touchdowns against the apparent sinners on the other side like they seem to think he does, surely God could have made Simon and Schuster stand up and take notice of how brilliant a writer Jacob was.

  My true point of view goes like this: If there really was a God, Jacob and I would be in Memphis right now.

  Meanwhile, if Lucille’s God heard her yapping, I’m sure he laughed his ass off. He laughed so hard, he peed his big, God pants. Because if, between the billions of people God had to baby-sit, he happened to be in the Rite-Aid parking lot in Woodland Hills, California, just in time to whisper commands of salvation into Lucille’s perky ears, then God needed to get a fucking hobby.

  FORTY

  Sara called me a few days after Jacob left and told me he was staying with them, in case I was worried.

  “I’m not,” I said. I was lying. Again. I’d become quite a master prevaricator.

  Sara wanted to know if there was anything she could do to help.

  “Is Jacob there now?” I said.

  “No, he went to Chez Jay’s with Pete and Odie. To watch the Dodger game. Why don’t you stop in and see them?” Chez Jay’s was a bar that happened to be about a mile from my apartment. I told her I couldn’t go.

  “I’m really busy,” I said. I would have bet my life that Jacob had asked Sara to call.

  “This is stupid, you two belong together,” she said. “Jacob’s really getting his head back on straight. Everything will work out. I know it will.”

  “I’m glad one of us is optimistic.” I asked her what Jacob had been doing all day, if he’d gone back to work or what.

  “No,” she said, “he’s just been sitting around reading and fiddling with Pete’s guitars. Can I tell him I spoke to you, Beatrice? Can I tell him you want to see him?”

  “Please don’t do that, Sara.”

  I said good-bye to her so she didn’t try to change my mind.

  Jacob started phoning me every day. I had to screen my calls.

  “Trixie, you have to call me back. Please. I’ll be around all afternoon.”

  He always talked to the machine like it was a real person.

  “Listen, why don’t you just come over when you get home. We’ll take a long walk on the beach and we’ll figure all this out. I’m not going anywhere tonight. I’ll wait until you get here.”

  The next day, he said, “Trixie, you should have come over last night.”

  Once he called just to say he hoped I was keeping up with my journal.

  “Remember to write what you feel. And don’t read it over too much. Don’t make corrections.” He was referring to the time he caught me rewriting. He’d been looking over my shoulder and thought I’d written the wrong date at the top of the page, until I told him I was fixing an old entry; you know, revising punctuation, spell-checking. He said you weren’t supposed to do that.

  Another time, Jacob sang to me.

  “Listen to this.” I heard him put the phone down and start strumming on a guitar. “I’ve been practicing,” he said. “I used to know how to play pretty well. I’m a little rusty, but Pete taught me a few songs. This one’s about us.”

  I only heard the first verse because the machine cut him off. It was the story of some barfly who was really smart, who could build things, and could seemingly grasp every riddle in life except why his girl had left him.

  It was just another fucked-up love song, but Jacob turned it into the truth. His truth. Jacob was the only person I’d ever met, besides myself, who believed music was a cosmic language that spoke directly to our souls—to ease our pain, and to remind us we weren’t alone.

  “A good song can save your life, Trixie. Don’t ever forget it.”

  He was going to write a book about it someday.

  After the serenade failed to win me back, Jacob made one last attempt to reach me. That’s when he said he wasn’t going to call anymore.

  “I get the hint,” he said. “I’m coming over tomorrow to get my computer. I’ll be there around noon. I’d really like to see you.”

  I made sure I was gone all day. And I left Jacob a note asking him to leave me his key. When I got home late that night, I knew Jacob had been there—even before I looked in the office to see if his computer was gone, because I smelled remnants of him in the air.

  He’d left the key on the desk.

  When I tried to spell out the whole mess for Kat, she told me that even if I was unhappy with Jacob, which we both knew was a big, fat, juicy lie, it couldn’t be any worse than what I was without him. She spat me the hocker of advice I usually spit at everyone else.

  “Blanca, you can’t commi
t suicide so as not to be murdered, right? That’s the worst way to die, right?”

  It drives me crazy when people know me well enough to remind me what I believe. Kat said I had a future with Jacob. “And you’re fucking it up for no other reason than you’re a stubborn idiot who’s afraid to be happy. But if you want to be a baby about it, so be it. I didn’t want you to end up in Dogpatch or Tallahassee or wherever the hell you wanted to go anyway.”

  FORTY-ONE

  “Dude, where’s Henry been? I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  Greg was standing in the middle of the hallway, barefoot, when I walked out my door. His feet looked like he’d been dancing in coal. He was the last person in the world I felt like talking to. I prayed to my non-existent God for the elevator to arrive as quickly as possible.

  “Henry’s on assignment in Borneo. He’s writing an article on albino orangutans.”

  “Right on,” Greg said. I pushed the Close Door button a dozen times. Greg’s voice echoed down the shaft. “You look really nice, by the way.”

  I didn’t want to hear that. I didn’t want to look nice for the pathetic evening I was in store for—the one I blamed all on Kat. I guess you could have called it a date, but I didn’t. It was only dinner. I was having dinner with some friend of Gopal’s that I met at a cocktail party. After scheming in the corner with Kat for half the evening, the bloke walked right up to me and wouldn’t stop talking. I refer to him as a bloke because he was English, but not the cool, working-class Englishmen you see in independent films. This one talked like he hadn’t taken a shit in days. He told me all about his consulting firm, and how he liked to walk Nigel, his Rottweiler puppy, to the dog park in Laurel Canyon. He also informed me that he was allergic to penicillin. He took it once when he was a kid and his throat swelled up like a balloon.

  “I almost died. Fortunately, my mother was a nurse. She gave me a shot of something, and things turned out brilliantly.”

  Lucky me, I thought. Why couldn’t his mother have been a telephone operator?