God-Shaped Hole

by Tiffanie DeBartolo

  Jacob’s face softened and he stood up. His fingers were thin and kind, and he grasped my hand with both of his. He smelled like an exotic wood.

  “Trixie,” he said. “Do you mind if I call you Trixie?”

  “No, I like it.”

  He asked me to sit down, and we sat in silence as he studied me, his head resting on his fist. I felt a bit uncomfortable, but was made to feel less so by the fact that Jacob seemed completely at ease, as if it were the most common thing in the world to sit and stare at someone you’d never met. I noticed his newspaper was French.

  Finally, he spoke.

  “You know, you’re really beautiful,” he said. “You kind of have, I don’t know, the face of a Henry James heroine.”

  That might sound like the biggest line of Velveeta you’ve ever heard, but trust me, it didn’t come out like cheese at all. He wasn’t flirting—not intentionally anyway. He was simply being honest—a rare quality I would soon come to know was typical of Jacob Grace. I found his compliment embarrassingly romantic, as I had more than once thought of becoming some neo-metropolitan version of Isabel Archer; had ached to leave the city of bright lights and ill-fated dreams, drained and confused, but still headstrong enough to embark on a literal and metaphorical journey of discovering all of what life might really hold for me.

  I have a lot of lame-ass daydreams like that.

  I felt my cheeks blush.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you self-conscious,” Jacob said with a gentle smile on his face.

  “I just never think of myself that way.”

  “I like the Victorian look: porcelain skin, raven hair, sort of refined features. It gives you a certain uniqueness here among the acres of sun-kissed blonds. It gives you depth.”

  I motioned to Jacob’s newspaper. “You speak French?”

  He shrugged. “Un peu,” he said. “I’m trying to learn.”

  I nodded and we were silent again.

  I got the impression Jacob was an odd person, and I mean that as the best possible compliment I could give a guy. He had the most sincere face I’d ever seen, and it seemed he put on absolutely no pretenses whatsoever. Something about being with him made me warm, like I was sitting in front of a fireplace whose embers were barely flickering, yet still giving off heat. It made me feel safe.

  “Jacob, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Your ad, you must’ve had dozens of calls. Why did you call me back?”

  He squinted. “I didn’t get dozens of calls. Six maybe, but not dozens. That’s why it took me so long to call you. You were the last of them.” He paused, making little dots on the tablecloth with his fork. “The truth is, I placed the ad as sort of a joke. I was in the office one day complaining about never finding any decent women in Los Angeles, and a coworker of mine cooked up the idea.”

  “Have you met all of us now?”

  “Five of you. One I chose not to meet.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Transvestite,” he said. “Too much make-up.”

  “What were the other ones like?” I wanted to know if I had any competition.

  “They ran the spectrum,” he said. “Suicidal gothic, older than my mother, on anti-depressants and loving it, and lastly, the one I was the least impressed with, a woman who thought Henry Miller was a police sitcom from the seventies. You’re the only normal one so far, normal being a relative term, of course.”

  “You have no idea how relative,” I said. “I went to Catholic school for twelve years.”

  That made Jacob laugh.

  “I thought it would be a great idea for a story,” he said. “So if nothing else, I’ll get work out of it. I’ve never placed a personal ad before either. And I kind of figured this whole thing would turn out to be just something to write about. Well, I mean, until now, maybe.”

  “You know,” I said, “I don’t even read the paper much. I just happened to pick one up that day. The ad was the first thing I saw.”

  “If that isn’t fate, I don’t know what is,” Jacob said, grinning as if he’d won the lottery.

  He had pointy canine teeth. Like a wolf.

  We ordered cappuccinos and grilled cheese sandwiches, and told each other our life stories.

  Jacob was born in Tennessee but moved to California before he was a year old. He grew up in Pasadena, the only child of a single mother who worked as a dance instructor. He described her peculiarly in the plural as “really good people.”

  “What happened to your father?” I said.

  “He took off a few months after they got here. He was kind enough to keep in touch for a year or two, but that was about it. We haven’t seen him since.”

  “Have you ever tried to contact him?”

  “No,” Jacob said. “Someday I’d like to be able to talk to him face to face though, the fucking piece of trash.”

  I got the feeling his father was still a raw subject for Jacob; it was the only time I saw his smooth ride wane to minor turbulence.

  Jacob was passionately obsessed with his writing. I could tell by the bonfire in his eyes when he spoke about it. It was everything to him.

  “If I didn’t have my work,” he said, “I’d probably be dead by now.”

  He told me about a year-long stint in a university writing program that he summed up as a complete waste of time. Not long after he quit, he wrote a short story that was published by Esquire magazine, and consequently optioned for a nice chunk of change by a local film studio. Jacob declined the offer to actually write the screenplay.

  “That’s not my gig,” he said.

  As far as he knew, the screenplay had never been written or made. But he lived off of that exploit for a few years, in the meantime writing stories here and there for various publications, as well as his work at the Weekly. Most recently, he said, he’d been working on a novel.

  “It’s a story about a kid from Hollywood who longs for his southern roots, obsessing over rainstorms, the blues, and the crazy woman in his building who thinks she’s Scarlett O’Hara.”

  “Does it have a name yet?”

  “I call it Hallelujah,” he said, as if it were a beloved pet.

  I’d told Greg—my previous boyfriend—that I was an orphan because, from the start, I could never foresee the relationship going anywhere and I didn’t want to have to introduce him to my mother. It became a real pain in the ass. I had to talk like an idiot when I answered the phone and Mom was on the other end. Holidays were a problem as well. The guy I dated before Greg, I told him my parents were South African expatriates, and that we didn’t speak any longer because they’d supported apartheid. But for some reason, when Jacob asked, I couldn’t bring myself to lie. On the contrary, I had the very atypical impulse to tell him everything.

  “I grew up in the Hollywood Hills. I have two brothers and a set of parents that I have virtually nothing in common with. My philandering father left my mother nine years ago and I haven’t spoken to him since. My mother, who now lives in Santa Barbara, means well but is criminally materialistic. I studied fine art in college, and I design jewelry for a living. That’s me in a nutshell.”

  “Somehow I doubt that,” Jacob said, his eyes shining. “But it’s a good start. Tell me about the jewelry you make.”

  “It’s the kind of stuff that looks fairly inexpensive, but sometimes costs a whole paycheck. I like to mix precious stones and gems with crude, organic materials. So things look a bit off.”

  I told him about a piece I’d sold the week before. It was one of my all-time favorites—an exquisite little Burmese ruby that, instead of placing on an ordinary chain, I secured to a piece of brown twine wrapped around heavy-duty wire, then encircled it in tiny pearls. It was extraordinary looking, completely unrefined and beautiful. The woman who bought it paid quite a bit, even after I tried to talk he
r out of it.

  “Why did you try and talk her out of it?” Jacob said.

  “Because the horrible smell of department store cologne oozed from her pores. And she called the necklace ‘cute.’ I knew she was going to wear it once to show her friends how cool she thought she was, then stuff it in a drawer and never put it on again.”

  I could tell by the look on Jacob’s face that he found me amusing. I kept talking. “I told her the necklace was fragile. And that it didn’t match her skin tone. She just wouldn’t give up. I guess you could say I get a little sentimental about my pieces. And truthfully, I never thought this whole business would take off, but people here will buy anything, thank God; it’s one of the only things in life that makes me happy. So far, I’ve only discovered four things that make life worth living for me. My work is one of them.”

  “What are the other three?” Jacob wanted to know.

  “Music, books, and sex,” I said. “Not necessarily in that order.”

  His eyebrows rose an inch and he smirked. “What else do you need?”

  Jacob said he could tell I was an artist by the way I held my spoon. I didn’t quite understand what he meant, but I liked that he was paying attention. He asked me if I would give him something I made, that he could wear around his neck.

  “I’ll make something for you.”

  We talked for a while longer, then we wandered down the street and stopped at a used record shop. We walked in and began pointing out the music we liked and didn’t like, assessing all the vinyl we thought life wasn’t complete without owning. We both concurred that anyone not in possession of Blood On The Tracks, Exile On Main Street, and anything by U2 didn’t know diddley about rock ‘n’ roll. We were also together on the fact that any band, song, or solo work that a guy named Paul Weller had been even remotely connected to was cool, even though 98 percent of the world’s population outside of Britain has never heard of him. The one thing we did disagree on was the genius of Prince. Jacob liked him; I put him in the over-rated, egomaniacal-freak category. But I scored an extra point with Jacob by being a Fugazi fan, even correcting him on the pronunciation of the singer’s last name.

  “MacKaye. I’m told it rhymes with pie, not pay.”

  “How the hell do you know so much about music?” Jacob said.

  I explained to him that, as with most things in my life, it was because of and despite my mother. Growing up, she constantly nagged me that if I knew my homework as well as I knew the words to every song on the radio, I’d be a genius. She wouldn’t let me watch MTV while I ate breakfast, and forbade me to turn on my stereo anytime after dinner.

  “Beatrice, I’m afraid you’re going to turn into a pothead. Then everyone will think I was a bad mother.”

  That’s what she used to say to me. Lucky for her, my nose is too acute for pot. Nothing that smells like a burning piece of vegetarian shit goes anywhere near my nasal passages.

  “But,” I said to Jacob, “I had a pair of headphones my mother didn’t know about. And I ended up valedictorian of my class. That finally shut her up.”

  Jacob nodded slowly. “What do you say we mark this day—the day we met—by buying each other a record? Something we think reflects our perceptions of each other.”

  It sounded like a great idea to me. We both began to browse the racks with concentrated intent. I walked up and down every aisle and looked in every bin, hoping something would strike me. Finally I came across an old Nick Drake album called Five Leaves Left. I discovered Nick Drake when I was in school but hadn’t listened to him for years. His music was full of grief and torment and truth. I knew Jacob would love it.

  Jacob had been outside waiting for me for five minutes. He’d walked directly to a bin, found what he was looking for, snuck up to the register, and purchased it. When I met up with him on the sidewalk he handed it to me. It was a record called Seven Steps To Heaven by Miles Davis. He told me that if it didn’t bring tears to my eyes when I listened to it, he couldn’t be my friend.

  “I’m kidding,” he said. “But you’ll dig it, I know you will. Especially the third track. It’s one of my favorite songs ever.” He stressed the “ever” like it hurt.

  I gave him the Nick Drake and he said he couldn’t wait to listen to it. Then he glanced at his watch, apologized, and said he had to go. With his hands in his pockets, he looked at me and breathed deeply. For the first time all day I got the impression he was nervous. Staring at his shoes, he said, “Not too long ago, I broke up with someone I was with for a long time. I haven’t done this in a while.”

  I took a step toward him, to let him know that anything he wanted to do was okay by me. He looked up, leaned in, touched his forehead to mine, and kissed me.

  His lips were full and soft and he tasted like coffee.

  “I’ll call you later,” he said, then he caught himself. “I mean, can I call you later?”

  I didn’t have to answer that.

  I stood watching him until he turned the corner and I couldn’t see him anymore. I went home, put on Seven Steps To Heaven, and spent the next six hours with Miles Davis, constructing a necklace for my new friend. I played the third song, his favorite, over and over, and swore I could smell Jacob Grace in the sounds emanating from my speakers.

  THREE

  Jacob called me that night and we talked for a long time. He told me all about Nina—the ex-girlfriend. Their relationship had always been rocky, he said, though they managed to stay together for three years.

  “I met her in traffic school,” he said, as if that explained why he’d been with her for so long.

  Jacob told me Nina was some kind of amazingly talented photographer by trade. “And, by the end of our relationship, a junkie.”

  I asked him if that’s why they broke up.

  “There were a lot of reasons,” he said. “After a while, we sort of lost our ability to communicate. I went looking for her at a party one night and found her passed out on the laundry room floor with a belt tied around her arm and a needle sticking out of her vein. Unbeknownst to me, it’d been going on for weeks. It’s not a good sign when your girlfriend’s a heroin addict and you don’t even know it.”

  Jacob said he tried to snap her out of it. She told him he was a drag and started sleeping with someone who shared her habit.

  “She left me for a crack-head,” he said. “Last I heard, she’s now a lesbian.”

  A lesbian. Cool. One less woman to worry about, I thought.

  “What did you do after she left?”

  “I got in my car and drove. I ended up in Costa Rica. I spent two months there, just writing. For hours on end. You know what it’s like when you’re working and everything just clicks. Six hours go by and it feels like seconds. I love that. It was one of the most exhilarating and most painful times of my life. I didn’t want to come back.”

  “Why did you?”

  “I was running out of money. And I knew I had a job waiting for me at the paper. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have. My roots are somewhere else. I’ve never felt like I belonged here.”

  I asked him where he thought he belonged.

  “Someplace more intimate, with more soul. Los Angeles signed a pact with the devil and lost its soul a long time ago, you know? It flourishes, but it’s doomed. I’m planning on getting out of here as soon as I can.”

  “Where to?”

  “To the south. Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, I don’t know. As soon as I sell my book, I’m going to buy a little house somewhere down there, one with a porch. I’m going to spend my days writing and my nights making love in the sweltering southern heat. Set my spirit free.”

  Jacob talked like no one I’d ever met. I wondered if he talked that way because he was a writer, or if he was a writer because he talked that way.

  I asked him when he knew he wanted to write. He told me about how, when he was in high school, h
e and his buddy, Pete, who was still his best friend, used to skip class and sneak off to Hollywood Park, where he’d met Charles Bukowski.

  “He was there all the time. It was obvious we were too young to gamble, so he used to take our money and go bet on horses for us. Then he’d buy us beers and try to get us dates with the waitresses. But he also gave me books. I didn’t know real men wrote poetry until I met him.”

  As far as women went, Jacob told me he’d dated a few girls since Nina, besides the ones who answered the ad, that is, none of which he had any intention of seeing again.

  “What about you, Trixie?”

  I told him about some of my mistakes, most recently Greg the neighbor. We went out for almost a year and broke up just before Thanksgiving. Up until about a month prior to meeting Jacob, Greg and I were still having sex on occasion, though I eventually put a stop to that as well. Greg made his living as a professional surfer, and I tend to have a weakness for men who manage to get through life without having to hold down a real job, probably because my father worked a hundred hours a day and I never saw him. What’s worse, anytime I complained about my father’s absence, my mother tried to make me feel like the guilty one.

  “Mom, why doesn’t Dad ever eat dinner with us?”

  “Beatrice, your father works hard so that you can live in a nice house and have everything you want. Don’t whine.”

  “What if what I want is for him to eat dinner with us once in a while?”

  “Drop it, Beatrice.”

  That’s my excuse for even speaking to Greg—a blond beach bum with a bowl-shaped haircut, who smelled like coconut, occasionally referred to me as “Dude,” and thought monogamy was the practice of sewing your initials onto a set of towels. I used to catch him traipsing the halls with random surfing Betty’s, and he’d offer me no explanations. He’d just greet me by jutting out his chin, as if I were the building superintendent. I suppose I should have stuck up for myself a little, but I didn’t care enough to fight about it. It’s not like I wanted to marry him. Hell, I could barely stand him. Yet it wasn’t until after Valentine’s Day that I finally cut him off once and for all. He gave me a card with my name written really big on the envelope. Not only had he decorated it with lightning bolts, but he’d spelled it wrong. Like this: Beatress.