God-Shaped Hole

by Tiffanie DeBartolo

  He let me ride him until I came, and by then, between the porn and watching me get off, he was ready for a little something. Slowly, I slid him inside me. Usually he liked me to sit up when I fucked him, so he could see my body. That night he pulled me down close to his chest and didn’t make a sound. No moans, no groans, nothing. He just let out a long exhale, like he’d been holding his breath, and he squinted for a few seconds. That’s how I knew he was finished.

  I fell asleep after that. Jacob didn’t shut off the light for at least another hour. He stayed up and finished reading the book.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  We slept late the next morning and splurged on room service for breakfast. I had a Belgian waffle with strawberries. Jacob had a mushroom and cheese omelet with hash browns, sausage, toast, and coffee. After my shower, I pranced around the room in the fluffy white hotel robe while we tried to decide what to do. It was our last full day in San Francisco and we didn’t want to waste it. Jacob suggested that we stay in bed and watch movies, which wasn’t a bad idea, except that it was a submission of avoidance rather than desire. He knew what I was going to propose. Deep down, I think he wanted me to say it, even needed me to. I waited until he’d ingested a sufficient amount of caffeine before I sprang it on him.

  “So, did you know your father lived around here?”

  “He lives in Mill Valley. That’s north of the city,” Jacob said. I didn’t realize he was privy to so much information about Thomas Doorley’s elusive life.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He’s lived in the same place for twenty-five years. It’s no big secret.”

  “Have you ever been there?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Feel like stopping by?”

  He tilted his head to the left and sighed.

  I made him sit down and I apologized for being a pest about the whole situation, but, I told him, I could see how badly he wanted to make contact with the man. I could see it in his face every time I mentioned Thomas Doorley’s name, every time I brought up the book. He was cursed. I even reminded him what he’d told me when we first met, that he hoped he would one day have the chance to speak to his father face to face. Those were practically his exact words.

  “We’re here. Why not just do it now?” I said.

  “I don’t know exactly where he lives or anything.”

  I took the secret piece of paper from my wallet and handed it to him.

  “Next excuse,” I said.

  “Trixie, don’t you think if he wanted to see me, he’d have found me by now?”

  “Yes. But what difference does it make what he wants? Fuck what he wants. He doesn’t deserve to have his wants respected. I mean, what about what you want? He’s your father, for God’s sake. You have every right.”

  “But he’s not my father. I mean, technically he’s my father, genetically. But beyond that, he’s nothing.”

  “All I’m saying is that if you want to know this man, regardless of what he thinks, you should be able to.”

  Jacob rested his elbows on the room service table and held his fists together like he was praying. His mouth was covered by his hands and he mumbled something inaudible as he stared at the dime-sized red stain that stood out on the white tablecloth. It was from a strawberry that had fallen off his fork when he reached for a bite of my waffle. He sat there mesmerized by the little scarlet smudge. He looked scared. I’d never seen that much trepidation and helplessness on his face before, and looking at him made me ache like I did in high school when I was a volunteer at the animal shelter and my mother wouldn’t let me bring home the dogs that were about to get the ax.

  “But Mom, they’re innocent.”

  “I don’t care, Beatrice.”

  “They sense what’s going to happen to them.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “They don’t want to die!”

  “I’m not going to say it again.”

  I eventually had to quit. Being at the shelter was even more depressing than being at home. And I still feel guilty about not saving those fucking dogs. I should have protected them. Just like I should have protected Jacob. I should have kidnapped him and taken him to some perfect, southern, Eggleston-snapshot of an Elysian Field.

  I should have locked him up instead of throwing him to the wolves.

  I should have never let anyone or anything hurt him.

  How many times in your life are you allowed to say, “If only…?”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Mill Valley was across the Golden Gate Bridge. How ridiculous, I thought, that I’d been to San Francisco a dozen times and had never crossed the Golden Gate. The sky was clear that day, the same color as the water, with a strong wind that drew our car to the left and filled the sails of the boats below us, sending them gliding across the bay. It was like driving right through a postcard.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” I said. I was trying to distract Jacob with the view.

  “Huh?” he said, a world away.

  I took the Stinson Beach exit off of 101 and followed the signs for about three miles in to Mill Valley. There was a quaint town there, with a market, a vintage movie theater, little shops selling souvenirs and novelties, an unusual number of Italian restaurants, and a bookstore café called The Depot. About a dozen mountain-bikers were gathered in the square, and almost every person I saw was lugging either a dog or a kid behind them. The air smelled like eucalyptus. Besides all the cars and the fact that the whole town appeared to be overrun by yuppies, it seemed like a delightful place to live.

  I parked in the lot behind the bookstore. Jacob stopped in for a cup of coffee and stalled for time by drinking it as slowly as possible. We wandered around, and the longer we wandered, the sweatier Jacob’s hands became. Finally I asked a kid in a blue-and-yellow striped shirt who was standing in front of the bike shop passing out flyers where Lovell Avenue was. That’s the name of the street Thomas Doorley lived on.

  “Right there,” he said and pointed to the road behind us.

  Jacob and I walked up a little hill, past a restaurant that served Indian burritos, whatever the hell those were, and checked the numbers on the houses. We were less than two blocks away.

  The Doorley house was a tiny A-frame painted pale gray with white trim. There was a run-down old gate in front of the small yard and the hydrangea bushes were overgrown and unruly—Thomas Doorley was definitely not a gardener.

  The house was right next door to a church, one with some sort of Sunday school in session. About a dozen children were scurrying around the basement classroom—we could hear them giggling through the open windows. Jacob walked over, looked in, and reported that the kids were having cookies and orange drink. Not orange juice, but orange drink, he specified. That concerned him.

  “Kids need vitamin C,” he said. “Not so much sugar. Remind me about that when we have kids. Remind me that our girls aren’t going to a school where they get fed sugar to eat and sugar to drink.”

  “Our girls won’t be going to school on Sunday,” I said.

  “Unless it’s to sing with the Aretha Franklin clone who heads the choir in Greenville, Mississippi.”

  “Athens, Georgia,” I said.

  Jacob sat down on the steps of the parish with his elbow on his knee, his chin on his fist, and stared at the ground. I took a picture of him there. He looked like The Thinker.

  “I need a cigarette,” he said.

  “Since when do you smoke?”

  “Since right now.”

  I asked him how old his father would be and he tapped his fingers to his thumb, trying to figure it out.

  “About fifty-one,” he said.

  I opened the gate in front of Thomas Doorley’s yard, trying to see inside the house. There was a television and a couch in the small front room, but everything was turned off and there were no c
ars in the driveway. It didn’t look like anyone was home.

  I was about to prowl around to the back when I heard a woman’s voice.

  “Can I help you?”

  I spun around. The lady who stood in front of me was probably in her mid-forties, kind of petite with frizzy red hair and freckles that covered every exposed inch of skin on her body. Beside her was a teenage boy, who, if I had to guess, was around sixteen. He had red hair, too; it came down almost to his shoulders. Something about his eyes struck me as familiar. I got a jolt when I figured out why.

  They were Jacob’s eyes.

  Woman and boy were each carrying a bag of groceries, but they looked like the kind of people who might have shaken our hands had theirs been free.

  “Um…do you live here?” I said to the woman.

  When she said she did, Jacob stood up. He walked over slowly, curiously, but he didn’t say anything. He just looked at her.

  Standing face to face with those two people, it dawned on me that there was a greater than slim chance I hadn’t thought our little field-trip through. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all. I’d pictured Thomas Doorley living alone. In a one-room cabin or in an old Airstream trailer. In the forest. In the middle of nowhere, cutting his own wood and growing marijuana in his backyard like some beatnik Unabomber.

  Meekly, the woman said, “Is there something we can do for you?”

  I introduced myself. I told her my name was Maureen McCormick. I said I was a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle. I don’t know why I lied, but I figured at that point, it was the safest way to get information out of her. I had only a vague idea of who she might be, but I hadn’t gone to Mill Valley to disrupt innocent lives; only guilty ones.

  “Rhonda Doorley,” she said. “This is my son, Eric.”

  As if he spoke another language and didn’t quite comprehend Rhonda’s words, Jacob mumbled, “Your son?”

  I introduced Jacob as Barry Williams, hoping Rhonda and Eric weren’t fans of The Brady Bunch.

  “Are you looking for my husband?” she said.

  I told her I was. I told her I was writing a story on artists living in Marin County. I told her the cashier at City Lights gave me their address.

  The lies were coming to me in flashes and I thought, damn, I’d make a hell of a detective, because these two sponges have soaked up every drop I’ve spilled so far. I must have seemed honest or something. Then again, Jacob stared at me like I had birdshit on my face.

  Rhonda spoke softly and told me that her husband wasn’t home; that she didn’t know when he’d be back. She was a bit of a shrinking violet. She struck me as the kind of woman who might let a man abuse her, simply because she didn’t know she was being abused.

  Eric’s sweatshirt said Mt. Tamalpais Lacrosse on it. I remembered passing Mt. Tamalpais High School on our drive into town.

  “You’re welcome to wait if you want,” Rhonda said. “But you could be waiting days. Tom lives in his own time zone. He was supposed to be back at noon.”

  It was after four.

  “No, that’s okay. Thanks anyway,” Jacob said. “Let’s go, Trixie.”

  If he’d called me Trixie one more time, he probably would have blown our cover.

  “Have we met before?” Rhonda said to Jacob.

  “No. We haven’t,” Jacob said regrettably. He took my hand and started dragging me down the street.

  We were already to the corner when Rhonda paged us.

  “Wait! Here he comes,” she said. “That’s Tom there!”

  An old Mercury Montego painted a hideous, carnival shade of blue was just rounding the bend.

  Jacob stopped dead in his tracks. Only his head moved. He followed the path of the car and made eye-contact with his father. Thomas looked at Jacob and Jacob looked at Thomas. If that guy is drunk, I thought, he’s going to run right over his wife, crash through his gate, and flatten the hydrangeas. He wasn’t paying one iota of attention to where he was going.

  The car came to a stop in the driveway. Thomas got out and Rhonda tried to tell him we were a couple of reporters. He ignored her. He walked our way, peering at Jacob.

  Once Thomas was directly in front of us, Jacob introduced himself. He said his name mechanically, as if he were participating in a spelling bee. He let the accent fall on his last name. It sounded like a slap in the face.

  “I know who you are,” Thomas said, smirking. “I figured you’d show up here one of these days. To be honest, I didn’t think it’d take you this long.”

  Thomas was even smaller than Jacob, completely unkempt, and the fresh smile he’d worn in the photograph I’d seen of him had been replaced by dark impassivity. Underneath it all, though, his face was still just an aged version of my lover’s. He was Jacob with deeper lines. Jacob plus twenty years and hundreds of bottles of Jack Daniels. Jacob plus the sixties, which, I judged, might have been part of the problem. The entire Decade of Love seemed shrouded inside of Thomas Doorley—like someone told him it had all been a myth—a myth he buried deep inside himself with the hope that it might sprout wings someday and finally fulfill it’s promise of freedom.

  “Who’s the little lady?” Thomas said, looking me up and down like I was beef roast on a platter.

  “The little lady is my girlfriend,” Jacob said.

  “Touchy, touchy…,” Thomas stretched out his arm to greet me.

  “Beatrice Jordan,” I said.

  He kissed the top of my hand. “It’s a pleasure, Miss Jordan.” Then he shifted toward his son. Jacob wouldn’t take his father’s hand.

  “Fair enough,” Thomas said.

  Unless Jacob softens up, I thought, this isn’t going to go well.

  “Let’s go get a drink,” Thomas said. He led and we followed, while Rhonda’s eyes trailed us. But Thomas offered his wife no explanations. He never even looked back at her.

  We ended up at a place that was probably Mill Valley’s most hopping scene at night, but in the middle of the day was empty save for us and the band that was setting up on the tiny stage. It was a sawdust bar called The Sweet Water, an inauthentic version of the kind of joint I was sure awaited us in any town below the Mason-Dixon line. I imagined our future hangout to have a jukebox instead of a band, with patrons who wasted their quarters on Lynyrd Skynyrd all night long. I would have had to bring lots of coins—to corner the market on better music, because I hate southern rock ‘n’ roll, especially the kind made by guys who cut down Neil Young in their songs.

  “The yuppies must feel like they’re roughing it in here,” I said without thinking. Thomas looked at me and laughed dryly, as if he agreed.

  The bartender took our orders. He already knew what Thomas wanted: whiskey with no rocks. I asked for a glass of white wine. Jacob got coffee.

  “Come on, drink with your old man,” Doorley said to Jacob. The bartender paused and waited for Jacob to reconfirm his choice. Forcefully, and without a flinch, he reiterated, “Coffee.”

  None of us said anything for the minute it took the bartender to fill our glasses. Thomas downed his drink in one gulp, then asked for another, all the while staring at Jacob. After his second shot, he spoke.

  “Shit, looking at you is like looking in a fucking mirror. Only I’m looking at twenty years ago.” Thomas turned to me. “I wasn’t a bad looking guy, was I?”

  “Damn straight,” I said.

  Jacob remained pensive. I felt like it was up to me to give birth to some sort of conversation. I told Thomas that I’d read Morning Glory. I asked him, artfully, where the inspiration came from for the story. He elbowed Jacob. “You better hang on to this one,” he said. “Smart and she’s got a nice ass. That’s a rare combination in a woman.”

  Jacob gave his father a foul look. If Thomas had made one more crass remark, I truly believe Jacob would have belted him.

  “Jacob’s a
writer, too,” I said to Thomas, rattling off as much of Jacob’s resume as I could remember. I even told him about Hallelujah, much to the dismay of my boyfriend, who I was sure, by the sneer he gave me, wanted me to shut up.

  The look on Thomas’s face made me think he was pleasantly surprised that his long-lost son made his living as a writer, even gratified by it, but he didn’t question me any further. He was in the middle of asking me what I did when Jacob interrupted him.

  “Is Eric my brother?” he said without looking up from his coffee.

  Thomas answered yes to Jacob’s question. He said Eric was indeed his half-brother. I think that hurt Jacob more than anything he could have imagined learning about the missing pieces of his life that day. He’d gone looking for a father, but a brother wasn’t something he’d bargained for at all.

  One of the guys in the band started tuning a guitar. It sounded like he was playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  “Do I have any other siblings I should know about?” Jacob said.

  “None that I know of,” Thomas said.

  “Does Eric know? About me?”

  “He does now. At least he will, once I get home and have to explain you people to my family.”

  I found it heartbreaking that, when referring to his family, Thomas never once meant Jacob. I hated Thomas for that.

  “I figured I’d tell him when and if the time came. I guess the time is now.”

  Thomas went on to explain tactlessly that Rhonda knew he’d “knocked a girl up” a long time ago, but nothing more than that. Evidently, Tom and Rhonda had been married for about sixteen years. She was his second wife. His first wife, who he was married to briefly in the mid-seventies, never had any kids.

  “Accidents happen,” Doorley said.

  I didn’t know if he was alluding to Jacob, to Eric, or to both of them. It was a pretty lousy thing to say, regardless.