Sorrow

by Tiffanie DeBartolo

  I took out my phone and sent Cal a text that said: All is well here. We miss you, brother.

  I saw Rae’s car turn the corner and head out of town.

  I looked down at my jeans, pressed my thumb onto the black fingerprint above my knee, and imagined October could feel it on her leg.

  Pathetic.

  SEVENTEEN.

  There’s a type of spider native to southern Africa. It’s called the wheel spider, and it cartwheels away from threatening situations when it senses it’s in danger. In fact, it’s so adept at getting away from perilous circumstances that it can do almost fifty cartwheels a minute to escape.

  I was the human equivalent of the wheel spider, constantly tumbling away from anything that had the potential to hurt me. Because I can talk until I’m blue in the face about how I hadn’t wanted to hurt Cal, and that was true, I would have rather cut off my strumming hand than betrayed him again. But I had a hunch that even if October’s boyfriend had been a stranger to me, even if she hadn’t had a boyfriend at all, I would have made up a dozen other reasons to spin away from her.

  Later that afternoon, when I got back to Casa Diez, October was in the yard with Diego, playing the wolfhound version of fetch. Wolfhounds aren’t known for their retrieving skills; every now and then Diego would go get the ball if you threw it, but he wouldn’t bring it back. He would just hold it in his mouth and circle you in big, gawky gallops, trying to coax you into chasing him for it.

  Diego dropped the ball and ran to my side when he saw me, his tail wag like a whip against my leg. October stood still, arms crossed in front of her chest, watching me.

  The walk home had made me more lucid. I felt as if I’d been pulled up the driveway by big, heavy thoughts. I went to October wanting to lay them at her feet, but all I could say was “Sorry.”

  She didn’t say anything. She just picked up the ball and threw it toward the garage. Diego followed the ball with his eyes but didn’t go after it.

  October crossed her arms again, this time higher and more rigidly, as if she were protecting her heart. She stood straight and dignified like the redwoods that surrounded her, like they were all a gang and she was their tiny leader.

  “Listen,” I sighed. “These last couple of months . . . Moving here . . . Meeting you . . . Reconnecting with Cal . . . It’s a lot. And I know that’s not an excuse for being an asshole, but that’s just who I am.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not all you are.”

  Diego took a step closer and leaned so heavily into me I had to steady myself to keep my balance.

  I said, “I don’t want people to get hurt, OK?”

  “Oh. OK. Well, either you think I have no feelings or you mean you don’t want Chris to get hurt.”

  I shrugged. The truth is, I wasn’t thinking about Cal or October. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking, One day she’ll see me for who I really am and she’ll crush me. I was thinking, I don’t want to get hurt.

  She studied me, and her face relaxed and paled, as if it were emptying itself of blood. Then she nodded and said, “I understand.” And I believed her, because her eyes were bristling with a sad tenderness I didn’t think I deserved.

  I turned and started toward my apartment. A moment later she said, “You’re going to die someday, you know.”

  I stopped at the steps and turned back around. Diego’s ball was at my feet.

  “I know that,” I said, gruffer than I’d meant to.

  “I’m not sure you do,” she said. “Because you live like someone who doesn’t understand how quickly all of this is going to be over. You live like someone who doesn’t understand how fast the sand moves through the hourglass. You live like someone who doesn’t understand how much all these decisions matter. How much your dreams and desires matter. How much your happiness matters. Or maybe you don’t care. But I think you do. I think you care so much.”

  I glanced off into the trees, looking for a retort, for a spark of wisdom I knew lived out there. I thought about the thesis I’d written on Aristotle’s notion of happiness, and how Sid used to tell me that it was useless to study philosophy and ethics if you couldn’t actually put what you’d learned into practice.

  “Before you know it, the majority of your life is going to be behind you,” October continued. “Hell, it may already be behind you. And in the end, nothing is going to seem as scary or as painful as the realization that you walked away from everything you ever wanted.”

  I felt that heavy pull again, a tension in my skin, in my body, in the weight of my feet on the gravel below me. It was like what October had said the night before about gravity being Earth’s way of keeping her spirit grounded. Only my spirit felt chained.

  “You think you know what I want?” I said.

  “I don’t know it. I feel it.”

  I picked up the ball and threw it hard across the yard. Diego didn’t flinch.

  Without another word, October turned and went into her house. The dog waited, watching for my next move, but he soon turned and went into the house too.

  I made it halfway up the steps to my apartment, changed my mind, and went back down to Cal’s studio.

  I tore off my shoes and threw them against the door. Then I grabbed the ’59 Les Paul Standard and spent the rest of the day using it to channel my rage.

  EIGHTEEN.

  October and I had a demanding week in preparation for the exhibit on Friday. We had no time to talk about anything except work, and that was a relief. But the vibe between us was strained. October was distant, and I was too sheepish to address the situation directly. On Monday morning I offered to make her a cappuccino and she looked at me as if we were strangers, as if it were a preposterous idea that I might fix her a cup of coffee. I kept meeting her eyes, searching for that familiar softness, but what I saw looked like disdain.

  I was at the studio until after midnight on Monday, putting the final touches on the birdcage. On Tuesday we did two abbreviated run-throughs, contracting the bars with October inside to be certain the machinery worked smoothly, and to make sure I knew exactly when to stop it so that it didn’t crush her.

  I’d ended up making the mechanism work by floating the cage over the base and attaching the cage to the base by pegs that sat in tracks. The tracks were embedded into the base of the cage, under the grid so you could barely see them. The tops of the cage bars were connected to a single hinged point, gears and pulleys inside the base drew the pegs toward each other along the tracks, and the hinged point allowed the curved bamboo to straighten toward the ceiling as the bars got closer.

  It sounds complicated, but it all worked on a simple system that could be controlled via an app on my phone that was normally used to turn lights on and off in houses.

  It took me a couple of tries to get the timing dialed in, but once I did, I felt certain it was ready; I disassembled it for transport the following day.

  I spent Wednesday packing everything up with the help of two husky handlers the gallery had sent over. October had her final dress fitting, met with a hair and makeup artist, and ran through the audiovisual portion of the performance on-site.

  On Thursday, October, Rae, and I went to the gallery to supervise the installation.

  The Thomas Frasier Gallery is a large, pristine, L-shaped building in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco. It has high ceilings and walls the color of brand-new teeth, with two gallery spaces inside. The main one was a long, narrow room with a small reception area—the bigger of the two, this was where the paintings and photographs by the other artists were being hung, along with two sculptures set up in the middle. Beyond that room was a hallway that led to a smaller gallery where the cage was being installed.

  October was the most prominent artist contributing to the exhibit, and attendance at the party, which included visiting her installation, required a sliding-scale donation
starting at 250 dollars.

  I worked until early evening to get the cage back together. Once it was secure, Rodney, the gallery’s audiovisual engineer, showed me how to connect the equipment to my app so I could start and stop the music and video clips along with everything else. After we got that uploaded, Rae drove October and me home, and while Rae and I chatted about the details of the day, October didn’t say a word.

  The cocktail reception was set for 6:00 p.m., with October’s exhibit commencing at 7:00 and running until 9:00, and the auction ending at 10:00.

  That afternoon the gallery sent a car to get October and, by association, me. We both sat in the back seat. And even though October seemed less tense than she had all week, she was still aloof when I tried to speak to her.

  “Did you sleep OK last night?” I mumbled.

  “I never sleep well before performances,” she said, her gaze out the window.

  “Have you eaten?” She had a habit of forgetting to eat when she was preoccupied with work. “I can go get you some food when we get to the gallery.”

  Her phone beeped and she pulled it out of her bag. “That’s not your job,” she said. “And anyway, there will be food there.”

  “Right. OK.”

  I had an urge to scoot over and press against her so that she could feel my frustration, and my affection, but instead I pulled out my phone and busied myself scrolling through the trending topics on Reddit. Meanwhile, October spent the rest of the ride texting with Cal. And I knew it was Cal, because I kept taking furtive glances to my left and saw his name at the top of her screen.

  In that moment, I envied Cal. And I remember chuckling a little when it occurred to me that I envied him not because he was a successful musician and I wasn’t, but because he was currently commanding October’s attention.

  We were met at the door by the gallery manager, a tall woman in a white pinstriped suit named Helen Driver. She took us up to the green room—a nice studio apartment a floor above the gallery that they’d set up for October to relax in and prepare. Rae was waiting there, as was October’s hair and makeup artist, Shelly. A platter of fancy cheese and crackers had been laid out, along with what I called vegetables but what Rae kept calling “crudités” like she was the Queen of England.

  Rae was carrying a clipboard and, on top of that, her usual squirrel food. As I watched her shuffling around, I could see she was in her glory—giving orders, eating dried fruit and nuts, and acting like hers was the world’s most stressful job.

  More reassuring to me was the bar cart near the couch. No tequila that I could see, but I spotted some top-shelf whiskey and planned on dipping into it prior to the reception.

  I had originally planned on avoiding the reception altogether. In my mind the night was going to go like this: I would hang out upstairs until it was time to put October in the cage. Then I would go down and man the cage and not have to talk to anyone. And then I would go home. But Rae informed me that October was going to need some alone time before the performance, and that meant I would have to make myself scarce right around the time the reception was set to begin.

  I let out a discernable grumble and October said, “You need to mingle anyway.”

  “Me? Why do I have to mingle?”

  “Joe . . .” She was sitting in a tall chair with her eyes closed and her head tilted up at Shelly, who was applying dark, sparkly shadow on her lids. I wasn’t used to seeing her with makeup on and thought she looked like she was wearing a theatrical mask of her own face.

  “You built this thing,” she said. “You need to talk about it. Toot your horn.”

  I mumbled something about not having a horn to toot, and she said, “Well, then toot your kazoo. You have to. It’s for charity.”

  I sat on the couch with my arms crossed in front of my chest, and Rae said, “I think he’s pouting now.”

  Moments later, Helen Driver summoned Rae downstairs to finalize the guest list, and she walked out just as Mr. P and his husband, Thomas, walked in. They were well-dressed men, late fifties, and though I’d seen them coming and going around Casa Diez, I’d never officially met them.

  They greeted October with air kisses and loud affection. Mr. P was the more handsome of the two. Tan and fit, he looked like an aging surfer, not a Silicon Valley mogul. Thomas was tall and elegant, with smooth, shiny, almost pink skin unnatural to someone his age. He wore round, gold-rimmed glasses, and his teeth were glow-in-the-dark white like the walls of the gallery.

  Thomas was carrying a small black vase filled with yellow lupine wildflowers. He held it up in front of October and said, “From Christopher.”

  He set the vase on the table and handed October the card that went along with it, but she didn’t read it because Shelly told her to close her eyes.

  Seeing the flowers from Cal reinforced my belief that I wasn’t good enough for October. If I were half the man she seemed to think I was, I would have been considerate enough to send her a vase of native wildflowers and a card too.

  Neither Mr. P nor Thomas noticed me slumped over on the couch until October pointed her thumb in my direction and said, “Guys, this is Joe.” She paused, and then added, “My assistant.” I stood up just as she said, “Joe, meet Phil Pearlman and Thomas Frasier.” Only then did I realize that Mr. P’s husband was Thomas Frasier, the gallery owner.

  When October said my name, their eyes widened, and when they shook my hand, it was with a suspicious amount of interest.

  “Well, hello . . .” Mr. P said.

  “We’ve heard so much about you,” Thomas added.

  These were two of October’s closest friends. I knew by the tones of their voices that she’d told them what had happened between us, and I didn’t know whether to be flattered or humiliated.

  “Joe doesn’t want to go to the cocktail party,” October said. “Will you guys take him downstairs and keep him company?”

  “Of course,” Thomas promised, slipping his arm through mine. “You’re a cutie, aren’t you?”

  I blushed, and Thomas said, “Look, he’s blushing.”

  “Mr. Pearlman,” I said, trying to deflect the attention. “Have you seen the birdcage?”

  “Oh, sweetie, call me Phil. And no. I’m waiting for the big reveal.”

  “I saw it!” Thomas exclaimed. “It’s exceptional.”

  Rae came back with the clipboard still in her hands and her snacks still on top.

  “Good god with your trail mix,” Phil said to her. “There’s smoked Gouda, jamón, and Marcona almonds over there, and you’re eating bird shit.”

  Rae was all business. “Ten minutes, and you guys have to clear the room.”

  Thomas leaned down toward my ear and mumbled “bossy bitch” under his breath, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

  In preparation for our exodus down to the party, I went to the bar cart and poured myself a double shot of whiskey. Phil saw what I was doing and said, “Make it two, Joey.”

  I handed him the drink and fixed another one for myself.

  Phil raised his glass and said, “To brilliant women. And the men who put them in cages.”

  I mumbled, “To art.”

  Shelly was in the middle of applying mascara to October’s eyelashes, but October managed to look over at me when I said that.

  The whiskey never kicked in. No doubt I appeared aloof and composed to everyone around me. That’s my superhero skill in life. But inside I was a basket case. I wanted the exhibit to be a success. I wanted to fit in. I wanted October’s friends and colleagues to like me. And I wanted the mechanics of the cage to function without issue. All of that, combined with a roomful of strangers I assumed knew more about art than I did, triggered fear, anxiety, and feelings of inadequacy rooted so deep in me I wished I could summon the numb, checked-out Joe Harper to represent me for the night.

  Downstairs, people were sta
rting to arrive. Many were from the tech world, Phil told me: young, obscenely paid, and dressed like kindergarteners. Lots of colorful hoodies, sneakers, and slouchy jeans. I had on black pants and the black striped shirt I’d bought for Cal’s dinner party and felt overdressed.

  “They look like they don’t have pots to piss in,” Phil said, “but they’ll pay thousands for these pieces, just watch.”

  Thomas and Phil seemed to know many of the guests, and they introduced me to a handful, including the woman who ran the organization for which we were raising money. Her name was Julia, and she told me I was the spitting image of an actor from a TV show on HBO. When she walked away, Thomas claimed she had been flirting with me.

  Thomas led me around the gallery, telling me about all the other pieces being auctioned off. Two in particular moved me. One was by a striking, livewire of a woman from Seattle named Jennifer, who became wide-eyed and animated when Phil told her I worked with October—I thought it said a lot about Phil that he used the word “with” as opposed to “for.”

  Jennifer told me she was a fan of October’s work and asked me rapid-fire questions about the birdcage. She was outgoing and cool, and her piece was cool too—a large-scale square panel made of wax, paint, and gold leaf on wood, with a round, celestial form in the middle of the square. When I narrowed my eyes hard at it, I felt as if I were looking at deep space and the light of the moon, or a portal into a distant, dreamy galaxy. There seemed to be as much hidden underneath as there was on the surface, and I could relate to that.