Sorrow
A Novel
Tiffanie DeBartolo
Copyright © 2020 by Tiffanie DeBartolo
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a review who may quote passages for review.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available
ISBN Paperback 978-1-949116-30-4
ISBN Ebook 978-1-949116-31-1
First Edition
“Sorrow”
written by Matt Berninger and Aaron Dessner
Lyrics reprinted by permission of The National
Cover design by: Jessica Dionne Abouelela
Formatting: Jessica Dionne Abouelela
Woodhall Press, 81 Old Saugatuck Road, Norwalk, CT 06855
WoodhallPress.com
Distributed by INGRAM
For my parents
Whoever uses the spirit
that is in him creatively is an artist.
To make living itself an art,
that is the goal.
—Henry Miller
Nothing in any life,
no matter how well or poorly lived,
is wiser than failure
and clearer than sorrow.
—Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
From: THOMAS FRASIER GALLERY
Sent: Thurs, June 1, 2017 at 8:12 AM
To: Joseph Harper
Subject: OCTOBER DANKO Sorrow: This is Art
The Thomas Frasier Gallery
in collaboration with
the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
is proud to announce the world premiere of:
SORROW: This Is Art
A Living Exhibit by October Danko
October Danko’s work has been a favorite
of art lovers from around the globe, and we are
pleased to invite you to the monthlong performance of:
SORROW: This Is Art
September 28–October 24
The newest piece in October’s Living Exhibit series will find her sitting at a table in SFMoMa’s Roberts Family Gallery from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. daily. One at a time, gallery visitors will be invited to sit across from her and take her hands, wherein she will “hold their sorrow.”
Each visitor may spend up to five minutes with the artist. They will be permitted to speak to her if they wish, but she will remain silent.
October explains: “This exhibit was inspired by my belief that pain can be art, that connecting as humans is the greatest gift we can give each other, and that, for better or worse, sometimes it’s our pain that connects us.”
*Ms. Danko suffers from Mirror Touch Synesthesia, a condition that enables her to experience the sensations of others simply by observing them experiencing the particular sensation. In its more esoteric form, the artist can intuit the emotions of another person by touching them.
October says she was inspired to create this Living Exhibit after a difficult period in her life. “There’s nothing like heartbreak to crack a person wide open. But the cracks can sometimes act as reservoirs too. Not only for pain, but for joy as well. Leonard Cohen once wrote that the cracks are where the light gets in, and this exhibit is about letting the light in. It’s about healing my own sorrow by connecting to the sorrow of others. It’s about letting go of my pain by holding on to someone else’s. Ultimately, it’s about the oneness of love and hope.”
Advanced tickets are now available on the museum website and HERE.
©October Danko, courtesy of The THOMAS FRASIER GALLERY
SFMoMA is closed on Wednesdays.
ONE.
My name is Joseph Harper and if there is one thing you should know about me, it is this: I am not a brave man.
Over the course of my thirty-seven living years I have been called a lot of respectable things: intelligent, sensitive, even good-looking and gifted. But not brave.
Never brave.
And now, a confession. One I’m not proud of. I was recently asked to leave the Whitefish Community Library in Whitefish, Montana, due to intoxication. It wasn’t even lunchtime yet, and the three shots of tequila I’d had before I got there began to hit me in an obvious and somewhat disorderly way.
I am not brave, I said to no one. I have never been brave.
I was alone in a warm, light-filled corner of the Botany section, on a leather recliner where, to my left, outside the window, the leaves of an aspen tree were announcing the steadfastness of spring. That settled me for a moment. Spring. Rebirth. New beginnings. But then I noticed the aspen’s eyes trained on mine with what I was certain was disappointment.
“Stop looking at me like that,” I said to the tree, louder than what was considered polite in a library.
I had the footrest up so my feet were comfortably elevated, and there was a rectangular coffee-table book called Remarkable Trees of the World on my lap. I used the book as a desk for my laptop because I found that if I just set the laptop on my legs, it eventually heated up and burned my skin, even through my jeans.
“Mr. Harper, is everything all right?”
Patty, the librarian, had wandered over to check on me. She knew me by name because I had been going there for almost three years to read and write and check my e-mail. The little guest cabin I lived in on Sid’s property didn’t have an internet connection, and even though Sid said I could get one, I never bothered because I didn’t think I’d be staying in Montana long enough to need it.
“Mr. Harper?” Patty said again.
She was wearing her usual camouflage pants, and I said, “Patty, where are your legs?” but she didn’t get the joke.
“Are you all right?”
I wanted to shake my head and tell her that I was most definitely not all right, but I gathered she was aware of this fact, that her question was largely rhetorical. She’d seen me when I was there an hour earlier, and I had been fine then. Well, I’d been sober. We’d exchanged trite pleasantries about the weather, and I was as right as a guy like me can be, which, if right were the whole, is only a fraction. But then I opened my inbox and saw the e-mail from the Thomas Frasier Gallery announcing October’s upcoming Living Exhibit entitled Sorrow, and the fraction halved.
I read the e-mail, even though I told myself not to. What’s it to me? I thought. Who cares?
I did. I cared so much that I shut my computer, left the library, and walked straight to the Great Northern Bar & Grill, where in quick succession I had the aforementioned shots of Cuervo Gold.
After that I returned to the library, intent on writing October an e-mail.
How are you? I typed. Long time no talk. Congratulations on SFMoMA.
October had once told me that having a show at SFMoMA was one of her biggest dreams in life.
You did it, I wrote. Hope you’re well.
Even in my inebriated state, I knew this was a pathetic attempt at communication, particularly since it had been 949 days since I’d last seen and/or spoken to her, and I deleted the whole thing. That’s when I directed my attention to the tree, and then Patty came over.
The aspen knew I wasn’t brave. I could see it in its eyes.
“Do you know why aspens have eyes?” I asked Patty, who was standing near my chair, looking either worried or fearful; I couldn’t tell which.
“They’re shade-intolerant,” I explained. “They need light. Lots of it. They battle with their neighb
ors for sun, and the higher they grow, the shadier their lower branches get. So you know what they do? They basically cut off the blood supply to the lower branches so that the taller branches, the ones that get all the light, can thrive. They’re smart trees. They don’t want to expend any energy trying to save the branches in the dark. Not when the ones in the light can flourish. The lower branches eventually fall off, and that leaves a scar. That’s what the eyes are. Scars.”
“Mr. Harper,” Patty said, “I think it might be time for you to go home.”
“My home is in California,” I told her.
“Some fresh air would do you good,” she said, quietly but firmly. “Would you like me to call Sid to come and get you?”
Fucking small towns. Everybody knows everybody. Right away I started packing up my stuff because I didn’t want her to call Sid. He didn’t need to see me like that.
Sid had been my thesis adviser back at UC Berkeley more than fifteen years ago. He teaches at the Flathead Valley Community College now, twelve miles south of Whitefish. He and his teenage daughter, Maggie, had moved up to Montana after his wife died in 2009. We’d kept in touch over the years, and when I found myself wandering aimlessly around the Pacific Northwest, I called him and told him I was in a bad way. He invited me to come and stay in the little caretaker’s cabin on his property while I figured things out.
I planned on hanging around for a month or so, until I got my head back on straight.
It’s been almost three years.
Back in college, I’d written my thesis on Aristotle and his definition of happiness as it related to how well one has lived up to one’s potential as a human being, and Sid had called it exemplary. He said I was a bright, insightful thinker, and he’d granted me my degree with a warm handshake and the kind of encouraging pat on the back that could only come from someone who had no idea what a gutless failure I was going to turn out to be. Or, rather, what a gutless failure I already was.
Because, if I’m being honest, getting that degree was another failure in a succession of failures. I know that sounds absurd, but it’s true. Going to college wasn’t a risky decision. It wasn’t brave. It wasn’t what I’d wanted to do. It was what my father expected of me. The one thing I’d wanted to do with my life—the big dream that would have given depth to my soul and confidence to my heart—I didn’t have the guts to go after.
The last thing Sid said to me before he sent me off into my future was, “You’ve got tremendous potential, Joe. Promise me you’ll do something with it.”
Like I said, that was a long time ago. And for every step forward since, I’ve taken three steps back.
October called it doing the Hokey Pokey. The month before I abandoned her at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, disappearing without explanation, she said, “That’s how you live your life, Joe.” She leaned in close to my face and sang: You put your left foot in, you take your left foot out, you put your right foot in then you freak the fuck about.
It never ceased to amaze me, the way she seemed to perceive what I was feeling when I was feeling it. I’ve always been skilled at hiding my emotions, but October runs on intuition and empathy like cars run on gasoline. And when she addressed me in that voice of hers, full of love and compassion and other sanguine motivations few people possess with that kind of authenticity, I wavered between wanting to throw her off the Golden Gate Bridge and fuck her brains out. Not that I had the balls to do either.
Anyway, if you want to know what my big dream was, I can sum it up in one word: guitar.
I started playing when I was twelve, and by the time I was sixteen I was as good as a kid could be. And this wasn’t according to me; it was according to just about everyone who saw me perform, including the guy who played guitar for Journey, who had been a child prodigy himself back in the 1970s and lived in my hometown of Mill Valley, a small, woody enclave north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, at the base of Mount Tamalpais, Marin County’s highest peak. The Journey guy saw me and Cal perform at an open mic night in town; afterward he came over, shook my hand, and told me I was a genius.
Cal was my best friend all through high school, and to this day the best friend I’ve ever had. The summer we met he could already sing, play guitar and drums, and within days of our meeting, he informed me that as soon as we graduated we were going to move to Brooklyn, start a band, and become legends. We even cut the tips of our thumbs and sealed the deal with our blood so there could be no turning back. We were going to call the band Blood Brothers in honor of our commitment.
“Brooklyn or bust,” Cal used to say.
And this was before every budding musician in the country was moving to Brooklyn to start a band. This was back in the mid-’90s, when people were still heading to Seattle for their musical fortunes and fame. But that pretty much sums Cal up in a nutshell. He was always ahead of the curve. He didn’t follow trends, he set them.
Cal used to say, “Dreams aren’t just ideas, Harp. They’re maps.”
If you want to know the truth, sometimes it feels stupid trying to put into words how important music was to me back then. But when I was a kid, music was all I had. It was my voice, my only real mode of communication. And until Cal Callahan came into my life, it was my only friend.
And what did I give music in return?
Nothing.
I betrayed it.
Like I betrayed Cal.
Like I betrayed October.
Here’s the thing: I knew that reading the e-mail from the Thomas Fraser Gallery announcing October’s upcoming Living Exhibit would get me to thinking. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it got me to feeling.
Four times out of five, I deleted e-mails that had anything to do with October or the gallery, but for some reason I didn’t delete this one.
Consequently, I knew about Sorrow.
I knew I could see her. I could talk to her. I could explain why I left that night, why I disappeared without saying goodbye, and she wouldn’t be able to talk back, order me to leave, call me a coward, or tell me how badly I hurt her.
Or I could do what I’d spent my life doing: nothing.
I was at a crossroads. And while finding myself at a crossroads was not new to me, I’d gone the wrong way at almost every turn.
The road less traveled? That had never been the road on which I’d walked. And if it’s true that fortune favors the brave, my life, up until that point, was a testament to the fact that the opposite is true as well.
Misfortune favors the spineless.
You know what October said to me once when I was feeling down on myself? We’d just hiked to Stinson Beach and were sitting on a piece of driftwood, eating vanilla soft-serve cones, and out of nowhere the feeling hit me—it’s a feeling that overcomes me sometimes, a voice that tells me I’m not good enough, that I’ll never be good enough—and as October’s fingers played connect-the-dots with the freckles on my forearm, her perspicacity kicked in and she said, “You know, it’s never too late to be the person you really are, Joe.”
I didn’t say anything, but what I thought was: Yeah, well, who the fuck is that?
As I zipped up my backpack and stumbled toward the library’s exit, I thanked Patty for her patience. She said, “You’re not going to drive, are you?”
I shook my head and promised her that I intended to sit in my truck and think for a while.
“I really need to think,” I assured her.
But it was more specific than that. What I needed to do was decide whether I was going to go back to California.
October was the only reason I would ever go back.
She was the reason I left, and she was the only reason I would ever return.
TWO.
Almost three years and twelve hundred miles between us, and there was still a pit in my stomach every time I thought about her. And I thought about her
a lot. Though rarely in the present tense. What I mean is, I didn’t often find myself wondering where October was or what she was doing. In my mind she existed almost exclusively in the past, in the memories I had of her, in the short time we had spent together.
For a while after I left, I chose to believe we were doomed from the start. That even if I’d stayed, everything would have eventually busted apart. I chose to believe I was doing us both a favor by taking off. I don’t believe that anymore. Not deep down, anyway. The stomach pit wouldn’t be there if I did.
Nevertheless, from day one there were obstacles, the most obvious one being that October Danko is a world-renowned artist. Granted, she’s only renowned to people in the world that know art. It’s not like she’s a household name or a celebrity. Still, she was accomplished enough when we met that, in comparison, I felt lacking.
That being said, I had never heard of her until I called about the job. The post I’d seen was elusive anyway:
Artist/Studio Assistant WANTED for film/art project(s)—beautiful redwood retreat setting (Mill Valley, CA)—salaried position w/potential to live on property—construction experience a must—call for details.
The location and the live/work situation caught my eye. I was still living in Berkeley and had been yearning to move back to Mill Valley, though I hadn’t pursued that desire in earnest for a couple of reasons. First, I didn’t want to deal with the emotional ramifications of living anywhere near my father. However, he had recently sold his company and retired to Vail, so I could check that excuse off my list.
Bob Harper’s departure aside, I couldn’t afford to live in Mill Valley on my own and probably would have taken the job at October’s even if it had required me to shovel shit for eight hours a day, if for no other reason than it might allow me to live among the redwoods again.
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