The other piece that caught my attention was a wall hanging made of dark ropes knotted together and then hung on polished walnut rods in an intricate pattern of lines and curves that, depending on where I stood, reminded me of a guitar or a woman’s body.
I overheard two young women gossiping about who October’s boyfriend was. One even asked Thomas if Chris Callahan was going to be at the reception, and she asked it in a tone that made me think it was the reason she’d come. Thomas told the girl he didn’t know, even though he did.
Cal had actually texted me a few days earlier to say he’d looked into making it home for the event, but he had a show in Berlin on Wednesday and one in Amsterdam on Saturday, and even if he’d chartered a plane, he said getting back to the Netherlands in time would have been impossible.
Bummed I can’t be there.
I’m sure you two will kill it.
Good luck and send me a pic of my girl.
Fifteen minutes before the installation opened, Rae shuffled over with Rodney at her side and said it was time for me to go get October.
The hallway to the stairs had been roped off, and a bearded behemoth of a man in a suit was standing guard. Big, shaggy, and gray, he looked like a hostile, human version of Diego. And even though he’d seen me come down earlier with Thomas and Phil, he stopped me from going up until Rae said, “He’s OK. He’s going to get Ms. Danko.”
Shelly was tying October into her dress when I walked into the room. I caught a quick flash of October’s bare back and left breast and darted back out, but October laughed and said, “Come in, Joe. You’ve seen boobs before.”
I stepped into the room but stared at the carpet until she was dressed. Once she was, she walked toward me with her arms out to the sides as if she were about to take a bow.
“Well?” she said.
She looked stunning. Like a raven that had been turned into a woman. Her gown was to the floor and made of dark feathers that sounded like whispers when she walked. The feathers looked black from a distance, but when she got closer, I could see nuances to the color—reflective, iridescent hints of gold and green and blue, like a real bird. The top of the dress was sleeveless and tied around October’s neck. It covered her torso but was open in the back. Her feet were bare. Her hair was big and wild. Looking at her made my chest feel like it was filling up with water.
“You’re a vision,” I said.
I took out my phone to snap a photo, and when I told her it was by request for Cal, she posed with her lips pursed like she was going to kiss the camera; that made me feel jealous and sad again.
“Ready?” I asked.
“One more thing.” She handed me a thick, black Sharpie and asked me to write “CHOICE” on her exposed back. “All the way across. Big and clear.”
I pressed my left palm against her skin, to steady my writing hand so I could print clearly, but also so I could talk to her without speaking. And maybe it worked, because once I took my hand away, she looked at me with more compassion than she had all week and said, “If it makes you feel any better, I’m nervous too.”
“You are?”
She nodded, and I wondered if she’d gleaned anything else in my touch. The sadness. The frustration. The longing.
I escorted October slowly down the stairs, one hand on her arm, the other on her back, while Shelly held up the back of the dress.
At the door to the gallery, October asked Shelly, Rae, and Rodney to wait in the hallway. I stood off to the side, expecting to wait too, but she said, “You come with me.”
We walked in and stood side by side in front of the cage, both of us looking up at it and then around the room. All week long, October had been keeping her distance from me, but she broke character there, hooked her arm through mine, sighed, and said, “You know, this one belongs to you even more than it belongs to me.”
I shook my head. “It was your idea. All I did was build it.”
“But you built it with your whole heart and soul. It’s a real work of art, Joe. I hope you recognize that. And I hope you know how much I appreciate it.” She didn’t take my hand so much as she slipped her fingers around the tips of my fingers and tentatively grasped them. And her voice quivered when she said, “I’m happy we made this together. I’m happy you’re here with me tonight. I’m happy we get to offer this creation of ours to the world. And no matter what the future holds, I’ll always remember this moment with you.”
I swallowed hard and felt a rush of gratitude toward her, for trusting me to create the piece, and for believing I could. There was the pride I took in the creation itself, which felt as meaningful to me as it did to her. And above all that, I had the sense that I, too, would remember the moment.
For a long time it weighed on me that I didn’t articulate any of that to her when I had the chance. I didn’t, for fear it would cut me open, expose my insides. But she had my fingers the whole time, and I like to think she knew.
“OK. Time to lock me up.”
I helped her step inside. “I never thought to ask, but what are you going to do in there for two hours?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged wistfully. “I never know. That’s part of the fun.”
She told me to go get the others. Shelly scurried in first, futzed with October’s hair one last time, and pronounced her good to go.
I shut and locked the door. Then I opened the app on my phone, made sure the bars, lights, and audiovisual devices were all detected, and signaled to Rodney that we were ready.
Rae gave Helen a thumbs-up, and Helen removed the ropes.
The lights blinked in the main gallery to indicate the performance was about to commence, and people began entering the room.
October nodded, and I pushed “Play.”
Nobody but Rodney had been allowed to see the visuals before the performance. October wanted her team to experience the installation in real time as much as possible. Films played on all three walls of the gallery, and they were provocative and disturbing—an in-your-face mishmash of statistics, social media messages, graphic photography, and video clips of everything from suffragette protests erupting in violence to botched back-alley abortions. In juxtaposition, the velvety voice of Leontyne Price, one of the first female African-American opera singers, blared from speakers hanging in the corners of the room.
I tried to focus on the gradual movement of the bars, but it was hard to take my eyes off October’s mesmerizing performance. At first she was inert, resigned to being locked up. Then she seemed to notice she was trapped and began trying to escape subtly. Then not so subtly. She pulled at the bars as they steadily closed in on her. She looked frightened as the cage narrowed. She opened her mouth to scream but nothing came out, only the sound of Leontyne’s tortured arias. She wrestled with her dress, and feathers blew around the cage. She pounded and collapsed onto the grate. She curled up into a ball and cried, and her eye makeup ran down her face like black wax. At some point she accidentally cut her arm on what must have been a loose nail—my bad—and blood dripped in an abstract, Pollock-like splatter all over the New York Times wallpaper.
The gallery was packed, and the audience was captivated. Most guests stared and gawked. A handful of people cried along with October. A few jaded jerks laughed and rolled their eyes, but nobody was bored.
Two hours went by in a blink and without any technical difficulties, and by the end I expected October to be as exhausted as I was, but as she sat on the grate, hugging her knees into her chest, unable to move, she looked wired.
October had done with her body what I tried to do with the guitar. She used it to speak a language that all humanity, if they were listening, could understand. It was beautiful, but it touched a nerve in me. I couldn’t put my finger on why right away, but something about the type of freedom she was exploring made me hyper-cognizant of the ways in which I held myself back.
Th
ere was more. I believed I knew October fairly well by then, and, yes, she was extraordinary, but she could also be vulnerable, complicated, awkward, and full of contradictions. I saw all of those qualities in her performance. I saw her humanness. What set her apart from most humans I knew was that she used those qualities to her advantage. She turned the dark and mundane into the poetic and magical.
That, I thought, is what it means to be an artist of life.
I didn’t perceive or understand this distinction when I was a kid. Cal was the closest thing to an artist that I knew, and in my eyes he was smarter, stronger, more enlightened than I was. He was unlimited. Single-minded. Special. That’s what I thought you had to be in order to be an artist, and that made it impossible for me to accept myself as one, because I didn’t see myself as a person with any exceptional qualities. Sure, I was a good guitar player, but that was a skill, something I’d learned through thousands of hours of practice. I didn’t connect it to my character or my destiny. I didn’t see it as the kite that lifted my spirit out of the dirt and off the ground.
Except that it was.
For so long I’d assumed I was too ordinary, too mortal, too pusillanimous to be who and what I wanted to be. What I learned from watching October was that it was exactly those prosaic human qualities, expressed in authenticity, that people connected to. Art isn’t about people who are better than us showing us how much better they are, it’s about being reminded of the ways in which we are all the same.
I read a line in a novel once that stuck with me. It said, “People, for some stupid reason, think they can escape their sorrows.” And if I learned anything from my work with October, it’s that there are two ways in which one can escape his or her sorrows.
Art and love.
By the end of October’s performance, I was fixated on the notion of what could have been and questioning whether cowardice was revocable.
Back when Cal was still trying to get me to join him in Brooklyn, he’d written me an e-mail that had haunted me for a long time. It said: The thing is, Harp, everyone is always one decision away from a completely different life.
I never responded to that e-mail. In fact, after Cal sent it to me, I didn’t speak to him again until the morning he walked into October’s kitchen.
Once the visuals faded, the lights went out and the music continued at a much lower volume while the crowd filed out and back into the larger gallery for more drinks. Only then did October give me the go-ahead to set her free.
She held onto my arm to steady herself, and we followed Rae and Shelly back upstairs. The green room was now full of people, and they all clapped when we entered.
October seemed uncomfortable and overwhelmed by the applause, and she went straight into the bathroom. I walked to the bar cart and poured myself another whiskey. When I turned around, Rae was there. And she was smiling.
“Great job, Joe. Well done. Really.”
It was the first genuinely nice thing she’d ever said to me, and I appreciated it. I mumbled a sincere “thank you” and offered her some whiskey, but she shook her head and said, “I’m driving you guys home, yeah?”
Soon, Phil rushed into the room. “That was luminous!” He threw his arm around my back. “You two make a great team! I hope this is just the beginning of a lot more collaborations!”
Is that what October and I are doing? I wondered. Collaborating?
October came out of the bathroom in a black slip dress with a big, camel-colored cardigan over it. Her sleeves were pushed up above her elbows and I could see a bandage on her forearm from where she’d cut herself in the cage.
She slid into a pair of sexy snakeskin boots, looked my way, and sighed. “We have to go downstairs and mingle before the auction ends.”
She’d twisted her hair up into a messy bun and wiped the dark eye makeup off her cheeks as best she could, but Shelly came over and said, “Lordy, let me touch you up before you go meet and greet.”
Thomas sauntered in, brimming with excitement, and announced that the top bid on the birdcage was currently at fifty grand.
Everyone cheered again, and while Shelly was fixing October’s makeup, October’s phone rang and she answered it. She and Shelly had stepped into the kitchen so I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but she looked sweet and animated as she spoke, and when she walked back into the room, she came straight to me and said, “Chris says congrats and thanks for the pic.”
I maintained a neutral expression, but I didn’t feel neutral. I felt like I was suffering the loss of something monumental.
Let her go, I thought.
My head believed that, but the little muscle in my chest was tense and tight as we shuffled down the steps to the main gallery, where the crowd still lingered, everyone waiting for a chance to meet October.
People swarmed her, and she gripped my arm, whispering, “Please don’t leave my side.” Then she started introducing me to everyone as the artist who built the cage. Strangers lauded my work and treated me like I was important, and while I tried with all my might to appreciate that, I remained too caught up in my own confusion to relax.
Phil pushed his way through the crowd, holding two glasses of champagne above his head. When he reached October and me, he handed each of us one. I didn’t want it, but I took it and then set it down on the table behind me. Across the room, Thomas raised his glass, made a toast praising October and all the other participating artists, including me, and then he thanked the guests for their generosity.
Having so many people touching and talking at October wore her down quicker than the performance had. Before long she was snapping the elastic hair band on her wrist and staring at her shoes, and Rae went to get the car.
The three of us were quiet on the drive home. October rested her head against the window; I was behind her, so I couldn’t see her face, but as we turned onto Lombard Street, I heard her sniffling in a way that made me think she might be crying. Rae glanced at me but didn’t say anything, and when we were stopped at a red light, she picked up her phone and sent me a text that said:
Gets emotional after performances.
Don’t worry she’s fine.
I wanted to reach up and rest my hand on October’s shoulder, to comfort her and let her know I was there, but I refrained because I felt Rae and I had turned a corner that night, and I didn’t want to take any steps backward with her.
Instead I wrote Cal a long text. I told him about how great the night had gone and how amazing October had been and how much one of the guests paid for the cage.
I should have left it at that, but ever since the drive into the city that afternoon, I’d been wondering where things stood between October and Cal, and I typed:
How’s it going with you two anyway? Better?
We were just getting off the bridge when his response came through.
Hard to get her to talk.
Still feels off.
Not letting her go without a fight tho.
I sent him back the thumbs-up emoji and put away my phone.
As we passed the Sausalito exit that used to take me to Bob’s houseboat, I thought about my father and wondered what he would have thought if he’d been at the gallery that night.
He wouldn’t have understood the performance, that’s for sure. But there was a part of me that wished he could have seen it anyway, wished he could have heard all the people praising my work.
It didn’t escape me that this was work I only knew how to do because of him. And I like to think he would have been proud of me. But if I knew Bob Harper like I thought I did, it’s more likely he would have deemed the whole thing a complete waste of wood, nails, and ingenuity.
NINETEEN.
I’d been keeping a file of words. I’d started the list after October asked me what my favorite word was because I hadn’t had an answer for her then. But after that, whenev
er I came across a great one, I typed it up in my phone with the intention of sharing it with her at some point.
When we pulled into Casa Diez, October thanked me for doing such a great job on the project, but she said it in the aloof, I’m-pretending-you’ve-never-been-inside-of-me voice she’d been using with me all week. Then she got out of the car and headed toward her house carrying the little yellow flower arrangement Cal had sent her.
Rae followed October to the door, lugging a big garment bag with October’s dress. I offered to carry that for her, but she said she was fine, and I was left staring at my hands.
I waited for one of them to invite me in, but they bade me good night, and I went back to my apartment.
Just like that, the evening was over.
I felt too wired to go to bed but too drained to play guitar. I picked up the novel I was in the middle of reading and went to the couch, hoping the book might lull me to sleep.
The red taillights of Rae’s car flickered across my wall, and I sat up and watched her drive off. A moment later I saw October open the front door and let Diego outside. She stood on the porch under a soft amber light with her big cardigan still on, watching the dog. The night had turned chilly, and she held the sweater tightly across her chest.
Diego peed for nineteen seconds—I counted—and headed inside. October followed him, ruffling the scruff on his neck.
I moved from the couch to the bed and lay down, the unopened book now resting on my stomach. I stared at the dank wooden planks on the ceiling. All different shades and lengths, some had big knots in them, some didn’t, and the mismatched colors and sizes looked cheap and amateurish. This was a pet peeve of mine back when I built houses: when the wood was chosen and installed with no thought to art or design. I used to hand select the boards so that the ceiling looked meticulous and streamlined, which took a lot of time and drove Bob insane, but the clients appreciated it.
Sorrow Page 20
