Sorrow

by Tiffanie DeBartolo

  I replayed the night in my head, looking for an answer to the question that had been bothering me. Namely, the performance had gone better than I could have imagined, so why had it left me so unsettled?

  I thought on it long and hard, and when that yielded no explanations, I changed tactics. I dug inside my body instead of inside my head. I tried to feel instead of think the answer.

  And then it hit me. And it was so obvious. The whole thing—the resignation, the imprisonment, the rage, the grief—it was about me. No, not about me, it was me. Sure, October was expressing the themes of the show, and the visual portion of the piece convinced the viewers of that. But where her performance was coming from, the motivation, the depth and truth she was expressing, was calculatedly directed at me.

  I was the one in the cage.

  I was the one whose walls were closing in on him.

  And the most jarring point of all?

  I’d built it myself.

  When October said the piece belonged to me even more than to her, she wasn’t kidding. She had been talking to me all along, and what she had been saying was that the decisions I’d made in my life had locked me into a confining, diminishing, unbearable space from which I couldn’t escape without a key.

  And what was the key?

  I’d written it on her back.

  It was the same thing Cal had tried to tell me over a decade earlier.

  Everyone is always one decision away from a completely different life.

  One decision.

  Or, in my case, about fifteen yards.

  I got up off the bed and paced around the room. My heart pounded. My breath fell short. I thought I was angry. I had an urge to kick a hole through the wall. Scream in October’s face about how my choices were none of her fucking business. And then I realized it wasn’t anger I was feeling, it was fear.

  Something shook inside me. Shook me to the edge of a place I’d never been. I looked over that edge, and it was as dark as a pool of thick, black paint, and I couldn’t tell how far down it went, but I knew I had to step into it.

  I felt as though the choice I had to make was between staying in a burning building or leaping out the window before the fire caught me. I would go up in flames if I didn’t jump, but if I did, there was a fifty-fifty chance I’d hit the ground and shatter to pieces.

  I needed a nudge.

  No, I needed a fucking shove.

  “Sam.”

  I sat back down on the bed, dropped my head into my hands, and asked my brother for help. And I swore I would listen this time, if he would just tell me what to do, if he would make it so obvious I couldn’t second-guess him even if I tried.

  The book I was reading had fallen to the floor and I picked it up. A decades-old novel by a Portuguese writer, I’d checked it out of the library because the blurb on the inside flap said it was about the existential nature of loneliness and chance, and that sounded right up my alley.

  I told Sam the plan: I was going to close my eyes and open the book to a random page, and I was going to point to a passage on that page, and then I was going to open my eyes and read the passage, and the passage was going to tell me what to do.

  I took note of the page I was on and removed the receipt from Mill Valley Market that I was using as my bookmark. I closed my eyes and turned page after page until my gut told me to stop. I ran my finger up and down the paper, lifted my finger, put it back down and decided I was ready to look.

  I opened my eyes. My finger was resting on the middle of a paragraph in a chapter I’d read a couple of nights earlier.

  Before I even studied the passage, I knew it was going to be significant because there was a word in it that I hadn’t known when I read it the first time, and I’d lightly circled it in pencil so I could look it up. Once I did, I was so taken with the word that I added it to the list I was saving to show October.

  The passage went like this:

  Each morning I go out with my tea and I check on the fig tree and I think, Do what you want, my dear, but only if it means going back to the house, only if it keeps the fear of saudade close and even closer than that, do you hear me?

  There was no equivalent to the word “saudade” in the English language, but the translation I found defined it as “a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound longing for an absent something or someone that one loves.” It went on to explain that saudade was sometimes described as “a nostalgia for something that never was.”

  I don’t remember walking out the door, down the steps, or across the yard. I only remember that when I got to October’s house I walked in without knocking and found her in the kitchen making a grilled cheese sandwich. She’d showered; I could tell because her hair looked like a wet rope hanging over her shoulder. And she’d changed into a pair of sweatpants and a loose, silky tank top. Her back was to me, and I could see the tops of the letters I’d written there, a little faded but still legible.

  CHOICE.

  The sound of the door startled her. She spun around and her hand went to her heart. “Jesus, Joe. You scared me.”

  Diego moseyed over from the living room floor and nuzzled up beside me, wagging his baseball-bat tail.

  “I can’t stop thinking about you,” I blurted.

  She tilted her head to the side, her face a rictus of expressions I couldn’t discern.

  “I’ve tried and I can’t. It’s like you turned on some faucet in me and I have no way to turn it off.”

  I thought for once that I might surprise her, but she didn’t look surprised. She looked cautious. She shut off the burner, moved the skillet to the adjacent burner, and leaned back, her hands behind her on the counter like she was going to hop up onto it.

  Fear began to rise in me, starting at my feet and filling up my body, as if I’d stepped into a pool of it.

  “Say something,” I mumbled.

  “I’m trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do with this information. Because I’m assuming that’s all it is. Information.”

  I took a step forward and noticed her face was pale and shiny, her eyes red from scrubbing off all the makeup.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “I’m open and available now, but come tomorrow I’m going to turn back into the cold, asshole Joe that makes up a bunch of excuses or changes his mind, but I’m not. This is different. I can feel it. Tell me you can feel it.”

  She said nothing, and her silence lingered like a stranger hiding behind a door—I didn’t know if it was benevolent or menacing. She turned back to the stove and used a spatula to lift the sandwich out of the skillet. She sliced the sandwich in half on the diagonal, put it on a plate, and handed it to me.

  “You don’t want it?”

  “I’ll make another one.” She nodded toward the table. “Sit.”

  I went and sat down, and the silence resumed while Diego and I watched her make another sandwich. She was slow and careful buttering the bread and slicing two different kinds of cheese, and it took forever. When she finished, she cut her sandwich in half and put it on a plate too. Then she poured us both glasses from a half-empty bottle of Chianti.

  She placed the wine bottle in the middle of the table, along with a couple of napkins, and sat across from me. The little yellow flower arrangement from Cal was on the table too, directly between us like a blooming “Yield” sign. I moved it out of the way.

  I watched her and she watched me. She had a funny way of eating her sandwich. Instead of biting it like normal, she tore pieces off and put them in her mouth the way a person would eat a croissant. But sometimes she would have to pull the entire length of her arm because the cheese was all melted and gooey and wouldn’t break off, and when that happened, she chuckled quietly.

  After we both finished our sandwiches and were sipping our wine, I said, “The performance tonight. The cage. What was it really about
?”

  She smirked like she knew exactly what I was asking her and said, “The beauty of art is that it can be about whatever you want it to be about.”

  She poured the rest of the wine into my glass.

  “Come over here,” I said. “I want to show you something.”

  I pulled out my phone and waited while she took a sip of her wine, wiped her hands on her napkin, and moved to the chair beside me.

  “Remember when you asked me what my favorite word was?”

  She nodded, setting her elbow on the table, her chin in her palm, a small smile still flickering on her face.

  “I’ve been keeping a list,” I told her.

  She pulled her chair closer and leaned against me so she could see over my shoulder. I could smell the clean, coconut scent of her shampoo, could feel her warm, Chianti-laced breath on my cheek.

  I tapped the NOTES icon on my phone, opened the file titled “WORDS” and slid the phone over to her.

  She slid the phone back and said, “Read them to me.”

  “Saudade” was at the top because it was the last one I’d entered. After I told her what it meant, she said, “That’s breathtaking.”

  I didn’t tell her it came from a passage that was part of the numinous impetus for why I was sitting in her house. That was a good story, but it was a story for another time. And that night I believed another time would someday come.

  The next word was “Koi No Yokan.” I felt shy reading its definition aloud. “It’s Japanese. Loosely translated, it’s the sense one can have upon first meeting a person that you’re going to fall in love with each other.”

  “Koi No Yokan,” she whispered, looking down at the table and, with her index finger, making an invisible drawing on my napkin. “I know that feeling.”

  The third word was “adamantine.” “It just means “unbreakable.” No biggie. But I like the way it falls off the tongue like a melody.”

  I scrolled to the next word. She saw it and said, “‘Cafuné.’ I know that one.”

  I pulled the phone toward my chest so she couldn’t read the definition. “What does it mean, smarty pants?”

  Another Portuguese term I’d come across in the same book, it was the word for tenderly running your hand through your lover’s hair. But October didn’t say what it meant. She reached up and acted it out, and goosebumps sprang up all over my arms.

  “This last one’s my favorite.” I showed her the word because I didn’t know how to pronounce it: mamihlapinatapai.

  She laughed. “That’s not a word, it’s an alphabet.”

  “It’s real, I swear. Indigenous to South America.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s the shared look between two people who want the same thing but are reluctant to initiate it.”

  She looked right at me and didn’t blink when she said, “I wonder if there’s a word for when one person is less reluctant than the other.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was referring to me or to herself in that instance, but the space between us was getting smaller, thicker, and as lush as the forest grass that grew in big patches behind the house.

  October took my hand and held it between both of hers, the way she had the day we met. Then she nodded and said, “I can feel it.”

  Something relaxed inside of me then. I put my free hand on her face and moved in to kiss her, but she pulled back, got up, and stepped away. Pointing at my phone, she said, “If you really mean what you’re saying, we need to call Chris right now and tell him what’s going on. Otherwise you can’t be here.”

  It would be morning in Amsterdam. I imagined calling Cal and waking him to tell him—what? That I was in love with his girlfriend? That she was in love with me? Was she? I tried to picture his face when he heard me say the words, the various possible reactions he might have, all of them catastrophic.

  I’m not letting her go without a fight, he’d said.

  I stood up and walked into the living room, and October followed.

  I paced, rubbing my face. “Fuck.”

  “Not an ideal situation. I get it,” October said. “But we have to tell him.”

  “I know. But fuck,” I said again. “Can I just think this through for a minute?”

  She sat on the couch while I continued to amble back and forth, trying to figure out how we could tell Cal the truth and cause him the least amount of pain. October’s eyes followed me like I was a metronome she was using to keep time.

  I sat down beside her and let my head fall into my hands. “He’s going to hate me.”

  “Maybe not forever.” I felt her eyes on the side of my face. “Trust me, Chris knows that what he and I are doing isn’t working. He has to be able to see the inevitable end in sight. With or without you thrown into the mix.”

  But I doubted Cal knew that. It wasn’t how his mind worked. When he wanted something, he went after it, and he got it; and if something was broken, he fixed it. Failure was not a conceivable outcome for him.

  A memory came back to me then. The first time I brought Cal over to Bob’s houseboat. We had only known each other for a few weeks, but we were already blood brothers. It was a Friday night, Bob had gone out, and Cal started snooping around the house, looking for a way we could entertain ourselves in the absence of guitars. He found a couple of fishing poles in a storage closet. I have no idea why Bob had them, because I’d never known him to fish or express even a vague interest in fishing. At any rate, Cal got it in his head that fishing was simple and that it would be fun for us to catch our dinner off the side of the boat, never mind that neither of us had ever fished, nor did we know the first thing about what to do with a fish if we managed to catch one.

  Cal asked me what I thought we should use as bait. I looked in the refrigerator and decided hotdogs were our best option. We both stabbed big chunks through our hooks and went out to the deck.

  Cal said, “It’s all in the wrist, Harp,” like he knew what he was talking about, even though he’d only heard that on TV.

  I flicked my rod backward with the intention of casting it out into the water, but the hotdog-heavy hook went left and caught Cal somewhere near his right eye.

  With a howl, he dropped his rod, leaned over, and clutched the side of his face. A moment later he started making this aahhh noise that sounded like what precedes the choo in a sneeze. I couldn’t see the damage I’d done, but a little blood dripped down his fingers, and I had a vision of Cal taking his hand away and there being nothing but an empty socket where his eyeball had been.

  Over and over I asked Cal if he was all right, begging him to let me see his eye, but he just kept making that noise. When he finally straightened up, I realized it wasn’t because I’d blinded him, it was because he was laughing so hard he couldn’t form words.

  Once he composed himself, he ran to the nearest bathroom and examined his wound in the mirror. I’d missed his eye by a hair, and the hook had carved a tiny but deep gash into the skin right below his lower lid that you can still see today if you look close enough.

  “Nice job,” he said. “That’s definitely going to leave a scar.”

  We retold the story to each other from our individual points of view a dozen times over the next few hours, and Cal’s version got gorier and gorier as the night went on. Right before we fell asleep, he asked me what had been going through my mind when I thought I’d taken out his eye, and I told him all I could think was that if I’d blinded him, he wasn’t going to hang out with me anymore.

  It was dark and quiet, Cal in the twin bed next to mine, a small bedside table between us, but I knew he was shaking his head because I could hear the sound of his hair pulling and swishing against the crisp pillowcase.

  “Harp, we signed a contract, remember? It says we’re best friends, and best friendship is bound by commitment, code, and honor. There’s nothing you could
do to make me not hang out with you anymore.”

  “Nothing?” I said in disbelief. “Come on, there has to be something.”

  He thought about it and said, “I guess if you stole my girlfriend. I mean, if I had a girlfriend, and you stole her, then I might hate you.”

  “Well, that’s fine, because I would never do that.”

  “Obviously,” he said.

  “Obviously.”

  October was still waiting for me to make the call.

  “Here’s what I think,” I said. “Now is not the right time to tell him.”

  “Joe—”

  “No, just hear me out, OK? He’s gone for what? Another month? He tells me every few days how much he’s looking forward to the show at the Greek. It’s a big deal for him to play it, and it’s a big deal for him to share it with me. And, to be honest, it’s a big deal for me to share it with him. For once, I’d like to not let him down.”

  October rested her head on my shoulder and sighed.

  “And what difference does it make if we tell him now or when he’s back?” I asked. “It’s the same information, and it’s not going to go over well, no matter what. If we wait, we can do it in person. And we won’t ruin his big homecoming. I feel like I owe him that.”

  I meant every word I said to October that night. As difficult as I knew it was going to be, I had no intention of bailing on her when the time came to confess to Cal. But the situation was a lot like vowing to go to Brooklyn back when I was a kid. As an idea, it seemed utterly possible. But ideas live in very specific futures, and not all futures arrive.

  “I know you’re not going to like what I’m about to say,” I mumbled. “But waiting until he gets home also gives you time to change your mind.”

  “I’m not going to change my mind,” October said.