Sorrow

by Tiffanie DeBartolo

  “I happen to think it’s more daring to tell the truth than it is to eat a dog biscuit.”

  “Of course you do,” I said. “And I’ll let you off the hook, but only because I want to know the answer to this next question.” I ate another strawberry and said, “Name a nonsexual act that you find erotic.”

  “That’s easy. Painting my lover’s toenails.”

  Intrigued, I raised my brow and tried to imagine if that would turn me on. “No one has ever painted my toenails.”

  “Duly noted.”

  She put the chicken, potatoes, and salad in individual glass containers; stacked them in a picnic basket with plates, cloth napkins, and cutlery; and asked me to take it all outside and set it up while she got dressed. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and I didn’t know why she had to change, but she said, “This is not proper picnic attire.”

  I took the basket to the small patch of lawn in the yard. Then I went and got the camping blanket from my bed and spread it out. I also brought an extra blanket, a pillow, a couple books, and my guitar.

  October came out in a floral-patterned sundress, the flowers on it reminding me of the starry mariposa lilies that Bob, Sam, and I used to go looking for on Ring Mountain in Tiburon, the only place in the world where they grow.

  She walked over, surveyed my setup, and said, “Nicely done, sir.” Diego came loping out, and she made him lie down on the side of the blanket opposite the food.

  We spent the rest of the day there, not doing much of anything. October read to me from Patti Smith’s Just Kids while I lay on my back, petted the dog, and watched clouds rolling by. We talked about our plans for the holidays. I told October I normally spent Christmas in Dallas with Ingrid and her husband, Jim. October said she would be spending Thanksgiving in Rochester with her parents and asked if I would consider coming along. When it started to get dark, she wrapped herself in the extra blanket, and I played Dylan songs until my fingers got too cold to move.

  Back inside, we sipped tequila and ate strawberries while October meticulously, flawlessly painted tiny animals on my four biggest toes: a blue bird, a pink rabbit, a black spider, and a red ladybug.

  Being the recipient of October’s unremitting focus, and the sensation of the paintbrush on my toes, did indeed turn me on. “So, this is how you seduce men?” I said. “You paint their toenails?”

  “Yep,” she laughed. “Works every time.”

  Once her work was complete, she moved the paint and brushes aside, rose up onto her knees, gently splayed my legs apart, and kissed me with her eyes open. “Whatever you do,” she whispered, “don’t move your feet until the paint dries.”

  She unbuttoned my jeans and pulled them to my calves, making sure to roll them up at the hems so they were out of harm’s way of my toes. Then she went down on me, and almost immediately I started laughing. I don’t even know why. I guess, looking back, I was just so happy. I felt like everything in the universe was miraculously in alignment, and the only way I knew how to acknowledge the full epic-ness of that perfection was to laugh.

  October laughed too, like she could feel what I was feeling, and the vibrations coming from her throat added another layer of joy to my joy. When I came, it was like an explosion of that joy surged upward from my cock to my heart.

  After she finished, she pulled my jeans back up, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and said, “Told you. Works every time.”

  Lightly, she touched all four of my painted toes in the order that she’d painted them and, surmising that they were sufficiently dry, sprayed them with a varnish that smelled like the stain I used to apply to exterior wood when I built houses. It ended up keeping the minuscule masterpieces on for so long, I eventually had to go to a nail salon in Whitefish and have them professionally removed because it became too heartbreaking to keep looking at them.

  I was buzzed when I got into October’s bed that night, and I tend to think too much when I’m buzzed. The closet door was open, and from where I lay I could see Cal’s clothes hanging on the left side, his jeans color-coordinated from dark to light, his shirts on matching mahogany hangers, and for the first time all day I felt the weight of fear and guilt like bricks on my chest.

  October walked into the closet, slipped out of her dress, and got into bed facing me. To avoid thinking of Cal, I told her about the mariposa lilies in Tiburon, how rare and beautiful they are, and how I thought it would be cool to use them in a selfie when they bloomed in the spring.

  And in fact, she ended up doing just that. Months after I left California, she went to Tiburon and filmed a selfie in the little field up on Ring Mountain where the lilies grow. In the clip, she’s wrapped in the camping blanket from my bed, holding an empty bottle of tequila in which she’d inserted a mariposa lily.

  The clip ends with her setting the bottle in the dirt, dousing it with lighter fluid, then dropping a match and watching the little flower burn.

  We’d only been in bed for a minute or so when October said, “Something’s bothering you.”

  The day had been golden, and I didn’t want it to end with a conversation about Cal or my shitty self-doubt. I shook my head and said, “It’s nothing.” Then I repeated what she’d said to me earlier: “We’re here now, and that’s all that matters.”

  I remember the exact expression on her face then. An openness so wide and filled with so much faith, it seemed more like blinding recklessness.

  The woman believed too much in me.

  She believed too much in everything.

  TWENTY-ONE.

  It rained the day before Cal’s show at the Greek Theater. I remember because October and I were out on the Coastal Trail at Lands End, a park set along the craggy coastline in San Francisco with stunning postcard views of the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Golden Gate Bridge to the east.

  We were location scouting for a selfie we intended to shoot the following week. It had been sunny when we left Mill Valley, and I hadn’t anticipated so drastic a change in the weather, but thick, spongy clouds quickly moved in; the drizzle and wind cut right through the flannel shirt I had on, and within minutes I was damp and cold.

  The plan as October had explained it was for me to film her as she walked naked through the labyrinth out on Eagle’s Point. She was going to have sharp maces hanging from ropes tied around each of her wrists like macabre, medieval bracelets, dangling and slicing up her legs as she moved.

  I hated the idea and tried to talk her out of it. When that didn’t work, I asked her what the motivation was.

  “I’m about to hurt someone very badly,” she said. “I want to hurt too.”

  We figured we would get one take before someone called the cops to report a naked, bloody woman in the labyrinth, so we needed to plan the shot carefully. I was mapping out the camera’s path when my phone rang.

  I pulled it from my pocket and raindrops misted the screen as if from a spray bottle, blurring Cal’s name.

  I told October I’d be back and stepped off the trail to take the call.

  “Yo,” Cal said.

  “Hey.”

  He was calling to say he would be landing at Oakland Airport the following morning and wanted to know if I would pick him up and take him to the venue.

  “This way we can hang out all day,” he reasoned.

  I paused, guarded, unsure of how to respond, and Cal said, “Harp, you still there?” as if maybe the phone had cut out.

  I turned around and watched October picking things up in the center of the labyrinth—talismans, rocks, crystals, notes people had left there. She was looking at me, holding up a folded piece of paper, pointing to it, but I was too far away to see what it was.

  “Harp?” Cal repeated.

  “Sorry, yeah. We’re over at Eagle’s Point. I can barely hear you.”

  I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to act normal aro
und Cal, and I knew it was a betrayal on top of an already inexcusable betrayal to agree to spend the day with him, given that I’d been having an affair with his girlfriend for the last month. But here’s the rub: I wanted to spend the day with him. I wanted to pretend, for twenty-four more hours, that he and I were still best friends and brothers. I wanted to see what his life was like on tour. And more than anything, I wanted to watch him perform in front of eighty-five hundred people.

  “Text me your flight info,” I said.

  Before we hung up, I asked Cal if he expected me to bring October. He sighed and said, “Nah, bro. I need to talk through some stuff before I see her. I need to pick your brain. She’s going to come over later with Rae.”

  Earlier that year a strong winter storm had toppled half a dozen redwoods in Muir Woods, and a group of rangers had set up audio recording equipment in and around the park to capture the sounds. Imagine a distinct, cacophonous creaking, like a giant door to the sky with a squeaky hinge, and then a loud, sweeping crash, the final thud actually a symphony of thudding, because a skyscraper tree doesn’t fall in isolation. It catches other branches and trees, often dragging down whatever its weight can raze.

  That’s the soundtrack I heard in my head throughout my last day in California. I was a rotten redwood, weak enough for the wind to knock me over. But instead of falling by myself, I was going to take my friends—the ones whose roots were helping to keep me stable—down too.

  The night before the show I slept in my apartment. It was the first time I’d stayed there in weeks, but I had an asinine notion that if I didn’t, Cal would be able to smell the bed, his pillow, his girlfriend on me, and I wanted to delay the inevitable for as long as I could.

  Before I left that morning, I stopped by the house to see October. I made cappuccinos, and we drank them in heavy silence. I couldn’t look at her, and she wouldn’t stop looking at me. She didn’t think it was a good idea for me to pick up Cal, but I told her it was important to me, and she let it go.

  I was rinsing out my mug when she said, “I forgot to show you something yesterday.” She handed me her phone, open to a photo album. “It didn’t seem right to take it from the dirt, but I snapped a few shots.”

  The pictures were of the folded piece of paper she’d found in the middle of the labyrinth, the one she’d been pointing out to me. On the front, someone had written: READ THIS. The note inside said: I miss you more than you know, my brother. But every day I feel your energy and hope you feel mine. I love you and do my best to help. One day you’ll find the strength to make right all that you’ve wronged. One day you’ll understand.

  “What the fuck,” I mumbled, shaken.

  “Maybe it’s a sign.”

  Of course it was a sign. But if I’ve learned anything from Sam, it’s that signs are only helpful if you have the guts to follow them.

  October tried to put her arms around me, but I stepped away and said, “I have to go.”

  As I turned to leave, she said, “Joe, everything’s going to be all right.”

  I nodded, but by then I was already starting to doubt it.

  I got to the airport absurdly early and had to wait in the cell phone lot for more than thirty minutes before Cal texted to say he was walking off the plane. Much like the day before, the weather was cool, damp, and gray, and as I pulled up to the curb I had to turn on my wipers in order to spot Cal when he came out.

  He exited through the sliding glass doors carrying a small leather duffle bag with shiny silver hardware, and he made a beeline for my truck, ducking into the passenger’s seat headfirst like a linebacker about to make a tackle. Right away he thanked me for picking him up, his face dewy from the few seconds he’d been outside.

  “That’s all the luggage you have? You’ve been gone for months.”

  “Most of my stuff is on the bus. Band and crew drove up from San Diego after last night’s show.”

  As I headed toward the freeway, I could feel Cal peering at the side of my face. He shook his head, laughed, and said, “It still trips me out to see you all grown up.”

  I tried to think of something to say, but my head was a clogged drain, all my words clumps of hair in the pipes, and I thought, I was mute when Cal and I started our friendship, and it looks like I’ll be mute the day it ends.

  Cal was in a talkative mood and didn’t notice. And he had October on the brain. He reclined his seat, rubbed his face, and said, “It’s been a long month, bro. She and I have barely spoken. I call her and instead of calling back she texts. It’s bullshit. I mean where is she that she can’t talk to me?”

  It wasn’t a rhetorical question. He looked to me for an answer.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Cal.”

  “Fuck. I know.” He fiddled with the radio, couldn’t find anything he wanted to listen to, and shut it off with a smack. “Has she said anything about what’s going on with us?” But then he waved me off. “Forget it. It’s not like she’s going to tell you. She knows where your loyalty lies.”

  Stupidly, guiltily, I mumbled, “I think she’s looking forward to the show tonight.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m more worried about after the show,” he said. “I finally got her on the phone last night, but she wouldn’t answer any of my questions and I lost my shit with her. Outright asked her if she was seeing someone, and you know what she said?”

  My body stiffened. I knew October had spoken to Cal the night before, but she’d gone outside to talk, and when she came back in, I didn’t ask her what they’d talked about.

  I kept my eyes on the back of the Tesla in front of me. Its license plate read “0PECL0L.”

  “She said, ‘We’ll discuss everything after the show.’ That was it. No denial, no protests, no calling me crazy or paranoid. I didn’t even get a lecture about our stupid fucking free love.” He turned the radio back on. “I know she can be private as fuck, but you see her almost every day. Have you noticed anything that might be worth mentioning?”

  My mouth felt like it was stuffed with newspaper. I shook my head. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault. It’s my fault. Trust me, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I’m ready for whatever she’s going to throw at me tonight.” He turned his torso and head my way. “The thing is, all the issues October has with me, with our relationship, she’s right.”

  I looked at him for a second. His resolve seemed inexorable.

  “I can’t expect her to sit around waiting for me while I’m gallivanting all over the world, doing whatever I want to do, with whoever I want to do it with. Did you know that when she and I first started dating, she toured Europe with me for three months?”

  I did not know that.

  “She turned it into one of her art projects. Photographed the empty venues during soundcheck, in every city we went to, and then she hand-sewed song lyrics onto the photographs. Showed the work at a gallery in London. It was a big hit. Back then she wanted to work and be with me. She was committed to it. To us. And you know what? I’ve never reciprocated that.” Cal started opening and shutting the AC register on his side of the truck. “It was the best three months of our relationship. But have I ever been there for her? No. Obviously she’s going to get bored and lonely. How can I blame her for that? I have no right to be mad at her if she is seeing someone. I just want it to stop. I want to move forward. I want another chance.”

  “What are you saying? That you’re going to give up your career so she doesn’t break up with you?”

  “Of course not. And she wouldn’t want that. But I’ve been on the road more often than not for a decade. It would do me good to chill for a while.” Cal took off his jacket and moved his hands around like a conductor while he talked. “This is my plan. I’m going to vow to take a year off. I’m going to end this free love nonsense. Really commit to this relationship. And I’m going to participate in
her life. I’m going to do shit with her. Shit she likes to do, like hiking and going to museums and the farmers’ market—she always wants me to go to the fucking farmers’ market with her, and I never do. You know, even when I took her to Big Sur I was on the phone most of the time, working. And how about taking her out for a romantic dinner once in a while? How hard does that sound? It sounds like fucking heaven, and I don’t know why I haven’t been doing it. I’m an asshole.” Cal turned the AC on low. “So yeah, that’s my plan. I’m going to show up and give her what she needs, and she’s going to forget about whatever fucking fuckhead she’s messing around with, because whoever he is, he can’t give her what I can give her. That much I know.” Cal nodded like he had it all figured out. “I’m not going to screw this up.”

  He stared at me, waiting.

  “What?” I mumbled.

  “Do you think I’ll be able to convince her to give me another chance?”

  This much I knew: Cal has a way of talking that makes people believe him. His confidence and resolve are so solid that if he told me he was going to steal a planet from the sky and leave it on October’s doorstep the next morning, I would have expected to see Jupiter waiting for her when she woke up.

  “Earth to Harp?”

  I was watching the road but not really seeing it. “Yeah,” I said with heartbroken honesty. “I think it’s entirely possible you will.”

  Per Cal’s instructions, once I got to the Greek Theater I followed the signs to the Foothill parking lot directly above the venue. A young kid in a yellow UC Berkeley rain jacket was standing guard, making sure no unauthorized vehicles pulled in. He checked my name off a list, gave me a parking pass, and told me to make sure it was visible on my dashboard.

  Cal’s tour manager, Wyatt, was waiting for us in the lot. He handed me a laminated All Access pass on a lanyard and gave Cal a rundown of the day’s schedule. Soundcheck at 3. Doors at 6:30. Opener at 7:30. Callahan at 9. And an end-of-tour party after the show. I wondered how that was going to fit into October’s plan to come clean with Cal.