Anyway.
As I was saying.
How do you let go of something that lives inside of you?
How do you discard something that feels attached to your ribcage and wrapped around your heart?
How do you cut it out without losing a piece of yourself in the process?
You know what you are to me?
A phantom limb.
I can still feel it.
And I don’t just mean I can still feel you. I mean that I know you can feel me too.
There’s another pause. Another big sigh. Then she says: I hope you’re happy. That’s the truth. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, I hope, more than anything, that you’re happy.
She examines the drawing for a time and eventually nods decisively, though the camera never pans around to her POV, and we never see the portrait.
A moment later she rips the drawing from her sketchbook, rips the portrait in half, rips those halves in half, and keeps ripping until the portrait is in hundreds of tiny pieces. Then she tosses what’s left of me into the trash bin near the kitchen table.
Done, she says.
I’d already been gone for two years by the time that clip was released. And though I dated in Montana—mostly women I met at the Great Northern, women who were as lost as I was, and too broken to give me any more than I could give them—not a day went by that a dozen things didn’t remind me of October. My whole world had become redolent with her point of view and passions, her commitment to life and to art, no matter how far away I was.
TWENTY-FOUR.
Four months before the debut of Sorrow: This Is Art, I got word that Bob had suffered a heart attack on a flight from Cabo San Lucas to Denver and had died in a hospital a few days later. His wife of two years, Maureen, sent me an e-mail explaining what had happened, but the e-mail sat in my inbox for over a week before I got around to opening it.
When I finally spoke to Maureen, she was tearful and apologetic, as if it were somehow her fault that I’d missed my father’s memorial service. Then she gave me the name and number of Bob’s lawyer and instructed me to contact him regarding my inheritance.
When I called Ingrid and told her that Bob was dead, she cried and said, “Oh, Joey, I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine how hard this is for you.”
I didn’t tell Sid and Maggie about Bob’s death. I don’t know why, except to say that I’m a weirdo, and I didn’t want them to make a fuss.
And anyway, Bob’s death wasn’t hard for me. He’d been gone from my life for a long time. The only difference was that now it was final.
When I contacted Bob’s lawyer, he told me that they were still dividing up the assets, but that when all was said and done, I would be left with enough money to live modestly for the rest of my life. I would never again have to take a job I didn’t want. I would be able to travel more. Maybe buy a house.
I didn’t foresee the money changing much else. Money can’t buy guts. It can’t sew up the broken pieces inside of you. And it certainly can’t make amends or substitute for love.
I wanted to mourn Bob. I wanted to feel the loss of whatever relationship he and I had missed out on. But for a long time, I didn’t feel anything at all.
And then one Monday night, a few days after the money came through, I left the library, stopped at the Great Northern for a drink, and had a few too many.
On my walk home from the bar, I broke down and called Bob’s cell phone, which still went to his voicemail. I left him a long, blubbering message about how sorry I was that we hadn’t mended fences. I told him how gorgeous Glacier National Park was. I told him about October and what I’d done to her. I told him about the birdcage I’d built and the cabin I was living in, and everything else I could think of that I’d kept bottled up inside for the last twenty years.
Then I did something even more stupid.
I texted Cal.
Bob died, I wrote. Heart attack.
He didn’t write back.
TWENTY-FIVE.
Only two people ever showed up at my cabin uninvited: Sid and his teenage daughter, Maggie, usually to coax me over for dinner or out to a movie.
It was mid-September, early evening, still warm, and dry enough that the mosquitoes were all but gone for the season. Bob had died four months earlier, and October’s big Sorrow exhibit at SFMoMA was a couple of weeks away. I was in the kitchen about to make coffee when I heard knocking.
I opened the door without thinking, expecting Sid or Maggie.
It was Cal. In a slim-fitted, denim button-down shirt with a distinctive, Western-style yoke and stitching, like he’d thought to dress for Montana.
Stunned, I stuttered his name, not quite sure he was real.
The look on his face was very real, however, and unambiguous. His mouth was taut and severe, his left hand in the air, index finger pointing to an invisible thought bubble above his head. He had something to say and had come to say it. But before he said a word, his face cracked like a windshield hit by a stone, and he hauled off and punched me, his fist hitting my right cheekbone, eye, and nose in one sliding blow.
I heard my teeth rattle inside my head like Tic Tacs in a packet, and I cupped my hand around my nose to catch the blood I could already taste in the back of my throat.
“What the fuck,” I spat.
A second later Cal hit me again, this time in the gut. He knocked the wind out of me, and I doubled over, gasping for air.
“Goddamn it, Harp,” he said, immediately helping me stand back up. “I did not come here to do that.”
He walked me to the couch and I sat down, dizzy and nauseous.
“Fuck,” I said again, coughing.
“I mean it. I don’t know what came over me.” He rubbed his knuckles, shook out his hand. “I’ve never punched anyone before. It hurts.”
Blood dripped down my face, and I wiped it off with the bottom of my T-shirt. It was warm and sticky. “I’ve never been punched before. That hurts too.”
Cal walked to my kitchen, wrapped a bunch of ice in a dishtowel, and handed it to me. He told me to press it to my cheek and I did. The right side of my face throbbed, and I felt like I was going to throw up.
Cal sat in the armchair diagonal from me, glowering in my direction with his head tilted back and to the side, arms crossed over his chest like a hip-hop star in repose.
I was still struggling to get a full breath, and the pain in my face made my eyes water. Blood continued to drip down my throat, and it tasted like I was sucking on a guitar string. I leaned my head against the couch to stop the room from spinning, and when I sat back up, Cal’s beady eyes were trained hard on me.
We looked at each other for a long time without saying anything.
The right side of my face was burning cold, and I took the ice away. I fingered my nose and Cal said, “Is it broken?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Your eye is pretty swollen. Gonna have a nice shiner there.”
My cheek started to ache again, and I put the ice back.
Cal was sitting on the edge of the chair now, legs spread, left elbow on left knee, chin in his palm. It could have been an album cover: Callahan Goes Country.
“That first punch was for fucking my girlfriend,” he said. “The second one was for generally being the biggest pussy I’ve ever met.”
I couldn’t argue with him on either count, and I didn’t.
I moved my jaw back and forth and heard more Tic-Tac noises.
“You have nothing to say to that?” Cal asked abrasively.
I sighed. “How did you find me?”
He threw his head back and laughed with disdain. “Seriously? Why are you such an asshat? Have you ever heard of the internet? Anyone can find anyone. We both know you’re here.” My face must have betrayed something when he said we,
because he rolled his eyes and said, “Yes, Harp. October knows where you are. People on Yelp have reviewed your guitar lessons. It’s not rocket science.”
Part of me wished Cal would hit me again, knock me unconscious.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he said. “Did you expect her to come knocking on your door? You’re the last person she wants to see. And she’s the last person you deserve.”
Again, I couldn’t argue with him.
“Cal, why are you here?”
He stood up and strode around the room like he was looking for something. His eyes paused on the corner where I kept my Martin, and the old Silvertone I’d recently acquired from a pawnshop in Columbia Falls. It came in a case that was also an amp, and Cal looked at it mawkishly, probably because he’d had an almost identical one when we were kids.
“Got anything stronger than water in this place?”
I nodded toward the kitchen. “Cabinet to the left of the sink.”
Cal walked into the kitchen, grabbed the tequila from the shelf, opened a few more cabinets, and came back with the bottle and two mugs that said “Cowgirl Coffee” on them. He poured generous shots.
I took the ice away from my face again, pulled two cubes from the dishtowel, and dropped them into my drink.
“Why am I here?” Cal repeated. “I was asking myself that same question on the cab ride over from the airport.” He downed his drink in one swallow and made a face. Paper-belly, I thought, and my heart ached.
I downed my drink too, and it was soothing at first, but once it settled into my gut, I swore it magnified the pain in my face.
As Cal refilled our mugs, declarations of contrition spun around my head, but I thought it best to let Cal do the talking. He was squinting up at the ceiling light, and I wondered if he noticed it was the same fake-bronze, flush-mounted fixture I’d had in my room as a kid, a frosted semicircle with a little knob in the center that looked like a nipple. Cal and I used to call it the boob light.
“I’m here because I’m a fucking sap, that’s why.” He stared down into his drink, ran his thumb around the rim of the mug, and I could tell by the way he was stretching his mouth from side to side that he was getting emotional. “I’m going to tell you something,” he said. “And I want you to think about this. Even during all those years that we’d lost touch, whenever I imagined myself old and gray, retired to some big old house, maybe over on Muir Beach or up in Bolinas, I always imagined you there, the two of us still playing the Tam High setlist, still talking about, I don’t know, guitars and girls, I guess.” He chuckled a little. “And that time I beat the crap out of you in Montana.”
I chuckled too, but tears filled my eyes.
“You’re my family, you fuckhead. Literally the only family member I have. And what you did—” He shook his head. “I confided in you. I trusted you. And the whole time you were—” He stopped, covered his mouth with his palm, rubbed his chin. “I shouldn’t have found out like that.” He met my eyes fiercely, and I stayed with him. “You should have told me, Harp. At the very least, you should have fucking told me.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” I set my mug on the table without finishing my drink. “I also know the word ‘sorry’ is meaningless. It doesn’t sum up even 1 percent of my remorse.” I rubbed my eyes despite the pain in my face. “I would do anything to make things right with you, Cal.”
He moved to pour me more tequila, but I covered my mug with my hand, feeling the need to be at least semi-lucid for the rest of the conversation.
“I need to ask you something,” Cal said. “And I need you to tell me the truth.” He ran his hand through his hair, brushing it back off his face. It was longer than the last time I’d seen him. More like the way he used to wear it when we were kids. “Did you actually care about her? Or were you just trying to fuck with me?”
I sat up and shook my head like crazy. It had never occurred to me that Cal might think I’d gotten involved with October out of spite.
“I would never do anything to intentionally hurt you, Cal.”
He waited to see if I was going to add anything to that. Then he smirked and said, “I asked you two questions. You only answered one.”
My heart pounded. It was at once terrifying and a relief to be able to say the words to Cal.
“I loved her.” I felt my face flush. My eyebrows rose, but the rest of my body slackened, resigned to the sad truth. “I still love her.”
Cal shot me a look of staggering exasperation that under any other circumstance would have been comical in its histrionics. “Well, that just reinforces my theory that you’re the biggest pussy I’ve ever met.” He squinted at me. “Which one of us were you running away from that night? Me or her?”
“Her. I just used you as the excuse.”
“For Christ’s sake, Harp. Help me understand this. Seriously. I need you to explain to me where bailing on her got you, because I don’t get it.”
I noticed the smell of smoke and meat and remembered that Sid said he was going to throw some steaks on the grill. Maggie was making cornbread and a big salad. I was supposed to bring beer and ice cream.
“Well?” Cal pressed.
After a long, laden sigh, I said, “Why have I run away from anything I’ve ever run away from? I was terrified. Terrified of my feelings. Terrified I wasn’t good enough for her. Terrified I couldn’t be what she needed. Terrified of her eventual rejection. And on top of all that, I’d made a mess with you that I didn’t know how to clean up.” The ice cubes in the dishtowel collapsed onto the coffee table as they melted, making a small racket. “The worst part is I never told her how I felt. I pretended she knew. You know, like when she touched me, it was clear to her or something. And on some level, I believe it was. But that’s not the same thing as having the guts to look someone in the eye and voice it out loud. Of all the regrets I have—and there are many—that’s the biggest one. That I felt so much more for her than I ever let on.”
Cal got up and walked to the sliding glass door across the room. Vertical vinyl blinds hung in front of it. He yanked on the bead chain to open the blinds and they clattered against each other before settling back into silence at the end of the track.
I watched him stare out across the yard, through the pines, the lights of Sid’s backyard visible in the approaching dusk.
“It’s nice here,” he said. “Peaceful.”
“Can I ask you something?”
He turned toward me, accidentally elbowing the blinds and causing another little commotion. When he grabbed for them to stop them from clanging, it only made them clang more. Once they settled down, he raised his eyes in anticipation of my question.
“How much do you know about me and October. What did she tell you?”
“As soon as we realized you were gone, we had a long conversation about it. I believe I was given the relevant details. Nothing more, nothing less, if you know what I mean.”
He came back over and sat down, and this time he relaxed into the chair. “I saw her on Friday.”
My heart dropped. It was Sunday. He’d seen her two days ago. “Where?”
“San Francisco. I had a meeting in Cupertino, and we met up for dinner in the city later that night.”
I immediately felt anxious. “You two still talk? You hang out?”
“We do now. Took a while.” He gave me one of those subtle-but-swaggering Cal shrugs. “The truth is, she was right. We didn’t belong together. She’d known it for a while, and once I realized it, we were able to become friends again. She’s actually the one who introduced me to Nicole, my fiancée.”
“You’re getting married?” Either I’d been slacking in the online stalking department or this news hadn’t yet hit the internet. “Congratulations, man.”
He smiled wholly for the first time since he’d arrived. “Gonna do it right this time. No more messing a
round. This one’s the real deal.”
“I couldn’t be happier for you. I mean it.”
“See, this is thing about being happy, Harp. It really puts the past into perspective.” Cal moved to the edge of the chair and leaned in toward me. “I mean there I was, sitting at a quiet little table in Octavia with October, and we’re sharing this incredible dish of crab pappardelle, and we’re talking about my wedding, and the big performance she has coming up, and it dawned on me that I have absolutely no hard feelings toward her anymore. None. Now, if you would have told me on the day she and I broke up that I would one day be able to sit across from her and share pasta, I would have bet you a lot of money otherwise.”
I noticed the buttons on Cal’s shirt were shiny, pearlescent snaps. The fanciest Western shirt I’d ever seen.
“During dessert something else occurred to me. I had a realization. And I looked at October and said, ‘You know what? If I can forgive you, I should be able to forgive him too, right?’”
My anxiety morphed into alarm. “You spoke to her about me?”
“I’m going to be straight with you. She wasn’t too thrilled about that. As soon as I mentioned you, she clammed up and stared at her crème brûlée. So, I said, ‘You don’t think I should forgive him?’ and she said, ‘Chris, I know how much he means to you, and I think you should do whatever feels right. I just don’t want to talk about him.’”
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