I told him I would, and it became real as soon as I said it. Almost as if agreeing to play on Cal’s record was a premonition or a vision. Not only could I foresee it coming true, I knew for a fact it was going to happen.
A worn-out silence rested between us on the drive to the airport. Downtown Whitefish was dormant at that hour, but the streetlamps were so bright they gave one the impression of being on a soundstage, on the set of a movie that takes place in a small mountain town. Once we headed south on US 93, however, the giant cabochon sky sparkled with constellations all around us.
Cal rolled down his window, and the crisp air blew his hair back. He stuck his head out and marveled at the stars.
“Big sky country living up to its name,” he said.
Glacier Park International is about thirteen miles southeast of Sid’s property, and despite its overreaching tag, it’s a small municipal airport, the kind of place where you can still roll up to the curb, shut off your engine, and wait without being chased away by security.
I parked behind the only other car at the terminal, a dusty Subaru from which an older couple was pulling blue vinyl suitcases out of the hatchback. The woman was in a bathrobe and slippers, and I surmised she wasn’t the one traveling.
I shut off the engine and turned slightly to face Cal, feeling compelled to say things before he left.
“Listen . . .” I began.
But Cal threw up his hands and said, “Oh, no. Don’t get all sentimental on me now, Harp. I’m fucking knackered.”
I must have looked dejected, because Cal scoffed at me, but it wasa good-humored scoff, as if he found me amusing. “What?” he said. “I punched you, you wrote me a dope-as-fuck song. We’re square.”
I laughed unreasonably hard at that, and my stomach hurt from where Cal had landed the second punch. At the same time, I felt an overwhelming, plaintive rush of gratitude toward him, and to the loyalty he had to our friendship, our brotherhood. “Can I at least thank you for coming? Can I acknowledge that I owe you more than I could ever put into words?”
“Fine, fine. Consider it acknowledged.” He leaned on the dashboard, looked sideways at me. “Now tell me you’re going back, and my work here is done.”
I didn’t respond one way or the other, but right then I knew I would go. And Cal knew it too, because he said, “And then what?”
“One day at a time. Let me get there first.”
He accepted my answer with a single nod, and his mouth fell open like he wanted to say one more thing. Then he shut his mouth. Then he almost spoke again. Finally, he spun his whole torso in my direction, leaned in, seemed to drop his voice an octave and said, “Confession: I left something out earlier. When I was telling you about my conversation with October.”
The air coming in through Cal’s open window didn’t feel especially cold, but I began to shiver.
“I wasn’t going to mention it because I have no idea what it means and I don’t want to get your hopes up, but it strikes me as pertinent at this juncture.” He scratched at the stubble on his chin. “Remember when I told you how I asked her if she thought I should forgive you?”
I nodded and tried to swallow, but my mouth felt like it was coated in breadcrumbs.
“Well, after she got all weird and quiet and said she didn’t want to talk about you, I pressed her on it. I said, ‘You mean to tell me you never think about him?’ and I swear over my life, Harp, this is what she said—and I quote: ‘Chris, I think about him every day. For a long time, he was the first thought I had when I woke up and the last one I had before I closed my eyes, and it almost destroyed me. I poured all of that into my work. I processed it and moved on. I don’t need to talk about it.’”
Cal waited for me to react, but I didn’t know how to interpret October’s words any more than he did, and I sat there in something of an emotional coma, watching the lady in the slippers. She was standing on the curb, holding the top of her robe together with one hand, waving to the man dragging the blue suitcases with the other. She kept waving, even as he turned his back and walked into the terminal, and something about that made me want to drown myself in Flathead Lake.
Cal checked the time on his phone and said, “I gotta go.”
He got out of the truck, shut the door, but stuck his head back through the window. “I almost forgot. Wedding’s gonna be in Maui on New Year’s Eve. Just a few close friends and family. And since you’re the only family I have, you better fucking show up.”
October once asked me if redwoods were my only tree obsession and I showed her a photo of a big banyan in Lahaina. One of the largest in the world, the tree is only about sixty feet high—tiny in relation to a redwood—but it spans outward over two hundred feet, a forest unto itself, its graceful branches stretching in wild, sweeping directions like a dancer’s limbs in motion.
I remember telling October that I wanted to have lunch beside that tree before I died and she’d said, “Me too. Let’s have lunch there together someday.”
“Harp,” Cal said.
I got out of the truck, walked around to the curb and hugged him as hard as I could.
“I’ll be there,” I told him.
I stayed at the airport until I saw Cal’s plane taxiing toward the runway. It was still pretty dark—the sun wouldn’t rise for another hour—and I felt a harboring silence inside the truck, even though a handful of cars and shuttles from local lodges were coming and going, dropping off travelers for the morning flights out of town, one to Salt Lake City, and the one Cal was on to Minneapolis, where he had a short layover on his way back to New York.
I was thinking about how I, too, often woke up with October on my mind and went to sleep hoping she’d show up in my dreams. Which she did. Often.
When I pulled out of the airport and headed back toward Whitefish, the sun was just starting to highlight the peaks to the east, and I could feel my heart—I was going to say beating—but it wasn’t a beat I felt that morning, it was a flow, as if my heart were an hourglass with sand trickling through it.
I had a vision then. And for the next twelve miles I formulated and designed, in my head, an art piece I was determined to build after I got back to California. The piece would be based on that hourglass feeling, and it would serve to remind me of something October had said to me the day after we ate the mushrooms.
You live like someone who doesn’t understand how fast the sand moves through the hourglass, Joe.
I stopped at the Cowgirl Coffee hut for a cappuccino, and then I hurried back to my cabin, suddenly feeling the restless anticipation of having someplace to be.
At first a voice inside my head tried to correct me. You don’t have anywhere to be, it said.
But right away I thought No, I do.
I thought, I have to go home.
TWENTY-SIX.
The morning I started my drive back to California, Cal emailed me an article about a border collie from Orlando named Ace who had disappeared while on vacation with his family in Hilton Head, South Carolina. The dog took off down the beach one morning while his humans were out boogie boarding and didn’t come back. The family stayed for three extra days searching for him. They put up posters, promised a generous reward, and regularly checked the local animal hospitals and shelters. Nothing. Heartbroken, they went home without him. Three years later, Ace showed up on their front porch, the prodigal canine. No one knew where the dog had been or how he’d found his way home, but there he was.
There was a photo in the article, taken moments after Ace was discovered at the door. He was all skin and bones, mangy and full of scabs, but he looked happy to be back.
“Ace is your spirit animal,” Cal wrote, adding two lines of laughing-face-with-tears emojis. “Good luck.”
I left Whitefish as soon as I could. But I hadn’t wanted to abandon my commitments the way I had before, and it took me a few weeks to wrap
up my life there. I finished out the month with my guitar students and attended the last two writing workshops of the session. In the meantime, I painted the walls and refinished the floors in the cabin—my parting gift to Sid, to thank him for his profuse hospitality.
By the time I hit the road, October was already well into her monthlong stint at SFMoMA. And because I’d decided—or rather, Cal had convinced me—that visiting the exhibit was the safest way for me to reunite with her—“In a setting that forces you to talk and her to listen. Where she has no choice but to hold your hands and absorb your Eeyore-ness.”—I didn’t have time to lag on my drive.
I made it to Bend the first day and spent the night at the Rainbow Motel, a whitewashed, flowery little motor court that three years earlier I’d deemed too bright and cheerful for my state of mind. I considered it an indication of personal and spiritual growth that I chose to stay there on my return.
I left Bend before sunrise the next morning because I’d set up appointments to see three apartments later that afternoon, all within walking distance of downtown Mill Valley. For the first time in my adult life, I could afford a decent place to live in my hometown, and I ended up taking the second apartment I saw: a furnished, one-bedroom in-law unit in a well-built, contemporary craftsman-style house. The apartment had its own entrance, off-street parking, and offered a month-to-month lease, which appealed to me, because eventually I wanted to buy a place of my own.
Cal told me October was staying at the St. Regis—a hotel across the street from the museum—for the duration of the exhibit. The good news was I could get settled in Mill Valley without worrying about accidentally running into her at Whole Foods. The bad news was I couldn’t accidentally run into her at Whole Foods.
It should be said that I harbored no false hopes of reconciliation. I didn’t expect October to be pleased that I’d returned, and I didn’t expect she’d want to see me. But I knew that in order for my hoped-for growth to be real, for it to count, I needed to face her, I needed to tell her the truth, and I needed to apologize.
One noteworthy piece of information regarding the apartment I rented: It was, coincidentally, up on Blithedale Ridge, high enough that I had a clear and direct view of Casa Diez on the opposite knoll. And while I did find it comforting to be able to see the lights of October’s kitchen from my bedroom, it pained me to stand on the deck at night, look out, and think, If I hadn’t been such a pussy, I’d live over there right now.
I drove to SFMoMA on Sunday, October 21, and arrived fifteen minutes before the museum opened. By the time I turned onto Third Street, I could see the line for Sorrow. It started at the Howard Street entrance, rounded the corner, ran the length of the building, and ended at the intersection of Third and Minna.
The popularity of the exhibit was something I hadn’t considered, and after doing some quick math in my head, I didn’t bother to park. October sat from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and each visitor was allowed up to five minutes with her. She was seeing, on average, twelve people an hour. That’s only eighty-four per day, and there were well over a hundred already in line. With only three performances left, I was going to have to get there a lot earlier the following day, or my chances of getting in would be nil.
Monday morning, I crossed the Golden Gate well before the sun started to crack thin interstices of flame-colored light into the sky over the East Bay. When I got to SFMoMA, I counted fifty-six people already in line. At number fifty-seven, I felt confident I would see October before the day ended.
The front-facing walls of the Roberts Family Gallery where Sorrow was being held are all glass, on the ground floor of the museum, and visible from the street. Huge shades, white but opaque, descended from the interior ceiling, preventing anyone from seeing the exhibit until it opened. Outside, the word “SORROW” was written across the shades in a font I recognized as October’s handwriting. Even that small hint of her presence packed a punch, and I braced myself for the day.
In line, I picked up on a sense of camaraderie among the people there, as if we were all connected to one another by the mere fact that we’d shown up and would, for hours, be taking small steps forward together. This was something else I hadn’t considered: the lengths to which October’s fans would go to see her.
Number fifty-five in line was Eli Murray, a British journalist covering Sorrow for the Times. A few years older than I, Eli lived in San Francisco’s Mission District. He hadn’t missed a day of the exhibit, and when I asked him why he kept coming back, he said, “Stare into an empath’s eyes for five minutes, you’re going to learn something about yourself every time. You’ll see.”
The young girl directly in front of me had come all the way from Beijing to experience Sorrow. She was nineteen and dreamed of being a performance artist herself. In her hand she held a piece of paper on which she’d written what she planned to say to October. She asked me if I would read it and let her know if it sounded all right. I found the note so touching, I asked her for permission to take a picture of it with my phone. She said I could, and this is what it said:
Hello. I be follow your career since I was small girl. Before I learn your work I am very sad like wanting to die. I think about to end me. My life is much tediousness in China. Less of art. Then I see I can make my sad beautiful. I can make my everything beautiful. Thank you for teach me this. I am Yanmei Liu from Beijing.
“You understand?” Yanmei asked me. “To make sad beautiful?”
I nodded and told her October had taught me the same thing.
The guy behind me was a ridiculously tall, bristly art student from a college in the city. His name was Jessie; he was wearing eyeliner, reeked of body odor, and talked about himself without pause. I pegged him as puerile, and most likely on some bad drugs, but listening to him yammer about his life distracted me, so I let him go. When Jessie finally asked me a question—namely, why I was there—it caught me off guard and I answered him with a shrug toward the sidewalk. After that he seemed to suss out some weakness in me; he made almost pathological eye contact as he gave me an unsolicited account of what drew him to Sorrow, explaining that he had a thing for older women due to the lasting impact of his first girlfriend, a sadistic, forty-two-year-old socialite whose name was also Jesse. “But without the ‘i’,” he clarified.
This was Jessie’s second time visiting Sorrow. He’d been there the day before and admitted that the reason he came back was because holding October’s hands and staring into her eyes had turned him on. As soon as his time was up, he planned on going to the restroom to jack off, just like he’d done the previous afternoon.
“Dude I described my cock to her in great detail yesterday no kidding I told her how I’d use it on her too if she’d let me I’m pretty sure she was as turned on as I was.”
I was pretty sure she wasn’t, and I almost got into it with Jessie, but I yawned and he didn’t yawn back, and according to an article I’d recently read, that meant he was a psychopath, so I refrained from starting any kind of heated exchange with him.
I told Jessie I needed to center myself before I went in to the museum, and I turned around, put in my earbuds, and listened to a playlist October had made me back when we first started hanging out.
In 2013 SFMoMA had closed for an extensive renovation. It reopened three years later with three times more exhibit space, including the ground-floor galleries now accessible via the new entrance at Schwab Hall, allowing visitors into the adjacent Roberts Family Gallery without having to go through the main lobby.
At 9:56 a guard unlocked the double doors, while the mechanical shades rose at a laboriously slow speed and disappeared into the ceiling. One at a time, the people at the front of the line advanced through a metal detector and into the building. I advanced halfway to the entrance, and from there I could see bronze stanchions with blush-colored ropes demarcating the queue that snaked toward the structure in the middle of the room.
She’s in there, I remember thinking, a wave of anticipation dousing my heart. But despite my anxiety, I felt grounded and eager. I believed I was where I was supposed to be. And I kept reminding myself of something Cal had said in Montana: I’d already lost what I was afraid of losing. There was nothing at stake here.
Not surprisingly, the structure was a work of art too. A 10 x 10 roofless form made of asymmetrical bronze frames, edging thick pieces of glass with just the slightest tint, as if the glassmaker had blown a thin stream of rose-colored smoke into them before they set. There was an open doorframe at the front of the glass house and one on the opposite side in the back. Each had a security guard standing by.
But the most visually compelling feature of the structure was the glass itself. All the panes looked like someone had taken a chisel to them, causing artfully crafted cracks to extend out from random points. I could barely see beyond the fractures, but even through the landscape of a thousand jagged lines, I recognized the figure of the woman seated at the table inside.
At exactly 10:00 a.m. the first person in line, a young African-American girl wearing a lot of colorful necklaces and a big backpack, was ushered up to the glass house and invited to enter.
One of the security guards took the pack from the girl before she went in. And as I advanced a few feet, I could make out October’s hands on the table. I saw the girl sit down and set her hands directly on top of October’s. It was impossible for me to know if the girl spoke or not. Five minutes later she walked out wiping her eyes and smiling.
Upon entering the museum, I took out my earbuds and put away my phone.
The Roberts Family Gallery was a huge space, and the glass house was in the center of it. At the back of the room, a wide, stunning maple staircase led to the main lobby of the museum, and also provided bleacher-like seating for visitors who wished to sit and observe what was going on in the gallery below.
Sorrow Page 28
