“I understand. I do. But if you tell me you’re interested in exploring this, I’ll tell Chris. I’ll break it off with him.”
I nodded, though I can’t say that made me feel any safer.
“The ball’s in your court,” October said.
That filled me with dread. I wasn’t good at having the ball, especially with women. “Why me?”
“Because I can sense your apprehension, and I don’t want to ask you for anything you don’t want to give me.”
I wanted to ask her more about Chris, but I knew the more I learned about him, the more insecure I would be, so instead I said, “What do you want?” However, I’d like to note the tone with which I asked the question. It wasn’t bold, confrontational, or flirty—tequila could only help a guy like me so much—it was detached and wary. I was petrified of the answer I might get.
“I want some more boozy milkshake,” she said, making the kind of eye contact that felt like a different and more dangerous conversation. But then she looked away, and I swore I saw her blush. “I feel nervous,” she said. “I haven’t been this nervous since The Voyage.”
I handed her the blender. “What’s The Voyage?”
She seemed relieved that I’d given her a topic of discussion, and as she refilled her glass, she began rambling on about her third Living Exhibit, which was, she said, ostensibly motivated by the aggressive anti-immigration rhetoric going on in the country at the time. But the specific details of the piece had been inspired by her great grandmother Rosa’s real-life journey to America.
She pulled up a series of photos on her phone and showed them to me. The “boat” on which the exhibit took place was a massive hydraulic platform that resembled the side of an old ship, with a steep set of steel stairs that led down to the windowless steerage of the lower deck, where the poverty-stricken travelers like her grandmother spent their journeys.
October inhabited the small, makeshift living quarters for sixteen days with a dozen performance artists from all over the world—immigrants, if you will—who had volunteered to be the other travelers on the boat.
“Back in 1916, Rosa left Italy with what amounted to forty-nine dollars in her handbag, at the age of seventeen, after her nineteen-year-old husband was killed in one of the earliest battles Italy fought against Austria-Hungary in the war.”
She showed me a photo of Rosa, taken a few months before her death at age ninety-nine. Rosa was even tinier than October, so tiny she looked as if she’d been folded in half, and her face was like pavement after a jackhammer.
“It was the most intense experience I’ve ever had during a performance, and the most challenging. I was living out this narrative that my great grandma had told me so many times, and it became so real to me that every night I would have nightmares about her dead husband and then wake up crying, full of grief and panic.”
“Is that what you feel now? Grief and panic?”
October zoned out for a moment. Then she said, “The truth is, there’s a part of me that knows I shouldn’t be having this conversation with you. And another part of me that feels, I don’t know, compelled. Like it’s essential. An inevitability. Or maybe I’m just crazy. All I know is that the day you walked into my studio, I almost burned my hand off with that blowtorch when I saw you.”
“Why?” I asked, baffled.
“Sometimes I meet people and I just know things about them.”
“What did you know about me that day?”
She let her head fall back and stared at the ceiling. Then she looked at me again and said, “That you belong here.”
I swallowed hard and felt the hair on my arms stand up.
She picked a blackberry out of the pie pan with her fingers and ate it. Then she wrinkled her nose like she knew it wasn’t her best work. “Joe, I don’t know how you ended up seeing that post and calling about the job and walking in that day, but you did, and here we are, and I refuse to believe there’s not a reason for it.”
I thought of Sam then, because if I believed in reasons and signs, then I had to believe they were from him. I had to consider the possibility that my brother had a hand in whatever this was.
I stood feebly in place, trying to figure out what to do. I wanted to be the kind of guy who could saunter around to the other side of the counter and kiss October right then and there, but I wasn’t.
Two minutes or an hour went by with both of us standing there, the kitchen counter between us, sipping at our brown recluses.
October took her phone out again and said, “I want to play you a song.”
I heard Sam’s voice whisper: Here’s your stupid sign, you shithead.
“I don’t know why,” October said, “but this song reminds me of you.”
The song started out with this sprinkly high hat/kick drum combo that was fast but slowly brooding at the same time. Then the first two lines come in, and they aren’t sung so much as they’re murmured with an aloofness that felt too close to home.
Sorrow found me when I was young.
Sorrow waited, sorrow won.
A few seconds later the baritone singer starts repeating the line I don’t wanna get over you in a way that seemed more like foreshadowing than a sign.
Listening to the song made me feel like October understood something crucial about me, something that lived deep inside my core, something she couldn’t possibly know. That’s when I knew I was in trouble. The fact that she played the song, and I understood why she played it, and perhaps she understood why she played it.
Still, it all seemed too fantastic. Too risky. And I didn’t take risks.
Because where could this possibly go? And if I blew it, then what? I’d be out
