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
