Sorrow Read online

  When I called the number on the ad, I reached October’s assistant, Rae. It was almost ten o’clock at night, but she answered right away, a Type-A sort of hello, sharp and no nonsense. She introduced herself and then launched into an explanation about how the position was not to replace her. She was the personal and administrative assistant, she said, and did not work on projects in the studio.

  The tone of Rae’s voice told me she took herself and her job very seriously. And I could tell she was protective of her boss. Though when I made reference to her boss—because at that point I still didn’t know October’s name—she said, “I’m more like the artist’s friend who happens to organize her life, yeah?”

  Rae, I would quickly come to learn, had a habit of ending the majority of her sentences with “yeah?” even if they were not questions. I can be easily annoyed, and this was a quirk that never ceased to get on my nerves.

  I told Rae I was interested in the position, though I had no idea what it required.

  “Like I said, you’d be the studio assistant. October needs someone to help her with a film project she’s been working on, as well as various other art and technology projects. Someone who will not be intrusive. Someone who knows how to work cameras and lighting equipment, can build things, and has a general understanding of art. Is that you, Mister what-is-your-name?”

  “Harper. Joe.”

  “What is your current occupation, Mr. Harper? You work in the film industry, yeah?”

  “The ad didn’t say anything about that being a requirement.”

  “You’re an artist then?”

  I explained to Rae that I was currently employed by an organic produce delivery service called FarmHouse. My job consisted of driving around to local farms, picking up fruits and vegetables, eggs, and jars of various pickled foods, and delivering them to people’s homes. The pay was shit, but spending the day visiting farms in Northern California was more appealing than working for my dad’s construction company, which was what I’d done for almost a decade after college.

  “You deliver vegetables?” Rae exhaled with obvious irritation. “You have no experience with film or art?”

  I thought about being honest and telling her I was applying for the job because of the trees mentioned in the ad, but she didn’t sound like someone who would appreciate that. So I told her how I’d spent ten years working in construction, which seemed to soften her a bit, and then I added something stupid about how in high school my art teacher said I was good at drawing.

  “I used to play guitar pretty well too. If you count that as art.”

  Rae did not make a sound to indicate if she did one way or the other.

  “I’ve built entire houses, so I’m sure I can build anything an artist might need. And I’m a quick learner.”

  “That’s something,” Rae groaned. “The truth is we need someone ASAP. Our last assistant got a job on a feature film and left us in the lurch. Tell me you have an eye for composition and can decorate a set.”

  “Sure,” I said, though I wasn’t confident that was the case.

  “And you can come in for an interview first thing in the morning, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you familiar with October Danko’s work?”

  “Full disclosure? I’ve never heard of her. Do I lose points for that too?”

  “No. October would prefer it, actually. You should know this before you come in. She’s a very private person. Sensitive. Needs a lot of space. Her assistant has to be quiet and unobtrusive.”

  “Gotcha,” I said. “I’m pretty introverted myself. Trust me, she won’t even know I’m there.”

  “Also,” Rae went on, “October is not into people who make a fuss about her, so don’t come in and try to impress her with a bunch of stuff you think you know about her or you’ll be out of luck.”

  “I just told you I don’t know anything about her.”

  “I’ll text you the address. Be there by nine, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  The next morning I was heading west on the Richmond Bridge just after sunrise. There was an accident up ahead, and traffic was at such a standstill that I put my truck in park, reclined my seat, and scanned my brain for a positive thought on which to focus.

  That day, like most days, I’d woken up with the sense that I was invisible, that I’d disappeared inside the heavy, cloudlike mass of my past, that I’d gone too far astray and was unable to get back on track no matter how hard I tried.

  The city of San Francisco was to my left; to my right the fog was just starting to lift from a midpoint above the water like a big white circus tent being erected over the Bay.

  I kept staring out to the north, and maybe a mile in that direction a tiny rock of a landmass off Port Richmond caught my eye. The rock was East Brother Island, a light station built in the late 1800s to guide sailors safely in and out of the Bay.

  That morning I could see the light in the lighthouse blinking. Having grown up in the Bay Area, I’d driven across the Richmond Bridge more times than I could count, but I’d never noticed a light on in the tower, and for one surreal moment I wondered if I was the only person who could see it. I watched the flare trying to reach up toward the sky, barely making it through the fog, and all I could think was That’s me.

  As the traffic began to lurch forward, I put the truck back into drive and did something I do when I’m feeling lost: I talked to my dead brother. That day I asked him for a sign. I needed him to remind me that I wasn’t as alone as I felt, and if he could let me know whether this job was the right move, that would be cool too.

  I didn’t necessarily think Sam could hear me, let alone respond, but I figured it was slightly possible, in as much as it was highly improbable, that his energy or spirit or whatever you want to call it was out there somewhere, probably rolling its spectral eyes at me but willing to help if he could.

  “The sign needs to be something unmistakable,” I said aloud, because as far as I’m concerned, interpretation is for the faithful—the skeptical and hopeless need to be hit over the head with certainty.

  I asked Sam to deliver his message to me in the form of a song. The next song to come on the radio, to be exact.

  Normally I listened to NPR in the morning, but I switched over to Live 105 to receive my brother’s communiqué. It was the station he’d listened to when he was alive, so I figured it would be the music he could control best as a spirit. There was a commercial on when I tuned in, and this seemed fortuitous. It meant Sam had extra time to play a mind trick on the DJ and get him to put on a relevant song after the commercial was over.

  I still remember the commercial playing that morning. It was an ad for a discount diamond store that I’d been hearing since I was a kid. Now you have a friend in the diamond business.

  When the commercial was over, the DJ started jabbering about a contest the station was having: Starting tomorrow, if you were the fifth caller after you heard the next song, you would win a trip to a music festival in Southern California, where this band would be playing in a couple of months.

  The DJ said Cal’s name, along with something about the song being the first single off Callahan’s new, critically acclaimed third album. I changed the station straightaway because I wasn’t emotionally equipped to hear the song. And because I didn’t need to hear it to understand the point Sam was trying to make.

  It was the same point Sam always made.

  And when I took the East Blithedale exit into Mill Valley a few minutes later, I was thinking about Cal, and Sam, and even Bob, and my heart felt so heavy I was afraid my chest was going to collapse in on itself and kill me. I would die on some artist’s front doorstep, having never taken a real chance on anything.

  I hadn’t touched my guitar in years.

  I’d just broken up with a glib acupuncturist named Meadow, a well-meaning woman for whom I
’d often felt an emotion akin to disdain.

  And I couldn’t help but wonder what I’d be doing right now if I’d gone to Brooklyn with Cal.

  THREE.

  October’s property is up West Blithedale Canyon, just two miles past Mill Valley’s small, quaint downtown, and only another few miles on foot to the top of Mount Tamalpais, one of my favorite spots in all of Marin County, where on a clear day you can see the whole Bay Area in a spectacular 360-degree view.

  The gate at the bottom of October’s driveway held a small, beautifully welded sign that read “CASA DIEZ.” There was a keypad to open it, but since I didn’t know the code, I pressed the call button and watched the mechanized gate slide open a few seconds later.

  A long gravel road took me up a steep hill and around a hairpin turn, opening into a rustic compound completely hidden by an array of trees—redwoods, oaks, poplars, madrones, and even a couple of elegant California buckeyes, their rosy-white floral fireworks in full bloom.

  I saw three buildings situated in a semicircle around the end of the driveway, all made of wood, painted farmhouse red but heavily faded from weather and age. The front of the building immediately to the right was a big wall of windows; I knew it was the studio, based on Rae’s directions—and the fact that I could see a stack of canvases piled up against the wall.

  The main house was straight ahead. It was much smaller than the studio, and even more run-down, in that charming old Mill Valley sort of way. The paint was chipped and I could see some dry rot in the window frames, but jasmine vines stretched and crawled up the front-facing wall, scenting the air wafting in through my open window.

  A large garage sat to the left of the main house, and after I parked my truck I wandered over to check it out. The door was padlocked, the windows were all covered up and I couldn’t see inside, but Rae had mentioned that the top floor was the apartment where I could live if I got the job. I walked up the staircase attached to the north side of the building and tried the door. It was locked, but the blinds were up. I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered in the window. The apartment was one big room, the size of the oversize garage beneath it. A wrought-iron bed covered in a striped camping blanket was pushed against the sidewall. A leather couch that looked as soft and worn as my brother’s old baseball mitt sat below the front window, and a storage chest acting as a coffee table sat in front of that. The little kitchen looked to be in the back, on the other side of the bed, and there was a door I assumed led to a bathroom behind that. The lofty redwoods that surrounded the garage cast the whole space in shadow and reminded me of a cabin that Bob, Sam, and I had stayed in on a trip to Mount Shasta when I was a kid.

  My immediate gut reaction was that I could be happy there. A moment later I heard Rae call my name. And I knew it was Rae because she said, “Joe, yeah?”

  I turned around to see her walking from the house toward the garage. She stopped at the bottom of the steps and waited for me to come down, one hand on her hip, a bag of what looked like trail mix dangling from the other. She grabbed a couple of nuts, plopped them into her mouth, and pointed over her left shoulder. “October’s studio is there.”

  Rae was younger than I’d imagined. Not a day over thirty, of what I guessed to be Japanese descent, with hair dyed a color that was either gray or lavender depending on how the light hit it. She was wearing a heavy black skirt that dragged on the ground when she walked, though the way she moved was more like a shuffle.

  “You look too small to build houses,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if she was accusing me of something or trying to make a joke. She put another handful of what I could now see were almonds and raisins in her mouth and headed toward the studio, scuffling across the gravel as if she weren’t lifting her feet at all.

  I spun around to take in the property. Everything was damp from the morning fog still lingering on the ridge across the valley—incidentally, the ridge where I had grown up—and I saw a gap in the thick cluster of trees where I could just barely make out the roof of my old house. My mom, Ingrid, had sold the place back when I was in college, right before she remarried and relocated to Dallas. I hadn’t laid eyes on it in years.

  The woodsy, mossy smell of my childhood lingered in the air, and that, along with the quick glimpse of the house, caused me to experience a pang of Mill Valley hiraeth that was both crushing and comforting all at once.

  “I forgot to ask you on the phone,” Rae said as she opened the door. “Are you good with dogs?”

  I didn’t have time to answer her before the tallest, gangliest dog I’d ever seen came rushing in our direction. So enormous, it didn’t even seem like a dog; it seemed like a furry, prehistoric creature. I stood still while it sniffed my fist and wagged its yardstick-long tail.

  “This is Diego. He looks intimidating but he’s a giant baby.” Rae held her bag of snacks up over her head so the dog couldn’t get to it.

  The dog’s head reached my ribcage, and I was certain it outweighed me, probably by twenty-five pounds. “I’ve never seen a dog this big.”

  “Irish wolfhound. Tallest breed in the world.” The dog ran off as we walked into the studio and then trotted back with a thick piece of rope in its mouth.

  I played a quick game of tug with Diego and glanced around the room, which smelled like turpentine, hot metal, and palo santo. The studio was a big, loftlike space—probably once a barn—with a high ceiling, the center of which held two large skylights that were littered with fallen branches, dead leaves, and other random forest detritus that I silently vowed to clean if I got the job. I could see a portioned-off film set in the back, decorated to look like an old suburban living room: lots of grandma patterns and textures, only with fake blood splattered on everything, like a crime scene. A camera sat on a tripod in front of the little alcove, and a small lighting rig was set up to the side.

  Another prop I noticed in the makeshift room was a beautiful old Gibson Dove that sent a shockwave to my heart. It had been years since I’d taken my guitar out from under the bed, and seeing one without warning was like running into an old, unrequited love.

  The canvases up against the wall were in various stages of being built and/or drawn, but not yet painted. They were clearly part of a series and had gigantic sketches of vintage boats on them, with ship-related phrases stenciled on top of the images. The first one I saw read, “I’LL SINK THIS SHIP IF I WANT TO.” Another said, “SAILING ON A SHIP OF FOOLS.” And another, the one that spoke to me with poignant and rather heartbreaking significance, even then, said, “BOY DID YOU MISS THE BOAT.”

  October’s back was to us as Rae and I approached. She was sitting on a stool in front of a long steel table, clear safety goggles on her face, using a small blowtorch on a canvas.

  The first thing I noticed about October was how small her hands were. Then I noticed everything about her was small. Her wrists, her ears, her shoulders. Coupled with what she was wearing—hickory-striped overalls streaked with dirt, paint, and grease, over a big, threadbare sweatshirt that reminded me of the one Cal wore all summer the year he and I met—she could have passed for a tomboyish teenager and wasn’t at all what I had expected.

  Rae tapped October on the back. October looked over her shoulder, and I caught her eye for half a second. She looked down to turn off the torch and then spun back around as if she’d been awakened by a hypnic jerk.

  She stood and pulled the goggles off, causing her dark, sun-streaked hair to fall down over her shoulders. Soot and splotches of paint smeared her face, and half-moon indentations marked her cheeks where the goggles had been pressing into her skin. With her head tilted to the side, she pushed her fringy bangs away from her eyes and looked sideways at me.

  “This is the guy who called about the job,” Rae told her.

  “Joe Harper,” I said, extending my hand.

  She took my hand and held it flat between both of hers.

  �
�Joe Harper,” she repeated. Her voice was low and soft. Then “Joe Harper” again, the second time with a more curious inflection. She was still holding my hand, now squinting hard at me, as if I were a spoon she was trying to bend with her mind, and my first thought was This woman is a little odd.

  Finally, she let go of my hand. Then she took an elastic band from her wrist, wrapped her hair up in it and said, “Tell me about your relationship to art, Joe Harper.”

  That caught me off guard. It didn’t seem like a topic I could address without a lot of thought. “Tell me what it means to you,” she added.

  It had been a long time since anyone had asked me what I thought or felt about art. I didn’t live in a world where that was the norm. Cal and I used to talk about art all the time, but that was back when he had me convinced I was an artist.

  I stood in silence, reflecting on what to say. Rae stepped impatiently from one foot to the other, snacking on her nuts and raisins, while October remained still, and seemed as though she could have waited all day for my response.

  Bear in mind, I didn’t yet know anything more than what I’d just seen about the kind of art October made, and that meant I had to think about the kind of art I knew—music—and offer her an honest reply.

  I tried to remember how playing guitar used to make me feel and said, “I guess, for me, art is how to tell, not the truth, but my truth. It’s a way to communicate who you are and what you feel. Some people think art is pretending, but to me it’s the opposite. It’s the one place where you can’t pretend.”

  October was watching me closely as I spoke, her eyes soft but curious.

  “The job is yours,” she said. “If you want it.”

  Rae jumped to attention. “Wait. You want to ask him more questions, yeah?”