nervous or excited by a woman.
“You know what else I think?” she said. “I think love is the ultimate art project. To me, there’s nothing more beautiful, more powerful, or more meaningful than truly and purely loving another human. No expectations. No strings attached. Just the freedom to be who you are and to be loved in spite of that.”
Sometimes the way October talked made my heart long for something I couldn’t name. She had words for things I didn’t. Space for things I’d shut out.
“But it’s impossible to have that kind of relationship with someone who’s gone all the time. And even when Chris is here, he’s either working or thinking about work. And he’s not remotely interested in mine. That’s not what I want.”
I nodded. It was the best I could do.
“Listen,” she said, leaning on the counter. “I don’t know what’s going to happen when Chris gets home at the end of the month, but I know what can happen.”
I put my hands in my pockets and fiddled with the change I could feel there. “What does that mean?”
She chose her words carefully. “I’d like to spend more time with you. Outside of work, I mean. If you’re open to that.”
I shook my head and sighed. “I don’t think I’m an open relationship kind of guy. I don’t want to get in the middle of something between you and your boyfriend. And more than that, I don’t want to jeopardize my job.”
“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