me with her tiny palm cupped under the spoon. “Here. Be my taste tester.”
She didn’t hold the spoon out very far, and I had to get way too close to her to reach it—so close we were almost-but-not-quite touching—the kind of closeness where you might as well be touching because your energies or whatever you call them are overlapping like some spiritual Venn diagram. I could feel her body as if she were pressing it against mine, even though I was still a few inches away.
I tasted the curry and took two steps back.
“It’s good,” I said.
She offered me a sad smile. “I like your shirt.”
As soon as she said it, I realized it wasn’t Cal’s friends for whom I’d made an effort. It was for October. I wanted her to notice me above the others at the party. But then I felt guilty for thinking that and wanting that; to distract myself from those feelings, I asked after Cal’s whereabouts, only for the first time in my life I called him Chris so as not to annoy her.
“He took Diego for a walk. He’ll be right back. There’s beer in the fridge. Oh, and an antipasto plate up there if you’re hungry.” She pointed to the top of the refrigerator. “Do me a favor and grab it down.”
Cal must have put it up there because I could barely reach it, and if I could barely reach it, October definitely couldn’t.
“Why is it on top of the fridge?”
“Diego has a weakness for prosciutto.”
It was a long, heavy wooden board filled with vegetables, cheeses, and meats, plus olives, nuts, and crackers. I lifted it carefully and set it on the counter. Like the table outside, the board looked like a work of art. October had arranged flowers, berries, and branches with imagination and precision all around the food, and even though I was hungry, I decided it was too beautiful to mess with before the guests got a chance to see it.
I grabbed a beer while October drifted over to her laptop. She pushed a few buttons, and seconds later music started playing softly inside and outside the house. Subtle singer-songwriter stuff that amplified my melancholy. I looked out the window and nursed my beer while a mopey guy playing what sounded like a prewar Martin whisper-sang, It’s not that we’re scared, it’s just that it’s delicate, and I wanted to say: Speak for yourself, buddy; I’m fucking terrified.
I could see October was listening to the song too, and I felt relieved when I spotted Cal and Diego walking up the driveway, because I didn’t want to be alone with her and all my leaden, Martin-tinged emotions.
I walked out to greet Cal just as a big Mercedes SUV pulled up. A tall, light-skinned African-American guy got out and then helped his wife out of the passenger side. Cal embraced them and introduced me as his oldest and best friend. They shook my hand and told me their names, but I’m terrible with new people and names, and a second later I couldn’t recall what they’d said.
We went inside; more cars pulled up, and before I knew it the house was filled with people talking and drinking and messing up October’s beautiful antipasto board without ever telling her how incredible it looked. They took her talent for granted. Or, as she might say, they missed the point. Even Cal seemed to miss it. But October didn’t care. She didn’t do it for them. She didn’t make interesting and beautiful things so that people would notice and tell her how interesting and beautiful they were. She did it because it moved her to do so. She did it for the doing itself. That’s what art is to her. Doing. Living. The expression of oneself in action and in creation. You know that old question about if a tree falls in a forest but nobody hears it, does it make any noise? October was the art equivalent of that. If you make something and nobody ever appreciates it, is it still art? I would argue it most certainly is. October would surely argue the same.
The only good part of all the socializing and mingling was that I couldn’t hear the mopey guy singing anymore.
Cal went out of his way to make me feel comfortable. He introduced me to his manager, Nancy, and her husband, John, and I talked to them for a while. They both had soft handshakes and shiny silver threads of coarse