or may not be weight-bearing, I’m not sure yet. For you, it will probably be fine. But you definitely won’t want Diego sitting on it.”
She laughed and said, “Duly noted.”
“Oh. Wait. I have to show you my favorite part.” I put the sketches down and walked to the corner of the room, where I’d left a long cardboard box. “I found this wallpaper to put on the bottom.” I opened the box and unrolled the paper for her to see. It was made to look like old editions of the New York Times. “Get it? Every birdcage I’ve ever seen has newspaper on the bottom. And these aren’t random newspapers. I got to pick the year when I ordered it. These are headlines from 1973, the year of the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade.”
“Incredible. Honestly, you’re blowing me away.”
We drank our awful, now cold cappuccinos and talked more about how I was going to make the mechanics work, as well as how the night would unfold. October told me we were having a meeting with the audiovisual engineer from the gallery the following day, and she couldn’t wait for me to explain this to him.
We worked separately for the rest of the day. I concentrated on the birdcage, and October concentrated on a selfie. She spent over an hour photographing her eyes in extreme close-up with a forensic camera. Then she edited the photos into a video montage, put a bunch of weird filters on them, and intercut the video with images of masochistic, hard-core pornography. The porn flashed by in quick, short bursts so that if you blinked you missed it and if you didn’t blink you weren’t quite sure you’d seen it at all. It made me uncomfortable when she showed it to me, mainly because it reminded me of the fantasy I’d had of her and Cal on the beach, and even though I knew it was impossible for October to have gleaned those thoughts from me, or sensed my shame all the way from Big Sur, I couldn’t exactly put it past her.
At some point later in the day, it must have been around four o’clock, Cal burst into the studio like he’d been shot out of a cannon and declared the workday over.“Enough of your toiling,” he said. “I’m only here for two more days. I want to hang out.”
October and I were at opposite ends of the room. We both stopped what we were doing and looked at him.
“Which one of us are you talking to?” she asked.
“Both of you. Come on. Let’s do something.”
October didn’t make a move, so Cal sauntered over to her, lifted her up, and flung her over his shoulder.
“All right,” she laughed. “Put me down.”
He slid her back to the ground. Then he rested his hands on her shoulders, looked at me and said, “Drop the tools, Harp. I’m not above picking you up either.”
I walked over, wiping my hands on my jeans. “I could use a break.”
“Excellent. How about we go for a drive?”
“For a drive,” October repeated, rolling her eyes. “As you know, what Chris means when he says ‘Let’s go for a drive’ is ‘Drive me somewhere.’”
I offered to do the driving, but October predicted we were going to end up at a bar and said, “You guys have fun. I’ll be the chauffeur.”
A second later Cal said, “I got it!” He looked at me when he said, “the Pelican Inn.”
The Pelican Inn is an authentic British pub off of Highway 1, on the way to Muir Beach. Cal and I used to hike there from my house when we were kids. We’d talk Ingrid into giving us some money, and when we got to the Pelican Inn we’d eat fish-and-chips and drink a couple of sodas before heading home. It used to make us feel like adults to sit in the bar, order food, and pay the check by ourselves. And we would feign British accents whenever we were there. Actually, it was more specific than that. We would feign the exact Manchester accents we had perfected by watching Noel and Liam Gallagher in interviews. We would introduce ourselves as Noel and Liam too. Cal was always Noel because he was the leader of our band, and because he is a month older than I am—Noel is the elder Gallagher brother.
More than once when we were kids, we’d talked about how we were going to go back someday, after we were grown up,