fix her a cup of coffee. I kept meeting her eyes, searching for that familiar softness, but what I saw looked like disdain.
I was at the studio until after midnight on Monday, putting the final touches on the birdcage. On Tuesday we did two abbreviated run-throughs, contracting the bars with October inside to be certain the machinery worked smoothly, and to make sure I knew exactly when to stop it so that it didn’t crush her.
I’d ended up making the mechanism work by floating the cage over the base and attaching the cage to the base by pegs that sat in tracks. The tracks were embedded into the base of the cage, under the grid so you could barely see them. The tops of the cage bars were connected to a single hinged point, gears and pulleys inside the base drew the pegs toward each other along the tracks, and the hinged point allowed the curved bamboo to straighten toward the ceiling as the bars got closer.
It sounds complicated, but it all worked on a simple system that could be controlled via an app on my phone that was normally used to turn lights on and off in houses.
It took me a couple of tries to get the timing dialed in, but once I did, I felt certain it was ready; I disassembled it for transport the following day.
I spent Wednesday packing everything up with the help of two husky handlers the gallery had sent over. October had her final dress fitting, met with a hair and makeup artist, and ran through the audiovisual portion of the performance on-site.
On Thursday, October, Rae, and I went to the gallery to supervise the installation.
The Thomas Frasier Gallery is a large, pristine, L-shaped building in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco. It has high ceilings and walls the color of brand-new teeth, with two gallery spaces inside. The main one was a long, narrow room with a small reception area—the bigger of the two, this was where the paintings and photographs by the other artists were being hung, along with two sculptures set up in the middle. Beyond that room was a hallway that led to a smaller gallery where the cage was being installed.
October was the most prominent artist contributing to the exhibit, and attendance at the party, which included visiting her installation, required a sliding-scale donation starting at 250 dollars.
I worked until early evening to get the cage back together. Once it was secure, Rodney, the gallery’s audiovisual engineer, showed me how to connect the equipment to my app so I could start and stop the music and video clips along with everything else. After we got that uploaded, Rae drove October and me home, and while Rae and I chatted about the details of the day, October didn’t say a word.
The cocktail reception was set for 6:00 p.m., with October’s exhibit commencing at 7:00 and running until 9:00, and the auction ending at 10:00.
That afternoon the gallery sent a car to get October and, by association, me. We both sat in the back seat. And even though October seemed less tense than she had all week, she was still aloof when I tried to speak to her.
“Did you sleep OK last night?” I mumbled.
“I never sleep well before performances,” she said, her gaze out the window.
“Have you eaten?” She had a habit of forgetting to eat when she was preoccupied with work. “I can go get you some food when we get to the gallery.”
Her phone beeped and she pulled it out of her bag. “That’s not your job,” she said. “And anyway, there will be food there.”
“Right. OK.”
I had an urge to scoot over and press against her so that she could feel my frustration, and my affection, but instead I pulled out my phone and busied myself scrolling through the trending topics on Reddit. Meanwhile, October spent the rest of the ride texting with Cal. And I knew it was Cal, because I kept taking furtive glances to my left and saw his name at the top of her screen.
In that moment, I envied Cal. And I remember chuckling a little when it occurred to me that I envied him not because he was a successful musician and I wasn’t, but because he was currently commanding October’s attention.
We were met at the door by the gallery manager, a tall woman in a white pinstriped suit named Helen Driver. She took us up to the green room—a nice studio