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.