Down By the River

By Meg Newman

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The man I’d been hoping to see was standing ten feet away from me, sorting through a pile of reddish-brown hardwood posts. Probably ash. He was thirteen years older than the last time I’d seen him, still lanky, with those long sideburns, and now nearly bald. I swear he had on the same pair of glasses. It had to be Matt.

“Matt?” I said. “It’s Julie. Julie Rustin. Your apprentice and JoAnn’s former significant other-girlfriend.”

“Holy Cow, it’s you. My carpentry apprentice. Wow, it’s been a long time,” Matt said, somehow laughing and speaking at once. Then he landed his quizzical look, the one with his left eye almost closed, his head tilted to the right and his finger bobbing in the air. Matt used this look whenever he was surprised—if we finished a job early, or when there was even more dry rot than we had anticipated. I reached forward with my right hand to shake, and my left arm loitered nearby for a possible hug. We embraced.

“My wife and I just moved back to the Bay Area after a stint in New York for school,” I said. “I’ve been picturing you and I bumping into each other here, at Urban Ore”—I gestured across the large expanse of salvaged building materials: reusable wood, wire, wool, furniture and other castoffs awaiting a new use and a more meaningful life—“and it’s happening. This is totally meant to be.”

Matt told me he is still living off Solano Avenue, in the same house, and continues to work as a carpenter and electrician. I remember him as a wizard in both fields. Soon, I could hardly hear Matt’s words, and I began to drift into my planned speech, the one I had been rehearsing for two months. I needed to know how JoAnn was doing.

To know JoAnn well was to understand, on some primal level, that half of her was in this world, and the other half was weighing suicide. I wanted to believe JoAnn was thriving since we broke up ten years ago.

“Matt,” I said. “To anyone other than you and me, this might seem out of the blue, too soon or too weird, but JoAnn was my lover and your best friend, so I think you understand why I need to ask about her before we go any further. How is she doing?” In my head, I finished the sentence, with: Did she commit suicide? 

Matt looked directly at me, “JoAnn committed suicide four years ago at the Reedley River, near where we grew up. She was facing ten years in prison for transporting hallucinogens.” He stopped talking and shook his head. “That was a whole strange time, and I never understood how she fell into that business. She was doing psychology research. Then she lost her job. Anyhow, she decided that going to prison was something she couldn’t handle. She put a gun to her temple at the riverbank.”

Matt deposited his gaze on top of my brown eyes. 

“Neither one of us could stop JoAnn’s depression or this from happening, Julie. You know that, don’t you?” 

I was swept back to 1975, the beginning of my relationship with JoAnn. I had just turned twenty. Our first date, which expanded from a school night taco dinner, to playing tennis and laughing under the local park lights until midnight, ended with our first kiss outside my dormitory. We had lots of long winding bike rides from Pescadero into the Santa Cruz mountains, where we slid easily into intimacy. And then to JoAnn’s depression and suicidality, which arrived like an unpredicted and tragic blizzard. Our frozen connections never quite recovered and it was hard to find time in our joyful conformations. One day JoAnn called me at work to say goodbye only she wasn’t going traveling. Just sitting in the kitchen with a loaded silver pistol. Many versions of this happened over the years we were together.

“It took me a long while to understand,” I said. 

We both stood in the bright sun, alongside the din of moving traffic, without speaking. I was imagining JoAnn at the edge of the river, her blond hair moving in the wind, her oversized glasses, and a gun in her left hand. She fires. And then she’s gone.

It's hard for me to swallow and I realize I haven’t taken a normal breath since Matt and I started talking. I was surprised about the drug conviction but not the suicide. My mind clung to a residue of disbelief that JoAnn was fully gone. I felt my blood pulsing, felt the sun on my back, felt my tears begin to flow. Matt and I leaned in, wrapped our arms around each other.