Aftermath of Dreaming (10 page)

“Smirnoff.”

“And I'll have a Pellegrino, no fruit.”

The waiter walked over to a large wooden stand, selected two menus, came back, and laid them with a flourish on the red and white checked tablecloth. Andrew put his reading glasses on before opening his.

I wished the restaurant were busy, wished there were people everywhere, on dates, in groups, to further cement my togetherness with Andrew. To make us a solid couple by being gazed upon as a unit. I figured the waiter's eyes would have to do.

I wondered if the waiter could tell I was underage. I had started going to bars in Pass Christian when I was fourteen, but everyone always thought I was twenty-eight. And that really is rather odd for them to all, but separately, pick that particular age to think I was. Unless I really looked thirty and they were all just trying to be nice. Though, actually, I did feel twenty-eight back then. At fifteen, I was drinking and having sex with a man seventeen years older than me, but in terms of my bar age, only what, four?

When I moved to New York, suddenly everyone could tell what age I truly was, as if some sort of regression had occurred as I traveled north—the years I had lived that counted for double in the South now did not in the brutality of urban reality. Any mature-beyond-my-years swagger I once possessed remained so firmly behind that I began to doubt it had ever been mine, and I thought of it as a Southern condition, like relinquishing to the heat.

The waiter deposited our drinks before us, then stepped back, holding his pen and pad protectively in front of his chest.

“And what would you like?” He had put a little smile into it, but I could feel the exhaustion underneath. I knew there were career waiters in the city who regarded the profession as solid and respectable, the filigree in New York City's culinary crown jewels. I also knew, after almost three months of working alongside them, the imprisonment they could feel in the locked servitude of the customer's meal. I wanted to tell him he was holding up well.

The choices on the page had barely registered on me, so I glanced quickly to find something.

“Pasta primavera, please.”

“Very good, and sir?”

Then commenced a lengthy discussion between them of the shrimp scampi, and another even more detailed one about veal scaloppine. Andrew brought up the chicken marsala; all were deemed excellent choices with accompanying persuasive nods of the waiter's head. A silence ensued.

“Cheeseburger, medium rare, and a green salad.” Andrew said, closing the menu, and allowing the waiter to pick it up from the table before he withdrew.

I turned my chair toward Andrew's and rubbed along the top of his thighs. I had read in a magazine once that you can tell how a man will treat you years past the honeymoon by the way he orders his food. Andrew hadn't really been rude. Just thorough and exacting. But it was like watching a dance instructor and a student on a floor where the tiles light up whenever the student misses a step. Though Andrew did leave an awfully nice tip.

 

The Monday morning light reaching into Andrew's hotel room high above Central Park exuded a richer glow than the rays that circulated down through the alley and air shafts that my apartment windows faced. The sky unfurled itself toward Andrew's bed. It reminded me of being at the Gulf, standing at the water's edge and seeing only the blues of sea and sky that were allowed by the yellow of the sun. Andrew was lying on his stomach, his head turned toward me, his face illuminated by sleep. I edged sideways off the bed, letting my weight gradually ease, not wanting to end his slumber. In the bathroom mirror, I unmussed my hair, and used his toothpaste on my finger to brush my teeth. I was back in bed, reliving the night before, when he awoke and looked at me.

“Are you going to take care of my back?”

“What?” I wondered if he had pulled it during the night.

“My back. I haven't woken up without pain in my back for years. Whatever you did last night when you rubbed it…Are you going to take care of it for me?”

“Oh, yeah, I will.” I was thrilled.

“Good. Are you completely all mine?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

I started to move against him, but he kissed my cheek, then jumped out of bed.

“C'mon, we're getting up. I want to see the slides of your work.”

In the dizziness of being with him, I had almost forgotten that I'd brought them, as he had asked me to during Sunday afternoon's phone call. Sitting on the bed and facing the windows, Andrew held each square up to the light. There were ten of the last pieces I had done in Mississippi before I left. They were a series of sculptures comprised of driftwood, copper wire, and found glass in expressionistic houselike crosses suggesting our reliance on fallible structures. The sculptures ranged in height from three to four and a half feet and were being stored in the attic of Momma's house, covered by old flowered sheets from the bed of my youth. There were also some slides of wood pieces and a few abstract oil paintings I had done years before.

Andrew was quiet as he scrutinized them again and again, sometimes flipping one over as if to view it from the other side. I tried to distract myself while I waited for his response by counting the number of taxis I could spot driving through Central Park, tiny yellow objects appearing and hiding among the trees. Then he picked up the slides' small plastic cases and inserted each slide into it precisely without marring them.

“You…”

It was an eternity before the next word. The number of cabs I had left off on was even, a sign—I hoped—that he liked my work.

“Are going to be…”

Nothing? Forgotten? What?

“A Big Fucking Star.”

Oh. Jesus God.

“A big fucking art star.” And he nodded his head.

I had no idea what to say. It was like being spoken to in a foreign
language, in words you've vaguely heard before, but never thought would be addressed to you and with the expectation of a reply.

“Can you leave these with me?”

“I can leave them.”
I can leave everything with you,
I thought,
even me.

“I want to let someone take a look at them.” He kissed my forehead and nose. “You big fucking art star.”

The phone in the living room rang, and Andrew reached for the extension next to the bed. “Hello?” He listened for a bit, and made small “uh-huh” sounds as the person spoke. “Hold everything a bit longer—give me fifteen. Oh, and when he comes in this afternoon, I want the other guys' pictures on the wall behind my desk facing him. Yes, even though he already has the—uh-huh. Okay, fifteen.” He replaced the receiver, picked my pullover up off the floor, and handed it to me.

“Okay, sweet-y-vette, you are going to call me this afternoon.”

I didn't want to leave. Ever. I felt giddy and renewed, but like I was being sent off to school. I wanted to stay with him and be next to him for the rest of my life.

“Okay, but…” I had no end to the sentence; it was all I could muster. My clothes had become traitors—their coverage of my body allowing me to leave. “But when will I see you again?” I sounded like a child who doesn't believe everyone will reappear in the morning after the night's sleep. “Will I see you again?”

He smiled at me, kindly, and put his finger on my nose. “Oh, you'll see me again. You'll see me a lot again.”

Andrew put on his jeans and a navy blue T-shirt, but with an air of being temporarily dressed, then kissed the top of my head as I put my shoes on. I resisted the urge to try to leave something of mine in his room; that was too obvious and schoolgirlish. When I stood up, I saw him holding out a hundred-dollar bill toward me.

“Oh, no.” I was shocked. Did he think I was there for that? Then I saw his eyes on mine. I obviously needed the money, that he could see, there was nothing more to his offer than that. I shook my head, and he put it away. I didn't want to need him for that or for him to think that I did.

In a whirlwind of motion, Andrew escorted me down in the elevator, had the doorman hail me a cab, and, settling me in, kissed my cheek while pressing the hundred-dollar bill into my hand.

“For the fare, so you'll have enough. Call me this afternoon, honey.”

And when he shut the door, the cab moved into action, entered traffic, and left Andrew's quickly departing figure behind.

Driving home on the 10,
getting farther and farther from the theater, I start coming down from the shock of seeing Andrew again after so many years. I think I just thought he was supposed to be dead. Or at least in Bel Air, where he lives. No, dead really, somehow. For me, at least. I mean, I knew he wasn't. He very clearly wasn't. I've seen indications of his continued existence in the media, but in terms of my own experience, I just really had decided he was dead. The Andrew I knew. Gone from my life while a carbon copy carried on in the world. But tonight at the theater, as we sat a few rows apart, it was horribly clear: Andrew is very much alive and so is everything I ever felt for him—full form, like a person who has been waiting for me and finally walks into the room.

As I lie in bed trying to fall asleep (and worrying that tonight might be a scream dream night—please, God, not that to deal with, too), I suddenly remember a conversation I had with Sydney last fall when she called to get referrals of musicians for her show. She was in a bad mood,
perturbed (her word), because of a phone conversation she had just had with Andrew Madden—she had no idea I knew him—about getting money from him. Sydney had been in one of his films a year or so before and had felt comfortable enough to ask him if he'd invest in her show.

“And it's not like he won't get every cent back, Christ. I mean, it's gonna sell out.” Her Canadian accent, which was normally under wraps, was on full display in that last word.

She went on to say that Andrew was considering investing some money—“a thousand dollars, like he doesn't have it”—but had been taking forever to decide. Weeks and weeks had gone by with no answer from him, so she had decided to call to say that she really needed to know, but instead of giving her an answer, all he had said was that he sure would love to fuck her, if only he wasn't married.

Big deal, I had thought as Sydney indignantly yammered on, that barely means anything coming from him. It's the same as a “hi how are you” from anyone else. I couldn't understand why she was so upset. If she knew him as well as she claimed she did, why was she taking it so seriously? I knew what Andrew would say when he really meant that, and what Sydney described wasn't it. He had told me once that most of the time he felt women expected that stuff from him, that some even got angry when he didn't flirt with or flatter them. I could imagine Andrew thinking Sydney would be one of them.

Then Sydney's diatribe suddenly drew to a climax. “He came on to me like I was some
waitress
.” She decimated the word more than spoke it.

I had never heard such disdain. She should meet my father, I thought, they'd get along so well on this subject. Then I remembered that Sydney's career had gone great guns right from the start, that she had never had a lowly job of any sort—luck had protected her from the artist's usual fate. As she continued on, her Canadian accent a fuzzy moss covering her angry words, I imagined a secret restaurant system that transmitted customers' attitudes toward the servers slaving over the food, letting waitstaffs everywhere know who the nightmare customers were in advance.

But Sydney's willingness to be talked to like a waitress had paid off.
Andrew obviously had given her the money, then attended her opening night to see his dollars at work.

Why hadn't I remembered that conversation before I went to her show tonight? Though maybe I did somewhere deep in my mind; but I would have gone anyway, if I had remembered, because I never would have thought Andrew would go to the show. His fame is so huge, his persona so large, that a small theater for a one-person show is not a space or event big enough to hold him. Though it did. Crammed in there, his presence taking up the entire room, leaving no space for anyone else, which was fine, because no one else mattered with him there.

Now that I have finally seen him after all these years, the odds are probably back in favor of it not happening again—at least for a very long time. Like last year when someone broke the taillight on my truck; that was a drag, but living in L.A., a person can only go so long without having some kind of car contretemps, so I was grateful that my turn came up on a little thing. It's the numbers game theory. So I figure three rows apart in a theater after we haven't seen each other in four and a half years…I've probably got a good long stretch of time before I see him again, before any real dialogue happens between us. Unless of course hand-waving counts as dialogue, I don't know. But even if it does, I'm sure I won't see him again now for a really long time. Maybe even forever. Maybe Andrew will die, really clinically decease, before I get a chance to see him again, and tonight in the theater was it. The last acknowledgment from me he will ever see.

And me from him.

Oh, fuck.

Jesus, I miss him.

 

“How was Sydney's show last night?”

“Fine,” I say too quickly to Reggie on the phone, making it sound like she'd laid a big one. “I mean, great. You know, it was what she does.”

My voice sounds hoarse and thin. I've had four cups of coffee in the two hours since six
A.M.
when I finally got out of bed, tired of just lying
there all night, unable to sleep. And the few times I did, the dreams I had of Andrew were so real—us at the theater, but wrapped up in each other's arms with the crazy crowd all around like bedclothes, keeping us warm—that I was even more exhausted upon awakening from them. But at least I didn't scream.

“And what else?”

“What else what?” Oh, please, Reggie, don't get all intuitive on me. Please be blithe and vague and unable to figure anything out. In short, please be completely unlike yourself.

“What else happened? Something did—you sound like you slept with someone and don't want to talk about it.”

“No. God.” I try to sound indignant to mask my shock at his accurate appraisal of my emotional state. “I just couldn't sleep, that's all.”

I had decided not to make oatmeal—I couldn't face those goddamn grains—but I need something to cut the caffeine, so I take an apple from the fridge and get peanut butter out to spread on it.

“Thinking about the wedding?”

For one wild second, I think Reggie means my long-lost fantasy of mine and Andrew's, then I remember Suzanne's wedding and wonder if it's supposed to be weighing on me so heavily that a restless night would not be odd.

“Are you worried about Suzanne's veil, honey?”

“Oh, no, not really. I still need to work on it, but no, just…you know. What's going on with you?”

 

Hanging up the phone from Reggie has an emptiness to it, like I was talking to someone else. But the person who was someone else in our conversation was me, because for the first time, I didn't tell him everything. I couldn't bring myself to after how he was about Michael. And anyway, what difference would it make? So I saw Andrew for the first time in four and a half years—big deal. Okay, so I am slightly completely totally a mess about it, but this whole thing will blow over, retreat into the past, become an incident I barely remember, with no more
significance or future impact than if I'd switched brands of dental floss. I saw Andrew again—big deal.

Yeah, then why didn't I tell my best friend? Well, I still can tomorrow when we have breakfast again. Just say very casually, “Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that I saw Andrew the other night. Not ‘saw' euphemistically, but ‘saw' literally across a crowded theater with tons of people all around, including his wife, so it was more like being stranded on a desert isle and watching a glittering cruise ship go by than having any real contact, though it did feel like real contact for me, and for him, too, I believe.”

Okay, that's exactly why I can't mention it casually to Reggie. Because it doesn't feel casual to me, and the words that would betray my true feelings about Andrew would come streaming out of my mouth as if my heart had found an outlet for them since Andrew's not around to get them, so telling Reggie would give them someplace to land, even though Reggie doesn't want them and would ban them from coming in, like they were boat people, uninvited and made to turn back around.

So I was right to not tell Reggie. Except that now, for the first time, a page in the journal of our friendship is blank.

 

The art opening where Michael and I are on our first postbrunch date is a vision of rousing yet mellowed expression: subdued black-hued paintings explode on the walls; subdued black-clad people throng the rooms. Through the mass of bodies, I catch glimpses of Michael at a table loading up a plate with food. His jeans and simple white T-shirt stand out in the crowd like a flare further highlighting his exquisite looks. I want to walk over and wrap myself all around him, but someone brushes past me, snapping my attention back to the paintings.

The artist is my friend Steve, with whom I used to go to En Chuan's meditation sessions. Steve is an old-moneyed WASP from back East whose personal style is mixing Zen with Ralph Lauren, making each the better for it aesthetically. His paintings emit a somber, elegant silence into the art opening revelers' din. Each one is surrounded by quiet admirers,
gradually ebbing into the art crowd's hysteria in the middle of the rooms. The effect is like a wedding with beautiful caskets on view.

Steve's wife died from ovarian cancer seven years ago, and this is his first show since then. I went to his studio a few weeks ago to see the paintings before the opening. He made green tea on the Bunsen burner he keeps there and served biscotti, and we sat in the loft's large silence with his paintings all around. We talked and didn't speak and spoke and quietly watched the sunlight shift and wash across the large canvases of deep gray and black and dark blue as well as a few that had words painted on them, too. Tonight, when Michael and I walked into the loud and crowded gallery, I was glad that I had first seen the work in the sanctuary of Steve's studio.

Which actually is where Steve and I originally met. About four years ago, a gallery owner suggested that I check out the Santa Fe Art Colony, a group of old warehouses converted into artists' lofts on the edge of downtown, to find a work space to share. Sure enough, on a large message board in the courtyard of the colony were ads for lofts that people were looking to share. The handwriting on one of them caught my eye—it was one step short of calligraphy, but not fussy, just beautifully expressed. I figured if the loft looked the way the person wrote, it'd be a great place to work. I immediately called the number from my cell phone and Steve answered right off, then gave me directions to find his loft.

Two minutes later, he opened the door and welcomed me in. He was wearing jeans and a worn Brooks Brothers shirt, and the smoke from his cigarette curled up from his mouth toward his hair as if it were painting the few gray strands in the black there. He was the most relaxed person I had ever seen. I had a palpable feeling, while talking to him about rent and square feet, that just being around his energy would improve my work.

I don't know if it did, but the arrangement we had was great for a bunch of years. I had a nice sunny section where I pounded and soldered and fused my sculptures while he worked at the other end filling his canvases. We'd meet in the middle to share the lunches we had
brought, items that always complemented each other although unplanned, and he'd smoke cigarettes afterward and we'd talk about music and art. It was how I always imagined it would have been if I had ever been allowed inside my father's work shed with him while he was working, and got to see that side of him close up. The same quiet, creative energy. Nothing mattered except the piece at hand. Then last year when I dropped art completely for making jewelry, I stopped renting his loft.

Not that I don't think the jewelry I make is art; I do. Sort of. But I'd never call it that because it would sound pretentious, frankly. A pin or a pair of earrings that someone puts on is just less precious than a work so uniquely produced it must hang untouched on a wall. The jewelry I create is definitely not for a museum or a gallery. Though I still sketch—I'm unable not to. But I have no interest in showing them to anyone. Except maybe Andrew. And wish I didn't.

Michael is still across the room, but now he's talking to someone—I can't see whom. I try to get a better view through the crowd, but people are crushingly close. I nudge past a woman next to me and catch a glimpse of a broad back and shoulders in front of Michael. Okay, he's talking to a man. I think. Or a drag queen who left her dress at home.

I seize a bit of unoccupied space in front of my favorite painting. It's a huge canvas, sprawling and almost barren, painted a deep shiny black with the word “epithalamium” in the darkest of grays written sideways, but straight up and off center to the right. When I first saw it at Steve's studio, he told me that the word means a song or a poem to celebrate a marriage and is from the Greek root “thalamos” for bridal chamber. Maybe I should buy it for Matt and Suzanne's wedding gift. No, I don't think she'd get it. She likes Impressionists, as I do, but sometimes I tire of paintings that conjure up a story of when and where and who. Though looking at a word referencing marriage is not evoking joy in me.

As I turn toward the next painting, Michael emerges through the crowd carrying a small plate brimming with food. “If these paintings were a voice,” he whispers in my ear, “I'd call it monotone.”

“Michael.”

He kisses my neck and ear as I explain about Steve's wife.

“That's horrible,” he says, holding the plate out to me. “Here, I grabbed the last shrimp for you.”

As Michael puts it in my mouth, Steve suddenly appears, so I quickly finish chewing as we hug, then introduce Michael to him.

“Great stuff,” Michael says, transferring the plate to me, so he can shake Steve's hand.