Aftermath of Dreaming Read online

  “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.

  “Oh, thanks.” Steve always appears vaguely surprised when complimented about his work, as if it were a particularly handsome dog that just happened to be following him. “I’m really trying to explore the nature of monotone in my work.”

  Michael looks momentarily nervous—did Steve overhear his remark?—then slightly abashed that his critique was so dead-on. I look around at the paintings and notice for the first time how acutely alone each one looks despite sharing space on the walls, then a woman steps in front of me, blocking further inspection.

  “You,” she says to Michael, planted before him like she is more art to view. “Are revolutionizing the FM experience.”

  “Thank you, I’m—”

&n
bsp; “I know who you are. I saw the article in the LA Times.”

  I am surprised that Michael’s fame has extended past the airwaves into the visual realm. I have always considered him famous, but in a concealed sort of way, a secret celebrity for the people at his station and the radioheads who were in on it, too. But here this woman is, great looking in a Kundalini-cum-collagen kind of way, gushing all over him like some love-crazy teenage fan.

  “Since you took over,” she continues. “The difference—you can’t even measure it.”

  Steve smiles a goodbye at me as someone pulls him away. I wish they had pulled fan-woman away instead.

  “That station is your voice, just lots of different conversations you’re having all throughout the day, and let me tell you—”

  “Wow,” Michael says, his eyes enrapt on hers. “That’s really wild you say that because that’s exactly how I think of it.”

  She puts one hand on his arm, the other on her left breast. “You are reaching me on a very deep level.”

  Even through the silicone? I think.

  “That’s just great. I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?” Michael slips an arm around me, as he holds his other hand out to her.

  The only thing preventing me from falling off my couch is Michael’s arm encircling my waist. My head is turned at an odd angle, forcing me to look uncomfortably down to see his head resting on my chest. He appears to be asleep. At least it sounds that way. One minute, his personal noises were connected to ecstasy; the next, exhaustion, with no transition in between.

  It started at my front door when he brought me home from the art gallery, as my key was finding the lock. Michael pressed against me from behind, making my legs weak, then the door opened and our clothes flew off, as if it were an indignity for them to be on, and my mouth found him, and the familiar and the now and the memories of all-other-times as he made me come again and again before he did as well, pulling us down into that lovely afterward drowsy spell.

  Michael stretches awake on top of me, causing me to slip toward the floor, but he catches me in time. “God, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  I reach out for the soft woven tapestry I keep draped on the couch and wrap it over us as I nestle against him. My parents got the tapestry in Paris on their honeymoon, its deep blues and sad yellows a prophecy of their marriage to come.

  “That’s downright scary,” Michael says.

  For a moment, I think he has somehow heard my thought, then I realize he is staring at my sister’s wedding veil, which is perched on a tall iron dressmaker’s stand in front of the large living room windows. The outside light is filling in the netting’s empty spaces with a soft, pearly glow, making it look like a bodyless bride ready to proceed through the semidark.

  “Yeah, I guess it is. Actually, it reminds me of a dream I had when I was really little, like in second grade.” I turn to face him, wanting to gauge the interest level in his eyes before I continue, but he is just watching, waiting for me to begin. “I was in my house, in the dream, though it didn’t look like the one I grew up in, and it was filled with tombstones, but wonderfully ornate ones like the mausoleums in New Orleans.”

  “Easy Rider.”

  “Exactly. And it wasn’t sad or scary, just beautiful and homier because all my ancestors were there. Suzanne was standing next to me when suddenly this angel gravestone—the most beautiful one, very Gothic, one hand carrying a torch, long hair streaming back—came flying through the house—well, rolling, really, she was on wheels—and the house was a shotgun design, so all the doorways lined up in a row, and she tore straight through with sirens whirring and bells clanging. I looked at Suzanne as if to say, ‘What’s the deal with her?’ and Suzanne very matter-of-factly said, ‘She thinks she’s a fire engine,’ as if that explained everything, and in the dream, it did, like we weren’t supposed to ruin her fantasy.”

  I look at Michael—who is now looking at the veil as if it sprang fully formed from my dream like Athena from Zeus’s head—and wonder what he’ll say. He’s been known to just change the subject if he decides a topic has reached its end, unencumbered by conversational rules, yet communication is his life. But maybe that’s why.

  “An emergency rescue vehicle,” Michael says. “That’s a trip.”

  In all the years of remembering that dream, I had never thought of it that way. Maybe so I wouldn’t have to wonder what I needed rescuing from. When I told Suzanne about it after it happened, she was just annoyed that I had her saying something that she thought was so dumb.

  “Do you have any food?”

  I know I do not, at least the kind he’d be interested in, but I go to the kitchen anyway, duly checking the oatmeal in case some miraculous conception had occurred and it had divinely delivered cookies. I am taking out two apples, plus the jar of peanut butter, when Michael walks in and peers over my shoulder into the fridge’s brightly shelved almost-emptiness.

  “Let’s get in your bed,” he says, then turns and leaves the kitchen.

  I put away the apples and peanut butter, fill two glasses with water, and follow him into my bedroom. It occurs to me that the scream dream might be scared off by his presence tonight. I hope so, otherwise it would be kind of weird for him to wake up at three A.M. as I scream hysterically into his ear. Michael is already in bed, appears, in fact, already asleep when I walk into the room. I put the glasses down on the stack of antique suitcases I use as a nightstand, pull back the spread, and get in. With one sleepy reach, Michael pulls me close to him, his body like a pillow. His arm lies over me protectively, and I fall asleep more easily than I have in months, somehow knowing that there won’t be any screams tonight.

  12

  The early morning air in my apartment is still tingly even though Michael is over two hours gone. My living room is ebullient with last night’s mess strewn about. Clothes are on the floor, the couch’s slipcover has been pulled off to throw in the wash, and the room is charged with the experience of us.

  I’m spinning and twirling, even though I’m sitting still. I want to tell Reggie everything, leave out no detail, but I know that I can’t, so I force myself to dial his number slowly, trying to keep my excitement held back.

  “That’s great, honey.” Reggie sounds uninterested and annoyed. “I’m glad you and Michael had such a good time.”

  I have told him the most G-rated, no-threat-to-our-friendship version of last night’s date that I could, but clearly that made no difference.

  “Oh, Reggie, are you really that upset with me?” I can hear him vigorously cutting what I know is sausage on his end of the line. “It was a date, with someone who knows me and l—l—”

  “And what? Someone who what?”

  “Okay, all right, so Michael hasn’t said the L-word to me—yet, but…” At least there’s a chance of my having a future with him because, for one thing, he’s straight, I want to say, but don’t, because honestly I don’t think Reggie is. At least I don’t think of him that way. More neutral kind of. If not deep inside really gay. He told me a story once a couple of years ago about how he and this male friend of his used to kiss so much whenever they saw each other that they practically had their tongues down each other’s throats. I had thought when I first met Reggie that he wasn’t really into women, so I was relieved that he finally felt safe enough to talk about it with me, and I told him the truth. I love you whoever you’re attracted to, I said, what matters is that you follow your heart. He was quiet for a moment then changed the subject. And ever since then, all he talks about is women. As if that conversation never took place. And he’s had a few girlfriends, so I don’t know what to think.

  Not that Reggie wants to date me. Which is one reason I find his possessiveness or whatever it is so easy to brush off, though annoying because sometimes I think he thinks he should want to date me. Similar to the way I feel about beets. The idea sounds good, they’d be unusual on my plate, but once tasted, they’re rejected and forgotten, a
s if forces other than myself had conspired to put them in front of me. So I understand, and besides, I’ve never even heard of a vegetable that Reggie will eat.

  “Are we not going to be able to talk anymore because I’m seeing Michael again? You didn’t hate him so much when I was with him before.”

  “I was building up steam.”

  “Reggie.” I pick up my clothes to put in the hamper, returning my living room to its natural state. There is emptiness on the line, then a sigh that is so connected to how I feel that I wonder for a moment if it was mine.

  “I just don’t want to see you go through the same thing you did last summer, but you know what? It’s your life and it’s none of my business.”

  “Ow. Hello? You’re my best friend—I want it to be your business. I just don’t want you against it—or me.”

  “I’m not, honey. Really. I just want you to be happy.”

  “That’s funny; so do I.”

  I stare out my living room window at the tree in the courtyard, wishing it could transport me away from all this Reggie-mess. It is a type of eucalyptus, silvery green and light brown, a habitat just out of reach but on display for me, along with the birds that nest there, the wind in the leaves. Sometimes I just sit and look at it, watching it through my living room window because even though it’s not a kind of tree that I grew up seeing, it reminds me of home—the big branches shading everything, an intermediary between earth and sky. It makes me feel safe and happy having it there right outside.

  “I’ll try not to be so grumpy about Michael.” Reggie’s tone is musically sweet, wrapping its apology around me.

  “Thanks, Reggie.”

  “How’s Chinese for tonight before I read you the new part of the script?”

  Even though it feels weird to have had such a short conversation with Reggie, at least it ended okay. He’s my best friend, stayed practically glued to me when Momma died, his voice a constant in my life; I have to be able to tell him about Michael. Especially since I’m not telling him about Andrew. Not that there is anything to tell. Or ever will be anyway. And after being with Michael last night, I don’t even care anymore that I saw Andrew the other night. Had almost completely forgotten about him and in fact only thought about Andrew because I still haven’t told Reggie—which I don’t need to because who cares? I don’t. I’m not even thinking about him.