Aftermath of Dreaming Read online

  But I wonder if Andrew has thought about me. Since the other night. And in the four and a half years since we were together. And I wonder if he wonders if we’ll ever see each other again, or if the other night was it.

  The headpiece for Suzanne’s veil is a nuptial nightmare come to life. It should be done, finished, executed exactly as she dreamed, for her to see at my dress fitting this Saturday. But it’s not. From the sketch she has given me, what I have done so far fulfills all of her specifications, but not only isn’t it finished, it looks half-baked somehow. She wants a jeweled effect without sparkles and not all pearls. I don’t even know what that means. I realize I could have asked her, but I thought having her draw it would make her demands more concrete. The sketch she gave me is the most expressionistic rendering of a veil I have ever seen. Schiele would have been proud. Maybe my sister should have been the artist in the family.

  I have moved the veil and the dressmaker’s stand into my studio so I can spread out and work with my tools, but all that does is remind me that I need to get downtown in an hour to meet Dipen to see how the casting for Rox’s order is coming so I can get that in gear. And then I need to drive clear across town to Brentwood to deliver a commission. I consider calling Suzanne and telling her that she just won’t be able to see her veil this Saturday, but I don’t feel like hearing bridal wrath, especially after this morning when Reggie was so cranky on the phone about my Michael-date.

  I attach a few tiny glazed beads onto the headpiece to fill in some gaps. They look nice. And completely uninspired. Okay, my only option for salvaging this project is to employ the method I use when making jewelry: I have to put the goddamn thing on. This is not something I want to do. At all. Lifting the veil off the stand and holding it carefully in both hands, I realize that I have no idea how to get it on. I wish I had the attendants that brides have—getting into the costume looks more complicated than getting to “I do.” After a few tangled attempts, it is resting on my head. The image in the mirror isn’t so much me with veil, as veil with me. I might as well be an eight-year-old girl with a feminine pad—this accessory is that unnecessary on the body it is on.

  As I glance around the room to ensure myself—illogically—that I’m alone, I half expect a matrimonial constable to appear with a citation for “endangering the welfare of a veil.” I look into the mirror again. I have heard that some women upon seeing themselves for the first time in bridal gear burst spontaneously in joyful tears. Sobs of despair are more what I feel. I suddenly wonder what people who spontaneously combust have just seen.

  The veil is floating down around me to the floor, billowing out in a soft silhouette. I look small inside all this white, contoured, like a negative version of the outlined-with-black-crayon pictures my cousin Renée and I used to draw. For the first time, I understand why the virginal color was picked; everything else recedes when the encapsulation is so pale. The bride’s previous life is blotted out, ready to be renewed and transformed into a new woman for the groom.

  The phone rings. It is probably Suzanne, conjured up by my wearing her veil, calling to reclaim her sole ownership of object and role, and to hasten my work along.

  “Hello?” It is difficult to get the receiver near my ear through all this netting. I can barely hear the person at the other end, the veil is crinkling and rustling so. I push it back, like gloriously long straight hair, behind my ear. “I’m sorry, hello?”

  “Yvette?” The female voice is vaguely familiar.

  “Yes?” Maybe it’s Roxanne about the order for her store.

  “Hi, it’s Sydney.”

  “Oh, hey.” Seeing Andrew at Sydney’s show two nights ago completely eclipsed my memory of her. “Your performance was amazing. I was sorry I couldn’t stay for the party; I hope you got my message.”

  “Yeah, I did. And thanks again—the guys are working out great.”

  “I’m so glad.” Why has she called? We’re not call ’n’ chat friends. I met Sydney years ago through a pop singer I used to be close friends with, but other than occasionally helping her find musicians for her shows, we rarely talk.

  “I thought I should let you know.” She stops for a pause I could drive my truck through. Holy Christ, what? Ever since I was fourteen and my mother called me at my cousin Renée’s house where I was spending the night to tell me in two short sentences that Daddy had left, I have had mixed feelings about telephonically transmitted news.

  “Andrew Madden asked about you.”

  “What?” I cannot have heard her right. For someone in my life today to not only know about but bring up this precious buried part of my memories and dreams is the colliding of the worlds I shuttle between.

  “He asked about you. At the party, after the show. I was all over the place, talking to everyone—did you see my preshow crowd on the ten o’clock news?”

  It takes me a split second to realize she is waiting for my response. Just tell me what he said, I want to scream. Inject it in me all at once, so this tedious trickling can end, then when his words are safely circulating inside, part of me and him-of-then, I can listen at a normal pace, decipher and decode what only I can know he meant.

  “No, I missed it, but I saw the news crew outside.” Whoever thinks manners are only important in the South has never tried to survive in Hollywood.

  “It’s getting great reviews.”

  “That’s wonderful, Sydney, I’m so happy for you.”

  “Thanks. It’s been a lot of work, and it just never ends, but you know how it is.”

  Actually, honestly, I don’t. My work is small, viewed up close, almost in private. Standing in person before the hordes isn’t something I do.

  “Well, you do it great.”

  “He wanted to know if we are friends.”

  “What’d you say?” I jump right back in with her to Andrew-land.

  “Yeah, you know. He asked about your art, if you were still doing it. I told him not that I know of, but your jewelry designs are going great.”

  “You said that?” As I move toward the chair to sit down, the veil and the phone cord encircle each other, binding me tighter to this call, so I perch on the edge with the receiver held in both hands.

  “He was really happy to hear it; said something about that making sense with how personal and delicate your art was. He asked if you were seeing someone, but I didn’t know, then he said, ‘I care a lot about Yvette, and have for a very long time.’ He wanted me to please tell you hello.”

  Hello, Andrew, I silently answer back with the wild hope that he can hear.

  “Then a bunch of people came over to us. Christ, that man is never left alone, crowds kept forming and unforming around him all night like amoebas.” I wonder if I’ll hear that used about something else in Sydney’s next show. “And his wife, Holly, is so beautiful. And such a great mom to their two kids. She’s so nice; no one can hate her.”

  Oh, right, his wife. Well, hello, Andrew. And goodbye.

  I crab-dance around Sydney’s questions about how I met him and were we involved by saying—which is true—that I have to run downtown.

  Driving on Beverly Boulevard in the late morning traffic to meet Dipen downtown, the word “care” reverberates in my brain. The way Andrew would say it. In his voice, in my mind. So maybe he has thought about me all these years. Like I’ve thought about him. God, I miss him.

  13

  The Monday that I woke up in Andrew’s bed at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York, I worked the eleven-to-eight shift at the restaurant in a state of tired ecstasy. The little sleep that I had gotten thanks to our late night and early rise proved to be helpful in muffling my expression of the shocked bliss I found myself in. I appeared extremely, privately glad, but nothing so exuberant as to warrant questions from the other hosts and hostesses, and especially from Lydia, which was good because it felt too personal to talk about at work. Seamus came on that night at six, but by then I was in the reservation room for the last hours of my shift, so I was able
to avoid his knowing eyes, thank God, because I have a shot at being a believable liar if the person I’m fibbing to can’t see me, but one-on-one, my truth-telling thoughts are practically pasted on my face, so readable is my countenance. I had the next day off, and on Wednesday was scheduled for the nine-to-four shift, so I figured I wouldn’t be in real contact with Seamus again until Thursday night, and by then his mind would be too roiled with the chaos of the week to remember to ask about Andrew and me.

  I called Andrew that Monday afternoon as he had told me to, sneaked downstairs to the restaurant’s pay phone booth—an astonishing blessing that it had a real booth with privacy—and dialed the hotel number, already knowing it by heart like a code to my salvation.

  Andrew’s voice was immediately on the line, unlike the wait I had endured the first time. “Where are you?” he said, forgoing a hello.

  “At the restaurant, at work.”

  “How are you?” The phrase was spoken so sincerely, it made me realize how rarely it is.

  “I’m good. It was…” My temperature rose a hundred degrees. “Really nice being with you last night.”

  His voice did a sideways and down one shift, moving us into a more private place. “It was wonderful being with you, sweet-y-vette. Do you love me?”

  “Yes.” I was relieved he had asked. I hadn’t said it to him when he said it to me, and remembering that had caused a lopsided, one-shoe-off sensation in my head. “I love you, Andrew.”

  “Good.”

  I thought so, too.

  “I’ve got some people here I have to see. What time do you finish work?”

  Oh, God, what clothes did I wear here? Was it anything I could see him in?

  “Eight, I get off at eight.”

  “Call me then.”

  “Okay.” I tried to keep out of my voice how ecstatic I felt about seeing him in only a few hours, to play it cool like it happened all the time.

  “Okay?” His voice was patient and kind. Andrew’s living room had people in it—the kind whose daily existence included sessions with him, yet in those few minutes, he gave me the implicit understanding there’d always be time for me.

  “Okay.”

  “Bye, honey, I’ll talk to you soon.”

  I walked slowly up the stairs and into the barroom. My task was to fill bowls with fancy mixed nuts (the nuts we illicitly wrapped in dinner napkins, hid in our pockets, and nibbled on throughout our coat-room shifts) to set along the bar in time for the predinner drinks crowd. All I could think about was how much time there was to endure before calling Andrew at eight, then seeing him when life would begin again.

  Andrew and I spoke when I finished my shift, talked when I got home, talked again at ten. Then at ten-thirty, when he promised to call me right back, I knew I would collapse asleep before he did. In a small way, it felt okay not to see him. I was still overflowing from being with him the night before, and that experience could extend further before another encounter with him regulated it to the past.

  The next morning, Carrie’s timing to converse about the Andrew escapade, as she called it, coincided with my being in the kitchen preparing to bake bread. I had stopped at the grocery at the end of my daily five-mile run to buy the ingredients, lugging the plastic bags the two long and two short blocks home. I was dying to tell her all about it—especially since it was a whole two days ago and I still hadn’t told anyone. Not that there was anyone else to tell. The only friends I had made so far, like Lydia, all worked at the restaurant, and that was way too gossipy a place for this information, so that left only Suzanne—not really an option. I could already guess how she’d feel about Andrew. She hadn’t liked widow-man, not that she had ever met him since she took off for college soon after Daddy left and had stayed in California, never once coming back. But she used to call me specifically to fuss about my seeing widow-man, what a terrible influence he was, and what kind of real high school experience could I have dating a man in his thirties. I’d do algebra problems during these “You should be…” speeches, throwing in a few “uh-huhs” every now and then until she ran out of steam and hung up. So I had a pretty strong feeling that telling her about Andrew Madden wasn’t going to be a happy sisterly chat.

  But Carrie was great. Drinking her protein shake, thrilled to hear everything, wanting all the details, asking questions, squealing when I told her about leaving my art slides with him. Then she told me about Andrew’s girlfriend, Lily Creed, the beautiful British actress who was at the table with him that first night he came to the restaurant.

  “But he has always had others on the side,” Carrie said, as if explaining a tricky but essential foreign language verb conjugation. “So you can’t feel bad about her. There’s no way she can think she’s the only one. And as my mother always said, ‘It’s not like he’s married.’”

  Which is exactly how I felt, too. Besides feeling constantly like I was in a dream, the dream that Manhattan was meant to be. As if the real New York City had been unlocked for me by Andrew, and for the first time since I moved there, I felt connected to the city and all the energy it held. Every moment was lived in high gear with a perpetual fall crispness in the air, and I felt I could take on the world.

  Andrew called as Carrie was in the shower washing henna out of her hair and I was filling the bread pans with dough.

  “What are you doing?” he growled to my “hello,” sounding like a lion disguised as a cub.

  “I’m baking you bread.”

  “You’re what?”

  “I’m baking you bread; I thought I’d drop it by this afternoon.” The oven door slipped shut out of my hand. I had had to stack the pots and Pyrex dishes we stored in there on my bed until the baking was done.

  “No one has made me anything since I can’t remember when. You are so fucking cute. When do I get my bread?”

  I was so ecstatic, I almost dropped a pan. “An hour or so for it to bake and cool; I can come by around one.”

  “If I’m not in, leave it at the desk.” His delight and warmth and protection were palpable over the phone. “You are in such big trouble for this.”

  I couldn’t think of a better way to be.

  I went to the hotel, dressed to see him, but when I reached the front desk, I was informed that Mr. Madden was out—would I care to leave a message? I opened my bag to take out the loaves. They were in Saran wrap, taped closed, then gift wrapped in pretty paisley paper napkins, and tied with silk bows. I had worried they looked too girly, but I decided it reflected more the giver than the givee, and who doesn’t like to unwrap something? The desk clerk appeared nonplussed as he took the warm bread from my hands. I guessed they didn’t get that very often.

  “Do you know what I’m doing right now?” was Andrew’s greeting when I picked up the phone later that afternoon.

  “Asking me to come over?”

  “Eating your bread.”

  “Oh! Do you like it?”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? I’ve eaten half a loaf already—what’s in this thing?”

  The name of every ingredient flew out of my head. “Uh. Wheat.” I might as well have said “cow” for the butter and milk. “I mean, flour and—”

  He rescued me from the list. “This is amazing.”

  “Was it still warm?”

  “No.” He sounded like a child who found out his Christmas train didn’t choo-choo. “Can it be? I want it warm next time.”

  God, he was cute.

  Then he told me about the art gallery. About the lunch he’d had that day with Tory Sexton, the British owner and namesake of the space, while I was delivering his bread. I knew about her SoHo gallery—everyone did. It was one of the top three downtown, farther outside the mainstream than the other two, but widely respected and reviewed. I had been there in June.

  I had moved to Manhattan to apply to the School of Visual Arts by December and start my undergraduate degree there in the spring, but a couple of weeks after I arrived in New York, knowing no one in the art
world, I decided what the hell, I’d go around and show the dealers my work just to see what they thought. I knew it would take years to get a show, probably at least until I graduated, but Daddy had always said, “God helps those who help themselves,” and maybe some job would turn up or something, you never know, so I took a week-old copy of Ruth’s New York magazine, pulled out the art section, and compiled a list of every gallery in town.

  And off I’d go. Working around my restaurant schedule, every minute I could, I’d focus on one neighborhood at a time, walk into a gallery, and ask if the owner had a moment to view my work.

  It was weeks of uninterested response. Many were arch and filled with disdain. A few were polite, outlining their gallery’s procedures or simply stating they were, in no way, an open door. The rest fell somewhere unpleasantly in between. After the first few days, I didn’t want to keep going. Each entrance was hard, every exit excruciating, but I consoled myself that I wouldn’t have to lie in bed every night thinking I was in New York but not doing anything toward my dream while I waited to get into school.

  The last group of galleries I hit was in SoHo, where, in reverse tack, I decided to start at the low end and work my way up. With only two galleries left to call on, I finally had a unique experience at Sexton Space. The assistant, a woman named Peg, explained that Tory would never grant me a meeting, but took the time herself to see my work. I showed her everything: color slides of my paintings, a small notebook of sketches, slides of my sculptures. As she studied each one, I imagined she was from upstate or Connecticut, close enough to Manhattan that her urban integration wasn’t jarring or hard.