Aftermath of Dreaming Page 13

  Handing all of it back, Peg told me that as my work developed, and if I got into some group shows, this might be a gallery I should come back to. She liked the construction of my work and thought I had a strong, unique vision that was clearly developing. “This is an extremely tough field, but don’t give up.”

  And here was Andrew, a couple of months later, explaining Tory to me, the work that she liked and how what he saw in mine was simpatico with her eye. He’d known her from London back in the seventies when he was shooting a movie there. I couldn’t help but think how funny it was that the one person on my self-ascribed door-to-door gallery tour who had shown real interest was Tory’s assistant. Maybe this was meant to be in some big cosmic way.

  “Call Tory tomorrow; she’s expecting you.”

  “Thanks, Andrew. That was really wonderful of you.”

  “I just passed your work on; you’re gonna do the rest, you big fucking art star.”

  Peg wasn’t in sight when I walked into Sexton Space that Thursday afternoon. I was told by an exquisite pale man, whom I didn’t remember from my summer visit, to wait; Ms. Sexton was on the phone. I studied the work on display in the prohibitively silent gallery. The air was filled with an admonishment not to speak, as if in the face of such nonnarrative images, words became obsolete.

  After thirty minutes of looking about, I began to feel lulled by the intensity of the paintings—rage was a prominent emotional theme—and the quiet of the room. Adrenaline had pooled in me with no place to go, so I jumped when a hand touched my back.

  Exquisite pale man told me to go in, as he pointed me toward Tory Sexton’s sanctum. I suddenly wished I had something to hold on to—some object to derive strength from.

  When I walked in, Tory Sexton was sitting inside a gigantic, ornately carved Chinese canopy bed, but with furniture in it instead of a mattress. It was a red-lacquered room within the real room that I had to walk up two steps then down one to get into. Low-slung leather stools were placed in front of a burnished wood table that Tory sat behind on a French rococo chair whose legs had been lopped off, guillotined victims of her revolutionary design. My slides were laid out in front of her like tiny children walking a tightrope in a row.

  Tory’s crimson lips were practically a separate entity. They floated above her black-suit-clad frame, pronouncing sounds, enunciating edits, and charting new courses with the air they exhaled. The conversation she was having at me was so previously unencountered in my life that my mind practically had to translate her words into ones I could believe. My sculptures were to be in her group show of new artists in December. I should talk with Peg to arrange the shipping of them here, the gallery would cover that, of course, and tell her now about where I was from that I was making such work at eighteen.

  While Tory listened to me, her right forefinger goosed the edge of one of my slides, then she abruptly held out her hand, signaling our time was at an end. “Call Peg,” she said as I stepped down into the real room. “There is much to be done.”

  Pushing out the gallery’s door, I noticed “Sexton Space” painted on both sides in small ruby letters, their syllables shouting ownership of the street. I walked to the subway in a daze and waited for the train to take me to work as my Tory experience settled into me and became true, not just a dream. I almost had an urge to tell the people on the platform, shout out my good news—I didn’t care to whom. For a second I considered calling Momma, but figured I should wait until my initial enthusiasm was over so I wouldn’t need any from her, too. Carrie would be thrilled though, and Suzanne. But maybe not. She’d probably find some reason it wasn’t good. And dammit, this meant she’d have to know about Andrew. Well, who cared, look what he had done for me. If that wasn’t an indication of how he felt, what was?

  After changing into my uniform at work, I called Andrew at his hotel, but had to leave a message since he wasn’t in. I could hardly wait to tell him.

  A few hours later, unable to stand it anymore, I slipped into the phone booth on an alleged restroom run and called Andrew’s hotel again.

  “Mr. Madden requested that I find out where you will be tonight, and he wants to know how did it go?” The operator’s voice serving the information was like a tennis ball, impartial to whose point it is, but the only connection the players can have. I felt a sudden affinity toward her, as his messenger.

  “Tell him I’m at work until midnight, and it went really, really great.”

  When I got home, Andrew’s voice was waiting for me via the small red bleeping light on my answering machine.

  “Hi.” Mechanical sounding, but him after all. “This is your uncle Andrew.” That was odd, but sweet somehow. As he took a breath, I imagined his body gradually materializing, each word contributing another layer to his presence there with me. “I’m out tonight, but I’ll call you in the morning, okay, honey? Good. Bye.”

  I played it again and again, holding the machine in my lap, as I sat cross-legged on the linoleum floor, the electric cord pulled taut from the wall. I didn’t know what to make of the “uncle” part, though it was sweet the way he’d said it, like a family member who has long been missing and is reconnected by claiming his role.

  When we spoke the next morning, Andrew was so thrilled about my Tory interview that he told me to come to the hotel.

  “Come around lunchtime—just call before you do. I’ll see you in a little bit, sweet-y-vette.”

  Hanging up, I felt as if clouds were under my feet, soft and buoyant and lifting me up.

  As Andrew opened his door at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, opened his door to my seeing him again—since I left his bed four days before, left my slides, left his world with mine forever changed—it felt as if we had lived a year together. He was wearing a dark blue T-shirt, jeans, and no shoes, like a comfortably rumpled bed I wanted to crawl into. We stopped in the foyer of his suite, and his body pressed against mine, which was pressed against the wall, and my mouth pressed against his, but for some reason, he wouldn’t allow a proper sexual kiss, so I was quick kissing his neck, cheeks, lips, and ears, while he moved his head whispering near, “You are so fucking cute; how’d you get so fucking cute?” over and over, until he took my hand. “Come on, honey.”

  I started walking to the bedroom, but he guided me toward the couch.

  “I need to finish up a call. Pick out whatever you want.” He pointed at a menu lying on the coffee table. “We’ll order up.”

  And go to bed after lunch, I finished for him in my head.

  He sat on the couch, reached for the phone, and motioned me to sit next to him.

  “Okay.” He returned his attention to the person on the line.

  Watching him as he listened, I could sense he was talking to a man.

  “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Really. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Hmmm.”

  I nestled up against the side of his body, his sounds resonating among the many minutes of the other person’s words.

  “I don’t agree that that is the way to go.”

  Andrew leaned forward, elbows bent and resting on his knees, then he glanced over at me. The menu was still on the table. He looked at it, then back at me with one eyebrow raised, as if I were a nine-year-old refusing to clean my room. I laughed noiselessly, causing a smile of surprise on his face that disappeared when his attention turned back to the phone. I opened the menu, glancing through page after page after page of elaborately explained food. I was so used to ordering the cheapest vegetarian thing that the many options were like picking out candy.

  “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I would do that.” Andrew appeared to be gathering and accessing information. There was so much space in his power—large open areas for other people to speak in while Andrew’s mind reassembled things, organizing them in ways the speaker couldn’t dream.

  So this was how they talked. Men like him in spacious, quiet rooms—their conversations building and edifying so many aspects of so many lives. I imagined them all over Manhattan, points on a grid that extended out to Washington, Chicago
, L.A., and beyond. The conversations in my father’s and grandfather’s offices had reached only across the state—their jurisdiction held close by map lines. Or if they did occasionally go beyond, the North was never involved, much less the entire country’s entertainment. Here, in Andrew’s suite, phone conversations impacted far points on the globe.

  Andrew’s friend, a famous actor whose films even I had seen, arrived after lunch, just at the moment when I thought we’d go to bed. At first I was annoyed at the intrusion, then thrilled to be meeting Andrew’s (from what the press said) best friend. The maleness in the room multiplied exponentially when he walked in. Sitting between them, these men whom most of the world experienced writ large, and listening to the actor tell me stories about Andrew, which Andrew laughed at, was like being in a deftly orchestrated scene with them.

  “She’s perfect,” Andrew said, after he had told his friend all about me. “An artist—beautiful, talented, and young. Name another with all that. Female ones, I mean. See? She’s perfect.”

  The actor was looking me over. “I’ll say.”

  “Okay, honey,” Andrew said, as he stood up and took my hand. “Where are you headed to now?”

  I didn’t want to go. I wanted us to tell his friend goodbye, so we could have sex while the afternoon began to end.

  But Andrew was looking at me, waiting for me to get up and go. The actor stood up and kissed my other hand. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Broussard. I look forward to seeing you again.”

  But before I could respond, Andrew helped me up by wrapping an arm around me and pulling me away from the actor. I looked over my shoulder as we left the room. “It was nice meeting you, too.”

  “Call me later, honey.” Andrew and I were in the outer hallway; the elevator button had been pushed.

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’m going out.”

  “Out? Where?” He sounded growly again. “Who are you going out with? I’ll fucking kill him.” The elevator doors opened. “Who are you going out with, Yvette?” I kissed his face and stepped inside. “You’d better call me. And you’d better not fuck him.” Andrew’s hand held the door open. “Call me. Okay?”

  I nuzzled into his neck, grinning and kissing him quietly. “Bye,” I said, moving backward, and the elevator doors gradually partitioned Andrew’s face out of view, as I heard him say, “Call me, Yvette.”

  “Did I meet you this summer?” Peg asked, when I called her at Sexton Space that afternoon.

  “Yes, I was in—”

  “I thought that was you. When Tory showed me your slides, I recognized them and…it’s so funny that it’s you.”

  “Yeah.” I remembered how short Peg was—one of those tiny girls who look capable of breaking a wild horse while keeping their cashmere sweater set impeccably clean.

  “Well, this is great. I loved your work, but Tory would never take an artist on without them having a show somewhere first or someone knowing them. When can you come down here? We should meet to go over everything we need to do.”

  I didn’t call Andrew as he had told me to. And that night, I let my phone ring and ring before listening to the machine click on, then hearing his barely audible, “Hmm, hmm,” noises, as if he were able to ascertain my whereabouts by his voice infiltrating my room. He called five times. I liked having him try to find me, but being unable to, the same way I couldn’t reach him physically when I wanted to. It was like letting some of my skin grow back on, a layer from the inseparableness I felt with him, especially since we hadn’t had sex again. Not that that was all I wanted from him, but sex solidifies things, and with Lily Creed in the picture, I wanted the reassurance that he wanted me that way, that he loved me that way. Besides the fact that it was so out-of-this-world fucking incredible. I wanted more.

  14

  “Please tell me you’re kidding me.”

  “Thanks for the nice reaction, Suzanne. No, I’m not kidding—I really am going to be in a show at a gallery in SoHo.”

  Carrie and Ruth were out of the apartment, so the curtain in my doorway was drawn back, the window overlooking the alley was open, and I was sitting in the middle of my room, drinking an iced tea while a summer breeze cooled me down. I knew I would need all that during my conversation with Suzanne.

  “I’m not talking about that part—I can’t even get there yet, I’m so flipped out about this Andrew Madden stuff. Andrew Madden, for Christ’s sake, is the biggest womanizer in the goddamn world. How do you not know that? What’d you do—move to New York and completely lose any sense you ever had? I knew that relationship with that married man in Mississippi was going to screw you up.”

  “He was widowed, and it’s not like that with Andrew.”

  “Not like what? So you’re not having sex with him?”

  “Yes, I am, but…” At least I thought we were, though he hadn’t let us since that very first night, as if he suddenly didn’t want to anymore, which I couldn’t figure out why, but I wasn’t going to tell Suzanne any of that. “Look, you don’t know him, you don’t understand. And besides, when did you get so small-minded to believe gossip anyway? You haven’t even met him.”

  “Gossip? Oh, please. Yvette, where there’s smoke, there’s fire; that’s all I’m going to say. Andrew Madden, for Christ’s sake. Well, when you get exploited in this relationship, or whatever it is you want to call it, because you will, it is only a matter of time, don’t say I didn’t warn you. And you’re not even in L.A.—how’d he get to you out there? Never mind. I knew I should have insisted you go to Tulane. You are still applying to the School of Visual Arts in the fall, right?”

  I was too busy staring at the mound of refuse in the alley and imagining Suzanne’s pretty little head sticking out of it, like a child buried in the sand, to respond to her needling.

  “Right? Yvette, tell me you’re still applying to college.”

  “You know what? I have a lot to do; I need to get off the phone.”

  “Uhhh, I could kill Mother for never coming out of her room. Just promise me you will—”

  “Bye, Suzanne, I’ll talk to you soon.” I hung up, then immediately picked it back up to call Andrew. I wasn’t going to tell him about the conversation with my dear sister, but just to hear his voice in my ear, so near, to refute her words in my head.

  “Malaysia,” Andrew answered when I asked him on the phone where was he going, trying to keep the panic and dread from my voice, though I doubted my success. “It may be hard for me to speak to you from there, but I’m not leaving for a while and I’ll be back. Besides, honey, you’re gonna be busy with Tory.”

  “Are you not going to be here for the show?” My emotions ran out ahead of my words, pulling sounds along in their torrent.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. It depends on how long this goes. I’m not leaving you, sweet-y-vette, I’ll just be gone for a little while.” His words were firmly bracketing me, but I still felt as though I were falling.

  After he told me to call him that afternoon, we hung up, and I went for a run in Riverside Park to try to calm myself after the double whammy of Suzanne’s phone call this morning and now Andrew’s terrible news. Andrew leaving New York—fuck. Okay. I had known that Andrew was about to start shooting his film. Carrie had left a newspaper gossip column on my bed about Paradise Again, the movie he was directing, producing, and starring in with Lily Creed, but I had assumed it’d be here. He was here; she had been here; why couldn’t they shoot the damn movie here? Malaysia, for Christ’s sake. Maybe there’d be a dreadful hurricane that would prevent him from going, if they even had hurricanes there—I didn’t know. Oh, Andrew, please don’t go.

  A breeze was attempting to come in off the Hudson, the park was full of people trying to heighten their August Saturday experience by being outdoors whether it was pleasant or not. I ran down the broad path past Ninety-sixth Street toward Seventy-second where I would turn around to head farther uptown than where I began, past Grant’s Tomb—a surprise to me that the joke’s punch line exi
sted in my neighborhood—then over and up into Morningside Heights before returning to the awful stretch of my block.

  Exactly two weeks before, I had run in this park and seen Andrew that night for the first time. One week before, I ran in this park—had a great run, actually, my timing nicely improved on the dreadful fifteen-block hill—and met Andrew that night, and in the short time since, he had so completely infiltrated me that not only couldn’t I imagine life without him, I hadn’t thought I’d ever have to. Oh, God, I wished he wouldn’t leave. And he didn’t even know how long he’d be gone. Don’t movies have schedules to keep? Carrie had told me that Andrew lived in L.A., but I still had never thought that he would one day actually leave New York. Fuck.

  As I ran past a pushcart hot dog vendor, the cooking infusing the air with more heat than it could hold and causing ripples of steam to move out toward the street, I tried to imagine being here without him, without phone calls to and from him three, four, five times every day, without him at the bottom of the park in the Ritz-Carlton, a sentinel of safety. It was like helium leaving a balloon; it was nothing without that vital energy inside.

  I passed the homeless man who I saw on the same bench every time I ran. One morning, when my run was feeling terrible and useless, I decided to just go get a coffee and bagel to eat on my walk home. As I was leaving the park, I saw the homeless man sitting on a bench at the entrance. I had never seen homeless people in Pass Christian. The man was looking toward the ground as if he had lost something—which very clearly he had, lost a lot of things, but this more recently—and I suddenly found myself saying to him, “I’m going to get a bagel, would you like one, with an egg or cheese on it, maybe?”