Aftermath of Dreaming Page 15

  A week or so later, I was at the restaurant working the eleven-to-eight shift. It was a chilly, rainy, early fall day, and the coat room had been hell during lunch. A dense, tangled mass of hats and attachés, wool and cashmere, umbrellas and shopping bags, even a pet carrier case that, thank God, was empty. A day destined to be a labyrinth of garments hiding for minutes on end while the owners waited impatiently for Lydia and me to find their truant coats. But at least we were doing the shift together. We had a good rhythm going, split the tips we procured evenly, and had fun talking about everyone and everything in between the customers coming and going—though I still had never told her about Andrew. Lydia had a full-length Russian sable coat that she wore the minute the thermometer dipped below fifty degrees. She’d hang it on the rack like a customer’s coat, and would let me try it on when no one was around. I never asked where she got it and she never volunteered. I imagined it was the last vestige of a relationship with some European man, a relationship she had hoped would prevent her from being where she had ended up—working the coat-check room of a restaurant in New York. But she was young and there were lots of rich men. “All you need is one,” she’d say to me and laugh as if she didn’t mean it, though I knew she did. It made me think how I had gotten a rich man, but it wasn’t like that with him.

  The worst part of the shift that day came toward the end when a customer went upstairs and summoned the British manager, Mr. Claitor, to intercede. Claitor flew down the stairs, solidly upright like an animated arrow moving through the air, while the angry, uncloaked customer straggled behind, demanding that his sacred twenty-year-old Burberry be found. After much sorting through and crawling about, the cloak was discovered snuggling under a Persian lamb, as if the coats had taken an instant liking to each other and had colluded on their own. Claitor soothed the customer in his U.K. tones, like a male Mary Pop-pins calming a truculent child, as he held open the treasured trench coat. But once the customer was safely out the door, the scolding began. “If this happens again, there will be changes around here,” he said, glancing at the hole in the counter to make it explicitly clear what he meant, as if Lydia and I didn’t understand. “Are you doing your job or am I?” He was awful and wonderful in a Night Porter sort of way.

  Finally at a little after three, I was able to sneak into the phone booth to call Andrew. His regular call to me that morning had been earlier than normal and brief, just telling me to call him that afternoon.

  “Yvette, I have to go now.”

  “Okay, I’ll call you later.”

  “No, I’m going now, leaving, for overseas.”

  “Oh, no.” The tears were in my voice and on my face so immediately that I wondered if they had heard his words before me.

  “I’ll try to call you from there, but I may not be able to. Take down my address in L.A. I’ll probably be back here, but I want you to have it just in case.” I hated “just in case.” “Just in case” sounded scary and him-without-me. “Ready?”

  The phone booth mercifully had a pencil on a cord and neat pieces of paper in a wooden slot by the inverted hanging directory. I had refilled the scrap paper months before. I had liked that the restaurant supplied it, edges so neat, color so white, but now I hated that it was helping in this parting of Andrew and me.

  Some words in Andrew’s address were familiar, like “Bel Air.” That was the brand of the first cigarette my cousin Renée and I smoked. I always imagined it was named after the car, not a land of enchantment where Andrew resided, and probably did four years earlier when I was fourteen and puffing my first cancer stick.

  “And if you really need me while I’m in Malaysia, call this number.” He gave me one with the L.A. area code. “Leave a message there and they’ll get it to me wherever I am. Use it if you need to.”

  “Thanks, Andrew.”

  “C’mon, you’re like a daughter to me.”

  And then it all made sense. No one else in his life had that special role, even with all those women circulating through. That “I’m going to be in your life for a very long time” role. Let the others be his girlfriends and then get dumped by him—I knew what I was to him and that was all that mattered.

  “Your show’s going to be a big fucking hit.”

  I couldn’t think of doing anything without him. “I love you, Andrew.”

  “You, too, sweet-y-vette. And don’t do any drugs. Promise me you won’t.”

  “I won’t, I promise.” That was out of the blue.

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

  He will? No, of course he won’t.

  “Andrew?”

  “Yes?”

  “Uhm, bye. Be careful and have a great time.”

  He laughed kindly. “Bye-bye, sweet-y-vette.”

  I let him hang up first, listening to the emptiness of the line. I knew the “If you’d like to make a call…” recording would come on in a moment, so I figured I’d let it shoo me off. I huddled forward over the hung-up pay phone, crying my goodbye to him, resisting the urge to quickly call back to make sure it would all be okay and I’d see him again, speak to him again one day, but he said I was like a daughter to him, so I knew I would. Andrew was going. Leaving. Gone. To a place far away—a devourer of our communication and physical reminders of us. Oh, Andrew, please think about me every day and come back quick. I wanted to shrink the Ritz-Carlton down to a tiny size and carry it with me all the time: him living there, the unfriendly operator, the yellow silk couch, the front desk clerk, the view from his room, the uniformed doormen, and mostly me with him. I took all of that, made a version I could forever see, and placed it in the foremost part of my mind so I would have to peer around it for anything else to be seen.

  15

  The morning when I was fourteen that I came home from spending the night at my cousin Renée’s house, the night that Momma called to tell me in two short sentences that Daddy had left us and wasn’t coming back, I went straight to his work shed before I entered the house. It was a late spring Saturday and the heat was already up and full and holding me in place, so to move at all required a going forward plus a breaking through. I abandoned my bike and let it fall against the porch railing, ignoring Momma’s admonishment in my head that it would chip the paint, dropped my knapsack on the red brick path—where tiny bouquets of weeds and grass were popping up through the cracks as if they too had gotten the news that Daddy had left and were reclaiming ownership since the man of the house was gone—and went to stand in front of my father’s work shed.

  I knew he wasn’t inside. But his presence seemed to radiate from the stillness behind the closed door and the window facing me. Like the sacristy in church, even when Monsignor Marcel wasn’t there, it was so definitely his space—his authority hanging over everything—that you couldn’t help but speak in whispers and say only good things. I opened the door and stepped inside. The work shed greeted me as it had the many times I had sneaked in while Daddy was at work to see what he was creating, to look at the tools, smell the leather, metal, and wood, feel the cool darkness around me, him around me, the sensations more my father than when he sat at the dinner table during the silence of our family meals.

  I went over to the worktable and looked up at the tools still hanging in their spots on the Peg-Board, tools utterly left behind, and I understood. My daddy was gone. Not just at his office or on an errand to the hardware store, but gone. Like a dead body is how it was in the work shed, all the physicality was there, but the life was gone, the secret was gone, the not-supposed-to be-in-there was gone, my father was gone.

  I sank down on the tall stool he never much used, and the cool metal seat was a slap to my bare legs, so I perched on the edge, just where the bottom of my shorts covered me. I could hear the buzzing of the spring day outside, dragonflies, air conditioners, the air so charged with heat it practically made a sound itself, but inside the work shed was quiet and peaceful. Had he come in here before he left? Considered taking some tools with him, but chan
ged his mind? Where did he go and would he make instruments there? The last one he had been working on, a violin, was nowhere to be found. I couldn’t remember if he had already given it away to a relative or not. Or not. Maybe he took it with him to give to someone who would be in this new life with him. The air in my lungs seemed to leave all at once and I couldn’t get any more in. I grabbed my chest, gasping in the dim light, then felt dizzy and let myself crumple to the floor. The wood shavings and dust filled my nose with their scent, and I curled up under my father’s worktable and cried myself into an exhausted sleep.

  When I awoke, the sun was higher and hotter in the sky, so a couple of hours must have gone by. I got up and started taking down the tools before I even knew what I was doing. Scraps of leather, pieces of wood, musical strings, and all sorts of materials were in the bins my father kept everything so well organized in. It was mine now, the work shed was, as if in my sleep that information had been passed to me like waking up from a dream and instantly knowing a truth. It was a realm I could enter and stay in by the sheer power of using its tools.

  I began working on an instrument of my own that afternoon—a mandolin, which seemed less forbidding than a violin—teaching myself to use the tools, work the wood, the hard and soft objects to be manipulated and changed into a greater sum than their parts, but finally had to stop hours later when I heard Momma’s voice calling me. I guessed she’d called my cousin’s house, then seen my backpack and bike lying where neither should have been. She yelled once more, then I heard her start back up the porch steps, and I knew I should call out to her. I opened the work shed door, saying, “I’m here, Momma, I’ve been home all day.” I saw her eyes see where I was. They looked like someone was about to strangle her, the one hazel and one green seemed to view a horror that was invisible to me. Then she made a “huhnn” noise, a kind of “I can’t believe it, yet doesn’t this make sense,” sound, then turned around and walked inside.

  We never talked about my using the work shed. In fact, she pretended from then on that the entire structure didn’t exist. Which was fine with me. The world inside the house didn’t exist when I was in the work shed, which must have been why Daddy went there. At certain times, when using a tool or trying to figure out how to construct part of a piece, I’d hear his voice in my head guiding me. Saying things I knew he would say, but things I’d never heard him utter in real life. As if part of him was still in the work shed, and that part of him was talking to me, working with me.

  That first instrument I tried to make came out looking more like a Cubist sculpture than a real mandolin, so I let it be that. I put it in a box I built and added some things of my father’s that he’d left behind—cuff links, part of the newspaper that was lying on his leather chair, broken bits of an Old Spice bottle, a bill addressed to him, the sash to his robe, an old 78 LP he loved more than anything—and titled the whole thing What’s Left. I kept it in the work shed until I moved to New York, then before I left, I sewed a velvet bag for it that it has stayed in behind the clothes in every closet I’ve had since then. It’s the only piece I’ve never shown anyone and probably never will.

  Downtown L.A. on a Friday is a driver’s nightmare. People are there only because they have to be at work, but they know that the traffic going out will get exponentially more terrible with each passing half hour after noon, so they all start leaving early. Which I think is what makes it worse. If they would just stay until the usual time, pretend it’s a Tuesday or a Wednesday, then the traffic would be okay. But they’ve never asked me.

  The only reason I am venturing here today is an emergency. I got a frantic call from Dipen this morning saying that the casting they did for the necklaces makes them not hang right. How many were done? I asked him, trying to stay calm. All of them, he replied. This is the only time I’ve ever been unhappy that he’s done what he said he’d do on time. As I fight my way through the sidewalk throng to reach his building, I pray that this setback won’t make my order for Roxanne late.

  Dipen rents space on a high floor in the Los Angeles Jewelry Center building, an old office tower from the twenties fronted with gorgeous sea-green tile that stands in vertical waves that protrude up the front between rows of windows reaching into a peak that I have heard holds a penthouse suite where wild Prohibition-era parties were held. The bottom of the building has been disgraced with modern and cheap-looking jewelry stores that flank the still-gracious double and revolving doors into the lobby, and a large ugly sign runs the width of the building above the stores. I usually stop for a second before I go in, my hands shielding my eyes from the ruined bottom part, and gaze up at the majestic green—such a choice—and imagine how it was way back when it was built.

  But today I am one of the many who are ignoring history as I push through the doors and wait with a crowd for one of the two ancient small elevators servicing the building. The elevators in the jewelry district are notoriously slow, which make the diamond and precious gems dealers on the upper floors nervous enough to hire private security men instead of relying on the ones the building provides. Robberies happen down here all the time.

  Dipen’s office is two tiny rooms that were partitioned out of a larger suite—most of the offices I pass in the long narrow corridor to reach his door are like it. People from all over the globe—India, Armenia, Korea, China, and the Philippines—are here in tiny spaces making jewelry for the United States. He grins at me sheepishly when I walk in, his dark hair falling over one of his eyes.

  “He use your measurements from the sketch you left me, but no good, not working, come see.”

  I follow Dipen around his desk into the other room and see the pieces for the necklaces lying on a worktable. They are shaped like tiny thin saxophones, but smooth, and the part that looks like the mouth of the horn curves back to touch the longer arm. They are meant to be attached by one end to a bronze leather cord, then the other, the part that forms a hook of itself, will hold a big semiprecious stone—a tourmaline or a checkerboard-cut citrine—by clasping a bar that the gem will be suspended from. But the weight and curve of the gold make the pieces fall in toward the gem instead of holding it straight.

  “I know this works, Dipen, the prototype did. How’d we do that?”

  “I had Mahee for that. This new guy, he follow measurements exactly, but no right.”

  I remember how Mahee could take my designs and would instinctively shave off a little here, add a bit more gold and weight there, to make them all fall right. I wish to God he hadn’t gone back to India.

  “Okay, let’s figure it out.” I pull out paper and a pen and draw a new prototype by flattening along the back and adding more of a curve on the top. I know Dipen’s going to charge me for the useless batch, and I imagine my profits on these pieces dwindling. “And he’ll melt these pieces down, right, so I won’t have to…”

  “Same gold, same gold, and…” Dipen looks away for a moment, as if consulting some hidden oracle. “I knock a third off price for casting those.”

  “Thanks, Dipen, you’re the best. And have him only do one first; I’ll come back and look at that.”

  “Right, right, all fine,” he says, smiling and walking me toward the door.

  “And the other pieces, how are they coming?”

  “Fine, no problem, we make many before. Next week, come back, see necklace.”

  As I enter the packed elevator to leave the building, I consider for a second getting a new caster, but then remember the horror stories I’ve heard from other designers: casters selling their designs to knockoff firms, casters being paid off by competing designers to stall orders so a talented new designer will fail, casters making pieces that are fourteen-karat gold instead of the eighteen-karat that was paid for. This setback with Dipen is deeply annoying, but nothing considering what it could be.

  Sitting in traffic on First Street trying to get out of downtown, I decide to call Lizzie. Maybe I’ll jump on the freeway, take it all the way to Santa Monica and go to her stor
e in Venice to get the check for those sales that she owes me. Her store’s phone rings and rings, no machine picking up, nothing. I know the number by heart, but I check it in my address book to make sure my fingers didn’t forget, then dial the same digits again. Nothing. Jesus, Lizzie, what kind of store isn’t open on a Friday afternoon? I am tempted to drive out there anyway—the really horrific traffic will be going the other way—and wait for her to appear, but that’s a dubious shot. I start to call Reggie to complain about Lizzie, but then don’t. He was so happy last night reading his script to me, sitting on my living room floor with Chinese food containers all around, then talking about Chopin and New Orleans and filming. It’s been pretty much all about me this week so I decide not to bother him about stupid Lizzie—it isn’t anything that hasn’t happened before, and those other times, she always paid.

  I am midscream, volume full throttle, eyes open and staring, in my bedroom. Then my sound disappears as I realize that what I was seeing is no longer there. I want to see it again so I can know what it is. It is two-forty A.M., and my apartment is completely quiet—now that I’ve stopped screaming, at least. I find it so weird that Gloria has never said anything. Unless she thinks I’m entertaining my own “visitors” who have really odd tastes—like scaring the be-Jesus out of me. The rotten part is that it’s hell trying to get back to sleep after one of those dreams. I wish it would fucking end.

  I go to the kitchen to make myself a cup of chamomile tea. While waiting for the water to boil, I lean against the kitchen counter in my antique silk slip and try to figure out what in real life does terrify me that might be causing the dream.