Aftermath of Dreaming Page 16

  Cockroaches head the list. Particularly the huge flying ones I had to grow up with on the warm wet Gulf Coast; they continue to inspire in me a fear unequal to most.

  When I was seven, I decided to take matters into my own hands about those fearsome pests since obviously the bug man (a regular visitor to every Southern home) and Daddy were unable to keep the horrible monsters away. Kneeling on the floor of my bedroom with my favorite teddy bear beside me, wearing an only-for-mass-and-certain-parties dress, I told God—out loud for double effect—that I was ready for a deal. I would let a roach—one of the big nasty flying ones that came in from the outside, like some true owner of our home whose generosity toward us could only last so long—crawl over my hand if for the rest of my life I never had to see another one. I thought this an extremely fair exchange.

  No roach appeared. For once, where is one when you need it? I couldn’t tell if that meant God was going to skip my part and, being all-loving, just do His, or maybe other people were praying out loud, too, and mine had gotten lost in the din. Or worse, maybe one crawl across the hand wasn’t enough for Him. All right, I’d try again. I recited the plan, but this time upped my end, saying that the roach could crawl along my entire arm. Again, nothing happened.

  Just as I was about to try again, Daddy stuck his head in and asked what I was doing. I explained the rules to him—maybe if I got him involved, the whole house could be an insect-free zone.

  He walked over to me, sat on the floor, and wrapped me up in a hug. “You can’t make deals with God, darling, it doesn’t work like that.”

  As soon as he said it, I knew it was true. Our trading sides were so uneven—my offer so paltry to Him, never enough to alter the exertion of nature on my life, but at least I had Daddy’s arms around me.

  The tea kettle is screaming that its job is done, so I pour the water into a mug, letting the chamomile-infused steam waft in my face. The scream dream reminds me of those cockroaches, appearing out of nowhere and flying suddenly into view. But the worst part is that my mind, or subconscious, made the damn dream up. Created it, called it forth, brought it into being—for what? To terrorize myself through and through?

  I get the pillow and blanket from my bed and head for the couch. The tree outside my living room window is lit up by security lights so its large branches and full leaves, soft brown and silvery green, are solid and shimmering in the dark. It is indifferent to the night—has no need to sleep, no pressure to lose consciousness so it will be alert for the next day’s activities. I find that as freeing as not setting an alarm clock. Suzanne’s veil is in the living room where I moved it this afternoon, like a marital ghost in the room’s gloom. Before I settle on the couch to go to sleep, I get up and move the veil back to my studio, out of sight.

  The dressing room’s three-part mirror reflects an ungodly amount of pink. There should be a design ordinance against this, but I guess bridal boutiques would have to be exempt from that rule. I understand the color is supposed to be warm, soft, and flattering to one’s skin, but the result on me is a heightening of green undertones I never knew I had. Or maybe that’s a physical reaction to the maid-of-honor dress hanging on me. And I mean hanging. The distance between the fabric and my body reminds me of that blank space you see on children’s pictures: earth and trees way down below—huge gap—then way up at the top, a line for the sky with the sun stuck in the corner; the space in between is unaccounted for, but caused by the other two.

  Suzanne is so ecstatic about this tent I am wearing that it has almost made her forget that she was mad as a wet hen when she saw that I hadn’t brought her veil with me for her to try on. She was also annoyed about my tardiness, but now her face is enrapt as she moves around me, plucking at the floral material billowing out from my frame.

  “I’m sorry, but other than me getting one three sizes smaller, what is there to fit on this dress?”

  “Hush, it’s perfect,” she says, still dancing around me, thrilled with the effect.

  “Is everyone’s like this, or am I just particularly lucky?”

  “Of course yours is different—you’re my maid of honor. It’s beautiful, exactly how I pictured it. Go show Matt.”

  My blond and handsome soon-to-be brother-in-law has intelligently brought something to read on this shopping extravaganza he joined us for. Suzanne started to protest when he sat down in the store and immediately pulled out the Wall Street Journal, but he patiently reminded her of the murder mysteries she devours at Dodger games, so she turned her focus on me.

  I stand in front of Matt for a paragraph before I interrupt his reading by saying, “I know, I look like a walking floral rectangle.”

  Matt lowers the paper. “No you don’t. You look…Pretty.”

  “In a bathroom-wallpaper kind of way, yeah. But it’s her day, and at least she’s paying for it. She’s probably going to use it later to slipcover an armchair.”

  “That’s the sisterly spirit.”

  Matt moves his newspaper off the hot-pink tufted velvet love seat so I can sit down. The dress pools around my shoes.

  “So, how are you? Seeing anyone? Are you happy?”

  Pink walls will never be exempt inside a bridal store, but those three questions should be. Though I know Matt means well, and I like that he adopts a brotherly role.

  “Work’s going well. I got a new store.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Thanks, and the commissions keep coming in, so I figure the next step is another boutique, and then a department store really is my goal, and getting into another magazine. A national would be great, so even with Momma’s money winding down, if things continue as they are, I should be okay.”

  “That’s good,” he says, but without the same enthusiasm as before.

  I can hear the financial-planning lecture Matt is calculating whether to give me or not, so I decide to keep the conversation moving along. “And I sorta started seeing Michael again.”

  “Michael?” IRAs and bonds are still cha-chinging in Matt’s head. “The guy who drank out of his own flask at our Christmas party?”

  I wish he’d forget that. “That was Rick. No, Michael, remember? We ran into y’all at the movie theater?”

  “Oh, Michael. Radio, right?”

  “Right.” Recalling Michael’s work is good. “So, anyway, it’s nice.”

  “Right, this is the guy who canceled dinner after Suzanne cooked seafood gumbo all day. Now I remember, okay. So you’re seeing him again—and he’s actually showing up?”

  I want to be annoyed that Matt mentioned that—didn’t I bring Suzanne a flowering plant to apologize?—but I like having shared history with him.

  “There you two are.” Suzanne appears carrying two child-sized wedding dresses. “What do you think?”

  “Yvette’s seeing Michael again.” Matt shoots me a look as if he got an extra turn picking Saturday-morning cartoons.

  “Oh, that’s nice, honey.” Suzanne hands me one of the dresses to hold up. “Okay, which one? Now consider the music that will be playing—it all has to match.”

  “What, in God’s name, are those?” Matt has finally noticed the objects of his intended’s concern.

  “The child bride’s dress,” my sister announces in a voice that I know means, “We’ve discussed this before.”

  “It’s an old Southern tradition,” I say for Matt. “A child bridal couple walks down the aisle first in the processional, symbolizing—what, Suzanne, do you know? I mean, other than the obvious.”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care; it’s sweet.” Suzanne puts down the dress she was holding and takes the other from my hands, holding it in front of her, as if it somehow could fit. “Which one?”

  Driving away from the bridal shop in my truck, I have a wild impulse for a cigarette—I haven’t had one in years, but a longing for the taste is there instantly. I have to keep telling myself that I don’t really want one and definitely don’t want that habit again. I know that desire is just t
o distract me from where I’ve been. Then an image appears in my mind of a long white coffin nail, as Daddy used to call cigarettes. It is lit, and the cherry at the end glows bright red. Then the long whiteness of the cigarette transforms into a bride with an aura of smoke obscuring her face.

  Michael and I have turned the corner onto Fairfax Avenue, or Kosher Canyon as he calls it, and are walking toward Canter’s Deli for a meal. It is Saturday night and the environment is divided—God’s darkness pushed far above by L.A.’s lights bright below. I haven’t seen Michael since Steve’s gallery opening on Wednesday night. Since, all right, one night after I went to the theater and saw Andrew. Not that I’m thinking about him. I’m thinking about Michael, his hand in mine, as we walk down Fairfax on this gentle night; I just seem to have lost track of what he’s talking about.

  But before I can figure it out, what grabs my attention is the absence of clothes. In the far corner of Canter’s parking lot is a man who appears to be in his sixties, each tired, difficult, meager year is collected on his pale face and paler body, which, save for a pair of dull baggy underwear, I can plainly see.

  “Oh, my God, he’s nekked.” My hand flies to my eyes to save the man from disgrace.

  “Naked,” Michael replies.

  “What?” I peek through my fingers. Maybe it was an apparition, a ghost from the street’s past, but the man is still there, his body so white it looks practically lit from within like a battered-up lamp you never notice until it’s turned on. The man is busy, precisely folding imaginary clothes, engaged in that most comforting of rituals—getting ready for bed.

  “It’s pronounced ‘naked,’ not ‘nekked.’”

  “Well, where I’m from, it’s ‘nekked.’ Of course, growing up, I thought they were two different words. ‘Naked’ was when you were about to or just finished having sex, and ‘nekked’ was not having any clothes on, but for no particular reason really, like for running through the sprinklers or something.”

  “So, this guy’s nekked and wishes he was naked.”

  “Michael.” I wish he wouldn’t try to be funny at a time like this.

  The man is moving around, pulling out imaginary drawers, pantomiming brushing his teeth in his private-illusion bedroom-cum-bath, living in a master suite that only exists in the gap between his memory and time. “We need to call the police. Not that I think he’s a criminal for doing his ablutions in a parking lot, but they could take him somewhere, get him off the street before someone comes along and…I don’t know. He needs protection.”

  “Yvette, the only place the police take anyone is jail; this guy shouldn’t go there. Wait here.”

  Before I can ask where he’s going, Michael hurries away from me and, darting between cars, crosses diagonally through the parking lot. He stops near an SUV and watches the man from a short distance.

  The man is now on his knees and looks to be praying. I can practically see the four-poster mahogany bed he thinks he is saying his nightly devotion next to. The Guardian Angel prayer that Suzanne and I said as children every night before bed is suddenly triggered in my mind. “Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom with love, commit me here, ever this day, be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.”

  The man makes the sign of the cross; I hope he said that intercession, too, and that his guardian angel isn’t too old to hear. God only knows the dangers that this poor man has to be frightened of since he is sleeping outside, and yet he looks so calm as he lies down for sleep. I think about how nervous I am every night going to bed, never knowing if I’ll awaken to a scream about something that isn’t even there. In the real world, at least. Maybe I’ll start saying a prayer before going to bed, too. Like the reverse of when I was a kid and, waking up from a bad dream, would say Hail Marys to feel safe while I got back to sleep.

  Michael slowly walks around the SUV and disappears from my view for a moment, then reappears, and walks back. His jacket is no longer on him, and he looks over his shoulder a couple of times before he reaches me.

  “That was so sweet of you. Did you put it over him?”

  “No, I didn’t want to get in his space and scare him. I just draped it nearby where he’ll see it and hopefully figure out to put it on. I didn’t see any other clothes around, but it’s something, at least. He probably ran out of his medication.”

  “What medication?”

  “He’s a paranoid schizophrenic, delusional. He’s clearly not living in the reality that we all see.”

  And for a moment, thinking of my Andrew memories, I understand the attraction.

  When Michael and I leave Canter’s at the end of our meal—towering pastrami sandwich for him, tuna salad on rye for me—we try to find Nekked Man to give him the half of my sandwich I didn’t touch, or Michael does as I wait on the sidewalk while he goes to the far corner of the parking lot and looks around, but Nekked Man is nowhere in sight. Nor is Michael’s jacket, which we hope is a good sign.

  Driving away from Fairfax on Beverly Boulevard, we head east to my apartment in the Saturday night traffic’s expectant rush. I am perched on the passenger seat in Michael’s car, his late eighties BMW, which from the outside looks great, cream paint job still good, no dings anywhere, but inside it’s a whole different world. The seat I am on rocks side to side whenever he accelerates, changes lanes, or stops, and putting my feet firmly on the floor is out of the question because it is covered with easily breakable CDs, partly filled soda cans, and a backpack that Michael explains is set and ready to go if he gets the urge to go hiking. The passenger door can’t be opened from the outside, requiring that Michael never open it for me, as if the car intuited his feelings about chivalry and adopted a defect to match. His radio station is playing on the expensive and confusing-looking stereo that he takes out of the trunk and slides into a slot in the dashboard every time we get in. The stereo is much better situated in this car for an accident, or even just a drive, than I am. For the first time in my life, I long for a shoulder strap.

  “So, I’m just going to do it. I sent them a check for the whole thing today,” I say as I check the traffic to make sure there are no major obstacles that Michael needs all his attention for. “I’ve been wanting to do a Buddhist retreat for years.”

  “That could work.”

  “Yeah, and this one is for Catholics. Well, Christians. ‘Zen for Christians,’ that’s what they’re calling it. Some Jesuit priest who happens to be a Zen master is leading it. Three full days of silence. I think it sounds fun. Like running a marathon is fun. You get purged and excellent all at the same time. It’s at the beginning of August, right after Suzanne’s wedding that we’re going to together, right?”

  “Right.”

  Michael’s head is completely turned to the left looking at a restaurant with lots of tables outside. The exterior is a deep bright yellow, making the profusion of black-clad patrons look like cross-walk safety sign figures come to life.

  “I think it will be helpful in a merging kind of way. The last time I went to mass was Momma’s funeral, and I stopped going regularly when I was fourteen.”

  “That’s never going to work.”

  “No, I think it’s perfect, really.” It’s sweet how passionate Michael is about this. “Dharma and divinity. Emptiness and redemption. What more could I want?”

  “What?” Michael looks at me for the first time. “No, this show. I thought it was in better shape than this, but it’s still…no one’s listening, would you listen? Jesus Christ.”

  As Michael’s car careens along, I think about the phone calls I used to have with Andrew. Hours of me talking and him listening, and him remembering practically everything. Andrew Madden with his huge career and insanely busy life always had time to listen to me, and this SOB sitting next to me can’t even hear three sentences without getting distracted by his fucking radio. But Andrew’s not around and Michael is. And maybe Michael can give that to me when things at the station settle down. Just stop comparing Michael to Andrew
—as long as I do that, no one can win.

  The cross above my bedroom door is the first thing I see when Michael wakes me hours later in the middle of the night. I nailed it up there last week, hoping its protection would extend from vampires to nightmares, but even though it hasn’t worked, I can’t bring myself to take it down. Maybe its protective powers just need some time to kick in; its safeguarding ability will emerge once God finally gets word it was hung.

  I pull the covers back so Michael and I can get under them and sleep properly in bed. Our clothes are long off, and the protected interior air of my bedroom is a few degrees cooler than pleasant on my skin. I remember Nekked Man and hope he found more clothes somewhere tonight and is asleep someplace safe.

  “That was the best sleep,” Michael says as he stretches. He sounds oddly done. “I’ve only been getting like four or five hours a night since I took over the station, but, man, those three hours felt like nine. That was amazing.” He kisses my shoulder and neck and arm. “You are amazing.”

  We kiss some more, and I am moving down his body with my mouth when Michael suddenly tells me he has to go.

  “Go where? No. Stay here.”

  “I can’t, Yvette, I need to be at the station really early tomorrow, and you know, traffic on the freeways is a bitch.”

  “On a Sunday?”

  He kisses my mouth and hands. “It’s important I’m there. Right now is a very—”

  “Crucial time,” I finish for him.

  He looks so appreciative of my understanding that I feel bad that I didn’t really mean it, so suddenly I do.

  Listening to Michael’s rhythmic footsteps going down the stairs, I wonder if the noise will awaken Gloria and bring flashbacks of her “visitors,” but my screams don’t seem to register on her, so maybe footsteps won’t, either.

  I wish Michael had stayed. Jesus, he’s so into his work, but maybe he just needs more time and then he’ll be like that about us. The outline of my body still feels nicely blurred from Michael’s skin, weight, and hands on me. The pillow is under my head, the blanket pulled up right; bed, sleep, and me start combining, becoming an undifferentiated dream. Everything with Michael is fine; we’re taking it slow, which is what I wanted to do. I hope going back to sleep at this hour will prevent the scream dream. Or thoughts about Andrew. Where did that come from? For God’s sake, I was thinking about Michael.