Aftermath of Dreaming Read online

  “You’re great at this stuff, Michael.” I had no idea what to say about synergy, being unsure I’d ever experienced it myself. It always sounded unreliable to me, like an outfit that is fabulous one night, but two weeks later is boring as hell. “You’ll be the Ted Turner of FM radio; soon every car will be cruising with your station on their dial.”

  Michael momentarily beamed, then quickly sobered. “No, no, I’m just doing my job.” He speared the last asparagus tip nestled among the ignored-by-both-of-us zucchini. “So, You. How are You?” The pronoun sounded capitalized.

  But before I could respond, Michael’s cell phone rang, causing the couple at the table next to us to dance the win/lose two-step as they each grabbed their phones, then realized the call wasn’t for them. Michael read the number on his phone’s screen before clicking it on and saying, “What’s happening over there?”

  Michael’s cell phone. Which is also a pager. But only for “extremely, extremely urgent messages,” as the cell phone’s voice mail tells you when you call, but the whole time we were together last year, everything I wanted to say to Michael felt “extremely, extremely urgent” to me, but I couldn’t get rid of a terrible little feeling that it really wasn’t to him, so in fact the only time I ever felt qualified to leave an “extremely, extremely urgent” message was when I called to say that I was constantly, all at the same time, both too urgent and not urgent enough for whatever it was that we were doing together, so maybe we should just not do it anymore and do something less urgent like…be friends.

  Which we did. Quite easily, really. He even called a few times to see how I was. I still haven’t been able to decide if that was a particularly good sign or a bad one, because tumult and despair are the only yardsticks I’ve ever known to gauge true love by. At least that’s what I went through one time before when I knew it was true love. Not that my breakup with Michael had no ill effect on me. I do remember a rough couple of weeks when I was sure the only thing that would save my sanity and entire personal future history would be to drive to his home and just bury my face in his groin until both of us forgot the past we had together and could start a new one over, like some weird kind of prequel that makes the original ending obsolete. But I never did.

  “Sorry about that.” Michael put his phone down on the table near his hand. “Things at the station are just…Wow. You know.”

  “Right,” I said brightly. I glanced at the salmon on my plate. It was so lovely, pink and firm, lying there ready anytime. I took a bite that was melty and soft, as if my teeth were unnecessary.

  “So.” Michael broke into my fishy reverie. “How are the accessories? I mean, jewelry.”

  “Great, it’s—”

  “Right. Rings, pendants, bracelets. Are these…?” He reached out his hand, briefly touched my earring, and then cradled my cheek as he might a small bird.

  “Yeah, they’re me. I mean, mine. Uh, my design.”

  The rest of the brunch swept by in a blur of sensations: Michael’s deep liquid eyes bathed my face as we talked about my new jewelry line, a soft breeze that seemed to be orchestrated by him as he stroked my arms, and the sun drowsed my body, making it softly enthralled from within.

  The patio was nearly empty when Michael and I finally left. The red brick floor had become an old friend now, an easy passage to float out on with Michael just behind me. We walked down Robertson Boulevard and around the corner to where my truck was parked on a side street lined with large jacaranda trees. The late spring day was awash in soft gold light diffused by the trees’ open umbrellas of tiny purple flowers and newborn leaves. I stood in front of Michael as he leaned his upper back against the passenger window of my late-model brown Chevy truck, his lower body jutted out toward me as small blossoms rained down on us whenever a small breeze blew.

  “So, do you wanna make out for a while and have it not mean anything?”

  I looked into his brown eyes as I said it, looked into his eyes so lit by the sun that my reflection was clear, a small me staring back, but me made lit from his inside.

  Michael choked, then tried to cover it by laughing, then I guess he realized I was serious because I was just standing there waiting to see if he wanted to or not.

  Finally he said, “Everything means something.”

  “Yeah, well, how about not something serious?”

  He looked at me for a moment like a diver eyeing a pool, then pulled my hips forward to meet his, as our lips touched and we kissed.

  It was like a dream, but not the kind I wake up screaming from. Time did that minutes-swoosh-by-while-seconds-spread-out-slow thing. And then it all stopped. Because I stopped. But there wasn’t a void, there wasn’t a hollow, there was only Michael’s face telling me that he had to see me again this week and the next, and asking why did we stop?

  Frankly, I was shocked. I hadn’t expected that. Maybe I had gotten so used to the “no discernible effect” with my screaming that I figured every area of my life was like that. Or at least Michael, who is casual about everything, so casual that he practically sets a new standard for casual, and this in L.A. no less. But as I stood next to my truck, being held by him, watching tiny purple flowers float and twirl and land on our shoulders and hair while he kissed my neck and mouth and lips and hand, every reason I had not to see him again floated away and disappeared on the wind.

  “Okay,” I said. “This week.”

  “And the next.”

  And time swooshed by as we pressed together, until I roused myself to pull away.

  Michael waited on the sidewalk and watched me through the passenger window while I turned the engine over a couple of times before it caught and started up. As I was driving off, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Michael wave at me as he walked backward away, a slow backward stride, waving and walking facing me, until I turned the corner and couldn’t see him anymore, but I knew that soon I would.

  2

  “Wait a minute,” Reggie says. It sounds as if he’s practically in my kitchen with me now, as if his large frame is hovering protectively near while I lean against my fridge, the perfect vertical bed. “What’s with this ‘nothing serious’ stuff? That’s why you broke up with Michael, am I right? The whole mushroom incident was just an example, if I recall, of how completely nonserious this guy is and has been ever since you met. What happened to that?”

  “I found out that mushrooms are not—”

  “What, serious?”

  “Yeah. They’re like making your own wine kind of thing—natural.”

  “Honey, a man who finally gets away for a weekend with his girlfriend, then spends the whole time eating mushrooms alone is not natural. He’s a freak. And dated.”

  “Okay, so Michael’s a little groovy.”

  “Next to who? Jerry Garcia?”

  “Reggie.” I blow air out my nose to stifle a laugh. I don’t want him to know that I think something that stupid about Michael is funny, but I’m sure he can tell I’m laughing anyway. “Look, maybe that ‘serious’ stuff was the whole problem in the first place the last time. Maybe I just need to see what happens and not be so concerned with some preconceived idea about where I think this should go and by when. Maybe this time I can just take it as it comes and, you know, have fun. I mean, he’s incredibly—”

  “Okay, honey, you know what? You’re nuts.”

  “And you’re not?” I leave the kitchen to pace my living room floor. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound all New Age-y about this, but Michael keeps coming back into my life—”

  “So does your period; that’s necessary, he’s not.”

  “Reggie.”

  “Of course, he’s also unpredictable and puts you in a bad mood.”

  “Are you done?”

  “I just think you deserve better.”

  “Well, obviously, I don’t. I mean, he is better. I mean…You know what I mean.”

  I wait for Reggie’s response, but there is just silence on the phone. We listen to each other brea
the for a while, as if waiting for our intakes of air and emotions to get in sync before we speak again. I imagine Reggie’s face hanging in the black nonspace that telephone communication creates. His features appear smaller when he is upset, his kind blue eyes and Kansas attractiveness pull in, as if the energy required for that emotion takes so much effort that his physicality must go without.

  Still silence.

  Okay, I knew he’d probably pretty definitely be upset about this Michael stuff, but what was I supposed to do, not tell him? He’s my best friend, for Christ’s sake. Though sometimes he acts like he’s jealous, which I mostly find hard to believe, then annoying the few times I do because we’ve always only been friends, and even though I know he’s straight—he’s had girlfriends and women are attracted to him, though he hasn’t dated in ages—I just don’t think of him that way, so I wish he’d remember that our friendship doesn’t involve sex and stop getting mad at me when I talk about other men.

  “I’m glad you had a good time with him yesterday.” I can hear the decision in Reggie’s voice to move on, to let the rhythms and sounds of our mutual morning ritual carry us back to how we are.

  I sit down on the couch, relieved. “Thanks, Reggie.” Our friendship has been one long conversation interrupted only long enough for us to have more experiences to tell each other about, and I don’t want anything to stop that. Until Reggie and I talk about something that’s happened, it’s not real. It’s still in our heads, swirling around, waiting to be interpreted and set down, our minds a journal of each other’s lives. “So what’s happening with the script?”

  “A big fat bunch of nothing. I mean, it’s great having you tell me about New Orleans, but I need to see the places ol’ Kate was writing about for myself—something to reinspire me—not that that’s going to happen with how goddamn busy work is.”

  Reggie’s dream project is the film adaptation of a Kate Chopin story that he’s been writing forever and that is sort of the reason we met over four years ago. It was an L.A. New Year’s Eve, rainy and dismal, things either should never be, but maybe not so surprising for winter and my second one out here.

  I had parties to go to that night with friends, but it was still afternoon, so I was browsing in a bookstore to kill a few of the year’s final hours. I looked at art books for a while, then went into a fiction aisle where a copy of The Awakening caught my eye. Taking it down, I flipped through until I found the chapter where the main character leaves her husband, and I suddenly remembered the first time I read that part and how I had to put the book down and just breathe for a moment because I was so amazed that this woman in 1890s New Orleans no less could walk away from the one man who enabled her to live the only life she knew.

  Then someone near me in the aisle said, “Do you like Chopin, too?” which immediately catapulted me back from the novel’s world to L.A. where a pleasant-looking man was gazing at me like we had been in conversation all day. Reggie was holding a book by Dumas, one finger marking a spot as if it had been resting next to his bed. He was wearing a dark gray Shetland wool sweater, so I knew he wasn’t from here. And not East Coast, either, but near. Culturally, at least. We stood for over an hour discussing Kate Chopin—he had read everything by her—and New Orleans—he had never been—while people milled past us, water to our rocks in a stream. And our friendship’s conversation began. Every year on New Year’s Eve, Reggie calls to wish me happy anniversary.

  “Maybe you could get down there for a weekend,” I say as my phone line clicks, but before I can decide to ignore it, Reggie tells me to go ahead.

  “Hello?” I hope it’s Michael, then immediately don’t, so I won’t have to say goodbye to one of them for the other.

  “You haven’t even left yet?”

  If I were forced to read those words without hearing the voice, I could still identify them as having been uttered by my only sibling, Suzanne.

  “I am having a major bouquet crisis over here.”

  “Hi, Suzanne. We said ten; it’s only nine.”

  “No.” Her word lasts three beats. “We said Monday, nine A.M.”

  I silently shake my head, taking my own three seats, as I remind myself of the advice I read in a bridal book after Suzanne announced her engagement and chose me as her maid of honor: “Remember, bridesmaids, however she behaves, this is her big day!” I wish I had never read that damn book, though wedding protocol is probably like traffic laws—you get punished for breaking one whether you knew it existed or not.

  “Okay, I’m just finishing up a call, then as fast as the freeway is moving, I’ll be there.”

  “Hurry,” my sister says, then hangs up the phone.

  I click back to Reggie and hear the alleluia of his iMac coming to life, as if announcing that instead of resting on the seventh day, God made Mac. I relay the interrupting interlude to him, sure that he will believe what I remembered and Suzanne forgot.

  “Freud was—”

  “A great man, yes, that I remember. I also remember Suzanne telling me ten o’clock, but my mantra for her wedding is ‘whatever.’” I walk down the hall to my bedroom to start getting ready to leave. “How is your work going anyway?”

  “The director’s a nightmare, and the client wants more energy, which, lemme tell ya, this commercial is never gonna have. They fight it out while I wonder how they expected the actors they hired to impersonate live people. If I passed one of these freaks in the produce aisle, I’d turn and run.”

  “They’re lucky they have you to edit. You always make something amazing.”

  “I should be making something amazing with my own script.”

  “You will. It’s gonna be great.”

  “Breakfast mañana?”

  Reggie ends all of our morning phone calls this way. He told me once that his therapist decided that Reggie doesn’t know how to separate effectively from people, that he continues to stay attached to them throughout his day. The evidence of this, the therapist explained, was in the wording of Reggie’s goodbyes—they always contained a reference to when he and the other person would connect again. I told Reggie I thought it was just being nice.

  Some therapists want to take all the manners out of you and think they haven’t done their job until they do. Like the phrase “I’m sorry,” for instance. How often have I said that in the course of my life? A hell of a lot more than the therapist I saw for a year was comfortable with, that’s certain. He would say, and rather gruffly considering he was a paid professional, “What are you sorry for? You didn’t do anything.”

  Where I grew up in Pass Christian that phrase was an expression of sympathy and concern and solidarity with the person you were visiting with. Such as: “I’m sorry you had a bad day,” or “I’m sorry the hurricane tore your house up,” or “I’m sorry the Saints lost again.” Although sometimes I wonder if the real reason we apologize so much down there is that we still haven’t atoned for that truly horrible crime that we committed.

  That apology enters my head a lot when I’m with Suzanne. Sometimes it feels like a spell was cast on me at birth that transforms anything I say or do around her from loving-little-sister to stark-raving-brat. At least, it appears that she views my behavior that way—but maybe some spell was cast on her, too. Though this morning, she definitely will think I’m a brat if I am any more late for my maid-of-honor obligation than I already am, which I might very well be since I seem unable to get dressed.

  I have changed my shirt three times. There is almost a gravitational pull from my closet keeping me here as the pile of discarded clothing grows. The phone rings. I imagine it is Suzanne, or at least her energy using someone else’s call to yell “Hurry up!” at me from her house in Santa Monica clear across town. I look in the mirror inside the closet door and only slightly dislike what I have ended up in. All right, just go.

  I hurry into the second bedroom that I converted into my office/studio. Morning light streams in, filling the room with a muted quiet, but the air is urgent with the an
ticipation of work that needs to get done. Sketches of completed and still-evolving designs are tacked to a Peg-Board on the wall above my worktable; tools of all shape and manner are hanging there too, their images outlined à la corpse in black Sharpie pen—a custom I picked up from my father’s work shed which he mimicked from all the detective novels he read; my computer is on and humming with photos of my new pieces waiting to be priced, printed, and organized; invoices and order forms spill from a two-tiered wire basket next to my carat and gram scales; black felt-lined trays filled with seed pearls and toggle clasps and checkerboard-cut amethysts and silk cords and yellow topaz vie for space on the worktable next to loose color-copied pages for press kits that are begging to be assembled. Not everything can be left out before I leave.

  Crouching down in front of the gunmetal-gray safe that takes up the whole far corner of the room, I spin the dial quickly three times, right-left-right. Its familiar clicking is such an old song to me now that I can hear if the rhythm is off. Getting the safe into the apartment was hell. I had to pay the landlord extra for a guy to come out and check the building’s structure to make sure an object this heavy and large wouldn’t fall through the floor and crash into the apartment below. The safe’s weighty door slowly swings open, revealing trays of finished pieces that need to be delivered to customers as well as more loose stones; necklaces and earrings; rings, bracelets, and pins; lemony pale citrine gems; rare mint garnets and cabachon-cut red ones; a tiny pile of peridots, known as the evening emerald gemstone; tourmalines of blue, purple, and watermelon pink/green; pieces set and bound with braided eighteen-karat gold, all sparkling and blinking at me from the safe’s squatting bulk.

  I take out trays and select earrings, a bracelet, and two pins, then put them on while checking in the mirror on the wall. The peridots are a pale whispering green, the tourmalines a soft lullaby blue, and all are shot through with thin bands of gold cutting across the gems that are then held together and apart by braided embraces of deep yellow gold. Sometimes I wish I could live inside a piece of jewelry. Or at least in a place where everything was smooth and polished and set and the only cuts that occurred were on purpose to make the light more enhanced.