Aftermath of Dreaming Page 8

  I sank back toward the wall, even allowed myself to lean against it for a moment, before the words of the manager, Mr. Claitor, snapped in my head, “No slouching! Haven’t you got a spine?” Then he’d smile, which should have been anemic considering its size, but it could melt your insides. I stood up straight and away from the dark wood paneling. Seamus was busying himself with the remaining slips of paper that indicated how many more parties were arriving that night. I watched his large, stubby fingers move them around with practiced speed, this one to there, that one next, as I wished I was in the other room seeing Andrew. Which is when I saw them. Next to the slips of paper lay the keys for the side door; the door used only by special people who needed to avoid the paparazzi waiting for them outside the main entrance. Seamus had already helped Andrew secretly leave.

  “Andrew Madden speak to you?” Seamus’s dark eyes darted over to me before glancing off, as if checking to make sure he was right about what I had been thinking at exactly that moment. It was funny that the name had become Andrew Madden—funnier even in Seamus’s brogue. Just last week it was Mr. Madden, as if now Seamus felt one step closer to a personal connection with him. I wondered if soon it’d be Andy.

  “I told him your name. He came up to me, asked about you. Wanted to know your name, where you were from, and if you were here. So, he did talk to you.” Seamus nodded his head twice, as if he didn’t need me in this conversation. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.” Then he looked at me and grinned before turning around and walking through the swinging kitchen door. I imagined the striking of his match burning bright in the all-white kitchen.

  I wanted to ask how he knew that I wanted no one else to know, but by the time Seamus came back out smelling of cigarettes and whiskey, the new hostess had arrived from the dining room, the dining room that no longer held anyone of interest. Seamus gave me a quick wink, then periodically grinned in my direction for the rest of the night. I felt like I was fourteen, had just gotten my period, and the boy’s gym coach, of all people, had found a pad for me—uncomfortable with, but grateful for, our inappropriate alliance.

  One of my roommates, Carrie, was still awake when I got home after work. She was also from Mississippi, a school friend of Suzanne’s, and I had found the apartment through her—a terrible three-bedroom on the Upper way-past-the-good-part West Side with rent cheap enough for me to afford. Another woman, Ruth, lived there, in fact had the lease and the biggest bedroom with the cheapest rent, I had a feeling. Ruth was a musical-comedy performer, as she described herself, and was constantly going off on cruise ships for months at a time, subletting her room to an endless line of performers she had met on the ships who wanted to try their luck on the Great White Way. It sounded exhausting. I had a tiny pantry-sized room in the back behind the kitchen that provided no space for my art—other than sitting on my bed and sketching—but it was a place to sleep.

  And since I was so new to New York, sleep was the only familiar landscape in my life—my dreams were a visual refuge for me. Though one night right after I moved in, as I was succumbing to slumber on the twin bed I had bought on Broadway at 108th—the salesman’s Puerto Rican accent more at home in the city than my Southern one, him waving off the delivery fee as a welcome gift to the city—I felt a small weight on my foot. I instinctively flicked my ankle, then heard a soft thud and the scamper of claws on linoleum floor. Immediately, I was up, running and screaming through the apartment to the living room couch where I hopped from cushion to cushion, still screaming. Carrie and Ruth came tearing out of their rooms in the front of the apartment, and Carrie bounded on to the sofa when she heard “Mouse!” But Ruth dismissed us with “I can’t believe you two are so afraid of that,” and went back to bed in her far-away-from-the-rodents room, though I noticed she didn’t protest when Carrie came home the next day with a cat.

  “How was work?” Carrie asked that Saturday night when I walked in. She was sitting with her back to me on the uneven and pocked living room hardwood floor teasing her cat with a small doll on a string. She had decided to train it to dislike everyone else, though I wasn’t sure how the doll would accomplish that. The whole thing infuriated Ruth, but maybe that was the point. I liked the cat, liked having another living thing in the apartment that was smaller than me who needed care, feeling myself sometimes like a cat the city had taken in but wasn’t doing a very good job of keeping. A half-empty bottle of wine and a small carton of milk sat beside Carrie on the floor.

  Her question was perfunctory. She didn’t mind hearing, so was glad to ask, but I could tell it was said as an intro to “good night.” Carrie worked at an answering service for a psychiatry practice and had many tales to tell of Upper East Side traumas the patients called in crisis about.

  “It was good.” I hadn’t crossed through the room yet, was still standing in the hall doorway watching her cat leap and flip through the air, a feline ballet. “I met Andrew Madden tonight.”

  “You what?” Carrie’s short blond hair fanned out à la Dorothy Hamill as she snapped her head around to face me, pulling the doll too far away from the cat as she did. The cat jumped at it, but grandly missed, swiping at the air, as if a tree would miraculously appear that she could slide down to brace her fall.

  “I met Andrew Madden.” The cat banged to the floor, then got up and nonchalantly walked a few steps as if it that were part of her plan.

  “Oh, my God.” Carrie was staring at me so oddly that I wondered if my hair had taken on some strange shape during my walk and bus ride home, but I decided to ignore it because I was finally with someone I could tell.

  “I know, it’s pretty wild, but he’s really sweet, and he wants me to call him tomorrow at his hotel, and oh, my God, he’s so incredibly gorgeous, and I’ve only seen one of his films, but it was like I’ve known him my whole life, and he said he wants to help me, though God knows what that means, and he had asked the maître d’ about me, then came down—”

  “This is going to change your life,” Carrie said in a low serious tone, her blue eyes searching mine to see if I understood.

  “Well, I don’t know about that.” The color on my face deepened. “I mean, okay, he said he wanted to help me, which is really sweet, but what can he do? Pay for some classes? Which would be great actually, but I mean, you know, he’s just some Hollywood actor movie star person.”

  “Just some movie star person,” Carrie yelled, making the cat run under the couch. “Honey, Andrew Madden is also a producer and a director; he’s won Academy Awards; runs a studio; and here’s where you come in, he’s also a renowned collector of contemporary art.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh, yes.” Carrie stood up and seemed to tower over me even from her shorter height. “Andrew Madden is not just some stupid movie star, honey; he’s practically his own industry.”

  “Oh.” I had to look away from her, as if the key to my understanding all this was on the other side of the room, but Carrie kept staring at me so I met her eyes again. “Wow.”

  “Exactly. Here.” Carrie picked up the bottle of wine and handed it me. I looked at it for a moment before realizing I needed a glass. I went to the kitchen for the one I had moved with, had packed among my socks and underwear. I had also brought a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and a bottle of Kahlúa that my cousin Renée and I made one afternoon from vodka and coffee. It was weeks after I unpacked that it struck me I must have thought it would be hard to find liquor stores, but in the neighborhood I had moved into, there was one practically on every corner.

  “Tell me, tell me, tell me. I want to hear everything,” Carrie said as I came back in the living room and sank onto the couch. She had refilled her glass and lit a fresh cigarette from an almost empty pack.

  “Well, I was standing in the coat-check room and suddenly he was just there, saying my name, asking what I’m doing, and telling me to call him tomorrow at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.” Telling Carrie, finally saying it out loud, made it real. Real in my apartment and in my life, a
nd not just in my head.

  “You’ve been discovered,” Carrie squealed, and her cat ran out from under the couch and flew out of the room.

  Like America. I just hoped with the same lasting results.

  9

  The next day Carrie was meeting friends at the Cloisters, thank God, because the last thing I wanted was her on the other side of the curtain that I used as a bedroom door, listening to my conversation with Andrew so she and I could talk about it more easily afterward—her suggestion. I assured her I could never make the call that way but promised I’d remember every detail. Ruth was at a rehearsal for a showcase she was doing in Queens. Whenever I imagined her singing, it was always with an immobile smile on her face and her arms high in a triumphant V before she moved into the next lyrically specific choreography.

  I sat down in my tiny room on the twin bed, the only size that would fit in the space, with the telephone book on my lap. I had decided to call Andrew at two. It definitely felt like an afternoon thing to do. One o’clock seemed desperate and three, lazy; so I picked two. Or ten after. On the hour would appear too obvious. It was almost ten after, so I decided to give it just a few more minutes. And hopefully breathe for a bit, too.

  I tried to think about how he had looked standing in front of me at the coat-check counter, to see if that would make calling him easier, make it feel like a normal thing to do, but that only made my heart beat faster.

  Okay, it was time. As I looked up the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in the phone book, my hands like a stranger’s doing a task of their own, I thought of my walk home from work the night before when I passed Andrew’s hotel on Central Park South as I did every time I walked home, the large red square carpet that took up most of the sidewalk, the two epauletted, gold-buttoned doormen in front. Now it all meant something different. It was where Andrew was. And had been for how long? How many nights had I passed that building never knowing it housed him? Walking past his hotel last night and peering in, I had thought how simple it would be to go in and ask for the phone number, or at least nab a packet of matches that surely would have it. I imagined going up to the front desk and saying, “I need to call Andrew Madden here tomorrow, what’s the phone number?” As if by connecting to his hotel early, I was connecting to him.

  “Good afternoon, the Ritz-Carlton, how may I direct your call?” The voice was elderly in a formidable way, not weak and kick over-able.

  “Mr. Madden’s room, please.” I tried to say it like I said it a lot, said it so much that I could do something else while I said it, said it and barely knew I was saying it. I tried to say it like that.

  “Who may I say is calling?”

  I wasn’t prepared for that. Not that I didn’t have the answer, but that question never entered my head in the zillion times I had practiced this.

  “Yvette Broussard.” I was afraid to not give my last name. Not that there were so many Yvettes calling him, although there might be a curious run on the name, but the operator sounded so officious that it was clear only one name would never do.

  “One moment, please, I’ll check.”

  Check? That sounded ominous. At least from her it did. She put me on hold, leaving me no idea what to do with the empty, controlled time. I pictured the hotel where it stood across the street from the southernmost part of Central Park. The hotel my call was buzzing through, on hold but still viable, while the operator did what? How long could it take to put my call through? I was waiting in telephonic purgatory.

  There was a small pulsing noise on the line, the hotel’s hold sound, rhythmic and thrilling, like step after step after step up a ladder to the high dive. I wondered what view Andrew Madden’s window had that he might be gazing through. Or, oh God, maybe he wasn’t there. Maybe I should have called earlier, maybe he meant this morning, and I had messed up. God, I hoped he was at his hotel. The nicest one I’d ever been in was the Monteleon, a century-old hotel in the French Quarter. My parents would take us there on special weekend trips when we didn’t stay with one of the many relatives that city was filled with. I supposed Andrew’s room at the Ritz-Carlton was a whole lot nicer than the ones at the Monteleon in a Yankee definition-of-luxury way.

  “This is Andrew.” His voice suddenly was in my ear, curling up in my head. I jumped, thinking for a second he had somehow appeared.

  “Hi,” I said, regaining my composure. “It’s Yvette.” He had used his first name, to direct me as to how to address him. I wondered if the operator had told him that I had asked for Mr. Madden.

  “Yvette.” He said my name as if he had been speaking it my entire life. “Yvette, Yvette.” Fluid and comfortable and mellifluous. His voice made the two syllables more familiar while placing them in an atmosphere they had never before been, yet were at home. It was exhilarating. “Yvette from Pass Christian, Mississippi.”

  “How’d you know how to say it right?” My accent became happily heavier hearing him speak the name of my hometown.

  “I did a movie down there once.” His words sounded muffled.

  “Oh.”

  I had a vague recollection of the one he meant, but I had never seen it. He might as well have referred to the Napoleonic Wars—I had the same uncomfortable sense that I should know much more about the topic than I did, but fortunately, he didn’t pursue it. I had never been a big movie buff. When we were growing up, Momma rarely took us. Bambi had been too traumatic for her and that apparently sealed the fate for all the rest. By the time I was able to get out of the house on my own, a local bar or an illicit trip to the French Quarter held much more interest than images projected in the dark. Though I had a feeling my own little private video festival of Andrew’s films was about to start.

  “And, and, and…How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Eighteen.” Andrew whistled. “Do you know what age I am?”

  “No.”

  “Forty-seven.”

  I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with that. Feel different? Hang up? As if there were a cutoff point. Widow-man was seventeen years older than me; twenty-nine didn’t seem that much further a leap. “That’s nice.”

  Which made him laugh, a lying-back-on-the-bed, chest-and-stomach laugh. I could almost feel how he looked.

  “You are so fucking cute.” I had never much liked the word “cute” before, but I sure did now. “How did you get so fucking cute?”

  It was exquisitely embarrassing. I felt enveloped in his warm brightness, all of me by all of him, even places in me that I hadn’t known before. Who had ever thought I was cute? Not me, not anyone, yet there he was naming and claiming and moving things aside to show me what was underneath.

  “Tell me, I want to know…”

  And then there was silence. For a long moment I worried the phone line had been cut. I was just about to say “Hello?” when…

  “What are Momma and Daddy like?”

  “They’re, uh…How’d you know—”

  “You’re from the South; you say Momma and Daddy. I still call my parents that. Years ago my brother started saying ‘Mother’ and ‘Father,’ but that to me sounded—”

  “Pretentious.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I know, my sister tries to remember to call them that, too. I think it’s silly.”

  “What are they like?”

  For so long, no one had asked. Parents in New York City seemed as evolutionarily unnecessary as wisdom teeth, and my friends in high school had had no interest in mine just as I didn’t in theirs probably because we could see how they were, our parent’s behavior marked our bodies like we were little Indians wearing the war paint or peace headdress of our tribe.

  “Well, Momma doesn’t talk, and Daddy just sort of…left years ago.”

  “Left? Where’d he go?”

  “Sarasota, I think. That’s in Florida. Momma heard from Cousin Elsie, a woman she hadn’t talked to in years, just one day out of the blue gets this call from her that she was sure she saw Paul—that’s my dad
dy—with some woman from the North, who had moved down there, and was making a career of buying rundown houses, fixing them up spit ‘n’ polish nice, then selling them for double the money, saw them at the Heart Ball out on the dance floor, him foxtrotting this woman like he had my momma at their wedding all those years ago, and what did she think about that? Like my momma would be surprised to know he wasn’t in Pass Christian. Like my momma thought he was out in the backyard straightening up his tools one more time on the Peg-Board he put up to keep them in a row.”

  “When was this?”

  “When she called or when he left?”

  “Both.”

  “He left when I was fourteen. Momma heard that news a couple of years later, then got divorce papers in the mail.”

  “And…”

  Another tremendous pause that had enough time in it for me to jump out of my skin, but at least I knew it wasn’t the phone line.

  “And what was he like before?”

  “He was…” I had been gulping for air, so I tried to breathe through my nose for a second to slow the intake. “He was…what the Gulf took her cue from every night to bring the tide in, is what he was. He was my daddy.”

  And again there was quiet on the line and I felt as if Andrew’s light, which had been surrounding me, had receded a bit, leaving me in a hollow of nonbrightness.

  “He must be a very sad man to have left a daughter like you.”

  “Oh.”

  “You never thought of that?”

  “No.”

  “Of course he is.”

  “Oh.” And Andrew’s light came racing back to envelop me.

  “And Momma doesn’t talk? Why not?”

  “I guess so she won’t scream. No, I don’t know. She was normal enough before, but when Daddy left, she took to her room and really kind of rarely comes out, and of course, how much is there to say if you’re looking at the same walls all day?”