Aftermath of Dreaming Page 9

  I waited to see how Andrew would respond, but there was more of that silence, so I continued. “Though I guess she could find something, but she doesn’t, it’s like she just crumpled up, and pale as hell, as you can imagine, like a Kleenex, all soft and white and unwilling to stand unless she’s propped up.”

  “Hmmm,” Andrew said. That was followed by another long pause, which didn’t bother me as much because it had felt good to get all that out. Suzanne had stopped trying to get Momma to talk once she took off for USC a few months after Daddy left. She’d just send a letter home from California to Momma every month, the stamp and postmark from a world where truant parents could be dealt with by mail, and every time I’d try to talk to Suzanne about it on the phone, she’d say, “I can neither save nor fix Mother,” and change the subject.

  “And you express yourself nonverbally like she’s doing, but creatively—which is healthy and has a point. I can’t wait to see your work.”

  It was like he had taken hold of my hands from deep inside where the muscles and sinew meet the bone to become the part of me that gets things done and greets life and feeds myself and puts clothes on; as if he had taken my hands so they could do all of that while he never let them go.

  And we talked about Suzanne, and Ruth, and Carrie, and widow-man, and two more hours went by.

  “When are you going to get here?” Andrew suddenly said. We had been residing together on a plane that hovered above our phones, wrapped in voice-filled, time-jumbled prose, so it was a jolt to think of seeing him live and real.

  “I can come over now.”

  “I’ll call you right back.” He sounded suddenly in a rush. “I have to meet with some people for a little bit, but…” Then his voice dropped down to a place inside of me that no one’s voice had ever been, as if he had built a door without my knowing it and now had the key to get in. “You’d better be there when I call because I want to see you tonight, is that clear?”

  “Okay.” The word must have fluttered through the line to him, it was so inseparable from my grin, and I gave my number to him.

  “Good. I’ll call you back.”

  “Okay, bye.”

  I hung up the phone and kept my hand on it for a while, my skin that touched it connecting me still to him where his voice had just been. I was going to see him tonight, oh, my God. I wanted to jump up, run through the hall, bang on Carrie’s door, and tell her about the call, but she was still gone.

  I felt deliriously separate from my surroundings and ensconced in the bubble of Andrew’s attention, like I could glide forth without touching earth. I stood up and looked in the mirror I had propped on the two-legged side of a three-legged table that I had found on the street. I had pushed it up to the wall under the window, hoping that would support it, and if I didn’t put too much weight on that corner, it did okay. I turned my face this way and that in the mirror, trying to imagine what Andrew saw in me, trying to see myself as if I were him, but I couldn’t.

  And what should I wear? I turned to study my clothes hanging against the wall on a rod that had been attached with a shelf built on top. I literally was living in a closet.

  As I flipped through the clothes, increasingly disliking each one, I remembered how Lily Creed had looked at Andrew’s table. She was perfection. Her dress was like the Venus de Milo’s shell—supporting her form and heralding her beauty while adding the loveliest touch so that your eyes were continually drawn to her bare arms and neck and face. I had nothing remotely like that.

  The bubble I was in, the image of my perfect night with Andrew, was about to burst, teetering as it was on a rocky precipice. I stared at my clothes, willing them to transform into something fabulous. They stubbornly would not metamorphose. I considered going down Columbus Avenue about twenty-five blocks to the fabulous part and splurging on a new outfit, maybe even going to Charivari, practicality be damned, but I was trying to save up money for art supplies and to rent some space in a loft, and Andrew had wanted to meet me when I was wearing a polyester lime-green uniform, for God’s sake, so I decided not to worry about it. I put on an outfit I hadn’t conjured up before: black leggings, black corset-style tank top, and a black open-weave pullover, then began the wait.

  I sat on my bed. I looked at the phone. I worried that the ringer had inexplicably died. I considered going into Carrie’s room—not Ruth’s, she somehow would know—to use her phone to dial mine, but what if Andrew happened to call at exactly the same time, got a busy signal, and never called again? It wasn’t worth the risk.

  I had forgotten to phone Momma that morning because calling Andrew had taken up all of my mind’s space, but the week before when I rang her, she had just gotten home from mass, as I had known she would, and was preparing her lunch. She sounded surprised to hear from me, like she always did, as though I hadn’t been calling every Sunday since I moved. Like she’d had a daughter once, but that was in the distant past, though given enough time, she would play along in this pretend parental role. Every week, I would ask the same questions, desperately trying to come up with new and improved ones that would inspire conversation. Few did.

  Though one time I did get to hear a few sentences about the art league tea she would not be attending that afternoon. Not that she hadn’t been invited. My momma was famous for changing her mind. No event was etched in stone; any and all could be canceled, missed, reneged on at a moment’s notice. Clothes and/or fatigue were the usual reasons. “I just need to sleep!” she’d say, as if the occasion had been specifically coordinated to conflict with her REM time, or the outfit so laboriously planned had unaccountably fallen from grace.

  I didn’t want to read a book or fix a meal or do anything really for fear that my involvement in a task would somehow send repeated signals of “unavailable” to Andrew, reaching him no matter where he was and preventing him from calling me.

  An hour and a half went by. Still I waited for Andrew to call. I felt hungry and internally cold, even though it was hot as Hades outside. I stared out the open window in my room that led to a fire escape overlooking an alleyway between buildings that were shouldered closer together than any I had ever seen. Refuse and trash from decades past formed a giant mound. Had it ever been nice? Or did this neighborhood immediately sink into disrespect and despair, fulfilling an unspoken obligation for the city to cover all points on the socioeconomic spectrum. Smells of pork and spices from the neighbors’ all-day meal drifted in. On summer weekends, with music blasting, they used a makeshift grill on their fire escape to barbecue all kinds of meat in sauces I was sure I’d never tasted. A couple of weeks after moving in, I had told Suzanne on the phone what it was like—she in Beverly Hills living with her boyfriend—and she had sent me a letter exhorting me to embrace the Puerto Rican culture and indulge myself in their music and food. My sister, sometimes, is out of her mind. My neighbors had as little interest in my embracing their culture as I did. I felt alien enough in New York City without adding a language I couldn’t speak, food I couldn’t digest (had she forgotten I was vegetarian?), and music I couldn’t dance to. Beneath the clamor of their barbecue, my apartment was still. The cat was probably sleeping in Ruth’s loft, gravitating naturally to the spot she was wanted least.

  Two more hours went by. Carrie still had not returned home. Ruth was burrowing in her room while Chinese food aromas and Mitzi Gaynor’s voice wafted from her confines. The cat had been duly ejected. I was hungrier. And felt stale, like a piece of bread taken out to make a sandwich then forgotten, my surfaces resistant instead of soft.

  10

  “What are you doing?”

  I had known it would be Andrew when I said hello. Had known it would be him when the phone finally, thankfully, mercifully rang a little after nine P.M. But his voice sounded altered from before; it was on a more intimate note than our first phone call had ended on.

  I didn’t know what to say. “Waiting for you” or “Hoping to die if you didn’t call” did not seem appropriate, though accurate th
ey were. Nor did I have anything fabulous, exciting, or even mildly interesting to report from the four and a half hours I had just lived through without him. There was nothing really, so a gap appeared on the line like a Nixonian tape, just blank.

  “Umm, I’m…” I got that out, then noticed how similar they sounded in my accent while hoping more words would magically materialize, but Andrew rescued me, ending the conversational flummox.

  “Why aren’t you here yet?”

  He said it so seriously that for a second I forgot he had only just called and wondered at my own delinquency before I remembered the sequence of events.

  “I will be.”

  “Will be?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Good.”

  We hung up.

  The cab driver didn’t flinch when I gave him the Ritz-Carlton’s address, so I tried to borrow his nonchalance. Taking a taxi was extravagant enough without getting all I could from it. I wasn’t surprised that I was nervous; what surprised me was that I wasn’t nervous in any way I had ever been before. I felt keyed up and able to notice each moment and detail as if I were reading microfilm, so much information compacted in such a small space, yet able to be seen.

  After crossing the iron curtain of my neighborhood and shuttling down Columbus Avenue, we passed brightly beckoning restaurants with clusters of customers in front talking and gesturing. They looked crucial to the neighborhood, an integral part of this Sunday summer night, sustaining the avenue as it stretched south toward Midtown.

  The Ritz-Carlton Hotel announced itself in gold letters above an ever-revolving door and again with its logo, the regal profile of a lion’s head, on a red carpet that flaunted itself across the sidewalk to the curb.

  “Welcome to the Ritz-Carlton,” the doorman said, as he held open the cab door while I counted out the bills, then put them in the driver’s hand. He asked if I had any bags in the trunk, and I wished for a moment that I did. Luggage to spend my life with Andrew.

  I had to request his room number. He hadn’t told me on the phone and I had forgotten to ask, but as the front desk clerk called to get Andrew’s permission for me to ascend, I realized they wouldn’t have allowed me to walk in and go straight up without announcing myself first anyway. I wondered if this was the sort of experience that induced all those restaurant customers to speak to me in the coat-check room before they headed upstairs. I immediately felt less churlish toward them.

  The elevator I took to the twenty-eighth floor was filled with an empty quiet. I had never been here before. Not just here-here, in the hotel, but Here, with everything that entailed. There was no reference in my life for it, so my mind had no idea what to think. It was experiencing a rare phenomenon, the completely new event, and my lack of knowledge of the circumstances I found myself in felt freeing. There was nothing for me to do. Nothing for me to think. Nothing but to give in. A bell chimed, the doors glided open, and I was released into a small hallway that contained the entrance to Andrew’s penthouse door. I knocked.

  I could hear footsteps approaching after what was probably a three-Mississippi wait, if I had been counting, which I wasn’t, but I knew it instinctingly becase of all those games of hide-and-seek I had played with the other neighborhood kids, hands covering closed eyes, counting off numbers plus our state’s name up to ten to give everyone time to find a spot. I had a sudden vision of a young Andrew being a master at that game.

  Then he opened the door and we looked at each other without saying a word. It was different seeing him after our journeylike phone call and the subsequent hours I’d spent with him in my head. As his eyes looked at mine, it was clear that a part of him was all for me, as all of me was for a part of him, like a branch’s relationship to the trunk of a tree.

  “Hi.” He barely said it; the word was fractionally formed.

  I moved into his arms. Our embrace was the ending and the beginning and we stood still in the middle. Andrew had such solid arms. Arms you wanted to detach and keep and connect around you again and again, an armor of amour, every bit of sinew and muscle and skin involved in his holding. And tall. His shoulder was at the bridge of my nose, providing many options to lay my cheek against. I forgot we had to let go.

  He kept one hand across the small of my back as he walked me into the suite’s large living room. And I had been imagining him in one hotel room. Good Lord. At least I had been right about the Yankee-luxury part; this definitely was more extravagant than the Monteleon. It looked like an extremely upscale apartment vacuumed free of “home.” Andrew steered me to a yellow silk couch that I sank into as we sat down. He took my chin in his hand and turned my head this way and that. It felt more supported than it did on my own neck.

  “Look at you. You’re perfect.”

  I really felt I was not, but his voice was so strong and radically different than the one in my head that the shouts of protest became disarmed.

  “Do you know how many beautiful women I’ve seen? You—are—per-fect.”

  And he started talking, saying long things, trains of thought about himself that had to do with me, and his words became physical, bathing me, swirling around, lulling me into a state of relaxed happiness I had never known.

  Then he paused for a moment and looked at me. “I’m going to be in your life for a very long time. I’ve been waiting for someone like you.” And he paused again, making sure I had heard.

  “Thank God,” was what I thunderously heard in my head. Thank God, thank God, thank God. Because the empty space in me perfectly matched the empty space in him, and for some inexplicable reason, the two empties together made one whole, like that weird math rule where you subtract twice, but still end up getting an addition, which in class I could never understand, but now here it was in the form of him.

  The sex lasted a couple of hours. I undressed in the living room’s light before walking into his bedroom, disrobing as easily as removing a cap that had squished my hair for too long. We were on the bed, a bed whose multitudinous softness I couldn’t before have imagined, and we moved together in the immense dense darkness that only hotel rooms have. I liked the blankness of the dark, the sole reliance on form and smell and sound and skin.

  At one point, Andrew reached over me and turned on a lamp. I had no idea which way we were on the bed and was surprised at how accurately he had located the switch. In the golden light, he looked into my eyes.

  “This is how you know I’m not just fucking you, that I’m making love to you.” And his eyes stayed on mine as he moved.

  Then he nestled against me, saying something small and low at the bottom of my ear.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “No I didn’t or I wouldn’t’ve said ‘what.’ What’d you say?”

  “I said…I said…” More movement ensued. “I said…I love you.” He sounded about to choke.

  Then the edges of my body disappeared, the room tilted, lifted, and opened up until there was only warmth and light and motion and Andrew’s head buried in my neck.

  Afterward, while he lay still on top of me, I rubbed and kneaded and plied his back, the big muscles of his public life and dizzy-heights career that were hard and interlocked. Encouraging his torso to release into gravity, I felt his rib cage expand, his lower back drop, and with a deep expulsion of breath, he relaxed into me.

  It was almost one A.M., just the beginning of Monday morning, and Andrew was sitting on the side of the bed, wearing a fresh black T-shirt, and shaking out his jeans. He had decided it was time we leave the bed, the bed it felt like we had spent three incredible years in during the two and a half hours we were there.

  “What do you want to eat?”

  I was in New York City with Andrew Madden so there were no limits to the answer for that question. The gleanings of the city had never been offered so openly to me, but I was distracted by trying to find my clothes. They appeared to have attempted some sort of freedom run during the interval I wasn’t held in their restra
int. By the time I recovered them, dressed, and walked back into the bedroom, Andrew was reading the sports page.

  “What did you like the best?” I said, standing before him.

  He looked at me over his reading glasses, his right brow heightening the surprise and question in his gaze.

  “No, no, not…” I glanced at the rumpled sheets to finish the sentence, as I blushed. “I meant, when you played sports in college, like you told me you did, what’d you like the best?”

  “Oh. For a second there, I wondered where the sweet Southern girl I was with had gone. Football. I liked football the best. But they all were great.”

  I didn’t understand football. All I knew was that Daddy had gone to Tulane and screamed bloody hell whenever the LSU Tigers scored a point.

  “Now, what are we going to get you to eat?”

  “Pasta and vodka.” I had come up with that menu selection hours before, while sitting on my bed during one of the interminable intervals in which I had kept deciding that surely in the following fifteen-minute period, Andrew would call. That was all so far away now. My closet of a bedroom, the sitting and waiting, my mind chilling itself to keep from processing the loud menacing question, “What if he doesn’t call?” I was safe from that now, ensconced in Andrew’s glow.

  “Pasta with vodka sauce?”

  “No.” That sounded odd. “Just…pasta, somehow, and vodka, like to drink.” I hoped the vodka part didn’t bother him since I was underage in New York.

  “I see.”

  Andrew briefly disappeared inside a closet larger than my bedroom. “Do you like this jacket?” he said, when he came out.

  He had put on what is generally referred to as a sports coat, though that phrase has always made me think of the burgundy polyester numbers I’d seen at the business conventions my daddy sometimes made appearances at in Gulfport. Andrew’s was of an entirely different breed. It was a silk cashmere, and each thin thread was a separate shade in a spectrum of mid to dark gray to black, creating an effect of a muted charcoal gloss fitted precisely to his frame.