Aftermath of Dreaming (6 page)

Downtown L.A. makes me miss New York.
Or makes me try to pretend that I am there, depending on the way the light is hitting the buildings. Because on a really bright, flat-light day, there is no way around the fact that I am on the West Coast and not in Manhattan. Even though the buildings here were built by men from back there and from Europe who went through Ellis Island before coming to L.A. to create tall office towers and high apartment buildings with beautiful, scrupulously detailed work of marble, terra-cotta, and tile just like in New York. But once L.A.'s collective consciousness decided it should have its own style based on easy weather and roomy land, bungalows with courtyards sprang up and two-story stucco structures became more alluring than the Gotham-esque towers of downtown.

But not to me. One of my favorite aspects of designing jewelry is being downtown—daily, usually—in the jewelry district, a universe
comprised of a few bustling blocks that looks like Manhattan's Midtown filled with an international community. I've been here all afternoon and still have one more contractor in another building to see before everything closes: Dipen, an engineer from India who learned how to cast jewelry when he came to California ten years ago. He just moved offices, and I hope to God that means his schedule isn't backed up.

As I make my way toward the tinted-glass double doors to leave 608 South Hill Street—a building filled with stall after stall and floor upon floor of importers, wholesalers, and retailers; diamonds and pearls; stringers, casters, and setters; gems and stones of all kinds; bronze, titanium, and platinum; wedding rings and colored gold all glittering—I almost don't notice my cell phone ringing. I manage to find it in my bag, push the green button, and shout a “hello” over the cacophony of sidewalk noise I have walked into.

“Are you still going to that show tonight?” Reggie says, jumping right in.

A sort of friend, Sydney, gave me comps to the opening of her one-woman show because I helped her find musicians for it. I had asked Reggie weeks ago to go with me, but he refuses to see anything live other than blues because he swears the musicians are all dead and only appear to still be breathing.

“Yeah, I kinda have to. Why?”

“I stayed up all last night reworking part of the script, and wanted to come by with some Manderette takeout and read it to you.”

“I'd so much rather do that,” I say, crossing Hill Street at Sixth to get to Dipen's building, which is over and down one block. The sunlight on Pershing Square looks like God adjusted his louvered blinds, reminding me that I need to hurry up if I'm going to catch Dipen still in. “I really don't feel like seeing her show—I couldn't even get anyone to go with me.” I don't mention that Michael was the only other person I asked—he's swamped at the station, so we're hooking up tomorrow night. “But I promised Sydney I'd be there and, you know, bad friendship karma, so…Can I hear your stuff another night?”

“You love Sydney's shows.”

“I know, but I could be working on sister-bride's veil or hearing your script. How's Thursday night?”

“Probably. Breakfast mañana?”

 

The theater in Santa Monica is a mob scene when I arrive. I am surprised at how momentous her opening night is, but I guess Sydney's film career distinguishes this from the normally ignored L.A. theater event. A local news crew is creating a vortex of hierarchy for everyone trying to get inside. The famous are stopped to comment toward the camera and smile, while the rest are passed over, our bodies so much scenery for the finery going by. The crowd conveys me into the auditorium, and I quickly jump out as it passes my seat's aisle. The chair beside mine is one of the few empty ones and its emptiness exudes a loud silence into the noisy air, informing everyone of the ticket left unused.

As people keep pouring in, I pick up the program to kill the remaining minutes before the show begins. I read Sydney's bio and the director's, glance at the credits of the musicians whom I know, then notice a list of people thanked for their help in making this show possible and am surprised to see my name on it—that was nice of her—near the top since they are alphabetically arranged. A woman jostles my leg as she sidles past me to reach her seat. The audience is mostly settled, just a few stragglers are wandering in. I turn back to the list to see if I know any other names on it when suddenly I get a strange sensation, like the building's about to explode. I turn around and in walks Andrew Madden, my ex-never-thought-I-could-breathe-without, whom I have not laid eyes on in almost four and a half years.

Oh, my God.

I immediately throw my program onto the floor so I can duck down to retrieve it, as chaotic gushing explodes in the theater. Andrew Madden is one of those particular people this town breeds who become internationally well-known. For almost four decades he has been a movie star, director, producer, studio head, and basic all-around grand Pooh-bah of
La-La-Land. I keep my head down near my feet in hopes that Andrew won't see me as he walks on by.

Please, dear God.

Audible commotion is erupting row by row, giving me a kind of auditory tracking system of Andrew's procession down the aisle, so I wait until it moves forward a safe distance before I finally peek my head up to look cautiously around. The back of Andrew's perfect head—and how is it possible for the back of a head to be so perfect?—is moving elegantly away from me, so I sit back in my seat, but hunched down low.

Thank you, God.

Okay, I'll be fine. He didn't see me, didn't even notice me. Now just stay down in the seat and pray that this horrible fiasco, all from helping a friend with her goddamn show, quickly ends—which it will. Then I can go home. Okay, just breathe. I'm all right—it's fine. Andrew didn't even notice me.

What is his fucking problem?

No, wrong reaction. Thank God he didn't notice me is how I feel. I don't want him to see me here by myself. It's good that he walked on by. But why couldn't Michael be with me? Damn his stupid radio shows. He should be here with his arm around me, all Mediterranean husband—I mean, handsome—next to Andrew's golden, incredibly fucking gorgeous-beyond-words looks. Michael who?

Fuck, that is not the right attitude. Not even how I really feel inside. It isn't? All right, stop. This is insanity. Big deal—Andrew's here. Who cares? Only every single other person in this theater. But not I. Andrew Madden—whoop-de-do. So he's here. I could care less. Here with Holly. His wife.

On the one hand, that pretty much says everything. On the other, this is the second time I have seen Holly, in person and live. I met her once years ago on the subway in New York, not long before I moved to California. I was with Tim, the man I was living with at that time, and she was with her husband—her first—and a female friend she would not stop hugging as the train rattled and swooped, stations passing by.

It was late at night, and the subway car was almost empty, so her
husband easily spotted Tim when we boarded at the Houston Street stop. They had grown up together in the city; introductions were made all around. Holly lifted her head from the friend's shoulder, blond hair only then not hiding her face, and gave Tim and me a glance before putting her head back down. She had clearly been crying, but laughed for most of the ride, always leaned against her friend, as if clinging to the last known vestige of joy.

“She's drunk,” Holly's husband mouthed to us as he stood above her, his hand on the rail steadying him. “Karen here is leaving tomorrow for a year in Australia,” he went on in full voice.

Tim nodded as if that explained all, and smiled. Then the two of them caught up on each other's lives while I watched Holly cleave onto Karen. I don't think she was aware I was there, but I knew who she was from the local news stories she did, mostly movie premieres, fashion stuff, and celebrity interviews.

Our exit came before theirs. We said our goodbyes; Tim and Holly's husband promised to have lunch, Karen shook my hand, and Holly lolled against her more firmly—as if the departure of total strangers was too much a foreboding of what tomorrow held in store. When Tim and I were halfway across the platform, I heard through the still-open train doors a long trill of Holly's laughter descend into a distinctive wail; then the subway bell rang its two-note tone, the doors slid shut, and the train carried them off. The reverberation of that cry left me unsettled for days. Her husband had seemed like a nice man. I wondered what he was really like inside.

Anyway. Andrew and Holly have settled into their seats at the theater just a few rows in front of me and a little to the right. That's closer than I'd like, but safe, I decide, because I am completely out of their (Andrew's) view.

Okay, so I just need to make it to the lights going down, which should be any minute now, then the show will distract me, I hope, or at least keep me under the cover of darkness until it ends and I can get out and run. I am immediately grateful to Sydney for not having an
intermission; at least I'm saved from that hellish interval of milling around. The outburst over Andrew has subsided to a low thrilling roar of whispers and nudges from an audience completely flustered since the most famous and talented performer is sitting among them and not appearing onstage.

The lights flicker once, then go back up, then flicker again. Just go down, lights, please, and plunge us into wonderful concealing darkness so I can't see Andrew and he can't see me and I don't have to look at Holly. Suddenly, as if my thoughts were his cue, Andrew turns around and looks at me.

Just looks at me. The way he used to gaze at me across his bed.

Then he waves. A fingers-up-and-down wave. Which I find odd, and wonder if it is a habit he picked up from his two kids. And still he is looking at me. A time-has-stopped look. A no-one-else-is-here look. Then he waves again. But I still haven't responded to his first wave, other than the fact that my eyes are unable to leave his. Unable to leave his the way the earth is unable to leave the sun. My hands feel glued to my lap and I am suddenly finding it very hard to get the muscles of my mouth to smile, and exactly what size smile do you use for an ex-never-thought-you-could-breathe-without anyway? I cannot figure this out, so I just kind of half-wave, half-cover my sort-of-smiling mouth and look away.

The houselights suddenly go down as if they were timed for him. Then Sydney comes on stage singing a big grand song and I try to stay focused on her, but I can't stop looking at Andrew. The patter Sydney does between the songs helps a bit, and her jokes are distracting to an extent, except that all I do during each one is compare when I laugh to when Holly does and try to figure out which one of us is more in sync with him. Then during what I guess would be called a “romantic number,” Andrew's and Holly's heads lean toward each other in an aren't-we-enjoying-this-the-most-since-we're-married sort of way, which I have a strong little feeling is for my benefit. At least on his part. I have no doubt she doesn't even know who I am, much less that I am here.

Mercifully, the lights fall to complete darkness, signaling the show's end, then they come up bright, brighter, brightest for Sydney to receive her applause. The crowd is on its feet, clapping and whooping, and the audience between Andrew and me conveniently blocks my view of him, so his of me. The irritated looks I get from the people in my row as I trip and push past them to get out to the aisle as they try to keep applauding are worth the freedom I gain as I use this perfect chaotic moment to slip out.

The second I am outside the theater, I break into a run to my truck like I am being chased by banshees, then I quick get in, even locking the door behind me as if that will keep Andrew from seeing me from all the way inside. And Holly. That's an introduction I have no desire to repeat. Not that she'd remember me. Or that Andrew would even greet me in front of her, or offer an introduction. Though actually, he might. With him, who knows? He might think it'd be fine, no reason in the world not to.

Hightailing it out of the parking lot, thank you, Chevy engine, I remember that I was supposed to go to the opening-night party afterward, so I leave a “loved your show; can't—cough, cough—make the party” message at Sydney's home, so she'll know how sincere I am.

When I reach a secure distance from the theater in that barren part of the 10 near Centinela, I pull over to the shoulder, put my truck into park, and lift my hands to cover my face. I thought tears would come, but they don't. I am in too much shock.

There are moments right after something has happened to me, catalytic or catastrophic, when I am truly amazed that the physical objects in my life continue to look the same as they did before. Like when I was in the waiting room, right after the doctor told me and Suzanne that Momma had died, I could not believe that the hospital I was sitting in was still standing, hadn't shattered and crumbled to the ground, no longer able to hold itself up. “My entire world has just changed,” I thought. “How can this physical object still be the same?” I figured maybe I had stumbled on a koan, one of those Zen Buddhist mysteries you meditate on, and supposedly after you sit still long enough, it reveals itself to you. The
emptiness is revealed. You can finally see past the illusion into the truth. But I didn't know—I had never tried.

Sitting here on the side of the freeway with every privately held image of Andrew streaming through my brain, I'm just grateful my truck doesn't explode because it sure feels like my heart is going to.

Meeting Andrew for the first time
was like getting pregnant—conception had occurred. And not unwittingly by me. Which is how I'd always thought it would be—to get pregnant. That somehow in that moment I would know. My body would know. And with Andrew, it did. I felt so deposited in. Like a bank. It made me wonder about withdrawals.

I was working and he was dining at a legendary restaurant in New York where I had managed to get a hostess job three months earlier, right after moving to the city at eighteen. “No daughter of mine will work as a waitress,” Daddy had once said when Suzanne and I were young and the topic of future possible summer jobs came up. “Babysitting is just fine.” Then he walked out of the room to go to his work shed to make another musical instrument, and that meant the subject was at an end. But I was all the way up north, it wasn't waitressing, and anyway, Daddy had been out of my life for four years at that point.

Andrew was sitting at one of a line of tables that jutted out from a
wall of windows shimmering with the gold-draped chains that the restaurant used instead of blinds. Two catty-corner walls were of this: panels of glass sheathed with swings of delicate gold chains one on top of another, like a totem pole of invisible necks, the chains swinging and swaying against one another, then flinging their shine across the room to echo upon the opposite no-gold walls. Against this backdrop, Andrew sat. With two women. One was a famous actress; both were horrifically beautiful. He was on one side of the table; they were on the other.

The air around them seemed stunned. It created a special space; the molecular makeup of their force field was clearly different from that of the other diners—as if the air itself realized it was too coarse in its natural form for them, so had transmuted itself finer and sweeter for their delicate intake. Everyone could see this. The captain of their table, Jurgos, practically gasped each time he penetrated the circumference surrounding them, knowing instinctively that the air he needed to breathe was not like their own.

It was into this atmosphere that I was asked (told, really) to carry a phone—this being 1987. Something about a call and Bonnie Davis, a name I also recognized, but even if I hadn't, the urgency and importance with which Seamus, the Irish maître d', commanded me to do this—his brogue, already usually thick, now running all over itself—signaled its unusual significance. Which I found odd. Henry Kissinger, the Kennedys, and have-different-last-names-but-still-somehow-are-Kennedys, and all the New York gods ate here regularly, so why some silly movie star, for Christ's sake, was putting Seamus into such a state, I had no idea.

The dining room was full. It was a Saturday night, late August, meaning the habitués were in the Hamptons. The city cleared each summer weekend, and that was my favorite time. Getting off work at the end of the night—eleven, if I came on at four; twelve, if I started at five—I would walk most of the distance home. Set out on Park Avenue, but usually, quickly, take one of the blocks over to Madison or Fifth. Those were the best. They were deserted; literally, quite empty. Often I would walk in the middle of Fifth Avenue so I could see the odd bus or cab approaching as I
headed downtown, and the buildings stood on each side of me like tall adults surrounding a child's first solo stroll, ready to reach out and hold me, if I were to fall. They felt mine in that dark, in that late-hour coolness, in that emptiness and uselessness they had at just those moments in time. Summer weekend nights made Manhattan a different country that I was able to enter by the sheer act of being there. I'd walk up Fifth, turn west at the park, and continue on, walking on the building side, passing the doormen at the restaurants and apartment buildings and hotels.

They were fighting when I got to the table. I was carrying the phone, the black streamlined (I think that model is called) phone with the funny push buttons on the receiver that were small and round and protruded like so many pegs. The dining room had the hushed buzz it would get—the vibrations of the diners' hopes and needs and desires and fears all rising, moving up over their heads until each voice met and mingled with the buzz of the others already there, then the hush would step in, blending them all together, and the gold swinging chains caught so many verbs and nouns that the words lay on them like air bubbles on a fisherman's net. I could only hear their conversation when I got up close.

“Because I don't want to,” the famous actress, Lily Creed, said as I approached the table.

Andrew was looking down, fixing a forkful from his plate. A beautiful, fleshy pink meat from a lamb that once was small, had become smaller still, and now was being prepared smallest yet into calculated cuts to enter Andrew's mouth.

He stopped, mouth ready and open, fork midair, when he saw me. Then it all went back so quickly—lips together, hand down—but our first moment was that. Seeing him like that. Then it was gone.

I knew I knew him from before. Like a dream I didn't need to have, it was already so much a part of my sleep. So much that I didn't even know that part of him was me until I saw him. Looked him in the eyes. Mine on his. His on mine. Again. Because that's what it was—an Again. An “Oh, it's you,” plus an “Oh, and that part of me I thought was me has been you. All this time, has been you.”

“Is that for me?” Andrew said, looking into my eyes and able to see all inside me and all outside me all at once me.

It was clear in that moment that everything was for him, whether it was meant to be or not.

I had to answer but didn't know what to say. My mind had gone blank. I knew Seamus had said, “Take a phone to Mr. Madden's table—a call [something] Bonnie Davis.” But I couldn't recall if he had said “from Bonnie Davis” or “for Bonnie Davis.” That information had slipped away, as though my body had known ahead of time that something momentous was about to happen, and shut down my brain so it wouldn't get in the way.

But it did get in the way because the word was lost, the preposition was gone, my mind did not grasp its short sound. And it wasn't like I could turn around, go back to the maître d' stand, and say, “Seamus, hi, sorry, me again. Is this a phone call for Bonnie Davis? Or from Bonnie Davis?” That was not a possibility, so there I stood in front of them, holding the phone before me, clutched in both hands like some dead telecommunication bouquet.

Finally, I made a decision. “It's for Bonnie Davis,”

“For Bonnie Davis or from Bonnie Davis?” Andrew replied.

Jesus God, all of this because of one word. I just wanted to hide, but then I saw the smile in his eyes and heard the hint in his words replaying in my head.

“From Bonnie Davis, for you.”

There was a pause. As if I had won. As if the contest were over and in one long, though barely perceptible, moment, we had shifted from crossing the finish line to celebrating the game.

“Thank you,” he said, and looked at me with a smile held inside.

I rested the phone before him, then knelt down to plug in the cord. I had to crawl on the floor because the jack was underneath the table in the middle of their legs. Lily had daintily painted toes on huge feet. Now, I'm usually rotten at telling the size of anything, but I had to put my hand flat on the ground next to her shoe while I inserted the plug, so it was easy to determine the space her feet took up. They were huge.
The other woman was wearing clunky, closed-toe, hot-looking shoes of synthetic leather. I imagined neither of them thought while they were getting dressed that someone would be examining their feet from so close up. I figured Lily still would have chosen the strappy high-heeled sandals that she had on while the other woman maybe would not—they probably were stinky when she took them off. Andrew's black silk-socked feet were encased in black leather loafers; I could sense their desire to be free, like two large children swimming in inner tubes. I scooted out the step or two backward and stood up, sure that I was a mess.

I looked at Andrew again. I hadn't wanted to, because a small part of me has never stopped believing the one-year-old's truth that if I'm not looking at you, you can't see me. He had just said, “Bonnie,” with the receiver to his ear, and I immediately pictured a lass wearing a full soft skirt, sitting on his knee with one arm around his neck and the other feeding him the lamb. Andrew turned back to me and slowly mouthed, “Thank you.” His lips, teeth, and tongue formed each empty sound perfectly, trusting the air to transport and transform them into normal volume for me. I thought I should smile, but couldn't. It was like being stoned, when just thinking of a response makes me believe it somehow was instantaneously conveyed to the room. I think he got it, but I couldn't hang around to see. I figured Jurgos would soon notice me still standing there, so I walked away from Andrew.

My mind began its way with me on the walk down the long marble corridor back to the maître d' stand.
Oh, for Christ's sake, Yvette, you really are too much. Andrew Madden looking at you? Please. You are out of your mind and pigheaded to boot. No one is looking at you, missy-thing, in your polyester lime-green Nehru jacket uniform. You're practically a walking diaphragm against attractiveness, honey, he was not looking at you
.

But privately, away from that voice in my head, I thought of him constantly.

 

I thought of him so repeatedly that one week later, at seven-thirty as I went to take my dinner break at work, I wished it were the previous
Saturday night, right before I met him, so I could live it all over again. I took my plate to the private dining room behind the barroom where customers usually didn't eat on Saturday nights. When the three private dining rooms were full—during the fall social season or for Christmas parties—we were forced to take our employee meals in the hall, a long passageway that allowed for quick and hidden access from the kitchen to any one of the dining rooms. The few chairs not being used were lined up flush against the wall, like a no-view single-seat train that kept you in place, while waiters, table captains, and busboys streaked past, like the blur outside a windowpane, yelling to one another in the Romance and Slavic languages of their motherland. As I ate in the empty silence of the private dining room, I tried to imagine where Andrew was and who was holding his attention.

When I returned from my break, Seamus sent me down to the coat-check room, normally a prized position because there you could earn tips during your shift. Few to no people gave money for escorting them to their table or delivering a phone, and certainly not for writing down their reservation when they called, but coat-checking enabled us hosts and hostesses to dip into the pile of cash walking in the doors each night, from patrons whose monthly florist bills were the size of our monthly nuts.

Even though we weren't supposed to. The house got the tips, but the customers didn't know that; they assumed we did. They'd watch us working hard to keep their coats and scarves from falling on the floor; saw us smiling nicely as we handed their garments over after (usually) quickly locating them, so they'd gladly put a dollar or two down. The tips were then swept into a small square hole that had been cut into the top of the counter, and shot straight to the pockets of the owners via a locked strongbox. Except for the ones that we hid in our hands and surreptitiously slid into our pants pockets, being sure to take them out later to neatly fold since a bulge under the jacket uniform was a dead giveaway.

As was taking too much. We all went by a two-for-the-house, one-for-us rule of thumb mostly because of a notorious story about a former host who, on a freezing pre-Thanksgiving day in a burst of holiday-shopping need, took every single tip that graced the coat-room counter
during an overflowingly full lunch shift. Unbeknownst to the host, the manager had emptied out the locked strongbox just that morning with the intention of doing a rare surprise check on it later that day. So when the manager found not even one lonely dime, he was forced to fire the host, as the thievery was too flagrant to ignore—which they did for the rest of us when we kept our take small. But that made it feel like the only ones who were really being duped were the customers, who kindly gave the tips thinking it was the hosts they were going to.

Lydia, another hostess, had explained the system to me on a rainy June evening about a week after I started working there when we were sent down to the coat-check room to work the early-dinner shift, which consisted of customers in from New Jersey and Elsewhere who arrived at six to eat from the fixed-price (meant to be cheap, but who are we kidding?) menu, then ran out by seventy-thirty to catch a cab for a Broadway show. So it was two time slots of hell. Once when they arrived and decloaked, and again when they descended en masse to be reclothed. Lydia had told me that night that she had no intention of handling all those drippy umbrellas and slimy raincoats without taking tips just to preserve my ignorance until they were sure I'd be cool. She wore her thick, strawberry-blond hair over one eye à la Veronica Lake, and would peer out the other eye under a perfectly groomed brow. She had moved to Europe with her mother when she was a small child, I was never able to ascertain why, and at five, she was put in a kindergarten in Germany though she didn't speak a word of the language. She said she'd always remember that year as bright shiny objects and finger paint smells mixed with harsh German sounds. I held out from taking tips for about a week, then joined in.

But in August, the clanging iron mechanical rack was empty, so there was nothing to do in the coat room but stand and smile politely as customers came in from the street, then direct them up the stairs. Unceasingly, first-time guests would point a hand and say, “Right upstairs?” As if my presence, a coat-room clerk, prevented them from taking action without my consent. This was doubly odd because other than the restrooms, there was nowhere else for them to go. I wondered if
they believed that if they just stayed down there long enough, the entire restaurant would descend to them. I'd smile and say, “Straight up the stairs,” and they would smile back as if they knew it all along, but had done me a favor by asking the way.