Aftermath of Dreaming (8 page)

“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, and 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.

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 daddy—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?”

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.