Aftermath of Dreaming (27 page)

“It all depends on how long he stays in. It could be—”

Michael charges through the door. “Winter, get me the press clips on that—”

He sees me standing beside her and breaks into a surprised smile. It is the first time that his usual way of greeting me is correct.

“Yvette, hi. What are you doing here? This is great. Did you hear the show? I think we're definitely—”

The look on my face stops him.

“No, forget it, right.” Michael takes my hand, and leading me into his office, turns to his assistant. “Winter, buzz Graham, tell him I'll be in a little later, and get the—”

Withdrawing my hand, I enter Michael's office without him.

“Forget it, Winter, I'll give you the rest later.”

“You want carrot juice, Michael, or a latte?” Winter says as Michael walks in, but he shuts the door as his answer.

I am half sitting, half leaning on the conference table, figuring the largest object in the room will lend me support.

Michael moves in front of me and straddles me like a chair. “How'd you get so fuckable this early in the day?”

“Michael.” I can't help but laugh.

“What? I mean it.” He is pressing on me, kissing my mouth and neck and ears. My back becomes diagonal to the table.

“I don't think we should see each other anymore.”

Michael straightens up and starts to withdraw his arms, then must realize how that would look, so he keeps them there, arms still around me, but his face so near that it feels uncomfortable considering what I just said. I wonder if he thinks continued physical contact will eradicate it somehow.

“I just think we do a lot better when we're friends.”

He drops his arms completely and steps back a little bit. “Uh-huh.”

“Don't you, really? I mean, if we could stay friends and still somehow also have sex, but we can't, or I can't, it seems to me.”

Winter sticks her face in the door. I always think “rain forest” when I see her; I am certain she spent her junior year abroad there. “Graham said he can wait, and that press clip you wanted—”

“In a minute, thanks.”

She looks crushed by Michael's words, then a smile appears on her face, as if she has picked up on the tension in the room and couldn't be happier.

We are quiet as we wait for her to leave, and I suddenly feel we are like divorcing parents with a pet that neither of them liked.

“Do you want to hear about it from my perspective?”

I am almost shocked that he has one about us.

“You know, you've done this before, and it just seems to me like things are going along great when suddenly you have to change it. We hang out, have a good time, isn't that enough? Does everything have to mean something serious?”

“No, everything doesn't, but I don't think this is ever going to mean anything at all, frankly, and maybe it never really has. Not that we don't care about each other, but you know what I mean.”

Michael is watching me in a way he hasn't before. Quietly and listening. For the first time, I feel like a complete person to him, not just a response that he needs. It confirms what I am doing even more.

“So let's stop seeing each other now while we're still friends. A lot of it was good; we're just not the One for each other.”

“I don't know if the One really exists.”

“Yeah, well, I don't either, but I want to find out.”

Sounds of the radio station start filtering in. I can hear the cadence of the morning news, and it gives me the same certain yet uneasy feeling I always felt sitting on my parents' bed before kindergarten watching my father prepare for work. As if something big and different were about to happen that would change my life, but I was only just now finding out about it.

“So I guess this means we can't have sex anymore?” Michael says it like he's kidding, but I know him too well.

“Yeah, I think we should finally really not.”

He gives me a hug and quick kiss. For the first time, I don't try to feel more from it than is really there.

“Okay, well. I'd better get in gear if I'm gonna make my meeting.
Hey, do you wanna stick around, watch the deejay? I can have breakfast with you in a little bit.”

“That's okay, thanks. I need to go.”

Winter blows in. I have a feeling she was just outside the door, listening the whole time and waiting to make her entrance.

“Bye, Michael.” I pass Winter in the doorway. As I walk away, I can feel his attention shift from me to her to his radio station. A national news program ends and a local one begins as I exit the building and enter the bright, white day.

It had ended. Finally the relationship
was over. Gossips chattered that Stephanie and Andrew's romance had stopped because their work together was done and there had never been anything real and lasting between them. As opposed to all the other real and lasting celebrity couplings in Hollywood.

Valiant Hour
held its top ten box office position well into the summer with public sightings of Andrew and Stephanie as a couple continuing until August when it all disappeared. Theaters replaced the movie with newer fare and Stephanie went on a much-publicized romantic trip to Scotland with the film's cinematographer. Which is how I found out. Andrew hadn't told me and there had been little to no shift in his attitude or time with me; we still saw each other regularly. So I was thrilled it was over, but nervous. I wanted to be the woman who filled Stephanie's place. Or not filled it, because I never believed in her feelings for him anyway. Maybe “take over” would be a better
way to say it. I wanted it to be Andrew and me and no one else.

On Labor Day weekend, a few weeks after I found out that Andrew and Stephanie were kaput, I didn't hear from him for a day and a half and I started to get concerned. All right, scared. Okay, terrified. He had met someone else and fallen in love that quickly. Fuck. And this new person probably wasn't just an in-between girl, but someone who would fill every space in him so much that there would no longer be any room or need for me. Panic moved in from the outside of my skin and settled under my breath all day, pushing it up when I tried to inhale, and pulling in when I tried to blow out. I was a wreck.

I bought a bottle of Absolut and some tonic, and drank a lot of it while sitting on my futon wishing my phone would ring.

It finally did at two
A.M.
, but by then I had been passed out—I mean, asleep—for a few hours.

“Hi, sweet-y-vette. I'm in Venice,” Andrew said over waves of soft white noise.

I wondered why he was telling me that, but all I cared about was that his voice was on my line calling me.

“Should I meet you at your house?” I was struggling to get my brain and body to match his alertness.

“No, I'm in Italy. Venice, Italy.”

“Italy?”

“I'm in Venice, Italy; not Venice, L.A. At the film festival. I'll be home in a few days.”

Now I understood. Oh, thank God, he had called and all the way from there.

“Go back to sleep, honey, I'll call you when I get home. If you need me, call Patrick and he'll get me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Do you still love me?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I…” He was quiet for a moment as if he were going to say the same thing. “I'll talk to you soon. Sweet dreams, Yvette.”

“Bye, Andrew.”

I hung up the phone and started to put it on the floor, then decided to let it stay on the bed with me, so that his voice it had transported could escort me into sleep. Andrew called. I wondered what time it was in Italy. New York was three hours ahead, and Europe six, so nine would make it eleven
A.M.
where he was. Jesus, I hoped a woman hadn't just left his bed. Okay, he probably was having sex with other women; they just better be one-time-only things that didn't mean anything to him. At least when he was with Stephanie, as horrible as that was, I knew who she was and I could perform the mental gymnastics required to diminish her threat to me, but these God-knows-who-and-how-many-other women were harder to dispel. Fuck. Oh, Andrew, come home from there and make me the only woman in your life. I fell asleep to that prayer.

 

For the next month, every time I saw him and every time he called, all I could think about was whether or not Andrew and I were getting closer to being a real couple. To the public, to him, to me. All behavior and conversation between us was looked at through that prism. I was obsessed. It was like some kind of relationship diet. I only felt good on days when the score of promising signs of our togetherness outweighed the bad ones. Seeing him was at the top of the list for making me feel good, but then it would make me feel shitty because why weren't we going out in public? Phone calls, lots of them in one day, were always a good sign, except when was he going to say “I love you” to me?

My art fell by the wayside, completely forgotten. I made mistakes working for Bill and dropped a lot of dishes at the restaurant. I stopped calling friends back—what was the point? I could only think about one thing—Andrew—and I couldn't talk about him with any of them. Especially Viv, who, inspired by Stephanie—all right, maybe not, but I thought of it that way—had broken up with Craig and was just loving her new single status. It made me want to scream. That was the last thing I could hear about, especially from her, since it included more harangues about how great Stephanie was doing now that she was finished
with that scumbag Andrew. Though I figured Viv would have to stop trashing him soon since her main conduit for information on him had dried up. Her last diatribe against him sounded like a death rattle.

My days began and ended with the same perpetual thought—were Andrew and I going to be together permanently? It was like some horrible game, like a king with twin sons who takes forever to pick the heir. Someone was going to get picked, but who and when? It was pure hell. And the whole time I tried to appear to him as if I didn't care. As if I wasn't the complete wreck I was inside that made me stop eating and barely sleep through the night. If I hadn't wanted to be with him so much, I would have wanted to die.

One morning in early November, Andrew called me and said, “Why don't you come over tonight and we'll watch the election returns?”

After saying yes in what I hoped was a calm voice, we made a plan, and hung up. I was shocked. Our get-togethers were always last-minute, arranged at the end of the night or as he drove toward my apartment in his car. This was a good ten hours away, and it involved politics, a love of his life, almost as much as collecting art. He had shared some of that world with me, particularly when we first met and my father's Southern Republican opinions still held me in their sway. Andrew taught me about socially responsible government and education instead of arms. I'd ask him the questions that even the forming of confused me, and he would answer at their core, explaining issues and consequences. I wanted to know more about all that for him. I loved his mind and the way he articulated his thoughts. Listening to him talk about politics was like being on an intense-but-intelligent ride—Oh, the places you'll go!—to quote another great, if quite different mind. So to be asked to watch the election returns with him was like an invitation to meet his family—a huge step. I knew he'd have insightful information about each candidate; hell, he knew and was courted by most of the Democrats.

My entire day was about our date at eight. I somehow got through the mundanity of my lunch shift at the restaurant by trying to distance myself from it. As I drove home afterward, still feeling cruddy from
handling plates of food, a horrible fear that had been lurking in me for the past few months raised its head and began shouting at me. Over and over it told me that for Andrew to be with me the way he was with those other women, like Lily and Stephanie, completely and publicly, I would have to be famous. Because in the three-plus decades that his romantic life had been fodder for the media, Andrew had never gone out with a woman who wasn't as famous as him, or at least close to it since very, very few ever reached his level. And I was nobody. Hadn't become a big fucking art star in New York and still wasn't one. No matter how many glittering parties I went to with Viv, or how many millionaire men I dated, or how much money I spent that I didn't have on facials and clothes, the reality was the same. I wasn't in his world. Where I grew up, it was the number of decades your family had lived there that mattered—past a century or so and you were in, and mine went back at least two, but in L.A., it was fame and money that mattered. And it looked like it did for Andrew, too.

But maybe that fear was just fucking with me. It had to be. Andrew loved me. And he said that I was the only woman in the world that he believed truly loved him—that had to mean a lot. And, good God, his success and fame were enough for ten. Surely, mine couldn't matter so much to him. We had just never had the chance to really be together, but with Stephanie out of the picture and both of us in the same city, it could finally happen. He had just been taking it slowly, not rushing in, and our date to watch the election returns would be the first step in changing everything.

When I got home, I stripped off my waitress uniform, took a shower, and put on his favorite dress, a small floral-print V-neck with a short pleated skirt. The depth of the neckline, brevity of the skirt, and floral of the fabric were the only differences from my Catholic school uniform. The first time I wore it around him, he opened his door and looked at me for a long while.

“What?” I said.

“You know I'm a sucker for that.”

I hadn't, but good.

So I wore that, using everything in my arsenal for a winning campaign.

 

Andrew had the same reaction to the dress when he opened the door as he had had before. I could tell it made him want to blow off watching the returns. I took it as a good sign about the future of the evening and us.

“Let's miss the beginning,” Andrew said as he led me past the kitchen where the TV was blaring and to his bed. I slipped off my dress, and with it all the fears that had been tormenting me. As I knelt on the sheets, I decided that none of that stuff—the fame and success—really mattered to him. It was just him and me. Us. We were completely similar when we were only in our skin and in each other's. And that was what mattered.

 

The marble counter of the island in Andrew's kitchen was covered with containers and platters of food that Andrew had pulled from his fridge after we finally emerged from his bedroom. We picked through the offerings; giving each other tastes, devouring some, ignoring others. He was into the borscht soup. I thought it looked metallically cold. I was eating sesame noodles. The TV on the counter was still on and the results that were being reported were exactly what Andrew had predicted. He started explaining to me what the party would do and we talked about the different candidates and how they had managed their campaigns—if anyone knew how to handle the media, it was Andrew.

A while later, we were in bed again, right in the middle, when the phone rang. Well, not rang—lit, actually. Andrew's phones didn't ring; they lit up all through his house, like Tinkerbell kept alive by an omnipotent invisible child. Even across a bright room with his back to the instrument, he could tell whenever one of the small transparent plastic buttons began blinking. So I wasn't surprised that in the deep dark of his bedroom—him moving on top of me, I had already had three, but his was still to come—he noticed the sharp small light flashing on the phone on his bedside table.

During the months he was seeing Stephanie, she would sometimes call while we were in his bed and he would have to answer, but he always expected it and would warn me ahead. I'd wait silently while devouring and dissecting every fragment of his side of their conversation. She required tons of shoring up from him. He was constantly having to tell her what a great job she did, and yes, she was the best, no other actress compared to her and on and on. It was shocking. All that animal confidence she exuded was bullshit. Every word she uttered and thing she did needed his constant encouragement.

His bedside phone, like all the others, had a row of buttons, and I knew that only a few persons had the number that lit the one button that would make Andrew pick up, like I did. That was the button that was blinking as he was moving on top of me, speaking into my ear, my hurried breath answering him, together moving forward, so near, but then his arm reached out and the phone was at his ear.

“Hello.”

He had stopped moving, which made me stop, but my body inside was a few beats behind. I wanted to continue moving—fuck the caller—but figured I'd better not.

“When does her plane leave?”

“That's obscene,” he said to the answer.

“Okay, see you in a little bit.”

Before I could register what had just happened, Andrew hung up the phone, kissed my lips, and, withdrawing from bed, said, “Come on, we have people coming over; we're getting dressed.”

Fuck. I wanted it to be just me and him. Who were these goddamn people coming over at ten after eleven? Then I realized it was me with him meeting some of his friends. That hadn't happened since the lunch in New York when actor best friend regaled me with funny Andrew tales. If this would be like that—all right, it could be fun. But who was this “she” whose plane was leaving God knows when?

Fuck.

She was a model from Germany. I had seen pictures of her the year before when she had exploded onto
Vogue
and everywhere else. Her
beauty was rarified it was so complete, though a bit lupine, I thought. Andrew's friend—the one who had called him and had brought her—was a famous photographer, and I vowed to never again like the hard and beautiful pictures of fashion and celebrities he shot.

We had settled in the kitchen where the stark, brightly lit whiteness seemed to outline the color and flesh of each of us as if we were in a flat cardboard set. I hoped it was hugely obvious that Andrew and I had been having sex. Andrew had wanted me to pull myself together, but I'd let my hair stay a bit mussed, having a feeling I might need the extra armor of our interrupted coitus. Take that, you fucking model.

She was wearing an exquisite dress that I had seen in last month's
Vogue
and loved. If I remembered correctly, it cost over three thousand dollars. Though up close and live, it didn't look as good on her slumping body and had a wine stain near the neck. What a slob. I tried to remind myself that Andrew loved my dress, but I felt small in it, silly, eighty-nine dollars on sale could not compete with that dress, even stained and slumped.