Aftermath of Dreaming (30 page)

“They're retro, but subtle,” she continues. “And on him, you barely notice.”

Reggie looks at me for a moment, then takes off the hip pair, so I hand the other frames back to him. The woman moves next to me, and we watch as his face is complemented when he puts the glasses on.

“Yeah, I really like them.”

Reggie says nothing and turns around to look in the mirror, then starts turning his head side to side and up and down.

“Those are great pins.”

It takes me a second to realize what she is talking about. In the rush to meet Reggie for breakfast, I had pulled on the top I was wearing last night with two of my pins still affixed near the neckline.

“Oh, thanks.” I glance down to see which ones they are. “Actually, I made them.”

“Really? Do you have a line?”

“Yeah, Broussard's Bijoux,” I say as I open my bag and pull out a card for her. “I'm in one store, Rox on Beverly, and I sell privately.”

“We should talk.” She reaches into her Hermès bag and proffers a
business card. “I'm in New York all next week, but call my assistant to set up an appointment—I'd be interested to see your line.”

And with that she turns and heads out the door. As she passes in front of the shop's window, her effortlessly sleek appearance stands out amid the yoga-pants and jeans crowd. I look down at the card in my hand, astonished at what I see.

“Reggie, you'll never believe who that woman was.” I join him at the register where a salesclerk, who has a hint of a German accent, as if he inherited it not from his motherland but from the store, is asking for his credit card.

“Who?” Reggie puts a worn card down.

“Linda Beckman, head jewelry buyer for Greeley's department store. She wants to see my stuff—I could die.”

“That's great, honey. Good thing I needed new sunglasses, huh?”

“Yeah, right? So which ones are you…” I stop when I see the hip pair on the counter; the other frames are nowhere in sight. “Well, those looked good, too.”

 

I am sitting on my couch at ten to three in the morning—having been kept awake for the last hour from a scream dream—staring into the tree outside my living room window and thinking about everything I need to do. I called Roxanne to see if she wanted more pieces, but she said check back in January, which is okay because I don't want to show her the new line until after Linda Beckman sees it and has first dibs. My appointment with her at Greeley's is next week and the samples for the new line of jewelry have come out even better than I imagined they would when I took the sketches to Dipen. The pearls shimmer and glow against the braided gold, and the tourmaline, citrine, and peridot that surround them complement and contrast with their natural luminescence. Even Dipen was impressed.

But thinking about this is making me more revved up, not less, so I turn on the television for some barbiturate channel-surfing. If anything
will put me to sleep, it's dead-of-night TV. I flip past eighties sitcoms, cable access shows, a John Wayne film my father loved, cop shows, stand-up comics, and…

“Well, there he is.” The words came out automatically as if they were too large to be contained. On the screen is Andrew. Full color, gorgeous, and close-up. In a classic, quintessential seventies film he did that defined many things, socially and in the movie industry. As I sit watching his face in my living room, with me but not real, like the dreams I've been having, I realize that when he made this movie, he was just a few years older than I am right now. Seeing what he looked like then, it is as if the image of him from back then is reaching toward me now where our difference in age is so much less. His body is moving, walking in his slow panther strides, the same way he walked me to his bedroom all those times. I breathe in and wait for the dull pain in my gut to appear. But it does not. I watch more of the movie, and still the throbbing of anguish doesn't come.

Okay, this is a first. Maybe I'm really done. Maybe seeing him at the theater and all those memories of him were exactly what I needed to get rid of him because here I am watching him, loving how he looks, remembering him gazing at me that very same way, his hand on me that way, smiling at me that way, and no big reaction is coming up. I'm just—okay.

Wow, I am clearly so completely over this man. But in a nice way, like seeing a picture of my favorite teddy bear when I was kid, the one I was sure I could never live without, definitely could not sleep without. Teddy was his name. He was purple and gold, which is a curious choice for a bear, and had only one eye. I loved Teddy. What I loved the most was that in the depths of his softness there was this really hard, solid object. And it would move, so I'd have to search for it in his down each time I held him just to find it. This secret inner core, totally belied by his countenance, that only I knew about. Eventually I realized it was the detached mechanism for a music box. He had been a wind-up toy, and the key must've broken off years before I was even born when my sister had
him. But I still knew about his real inner core and no one else did, and what mattered was what he was, not his past, and I was the only one willing to find that part each time.

I pull the tapestry from the back of the couch over me as Andrew's voice moves through my living room surrounding my body, resting in my ears, floating in my head. I fall asleep with his face near, the light behind it illuminating my dreams.

I went through three different
outfits this morning deciding what to wear to Greeley's, and even called Suzanne for her opinion because Reggie is useless in that area. I needed critical truth about how best to project the creative-yet-business vibe that is essential for this sales call. The outfit Suzanne and I came up with—me describing clothes over the phone, her asking questions about hem lengths and necklines—felt so right that I didn't even feel the need to change in my truck into the backup shirt that I brought along.

In the sales office of Greeley's department store, an older thin-haired receptionist who looks as though she has seen decades of trends and designers come and go tells me to have a seat, she'll buzz Ms. Beckman. I sit down on the low-slung couch. The office is done in peach with touches of chrome, soft but modern. Full-blown photographs of accessories and jewelry from the store's catalogue are framed on the wall like modern art. I suddenly think of Tory. Of waiting in the gallery
for her to get off the phone on that day I first met her so long ago in New York, and of Andrew setting the whole thing up. It feels like a memory I've only heard about, like things that happened prekindergarten during that age of not knowing how to do things that in ensuing years were easily learned.

The receptionist tells me I can go in and waves her hand to a door on the left. Linda Beckman is sitting behind her desk in an all-cream room. Her blond hair and pale suit perfectly complement her softly made-up face. She would not be described as beautiful, but has made the most of what God gave her on a level that most women only dream about.

She puts her hand out to me and offers me a seat. “Is that from your new line you were telling me about on the phone?”

She has noticed the necklace I am wearing, as I hoped she would. It is a thin chain of braided eighteen-karat gold from which hangs a large green-gray Tahitian pearl that has an even thinner band of braided gold encircling it with a spray of green peridot dangling on a short chain underneath it. I do what I do with women in their homes; I take the necklace off and hand it to her. I have found that it has the same effect as when a little girl lets a new friend play with her favorite doll. Linda looks surprised for a split second, then I see her eyes light up when the pearl is in her hands. She stands up and moves across the room to put the necklace on in the reflection of the glass of a framed photograph from the store's catalogue.

When she comes back to her desk still wearing my necklace, I pull out the trays of pins and necklaces and bracelets and rings from my faux Vuitton bag, and Linda picks up and plays with or tries on almost everything. She glances through my press kit as she tells me that she wants the order in for January, and I try to contain my euphoria as she explains the terms.

Driving home on Wilshire Boulevard, I pass the other department stores that dominate this section of Beverly Hills, and I can barely believe what's just happened. My jewelry is going to be in one of these, on display and for sale in a national store. And in Greeley's catalogue,
The
Style Journal,
a renowned quarterly that years ago set the bar for all other high-end retail. I have to get the samples of my entire new line of South Sea pearls held with braided gold while peridot, tourmaline, and citrine dance around them to a photography studio next Monday for them to be included in the spring catalogue. Talk about tear sheets for my press kit. The shoots they do are notorious for being beautiful, yet exotically decadent. I can't wait to see my work immortalized that way. I silently bless Suzanne and her wedding for inspiring me to work with pearls.

 

“That's great, honey, I'm so happy for you. Matt, you have time to squeeze Yvette in tomorrow to look at her contract, don't you, love?” Suzanne has addressed the last part to her financial-whiz husband, but I know it was mostly intended for me.

“Thanks, Suzanne, but I don't need to waste his time. There's not a contract. This is retail, it's an order I'm filling and the terms are what every designer gets the first—”

“Matt, talk to her.” And Suzanne hands the phone to my brother-in-law. When my sister has children, I will be a fabulous aunt in terms of empathizing with them on what it is like to be raised by her.

“Congratulations—you're in a national store!”

“Thanks, Matt.”

“Now, tell me what your deal is.”

“From what I hear from other designers, it's pretty standard for big stores so it's not like I can negotiate. Greeley's policy is that the first time they carry your line, it's on consignment, then they send you checks each month based on what sells, but Linda Beckman, the head jewelry buyer, feels very confident about my line, says it's really different from anything they have so it's just a matter of the money coming later instead of up front.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And there's the catalogue.”

“The catalogue?”

“I have to pay for P and A—that's prints and advertising, all designers do—but when you consider what I'm getting, people all over the country seeing my work, and the top-notch photographs, it's really a good deal.”

Matt is quiet for a moment. I can hear Suzanne in the background picking up their dinner plates from the dining room table, the one from the house we grew up in that has been in the family for three generations.

“Keep your own accounting. Don't assume they'll report everything and on time, but it's great news, Yvette, it's a whole new level for your career. I'm proud of you.”

 

Reggie was so ecstatic over my sale that he decided we should take a day off just to celebrate. He pulls his car—late-model El Dorado, which I love because it makes me feel like I'm back in the South—into my driveway to pick me up, and when we hug, I can tell that his tummy that I never thought was a big deal, but was the reason for his diet, I guess, is completely gone. I notice my neighbor Gloria peeking around her curtain, as Reggie opens the car door for me. I am tempted to yell up to her that this isn't a new boyfriend because I know she will ask later on.

“Santa Boo is where I'm taking you.” Reggie's infectious cheer is in high gear, or another and the idea of leaving L.A. for a day is heavenly.

As we drive through Malibu up the PCH, we pass houses crammed next to one another on the edge of the highway like a continuous screen hiding the beach and ocean beyond. Coming down the hill past Pepperdine University, we see an expanse of coastline not blocked by development, and the surfless Pacific lies tranquilly under the November typing-paper-white sky. Reggie is playing a cassette he made just for this drive, an hour and a half 's worth of music to carry us up the coast, then on the way back, we'll play radio roulette, his term for pushing buttons and never knowing what you'll get. I have a feeling that Michael's station isn't programmed on Reggie's radio and that's fine with
me. I haven't listened to Michael's “voice,” as Kundalini-cum-collagen woman so accurately identified his station, since I stopped seeing him.

 

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art is a large two-story white stucco Spanish Mission–style building surrounded by attractive businesses against a backdrop of mountains. It is almost more compelling to stay outside and walk around in the gently sunny day, but the large purple banner hanging on the museum's façade announcing a Picasso exhibit trumps that idea.

Reggie and I step inside the charged quiet of great art on display in the gallery and read the curator's notes on the show, “Weeping Women,” which has been traveling the country. The exhibit is composed entirely of portraits of Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter, his wife and mistress at the time the paintings were done, respectively. When the portraits of Marie-Thérèse were first shown, Dora Maar walked into the gallery, saw the work, and immediately knew Picasso was in love with his model, so infused were they with that truth.

“Prick,” Reggie says, when we finish reading the circumstances of the paintings.

“But here you are to enjoy his work.”

“That doesn't mean I like him personally.”

“You don't know him personally. He wasn't Stalin or Hitler sending millions to the grave.” We both know what we are also talking about, or whom, I should say. Even though Reggie and I haven't talked about Andrew in ages, it sometimes feels as if the subject is always there between us, sitting just under the surface.

“Look what he left the world for eternity.”

Reggie's eyes stay on mine for a moment defiantly, then he turns and looks around the gallery, as I do. The walls are filled with intense and colorful executions of remorse and desire, sadness and love. The crowds looking at the paintings appear stripped of all outer guise as they stand in their naked desire to view beauty, like babies unable to hide their needs.

Reggie takes my hand and we walk slowly through each room, looking at every portrait, saying few words, and I am struck by Picasso's insistence for honesty. His decision to paint his mistress despite the consequences. It makes me think about the area of my life I have kept from Reggie—Andrew, namely.

At a café near the museum, Reggie pulls a chair out for me at an outside table, but before I can sit down, he gives me a hug. “Maybe we'll make it a perfect road trip and stay over somewhere. The San Ysidro Ranch has got some great bungalows.”

“Where the Kennedys honeymooned—yeah, right,” I say, playing along with his silly idea.

He presses himself in close, more of him on me than usual. “I'm getting a woody just holding you,” he says in my ear.

I can't believe what I just heard. Reggie? A woody? About me? Oh, please tell me I didn't hear him right, but I know I did. And that term. Where'd he get that? The school yard? It quadruples the embarrassment I feel—a woody. Like Pinocchio. Not an association I want with sex. Nor is Reggie. Oh, good God.

I try to laugh, but it comes out like a snort, so I take advantage of that and say, “Gee, I need to blow my nose, be right back.”

As I head into the restaurant, my eyes adjusting to the lower lights inside, I try to remember the last time I used the exclamation “gee.” I decide I never have and wonder if it came out as the unfulfilled wish of what I hoped our day would be rated. I guess his suggestion of us spending the night was serious. Oh, good Christ. I mean, I love Reggie, he's my best friend, but part of the comfort of him is that since he's not a girl, I don't have to deal with weird female stuff like with Suzanne or Viv, and since he's not really straight, or has never seemed so to me, I could talk to him like a girl. And sexual tension has just never been an issue between us. Or maybe it always was and I just couldn't see it. Or didn't want to.

I suddenly have an urge to take out my cell phone and call…well, Reggie, actually, because he's who I call when people behave oddly or confusingly or try to switch their role, all of which he just did. The
friend I want to talk to not only isn't home, he's the reason I need to call, as if Reggie could somehow also be a separate person in his apartment for me.

In the bathroom, I wash my hands and put powder on my face. I hope my eyes won't betray me when I go back to the table with their loud conveying of the no-longer-want-to-hang-out-with-him that I feel. Was I wrong to say yes to this day? Maybe I crossed some universal line for friendship that gave him a signal that that was okay. No, I've been behaving exactly as I always have, though now that I think about his diet and this day, maybe he's been planning some kind of relationship change for us ever since I stopped seeing Michael. Oh, good God.

I've powdered my nose five times and can't think of anything else to do to stall my appearance at lunch. Fuck. This is so weird. I make a small prayer to Mary that Reggie was being temporarily weird or got so overcome by all the beauty, sex, and love we saw at the museum that that energy just slipped out at me. But I doubt it. Finally, I join him at our table.

I can tell Reggie knows that he flipped me out because he immediately starts talking about his work, about editing a commercial he actually did like because of the director's vision, a nice neutral topic that makes me sort of relax. “His spots are like short films, really beautiful and telling the story visually. I wouldn't mind him shooting my script.”

“I thought you wanted to do it.” The pasta I ordered is heavier than I expected, with too much cream. The first few bites were comforting and nice, but now the richness is making me sick.

“Honey, let's be realistic. I've been here too long to not know the score. First-time director without film school or a movie to his credit? Who are we kidding? I need something to happen in my life, it's been the same for way too long. If this guy can get it going, I'd be thrilled. Let him do this one, then maybe some doors will open; otherwise, this wait I've been in will be my whole life.”

We walk on the beach together after lunch, and the sun, the sea, the sky, the sand are so encompassing of our senses that we are content not to talk. As we stand at the surf 's edge watching the winter sunset's early
decline, I wonder how long Reggie's transformation has been going on. Was it a sudden moment of change or an on-going one that started with the protein shakes that made Reggie lose weight and wait diligently?

“I'm going home to visit my father for the weekend,” Reggie says on the drive back to L.A. as we head south into the night. We have yielded onto the freeway, becoming one of many commuters, but without the day's work.

“Yeah? Are you looking forward to it?”

“You know, he'll call me ‘son.' He's done that for so long, I think he thinks it's my goddamn name. Ever since Mom died, he's called me and my brother ‘son' for what, twenty years now, like he needs to reinforce the family bond for fear it'll disappear like she did.”

“You're probably right. If so, it's sad and kind of sweet.”