Aftermath of Dreaming (31 page)

We ride along in silence on the rhythm of the miles. Reggie was a godsend when my momma died, flying down to Mississippi to be at the funeral with me and letting me spend the night with him that first week back in L.A. so I wouldn't have to be by myself when the darkness of night came down and I had to adjust my thoughts of Momma being not in her bed but in the ground. He'd known what that was like.

The first time Reggie and I got together after we met, he showed me a black-and-white picture of his mother. She was twenty-one when it was taken, a lovely, young, open-faced woman wearing a gingham shirt. “Ain't she a tomato?” he'd said loudly, causing the other people in the café to all turn and look. He was so comfortable in his exuberance about her, so resolved with her absence in his life that he didn't notice the public reaction, just kept on showing me pictures of her. Riding in his car on the freeway, watching lights speed up close and away, I long to have that about my father, though I know that it's easier when the parent is dead and not just gone.

“I saw Andrew on TV a few weeks ago.” I pause for a moment to see if Reggie is receptive, but he is quiet, just smoothly moving into the fast lane. “
Spontaneous
was on, and it was nice, really, just to see him, but especially from that time, L.A. in the seventies. He was so much a part of all that, and I always felt like I got to experience that period by being with
him, through him in a way. So it was nice, but the best part was that I felt so okay about him and me. 'Cause, you know, he stepped into my life not long after Daddy was gone, and Andrew was really there for me, like a father to me those years I lived in New York, so it was nice, just to sit there and see him.”

Reggie changes lanes again through the steady traffic. The car is moving fast and the highway is streaming past.

“Goddammit, Yvette, you are out of your mind.” His voice is at such a pitch and his words so unlike what I thought I'd hear that I almost say, “What?” But his diatribe is spewing on. “He wasn't your father, okay? He was just some man who had sex with you and didn't care enough to do anything more. He probably doesn't even remember your name.” Fuck you, I start to say, but Reggie is continuing, his voice filling the car. “You've got to let go of this. You've been dragging him around for years and where has it gotten you? Stuck in the past and ignoring what's in your life today.”

Like him trying to make a pass at me? Is that the thing in my life that I'm missing?

“Reggie, I have let Andrew go, that's exactly what the fuck I was saying, if you would listen instead of having a goddamn fit that I mentioned his name. And fuck you, by the way, he was like a father to me, and whether you believe that or not doesn't change anything. What is your goddamn problem about him anyway? Christ, you're the one who's so worked up about this, not me. I'm fine. I have moved on. I've dated a lot since him. It's not my fault none of them have been the one.”

I glance over at Reggie and his features look smaller on his face. We pass a few mile markers in silence.

“I just want you to be happy, honey, that's all I'm saying.”

“I am.”

“Good.” Then he turns the radio on loud.

 

A couple of days after the Santa Boo excursion with Reggie, I am beginning to wonder if this friendship is going to have to end. Not that I
want it to, but if I can't tell him what's going on in my life…And not even an honest-to-God encounter, just a movie on TV. Christ, I guess he'd really flip his lid if anything real with Andrew happened. Reggie is in Kansas seeing his dad, so we haven't talked much and that's probably for the best. But it's Saturday afternoon, and I can't stay in my apartment thinking about all this another second, so to distract myself I find a matinee to go to.

I decide to wear something upbeat and happy; maybe it will affect my mood. As I put on a deep red sweater, I remember reading somewhere that red cars get hit more than other ones, but only during daylight hours because at night they look gray. I wonder how drivers' eyes under streetlights can transpose vibrant red to dull gray. Self-preservation, maybe, to not be drawn into a nocturnal crash. Then what happens to that instinct during the day?

I arrive at the theater early, so I decide to go to a store three very long blocks down La Brea to try on vintage Levi's that I will never buy. Not because I don't want to buy the Levi's, but whenever I see the way they look on other women I always think, “How do those jeans fit like that on you? That has never happened for me.” But still I persist in trying, certain that there is one pair out there that will fit great; it's just a matter of finding it. As I walk the three very long blocks to the store on the empty sidewalk of the busy street, I feel very pioneering to be a pedestrian in L.A.

Half an hour later I emerge from the store jeans-free, but consistent at least. As I head back to the theater, hurrying so I won't be late, I keep thinking about a pair of Levi's I tried on that finally actually maybe did fit but that I still didn't buy, because I was sure that the minute I left the store they suddenly would not, so I'm not noticing very much except that there is a man on the sidewalk—tall, almost young—coming toward me from the other direction. Or veering toward me really. Not drunk, he definitely is not drunk, he's clean looking actually, but just walking diagonally, like San Vicente to Pico kind of. Anyway, I think about moving which is hard. It's a sidewalk, for God's sake, public—moving is such a statement and, other than running into the traffic,
where would I go? Then next thing I know, he's near me, in front of me, his arm pulls back, and he punches me hard, right on my left breast.

I am completely shocked. I stand there holding myself and staring at him as the word “clobbered” flashes in my head. Finally, I say, “But I'm a girl.” I have no idea why, he clearly can tell that I am. Not that he should be beating up men, but what the hell was that for?

He just looks at me and smiles. With his whole body. Luxuriating, really. I half expect him to light a cigarette and ask how it was for me. Then he does this odd little chuckle and strolls away like he could not be happier with himself if he tried.

The cars on La Brea are blithely driving by. No one has noticed this daylight public bashing. No masked savior has flown down from the sky to stop my perpetrator. It is just me. Walking alone in what should be harmless territory, a sidewalk on a commercial street in a good neighborhood. An activity that appears to be safe, but isn't.

Before I even realize what I am doing, I pull out my cell phone, following my instinct to call Reggie, then I remember the weirdness we are in and that he's out of town, so I hang up. I could call the police. Should probably, but I don't feel like it. I can always do it later, say I was in shock. Frankly, I want to catch the movie and just not think about it.

Driving home in my truck from the movie—which was distracting, but not completely—through the descending darkness of the late afternoon, I think about that guy walking up to me on the sidewalk and hauling one off. And so casually. Easily. As if I had been walking there for the express purpose of letting him take care of his need to express anger. Fuck him. I suddenly am reminded of Reggie blowing up at me in his car on the way home from Santa Barbara. The way his anger came out so completely and unexpectedly. Not that I didn't know he doesn't like hearing about Andrew, but for Christ's sake, yelling at me? What is it with these guys? I realize that I don't want some masked hero coming down from the sky to save me. I want the person who's always there no matter what. Me.

And suddenly I decide to learn how to box. Not that kick-to-get-fit version, I'm talking traditional, in the ring, Ali-is-still-God boxing. So
that I'll never be at the mercy of someone like that again. Someone's hands altering my body, hurting me. I wonder what the emotional equivalent to boxing is. But maybe doing it physically will give that to me. The minute I get inside my apartment, I pull out the Yellow Pages and begin calling gyms.

To be totally honest, it wasn't until
a couple of years ago that I realized deep down what age I truly am. Not that all this time I've been in some annually recurring version of Alzheimer's—I am aware what year this is and how that relates to my birth—but a few years ago I discovered quite accidentally that in bed I still thought of myself as seventeen.

Not consciously. I wasn't removing my clothes thinking years were being shed at the same time. Other than a vague, off to the side, sort of still-in-my-Catholic-school-uniform feeling, I had no idea I thought of myself as still seventeen until one night right in the middle of having sex, the man I was with said, “Woman.” Just “Woman,” as if that was expressive enough. Growing up in the South, I was used to being called “sweetie” and “sugar pie,” or at least “honey” here in L.A., and, okay, this man was a Yankee, but other than wondering if his last girlfriend was Betty Friedan, it took me a good minute to figure out that he was talking to me. That I was the “Woman.” I think I even looked around,
worried it was one of those “Surprise! Ménage à trois!” moments—which actually did happen to me once, making me forever doorbellphobic during sex.

Anyway, what I wanted to do was stop what I was doing, climb off him, and say, “Oh, my God, do you know how old I am?” But I did not because he did, in fact, know how old I am, I mean, was then. He was forty-two and well aware of our respective ages. I guess it was just me who wasn't.

But I've never been very clear about all this. When I started seeing widow-man in Pass Christian, I would forget how much older he was than me. Not that he didn't know the real difference in our ages. He did. And I did when prom night came around and I tried to picture how he would look on the dance floor with his wide chest that definitely did not come from high school football practice. He had one of those adult male bodies that just worked for him. I remember one day he decided to go for a five-mile run, just decided and went. He was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, but he came back, had had a great run, that was it. I will never forget looking at him and wanting that. To be able to just tell my body to perform some physical feat and have it simply comply.

I was still trying to figure out how mine worked. I had only recently started getting my period when I met him, then I immediately went on the pill to stop it. Well, not to stop it, but to stop its effect. Once I could get pregnant, and was doing what you do to get pregnant, I would avoid getting pregnant by making my body think it was pregnant. Which is how I was told the pill works. Like having some constant ghost baby inside my womb, which honest to God, I never even knew I had. I thought only Mary had a womb for Jesus, but clearly I did, too. Just one with nothing in it. Even though my body thought there was, constantly experiencing a false physical reality as if it were true. Like me and my age, I guess. Anyway.

It's my birthday today. On a Monday this year, which is a horrid little day to have a birthday, though it is starting out okay. I went shopping at Barneys, which I rarely do, mostly because I rarely do, so I figured
it'd feel special, like Easter Sunday mass after a year of not going. I found some pretty pastel sweaters that I loved, picked out two, then agonized over getting a third with the salesclerk who I immediately liked because she had a name that was unpronounceable when you see it and unspellable when you hear it. I left with only two, but made a silent vow to go back more often—a kind of Lent in reverse—instead of giving up going to Barneys, I decided to give up not going to Barneys.

What I wish I had given up was the massage I am getting now. It is at a natural hot springs spa in Korea Town that I've been to quite a bit, because for some reason I keep forgetting that I don't like it here. The idea of it is so nice—warm water, all naked, hands kneading my body—but the reality is being in a cold echoey room, forced to wear a rubber cap like some cranium version of “socks in the shower,” and a rubdown that consists more of slapping and shoving than anything else.

After enduring twenty minutes of this while alternately calculating how many sweaters this session is costing and admonishing myself to get back in the moment and “Enjoy this, goddammit,” I sit straight up, look the masseuse in the eye, and say, “Okay, it's my birthday, but stop spanking me.” She looks completely shocked, as am I, so I try to diffuse things by laughing, which helps not at all, then I realize that she has in her favor both being fully clothed and able to hit while I do not, so I grab my towel and leave.

Suzanne and Matt are giving me a party this evening, but I don't know if I want to celebrate being thirty. The number sounds frightening, but I can't keep saying I'm twenty-nine because, for one thing, I'm not, and what would I do about the events of whichever year that I'd have to erase? And for another, the whole time I was officially twenty-nine and would tell someone that in response to their horrid question, it always felt like a lie. “I'm twenty-nine” begs the unspoken thought, “She must be thirty.”

As I drive to Suzanne and Matt's house in one of my new sweaters, which is not making me feel as fabulous as I had thought it would when I tried it on in the Barneys dressing room, I want to call Suzanne from
my cell phone and tell her that I can't make it after all. But I know I can't do that, so I console myself with the fact that at least it's not a surprise party, thank God, just a regular one.

Although, actually, maybe the party should have been a surprise because then everyone who's going to come has arrived by the time you open the door. But with a regular party, guests can show up anytime they want, if they actually remember to come. I spent the entire blessedly short soirée praying that more people would walk through the door, as I tried to be a happy and appreciative birthday girl for Matt, Suzanne, and the few obviously date-book-proficient guests who remembered to attend. Maybe it being on a Monday night confused people and it got erased from their minds somehow. Or Suzanne didn't call everyone, but I doubt that. It was the first time I had seen Reggie since our day two weeks ago in Santa Barbara, and though we've been talking on the phone to try to ease past our blowup, the moment we hugged hello felt weird. Like it was uncomfortable to hug, but also uncomfortable not to hug, so we ended up having one of those don't-know-the-other-person-too-well, quick, sideways hugs. I know he felt it, too.

I considered telling Suzanne that I was too tired for the cake, but I knew that wouldn't fly with her, especially since she had made my favorite German chocolate cake like Momma used to. Even with that, I could not get out of there fast enough when the party was over—rather early, thank God.

Driving home on the PCH to get to the 10, I look out my truck's windshield into the night. There isn't a heavenly body in sight. In fact, the entire sky is completely blank, as if God had dragged a blanket along on His way to bed, catching every object in its hem. I wonder if some huge erasing phenomenon is going on—the entire zodiac of stars and calendars obliterated forever. I decide to feel lucky that the erasing hadn't gotten around to everyone's date book before my party began; at least some people came. And maybe it means that this birthday doesn't have to count. Maybe the universe is giving me a little gift for all my teenage years in bars when I looked older but really wasn't, so now I can truly be younger and not only when I have sex.

It is too early to go to bed when I get home and I have a feeling I won't be tired for a long time anyway, as if I am destined to be awake for every hour of this dreadful birthday. So I sit on my couch, wondering if Momma is thinking of me wherever she is, if her spirit is sending me birthday love. Maybe Daddy thought of me today. But probably not, considering that the last birthday of mine that he was around for was sixteen years ago. It seems more probable that Momma did from beyond the grave.

The ringing of the phone is such a jolt that it makes me jump. As I pick up the receiver, wondering whose date book the erasing possibly could have passed over, I hear “Happy birthday” in my ear. It takes me a minute to believe who it is.

“How did you get this number?”

I realize that isn't the friendliest greeting in the world, but I am in shock. Andrew's perfect vocal shield wraps me in close as he tells me that he's been calling it for quite a while, which really is not an answer, but he has just never left a message. For over two years since I moved into this apartment, I've had a different phone number from the one he used to call me at in my Beverly Hills apartment when we were seeing each other, so the only way he could have gotten this number was if he had called my old Beverly Hills number within six months after I moved to this one and gotten the referral for my new one here. Which means that some of those hang-ups I've heard on my answering machine in the past five years actually have been him, my fantasy confirmed. I can tell he is on a cell phone and driving in his car, moving through the city under the big, empty sky.

“You sure flew out of that theater fast,” he says. “Fuckin' FBI couldn't find you.”

“Yeah, well, I guess they didn't look very hard.”

“I think about you a lot more than you think I do.”

“Well, considering that I don't think you think about me at all, I guess you do.”

Which makes him laugh, which makes me laugh, and there it is. One second of mutual time between us yielding and spreading until it connects our now with when we were before. A highway in one hello.

“Do you still love me?”

“Still.” And I am back, as if the five years apart are five seconds and our breakup had never happened and all I know is that I have to see him, have to have him, have to feel him fill me the way his voice is filling the emptiness inside.

“You wanna come over?” For a split second I worry about his personal obstacles to being with me, but I erase them from my mind when he asks for my address. For all I know, they are separated, I rationalize, though I know they probably aren't because it would have been in the news, but I am like water rushing to Andrew's shore, unable to do anything but be with him.

I give him directions and run around frantically trying to straighten my apartment and myself as he announces over the phone every major intersection he drives through. I feel like a small boat listening to the radar of an oncoming sub. When he pulls onto my street, Andrew sounds completely flummoxed that a parking space isn't waiting for him in front of my building. I suggest he look a bit farther down the block, but for an irrational moment I think he might leave. Maybe it has become standard in L.A. for late night trysts to include valet parking. He declares triumph as he pulls into a space, sounding astonishingly proud for so simple a feat. I tell him that I need to hang up now, but he sounds hurt, so I explain that my line has to be open for him to call me from the gate. How long had he intended for us to stay on the line? Maybe there is some new kind of in-person phone sex he wanted to try.

I can hear his footsteps coming up the stairs and with each step my heart beats faster and faster like it is doing the tarantella inside me. Then a gentle knock is on the door and I open it and Andrew comes in as naturally and majestically as the sun rising on the day. We look at each other as his brightness fills the room.

“Look at you,” he finally says. “You look even more beautiful and younger now than you used to.” I have to stop myself from running over to a mirror; maybe that erasing thing is doing more than I thought. “I bet you don't look much different than that when you're my age and then—you die.”

He makes a little laugh, I think to make me laugh, but I don't think it is funny. I am looking at his great face, and for the first time, I see the age on it and suddenly understand something I never contemplated before—what lines on a face actually lead to. Such an obvious answer—the end for us all—but one I never thought about until he spelled it out to me so clearly. I move to him and bury my face in his neck, kissing him again and again while I take off my clothes and undo his pants.

At first when he keeps his sweater on, I figure he is still warming up, but after a while I wonder if it is his body's temperature or years he is trying to adjust. As much as I want to feel his bare chest against me, the cashmere screen of his sweater becomes another layer of his skin.

Our motions are one, and a kind of multiple time thing happens where past and future and present are here with us, moving with us, coming with us into one endless space where they can always be.

An air pocket of time has filled my apartment, floating us out of the usual dimension, letting us exist in our own realm. Lying with him afterward, rubbing his back as he lies on my stomach, I realize that I had always believed that at a certain predetermined age some other, different older body would descend on top of mine, taking over who I am and rendering me completely gone. That my life and self and sex as I knew it would end and suddenly “old” would begin. That isn't true with Andrew at all. Everything is so much the way it had been, just a deeper, more layered continuum of his body with me and my body with him. I feel I am able to peek ahead at how growing older will be—experiencing through him a physical reality that I had always thought would erase me even before I was gone.

“How're Momma and Suzanne?”

“Momma's dead almost three years now.” I had wanted to call him when she died, but never could.

“Good God, how? She was young.”

“Yeah, fifty-one.”

“Jesus.” I know he is thinking that he's seven years older than that.

“Car accident. Drunk driver drove straight into her four blocks from her house. Two o'clock in the afternoon. We couldn't get her to go
anywhere once Daddy left, then a drive to the grocery store ended her life.”

“I am so sorry. How're you doing with it?”

“Fine now. The grief was horrendous, but—”