Aftermath of Dreaming (35 page)

“And she has great design ideas for my script. Her area is early twentieth-century American, so there's lots of crossover, aesthetically speaking. And we've been working on it with the director for the past few weeks.”

I feel simultaneously shut out and relieved. “I'm so glad you found someone.”

“Thanks, Yvette.” He sounds defensive, embarrassed, and proud. After we hang up the phone, I realize how much this needed to happen and for how long. I just wish it wasn't making me feel so empty.

I take my coffee and oatmeal to the studio, walking through the living room and doing everything I can to not look outside the windows. I might have to get some goddamn draperies. My studio is practically the only habitable room in my apartment now. I put some discs on the CD player, and let my computer boot up while I start eating my breakfast. None of my customers responded to the brochure I sent them, but July is usually a slump for jewelry, though my bank accounts need money fast, thanks to the outlay I had when I bought the jet and materials for my new line. After a few bites, I push the oatmeal away. Losing myself
in making this jewelry is the sustenance I want right now. I open the safe and pull out trays of tourmaline, citrine, topaz, peridot, gold chains, and most wonderfully, jet. The pieces of jet lie on the black felt-lined tray like a glistening glass of water floating on a wave, shining and sparkling bright against the same color, as if they alone own it. I stack the trays of semiprecious stones and gold on one side of my desk, Howlin' Wolf is in full moan, and I put the jet in front of me, picking up the largest piece. It is warm to the touch, not cool like gold and stones are, but warmer even than my hand, like someone physically larger enveloping me in a hug.

The decision to call Andrew
must have formed on its own during the few hours I slept because it was clear as soon as I woke up this morning. It is so completely what I must do that no part of my mind is even bothering with “Should I or shouldn't I?” The only question is “What time?” As I pour water into the coffeemaker, I decide that later mid-morning is probably the best time to catch him on his cell phone away from his house.

I drink a few cups of coffee to kill some time. I try to concentrate on work, but all I can think about are the numbers of Andrew's cell phone and when I can dial them, so I take a long bubble bath, letting the cool water be a contrast to the early August heat.

Finally, it is eleven—that should be late enough. I go into the living room—my studio's too distracting—and sit on the couch with my back to the ruined tree. I rest my hand on the phone for a moment, as if Andrew will get the message and call me himself, then I dial his number.

“Hello.” Andrew's voice enters my body, nestling among all the other words it has sown inside me.

“Hey, it's Yvette,” I say softly, as if my lowered tone will lessen the possibilities of it being a bad time to call.

“Are you all right?” Andrew sounds frantically concerned.

“Yeah, I'm fine.”

“Where have you been?”

“Here, what do you mean?”

“I've been calling and calling you and all I'd get is a message that your phone's been disconnected.”

“Disconnected? No, it's what I'm calling you on.”

“Your phone hasn't been disconnected?” Then he confidently spiels off a number to me.

Andrew is shocked when I tell him that that's the number for my old apartment in Beverly Hills, where I lived when we were seeing each other years ago. He doesn't write numbers down, just memorizes them, so when he got back from New York last spring, he remembered my old apartment's phone number and had been calling that one.

“And I thought you just didn't want to speak to me anymore,” I say, which makes him laugh, letting me know how impossible that would be.

“And I thought you'd gotten married to some really jealous guy who made you give up your old friends.”

What is it with him about me getting married? And in six months? Then I remember how fast that happened for him.

“Are you okay?”

“My daddy died.”

“Oh, God. I'm so sorry, when?”

I explain how I found out and what Suzanne told me.

“And you hadn't seen him at all since he took off, had you?”

“No.”

“How are you doing about it?”

“Umm.” Tears form in my eyes, and I realize that I haven't let them out to anyone since it happened. While I cry, Andrew's silence holds me like his strong arms. “It's…hard sometimes. Some hours I just lie on
the floor and listen to music because I'm too exhausted to do anything else, and I can't think about anything else except that I have no idea where he is, not that I have for sixteen years, but this is worse because when he was in Florida, I could imagine getting a private detective and finding him, or going there myself. Something. But now…And then I'll be fine and I can work and do stuff, then it hits me again. And I'm not sleeping much at night. It's like that.”

“Yeah, I remember. When my daddy died it was the summer before I went to Malaysia for a film.”

“Right before we met.”

“You're kidding.” We are quiet for a moment as if that time in our lives has come into the rooms with us. “Yeah, I guess it was. Well, the way Lily acted, you would have thought the Chinese food hadn't arrived. She couldn't understand why I was so upset. She was annoyed it affected me.”

“Wow, that's pretty harsh.”

“I think about him every day,” Andrew says. “Mostly small things. How he always drank his orange juice after his breakfast—not with the meal. How he'd fold his newspaper like he was riding a train when he was sitting on the couch. That's what comes back. Not the big moments you were sure mattered.”

“I think about mine every day, too, but it's not comforting. It's hard for me to feel that his spirit is benevolent toward me.”

“That will change. Give it a while. Your relationship with him isn't over just because he's dead. It continues and gets better, that's what I've found. If anything, now it can be what it never was. I bet in a few months, you'll feel that he's with you all the time in a way you never could feel before.”

“I hope that's true.” I am silent for a moment as I try to imagine what it'd be like to feel my father with me, to finally have that emptiness filled. “God, it's good talking to you. I've been wanting to tell you.”

“You, too, sweet-y-vette. I'm glad you called. I've got some people in the next room waiting for me. Give me your number and I'll call you later, okay, honey?”

After I hang up, Andrew's words about my father take on their own life and are routing themselves to the place inside me where the grief has lived. They attach themselves to it, softening its hard, jagged edges with their presence. My grief is no longer alone. It will always hold Andrew's experience and words of comfort, so that when its sadness hits, it will be tempered by this hope and nonaloneness I finally feel.

 

My eyes are open wide staring at a large man dressed in black standing over me in my living room. His arms are reaching out, about to grab and attack, then it stops. My scream continues after the image fades, then the nightmare is truly over. The man has disappeared like a special effect in a film, but a horror film I produce and project in the air next to me, no screen needed, the imagined intruder's body blocking out the real wall behind him, until he
poofs
goodbye as magically as he appeared.

 

“None of your jewelry sold in those other stores,” Linda Beckman says, peering over her glasses at me as she sits behind her cluttered and significant desk. “Though I guess you know that. Well, let's see the new line.”

There's a nice opening for this sales call, but I refuse to let her words shake me. I pull the samples out of my bag that is on the floor next to me in Linda's extremely cream office. “I'm working in jet now,” I say as I place the trays in front of her. “But still with gold and semiprecious stones. It's a similar concept to the pearls, just a different material.”

Linda pushes the glasses up her nose and begins lifting jewelry out of the trays. She holds a piece up, scrutinizes it, puts it back, and continues that way for a while. Her expression is inscrutable as she sorts through the trays like it's so much overripe fruit.

I am about to say, “Well, thanks for looking; maybe my next line,” when Linda picks up a bracelet and puts it on. She holds her arm out briefly in front of her, then earrings, a necklace, and a pin join her outfit.
She stands up and walks over to one of the framed black-and-white catalogue photographs, checking her reflection in the glass. I wonder why she doesn't just buy a mirror.

“Love them,” she says, spinning around and facing me. “The jet is very fresh this way. I love that you're using it for fall and not that black-and-white-for-summer look; I'm so sick of that. Okay, we'll do an order for this store, and if it's a hit, we'll do a shipment to New York. And that one you'd get paid for.”

I look at her in confusion.

“It's a charge back. We already paid you for the stock that sat in our stores, so you'll get it back and we'll get your new line in exchange for our money that you've kept. The old stuff will be shipped to you; you should get it next week. And we'll need a check from you for P and A for this line. I want these samples rushed over for the shoot.”

Driving away from Greeley's, or Greedy's as I now think of them, I don't know if I should be elated or crushed. I've heard stories from other designers about the department stores playing hardball, I just never thought it would be this hard. Why didn't Greeley's mark the damn jewelry down in a July Fourth sale? Because this way, I realize, they don't lose a dime, the crooks. It's like some terrible wedding contract where the man can keep switching brides under his same vows until he hits upon one he decides to like.

All right, this is the reality of playing in this league, so get a game plan. For this order to be ready for the late-September delivery that Linda wants, I'll have to buy the rest of the materials tomorrow and immediately get them into production, which means that in thirty days I'll have to pay Dipen and the vendors with no money coming in, so I am looking at being in the red with a checking account that is sliding to zero. Fuck. I'll have to sell all of the pieces they are shipping back, plus get some commissions fast, if I want to pay my bills. I'll call Rox, and if she doesn't want it, I'll hit every shop on every boulevard where there are boutiques. Something will come up. I hope.

 

Andrew and I talk pretty frequently when he is in his car or at his office behind a closed door. Small moments that bind us are etched out of the day, a separate time away from the rest of our lives. But it isn't enough. A hole has been opened in me, a huge gaping desire that bellows and yells from the moment I wake up and continues through my day and into my sleep where, when I'm not screaming, I'm dreaming of him. Being with him, seeing him. Him, him, him. The phone calls we have quench it while making it worse. The days that he doesn't call—I can't call him because of his “situation,” there's a euphemism—drag on and on like some dreadful boot camp where if I just live through the next grueling task, then release will come in the form of his voice on the line, but it never does. Until he calls the next day and I am able to breathe again, but it's all I can do not to say, “I have to see you right now. I am going to die if I don't. Get over here.” Instead I ask as casually as I can if he can come over, and the answer is always the same. He wants to and will try, but things are crazy right now, then his voice goes down deep inside me to exactly where I want him to be and he talks to me there and I talk to him from there and it's like he's with me and I'm with him and we are together in this perfect place created by our voices that are one and moving together, moving with each other until he and us and this is the only reality there is and it takes over my entire body.

 

“Broken, Reggie. Probably in transit because it looks like the goddamn salesclerks just threw my jewelry into a box and sent it off. They wrap socks better than this.” I am in my living room with the phone cradled against my shoulder as I look through the boxes that just arrived from Greeley's. “Okay, some of the pieces have bubble wrap around them, but not all. It's a fucking mess. I want to kill these stupid people.”

“Call that Linda woman and yell.”

“Oh, God, I can't do that. This is like the Mafia I'm dealing with.
You play by their rules or they cut you out. I've asked around, and all the department stores are like this with small, individual vendors. It's their retail world; we just want to sell in it.” I sit on the floor with my back against the couch in the middle of boxes and invoices and bubble wrap and jewelry that is whole and jewelry that is broken.

“Fuck that. Don't let them have your stuff anymore.”

“That's really not a solution. It's like…Look, you're letting someone else direct your script even though that was your dream because you'd rather see it on the big screen than only on your computer.” I automatically look out the window to be comforted by the tree, but am confronted with its brutalized form, so I quickly turn away. “It's the price of doing business with these people.” I pull out a single pearl earring from the bottom of a box; its match is nowhere near. “Oh, good Christ, one of the pearls even looks pocked—is this insane?”

“What are you going to do?”

“Throw myself off a cliff. No, I'll try to sell the pieces that are okay and reuse the broken ones. Melt down the gold; put the gems in other things. You know, move on.”

 

Spending all day going in and out of boutiques on Robertson Boulevard to show them my jewelry reminds me of going around to art galleries years ago in New York City. Cold-calling sucked then and still does. It is the first week of September, and all the managers have told me that they already have their fall inventory; can I come back in January? I want to blow everything off and drive up to Andrew's office, tell his assistant that I have an appointment, he wouldn't say no, walk in, get on his desk, and dive into Andrew-sex-oblivion. Oh, God do I want to do that. I need to do that. He called last night about eleven, and it was like all those times years ago when my phone ringing at that hour meant the coast was clear, Stephanie and her fabulous self had left, and I could go up to his house and crawl into bed with him. For a second last night, I thought I would see him because it felt so much like it had been, us connected and seeing each other all the time, but he had to go home.

I almost close my eyes as I walk down the sidewalk on Robertson because thinking of Andrew makes me lose myself in its deliciousness, but I need to get back on track. I'll get a bite to eat, and drive out to Santa Monica. Maybe the stores there in true beach fashion are more relaxed in their ordering.

I find myself in front of the white and bright SoHo-style café, and as I push open the door, the smell of good food and the sight of people wearing clothes that were probably bought last week envelop me. Coltrane is playing at a pleasant volume and underneath it are the sounds of conversations from the packed tables in the dining area and the customers asking about dishes in the display case. After a good five minutes in line, I order a cappuccino and a grilled-vegetable sandwich. I have paid, gotten my lunch, and am walking outside to sit at one of the wrought-iron tables before I realize that I was hoping I would see that guy who helped me before. At an audition probably.