Aftermath of Dreaming (9 page)

I sat on my bed. I looked at the phone. I worried that the ringer had inexplicably died. I considered going into Carrie's room—not Ruth's, she somehow would know—to use her phone to dial mine, but what if Andrew happened to call at exactly the same time, got a busy signal, and never called again? It wasn't worth the risk.

I had forgotten to phone Momma that morning because calling Andrew had taken up all of my mind's space, but the week before when I rang her, she had just gotten home from mass, as I had known she would, and was preparing her lunch. She sounded surprised to hear from me, like she always did, as though I hadn't been calling every Sun
day since I moved. Like she'd had a daughter once, but that was in the distant past, though given enough time, she would play along in this pretend parental role. Every week, I would ask the same questions, desperately trying to come up with new and improved ones that would inspire conversation. Few did.

Though one time I did get to hear a few sentences about the art league tea she would not be attending that afternoon. Not that she hadn't been invited. My momma was famous for changing her mind. No event was etched in stone; any and all could be canceled, missed, reneged on at a moment's notice. Clothes and/or fatigue were the usual reasons. “I just need to
sleep
!” she'd say, as if the occasion had been specifically coordinated to conflict with her REM time, or the outfit so laboriously planned had unaccountably fallen from grace.

I didn't want to read a book or fix a meal or do anything really for fear that my involvement in a task would somehow send repeated signals of “unavailable” to Andrew, reaching him no matter where he was and preventing him from calling me.

 

An hour and a half went by. Still I waited for Andrew to call. I felt hungry and internally cold, even though it was hot as Hades outside. I stared out the open window in my room that led to a fire escape overlooking an alleyway between buildings that were shouldered closer together than any I had ever seen. Refuse and trash from decades past formed a giant mound. Had it ever been nice? Or did this neighborhood immediately sink into disrespect and despair, fulfilling an unspoken obligation for the city to cover all points on the socioeconomic spectrum. Smells of pork and spices from the neighbors' all-day meal drifted in. On summer weekends, with music blasting, they used a makeshift grill on their fire escape to barbecue all kinds of meat in sauces I was sure I'd never tasted. A couple of weeks after moving in, I had told Suzanne on the phone what it was like—she in Beverly Hills living with her boyfriend—and she had sent me a letter exhorting me to embrace the
Puerto Rican culture and indulge myself in their music and food. My sister, sometimes, is out of her mind. My neighbors had as little interest in my embracing their culture as I did. I felt alien enough in New York City without adding a language I couldn't speak, food I couldn't digest (had she forgotten I was vegetarian?), and music I couldn't dance to. Beneath the clamor of their barbecue, my apartment was still. The cat was probably sleeping in Ruth's loft, gravitating naturally to the spot she was wanted least.

 

Two more hours went by. Carrie still had not returned home. Ruth was burrowing in her room while Chinese food aromas and Mitzi Gaynor's voice wafted from her confines. The cat had been duly ejected. I was hungrier. And felt stale, like a piece of bread taken out to make a sandwich then forgotten, my surfaces resistant instead of soft.

“What are you doing?”

I had known it would be Andrew when I said hello. Had known it would be him when the phone finally, thankfully, mercifully rang a little after nine
P.M
. But his voice sounded altered from before; it was on a more intimate note than our first phone call had ended on.

I didn't know what to say. “Waiting for you” or “Hoping to die if you didn't call” did not seem appropriate, though accurate they were. Nor did I have anything fabulous, exciting, or even mildly interesting to report from the four and a half hours I had just lived through without him. There was nothing really, so a gap appeared on the line like a Nixonian tape, just blank.

“Umm, I'm…” I got that out, then noticed how similar they sounded in my accent while hoping more words would magically materialize, but Andrew rescued me, ending the conversational flummox.

“Why aren't you here yet?”

He said it so seriously that for a second I forgot he had only just called and wondered at my own delinquency before I remembered the sequence of events.

“I will be.”

“Will be?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Good.”

We hung up.

 

The cab driver didn't flinch when I gave him the Ritz-Carlton's address, so I tried to borrow his nonchalance. Taking a taxi was extravagant enough without getting all I could from it. I wasn't surprised that I was nervous; what surprised me was that I wasn't nervous in any way I had ever been before. I felt keyed up and able to notice each moment and detail as if I were reading microfilm, so much information compacted in such a small space, yet able to be seen.

After crossing the iron curtain of my neighborhood and shuttling down Columbus Avenue, we passed brightly beckoning restaurants with clusters of customers in front talking and gesturing. They looked crucial to the neighborhood, an integral part of this Sunday summer night, sustaining the avenue as it stretched south toward Midtown.

The Ritz-Carlton Hotel announced itself in gold letters above an ever-revolving door and again with its logo, the regal profile of a lion's head, on a red carpet that flaunted itself across the sidewalk to the curb.

“Welcome to the Ritz-Carlton,” the doorman said, as he held open the cab door while I counted out the bills, then put them in the driver's hand. He asked if I had any bags in the trunk, and I wished for a moment that I did. Luggage to spend my life with Andrew.

I had to request his room number. He hadn't told me on the phone and I had forgotten to ask, but as the front desk clerk called to get Andrew's permission for me to ascend, I realized they wouldn't have allowed me to walk in and go straight up without announcing myself first anyway. I wondered if this was the sort of experience that induced all
those restaurant customers to speak to me in the coat-check room before they headed upstairs. I immediately felt less churlish toward them.

The elevator I took to the twenty-eighth floor was filled with an empty quiet. I had never been here before. Not just here-here, in the hotel, but Here, with everything that entailed. There was no reference in my life for it, so my mind had no idea what to think. It was experiencing a rare phenomenon, the completely new event, and my lack of knowledge of the circumstances I found myself in felt freeing. There was nothing for me to do. Nothing for me to think. Nothing but to give in. A bell chimed, the doors glided open, and I was released into a small hallway that contained the entrance to Andrew's penthouse door. I knocked.

I could hear footsteps approaching after what was probably a three-Mississippi wait, if I had been counting, which I wasn't, but I knew it instinctingly becase of all those games of hide-and-seek I had played with the other neighborhood kids, hands covering closed eyes, counting off numbers plus our state's name up to ten to give everyone time to find a spot. I had a sudden vision of a young Andrew being a master at that game.

Then he opened the door and we looked at each other without saying a word. It was different seeing him after our journeylike phone call and the subsequent hours I'd spent with him in my head. As his eyes looked at mine, it was clear that a part of him was all for me, as all of me was for a part of him, like a branch's relationship to the trunk of a tree.

“Hi.” He barely said it; the word was fractionally formed.

I moved into his arms. Our embrace was the ending and the beginning and we stood still in the middle. Andrew had such solid arms. Arms you wanted to detach and keep and connect around you again and again, an armor of amour, every bit of sinew and muscle and skin involved in his holding. And tall. His shoulder was at the bridge of my nose, providing many options to lay my cheek against. I forgot we had to let go.

He kept one hand across the small of my back as he walked me into the suite's large living room. And I had been imagining him in one hotel
room. Good Lord. At least I had been right about the Yankee-luxury part; this definitely was more extravagant than the Monteleon. It looked like an extremely upscale apartment vacuumed free of “home.” Andrew steered me to a yellow silk couch that I sank into as we sat down. He took my chin in his hand and turned my head this way and that. It felt more supported than it did on my own neck.

“Look at you. You're perfect.”

I really felt I was not, but his voice was so strong and radically different than the one in my head that the shouts of protest became disarmed.

“Do you know how many beautiful women I've seen? You—are—per-fect.”

And he started talking, saying long things, trains of thought about himself that had to do with me, and his words became physical, bathing me, swirling around, lulling me into a state of relaxed happiness I had never known.

Then he paused for a moment and looked at me. “I'm going to be in your life for a very long time. I've been waiting for someone like you.” And he paused again, making sure I had heard.

“Thank God,” was what I thunderously heard in my head. Thank God, thank God, thank God. Because the empty space in me perfectly matched the empty space in him, and for some inexplicable reason, the two empties together made one whole, like that weird math rule where you subtract twice, but still end up getting an addition, which in class I could never understand, but now here it was in the form of him.

The sex lasted a couple of hours. I undressed in the living room's light before walking into his bedroom, disrobing as easily as removing a cap that had squished my hair for too long. We were on the bed, a bed whose multitudinous softness I couldn't before have imagined, and we moved together in the immense dense darkness that only hotel rooms have. I liked the blankness of the dark, the sole reliance on form and smell and sound and skin.

At one point, Andrew reached over me and turned on a lamp. I had no idea which way we were on the bed and was surprised at how accu
rately he had located the switch. In the golden light, he looked into my eyes.

“This is how you know I'm not just fucking you, that I'm making love to you.” And his eyes stayed on mine as he moved.

Then he nestled against me, saying something small and low at the bottom of my ear.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“No I didn't or I wouldn't've said ‘what.' What'd you say?”

“I said…I said…” More movement ensued. “I said…I love you.” He sounded about to choke.

Then the edges of my body disappeared, the room tilted, lifted, and opened up until there was only warmth and light and motion and Andrew's head buried in my neck.

 

Afterward, while he lay still on top of me, I rubbed and kneaded and plied his back, the big muscles of his public life and dizzy-heights career that were hard and interlocked. Encouraging his torso to release into gravity, I felt his rib cage expand, his lower back drop, and with a deep expulsion of breath, he relaxed into me.

 

It was almost one
A.M.
, just the beginning of Monday morning, and Andrew was sitting on the side of the bed, wearing a fresh black T-shirt, and shaking out his jeans. He had decided it was time we leave the bed, the bed it felt like we had spent three incredible years in during the two and a half hours we were there.

“What do you want to eat?”

I was in New York City with Andrew Madden so there were no limits to the answer for that question. The gleanings of the city had never been offered so openly to me, but I was distracted by trying to find my clothes. They appeared to have attempted some sort of freedom run
during the interval I wasn't held in their restraint. By the time I recovered them, dressed, and walked back into the bedroom, Andrew was reading the sports page.

“What did you like the best?” I said, standing before him.

He looked at me over his reading glasses, his right brow heightening the surprise and question in his gaze.

“No, no, not…” I glanced at the rumpled sheets to finish the sentence, as I blushed. “I meant, when you played sports in college, like you told me you did, what'd you like the best?”

“Oh. For a second there, I wondered where the sweet Southern girl I was with had gone. Football. I liked football the best. But they all were great.”

I didn't understand football. All I knew was that Daddy had gone to Tulane and screamed bloody hell whenever the LSU Tigers scored a point.

“Now, what are we going to get you to eat?”

“Pasta and vodka.” I had come up with that menu selection hours before, while sitting on my bed during one of the interminable intervals in which I had kept deciding that surely in the following fifteen-minute period, Andrew would call. That was all so far away now. My closet of a bedroom, the sitting and waiting, my mind chilling itself to keep from processing the loud menacing question, “What if he doesn't call?” I was safe from that now, ensconced in Andrew's glow.

“Pasta with vodka sauce?”

“No.” That sounded odd. “Just…pasta, somehow, and vodka, like to drink.” I hoped the vodka part didn't bother him since I was underage in New York.

“I see.”

Andrew briefly disappeared inside a closet larger than my bedroom. “Do you like this jacket?” he said, when he came out.

He had put on what is generally referred to as a sports coat, though that phrase has always made me think of the burgundy polyester numbers I'd seen at the business conventions my daddy sometimes made appearances at in Gulfport. Andrew's was of an entirely different breed. It
was a silk cashmere, and each thin thread was a separate shade in a spectrum of mid to dark gray to black, creating an effect of a muted charcoal gloss fitted precisely to his frame.

“It's stunning.”

“An old girlfriend of mine gave it to me.”

I wondered who she was and how much of him and his life had been hers. I was envious of what the gift implied. She had been able to buy him a jacket, a perfect one for his body and wardrobe and style. I imagined her—exquisite—sitting in a quiet, elegant store, having the time and money and opportunity to give him this gift that had lasted past their relationship's end. I wanted to give him something like that.

“Let's go.”

“Where?” I knew New York continued into every hour of any night, but now that my hunger depended upon it, I doubted it would sufficiently come through.

“I know a place, don't you worry.”

 

Walking on the quiet, vacant streets with Andrew was having him enter my dreams. The buildings I so often passed alone in similar dark emptiness now saw me with him. I felt a novel lack of need for their reliable stability. The path he was taking us on, unbeknownst to him, was a backward retracing of the route I took as I walked home from work, before catching the Broadway northbound bus the rest of the trip up. Andrew turned us right out of the hotel, heading east along Central Park South, then made another right onto Fifth. The marquee of the Paris movie theater boasted a British film that was getting much attention for its “searing portrayal of human darkness.” A smoldering blonde, cigarette dangling to ensure the point, peered broodingly from the glass-encased poster.

“Didn't see it—that's not my cup of tea,” he replied to my question about it.

I wasn't much interested in the film myself, but I would have enjoyed hearing his personal review so I could see it with his words interpreting the images, like his private subtitles in my head.

Fifth Avenue widened in Andrew's presence. Buildings sat back; the sidewalk softened. New York turned itself into a reverent country for him.

 

P. J. Clarkes' on Third Avenue was barely inhabited when we entered. A white-aproned bartender stood still as a statue in front of the beveled glass behind the bar. Portraits of Lincoln and J.F.K. stared down silently above him. A lone man sat next to a dark wood wall with a pitcher of beer, a mug, and the
Daily News
on the table before him. Andrew and I walked past them without disturbing their gaze, and into the empty dining room where Andrew settled me down at a large round table.

“That table there is for parties of four or more.” A waiter was striding toward us, delivering his directive to Andrew's back. “You're gonna have to move to—”

Andrew slowly turned his head. It was like being inside a cartoon; the waiter was immediately defeated by seeing who our superhero was.

“Oh, I'm so sorry, Mr. Madden, awfully sorry, sir, I couldn't see it was you, sir.”

Andrew didn't say a word.

“Let me get you some menus, sir, and anything you'd be wanting to drink?”

“She will have a vodka…” Andrew paused for me to finish my request.

“Tonic with a lemon twist.”

“Any particular vodka that would be?” the waiter asked.

I had never ordered a brand drink before. When I went to bars in New Orleans with my friends, I'd bring enough money for one drink, figuring that by the time it was empty, I'd have met someone who'd buy me more, but those guys only bought house brand. Andrew and the waiter were waiting.