I went to a twelve-thirty feature on the opening Friday. Alone in the dark with my popcorn, watching Stephanie and thinking of Andrew viewing each frame, I tried to interpret the story line as some kind of allegory for them since she died at the end.
I had seen still photographs of the movie in Andrew’s kitchen one night. On a table in the corner under the windows, which the dark outside had turned into mirrors, was a light box with color slides spread out on top. Like the mess in a child’s room, it looked like it would be there for a while.
Andrew was picking the poster shot and other photos to be used for press. He pulled a chair up close to his so I’d be next to him and able to see his choices and rejects. They all had Stephanie in them. Good Christ, this woman looked like she would never die. She was above death, too full of a singular stunningness to succumb.
Andrew was making small piles; some he’d go back to, others he pushed aside. He would show me one, look at me with an eyebrow raised, then set it down in what he’d determined was its appropriate place.
At one point he said, “Do you know how long I’ve been doing this?”
I thought he meant looking at the slides that night, so I started to rub his back, which he gave himself into, but then he said, “Longer than you’ve been alive.”
Oh, that. I moved in front of him and removed my dress. The slides and Stephanie became a thing of the past.
I called Andrew when I got home from Valiant Hour to tell him how much I loved it. His voice got that formal tone it sometimes had—a combination of embarrassed, polite, and tongue-tied—but it would have been odd not to mention it, this huge thing going on in front of our eyes. And I was proud of him, which sounds silly and hubristic, but there it is. I would’ve sung his praises to the world if I could. So I said it to him, and he thanked me, simply and rather elegantly, then told me that the next couple of days were going to be crazy with Stephanie and everything.
By the end of the weekend, it was clear his film had done well. Exploded, you could say. I woke up Monday morning and began baking bread. We hadn’t seen each other in over a week, but I had known what was taking up his time, the culmination of years of his professional and private life up on the screen.
It had been a while since I had baked for him—that was in the fall, and now it was late spring. I decided to do apple bread, an old recipe of my grandmother’s that required two types of apples very finely chopped. I enjoyed the detail work. Cutting each apple slice into a precise amount of minuscule cubes that would almost melt when baked, the membranes of apple dissolving under the heat. I liked tools that create small out of large. A whole represented by a wee part. I remembered an art teacher at the School of Visual Arts who used to say, “If you want an orange, one slice is better than a whole apple.” Which was kind of how my relationship was with Andrew—a slice of him, which was better than the whole of someone else, but I knew that wasn’t going to be enough for much longer. Hopefully, he’d get rid of Stephanie since the film was finally out.
The bread was cooling when Andrew called. It was almost eleven in the morning, far past the normal time that we spoke. My apartment was warm from the oven, and the open windows were letting in dim sounds from Wilshire Boulevard along with a small breeze.
When I told him what I was doing, he asked how soon I could be there. I had been to his home only a few times during daylight hours, and this was a Monday, a brighter workday than the others, the ravages of the weekend exposed, projects left undone on Friday loudly yelling their impatient needs. In the midst of all that, I entered Andrew’s home.
Patrick answered the door, a further signal of the careercentric day. While asking how I was, he led me to the pool where Andrew was sitting on a chaise longue, phone at his ear, notepad and pen on the low table next to him.
I was holding the two loaves of bread. I thought I would go into the kitchen for a knife, but Andrew gave me a silent kiss, while taking a loaf from me. He quietly unwrapped it, and broke pieces off with his hand, silently chewing while listening to the person on the phone. He pantomimed his delight about the bread to me with his face, and reached over and rubbed my leg. I was stretched out on the chaise next to him. The sun was softer up where he lived, muted by an ocean breeze that pushed it through so the harshest rays were dispersed someplace less fortunate. Glaring white towels were stacked on a wrought-iron shelf, and the pool was a miniature Aegean Sea—a fount of pleasure for men and mermaids.
Andrew finished his call and turned to me, but before the kiss was complete, Patrick was at his side with a list.
“Hold everything until I tell you, even Stephanie,” Andrew said, without even looking at the paper Patrick proffered. “And would you put these in the kitchen, please?” He handed Patrick the bread, then stood up, and taking my hand, walked me to his bed. It felt as if we were playing hooky from school, but the teacher knew where we were.
Lunch, the result of a call Andrew made to Patrick stating what we wanted, was waiting for us two hours later when we emerged from his bedroom and entered the green-walled, dark wood dining room. Sitting at the large round cherrywood table, I thought how very Andrew it was to not have a rectangular one, bypassing the need to decide who would sit opposite him at the other end.
On the long art-filled walk back to his bed, we passed a maid running a vacuum. She immediately turned it off when she saw Andrew, her body and the machine silent as if that would make them invisible as we went by. In bed again, we napped, then I woke him with my mouth. The room was dark from the wide expanse of drawn curtains, day for night.
Afterward we went down to his screening room, past his gym, and lay on the dove-gray velvet sofa watching the films that had opened against his that past weekend. And still he took no phone calls. Patrick rang in at one point to tell him he was leaving, and I could tell that he asked if Andrew wanted to know who had called, but was told, “No, tomorrow.” We were out of town together, gone. Escaping further into home, instead of leaving, but protected as if by great distance. After viewing most of one film, then part of another, and bits of a third, we got bored with them. I was more interested in listening to his reaction to the actors and directors and writers than what was on the screen anyway. One actor he called “a very talented little girl”; an actress was hard on the eyes to watch.
We went upstairs to the kitchen and rooted around in the fridge for food. He definitely had the best “leftovers” of anyone I’d ever known. Whole geographical regions represented by bowls and containers of scrumptious cuisine. It was heaven. The large house was still except for us, other than the constantly flashing light on his phones when there was a call to remind us that the world was outside while we pretended it wasn’t.
In his bed again, only sensations of him in me and him through me and me for him were present. It was quiet in the dark, in the almost pitch-blackness, in the inky ravenness, like his Ritz-Carlton room had been that night when we were together in it five and a half years before. As I moved on top of him, Andrew’s voice said firmly in my ear, “Why are you the only woman in the world who I believe truly loves me?”
He looked me deep in my eyes when he said it, then his words kept reappearing the longer we looked at each other, coming over and over again. Lying together afterward, each sound, each syllable, each breath they were carried on traveled deep into my heart, then journeyed out along my veins where they would never be separate from me.
24
My sister’s living room has successfully completed its transmogrification into an issue of Modern Bride. Suzanne is holding forth in italicized verse while flinging yards of net around the room—the yards of net I have labored over to create a bridal-fantasy dream come true for her.
“Impossible for me to get married without a goddamn veil. This isn’t what I wanted or drew. I want froufrou without looking complicated or too…too…I’m getting married in two days and I’m not even going to have a veil.” My sister sputters to a stop, her harangue and arms winding down.
“Suzanne, I’m sorry, okay? I’ll fix it and it’ll look great, I promise.”
The veil she is holding is exactly what she drew, or as close to it as I could get. Not to mention that she already saw the damn thing, just a little less finished. I fight the urge to snatch it out of her hands, throw it on the ground, and stomp on it, screaming, “How do you like it now?” This fantasy allows my breathing to luxuriate in a long, slow exhale, as my body has tired itself out from my imagined tantrum.
Suzanne is staring at me. I have a wild worry that she can read my thoughts, but realize she is just waiting for me to continue reassuring her. “Your new and improved veil will be at the church on Saturday whenever you want.”
“Three o’clock.”
“Okay, I’ll be there, veil in tow.”
“Okay.”
“Okay. So.”
The child bride’s dress is hanging over the back of an upholstered chair, the whites of each fabric blending together into a blinding cloud. “This one’s nice,” I say, lifting the lace-covered frock.
“Coffee?” Suzanne is already leaving the room.
With cyanide for you preferably, but okay.
As I replace the child bride’s gown on the chair, I notice my maid-of-honor dress hanging on the wall, like some horrible floral flag. “Well, you cheer me up immensely,” I say out loud. I am glad that Suzanne insisted on keeping it here until today. Its proclamation of maidenhood in my apartment all these weeks would have done me in; the veil was depressing enough to have around.
Suzanne and the silver coffee service glide in like the figurehead on a ship.
“So is anyone coming?” I move our mother’s prayer book off the coffee table and sit down next to it on the couch, taking small comfort in Momma’s presence by proxy.
“Of course anyone is coming.” My sister is pouring the coffee we drank growing up; she has bags of it airmailed to her each month. The aroma of all our relatives’ kitchens every morning and most afternoons is now wafting toward me in Suzanne’s living room so far away on the West Coast. She and I were weaned on this coffee in the form of coffee-milk, which was milk heated on the stove just to the point where the whiteness of it gets really bright, then poured at the same time as the coffee into a cup already waiting with three full spoons of sugar in it. Pouring it was the trick. The milk came out of the open pot faster than the coffee did through the spout, so more milk went in, leaving a beverage that was a beautiful soft ivoried dark. Suzanne and I would sit with our coffee-milk at our relatives’ breakfast tables, listening to family news, and watching facial expressions that said everything about who was getting along with whom, while the adults drank their coffee black. It was heresy for the adults to put in sugar, much less milk. But one uncle, who had scandalized the family by moving North, sometimes returned and would tease our grandmother, his momma, by putting a broken spoon handle in his cup, stirring it a few times, then lifting it out, saying, “See, Momma, I told you, the coffee down here just eats spoons right up.” Even though it had been many years since I had to drink mine as coffee-milk, I still like the taste of sugar in it.
“Three hundred anyones are coming to the wedding. About a hundred of Matt’s relatives from San Francisco, practically his entire firm—”
“No, I meant from home is anyone coming.”
“Oh. No. They’re not.” Suzanne hands me my cup. She has put the sugar cubes in first, the way we were taught growing up so that the heat of the coffee liquefies them, thereby making a spoon unnecessary although it was still used for decorum.
“Aunt Cecile already gave us that engagement party down there, and we decided to go visit in the fall when everyone is back in town, so, no. No one’s coming out here for it.”
“Oh.”
“What?” Suzanne sounds the way she did as a child after she explained the rules of a game she made up that she worried I might not play.
The china cup I am holding has the same delicately balanced weight of hundreds of cups I have held sitting with countless family members in many living rooms as we participate in being flesh and blood. “Is this y’all’s pattern?”
My sister nods.
“It’s nice.” I can imagine her selecting the autumnal floral china, the juxtaposition of blossoms in a season near death—it is very Suzanne to have avoided the exuberance of a spring palette. Beauty with restraint. I have always liked that about her.
“No, it’s just…” I put my coffee cup down carefully, hoping the action will force me to also be delicate with the fragility I am feeling. “I mean, we have how many first and second and removed and twice-removed cousins, but honest to God, sometimes I feel completely untethered, like a wayward party balloon.”
Suzanne stirs her coffee. She must have forgotten that I am probably the only person in L.A. who knows she doesn’t need to.
“Would you like some more?” My sister reaches for the pot, my answer decided by her already.
“Not really.”
As I drive home from my sister’s house, the thought of having to redo her veil by Saturday afternoon (it’s Thursday!) makes me want to scream right now. I try to in my truck, but I feel stupid, self-conscious. For the first time, I am grateful to my subconscious for creating my scream dream, allowing me that nocturnal release. And maybe I have finally done it enough for it to end.
I turn my radio on to a station on the far right of the dial that plays classical. One of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos has just begun. That’d be nice to play at my wedding.
What?
Oh, God, no. Do not have thoughts like that. The last thing I need is some unfulfilled bridal fantasy following me around. I will make this veil for Suzanne, be in her wedding, and then consign the entire frightening social institution to the far back regions of my mind where it belongs.
I have my jewelry to think about, like remembering to call Roxanne when I get home to see if she is happy with the order I delivered three days ago, and how could I ever have a husband when Michael won’t even spend the night? Of course, Andrew made me leave his bed, too, the jerk. Jesus, I never thought I’d say that he and Michael were alike. Okay, Michael has had to leave those nights because of work, and that could change. Yeah, like him changing the format of his station to conservative talk radio. I suddenly realize that the many messages coming from him—committed, not, maybe, too-soon-to-tell—are all the same, just like the different shows he broadcasts, supposedly unique in themselves, but really it’s only Michael’s voice getting through. All Michael all the time without ever really knowing him.
I wonder if one reason I haven’t been tons more upset about Michael leaving in the middle of most nights is that I have breakfast with Reggie every morning. Maybe that “nature abhors a vacuum” thing isn’t working for me romancewise because a big part of my intimate/love area is taken up with my male best friend. That’s worrisome. I wonder if he has ever thought that.
Reggie calls as I am three hours into reconfiguring Suzanne’s veil. The message I left for him after I called Roxanne when I got home has elicited an unusually fast response.
“She’s a bride, honey, i.e., nuts,” Reggie says, after I regale him with my terrible redo-the-veil tale. “Plus, I think most people go a little crazy when they can be demanding in an obscurely specific way. They think they’re being creative, meanwhile, they act like a child.”
“I guess I’ve been lucky so far with my commissions, not having to deal with this. Jesus, Reggie, if this is what you go through with your clients, I think I’d throw myself off a bridge.”
“It’s a little easier to take when they’re paying you a lot. All you’re getting out of this is—”
“Freedom from sisterly guilt. A small thing.”
“No pressure there. Honey, it’s going to be beautiful; everything you do is. And if she can’t get past her hysteria to appreciate it, there’s nothing you can do.”
“Thanks, I just don’t want her perpetually hating me because I ruined her wedding.”
Reggie always knows exactly what I need to hear. He is able to talk me down off the emotional ledges I climb up on better and faster than anyone else.
“Is Michael going with you?” I am shocked that he asked and can hear in his voice that it is a kind of reconciliation. I know his face looks sweet right now, the way it does when he is about to give me a hug and sing one of his funny made-up songs.
“Yeah, he is.”
“You’re going to have a great time and the veil’s going to be perfect.” Reggie sounds so confident of this that I feel renewed energy to tackle Suzanne’s headpiece. “Breakfast mañana?”
Manaña is now just a few hours away. I have labored though the night: filling in, taking out, starting over, and covering up, but the headpiece has decided not to work. I have encountered this before when I was doing sculptures with certain metals and various found objects, this refusal to become something else, but none of those had a bride waiting for them who also happens to be my sister. I know that inanimate objects are not alive, but they do, like us, have mass and weight comprised of atoms with space, and they can be pliable or irrefutably static, completely resistant to change. Like us. Or me sometimes, actually. Not changing myself, or refusing to see that something—like this damn headpiece—or someone isn’t going to, either. Like Michael, let’s be honest.
Aftermath of Dreaming Page 26