Aftermath of Dreaming

by DeLaune Michel

  She was wearing an exquisite dress that I had seen in last month’s Vogue and loved. If I remembered correctly, it cost over three thousand dollars. Though up close and live, it didn’t look as good on her slumping body and had a wine stain near the neck. What a slob. I tried to remind myself that Andrew loved my dress, but I felt small in it, silly, eighty-nine dollars on sale could not compete with that dress, even stained and slumped.

  “Where’s the bathroom?” the model asked after introductions were made.

  She was barely out of the room when the photographer looked at Andrew, turned toward him really, with his back to me like I was more kitchen counter, and said, “So what do you think about her—pretty hot, huh? She’d be nice. And perfect for you.”

  Andrew was quiet for a second, then said, “She’s a very pretty girl.” He stated it simply, like the fact it was.

  But the photographer’s words began furiously reprinting themselves in my head. “So what do you think about her—pretty hot, huh? She’d be nice. And perfect for you.” Again and again and again.

  Andrew had changed the subject; they were talking about mutual friends, but my mind was reeling.

  “Ooo, that bathroom was sssooo cold,” the model declared as she entered the kitchen’s hot glare. “My pee froze midair before it hit the john.”

  Andrew looked at me and I looked at him. I knew he knew what I was thinking and I knew he agreed. Growing up in the South, there were some things you just didn’t mention because of an implicit understanding that they weren’t interesting to anyone else, particularly to people you’ve just met, like your bodily functions. I wondered if it was her upbringing—it kind of matched how she was with the dress—or a hazard of being that beautiful, the misguided belief that every part of her, refuse included, was a fascinating subject. God, I hated her.

  “How about a little food?” Andrew said, practically clapping his hands to help break the moment. “Yvette, will you help me see what’s in the fridge?” We both knew exactly what was in the fridge, but I inwardly thanked him for an activity that put me in the hostess role.

  “Oh, we’re not hungry,” the photographer said. Did the model ever allow herself to be? “We just came from Patricia’s birthday party—Patricia Alpert.” He addressed the last part to me, which I could have believed was a nice inclusion, but instead his tone built a wall around the three of them who knew Patricia already.

  “She was so sorry you weren’t there,” he continued, his focus back on Andrew and the model. “She went on and on about how important you were to her growing up.”

  That I hadn’t known, but could have guessed. Patricia Alpert was the daughter of a legendary studio mogul and had come into success on her own as a film producer, plying her access to her father’s movie star friends.

  “And what was in that card you wrote?” the photographer asked. “She kept giggling and waving it around like she’d let us see, but she never did.”

  Andrew was standing next to me holding the refrigerator door open, though it would have stayed open on its own, and I was filling the marble counter of the island with the containers and platters that had provided our recent meal. The photographer and the model were on the other side of the island across from us and I wanted them to stay there, if not leave.

  “It said, ‘You’ll always be eight to me.’”

  I knew as he said it that Andrew meant the age, but it registered in my mind as some kind of grammatically incorrect double entendre.

  “Love that! And so did she.” This goddamn photographer-man would not shut up. “And what you gave her, it was her favorite. And she got loot, lemme tell ya, but those two dozen red roses you sent were the highlight of her evening.”

  Oh, good God.

  Roses. He sent her roses. Or rather, Patrick probably did, following a command from Andrew just that day, maybe even right after Andrew and I had talked on the phone making our plans, once he knew he wouldn’t go to Patricia’s birthday party. Andrew had had roses sent so she would know how much he cared about her even though he wasn’t there. Roses. Twenty-four tall and red and public emissaries of his love. To bloom in front of her and everyone else. And when they started to wilt, she could throw them out or press them or make potpourri and save the memory in her heart for eternity. Roses. For her and everyone to see.

  I could feel Andrew looking at me. And I could hear the hum of the photographer’s words whirling on and on like a camera motor, but roses was all I could think in my head.

  Andrew sends roses. He has sex with other women. And he was looking for a new girlfriend right in front of me.

  The bowl of borscht was sweaty from the fridge. Andrew hadn’t covered it when he put it in earlier, just pushed it toward the back, and I had wondered if the chef would find it the next day and throw it out or rescue it with plastic wrap. As I lowered the bowl to the counter, it slipped out of my hands, and a long cold wave of bright red liquid went flying over the marble island, spraying, splattering, and covering the model and the photographer and the gleaming, shining room.

  I will never know who cleaned it up. Sometimes I think Andrew couldn’t possibly have gone to bed with borscht congealing everywhere; other times I know he’d never dirty his hands with that, a damn spot that wouldn’t come out. Maybe Miss Lupine licked it up while photographer-man took pictures—Helmut Newton-esque, but real life.

  I left without a word. Walked out of the kitchen as if I heard my name being called and wanted to find the source. Got in my truck, and thankfully (or not) didn’t hit the photographer’s stupid Bentley parked badly behind me as I flew down the winding driveway hill and went out the gate that opened automatically.

  Okay, so maybe I was stupid not to see how things were for as long as I did, but I wasn’t so stupid as to ever see him again, I thought as I drove through the dark, empty streets in a blur of anger. Roses for one and a pimp-parade from another. Fuck that. And fuck, fuck, fuck him.

  I drove around for a couple of hours trying to calm myself down enough to be able to go home and sleep. I considered getting a bottle of Absolut, but realized I might not stop drinking. When I finally got home, the message light on my answering machine was flashing. It seemed to be quite a night for blinking phone lights. There were three messages from Andrew, if you could call them that. Andrew had stopped speaking on my answering machine once we started having sex, as if they’d be evidence, and I guess they would have been, but I could always tell the messages he left by a little sound he would make. A “hunh” noise. Unidentifiable if it was ever used publicly, but I knew it was him and he knew I did. That sound was on each of three messages and nothing else.

  Lying on my futon, unable to sleep—I should have gotten the goddamn Absolut—I knew without any doubt that I would never see Andrew Madden again. Fuck him.

  My phone rang the next morning at Andrew’s usual time to call. I was still in a daze. I had finally fallen asleep around five-thirty A.M., so I felt hungover even without the vodka. I lay on the futon listening to the phone ring, then my machine clicked on when I didn’t pick up. I heard a small hesitation, then a hang-up. Fifteen minutes later, it was the same: ring, ring, ring, ring, machine pick up, a hesitation, then hang-up. And on and on every quarter hour all morning long. I guess he thought it would be like that time in New York the morning after Suzy came to the Ritz-Carlton—a pseudoapology and everything back to how it was. But fuck him, I wasn’t playing anymore. He could find someone else and I was sure he would. But he was going to be fucked because no one else would love him without wanting to be in one of his stupid goddamn films, no one else would make his back feel new again, would love him in the way I had. But fuck him—he had thrown it all away.

  All that afternoon and night, my phone continued to ring. A couple of times, he left the “hunh” message, as if I hadn’t known the constant hang-ups were him. My phone continued to ring every morning at his usual time and every night around eleven. It rang and there were no messages. It rang and I didn’t pick
it up. It rang and I listened to it. It rang like that for a month and then it stopped. It returned to the rhythm it had had before, but without Andrew’s melody in it.

  When I woke up each morning, it would take me a second to awaken to the Andrew-less reality. It was like having been flung into the ocean on a small dinky craft with no tracking system and the North Star out of sight. Andrew was gone. And my apartment felt empty and quiet, and my life felt colorless, as if it had died inside of me, but had forgotten to notify my body. I carried on, but felt useless.

  I tried to hide how I felt when I was with Viv, but she noticed the plunging of my mood. I was sad not to be in a relationship, I said to her. You know, lonely, that’s all. I definitely could not tell her the real reason.

  She was already involved with someone, the choreographer she was using for her new video. “And it’s such a relief not to be with a suit!” Viv said, whenever the subject of Craig came up, though they had stayed friends, and Craig was dating around.

  A couple of months after the election-night horror, I was still crying a lot. It wasn’t getting any better trying to live without Andrew. How could I ever fall in love with another man? Who could I be with after him? Andrew was the pinnacle, perfect and complete, überman. There was nowhere to go but down. It reminded me of when I left Mississippi at eighteen and had been living in New York for a few months, I realized one day that being up there I had gotten ruined (to ever be able to live in an unfabulous place) and enlightened (as to why I never would) all at the same time. That’s what being with Andrew was like in regard to other men—ruined and enlightened all at the same time. I never said any of that to Viv, but she could hear in my voice that I was still down.

  “I have a great idea that will cheer you right up,” Viv said to me one Friday morning over the phone. “Craig wants to do a little sex-and-drugs blowout in Palm Springs this weekend and is looking for a girl to take for some one-on-one fun. I’ll call him and tell him you’ll be his date.”

  I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what she was saying. Her ex-boyfriend, for God’s sake, lent to me like a dress to lift my spirits, and I lent to him.

  “I’m not some good-time girl, Viv. I don’t want to be a weekend fuck for your ex-boyfriend.”

  “Okay, okay, hush.” I could imagine Viv’s hands flying about, trying to erase our exchange.

  “I gotta go,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  We never called each other again. A part of me missed our long talks on her comfy couch, missed discovering great places and getting our nails done. But I couldn’t and didn’t want to get over the suggestion she had made. Like I had any interest in fucking her ex-boyfriend. Or worse, in being a weekend fling for him. Something to tell the boys about on Monday morning. Was she nuts? Or was she just so used to people fucking their way to the top that she considered an offer of Craig Beltram as manna from heaven?

  A few weeks after Viv and I stopped talking, on New Year’s Eve afternoon, I met Reggie in the bookstore, and having him made Viv’s departure easier to take. And frankly, it was a better exchange.

  But I was still ravaged with a depression that I couldn’t shake. I stood for hours in the studio I’d made out of the dressing room in my apartment and tried to get back to my art, which I had ignored for months, but nothing came. I dragged myself through my waitressing shifts and my work for Bill. I lost weight and couldn’t sleep. Nothing interested me. My mind was a treadmill of thoughts and memories and imagined conversations with Andrew that kept running and running repeatedly, making me feel worse. There were hang-ups on my machine that I wanted to believe were from him, but I also didn’t want to kid myself.

  In the middle of January, in an effort to break out of my depression, to somehow jump-start my life, I threw myself into my art. I decided that if I got a proper studio, I could work. Maybe the problem was that I was trying to create at home, which held memories of Andrew. I needed someplace new, clean, free of him.

  A gallery owner who wanted to see my next batch of work for a planned group show suggested I look into the Santa Fe Art Colony for a space. Which is how I met Steve, by renting part of his studio from him. We became friends through the conversations we had at the end of our work sessions. Or his work sessions, I should say. The change of venue hadn’t done anything to change my mood or lift the block I was in. How could I create when I was feeling so dead?

  Then the fantasies of driving my truck off a cliff began. Wonderful, exultant crashes of glass and steel, me crumpling within, the sea taking over, pulling the truck and me under, and tearing us up on the hard sand floor. The Awakening’s ending with an L.A. twist—driving instead of walking into the ocean.

  I started going for long drives along the PCH. It was annoying how hard it was to find a place to drive off. I realized that the places I’d seen in movies, commercials, and magazines of craggy, terrifying cliffs at the edge of Highway 1 were all farther up the coast. That was where the drive-off points that I needed were, high above the surf with sharp rocks below and water swirling in and around, an evil accomplice with an undertow. Malibu and Ventura had nothing as dramatic and lethal as that. So I went through the motions of life while silent and graphic auto-suicides played over and over in my mind. But it was better than the constant thoughts of Andrew. Kind of.

  One afternoon in Steve’s loft after another very noticeable nonworking session for me and lots of productivity for him, he and I were drinking the green tea he had made and sitting quietly in the large concrete space’s fading light. The February day was pressing against the tall windows, its cold gray a match for the color of the floor. Steve was smoking a cigarette, and I was battling with myself about whether to ask him for one. If I was going to drive off a cliff, why worry about lung cancer?

  “I started going to a meditation group,” Steve said suddenly, as if the thoughts that were in his head were also in mine, so the dive he took into this topic wasn’t a complete surprise. “An Intro into Buddhism thing that this Vietnamese monk is doing at his apartment. It’s small, just about five of us. And it’s free. Why don’t you come? Maybe you could use a new view on things.”

  “That’s a nice way of putting it.”

  Steve laughed with me, then had a deliciously long drag off his cigarette. “We all need to shake things up every once in a while. If you don’t like it, don’t go back.”

  I told him thanks, I’d think about it, then we talked about other things until he finished another cigarette and we locked up the studio and left.

  A few weeks later, I was home one night flipping through the channels on the TV. It was just after eleven, so I figured I’d catch the evening news, which I rarely do, preferring a newspaper instead, but I turned it on and five minutes later there it was. A nice annunciation story about Andrew Madden’s newest life role via Holly McRae’s conception. Clearly adding “daddy” to the list of his achievements was a news-making event, particularly at the age of fifty-four when it happened for him. And I guess it was a lot easier for them to have it on the news than to make all those “Guess what?” phone calls to everyone. Sitting on my futon, looking at the grinning photograph of Andrew on the screen while the anchor gave the happy details, felt like getting cut over and over in my gut. As if Holly’s full womb were excavating mine. As if the conception I had felt when I first met Andrew had finally died.

  I dove into Buddhism classes with Steve. The first time I went I thought I’d try it once and forget about it, but there was so much peace there, such a sense of another way to live. And it wasn’t about changing all the outside stuff the way those stadium-renting, bestselling gurus say you have to do, this was quiet and internal. Just between you and you. I liked the independence of it.

  One night before we meditated, Dr. En Chuan said that a way to get over a resentment toward someone is to pray for them to have everything you want. That sounded dreadful and difficult enough, but why should I pray for Andrew and Holly when they had everything already? Then En Chuan went on. Y
ou don’t have to be happy about doing it, he said, in fact, you can still be annoyed at the person, but just pray that they have inner peace and happiness; everyone needs help with that. The prayers will help them, but they will help you the most.

  Driving home that night, I thought about what En Chuan had said, but I didn’t think I’d be able to do that. Those two had everything in the goddamn world, and besides, the whole point was for me to stop thinking about him. But maybe I’d try it a little. Especially since I didn’t have to be happy about doing it.

  The meditation and the few prayers I said may have helped, because the depression started lifting and the truck-crashing suicide scenarios fell away. I was able to get back to my art and start a new series of sculptures, and began dating a bit. No one I was seriously interested in, every man still seemed second-rate, but I was participating in life in a way I hadn’t for a long time. And the gallery owner who had been interested in my work wanted to put some of my new pieces in her next group show.

  So things were going okay when six months later it was announced in the newspapers—and I’m sure on TV, I just didn’t watch—that Andrew and Holly were the proud parents of a baby girl. The real daughter he had never had finally appeared. My long-ago stand-in role was officially done.

  I started making jewelry—just for birthdays and Christmas presents—crafted from materials that had seemed too delicate to put in a sculpture, along with semiprecious gems I bought downtown in the jewelry district not far from Steve’s studio. I must have been making my fifth or sixth set of earrings when I remembered something one of my teachers at the School of Visual Arts had said about my work.

  “It almost looks like jewelry.”