The tray of jewelry on his lap holds rings of everlasting gold with wedding-white pearls, as he talks about what could have been for us.
Lying in bed after Andrew has gone, I think about how I was back then, and I finally understand his inability to commit to me. I wouldn’t have fit into his world at all. I would have become a kind of mute appendage of him. Would never have discovered creating jewelry and the joy it brings me. So in a weird and wonderful and terrible way, maybe that was for the best. But I go to sleep with the words “if we were where we are now, but just back then…” filling my head.
When I awaken the next morning, every inch of my apartment is filled up with him. He’s only been here twice, but in the rooms where there aren’t memories of us, I have memories of the fantasies of us, so it’s all here—a kind of parallel life that happens as soon as I open my eyes to the day.
Andrew and I talked every day for two weeks after that night, but then he went to New York, so the phone calls have stopped for the past week, and since he’s with his family, I know we can’t talk, but this silence will end as soon as he comes back to L.A. I hope to God that it’s soon because I am about to lose my mind not speaking to him. Fortunately, I’ve been busy getting the order ready for Hawaii, though not distracted enough to not think about him every minute.
I am stuck in four-thirty eastbound traffic on the 10. Cars have surged to a stop, but sitting here isn’t bothering me too much because I just shipped off my jewelry to Greeley’s receiving warehouse to then be sent to Hawaii in time for my early March delivery. Greeley’s has a warehouse in west Texas where every item must go to be processed, then directed to the appropriate store. Even when my jewelry was going across town to Beverly Hills, it first had to make a journey to Texas before it could be shipped here. Getting the order inventoried, packed, and shipped to Greeley’s specifications was like doing a tax return with lots of those frightening schedule forms. I wish Andrew were back in town so he could come over tonight to celebrate with me—or even just call me, so I can tell him about it. How long is this damn New York trip going to last? I wish I could fly down to Honolulu and see my jewelry in the store. But even with the check for the sales in Beverly Hills, the amount of inventory I just invested in for this order was large, so I should be conservative until it blows out of the Honolulu store—please, God. The cars in front of me have barely moved. I suddenly realize that I’m not stuck in traffic—I am traffic.
I am also famished. I skipped lunch to make my deadline, so as I inch toward the Robertson Boulevard exit, I decide to get off and find some food.
Daydreaming about my jewelry being in every Greeley’s store—there are nine across the country, dotting the map like bright lights of style—keeps me driving north on Robertson and forgetting my hunger until I’m in the fashionable shopping district almost at Beverly Boulevard. I notice that across from Wisteria and its eternally sun-drenched patio is a café I’ve never seen before. I pull into a parking spot—a miracle on this street after eleven A.M.—and walk in.
The café’s interior could have been airlifted from SoHo. There are tons of that very tiny white tile with deep blue accents and heaps of stainless steel. I walk toward the glass-fronted deli case and see to my right a section of white-clothed tables set with deep blue linen napkins and yellow roses in French jelly jars. Light streams in through tall windows that have red geraniums growing in weathered window boxes. Every dish in the deli case is gorgeous. Salads and seafood and tarts and pastas and vegetables with incredible things done to them—the kind of food I like to think I will someday make, but doubt I ever will. There isn’t another person in sight. It’s that funny nontime for restaurants between lunch and dinner, and as I gaze at the different delicacies, I wonder if they are even open.
“See anything you like?”
I look up into clear blue eyes refracting the light. The man who owns them is tall with dirty-blond hair and looks like he came from the Brittany coast with his strong jaw and cheekbones, rugged but refined.
“Everything looks amazing and I’m starved. What do you suggest?”
“The artichoke pesto penne is really good.”
“Sounds great.”
“You like salad? I’ll put some greens with walnut and mandarin orange in for you.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t worry about it.” As he arranges large portions in a takeout box, his strong back and arms are apparent under the white of his chef ’s shirt. I look back in the deli case as if fascinated by its contents to keep from staring at him.
“So, when did this place open?”
“Three and a half weeks ago. Do you work around here?”
“No, I design jewelry. My line’s not in these stores, but Greeley’s just picked it up.”
“That’s great—that’s a big deal.”
“Oh, thanks.” I look up into his eyes, and they are waiting for mine to join them. For a moment, I have to remember to breathe. “Well. So, what do I owe you?”
“That’ll be six dollars and eighty-nine cents.”
As I try to figure out if that’s right—according to the prices on the large blackboard, it seems he only charged me for one item—I discover that I’m out of cash, so I pull out a credit card.
“Our machine’s not hooked up yet.” His eyes are still on mine like they belong there.
“Oh, God, well, this is embarrassing, but I’m out of cash and left my checkbook at home. I’m sorry you went to all that trouble.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He puts two pieces of baguette into the bag with the food, folds it closed, and hands it to me. “Here.”
“I can’t let you do that, bosses and profits and all.”
“Take it. Enjoy your dinner.”
I will if I think about you during it, I think as I take the bag from his large, strong hand. “That’s incredibly sweet of you. Thanks so much.”
And he smiles at me. A tangible smile. Like it could leave with me, too.
As I pass the café’s large front window, I want to see him one more time, so I look inside, pretending it is for another thank-you in the form of a wave. His eyes are already on mine and he lifts his hand to wave before I do.
It has been five weeks since I have seen Andrew and three weeks since we have spoken on the phone. Every day I have to resist not calling his cell phone. He’ll call when he’s back, I keep telling myself, just like after his last trip. But maybe he’s already back and isn’t going to call. No, he wouldn’t do that. He’s never done that. But maybe he’s decided he can’t see me anymore, which I guess is best for me and definitely for his wife, but to not even call isn’t like him, but maybe that’s how he ends things. No, he’s just still in New York on some crazy extended trip and I’ll hear from him. Please God.
Every day I force myself into my studio to work on commissions, or I drive downtown in a daze of Andrew thoughts to pick up work from Dipen. I found a woman to do a Web site for me, so I need to get pictures of the jewelry together and write copy and I still need to go over Greeley’s arcane accounting for the Beverly Hills sales, not to mention see how Honolulu is doing, but my mind is a constant blur about Andrew. I spend lots of time staring at the phone, like it is my mortal enemy for not ringing with him at the other end of the line, while wishing it would and thinking magical thoughts, like “In this next ten minute period, Andrew will call.” Or “If I think about him hard enough, that energy will connect to him and he’ll call.”
I am screaming at the top of my lungs, staring at the empty spot in my bedroom where the black-clad apparition stood. The vision has already faded before my open eyes, but I still give the scream one last burst of energy as if that will make it go away permanently.
“I finally saw something this time.” I am spooning oatmeal into a bowl, the phone is at my ear, and after I pour soy milk in, I take the bowl to the living room and sit on the couch to look at the tree (my tree, as I think of it) outside the window while I talk to Reggie. He isn’t sipp
ing through a straw anymore, but the crunchy sounds I’m hearing from his end of the line indicate that he hasn’t gone back to sausage and eggs. Grape-Nuts, probably. We have tentatively been having telephonic breakfast together again for the last week and so far it’s been okay. As long as I don’t talk about Andrew.
“So tell me already, the suspense is killing me.”
“Some kind of a figure, a man, all in black, near my bed. And menacing. Then he disappeared.”
Reggie is quiet for a moment, then softly says, “Yvette, are you having some kind of a memory come up? About your father, I mean?”
“Oh, God, no. I mean, okay, fine, I have some Daddy issues, who wouldn’t with the way he took off.” I know Reggie is thinking about my relationship with Andrew as more living proof of that, but I decide to ignore that. “But my father never did anything like that to me. I mean, look, I met a woman once at SVA who was an incest survivor and she told me about this therapy group she was in and convinced me that I should check it out, maybe uncovered stuff would come up. So I went a few times and not only didn’t anything come up, but I didn’t relate to it. The symptoms they have and everything.”
Reggie says nothing, so I know he is still convinced his theory is right.
“I just hope they stop soon, honey.”
“So do I.”
31
It has gotten to the point that no matter why I am on the 10 freeway, the minute I pass the 405 interchange heading west, I feel it. Fear, really. Dread. A kind of internal backing up. My body thinks it is going to the boxing gym, where I’ve been going twice a week since November, even if I’m not. Because I am going to get hit at the gym, and my body knows this. I can think all I want about mouth guards and body pads, big pillowy gloves that will never break skin, but the reality is that I am going to get hit. On purpose. Repeatedly.
The fear and dread feels kind of like as a kid when I had to learn how to swim. I was terrified of that. Though I loved playing in the water. I just didn’t want to learn how to swim. “Put your face in the water,” the swimming teacher would say. But I didn’t ever want my face in the water. To this day, I cannot take a shower without a dry cloth nearby. God forbid I am ever on a sinking ship—I’ll be grabbing towels to take to the lifeboat. Just keep my face dry. I have no idea why.
And not only am I going to get hit, but I am being trained to stay forward, closer to the hit. To move, certainly, away from the hits—run and hide is what I want to do, but I ignore that logical instinct and choose to believe my coach as he repeatedly yells to me that the closer I am to my opponent, the less effective his punches will be. No time or space for their impact to build up in. “For it to become something,” he always says.
So if something happens only once, it could be a fluke, an odd beat out of sync with time, but if that same thing occurs a second time, then a rhythm is established and from that I can kind of tell when it will happen again. This works for anything: scream dreams, right hooks, sex with someone. Andrew and I had been on an eight-week rhythm method thing, established by that first night we were together in December and then the second time in February that made the weeks in between those two dates mean something. Eight weeks without him that moved interminably forward through time suddenly landed and connected me on him. Him on me. Again. But now we have skipped what should have been our third time of seeing each other according to the eight-week rhythm we were on. Now there is a long, silent ten-week pause, which, God knows, rhythms can have—thank you, John Cage—but I am stuck waiting for the beat and hating this rhythm of waiting.
On my third try, I finally get the manager of Greeley’s jewelry department in Honolulu on the line.
“Right, Broussard’s Bijoux, that’s that line of pearls and semiprecious stones?”
That’s encouraging—maybe since she’s familiar with the line, everything flew out of there, too.
“Well, I hate to tell you this, but your line’s just been sitting in the display cases, not budging at all.”
For the first time, maybe to distract myself from the horror of her words, I can hear her Chicago accent. I imagine her gladly abandoning that wintery land with fantasies of starting a new life, only to have a similar one, sans snow, on the big island.
“It’s not a very sophisticated crowd we get down here. In L.A., I can see how this stuff would work, but Honolulu is mostly tourists and they aren’t going to spend upward of five hundred dollars for a piece of jewelry. And the locals, well, pearls are everywhere. Tahiti’s so close by, this market’s pretty flooded. I don’t know what that buyer in the forty-eight was thinking. I told them when they hired me to open this store to let me do my own ordering, but you know how these big stores are.”
“So will you put them on sale? What’s going to happen?” I want to fly down there and rescue them, as if they were a child who was left at an inappropriate house over night.
“I have to wait and see what they decide. They usually give stock a three-month cycle, so you have a couple more weeks till the end of May. And who knows, one customer could come in and buy the whole thing. Not that I’m counting on it.”
I hang up the phone and immediately call Reggie.
Driving on the 10 at one-thirty A.M. is like being among the die-hard dregs of a crowd after a rock concert has ended. Not many other vehicles are around, but the ones that are appear just as needy for this experience not to end as I am. I’ve made the loop past the downtown skyscrapers three times now and even that hasn’t made a dent in the despair and almost physical pain I am in, so I am flying on the 10 heading west to the beach. I’ll take the PCH up to Topanga, cut through the canyon, then pick up the 101 in the Valley and take it home. Hopefully that’ll be a long enough drive. I told myself that I couldn’t sleep because of the godforsaken news from Honolulu, but really it’s because I haven’t talked to Andrew in eleven weeks.
I can barely face what I am terrified this means. Maybe he isn’t ever going to call me again. He can’t be in New York this long. I’ve scoured newspapers and magazines for some hint of a project he or his wife could be doing, but there’s been nothing. I could just call his cell phone and hope that he can talk, but that feels risky for his situation and desperate about mine. He’s always called before. Even when I walked out on him that night at his house and stopped answering my phone, he called for a month, so why this silence now? Maybe he really did decide that we shouldn’t see each other. I just can’t believe he didn’t say goodbye.
Every time I check my phone messages, I automatically pray to hear that little “hunh” that means that Andrew called. Instead, this morning I get “Hi, Yvette, it’s me. There’s an opening at the museum tonight and I figured you might wanna go. Call me.”
For a split second I think how sweet of Michael to invite me, but then I am wearied by it. I wonder what will have to change in my life for him to stop calling out of the blue. Maybe getting married. If I ever do.
“We think your line will do better in other stores.” Linda Beckman’s voice over the phone is explaining Greeley’s decision to me.
“Stores? So the line’s going to be split up?”
“White Plains, Miami, and Houston. Those markets are much better for your work—more sophisticated. I’ll figure out who gets what. Don’t worry, I won’t leave it to the people in Hawaii to ship whichever pieces to whatever store.”
“Thanks,” I say, trying to sound like that’s a relief, though this situation is making my stomach sick.
After finding out from Linda when the stores will each get a third of my line, like a head here, the torso there, arms and legs way over there, I hang up.
Oh, Jesus God. A horrible remembered vision of my jewelry in Lizzie’s shop comes to mind. A few pieces in a jumbled display case with no context, just jammed up next to any old jewelry. I tell myself that Greeley’s, known for their high-end fashion, is not going to dump pieces somewhere and not display them well. I hope.
I walk into my studio to tackle my work for t
he day, and decide to check my e-mail while I finish my third cup of coffee. But instead of some wonderful, life-altering news, it is the usual spam, customers checking on commissions, and one “inspirational” note forwarded from Suzanne saying, Don’t tell God how big your problems are, tell your problems how big God is. Then it goes on about a little boy in Phoenix who had leukemia and wanted to be a fireman, and how he got to be one for a day, and then a week later as he lay dying, the fire chief came to his hospital bed, held his hand, and told the little boy that he was a real fireman now, because the big chief, Jesus, was waiting for him in heaven.
I feel even worse after I read it. Why does she send me these things? I never know how to respond. “Thanks for the reminder that innocent children are dying terrible, senseless deaths every day—hope your day is going great, too.” I don’t think Suzanne would appreciate that. Then I feel shitty because I know she means well, and I guess if she were capable of a simple, “Hey sis, what’s up?” e-mail she’d send that, so I guess she’s not. I suddenly feel so separated from her. And from my jewelry that is being sent all over the country. And a whole, whole, whole lot from Andrew. As I shut down the e-mail program, I have to fight the urge to go to the couch, lie down, and not ever get up.
32
It has been fourteen weeks since I’ve heard Andrew’s voice and all I want is to see his face in front of me. Instead I am looking at big, pillowy gloves coming straight at my head. Not at the same time. My partner’s first combination is right jab, left hook, right hook, which I am supposed to swerve from. Okay, it’s not called “swerve.” Or “duck,” which is the only other word I can think of, but something that I can never remember what they call it when you move out of the way, but in that very specific boxer way where you’re gone, but still near, so you can hit them back. It has to do with the rhythm of your weight. How quickly and easily you can shift so you’re gone when they’re there, but right there before they’re gone. I’m still learning.
Aftermath of Dreaming Page 34