Aftermath of Dreaming by DeLaune Michel
1
I’ve been waking up screaming for the past three months. Not every night, God, no. Probably just three or four times a week. Three or four times a week in the middle of the night, I find myself sitting straight up in bed, eyes wide open, screaming from the depth of my being a sound so loud I never would have thought I could make, then suddenly it all stops. And a void is left, a hollow, like that vacuum thing they talk about nature abhorring, but here it is in my apartment, alive and full of air, sucking all the images and dreams out of me, and all I am left with is wondering what it is and why don’t my neighbors ever do anything?
Because I really have been screaming—out loud. I mean, I know how confusing it can be when you sleep—there’s that whole falling-down dream where you’d swear you’re flying hard and fast through the air, then when you land, you’ve been in your bed the whole time, haven’t moved at all. But these sounds are real. So real they wake me up every time.
I keep thinking I will mention it to my neighbors when I pass them in the courtyard or see them at the mailbox. “By the way,” I could say. “Have you been hearing screams coming from my apartment on a regular basis for a few months now? In case you’ve been wondering about it, maybe waiting to see if it continues before you do anything—don’t worry, it’s only my dreams.”
In the repeated fantasies I have of this exchange, it always ends in an empty, silent stare from them. Particularly from Gloria, the was-prostitute now-seamstress, whose apartment shares a staircase with mine. Not that she dresses like a prostitute, or that we live on or near Selma, the purportedly high-traffic street for that sort of thing in Hollywood, though I think her business was more a call-and-come-over kind. And I don’t even know why she had to tell me about that part of her past. She’s the last person I would have suspected, though she does keep her red hair Playboy-esque long, falling around her face and softening the lines around her eyes that are obvious when the sun hits her dead-on. Was-prostitute, near-fifty, now-alone. There’s a terrifying dénouement.
One afternoon last year right after I moved in, I accepted her invitation for a cup of coffee and that was when she immediately began confiding her long sordid tale. As I sat on her couch feeling rather trapped, frankly, and listening to her cataloguing of the men and their particular predilections, her apartment’s girlish, old-fashioned floral décor shifted in my mind from kitschy pleasant to purely depressing, as if it were meant to protect her from remembering her past.
Better protection would have been for her to not confide in me at all. Now that the knowledge rested also in me, it felt like my unfortunately spontaneous thoughts of it added even more ghosts to the memories she had of her “visitors” as she called them, the men who traipsed up and down the stairs before the landlord finally put a stop to it.
The other night after the screaming happened—it was twice in a row this week, usually I get a night off in between—I drank some water and was lying back down when it occurred to me that maybe I should worry. I mean, my life is wonderful. I’m twenty-nine, single, and living in L.A. I’m happy and all that stuff. I’m fine.
I’m just screaming on a regular basis with no discernible reason or effect.
Which is kind of like living in the South, actually, where there are lots of big, dramatic actions full of urgency and despair that finally may as well not have happened for all the consequence they have. You can exhibit all sorts of peculiar behavior where I’m from, just don’t expect your neighbors to talk to you about it. Probably because they are all too busy being peculiar themselves to notice or even care.
I grew up on the Gulf Coast in Pass Christian, Mississippi (pronounced pass-chris-tchan-miss-sippy, with the syllables folding into and on top of each other. It’s a slow-hurry sound like your first two sips of a good drink), just east of New Orleans, where both my parents grew up in families going back many generations in Louisiana. My grandfather’s secretary, Miss Plauché, used to walk to work through the New Orleans business district every day facing backward and would return home the same way, just facing the other…You get the picture. No one ever said a word. Not to her, not to anybody. But as Momma always said, “Well, it’s not like she’s hurting anyone.” Of course, it did give new meaning to the expression “You know, I bumped into Miss Plauché today.”
One early summer morning when I was young, my grandfather, in a gesture weighted with importance for its rarity, let me accompany him to his office. We sat in the serious-business air-conditioned quiet, he at his massive desk solidly engaged in the Wall Street Journal, and I on the thick, plush carpet, stomach down, head resting on my hands, as close as I could get to peer out the floor-to-ceiling windows way high above the city. The people far below, so many dark-suited men among brightly clothed women, moved in chaotic order like a game of marbles expertly won, until the flow was broken and a parting occurred. Then I saw Miss Plauché walking backward toward the big bank building. Her silver-haired head bobbed along like a sleepwalker meandering undisturbed toward her dream’s destination. As I lay there watching her peculiar backward stride, I wondered what it was she was leaving behind in her past that she still needed so badly to see. And why didn’t anyone ever ask her?
I had lunch yesterday with an ex-…Oh, I don’t know. What do you call those people anymore, “boyfriend”? Let’s be honest, “boyfriend” is for high school and, frankly, I never even had a boyfriend. When I was in tenth grade, I sort of jumped over that part and went directly to an affair with a thirty-two-year-old just-widowed man whom I definitely did not call my “boyfriend.” So that word has never really worked for me, and “lover” just sounds so…Judith Krantz. Anyway, this person, Michael, that I was involved with for almost a whole year, we hadn’t seen each other in nine months, but he called, so we had lunch. Well, brunch, really; it’s such a prettier meal than lunch.
Particularly at Wisteria, a restaurant I had never been to before, just driven past it on Robertson Boulevard while always experiencing that dreadful wanting to slow and stare and somehow suddenly be one of the glorious people eating outside there, so I loved that Michael picked it for brunch, but considering its high prices in relation to his modest salary, I was shocked. Michael is the programming director of a local NPR radio station, but not the local NPR station, the one whose shows really are better than commercial radio, which is probably why it’s so popular—the cachet of having your radio at the far left of the dial without having to listen to any weird-views-and-strange-music stuff. Michael works at one of those, but secretly wishes it was the big one.
Michael was nowhere in sight when I arrived at Wisteria a few minutes past our agreed-upon time. As I waited by the ma?tre d’ stand at the entrance to the patio, the California sun seemed to intensify, but without adding extra heat, only shimmer, so that everyone glowed luminously. Even the brunettes looked blond. Though I doubted my mane of dark curls did as I hurried behind the ma?tre d’ through a tight array of tables, faltering a bit on the patio’s uneven brick floor. I wondered if it was purposely designed that way to reveal who was used to it and who was not. I reached the (decent, not great) table without fully tripping and sank into the refuge of the chair. All the women at the other tables had drinks. Red and full and tall with straws shooting out of them like stamens, their bee-stung lips sucking the nectar down. It made me want straight gin, but at brunch that’s a bit of a statement.
“May I have an iced tea, please?” I asked a waiter, or actually a busboy I realized when he gave me an aggrieved look and walked away.
Michael had not materialized. The other diners’ conversations lapped toward me, leaving a small gulf of quiet where my table sat. I wanted him here to fill it with me. With him. With an us that once-was and how-it’d-been, but now would be made radiant by the glittering sun and the exclusivity of this locale we’d be in.
I looked around for Michael. He still had not arrived. My gaze stopped at the far corner of the patio—the prime banquette, colonized by a family. A tiredly handsome man, not even trying to smile, just focusing on his food and the champagne he kept downing and that was then immediately replenished; an energetically conversing woman wearing a stunningly elegant straw hat with nonchalance—on anyone else it would have been too much; the oldest child, the daughter, silent in the security of her exquisite blossoming—the sunlight that landed on her surely never wanted to leave, so happy it was with that similarly golden home; and the son. The son who allowed them to be done—no third child after two daughters here—and who appeared as unaware of what he had saved his family from as he was, for now, of all the power that held. As I watched this family in their attuned nonengagement, the conversation from the couple at the table next to me invaded my ears. It was like watching a silent film with the sound from another movie piped in.
“Yvette.”
I heard my name spoken by Michael before I saw him. He sounded calm, which always amazed me when we were together, this calm voice Michael has, unperturbed by daily life as if emanating from an ancient realm—and his looks are that of a Mediterranean god, the you-want-to-start-civilizations-with-this-man kind so they sort of match—yet his body is in constant action. I feel movement with Michael whether he is still or not. It sometimes used to make me think I might get left behind.
I half stood up and leaned forward to receive the kiss he gave me on the lips, a restaurant kiss, a kiss that hasn’t decided yet if it will become something more or not.
“Michael, hi.” I hoped I sounded wonderful in an ultra-me kind of way. Really present and happy to be there, but able to leave at any second without a regret in sight. I hoped the elocution of his name and short syllable of “hi” held all that.
Immediately, the heretofore nonexistent waiter rushed to our table, as if automatically summoned by the presence of a man.
“We’re ready, Yvette, aren’t we?” Before the waiter could offer his salutation and the recitation of the specials, Michael had forged ahead.
“Yeah, I’ll have the grilled vegetable salad.”
Michael looked at me like I was a small child whose favorite doll had been snatched away, then said to the waiter, “What’s your salmon today?”
“Grilled with a peppercorn crust, served on—”
“No.” The word deflated the waiter. “She can’t eat pepper. Let’s do poached salmon for her, I’ll have crab cakes, and bring the grilled vegetable salad for the table, and two iced teas.”
The waiter turned away, clearly pleased to have the order so easily. Michael took one of my hands and, smiling at me, said, “You love salmon.”
This morning as I am telling my best friend about yesterday’s Michael-brunch, it is at this point in the story that I get into trouble.
“Oh, good Lord.” Reggie’s voice carries out of the telephone, filling my living room. “He ordered you a piece of cold fish and you memorized it. This brunch has become mythic.”
“It has not.”
I am sitting on my couch—the couch from my momma’s house, the home I grew up in, that I slipcovered with a pretty but sturdy dusty blue linen so I can flop down on it and not worry about the cream satin damask underneath—talking to Reggie on the phone while I try to make my way through a bowl of oatmeal, the heart-healthy food. We’ve been talking during breakfast on our phones in our homes for a few years now.
“Do you not want me to continue or what?”
“Yeah, no, let’s hear it,” Reggie says. “Have you eaten even a bite, ’cause I’m halfway finished over here.”
His crunching of toast can be faintly heard. I know it is almost burned, buttered right when popped out, then quickly slathered with boysenberry jam to allow as much melding of the two as possible. Early on in our morning-call ritual, we described our favorite breakfasts to each other, making it easier to imagine the other person was there. Ever since then, I have kept my eye out for an all-in-one spread—like they do with peanut butter and jelly for kids—so I can buy a case of butter’n’jam and leave it at Reggie’s door as a surprise. His breakfast ready in one less step.
“There’s not a lot more to tell,” I say in a voice that indicates how completely untrue that is, as I take the mostly uneaten oatmeal to the kitchen sink. “It was your basic nonmythic brunch.” I turn the hot water on, causing a spray to shoot up from hitting the spoon. “Until the end.”
“Yvette, turn the water off. You wash more dishes than any person I know, yet you barely eat. What do you do, take in your neighbors? Tell me what happened.”
Michael’s words were swirling around me in Wisteria’s sun-drenched air. “There’s definitely an increase in our listeners. The new shows I’ve started are pulling them in; the numbers are like nothing they’ve seen before.”
“That’s great, Michael, I’m so happy—”
“Yeah, so—thanks! So basically the station is where I want it to be right now. Okay, Tuesday nights—maybe Monday, too—could be better, though I think this new deejay I found is going to hit them out the park.”
I was trying to stay focused on Michael’s business talk, which I always loved. Michael makes radio programming sound exciting and revolutionary and capable of transporting you higher, like some perfect legal drug. But my thoughts were drifting. I kept trying to figure out if enough time-space coordinates had shifted in our relationship, so we could kiss, make out, whatever…and still have it not appear on the Relationship Radar screen. So it could go by undetected. By us.
“And the weekend morning shows still aren’t doing what I know they can, but sometimes synergy takes time.” Michael was alternating bites of crab cakes with bites of asparagus that he expertly extracted from the mound of grilled vegetables on the table between us.
“You’re great at this stuff, Michael.” I had no idea what to say about synergy, being unsure I’d ever experienced it myself. It always sounded unreliable to me, like an outfit that is fabulous one night, but two weeks later is boring as hell. “You’ll be the Ted Turner of FM radio; soon every car will be cruising with your station on their dial.”
Michael momentarily beamed, then quickly sobered. “No, no, I’m just doing my job.” He speared the last asparagus tip nestled among the ignored-by-both-of-us zucchini. “So, You. How are You?” The pronoun sounded capitalized.
But before I could respond, Michael’s cell phone rang, causing the couple at the table next to us to dance the win/lose two-step as they each grabbed their phones, then realized the call wasn’t for them. Michael read the number on his phone’s screen before clicking it on and saying, “What’s happening over there?”
Michael’s cell phone. Which is also a pager. But only for “extremely, extremely urgent messages,” as the cell phone’s voice mail tells you when you call, but the whole time we were together last year, everything I wanted to say to Michael felt “extremely, extremely urgent” to me, but I couldn’t get rid of a terrible little feeling that it really wasn’t to him, so in fact the only time I ever felt qualified to leave an “extremely, extremely urgent” message was when I called to say that I was constantly, all at the same time, both too urgent and not urgent enough for whatever it was that we were doing together, so maybe we should just not do it anymore and do something less urgent like…be friends.
Which we did. Quite easily, really. He even called a few times to see how I was. I still haven’t been able to decide if that was a particularly good sign or a bad one, because tumult and despair are the only yardsticks I’ve ever known to gauge true love by. At least that’s what I went through one time before when I knew it was true love. Not that my breakup with Michael had no ill effect on me. I do remember a rough couple of weeks when I was sure the only thing that would save my sanity and entire personal future history would be to drive to his home and just bury my face in his groin until both of us forgot the past we had together and could start a new one over, like some weird kind of prequel that makes the original ending obsolete. But I never did.
“Sorry about that.” Michael put his phone down on the table near his hand. “Things at the station are just…Wow. You know.”
“Right,” I said brightly. I glanced at the salmon on my plate. It was so lovely, pink and firm, lying there ready anytime. I took a bite that was melty and soft, as if my teeth were unnecessary.
“So.” Michael broke into my fishy reverie. “How are the accessories? I mean, jewelry.”
“Great, it’s—”
“Right. Rings, pendants, bracelets. Are these…?” He reached out his hand, briefly touched my earring, and then cradled my cheek as he might a small bird.
“Yeah, they’re me. I mean, mine. Uh, my design.”
The rest of the brunch swept by in a blur of sensations: Michael’s deep liquid eyes bathed my face as we talked about my new jewelry line, a soft breeze that seemed to be orchestrated by him as he stroked my arms, and the sun drowsed my body, making it softly enthralled from within.
The patio was nearly empty when Michael and I finally left. The red brick floor had become an old friend now, an easy passage to float out on with Michael just behind me. We walked down Robertson Boulevard and around the corner to where my truck was parked on a side street lined with large jacaranda trees. The late spring day was awash in soft gold light diffused by the trees’ open umbrellas of tiny purple flowers and newborn leaves. I stood in front of Michael as he leaned his upper back against the passenger window of my late-model brown Chevy truck, his lower body jutted out toward me as small blossoms rained down on us whenever a small breeze blew.
“So, do you wanna make out for a while and have it not mean anything?”
I looked into his brown eyes as I said it, looked into his eyes so lit by the sun that my reflection was clear, a small me staring back, but me made lit from his inside.
Michael choked, then tried to cover it by laughing, then I guess he realized I was serious because I was just standing there waiting to see if he wanted to or not.
Finally he said, “Everything means something.”
“Yeah, well, how about not something serious?”
He looked at me for a moment like a diver eyeing a pool, then pulled my hips forward to meet his, as our lips touched and we kissed.
It was like a dream, but not the kind I wake up screaming from. Time did that minutes-swoosh-by-while-seconds-spread-out-slow thing. And then it all stopped. Because I stopped. But there wasn’t a void, there wasn’t a hollow, there was only Michael’s face telling me that he had to see me again this week and the next, and asking why did we stop?
Frankly, I was shocked. I hadn’t expected that. Maybe I had gotten so used to the “no discernible effect” with my screaming that I figured every area of my life was like that. Or at least Michael, who is casual about everything, so casual that he practically sets a new standard for casual, and this in L.A. no less. But as I stood next to my truck, being held by him, watching tiny purple flowers float and twirl and land on our shoulders and hair while he kissed my neck and mouth and lips and hand, every reason I had not to see him again floated away and disappeared on the wind.
“Okay,” I said. “This week.”
“And the next.”
And time swooshed by as we pressed together, until I roused myself to pull away.
Michael waited on the sidewalk and watched me through the passenger window while I turned the engine over a couple of times before it caught and started up. As I was driving off, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Michael wave at me as he walked backward away, a slow backward stride, waving and walking facing me, until I turned the corner and couldn’t see him anymore, but I knew that soon I would.