11
Driving home on the 10, getting farther and farther from the theater, I start coming down from the shock of seeing Andrew again after so many years. I think I just thought he was supposed to be dead. Or at least in Bel Air, where he lives. No, dead really, somehow. For me, at least. I mean, I knew he wasn’t. He very clearly wasn’t. I’ve seen indications of his continued existence in the media, but in terms of my own experience, I just really had decided he was dead. The Andrew I knew. Gone from my life while a carbon copy carried on in the world. But tonight at the theater, as we sat a few rows apart, it was horribly clear: Andrew is very much alive and so is everything I ever felt for him—full form, like a person who has been waiting for me and finally walks into the room.
As I lie in bed trying to fall asleep (and worrying that tonight might be a scream dream night—please, God, not that to deal with, too), I suddenly remember a conversation I had with Sydney last fall when she called to get referrals of musicians for her show. She was in a bad mood, perturbed (her word), because of a phone conversation she had just had with Andrew Madden—she had no idea I knew him—about getting money from him. Sydney had been in one of his films a year or so before and had felt comfortable enough to ask him if he’d invest in her show.
“And it’s not like he won’t get every cent back, Christ. I mean, it’s gonna sell out.” Her Canadian accent, which was normally under wraps, was on full display in that last word.
She went on to say that Andrew was considering investing some money—“a thousand dollars, like he doesn’t have it”—but had been taking forever to decide. Weeks and weeks had gone by with no answer from him, so she had decided to call to say that she really needed to know, but instead of giving her an answer, all he had said was that he sure would love to fuck her, if only he wasn’t married.
Big deal, I had thought as Sydney indignantly yammered on, that barely means anything coming from him. It’s the same as a “hi how are you” from anyone else. I couldn’t understand why she was so upset. If she knew him as well as she claimed she did, why was she taking it so seriously? I knew what Andrew would say when he really meant that, and what Sydney described wasn’t it. He had told me once that most of the time he felt women expected that stuff from him, that some even got angry when he didn’t flirt with or flatter them. I could imagine Andrew thinking Sydney would be one of them.
Then Sydney’s diatribe suddenly drew to a climax. “He came on to me like I was some waitress.” She decimated the word more than spoke it.
I had never heard such disdain. She should meet my father, I thought, they’d get along so well on this subject. Then I remembered that Sydney’s career had gone great guns right from the start, that she had never had a lowly job of any sort—luck had protected her from the artist’s usual fate. As she continued on, her Canadian accent a fuzzy moss covering her angry words, I imagined a secret restaurant system that transmitted customers’ attitudes toward the servers slaving over the food, letting waitstaffs everywhere know who the nightmare customers were in advance.
But Sydney’s willingness to be talked to like a waitress had paid off. Andrew obviously had given her the money, then attended her opening night to see his dollars at work.
Why hadn’t I remembered that conversation before I went to her show tonight? Though maybe I did somewhere deep in my mind; but I would have gone anyway, if I had remembered, because I never would have thought Andrew would go to the show. His fame is so huge, his persona so large, that a small theater for a one-person show is not a space or event big enough to hold him. Though it did. Crammed in there, his presence taking up the entire room, leaving no space for anyone else, which was fine, because no one else mattered with him there.
Now that I have finally seen him after all these years, the odds are probably back in favor of it not happening again—at least for a very long time. Like last year when someone broke the taillight on my truck; that was a drag, but living in L.A., a person can only go so long without having some kind of car contretemps, so I was grateful that my turn came up on a little thing. It’s the numbers game theory. So I figure three rows apart in a theater after we haven’t seen each other in four and a half years…I’ve probably got a good long stretch of time before I see him again, before any real dialogue happens between us. Unless of course hand-waving counts as dialogue, I don’t know. But even if it does, I’m sure I won’t see him again now for a really long time. Maybe even forever. Maybe Andrew will die, really clinically decease, before I get a chance to see him again, and tonight in the theater was it. The last acknowledgment from me he will ever see.
And me from him.
Oh, fuck.
Jesus, I miss him.
“How was Sydney’s show last night?”
“Fine,” I say too quickly to Reggie on the phone, making it sound like she’d laid a big one. “I mean, great. You know, it was what she does.”
My voice sounds hoarse and thin. I’ve had four cups of coffee in the two hours since six A.M. when I finally got out of bed, tired of just lying there all night, unable to sleep. And the few times I did, the dreams I had of Andrew were so real—us at the theater, but wrapped up in each other’s arms with the crazy crowd all around like bedclothes, keeping us warm—that I was even more exhausted upon awakening from them. But at least I didn’t scream.
“And what else?”
“What else what?” Oh, please, Reggie, don’t get all intuitive on me. Please be blithe and vague and unable to figure anything out. In short, please be completely unlike yourself.
“What else happened? Something did—you sound like you slept with someone and don’t want to talk about it.”
“No. God.” I try to sound indignant to mask my shock at his accurate appraisal of my emotional state. “I just couldn’t sleep, that’s all.”
I had decided not to make oatmeal—I couldn’t face those goddamn grains—but I need something to cut the caffeine, so I take an apple from the fridge and get peanut butter out to spread on it.
“Thinking about the wedding?”
For one wild second, I think Reggie means my long-lost fantasy of mine and Andrew’s, then I remember Suzanne’s wedding and wonder if it’s supposed to be weighing on me so heavily that a restless night would not be odd.
“Are you worried about Suzanne’s veil, honey?”
“Oh, no, not really. I still need to work on it, but no, just…you know. What’s going on with you?”
Hanging up the phone from Reggie has an emptiness to it, like I was talking to someone else. But the person who was someone else in our conversation was me, because for the first time, I didn’t tell him everything. I couldn’t bring myself to after how he was about Michael. And anyway, what difference would it make? So I saw Andrew for the first time in four and a half years—big deal. Okay, so I am slightly completely totally a mess about it, but this whole thing will blow over, retreat into the past, become an incident I barely remember, with no more significance or future impact than if I’d switched brands of dental floss. I saw Andrew again—big deal.
Yeah, then why didn’t I tell my best friend? Well, I still can tomorrow when we have breakfast again. Just say very casually, “Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that I saw Andrew the other night. Not ‘saw’ euphemistically, but ‘saw’ literally across a crowded theater with tons of people all around, including his wife, so it was more like being stranded on a desert isle and watching a glittering cruise ship go by than having any real contact, though it did feel like real contact for me, and for him, too, I believe.”
Okay, that’s exactly why I can’t mention it casually to Reggie. Because it doesn’t feel casual to me, and the words that would betray my true feelings about Andrew would come streaming out of my mouth as if my heart had found an outlet for them since Andrew’s not around to get them, so telling Reggie would give them someplace to land, even though Reggie doesn’t want them and would ban them from coming in, like they were boat people, uninvited and made to turn back around.
So I was right to not tell Reggie. Except that now, for the first time, a page in the journal of our friendship is blank.
The art opening where Michael and I are on our first postbrunch date is a vision of rousing yet mellowed expression: subdued black-hued paintings explode on the walls; subdued black-clad people throng the rooms. Through the mass of bodies, I catch glimpses of Michael at a table loading up a plate with food. His jeans and simple white T-shirt stand out in the crowd like a flare further highlighting his exquisite looks. I want to walk over and wrap myself all around him, but someone brushes past me, snapping my attention back to the paintings.
The artist is my friend Steve, with whom I used to go to En Chuan’s meditation sessions. Steve is an old-moneyed WASP from back East whose personal style is mixing Zen with Ralph Lauren, making each the better for it aesthetically. His paintings emit a somber, elegant silence into the art opening revelers’ din. Each one is surrounded by quiet admirers, gradually ebbing into the art crowd’s hysteria in the middle of the rooms. The effect is like a wedding with beautiful caskets on view.
Steve’s wife died from ovarian cancer seven years ago, and this is his first show since then. I went to his studio a few weeks ago to see the paintings before the opening. He made green tea on the Bunsen burner he keeps there and served biscotti, and we sat in the loft’s large silence with his paintings all around. We talked and didn’t speak and spoke and quietly watched the sunlight shift and wash across the large canvases of deep gray and black and dark blue as well as a few that had words painted on them, too. Tonight, when Michael and I walked into the loud and crowded gallery, I was glad that I had first seen the work in the sanctuary of Steve’s studio.
Which actually is where Steve and I originally met. About four years ago, a gallery owner suggested that I check out the Santa Fe Art Colony, a group of old warehouses converted into artists’ lofts on the edge of downtown, to find a work space to share. Sure enough, on a large message board in the courtyard of the colony were ads for lofts that people were looking to share. The handwriting on one of them caught my eye—it was one step short of calligraphy, but not fussy, just beautifully expressed. I figured if the loft looked the way the person wrote, it’d be a great place to work. I immediately called the number from my cell phone and Steve answered right off, then gave me directions to find his loft.
Two minutes later, he opened the door and welcomed me in. He was wearing jeans and a worn Brooks Brothers shirt, and the smoke from his cigarette curled up from his mouth toward his hair as if it were painting the few gray strands in the black there. He was the most relaxed person I had ever seen. I had a palpable feeling, while talking to him about rent and square feet, that just being around his energy would improve my work.
I don’t know if it did, but the arrangement we had was great for a bunch of years. I had a nice sunny section where I pounded and soldered and fused my sculptures while he worked at the other end filling his canvases. We’d meet in the middle to share the lunches we had brought, items that always complemented each other although unplanned, and he’d smoke cigarettes afterward and we’d talk about music and art. It was how I always imagined it would have been if I had ever been allowed inside my father’s work shed with him while he was working, and got to see that side of him close up. The same quiet, creative energy. Nothing mattered except the piece at hand. Then last year when I dropped art completely for making jewelry, I stopped renting his loft.
Not that I don’t think the jewelry I make is art; I do. Sort of. But I’d never call it that because it would sound pretentious, frankly. A pin or a pair of earrings that someone puts on is just less precious than a work so uniquely produced it must hang untouched on a wall. The jewelry I create is definitely not for a museum or a gallery. Though I still sketch—I’m unable not to. But I have no interest in showing them to anyone. Except maybe Andrew. And wish I didn’t.
Michael is still across the room, but now he’s talking to someone—I can’t see whom. I try to get a better view through the crowd, but people are crushingly close. I nudge past a woman next to me and catch a glimpse of a broad back and shoulders in front of Michael. Okay, he’s talking to a man. I think. Or a drag queen who left her dress at home.
I seize a bit of unoccupied space in front of my favorite painting. It’s a huge canvas, sprawling and almost barren, painted a deep shiny black with the word “epithalamium” in the darkest of grays written sideways, but straight up and off center to the right. When I first saw it at Steve’s studio, he told me that the word means a song or a poem to celebrate a marriage and is from the Greek root “thalamos” for bridal chamber. Maybe I should buy it for Matt and Suzanne’s wedding gift. No, I don’t think she’d get it. She likes Impressionists, as I do, but sometimes I tire of paintings that conjure up a story of when and where and who. Though looking at a word referencing marriage is not evoking joy in me.
As I turn toward the next painting, Michael emerges through the crowd carrying a small plate brimming with food. “If these paintings were a voice,” he whispers in my ear, “I’d call it monotone.”
“Michael.”
He kisses my neck and ear as I explain about Steve’s wife.
“That’s horrible,” he says, holding the plate out to me. “Here, I grabbed the last shrimp for you.”
As Michael puts it in my mouth, Steve suddenly appears, so I quickly finish chewing as we hug, then introduce Michael to him.
“Great stuff,” Michael says, transferring the plate to me, so he can shake Steve’s hand.
“Oh, thanks.” Steve always appears vaguely surprised when complimented about his work, as if it were a particularly handsome dog that just happened to be following him. “I’m really trying to explore the nature of monotone in my work.”
Michael looks momentarily nervous—did Steve overhear his remark?—then slightly abashed that his critique was so dead-on. I look around at the paintings and notice for the first time how acutely alone each one looks despite sharing space on the walls, then a woman steps in front of me, blocking further inspection.
“You,” she says to Michael, planted before him like she is more art to view. “Are revolutionizing the FM experience.”
“Thank you, I’m—”
“I know who you are. I saw the article in the LA Times.”
I am surprised that Michael’s fame has extended past the airwaves into the visual realm. I have always considered him famous, but in a concealed sort of way, a secret celebrity for the people at his station and the radioheads who were in on it, too. But here this woman is, great looking in a Kundalini-cum-collagen kind of way, gushing all over him like some love-crazy teenage fan.
“Since you took over,” she continues. “The difference—you can’t even measure it.”
Steve smiles a goodbye at me as someone pulls him away. I wish they had pulled fan-woman away instead.
“That station is your voice, just lots of different conversations you’re having all throughout the day, and let me tell you—”
“Wow,” Michael says, his eyes enrapt on hers. “That’s really wild you say that because that’s exactly how I think of it.”
She puts one hand on his arm, the other on her left breast. “You are reaching me on a very deep level.”
Even through the silicone? I think.
“That’s just great. I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?” Michael slips an arm around me, as he holds his other hand out to her.
The only thing preventing me from falling off my couch is Michael’s arm encircling my waist. My head is turned at an odd angle, forcing me to look uncomfortably down to see his head resting on my chest. He appears to be asleep. At least it sounds that way. One minute, his personal noises were connected to ecstasy; the next, exhaustion, with no transition in between.
It started at my front door when he brought me home from the art gallery, as my key was finding the lock. Michael pressed against me from behind, making my legs weak, then the door opened and our clothes flew off, as if it were an indignity for them to be on, and my mouth found him, and the familiar and the now and the memories of all-other-times as he made me come again and again before he did as well, pulling us down into that lovely afterward drowsy spell.
Michael stretches awake on top of me, causing me to slip toward the floor, but he catches me in time. “God, are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
I reach out for the soft woven tapestry I keep draped on the couch and wrap it over us as I nestle against him. My parents got the tapestry in Paris on their honeymoon, its deep blues and sad yellows a prophecy of their marriage to come.
“That’s downright scary,” Michael says.
For a moment, I think he has somehow heard my thought, then I realize he is staring at my sister’s wedding veil, which is perched on a tall iron dressmaker’s stand in front of the large living room windows. The outside light is filling in the netting’s empty spaces with a soft, pearly glow, making it look like a bodyless bride ready to proceed through the semidark.
“Yeah, I guess it is. Actually, it reminds me of a dream I had when I was really little, like in second grade.” I turn to face him, wanting to gauge the interest level in his eyes before I continue, but he is just watching, waiting for me to begin. “I was in my house, in the dream, though it didn’t look like the one I grew up in, and it was filled with tombstones, but wonderfully ornate ones like the mausoleums in New Orleans.”
“Easy Rider.”
“Exactly. And it wasn’t sad or scary, just beautiful and homier because all my ancestors were there. Suzanne was standing next to me when suddenly this angel gravestone—the most beautiful one, very Gothic, one hand carrying a torch, long hair streaming back—came flying through the house—well, rolling, really, she was on wheels—and the house was a shotgun design, so all the doorways lined up in a row, and she tore straight through with sirens whirring and bells clanging. I looked at Suzanne as if to say, ‘What’s the deal with her?’ and Suzanne very matter-of-factly said, ‘She thinks she’s a fire engine,’ as if that explained everything, and in the dream, it did, like we weren’t supposed to ruin her fantasy.”
I look at Michael—who is now looking at the veil as if it sprang fully formed from my dream like Athena from Zeus’s head—and wonder what he’ll say. He’s been known to just change the subject if he decides a topic has reached its end, unencumbered by conversational rules, yet communication is his life. But maybe that’s why.
“An emergency rescue vehicle,” Michael says. “That’s a trip.”
In all the years of remembering that dream, I had never thought of it that way. Maybe so I wouldn’t have to wonder what I needed rescuing from. When I told Suzanne about it after it happened, she was just annoyed that I had her saying something that she thought was so dumb.
“Do you have any food?”
I know I do not, at least the kind he’d be interested in, but I go to the kitchen anyway, duly checking the oatmeal in case some miraculous conception had occurred and it had divinely delivered cookies. I am taking out two apples, plus the jar of peanut butter, when Michael walks in and peers over my shoulder into the fridge’s brightly shelved almost-emptiness.
“Let’s get in your bed,” he says, then turns and leaves the kitchen.
I put away the apples and peanut butter, fill two glasses with water, and follow him into my bedroom. It occurs to me that the scream dream might be scared off by his presence tonight. I hope so, otherwise it would be kind of weird for him to wake up at three A.M. as I scream hysterically into his ear. Michael is already in bed, appears, in fact, already asleep when I walk into the room. I put the glasses down on the stack of antique suitcases I use as a nightstand, pull back the spread, and get in. With one sleepy reach, Michael pulls me close to him, his body like a pillow. His arm lies over me protectively, and I fall asleep more easily than I have in months, somehow knowing that there won’t be any screams tonight.