15
The morning when I was fourteen that I came home from spending the night at my cousin Renée’s house, the night that Momma called to tell me in two short sentences that Daddy had left us and wasn’t coming back, I went straight to his work shed before I entered the house. It was a late spring Saturday and the heat was already up and full and holding me in place, so to move at all required a going forward plus a breaking through. I abandoned my bike and let it fall against the porch railing, ignoring Momma’s admonishment in my head that it would chip the paint, dropped my knapsack on the red brick path—where tiny bouquets of weeds and grass were popping up through the cracks as if they too had gotten the news that Daddy had left and were reclaiming ownership since the man of the house was gone—and went to stand in front of my father’s work shed.
I knew he wasn’t inside. But his presence seemed to radiate from the stillness behind the closed door and the window facing me. Like the sacristy in church, even when Monsignor Marcel wasn’t there, it was so definitely his space—his authority hanging over everything—that you couldn’t help but speak in whispers and say only good things. I opened the door and stepped inside. The work shed greeted me as it had the many times I had sneaked in while Daddy was at work to see what he was creating, to look at the tools, smell the leather, metal, and wood, feel the cool darkness around me, him around me, the sensations more my father than when he sat at the dinner table during the silence of our family meals.
I went over to the worktable and looked up at the tools still hanging in their spots on the Peg-Board, tools utterly left behind, and I understood. My daddy was gone. Not just at his office or on an errand to the hardware store, but gone. Like a dead body is how it was in the work shed, all the physicality was there, but the life was gone, the secret was gone, the not-supposed-to be-in-there was gone, my father was gone.
I sank down on the tall stool he never much used, and the cool metal seat was a slap to my bare legs, so I perched on the edge, just where the bottom of my shorts covered me. I could hear the buzzing of the spring day outside, dragonflies, air conditioners, the air so charged with heat it practically made a sound itself, but inside the work shed was quiet and peaceful. Had he come in here before he left? Considered taking some tools with him, but changed his mind? Where did he go and would he make instruments there? The last one he had been working on, a violin, was nowhere to be found. I couldn’t remember if he had already given it away to a relative or not. Or not. Maybe he took it with him to give to someone who would be in this new life with him. The air in my lungs seemed to leave all at once and I couldn’t get any more in. I grabbed my chest, gasping in the dim light, then felt dizzy and let myself crumple to the floor. The wood shavings and dust filled my nose with their scent, and I curled up under my father’s worktable and cried myself into an exhausted sleep.
When I awoke, the sun was higher and hotter in the sky, so a couple of hours must have gone by. I got up and started taking down the tools before I even knew what I was doing. Scraps of leather, pieces of wood, musical strings, and all sorts of materials were in the bins my father kept everything so well organized in. It was mine now, the work shed was, as if in my sleep that information had been passed to me like waking up from a dream and instantly knowing a truth. It was a realm I could enter and stay in by the sheer power of using its tools.
I began working on an instrument of my own that afternoon—a mandolin, which seemed less forbidding than a violin—teaching myself to use the tools, work the wood, the hard and soft objects to be manipulated and changed into a greater sum than their parts, but finally had to stop hours later when I heard Momma’s voice calling me. I guessed she’d called my cousin’s house, then seen my backpack and bike lying where neither should have been. She yelled once more, then I heard her start back up the porch steps, and I knew I should call out to her. I opened the work shed door, saying, “I’m here, Momma, I’ve been home all day.” I saw her eyes see where I was. They looked like someone was about to strangle her, the one hazel and one green seemed to view a horror that was invisible to me. Then she made a “huhnn” noise, a kind of “I can’t believe it, yet doesn’t this make sense,” sound, then turned around and walked inside.
We never talked about my using the work shed. In fact, she pretended from then on that the entire structure didn’t exist. Which was fine with me. The world inside the house didn’t exist when I was in the work shed, which must have been why Daddy went there. At certain times, when using a tool or trying to figure out how to construct part of a piece, I’d hear his voice in my head guiding me. Saying things I knew he would say, but things I’d never heard him utter in real life. As if part of him was still in the work shed, and that part of him was talking to me, working with me.
That first instrument I tried to make came out looking more like a Cubist sculpture than a real mandolin, so I let it be that. I put it in a box I built and added some things of my father’s that he’d left behind—cuff links, part of the newspaper that was lying on his leather chair, broken bits of an Old Spice bottle, a bill addressed to him, the sash to his robe, an old 78 LP he loved more than anything—and titled the whole thing What’s Left. I kept it in the work shed until I moved to New York, then before I left, I sewed a velvet bag for it that it has stayed in behind the clothes in every closet I’ve had since then. It’s the only piece I’ve never shown anyone and probably never will.
Downtown L.A. on a Friday is a driver’s nightmare. People are there only because they have to be at work, but they know that the traffic going out will get exponentially more terrible with each passing half hour after noon, so they all start leaving early. Which I think is what makes it worse. If they would just stay until the usual time, pretend it’s a Tuesday or a Wednesday, then the traffic would be okay. But they’ve never asked me.
The only reason I am venturing here today is an emergency. I got a frantic call from Dipen this morning saying that the casting they did for the necklaces makes them not hang right. How many were done? I asked him, trying to stay calm. All of them, he replied. This is the only time I’ve ever been unhappy that he’s done what he said he’d do on time. As I fight my way through the sidewalk throng to reach his building, I pray that this setback won’t make my order for Roxanne late.
Dipen rents space on a high floor in the Los Angeles Jewelry Center building, an old office tower from the twenties fronted with gorgeous sea-green tile that stands in vertical waves that protrude up the front between rows of windows reaching into a peak that I have heard holds a penthouse suite where wild Prohibition-era parties were held. The bottom of the building has been disgraced with modern and cheap-looking jewelry stores that flank the still-gracious double and revolving doors into the lobby, and a large ugly sign runs the width of the building above the stores. I usually stop for a second before I go in, my hands shielding my eyes from the ruined bottom part, and gaze up at the majestic green—such a choice—and imagine how it was way back when it was built.
But today I am one of the many who are ignoring history as I push through the doors and wait with a crowd for one of the two ancient small elevators servicing the building. The elevators in the jewelry district are notoriously slow, which make the diamond and precious gems dealers on the upper floors nervous enough to hire private security men instead of relying on the ones the building provides. Robberies happen down here all the time.
Dipen’s office is two tiny rooms that were partitioned out of a larger suite—most of the offices I pass in the long narrow corridor to reach his door are like it. People from all over the globe—India, Armenia, Korea, China, and the Philippines—are here in tiny spaces making jewelry for the United States. He grins at me sheepishly when I walk in, his dark hair falling over one of his eyes.
“He use your measurements from the sketch you left me, but no good, not working, come see.”
I follow Dipen around his desk into the other room and see the pieces for the necklaces lying on a worktable. They are shaped like tiny thin saxophones, but smooth, and the part that looks like the mouth of the horn curves back to touch the longer arm. They are meant to be attached by one end to a bronze leather cord, then the other, the part that forms a hook of itself, will hold a big semiprecious stone—a tourmaline or a checkerboard-cut citrine—by clasping a bar that the gem will be suspended from. But the weight and curve of the gold make the pieces fall in toward the gem instead of holding it straight.
“I know this works, Dipen, the prototype did. How’d we do that?”
“I had Mahee for that. This new guy, he follow measurements exactly, but no right.”
I remember how Mahee could take my designs and would instinctively shave off a little here, add a bit more gold and weight there, to make them all fall right. I wish to God he hadn’t gone back to India.
“Okay, let’s figure it out.” I pull out paper and a pen and draw a new prototype by flattening along the back and adding more of a curve on the top. I know Dipen’s going to charge me for the useless batch, and I imagine my profits on these pieces dwindling. “And he’ll melt these pieces down, right, so I won’t have to…”
“Same gold, same gold, and…” Dipen looks away for a moment, as if consulting some hidden oracle. “I knock a third off price for casting those.”
“Thanks, Dipen, you’re the best. And have him only do one first; I’ll come back and look at that.”
“Right, right, all fine,” he says, smiling and walking me toward the door.
“And the other pieces, how are they coming?”
“Fine, no problem, we make many before. Next week, come back, see necklace.”
As I enter the packed elevator to leave the building, I consider for a second getting a new caster, but then remember the horror stories I’ve heard from other designers: casters selling their designs to knockoff firms, casters being paid off by competing designers to stall orders so a talented new designer will fail, casters making pieces that are fourteen-karat gold instead of the eighteen-karat that was paid for. This setback with Dipen is deeply annoying, but nothing considering what it could be.
Sitting in traffic on First Street trying to get out of downtown, I decide to call Lizzie. Maybe I’ll jump on the freeway, take it all the way to Santa Monica and go to her store in Venice to get the check for those sales that she owes me. Her store’s phone rings and rings, no machine picking up, nothing. I know the number by heart, but I check it in my address book to make sure my fingers didn’t forget, then dial the same digits again. Nothing. Jesus, Lizzie, what kind of store isn’t open on a Friday afternoon? I am tempted to drive out there anyway—the really horrific traffic will be going the other way—and wait for her to appear, but that’s a dubious shot. I start to call Reggie to complain about Lizzie, but then don’t. He was so happy last night reading his script to me, sitting on my living room floor with Chinese food containers all around, then talking about Chopin and New Orleans and filming. It’s been pretty much all about me this week so I decide not to bother him about stupid Lizzie—it isn’t anything that hasn’t happened before, and those other times, she always paid.
I am midscream, volume full throttle, eyes open and staring, in my bedroom. Then my sound disappears as I realize that what I was seeing is no longer there. I want to see it again so I can know what it is. It is two-forty A.M., and my apartment is completely quiet—now that I’ve stopped screaming, at least. I find it so weird that Gloria has never said anything. Unless she thinks I’m entertaining my own “visitors” who have really odd tastes—like scaring the be-Jesus out of me. The rotten part is that it’s hell trying to get back to sleep after one of those dreams. I wish it would fucking end.
I go to the kitchen to make myself a cup of chamomile tea. While waiting for the water to boil, I lean against the kitchen counter in my antique silk slip and try to figure out what in real life does terrify me that might be causing the dream.
Cockroaches head the list. Particularly the huge flying ones I had to grow up with on the warm wet Gulf Coast; they continue to inspire in me a fear unequal to most.
When I was seven, I decided to take matters into my own hands about those fearsome pests since obviously the bug man (a regular visitor to every Southern home) and Daddy were unable to keep the horrible monsters away. Kneeling on the floor of my bedroom with my favorite teddy bear beside me, wearing an only-for-mass-and-certain-parties dress, I told God—out loud for double effect—that I was ready for a deal. I would let a roach—one of the big nasty flying ones that came in from the outside, like some true owner of our home whose generosity toward us could only last so long—crawl over my hand if for the rest of my life I never had to see another one. I thought this an extremely fair exchange.
No roach appeared. For once, where is one when you need it? I couldn’t tell if that meant God was going to skip my part and, being all-loving, just do His, or maybe other people were praying out loud, too, and mine had gotten lost in the din. Or worse, maybe one crawl across the hand wasn’t enough for Him. All right, I’d try again. I recited the plan, but this time upped my end, saying that the roach could crawl along my entire arm. Again, nothing happened.
Just as I was about to try again, Daddy stuck his head in and asked what I was doing. I explained the rules to him—maybe if I got him involved, the whole house could be an insect-free zone.
He walked over to me, sat on the floor, and wrapped me up in a hug. “You can’t make deals with God, darling, it doesn’t work like that.”
As soon as he said it, I knew it was true. Our trading sides were so uneven—my offer so paltry to Him, never enough to alter the exertion of nature on my life, but at least I had Daddy’s arms around me.
The tea kettle is screaming that its job is done, so I pour the water into a mug, letting the chamomile-infused steam waft in my face. The scream dream reminds me of those cockroaches, appearing out of nowhere and flying suddenly into view. But the worst part is that my mind, or subconscious, made the damn dream up. Created it, called it forth, brought it into being—for what? To terrorize myself through and through?
I get the pillow and blanket from my bed and head for the couch. The tree outside my living room window is lit up by security lights so its large branches and full leaves, soft brown and silvery green, are solid and shimmering in the dark. It is indifferent to the night—has no need to sleep, no pressure to lose consciousness so it will be alert for the next day’s activities. I find that as freeing as not setting an alarm clock. Suzanne’s veil is in the living room where I moved it this afternoon, like a marital ghost in the room’s gloom. Before I settle on the couch to go to sleep, I get up and move the veil back to my studio, out of sight.
The dressing room’s three-part mirror reflects an ungodly amount of pink. There should be a design ordinance against this, but I guess bridal boutiques would have to be exempt from that rule. I understand the color is supposed to be warm, soft, and flattering to one’s skin, but the result on me is a heightening of green undertones I never knew I had. Or maybe that’s a physical reaction to the maid-of-honor dress hanging on me. And I mean hanging. The distance between the fabric and my body reminds me of that blank space you see on children’s pictures: earth and trees way down below—huge gap—then way up at the top, a line for the sky with the sun stuck in the corner; the space in between is unaccounted for, but caused by the other two.
Suzanne is so ecstatic about this tent I am wearing that it has almost made her forget that she was mad as a wet hen when she saw that I hadn’t brought her veil with me for her to try on. She was also annoyed about my tardiness, but now her face is enrapt as she moves around me, plucking at the floral material billowing out from my frame.
“I’m sorry, but other than me getting one three sizes smaller, what is there to fit on this dress?”
“Hush, it’s perfect,” she says, still dancing around me, thrilled with the effect.
“Is everyone’s like this, or am I just particularly lucky?”
“Of course yours is different—you’re my maid of honor. It’s beautiful, exactly how I pictured it. Go show Matt.”
My blond and handsome soon-to-be brother-in-law has intelligently brought something to read on this shopping extravaganza he joined us for. Suzanne started to protest when he sat down in the store and immediately pulled out the Wall Street Journal, but he patiently reminded her of the murder mysteries she devours at Dodger games, so she turned her focus on me.
I stand in front of Matt for a paragraph before I interrupt his reading by saying, “I know, I look like a walking floral rectangle.”
Matt lowers the paper. “No you don’t. You look…Pretty.”
“In a bathroom-wallpaper kind of way, yeah. But it’s her day, and at least she’s paying for it. She’s probably going to use it later to slipcover an armchair.”
“That’s the sisterly spirit.”
Matt moves his newspaper off the hot-pink tufted velvet love seat so I can sit down. The dress pools around my shoes.
“So, how are you? Seeing anyone? Are you happy?”
Pink walls will never be exempt inside a bridal store, but those three questions should be. Though I know Matt means well, and I like that he adopts a brotherly role.
“Work’s going well. I got a new store.”
“That’s great.”
“Thanks, and the commissions keep coming in, so I figure the next step is another boutique, and then a department store really is my goal, and getting into another magazine. A national would be great, so even with Momma’s money winding down, if things continue as they are, I should be okay.”
“That’s good,” he says, but without the same enthusiasm as before.
I can hear the financial-planning lecture Matt is calculating whether to give me or not, so I decide to keep the conversation moving along. “And I sorta started seeing Michael again.”
“Michael?” IRAs and bonds are still cha-chinging in Matt’s head. “The guy who drank out of his own flask at our Christmas party?”
I wish he’d forget that. “That was Rick. No, Michael, remember? We ran into y’all at the movie theater?”
“Oh, Michael. Radio, right?”
“Right.” Recalling Michael’s work is good. “So, anyway, it’s nice.”
“Right, this is the guy who canceled dinner after Suzanne cooked seafood gumbo all day. Now I remember, okay. So you’re seeing him again—and he’s actually showing up?”
I want to be annoyed that Matt mentioned that—didn’t I bring Suzanne a flowering plant to apologize?—but I like having shared history with him.
“There you two are.” Suzanne appears carrying two child-sized wedding dresses. “What do you think?”
“Yvette’s seeing Michael again.” Matt shoots me a look as if he got an extra turn picking Saturday-morning cartoons.
“Oh, that’s nice, honey.” Suzanne hands me one of the dresses to hold up. “Okay, which one? Now consider the music that will be playing—it all has to match.”
“What, in God’s name, are those?” Matt has finally noticed the objects of his intended’s concern.
“The child bride’s dress,” my sister announces in a voice that I know means, “We’ve discussed this before.”
“It’s an old Southern tradition,” I say for Matt. “A child bridal couple walks down the aisle first in the processional, symbolizing—what, Suzanne, do you know? I mean, other than the obvious.”
“I don’t know and I don’t care; it’s sweet.” Suzanne puts down the dress she was holding and takes the other from my hands, holding it in front of her, as if it somehow could fit. “Which one?”
Driving away from the bridal shop in my truck, I have a wild impulse for a cigarette—I haven’t had one in years, but a longing for the taste is there instantly. I have to keep telling myself that I don’t really want one and definitely don’t want that habit again. I know that desire is just to distract me from where I’ve been. Then an image appears in my mind of a long white coffin nail, as Daddy used to call cigarettes. It is lit, and the cherry at the end glows bright red. Then the long whiteness of the cigarette transforms into a bride with an aura of smoke obscuring her face.
Michael and I have turned the corner onto Fairfax Avenue, or Kosher Canyon as he calls it, and are walking toward Canter’s Deli for a meal. It is Saturday night and the environment is divided—God’s darkness pushed far above by L.A.’s lights bright below. I haven’t seen Michael since Steve’s gallery opening on Wednesday night. Since, all right, one night after I went to the theater and saw Andrew. Not that I’m thinking about him. I’m thinking about Michael, his hand in mine, as we walk down Fairfax on this gentle night; I just seem to have lost track of what he’s talking about.
But before I can figure it out, what grabs my attention is the absence of clothes. In the far corner of Canter’s parking lot is a man who appears to be in his sixties, each tired, difficult, meager year is collected on his pale face and paler body, which, save for a pair of dull baggy underwear, I can plainly see.
“Oh, my God, he’s nekked.” My hand flies to my eyes to save the man from disgrace.
“Naked,” Michael replies.
“What?” I peek through my fingers. Maybe it was an apparition, a ghost from the street’s past, but the man is still there, his body so white it looks practically lit from within like a battered-up lamp you never notice until it’s turned on. The man is busy, precisely folding imaginary clothes, engaged in that most comforting of rituals—getting ready for bed.
“It’s pronounced ‘naked,’ not ‘nekked.’”
“Well, where I’m from, it’s ‘nekked.’ Of course, growing up, I thought they were two different words. ‘Naked’ was when you were about to or just finished having sex, and ‘nekked’ was not having any clothes on, but for no particular reason really, like for running through the sprinklers or something.”
“So, this guy’s nekked and wishes he was naked.”
“Michael.” I wish he wouldn’t try to be funny at a time like this.
The man is moving around, pulling out imaginary drawers, pantomiming brushing his teeth in his private-illusion bedroom-cum-bath, living in a master suite that only exists in the gap between his memory and time. “We need to call the police. Not that I think he’s a criminal for doing his ablutions in a parking lot, but they could take him somewhere, get him off the street before someone comes along and…I don’t know. He needs protection.”
“Yvette, the only place the police take anyone is jail; this guy shouldn’t go there. Wait here.”
Before I can ask where he’s going, Michael hurries away from me and, darting between cars, crosses diagonally through the parking lot. He stops near an SUV and watches the man from a short distance.
The man is now on his knees and looks to be praying. I can practically see the four-poster mahogany bed he thinks he is saying his nightly devotion next to. The Guardian Angel prayer that Suzanne and I said as children every night before bed is suddenly triggered in my mind. “Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom with love, commit me here, ever this day, be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.”
The man makes the sign of the cross; I hope he said that intercession, too, and that his guardian angel isn’t too old to hear. God only knows the dangers that this poor man has to be frightened of since he is sleeping outside, and yet he looks so calm as he lies down for sleep. I think about how nervous I am every night going to bed, never knowing if I’ll awaken to a scream about something that isn’t even there. In the real world, at least. Maybe I’ll start saying a prayer before going to bed, too. Like the reverse of when I was a kid and, waking up from a bad dream, would say Hail Marys to feel safe while I got back to sleep.
Michael slowly walks around the SUV and disappears from my view for a moment, then reappears, and walks back. His jacket is no longer on him, and he looks over his shoulder a couple of times before he reaches me.
“That was so sweet of you. Did you put it over him?”
“No, I didn’t want to get in his space and scare him. I just draped it nearby where he’ll see it and hopefully figure out to put it on. I didn’t see any other clothes around, but it’s something, at least. He probably ran out of his medication.”
“What medication?”
“He’s a paranoid schizophrenic, delusional. He’s clearly not living in the reality that we all see.”
And for a moment, thinking of my Andrew memories, I understand the attraction.
When Michael and I leave Canter’s at the end of our meal—towering pastrami sandwich for him, tuna salad on rye for me—we try to find Nekked Man to give him the half of my sandwich I didn’t touch, or Michael does as I wait on the sidewalk while he goes to the far corner of the parking lot and looks around, but Nekked Man is nowhere in sight. Nor is Michael’s jacket, which we hope is a good sign.
Driving away from Fairfax on Beverly Boulevard, we head east to my apartment in the Saturday night traffic’s expectant rush. I am perched on the passenger seat in Michael’s car, his late eighties BMW, which from the outside looks great, cream paint job still good, no dings anywhere, but inside it’s a whole different world. The seat I am on rocks side to side whenever he accelerates, changes lanes, or stops, and putting my feet firmly on the floor is out of the question because it is covered with easily breakable CDs, partly filled soda cans, and a backpack that Michael explains is set and ready to go if he gets the urge to go hiking. The passenger door can’t be opened from the outside, requiring that Michael never open it for me, as if the car intuited his feelings about chivalry and adopted a defect to match. His radio station is playing on the expensive and confusing-looking stereo that he takes out of the trunk and slides into a slot in the dashboard every time we get in. The stereo is much better situated in this car for an accident, or even just a drive, than I am. For the first time in my life, I long for a shoulder strap.
“So, I’m just going to do it. I sent them a check for the whole thing today,” I say as I check the traffic to make sure there are no major obstacles that Michael needs all his attention for. “I’ve been wanting to do a Buddhist retreat for years.”
“That could work.”
“Yeah, and this one is for Catholics. Well, Christians. ‘Zen for Christians,’ that’s what they’re calling it. Some Jesuit priest who happens to be a Zen master is leading it. Three full days of silence. I think it sounds fun. Like running a marathon is fun. You get purged and excellent all at the same time. It’s at the beginning of August, right after Suzanne’s wedding that we’re going to together, right?”
“Right.”
Michael’s head is completely turned to the left looking at a restaurant with lots of tables outside. The exterior is a deep bright yellow, making the profusion of black-clad patrons look like cross-walk safety sign figures come to life.
“I think it will be helpful in a merging kind of way. The last time I went to mass was Momma’s funeral, and I stopped going regularly when I was fourteen.”
“That’s never going to work.”
“No, I think it’s perfect, really.” It’s sweet how passionate Michael is about this. “Dharma and divinity. Emptiness and redemption. What more could I want?”
“What?” Michael looks at me for the first time. “No, this show. I thought it was in better shape than this, but it’s still…no one’s listening, would you listen? Jesus Christ.”
As Michael’s car careens along, I think about the phone calls I used to have with Andrew. Hours of me talking and him listening, and him remembering practically everything. Andrew Madden with his huge career and insanely busy life always had time to listen to me, and this SOB sitting next to me can’t even hear three sentences without getting distracted by his fucking radio. But Andrew’s not around and Michael is. And maybe Michael can give that to me when things at the station settle down. Just stop comparing Michael to Andrew—as long as I do that, no one can win.
The cross above my bedroom door is the first thing I see when Michael wakes me hours later in the middle of the night. I nailed it up there last week, hoping its protection would extend from vampires to nightmares, but even though it hasn’t worked, I can’t bring myself to take it down. Maybe its protective powers just need some time to kick in; its safeguarding ability will emerge once God finally gets word it was hung.
I pull the covers back so Michael and I can get under them and sleep properly in bed. Our clothes are long off, and the protected interior air of my bedroom is a few degrees cooler than pleasant on my skin. I remember Nekked Man and hope he found more clothes somewhere tonight and is asleep someplace safe.
“That was the best sleep,” Michael says as he stretches. He sounds oddly done. “I’ve only been getting like four or five hours a night since I took over the station, but, man, those three hours felt like nine. That was amazing.” He kisses my shoulder and neck and arm. “You are amazing.”
We kiss some more, and I am moving down his body with my mouth when Michael suddenly tells me he has to go.
“Go where? No. Stay here.”
“I can’t, Yvette, I need to be at the station really early tomorrow, and you know, traffic on the freeways is a bitch.”
“On a Sunday?”
He kisses my mouth and hands. “It’s important I’m there. Right now is a very—”
“Crucial time,” I finish for him.
He looks so appreciative of my understanding that I feel bad that I didn’t really mean it, so suddenly I do.
Listening to Michael’s rhythmic footsteps going down the stairs, I wonder if the noise will awaken Gloria and bring flashbacks of her “visitors,” but my screams don’t seem to register on her, so maybe footsteps won’t, either.
I wish Michael had stayed. Jesus, he’s so into his work, but maybe he just needs more time and then he’ll be like that about us. The outline of my body still feels nicely blurred from Michael’s skin, weight, and hands on me. The pillow is under my head, the blanket pulled up right; bed, sleep, and me start combining, becoming an undifferentiated dream. Everything with Michael is fine; we’re taking it slow, which is what I wanted to do. I hope going back to sleep at this hour will prevent the scream dream. Or thoughts about Andrew. Where did that come from? For God’s sake, I was thinking about Michael.
But not anymore, I guess. Andrew is in my mind as solidly as a body in my bed, the way his hands felt on me, his eyes on mine. Fuck. Michael, why aren’t you canceling out Andrew? Okay, I just need to see Michael more, that’s all, get really hooked in with him, then Andrew will be a thing of my past, never to be thought of or seen by me again. I hope.
But really kind of don’t.
Fuck.