2
“Wait a minute,” Reggie says. It sounds as if he’s practically in my kitchen with me now, as if his large frame is hovering protectively near while I lean against my fridge, the perfect vertical bed. “What’s with this ‘nothing serious’ stuff? That’s why you broke up with Michael, am I right? The whole mushroom incident was just an example, if I recall, of how completely nonserious this guy is and has been ever since you met. What happened to that?”
“I found out that mushrooms are not—”
“What, serious?”
“Yeah. They’re like making your own wine kind of thing—natural.”
“Honey, a man who finally gets away for a weekend with his girlfriend, then spends the whole time eating mushrooms alone is not natural. He’s a freak. And dated.”
“Okay, so Michael’s a little groovy.”
“Next to who? Jerry Garcia?”
“Reggie.” I blow air out my nose to stifle a laugh. I don’t want him to know that I think something that stupid about Michael is funny, but I’m sure he can tell I’m laughing anyway. “Look, maybe that ‘serious’ stuff was the whole problem in the first place the last time. Maybe I just need to see what happens and not be so concerned with some preconceived idea about where I think this should go and by when. Maybe this time I can just take it as it comes and, you know, have fun. I mean, he’s incredibly—”
“Okay, honey, you know what? You’re nuts.”
“And you’re not?” I leave the kitchen to pace my living room floor. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound all New Age-y about this, but Michael keeps coming back into my life—”
“So does your period; that’s necessary, he’s not.”
“Reggie.”
“Of course, he’s also unpredictable and puts you in a bad mood.”
“Are you done?”
“I just think you deserve better.”
“Well, obviously, I don’t. I mean, he is better. I mean…You know what I mean.”
I wait for Reggie’s response, but there is just silence on the phone. We listen to each other breathe for a while, as if waiting for our intakes of air and emotions to get in sync before we speak again. I imagine Reggie’s face hanging in the black nonspace that telephone communication creates. His features appear smaller when he is upset, his kind blue eyes and Kansas attractiveness pull in, as if the energy required for that emotion takes so much effort that his physicality must go without.
Still silence.
Okay, I knew he’d probably pretty definitely be upset about this Michael stuff, but what was I supposed to do, not tell him? He’s my best friend, for Christ’s sake. Though sometimes he acts like he’s jealous, which I mostly find hard to believe, then annoying the few times I do because we’ve always only been friends, and even though I know he’s straight—he’s had girlfriends and women are attracted to him, though he hasn’t dated in ages—I just don’t think of him that way, so I wish he’d remember that our friendship doesn’t involve sex and stop getting mad at me when I talk about other men.
“I’m glad you had a good time with him yesterday.” I can hear the decision in Reggie’s voice to move on, to let the rhythms and sounds of our mutual morning ritual carry us back to how we are.
I sit down on the couch, relieved. “Thanks, Reggie.” Our friendship has been one long conversation interrupted only long enough for us to have more experiences to tell each other about, and I don’t want anything to stop that. Until Reggie and I talk about something that’s happened, it’s not real. It’s still in our heads, swirling around, waiting to be interpreted and set down, our minds a journal of each other’s lives. “So what’s happening with the script?”
“A big fat bunch of nothing. I mean, it’s great having you tell me about New Orleans, but I need to see the places ol’ Kate was writing about for myself—something to reinspire me—not that that’s going to happen with how goddamn busy work is.”
Reggie’s dream project is the film adaptation of a Kate Chopin story that he’s been writing forever and that is sort of the reason we met over four years ago. It was an L.A. New Year’s Eve, rainy and dismal, things either should never be, but maybe not so surprising for winter and my second one out here.
I had parties to go to that night with friends, but it was still afternoon, so I was browsing in a bookstore to kill a few of the year’s final hours. I looked at art books for a while, then went into a fiction aisle where a copy of The Awakening caught my eye. Taking it down, I flipped through until I found the chapter where the main character leaves her husband, and I suddenly remembered the first time I read that part and how I had to put the book down and just breathe for a moment because I was so amazed that this woman in 1890s New Orleans no less could walk away from the one man who enabled her to live the only life she knew.
Then someone near me in the aisle said, “Do you like Chopin, too?” which immediately catapulted me back from the novel’s world to L.A. where a pleasant-looking man was gazing at me like we had been in conversation all day. Reggie was holding a book by Dumas, one finger marking a spot as if it had been resting next to his bed. He was wearing a dark gray Shetland wool sweater, so I knew he wasn’t from here. And not East Coast, either, but near. Culturally, at least. We stood for over an hour discussing Kate Chopin—he had read everything by her—and New Orleans—he had never been—while people milled past us, water to our rocks in a stream. And our friendship’s conversation began. Every year on New Year’s Eve, Reggie calls to wish me happy anniversary.
“Maybe you could get down there for a weekend,” I say as my phone line clicks, but before I can decide to ignore it, Reggie tells me to go ahead.
“Hello?” I hope it’s Michael, then immediately don’t, so I won’t have to say goodbye to one of them for the other.
“You haven’t even left yet?”
If I were forced to read those words without hearing the voice, I could still identify them as having been uttered by my only sibling, Suzanne.
“I am having a major bouquet crisis over here.”
“Hi, Suzanne. We said ten; it’s only nine.”
“No.” Her word lasts three beats. “We said Monday, nine A.M.”
I silently shake my head, taking my own three seats, as I remind myself of the advice I read in a bridal book after Suzanne announced her engagement and chose me as her maid of honor: “Remember, bridesmaids, however she behaves, this is her big day!” I wish I had never read that damn book, though wedding protocol is probably like traffic laws—you get punished for breaking one whether you knew it existed or not.
“Okay, I’m just finishing up a call, then as fast as the freeway is moving, I’ll be there.”
“Hurry,” my sister says, then hangs up the phone.
I click back to Reggie and hear the alleluia of his iMac coming to life, as if announcing that instead of resting on the seventh day, God made Mac. I relay the interrupting interlude to him, sure that he will believe what I remembered and Suzanne forgot.
“Freud was—”
“A great man, yes, that I remember. I also remember Suzanne telling me ten o’clock, but my mantra for her wedding is ‘whatever.’” I walk down the hall to my bedroom to start getting ready to leave. “How is your work going anyway?”
“The director’s a nightmare, and the client wants more energy, which, lemme tell ya, this commercial is never gonna have. They fight it out while I wonder how they expected the actors they hired to impersonate live people. If I passed one of these freaks in the produce aisle, I’d turn and run.”
“They’re lucky they have you to edit. You always make something amazing.”
“I should be making something amazing with my own script.”
“You will. It’s gonna be great.”
“Breakfast ma?ana?”
Reggie ends all of our morning phone calls this way. He told me once that his therapist decided that Reggie doesn’t know how to separate effectively from people, that he continues to stay attached to them throughout his day. The evidence of this, the therapist explained, was in the wording of Reggie’s goodbyes—they always contained a reference to when he and the other person would connect again. I told Reggie I thought it was just being nice.
Some therapists want to take all the manners out of you and think they haven’t done their job until they do. Like the phrase “I’m sorry,” for instance. How often have I said that in the course of my life? A hell of a lot more than the therapist I saw for a year was comfortable with, that’s certain. He would say, and rather gruffly considering he was a paid professional, “What are you sorry for? You didn’t do anything.”
Where I grew up in Pass Christian that phrase was an expression of sympathy and concern and solidarity with the person you were visiting with. Such as: “I’m sorry you had a bad day,” or “I’m sorry the hurricane tore your house up,” or “I’m sorry the Saints lost again.” Although sometimes I wonder if the real reason we apologize so much down there is that we still haven’t atoned for that truly horrible crime that we committed.
That apology enters my head a lot when I’m with Suzanne. Sometimes it feels like a spell was cast on me at birth that transforms anything I say or do around her from loving-little-sister to stark-raving-brat. At least, it appears that she views my behavior that way—but maybe some spell was cast on her, too. Though this morning, she definitely will think I’m a brat if I am any more late for my maid-of-honor obligation than I already am, which I might very well be since I seem unable to get dressed.
I have changed my shirt three times. There is almost a gravitational pull from my closet keeping me here as the pile of discarded clothing grows. The phone rings. I imagine it is Suzanne, or at least her energy using someone else’s call to yell “Hurry up!” at me from her house in Santa Monica clear across town. I look in the mirror inside the closet door and only slightly dislike what I have ended up in. All right, just go.
I hurry into the second bedroom that I converted into my office/studio. Morning light streams in, filling the room with a muted quiet, but the air is urgent with the anticipation of work that needs to get done. Sketches of completed and still-evolving designs are tacked to a Peg-Board on the wall above my worktable; tools of all shape and manner are hanging there too, their images outlined à la corpse in black Sharpie pen—a custom I picked up from my father’s work shed which he mimicked from all the detective novels he read; my computer is on and humming with photos of my new pieces waiting to be priced, printed, and organized; invoices and order forms spill from a two-tiered wire basket next to my carat and gram scales; black felt-lined trays filled with seed pearls and toggle clasps and checkerboard-cut amethysts and silk cords and yellow topaz vie for space on the worktable next to loose color-copied pages for press kits that are begging to be assembled. Not everything can be left out before I leave.
Crouching down in front of the gunmetal-gray safe that takes up the whole far corner of the room, I spin the dial quickly three times, right-left-right. Its familiar clicking is such an old song to me now that I can hear if the rhythm is off. Getting the safe into the apartment was hell. I had to pay the landlord extra for a guy to come out and check the building’s structure to make sure an object this heavy and large wouldn’t fall through the floor and crash into the apartment below. The safe’s weighty door slowly swings open, revealing trays of finished pieces that need to be delivered to customers as well as more loose stones; necklaces and earrings; rings, bracelets, and pins; lemony pale citrine gems; rare mint garnets and cabachon-cut red ones; a tiny pile of peridots, known as the evening emerald gemstone; tourmalines of blue, purple, and watermelon pink/green; pieces set and bound with braided eighteen-karat gold, all sparkling and blinking at me from the safe’s squatting bulk.
I take out trays and select earrings, a bracelet, and two pins, then put them on while checking in the mirror on the wall. The peridots are a pale whispering green, the tourmalines a soft lullaby blue, and all are shot through with thin bands of gold cutting across the gems that are then held together and apart by braided embraces of deep yellow gold. Sometimes I wish I could live inside a piece of jewelry. Or at least in a place where everything was smooth and polished and set and the only cuts that occurred were on purpose to make the light more enhanced.
I fill a large fake Louis Vuitton travel case with trays of jewelry, return the other ones to the safe along with the trays of topaz and amethysts and pearls from the worktable, shut the door, spin the dial a few turns, then stand up to look around to see if I’ve forgotten anything. Price sheets, order forms, and business cards with the name of my line, Broussard’s Bijoux, are already in the pocket of the travel case, and I am reminded, for the hundredth time, that I need to get a brochure printed up, as well as a Web site—does it ever end?—but finally I’m ready to run.
I grab my purse in the living room, lock the front door behind me, then race down the stairs and across the courtyard as the soft late May sunshine plays on my skin letting me know how it feels to be out in the clothes I am in that makes me turn around, run up to my apartment, grab my favorite black shirt plus a blue one, relock the front door behind me, run to my truck, and, finally, leave.