20
I moved to Los Angeles Labor Day weekend of 1992 when I was twenty-three, a few months after graduating from SVA and breaking up with Tim. Moved and landed in Suzanne’s guest room. Or rather the guest room of Marc, her boyfriend at that time, with whom she lived in his Spanish-style house in Beverly Hills. The house was large and cool with a pool I would take dips in on the long hot September afternoons while Suzanne and Marc were at work. Marc was a music agent and he introduced me to Bill, the music producer I worked for as an assistant a few days a week. Marc hooked me up with him right after I got to L.A., sending me up to Bill’s home in Silverlake. I liked Bill immediately. He was originally from Detroit with an Ivy League yet groovy vibe about him. He had kind blue eyes, and offered me some of the fresh carrot juice he had just made before we sat outside on his terraced patio to talk about where I was from, the bands he was producing, and the things he needed done.
In my first few days after moving, I started adjusting to the sights of L.A., like the trees. I had never seen such odd ones before. Not that the palm trees were odd—okay, they were out of place, not even indigenous to the city, but they didn’t look odd; their gaunt bodies and full plumes on top reminded me of the anorexic yet heavy-chested actresses everywhere. It was the other types of trees, the regular North American kind, that were so odd. They were small. Tiny. I figured maybe the desert climate kept them from growing full because it was hot here, blazing. The sun was at such a close angle—not the rays buffeted through the humidity that I grew up with in the South, or even the curved slant of it you’d get in New York City. This sun was right next to me, literally on my shoulder, like I’d bump into it if I turned around too fast. So a bunch of nice, full, shade-producing, sun-blocking trees would have been a huge help against that heat-inducing foe, but everywhere I went—Sunset Boulevard, Westwood, Beverly Hills—the trees were so curiously small. It made me long for the deep shade and towering fullness of the virtual forests at home in Pass Christian.
Two weeks after I started working for Bill, almost my third week in L.A., I finally called Andrew to let him know I had moved. I had been waiting to call him because I wanted to get more settled somehow, but the longing to hear his voice overpowered me. It had been a month since we had spoken on the phone, and that was in New York, so it was beginning to feel like something that had happened in a far-off distant land that wasn’t connected to me but I needed it to be. Needed him to be. It was a Saturday morning, Suzanne and Marc and I had finished breakfast, and I was still sitting at their antique country pine kitchen table while the morning light bounced off the citron walls, studying the book-sized L.A. map to acquaint myself with routes around town. At least streets were clearly marked in this city, with one sign at the corner, and also a larger one a few yards ahead to give a pleasant warning of your future turn. I remembered the small street signs in Pass Christian, mostly hidden by full, luscious trees, and wondered how anyone ever moved there and comfortably got around, but maybe that was the point. Suzanne and Marc came through the kitchen in tennis garb, and told me they’d be back in a few hours. I waved nonchalantly as if I couldn’t care less that I had the house again to myself. And the phone.
I waited for the sounds of the garage door opening, the car doors shutting, the car starting and revving (it was a Porsche), and backing out of the drive, before I walked into the den where large sliding doors led out to the pool, sat down on the gargantuan denim-covered couch, picked up the phone on the side table, and dialed Andrew’s number that I had known by heart for years, but had always had to dial long distance. Now, for the first time, it was local.
The operator answered, and upon hearing my name, told me to hold, so I knew she was getting him. It seemed as if only one person always answered his phone; no matter what hour it was or day of the week, the voice sounded exactly the same, as if there were a woman put on earth just to handle Andrew’s phones. In the years I lived in New York, whenever I called Andrew, I always imagined this operator-woman somewhere in an almost bare, nondescript room, far away from his home, with plastic containers of food and a diet Coke on her desk, always there, never ever gone.
“Where are you?” Andrew said, his concerned voice and large presence suddenly on the line. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m good; I’m in L.A.”
“L.A.? Where?”
I gave him the details, leaving out the length of time I’d been here, until he asked.
“Why haven’t you called me before? I’ve been worried, not hearing from you for weeks, and I couldn’t call you because of Tim-my.” Andrew exaggerated the last syllable the way he had done since I first started seeing Tim. “Is he here, too?”
“No, that’s all over.”
“Good.” He said it as if Tim were a phase I had needed to go through that he had always known would end, and that having done so it signaled my growth. “Not calling me for weeks, no idea where you were—you are in such big trouble for this.”
Thank God.
“Do you still love me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then why aren’t you up here already? Come on.” He gave me directions to his home in Bel Air, making sure I knew the right way to go. I almost told him I had a map, but I wanted his instructions. As we hung up, the tingly feeling that had been building in me all during the call settled inside, making me glow stronger than the sun outside. I was going to see Andrew. I hadn’t expected that when I called him. I figured we’d just pick up our routine of talking every day, and maybe at some point, one day…But this was so immediate. I wondered what it meant and hoped it was huge and would become habitual.
I changed into a little floral dress I had bought on Melrose and put on some makeup, having to keep my hands steady while I thought back to the last time I had seen him. It was in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton, and we had been sitting on the yellow silk couch looking at pictures of Malaysia when that terrible Suzy girl arrived. Maybe seeing him now could be a fresh start, maybe he’d even ask about my art. I looked in the mirror of Marc’s guest room one last time before I picked up my bag to go. I was finally going to see Andrew again after five years. Five years that in some ways felt like ten, but also felt like five minutes. I left a note for Suzanne, telling her I had borrowed her car to run some errands, and ran out the door.
On the drive up the road in Bel Air to Andrew’s home, I passed huge houses with manicured lawns that became increasing large and more hidden from view the farther up I went. It felt like a dream, being on my way to see him again, real the way dreams feel while I’m having them, yet this one I didn’t have to wake up from. The road kept winding around, then wound back one more time, and there at the very top, as if God had saved it for him, was Andrew’s property. From the street, all I could see was a dense boundary of trees and shrubbery that I was sure hid a tall and fierce fence topped with barbed wire. A large white gate was closed across a driveway that looked like a small road. I stopped the car on the street before I got any closer—I figured he had security cameras rigged all over the place—and checked my makeup in the rearview mirror, then with an expulsion of air from my gut that was meant to relax the butterflies in there but only made them worse, I drove into the driveway and stopped in front of the gate. I pushed the button on an intercom box that protruded toward my car like a land-bound periscope, and a few seconds later, the wide white gate silently swung open, and a camera swiveled, keeping my car in sight as I drove into the property. Access to Andrew’s kingdom had been silently granted.
The curving roadway was flanked by large shady trees and strategically placed groups of shrubs through which I glimpsed tennis courts on the left, then farther up on the right a small house, then the driveway curved once again and his home came into view.
It could have been on the Mediterranean coast, the Italianate architecture was so perfect and grand. Opening the car door, I half expected to smell sea air. It was like an island, a retreat from the intrusion of city life below.
The front door’s heavy wood muffled my knock, but I noticed a doorbell, so I pushed that, and a moment later, the door opened by inches and seconds and feet and minutes and Andrew appeared.
“Hi.” He said the word as only he could, not so much making it two syllables, but with enough space that there was a sunrise in the first part and a sunset in the last with a day in between for us.
I stood on the step taking him in. I’d seen his face and body in photographs and films countless times in the intervening years, but none of it compared to seeing him live. He was stripped down without the celluloid. Available, raw and real. Then our arms and lips and hands and tongues came together as if they had never not.
He led me through rooms of highly polished dark wood floors, satiny cream walls, and exquisite museum-quality antiques. Kellys, Baselitzes, Lichtensteins, Freuds, Twomblys, Johns, and Richters lined the walls. I thought of my sculptures in Momma’s attic and fantasized about one of them being there as we continued through more rooms past more art, then into his bedroom where Andrew sat down on the bed. It was huge. A room of its own. No words were spoken as our garments were removed.
The sex we had didn’t feel like only the second time. It was a continuation, an “and then,” as if the movement and rhythm and heat had been present all along, just under our skin. We fell in.
After a couple of hours, we got up and went to the kitchen for food, bringing a tray of gourmet dishes his chef had made back to the bed with ice-cold bottles of Pellegrino and beer.
“I’m glad you’re here. I’ve missed seeing your beautiful face,” Andrew said. We were lying back on the bed content after feeding each other and devouring the food. I didn’t say anything. It was a huge admission from him. One that I knew he might not have said if he’d thought much about it beforehand. It had come out on its own, unable to stay in, and I let it roll over my skin like the sensations of him during sex.
Andrew reached over to the bedside table and pressed a button, making the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall heavy silk cream-colored curtains slowly open, as if the day outside were a performance for us. The slightest cast of shadow was reaching toward his house. I realized it had to be past three and suddenly remembered Suzanne’s car sitting outside. It seemed ages ago since I had left that note for her. She was probably frantic, but mostly mad.
“Will I see you again soon or is it going to be years?” I said as I reluctantly got up and started to dress.
“What do you think?” He looked at me from his bed, his eyes on mine as if they had never left.
And I knew what he meant.
He kissed me at the front door. “Call me later, sweet-y-vette.”
Despite the annoyance of having to deal with an angry, carless Suzanne, I was ecstatically happy as I flew down the hill in Bel Air. As I turned onto Sunset, speeding into the curves to take them tight and fast, it felt as if Andrew’s arms were still holding me close.
And we were back. Not in the way it had been before, because we weren’t sexually involved before. Okay, once, I know, but that didn’t really count in terms of defining the relationship because the relationship wasn’t sexual. It was parental in a way. But now it was going to be different, that was clear. Though I wasn’t sure what change had suddenly allowed it. But I didn’t care. Andrew was back in my life; that was all that mattered.
Andrew and I started talking a few times every day. He’d call in the morning after Suzanne and Marc had left for work; I’d call him in the afternoon or night. Our New York habit but with the addition that we also talked about the sex we were regularly having. I’d go up to his house late at night, a wind was always high and restless in the trees around his estate even when it had been still as death in L.A. below, and he’d greet me at the front door, the same small “hi” every time before we kissed. Then we’d go into the kitchen if he had to finish up a call he was on with other movie people, I figured, who also conducted business at all hours of the night. The calls sounded important and concerned money or positions of power changing around. I’d sit on a stool waiting for him, listening to him talk and trying to fill in what the other person was saying, clues to Andrew’s life and what consumed him.
The kitchen was completely different from the rest of the house with its dark woods, important paintings, and astonishing antiques; it was a modernist’s dream. Steel and chrome and white and beams. Reflective surfaces absent of color except for an eternally present, exquisitely fresh bowl of fruit whose type of occupant changed every few days and a David Hockney behind glass, one of the Mulholland Drive series, spreading itself across the large kitchen wall like a bird unable to take full flight. Once the calls were done or would no longer be answered, since calls never ceased to come in for him, we would walk the path to his bedroom, the dark and beautiful art-filled journey into the place where his jeans would come down, my clothes would be taken off, usually with him lying on the bed watching, then I would get on top of him and work my way down to the beginning of bliss for both of us.
After a couple more weeks of living at Marc and Suzanne’s when I thought Suzanne and I were going to tear each other’s hair out, I bought an old Chevy truck (good for hauling my sculptures, I thought) and put down a deposit plus first month’s rent on a five-hundred-dollar-a-month rent-controlled studio apartment on a pretty street in Beverly Hills. I had sold most of the work I did for the graduation show at SVA in New York back in May, so I had that money, and I had gotten a waitressing job at a restaurant to supplement my income since a few days a week working for Bill wasn’t covering everything.
The apartment was in an old Spanish-style building from the twenties with huge windows and beautiful tile. It had one large, light-filled room plus an eat-in kitchen, a huge walk-in closet, a decent-sized bathroom, and, the best part, a dressing room that I used as my (tiny) art studio. I had decided to start painting again, wanting to make box-type pieces with objects depicting the juxtaposition of being in two worlds, separate but at once. So the dressing room was messy and full, with a drop cloth covering the hardwood floor and a floodlight clamped onto the door frame so I could work late at night after my restaurant shifts, while I was still wound up from getting customers’ gourmand desires while they were under the delusion that sitting in the new hot spot, eating an overly expensive meal, was going to change who they were, or at least fix their unhappiness.
One afternoon when I was home after a morning of working for Bill, Andrew called me from his car. He asked what I was doing, and when I answered, “Working on a new piece,” he immediately wanted my address. I had a split second of thinking his motivation was to see what I was working on, then I realized, probably not. I gave the address to him, using the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences building as a reference point since it was at the corner of my street and I knew he would know where it was at the very least because of all the premieres he must have attended there through the years, not to mention the two Oscars he had won. My downstairs neighbor had told me what the building was soon after I moved in, as I was cooling down from a run early one evening and watching an impeccably hip phalanx walking past our apartment building. A film premiere, she had explained, at the academy. But Andrew had no response to that information. No “That’s funny, I’m there for screenings quite a bit.” Or “I’m glad you landed on a safe block.” Just “I’ll be right there.” Which was annoying. Was I not supposed to mention that precious part of his world? We didn’t talk about his career regularly, and when we did, he was the one who brought it up, and it took the form of him thinking things through out loud while watching my reaction to see how it sounded, sometimes asking what I thought about a particular point or two, then when he was done, we’d have sex.
Andrew walked into my apartment that afternoon, filling up the space with his tall strong frame, the light from his eyes blinding the room. We had sex on the futon that Bill had given me after assuring me that he had bought it to use as a couch, then changed his mind and never did. I had gotten a down-filled mattress pad to cover it, like gold inlay on a plastic watch, I thought every time I lay down, but it was comfortable, I could sleep, and my checkbook hadn’t been wrecked by buying a bed.
At Andrew’s house, we had a routine, but that afternoon it was altered, the sex a collage of sensations, some motions moved forward, others following while before they had led, and my apartment was the background. Having him there was like a picture of our relationship enlarged. Easier to see, but some things were blurred while others were cut off, as if unnecessary to the subject’s essentiality. The sex was different and familiar, and Andrew became imprinted where my life developed most.
Afterward, Andrew got up to use the bathroom. He walked down the short hall and into the dressing room where I heard him stop, his footsteps muffled slightly by the drop cloth. I could imagine him turning his head to look at my pieces, and I wondered what he thought about them and if he would tell me, as he had with my sculptures all those years ago on his bed at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. A few seconds later I heard more steps, the bathroom door shut, then the faucet turned on. I lay naked on the futon as a soft breeze from the mid-October day blew in through the window, running over my skin the way Andrew’s hands just had, and I waited to see if and what he would say about my art and tried not to care if he didn’t, but wasn’t very successful.
Hopefully, he’d say something. Please, God, say something. I heard water splashing a face, then hands interrupted the spigot’s flow. I tried to remember when I had last washed the towels. Two days ago; not great, not horrible. As my grandmother always said, you were clean when you got out of the tub and used them. I thought of his laundry and linens that were whisked away and invisibly replaced. His clothing retained a perfumed cleanliness, the unsullied perfection of being taken care of by many invisible hands. I could smell it on his garments each time I unzipped his jeans, pushed them down, and opened his fly while he stood, sometimes in his kitchen, when our sex started there at the end of a phone call that had been particularly long, or sometimes during one, if it was useless and annoying to him.
Andrew walked back into the room, got onto the futon with me, and put his head on my stomach with his body lying between my legs. As I rubbed his back, he was quiet and so was I as I waited to see if he’d talk about my art. I knew I couldn’t casually say, “So what’d you think of what you saw?” My voice would belie the importance behind it and I didn’t want him to know that.
“I didn’t know if you were going to call me,” Andrew said.
“What?”
“When I first met you at the restaurant in New York. You in that uniform and more beautiful than any woman there, including the one I was with.” He looked me in the eyes, nodding his head. “You know who I mean—Lily—and she could tell, too. After you brought me the phone, she kept saying ‘You like her, don’t you?’ over and over all through the rest of our meal. She bitched about you for weeks—you really threatened her.”
It was shocking to hear that she had noticed me, much less been worried about what effect I might have on him.
“Then all Sunday morning,” Andrew went on. “After I met you the night before at the coat room, I was kicking myself for not getting your phone number. I didn’t think you were gonna call me. Thought I’d have to go back to that restaurant for another meal just to talk to you again, which, by the way, was the only reason I went there two weeks in a row was to meet you. I couldn’t stop thinking about you that whole time in between.”
“Me, too.”
“I didn’t even need to go to the bathroom, remember, after we talked? You were still in the coat-check room, and I went in the men’s room and thought, Fuck, now what do I do? So I washed my hands, then had to tip the attendant a dollar for handing me a towel.”
It was funny he had remembered the attendant. I had forgotten all about him, a small wiry man who would continually run out of the men’s room when no one was in there and stand outside the ladies’ room, shouting in to the female attendant to come out and talk to him. Then he’d race back whenever anyone entered the foyer or came down the stairs—shooting in and out of the men’s room like a hermit crab from a sand hole.
Andrew wrapped his arms around me, holding me close and kissing me, and I tried to gather in as much of him to last me before I saw him again. It almost made up for him saying nothing about my art.
After Andrew left, as I was working in the dressing room on the new piece, I wondered if he would ever talk to me about my art again—the work he’d seen that afternoon, all of it—the way he had finally spoken to me about his experience when we first met. Maybe I should bring it up, just ask him one day, “So, what did you think of the work you saw at my apartment?” But I didn’t think I could do it without caring too much. Especially after all that had happened with it and me and him. Maybe I wouldn’t bring it up. Or maybe I wouldn’t have to because he would. Dear God, I hoped so. And I hoped it wouldn’t take him years, as it had for him to reveal his feelings about when he first met me. I didn’t think I’d be able to wait that long.