25
It had ended. Finally the relationship was over. Gossips chattered that Stephanie and Andrew’s romance had stopped because their work together was done and there had never been anything real and lasting between them. As opposed to all the other real and lasting celebrity couplings in Hollywood.
Valiant Hour held its top ten box office position well into the summer with public sightings of Andrew and Stephanie as a couple continuing until August when it all disappeared. Theaters replaced the movie with newer fare and Stephanie went on a much-publicized romantic trip to Scotland with the film’s cinematographer. Which is how I found out. Andrew hadn’t told me and there had been little to no shift in his attitude or time with me; we still saw each other regularly. So I was thrilled it was over, but nervous. I wanted to be the woman who filled Stephanie’s place. Or not filled it, because I never believed in her feelings for him anyway. Maybe “take over” would be a better way to say it. I wanted it to be Andrew and me and no one else.
On Labor Day weekend, a few weeks after I found out that Andrew and Stephanie were kaput, I didn’t hear from him for a day and a half and I started to get concerned. All right, scared. Okay, terrified. He had met someone else and fallen in love that quickly. Fuck. And this new person probably wasn’t just an in-between girl, but someone who would fill every space in him so much that there would no longer be any room or need for me. Panic moved in from the outside of my skin and settled under my breath all day, pushing it up when I tried to inhale, and pulling in when I tried to blow out. I was a wreck.
I bought a bottle of Absolut and some tonic, and drank a lot of it while sitting on my futon wishing my phone would ring.
It finally did at two A.M., but by then I had been passed out—I mean, asleep—for a few hours.
“Hi, sweet-y-vette. I’m in Venice,” Andrew said over waves of soft white noise.
I wondered why he was telling me that, but all I cared about was that his voice was on my line calling me.
“Should I meet you at your house?” I was struggling to get my brain and body to match his alertness.
“No, I’m in Italy. Venice, Italy.”
“Italy?”
“I’m in Venice, Italy; not Venice, L.A. At the film festival. I’ll be home in a few days.”
Now I understood. Oh, thank God, he had called and all the way from there.
“Go back to sleep, honey, I’ll call you when I get home. If you need me, call Patrick and he’ll get me, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Do you still love me?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I…” He was quiet for a moment as if he were going to say the same thing. “I’ll talk to you soon. Sweet dreams, Yvette.”
“Bye, Andrew.”
I hung up the phone and started to put it on the floor, then decided to let it stay on the bed with me, so that his voice it had transported could escort me into sleep. Andrew called. I wondered what time it was in Italy. New York was three hours ahead, and Europe six, so nine would make it eleven A.M. where he was. Jesus, I hoped a woman hadn’t just left his bed. Okay, he probably was having sex with other women; they just better be one-time-only things that didn’t mean anything to him. At least when he was with Stephanie, as horrible as that was, I knew who she was and I could perform the mental gymnastics required to diminish her threat to me, but these God-knows-who-and-how-many-other women were harder to dispel. Fuck. Oh, Andrew, come home from there and make me the only woman in your life. I fell asleep to that prayer.
For the next month, every time I saw him and every time he called, all I could think about was whether or not Andrew and I were getting closer to being a real couple. To the public, to him, to me. All behavior and conversation between us was looked at through that prism. I was obsessed. It was like some kind of relationship diet. I only felt good on days when the score of promising signs of our togetherness outweighed the bad ones. Seeing him was at the top of the list for making me feel good, but then it would make me feel shitty because why weren’t we going out in public? Phone calls, lots of them in one day, were always a good sign, except when was he going to say “I love you” to me?
My art fell by the wayside, completely forgotten. I made mistakes working for Bill and dropped a lot of dishes at the restaurant. I stopped calling friends back—what was the point? I could only think about one thing—Andrew—and I couldn’t talk about him with any of them. Especially Viv, who, inspired by Stephanie—all right, maybe not, but I thought of it that way—had broken up with Craig and was just loving her new single status. It made me want to scream. That was the last thing I could hear about, especially from her, since it included more harangues about how great Stephanie was doing now that she was finished with that scumbag Andrew. Though I figured Viv would have to stop trashing him soon since her main conduit for information on him had dried up. Her last diatribe against him sounded like a death rattle.
My days began and ended with the same perpetual thought—were Andrew and I going to be together permanently? It was like some horrible game, like a king with twin sons who takes forever to pick the heir. Someone was going to get picked, but who and when? It was pure hell. And the whole time I tried to appear to him as if I didn’t care. As if I wasn’t the complete wreck I was inside that made me stop eating and barely sleep through the night. If I hadn’t wanted to be with him so much, I would have wanted to die.
One morning in early November, Andrew called me and said, “Why don’t you come over tonight and we’ll watch the election returns?”
After saying yes in what I hoped was a calm voice, we made a plan, and hung up. I was shocked. Our get-togethers were always last-minute, arranged at the end of the night or as he drove toward my apartment in his car. This was a good ten hours away, and it involved politics, a love of his life, almost as much as collecting art. He had shared some of that world with me, particularly when we first met and my father’s Southern Republican opinions still held me in their sway. Andrew taught me about socially responsible government and education instead of arms. I’d ask him the questions that even the forming of confused me, and he would answer at their core, explaining issues and consequences. I wanted to know more about all that for him. I loved his mind and the way he articulated his thoughts. Listening to him talk about politics was like being on an intense-but-intelligent ride—Oh, the places you’ll go!—to quote another great, if quite different mind. So to be asked to watch the election returns with him was like an invitation to meet his family—a huge step. I knew he’d have insightful information about each candidate; hell, he knew and was courted by most of the Democrats.
My entire day was about our date at eight. I somehow got through the mundanity of my lunch shift at the restaurant by trying to distance myself from it. As I drove home afterward, still feeling cruddy from handling plates of food, a horrible fear that had been lurking in me for the past few months raised its head and began shouting at me. Over and over it told me that for Andrew to be with me the way he was with those other women, like Lily and Stephanie, completely and publicly, I would have to be famous. Because in the three-plus decades that his romantic life had been fodder for the media, Andrew had never gone out with a woman who wasn’t as famous as him, or at least close to it since very, very few ever reached his level. And I was nobody. Hadn’t become a big fucking art star in New York and still wasn’t one. No matter how many glittering parties I went to with Viv, or how many millionaire men I dated, or how much money I spent that I didn’t have on facials and clothes, the reality was the same. I wasn’t in his world. Where I grew up, it was the number of decades your family had lived there that mattered—past a century or so and you were in, and mine went back at least two, but in L.A., it was fame and money that mattered. And it looked like it did for Andrew, too.
But maybe that fear was just fucking with me. It had to be. Andrew loved me. And he said that I was the only woman in the world that he believed truly loved him—that had to mean a lot. And, good God, his success and fame were enough for ten. Surely, mine couldn’t matter so much to him. We had just never had the chance to really be together, but with Stephanie out of the picture and both of us in the same city, it could finally happen. He had just been taking it slowly, not rushing in, and our date to watch the election returns would be the first step in changing everything.
When I got home, I stripped off my waitress uniform, took a shower, and put on his favorite dress, a small floral-print V-neck with a short pleated skirt. The depth of the neckline, brevity of the skirt, and floral of the fabric were the only differences from my Catholic school uniform. The first time I wore it around him, he opened his door and looked at me for a long while.
“What?” I said.
“You know I’m a sucker for that.”
I hadn’t, but good.
So I wore that, using everything in my arsenal for a winning campaign.
Andrew had the same reaction to the dress when he opened the door as he had had before. I could tell it made him want to blow off watching the returns. I took it as a good sign about the future of the evening and us.
“Let’s miss the beginning,” Andrew said as he led me past the kitchen where the TV was blaring and to his bed. I slipped off my dress, and with it all the fears that had been tormenting me. As I knelt on the sheets, I decided that none of that stuff—the fame and success—really mattered to him. It was just him and me. Us. We were completely similar when we were only in our skin and in each other’s. And that was what mattered.
The marble counter of the island in Andrew’s kitchen was covered with containers and platters of food that Andrew had pulled from his fridge after we finally emerged from his bedroom. We picked through the offerings; giving each other tastes, devouring some, ignoring others. He was into the borscht soup. I thought it looked metallically cold. I was eating sesame noodles. The TV on the counter was still on and the results that were being reported were exactly what Andrew had predicted. He started explaining to me what the party would do and we talked about the different candidates and how they had managed their campaigns—if anyone knew how to handle the media, it was Andrew.
A while later, we were in bed again, right in the middle, when the phone rang. Well, not rang—lit, actually. Andrew’s phones didn’t ring; they lit up all through his house, like Tinkerbell kept alive by an omnipotent invisible child. Even across a bright room with his back to the instrument, he could tell whenever one of the small transparent plastic buttons began blinking. So I wasn’t surprised that in the deep dark of his bedroom—him moving on top of me, I had already had three, but his was still to come—he noticed the sharp small light flashing on the phone on his bedside table.
During the months he was seeing Stephanie, she would sometimes call while we were in his bed and he would have to answer, but he always expected it and would warn me ahead. I’d wait silently while devouring and dissecting every fragment of his side of their conversation. She required tons of shoring up from him. He was constantly having to tell her what a great job she did, and yes, she was the best, no other actress compared to her and on and on. It was shocking. All that animal confidence she exuded was bullshit. Every word she uttered and thing she did needed his constant encouragement.
His bedside phone, like all the others, had a row of buttons, and I knew that only a few persons had the number that lit the one button that would make Andrew pick up, like I did. That was the button that was blinking as he was moving on top of me, speaking into my ear, my hurried breath answering him, together moving forward, so near, but then his arm reached out and the phone was at his ear.
“Hello.”
He had stopped moving, which made me stop, but my body inside was a few beats behind. I wanted to continue moving—fuck the caller—but figured I’d better not.
“When does her plane leave?”
“That’s obscene,” he said to the answer.
“Okay, see you in a little bit.”
Before I could register what had just happened, Andrew hung up the phone, kissed my lips, and, withdrawing from bed, said, “Come on, we have people coming over; we’re getting dressed.”
Fuck. I wanted it to be just me and him. Who were these goddamn people coming over at ten after eleven? Then I realized it was me with him meeting some of his friends. That hadn’t happened since the lunch in New York when actor best friend regaled me with funny Andrew tales. If this would be like that—all right, it could be fun. But who was this “she” whose plane was leaving God knows when?
Fuck.
She was a model from Germany. I had seen pictures of her the year before when she had exploded onto Vogue and everywhere else. Her beauty was rarified it was so complete, though a bit lupine, I thought. Andrew’s friend—the one who had called him and had brought her—was a famous photographer, and I vowed to never again like the hard and beautiful pictures of fashion and celebrities he shot.
We had settled in the kitchen where the stark, brightly lit whiteness seemed to outline the color and flesh of each of us as if we were in a flat cardboard set. I hoped it was hugely obvious that Andrew and I had been having sex. Andrew had wanted me to pull myself together, but I’d let my hair stay a bit mussed, having a feeling I might need the extra armor of our interrupted coitus. Take that, you fucking model.
She was wearing an exquisite dress that I had seen in last month’s Vogue and loved. If I remembered correctly, it cost over three thousand dollars. Though up close and live, it didn’t look as good on her slumping body and had a wine stain near the neck. What a slob. I tried to remind myself that Andrew loved my dress, but I felt small in it, silly, eighty-nine dollars on sale could not compete with that dress, even stained and slumped.
“Where’s the bathroom?” the model asked after introductions were made.
She was barely out of the room when the photographer looked at Andrew, turned toward him really, with his back to me like I was more kitchen counter, and said, “So what do you think about her—pretty hot, huh? She’d be nice. And perfect for you.”
Andrew was quiet for a second, then said, “She’s a very pretty girl.” He stated it simply, like the fact it was.
But the photographer’s words began furiously reprinting themselves in my head. “So what do you think about her—pretty hot, huh? She’d be nice. And perfect for you.” Again and again and again.
Andrew had changed the subject; they were talking about mutual friends, but my mind was reeling.
“Ooo, that bathroom was sssooo cold,” the model declared as she entered the kitchen’s hot glare. “My pee froze midair before it hit the john.”
Andrew looked at me and I looked at him. I knew he knew what I was thinking and I knew he agreed. Growing up in the South, there were some things you just didn’t mention because of an implicit understanding that they weren’t interesting to anyone else, particularly to people you’ve just met, like your bodily functions. I wondered if it was her upbringing—it kind of matched how she was with the dress—or a hazard of being that beautiful, the misguided belief that every part of her, refuse included, was a fascinating subject. God, I hated her.
“How about a little food?” Andrew said, practically clapping his hands to help break the moment. “Yvette, will you help me see what’s in the fridge?” We both knew exactly what was in the fridge, but I inwardly thanked him for an activity that put me in the hostess role.
“Oh, we’re not hungry,” the photographer said. Did the model ever allow herself to be? “We just came from Patricia’s birthday party—Patricia Alpert.” He addressed the last part to me, which I could have believed was a nice inclusion, but instead his tone built a wall around the three of them who knew Patricia already.
“She was so sorry you weren’t there,” he continued, his focus back on Andrew and the model. “She went on and on about how important you were to her growing up.”
That I hadn’t known, but could have guessed. Patricia Alpert was the daughter of a legendary studio mogul and had come into success on her own as a film producer, plying her access to her father’s movie star friends.
“And what was in that card you wrote?” the photographer asked. “She kept giggling and waving it around like she’d let us see, but she never did.”
Andrew was standing next to me holding the refrigerator door open, though it would have stayed open on its own, and I was filling the marble counter of the island with the containers and platters that had provided our recent meal. The photographer and the model were on the other side of the island across from us and I wanted them to stay there, if not leave.
“It said, ‘You’ll always be eight to me.’”
I knew as he said it that Andrew meant the age, but it registered in my mind as some kind of grammatically incorrect double entendre.
“Love that! And so did she.” This goddamn photographer-man would not shut up. “And what you gave her, it was her favorite. And she got loot, lemme tell ya, but those two dozen red roses you sent were the highlight of her evening.”
Oh, good God.
Roses. He sent her roses. Or rather, Patrick probably did, following a command from Andrew just that day, maybe even right after Andrew and I had talked on the phone making our plans, once he knew he wouldn’t go to Patricia’s birthday party. Andrew had had roses sent so she would know how much he cared about her even though he wasn’t there. Roses. Twenty-four tall and red and public emissaries of his love. To bloom in front of her and everyone else. And when they started to wilt, she could throw them out or press them or make potpourri and save the memory in her heart for eternity. Roses. For her and everyone to see.
I could feel Andrew looking at me. And I could hear the hum of the photographer’s words whirling on and on like a camera motor, but roses was all I could think in my head.
Andrew sends roses. He has sex with other women. And he was looking for a new girlfriend right in front of me.
The bowl of borscht was sweaty from the fridge. Andrew hadn’t covered it when he put it in earlier, just pushed it toward the back, and I had wondered if the chef would find it the next day and throw it out or rescue it with plastic wrap. As I lowered the bowl to the counter, it slipped out of my hands, and a long cold wave of bright red liquid went flying over the marble island, spraying, splattering, and covering the model and the photographer and the gleaming, shining room.
I will never know who cleaned it up. Sometimes I think Andrew couldn’t possibly have gone to bed with borscht congealing everywhere; other times I know he’d never dirty his hands with that, a damn spot that wouldn’t come out. Maybe Miss Lupine licked it up while photographer-man took pictures—Helmut Newton-esque, but real life.
I left without a word. Walked out of the kitchen as if I heard my name being called and wanted to find the source. Got in my truck, and thankfully (or not) didn’t hit the photographer’s stupid Bentley parked badly behind me as I flew down the winding driveway hill and went out the gate that opened automatically.
Okay, so maybe I was stupid not to see how things were for as long as I did, but I wasn’t so stupid as to ever see him again, I thought as I drove through the dark, empty streets in a blur of anger. Roses for one and a pimp-parade from another. Fuck that. And fuck, fuck, fuck him.
I drove around for a couple of hours trying to calm myself down enough to be able to go home and sleep. I considered getting a bottle of Absolut, but realized I might not stop drinking. When I finally got home, the message light on my answering machine was flashing. It seemed to be quite a night for blinking phone lights. There were three messages from Andrew, if you could call them that. Andrew had stopped speaking on my answering machine once we started having sex, as if they’d be evidence, and I guess they would have been, but I could always tell the messages he left by a little sound he would make. A “hunh” noise. Unidentifiable if it was ever used publicly, but I knew it was him and he knew I did. That sound was on each of three messages and nothing else.
Lying on my futon, unable to sleep—I should have gotten the goddamn Absolut—I knew without any doubt that I would never see Andrew Madden again. Fuck him.
My phone rang the next morning at Andrew’s usual time to call. I was still in a daze. I had finally fallen asleep around five-thirty A.M., so I felt hungover even without the vodka. I lay on the futon listening to the phone ring, then my machine clicked on when I didn’t pick up. I heard a small hesitation, then a hang-up. Fifteen minutes later, it was the same: ring, ring, ring, ring, machine pick up, a hesitation, then hang-up. And on and on every quarter hour all morning long. I guess he thought it would be like that time in New York the morning after Suzy came to the Ritz-Carlton—a pseudoapology and everything back to how it was. But fuck him, I wasn’t playing anymore. He could find someone else and I was sure he would. But he was going to be fucked because no one else would love him without wanting to be in one of his stupid goddamn films, no one else would make his back feel new again, would love him in the way I had. But fuck him—he had thrown it all away.
All that afternoon and night, my phone continued to ring. A couple of times, he left the “hunh” message, as if I hadn’t known the constant hang-ups were him. My phone continued to ring every morning at his usual time and every night around eleven. It rang and there were no messages. It rang and I didn’t pick it up. It rang and I listened to it. It rang like that for a month and then it stopped. It returned to the rhythm it had had before, but without Andrew’s melody in it.
When I woke up each morning, it would take me a second to awaken to the Andrew-less reality. It was like having been flung into the ocean on a small dinky craft with no tracking system and the North Star out of sight. Andrew was gone. And my apartment felt empty and quiet, and my life felt colorless, as if it had died inside of me, but had forgotten to notify my body. I carried on, but felt useless.
I tried to hide how I felt when I was with Viv, but she noticed the plunging of my mood. I was sad not to be in a relationship, I said to her. You know, lonely, that’s all. I definitely could not tell her the real reason.
She was already involved with someone, the choreographer she was using for her new video. “And it’s such a relief not to be with a suit!” Viv said, whenever the subject of Craig came up, though they had stayed friends, and Craig was dating around.
A couple of months after the election-night horror, I was still crying a lot. It wasn’t getting any better trying to live without Andrew. How could I ever fall in love with another man? Who could I be with after him? Andrew was the pinnacle, perfect and complete, überman. There was nowhere to go but down. It reminded me of when I left Mississippi at eighteen and had been living in New York for a few months, I realized one day that being up there I had gotten ruined (to ever be able to live in an unfabulous place) and enlightened (as to why I never would) all at the same time. That’s what being with Andrew was like in regard to other men—ruined and enlightened all at the same time. I never said any of that to Viv, but she could hear in my voice that I was still down.
“I have a great idea that will cheer you right up,” Viv said to me one Friday morning over the phone. “Craig wants to do a little sex-and-drugs blowout in Palm Springs this weekend and is looking for a girl to take for some one-on-one fun. I’ll call him and tell him you’ll be his date.”
I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what she was saying. Her ex-boyfriend, for God’s sake, lent to me like a dress to lift my spirits, and I lent to him.
“I’m not some good-time girl, Viv. I don’t want to be a weekend fuck for your ex-boyfriend.”
“Okay, okay, hush.” I could imagine Viv’s hands flying about, trying to erase our exchange.
“I gotta go,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.”
We never called each other again. A part of me missed our long talks on her comfy couch, missed discovering great places and getting our nails done. But I couldn’t and didn’t want to get over the suggestion she had made. Like I had any interest in fucking her ex-boyfriend. Or worse, in being a weekend fling for him. Something to tell the boys about on Monday morning. Was she nuts? Or was she just so used to people fucking their way to the top that she considered an offer of Craig Beltram as manna from heaven?
A few weeks after Viv and I stopped talking, on New Year’s Eve afternoon, I met Reggie in the bookstore, and having him made Viv’s departure easier to take. And frankly, it was a better exchange.
But I was still ravaged with a depression that I couldn’t shake. I stood for hours in the studio I’d made out of the dressing room in my apartment and tried to get back to my art, which I had ignored for months, but nothing came. I dragged myself through my waitressing shifts and my work for Bill. I lost weight and couldn’t sleep. Nothing interested me. My mind was a treadmill of thoughts and memories and imagined conversations with Andrew that kept running and running repeatedly, making me feel worse. There were hang-ups on my machine that I wanted to believe were from him, but I also didn’t want to kid myself.
In the middle of January, in an effort to break out of my depression, to somehow jump-start my life, I threw myself into my art. I decided that if I got a proper studio, I could work. Maybe the problem was that I was trying to create at home, which held memories of Andrew. I needed someplace new, clean, free of him.
A gallery owner who wanted to see my next batch of work for a planned group show suggested I look into the Santa Fe Art Colony for a space. Which is how I met Steve, by renting part of his studio from him. We became friends through the conversations we had at the end of our work sessions. Or his work sessions, I should say. The change of venue hadn’t done anything to change my mood or lift the block I was in. How could I create when I was feeling so dead?
Then the fantasies of driving my truck off a cliff began. Wonderful, exultant crashes of glass and steel, me crumpling within, the sea taking over, pulling the truck and me under, and tearing us up on the hard sand floor. The Awakening’s ending with an L.A. twist—driving instead of walking into the ocean.
I started going for long drives along the PCH. It was annoying how hard it was to find a place to drive off. I realized that the places I’d seen in movies, commercials, and magazines of craggy, terrifying cliffs at the edge of Highway 1 were all farther up the coast. That was where the drive-off points that I needed were, high above the surf with sharp rocks below and water swirling in and around, an evil accomplice with an undertow. Malibu and Ventura had nothing as dramatic and lethal as that. So I went through the motions of life while silent and graphic auto-suicides played over and over in my mind. But it was better than the constant thoughts of Andrew. Kind of.
One afternoon in Steve’s loft after another very noticeable nonworking session for me and lots of productivity for him, he and I were drinking the green tea he had made and sitting quietly in the large concrete space’s fading light. The February day was pressing against the tall windows, its cold gray a match for the color of the floor. Steve was smoking a cigarette, and I was battling with myself about whether to ask him for one. If I was going to drive off a cliff, why worry about lung cancer?
“I started going to a meditation group,” Steve said suddenly, as if the thoughts that were in his head were also in mine, so the dive he took into this topic wasn’t a complete surprise. “An Intro into Buddhism thing that this Vietnamese monk is doing at his apartment. It’s small, just about five of us. And it’s free. Why don’t you come? Maybe you could use a new view on things.”
“That’s a nice way of putting it.”
Steve laughed with me, then had a deliciously long drag off his cigarette. “We all need to shake things up every once in a while. If you don’t like it, don’t go back.”
I told him thanks, I’d think about it, then we talked about other things until he finished another cigarette and we locked up the studio and left.
A few weeks later, I was home one night flipping through the channels on the TV. It was just after eleven, so I figured I’d catch the evening news, which I rarely do, preferring a newspaper instead, but I turned it on and five minutes later there it was. A nice annunciation story about Andrew Madden’s newest life role via Holly McRae’s conception. Clearly adding “daddy” to the list of his achievements was a news-making event, particularly at the age of fifty-four when it happened for him. And I guess it was a lot easier for them to have it on the news than to make all those “Guess what?” phone calls to everyone. Sitting on my futon, looking at the grinning photograph of Andrew on the screen while the anchor gave the happy details, felt like getting cut over and over in my gut. As if Holly’s full womb were excavating mine. As if the conception I had felt when I first met Andrew had finally died.
I dove into Buddhism classes with Steve. The first time I went I thought I’d try it once and forget about it, but there was so much peace there, such a sense of another way to live. And it wasn’t about changing all the outside stuff the way those stadium-renting, bestselling gurus say you have to do, this was quiet and internal. Just between you and you. I liked the independence of it.
One night before we meditated, Dr. En Chuan said that a way to get over a resentment toward someone is to pray for them to have everything you want. That sounded dreadful and difficult enough, but why should I pray for Andrew and Holly when they had everything already? Then En Chuan went on. You don’t have to be happy about doing it, he said, in fact, you can still be annoyed at the person, but just pray that they have inner peace and happiness; everyone needs help with that. The prayers will help them, but they will help you the most.
Driving home that night, I thought about what En Chuan had said, but I didn’t think I’d be able to do that. Those two had everything in the goddamn world, and besides, the whole point was for me to stop thinking about him. But maybe I’d try it a little. Especially since I didn’t have to be happy about doing it.
The meditation and the few prayers I said may have helped, because the depression started lifting and the truck-crashing suicide scenarios fell away. I was able to get back to my art and start a new series of sculptures, and began dating a bit. No one I was seriously interested in, every man still seemed second-rate, but I was participating in life in a way I hadn’t for a long time. And the gallery owner who had been interested in my work wanted to put some of my new pieces in her next group show.
So things were going okay when six months later it was announced in the newspapers—and I’m sure on TV, I just didn’t watch—that Andrew and Holly were the proud parents of a baby girl. The real daughter he had never had finally appeared. My long-ago stand-in role was officially done.
I started making jewelry—just for birthdays and Christmas presents—crafted from materials that had seemed too delicate to put in a sculpture, along with semiprecious gems I bought downtown in the jewelry district not far from Steve’s studio. I must have been making my fifth or sixth set of earrings when I remembered something one of my teachers at the School of Visual Arts had said about my work.
“It almost looks like jewelry.”
That sounded small.
“I don’t mean that negatively,” he went on. “Fine jewelry is an art. Your work is so delicate and personal, very much close-up. It’s definitely for the public, but in a personal context which jewelry is—art for a person to wear. An extension of them via you, not work that is left alone in a room. It’s just a thought.”
I had felt extremely seen when he said that, as if he were explaining a part of me to myself. But back then, I still wanted my work to be how I had envisioned it in Mississippi. Big. Important. Appearing in ArtForum. Art that goes into a museum was a powerfully propelling reason to get out of the South, a motivation to pole-vault out of my roots’ clinging grasp.
But the painting and sculpting fell away easily a few months after I remembered that, especially since people were buying up my jewelry. Friends loved the pieces I gave them, told their friends, and commissions rolled in. Lizzie started carrying my jewelry, and an actress wore some in a shoot for Los Angeles Magazine. I gave up my space in Steve’s loft and moved into a nice-sized two-bedroom apartment, so my studio could be at home. And I was happy. The process of creating didn’t feel like such a big question mark anymore because once a piece was finished, I knew there was a market for it.
I’d still see items about Andrew in the media; it was impossible not to. And pictures of Holly would pop up; she was he practically. But the stabbing feeling it had engendered in my gut cut down to a low throb, a dull pain that was an automatic response to his name. But I could live with it. Even ignore it sometimes.
Life went on, in its way.