Aftermath of Dreaming (12 page)

The Monday that I woke up
in Andrew's bed at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York, I worked the eleven-to-eight shift at the restaurant in a state of tired ecstasy. The little sleep that I had gotten thanks to our late night and early rise proved to be helpful in muffling my expression of the shocked bliss I found myself in. I appeared extremely, privately glad, but nothing so exuberant as to warrant questions from the other hosts and hostesses, and especially from Lydia, which was good because it felt too personal to talk about at work. Seamus came on that night at six, but by then I was in the reservation room for the last hours of my shift, so I was able to avoid his knowing eyes, thank God, because I have a shot at being a believable liar if the person I'm fibbing to can't see me, but one-on-one, my truth-telling thoughts are practically pasted on my face, so readable is my countenance. I had the next day off, and on Wednesday was scheduled for the nine-to-four shift, so I figured I wouldn't be in real contact with Seamus again until Thursday night, and
by then his mind would be too roiled with the chaos of the week to remember to ask about Andrew and me.

I called Andrew that Monday afternoon as he had told me to, sneaked downstairs to the restaurant's pay phone booth—an astonishing blessing that it had a real booth with privacy—and dialed the hotel number, already knowing it by heart like a code to my salvation.

Andrew's voice was immediately on the line, unlike the wait I had endured the first time. “Where are you?” he said, forgoing a hello.

“At the restaurant, at work.”

“How are you?” The phrase was spoken so sincerely, it made me realize how rarely it is.

“I'm good. It was…” My temperature rose a hundred degrees. “Really nice being with you last night.”

His voice did a sideways and down one shift, moving us into a more private place. “It was wonderful being with you, sweet-y-vette. Do you love me?”

“Yes.” I was relieved he had asked. I hadn't said it to him when he said it to me, and remembering that had caused a lopsided, one-shoe-off sensation in my head. “I love you, Andrew.”

“Good.”

I thought so, too.

“I've got some people here I have to see. What time do you finish work?”

Oh, God, what clothes did I wear here? Was it anything I could see him in?

“Eight, I get off at eight.”

“Call me then.”

“Okay.” I tried to keep out of my voice how ecstatic I felt about seeing him in only a few hours, to play it cool like it happened all the time.

“Okay?” His voice was patient and kind. Andrew's living room had people in it—the kind whose daily existence included sessions with him, yet in those few minutes, he gave me the implicit understanding there'd always be time for me.

“Okay.”

“Bye, honey, I'll talk to you soon.”

I walked slowly up the stairs and into the barroom. My task was to fill bowls with fancy mixed nuts (the nuts we illicitly wrapped in dinner napkins, hid in our pockets, and nibbled on throughout our coat-room shifts) to set along the bar in time for the predinner drinks crowd. All I could think about was how much time there was to endure before calling Andrew at eight, then seeing him when life would begin again.

 

Andrew and I spoke when I finished my shift, talked when I got home, talked again at ten. Then at ten-thirty, when he promised to call me right back, I knew I would collapse asleep before he did. In a small way, it felt okay not to see him. I was still overflowing from being with him the night before, and that experience could extend further before another encounter with him regulated it to the past.

 

The next morning, Carrie's timing to converse about the Andrew escapade, as she called it, coincided with my being in the kitchen preparing to bake bread. I had stopped at the grocery at the end of my daily five-mile run to buy the ingredients, lugging the plastic bags the two long and two short blocks home. I was dying to tell her all about it—especially since it was a whole two days ago and I still hadn't told anyone. Not that there was anyone else to tell. The only friends I had made so far, like Lydia, all worked at the restaurant, and that was way too gossipy a place for this information, so that left only Suzanne—not really an option. I could already guess how she'd feel about Andrew. She hadn't liked widow-man, not that she had ever met him since she took off for college soon after Daddy left and had stayed in California, never once coming back. But she used to call me specifically to fuss about my seeing widow-man, what a terrible influence he was, and what kind of real high school experience could I have dating a man in his thirties. I'd do algebra problems during these “You should be…” speeches, throwing
in a few “uh-huhs” every now and then until she ran out of steam and hung up. So I had a pretty strong feeling that telling her about Andrew Madden wasn't going to be a happy sisterly chat.

But Carrie was great. Drinking her protein shake, thrilled to hear everything, wanting all the details, asking questions, squealing when I told her about leaving my art slides with him. Then she told me about Andrew's girlfriend, Lily Creed, the beautiful British actress who was at the table with him that first night he came to the restaurant.

“But he has always had others on the side,” Carrie said, as if explaining a tricky but essential foreign language verb conjugation. “So you can't feel bad about her. There's no way she can think she's the only one. And as my mother always said, ‘It's not like he's married.'”

Which is exactly how I felt, too. Besides feeling constantly like I was in a dream, the dream that Manhattan was meant to be. As if the real New York City had been unlocked for me by Andrew, and for the first time since I moved there, I felt connected to the city and all the energy it held. Every moment was lived in high gear with a perpetual fall crispness in the air, and I felt I could take on the world.

 

Andrew called as Carrie was in the shower washing henna out of her hair and I was filling the bread pans with dough.

“What are you doing?” he growled to my “hello,” sounding like a lion disguised as a cub.

“I'm baking you bread.”

“You're what?”

“I'm baking you bread; I thought I'd drop it by this afternoon.” The oven door slipped shut out of my hand. I had had to stack the pots and Pyrex dishes we stored in there on my bed until the baking was done.

“No one has made me anything since I can't remember when. You are so fucking cute. When do I get my bread?”

I was so ecstatic, I almost dropped a pan. “An hour or so for it to bake and cool; I can come by around one.”

“If I'm not in, leave it at the desk.” His delight and warmth and protection were palpable over the phone. “You are in such big trouble for this.”

I couldn't think of a better way to be.

 

I went to the hotel, dressed to see him, but when I reached the front desk, I was informed that Mr. Madden was out—would I care to leave a message? I opened my bag to take out the loaves. They were in Saran wrap, taped closed, then gift wrapped in pretty paisley paper napkins, and tied with silk bows. I had worried they looked too girly, but I decided it reflected more the giver than the givee, and who doesn't like to unwrap something? The desk clerk appeared nonplussed as he took the warm bread from my hands. I guessed they didn't get that very often.

 

“Do you know what I'm doing right now?” was Andrew's greeting when I picked up the phone later that afternoon.

“Asking me to come over?”

“Eating your bread.”

“Oh! Do you like it?”

“Are you fucking kidding me? I've eaten half a loaf already—what's in this thing?”

The name of every ingredient flew out of my head. “Uh. Wheat.” I might as well have said “cow” for the butter and milk. “I mean, flour and—”

He rescued me from the list. “This is amazing.”

“Was it still warm?”

“No.” He sounded like a child who found out his Christmas train didn't choo-choo. “Can it be? I want it warm next time.”

God, he was cute.

Then he told me about the art gallery. About the lunch he'd had that day with Tory Sexton, the British owner and namesake of the space, while
I was delivering his bread. I knew about her SoHo gallery—everyone did. It was one of the top three downtown, farther outside the mainstream than the other two, but widely respected and reviewed. I had been there in June.

I had moved to Manhattan to apply to the School of Visual Arts by December and start my undergraduate degree there in the spring, but a couple of weeks after I arrived in New York, knowing no one in the art world, I decided what the hell, I'd go around and show the dealers my work just to see what they thought. I knew it would take years to get a show, probably at least until I graduated, but Daddy had always said, “God helps those who help themselves,” and maybe some job would turn up or something, you never know, so I took a week-old copy of Ruth's
New York
magazine, pulled out the art section, and compiled a list of every gallery in town.

And off I'd go. Working around my restaurant schedule, every minute I could, I'd focus on one neighborhood at a time, walk into a gallery, and ask if the owner had a moment to view my work.

It was weeks of uninterested response. Many were arch and filled with disdain. A few were polite, outlining their gallery's procedures or simply stating they were, in no way, an open door. The rest fell somewhere unpleasantly in between. After the first few days, I didn't want to keep going. Each entrance was hard, every exit excruciating, but I consoled myself that I wouldn't have to lie in bed every night thinking I was in New York but not doing anything toward my dream while I waited to get into school.

The last group of galleries I hit was in SoHo, where, in reverse tack, I decided to start at the low end and work my way up. With only two galleries left to call on, I finally had a unique experience at Sexton Space. The assistant, a woman named Peg, explained that Tory would never grant me a meeting, but took the time herself to see my work. I showed her everything: color slides of my paintings, a small notebook of sketches, slides of my sculptures. As she studied each one, I imagined she was from upstate or Connecticut, close enough to Manhattan that her urban integration wasn't jarring or hard.

Handing all of it back, Peg told me that as my work developed, and if I got into some group shows, this might be a gallery I should come back to. She liked the construction of my work and thought I had a strong, unique vision that was clearly developing. “This is an extremely tough field, but don't give up.”

And here was Andrew, a couple of months later, explaining Tory to me, the work that she liked and how what he saw in mine was simpatico with her eye. He'd known her from London back in the seventies when he was shooting a movie there. I couldn't help but think how funny it was that the one person on my self-ascribed door-to-door gallery tour who had shown real interest was Tory's assistant. Maybe this was meant to be in some big cosmic way.

“Call Tory tomorrow; she's expecting you.”

“Thanks, Andrew. That was really wonderful of you.”

“I just passed your work on; you're gonna do the rest, you big fucking art star.”

 

Peg wasn't in sight when I walked into Sexton Space that Thursday afternoon. I was told by an exquisite pale man, whom I didn't remember from my summer visit, to wait; Ms. Sexton was on the phone. I studied the work on display in the prohibitively silent gallery. The air was filled with an admonishment not to speak, as if in the face of such nonnarrative images, words became obsolete.

After thirty minutes of looking about, I began to feel lulled by the intensity of the paintings—rage was a prominent emotional theme—and the quiet of the room. Adrenaline had pooled in me with no place to go, so I jumped when a hand touched my back.

Exquisite pale man told me to go in, as he pointed me toward Tory Sexton's sanctum. I suddenly wished I had something to hold on to—some object to derive strength from.

When I walked in, Tory Sexton was sitting inside a gigantic, ornately carved Chinese canopy bed, but with furniture in it instead of a mattress. It was a red-lacquered room within the real room that I had to
walk up two steps then down one to get into. Low-slung leather stools were placed in front of a burnished wood table that Tory sat behind on a French rococo chair whose legs had been lopped off, guillotined victims of her revolutionary design. My slides were laid out in front of her like tiny children walking a tightrope in a row.

Tory's crimson lips were practically a separate entity. They floated above her black-suit-clad frame, pronouncing sounds, enunciating edits, and charting new courses with the air they exhaled. The conversation she was having at me was so previously unencountered in my life that my mind practically had to translate her words into ones I could believe. My sculptures were to be in her group show of new artists in December. I should talk with Peg to arrange the shipping of them here, the gallery would cover that, of course, and tell her now about where I was from that I was making such work at eighteen.

While Tory listened to me, her right forefinger goosed the edge of one of my slides, then she abruptly held out her hand, signaling our time was at an end. “Call Peg,” she said as I stepped down into the real room. “There is much to be done.”

Pushing out the gallery's door, I noticed “Sexton Space” painted on both sides in small ruby letters, their syllables shouting ownership of the street. I walked to the subway in a daze and waited for the train to take me to work as my Tory experience settled into me and became true, not just a dream. I almost had an urge to tell the people on the platform, shout out my good news—I didn't care to whom. For a second I considered calling Momma, but figured I should wait until my initial enthusiasm was over so I wouldn't need any from her, too. Carrie would be thrilled though, and Suzanne. But maybe not. She'd probably find some reason it wasn't good. And dammit, this meant she'd have to know about Andrew. Well, who cared, look what he had done for me. If that wasn't an indication of how he felt, what was?