Aftermath of Dreaming (29 page)

“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.

There is a concept in Buddhism of
“No birth; no death.” That all living things continue on in some form. A seed grows into a stem with leaves, then flowers, and dies only to become mulch for new plants in the spring. A cycle of birth and death; everything on the chain continuing, no stopping.

But the Buddhist retreat that I was supposed to go on next week has been stopped. I got a message on my answering machine—after another hang-up—that the Jesuit priest who was going to run it had a medical emergency, so it's been postponed until they aren't sure when. I really could have used the break from everyday life after Suzanne's wedding last weekend, but the Catholic imperative to be forgiving, plus the Buddhist practice of nonattachment are making me feel guilty for my attitude, so I remind myself that the retreat will happen at the time when it will be best.

I have strong faith in Buddhism; I just wish Lizzie played by their
rule of continuing. Lizzie probably has not died, but her store, I am sickened to discover, is undeniably, irrevocably kaput. I am standing on a sidewalk under the hot August sun staring at the Closed sign in the door of her store. The empty darkness of the windows is hard to comprehend, so I keep looking up the street and back at them, as if this vision I am having will suddenly change.

“Goddamn you, Lizzie.” I glance around to see if anyone heard me, a woman railing at an empty storefront. I don't know why I believe that bellowing her name will somehow make her hear my anger. She is not God, able to divine my thoughts; she is human—closer to Beelzebub, frankly—and skipped out on me without paying and with my jewelry besides.

I get in my truck, start it up, and throw it into gear too quickly, causing it to lurch forward and die. I sit for a moment wondering what birth will arise from this death, but all I feel is anger. The five stages of grief flash in my mind like cards dealt during a magic trick. The joker turns up last and has Lizzie's face on it.

For the first time, I find my way through the Venice streets easily, as if the neighborhood is escorting me out, as if it knows I have no need to go there again. As I get on the 10 freeway heading east to go home, I wonder where Lizzie has disappeared to. In what part of this vast area called Los Angeles is she conjuring a new life. I imagine a trail of fake eyeglasses and packets of red hair dye left in her wake as she discards her store-owner disguise.

And where is my jewelry that was in Lizzie's store? Is she wearing the pieces? Sold them cheap to a friend or maybe gave them to a relative as a seemingly extravagant gift? I want to slap her and wake up from this bad dream. The jewelry is completely lost, gone, given to her with nothing received back except an invoice—a lot of good that will do—and no idea where she or it went. When my pieces in Rox were sold, I didn't know who bought them, but I'd already been given a check for the merchandise, the reciprocal evidence that what I delivered had not disappeared into the ether like a scream never heard.

I had thought Lizzie was permanent, one of those people who will
always be right where they are. No change in their life, no growth. One nonmoving thing to count on that will always be in the same spot decades from now. Boy, was I wrong. Lizzie is no longer. Just gone, gone, gone. My father did that once, but he didn't have my jewelry, just my heart. Goddamn him, too.

 

“It's your father being absent so long, honey,” Reggie says during our telephonic breakfast this morning after I tell him about yet another scream dream last night. “You feel unsafe in the world, that's pretty clear.”

“It's not because of him.” It's too hot this morning for oatmeal and I can hear Reggie sipping on a straw. In an effort to lose weight, he is only drinking protein smoothies for breakfast, he told me, and the rest of his meals are as rigidly mapped out. He's been thrilled for the last month ever since I broke up with Michael, and maybe that euphoria has fueled him to resist his normal fare of sausage, toast, and eggs. “Anyway, I just want the screams to end—it's been six months. Enough already.”

“Have you ever thought about finding him?”

“Who?”

“Paul, your father.”

“Oh. No, I haven't. Once I did. Years ago when I was still in Mississippi after that dreadful Cousin Elsie woman called, I had daydreams about stealing Momma's car and running away to Florida and somehow connecting with him there, as if our mutual DNA would illuminate my way to him like radar, but I never did. Not only wasn't it realistic, but even if I had miraculously found him, I guess I didn't want to see how he'd respond. Or wouldn't. Sometimes it's better not knowing.” I make a point of turning on the water in the kitchen sink. “Can we change the subject, please?”

“I just don't want you waking up screaming anymore.”

“Yeah, well, I don't, either.” We listen to each other breathe for a moment. I can tell he isn't saying anything in case I want to talk about
this some more, which I know he thinks I should, but I don't. “So, what are you up to today?”

Reggie distracts me with tales of his current job. Since I have stopped seeing Michael, my conversations with Reggie have felt more complete, because there is no longer an entire area that I have to leave out. Hanging up the phone, I wonder if or when he will ever start seeing someone.

 

With Lizzie's shop no longer selling my jewelry—or even in existence, damn her—the solution is to get into another store, a real one that pays on time. And after Suzanne's wedding I began thinking of working with pearls.

As I drive through my neighborhood in the September heat to get downtown, I hear the whir of a small engine growing louder with each block. My stomach instinctively tightens against what I fear the noise is, and I immediately begin praying that it isn't, but I turn the corner and almost run into it. A large truck with a high-sided bed is double-parked in the street and a group of three men wearing straw cowboy hats and long-sleeved shirts despite the heat are the bandits blocking my way. The whirring has become thunderous, like a jetliner taking off, competing only in volume with a radio playing Spanish music that is audible when the buzzsaw one of them is toting isn't cutting, brutalizing, and massacreing a huge California cypress tree.

Trees in Los Angeles are clipped and groomed like a porn star's bush. When I first moved here, I thought the bare branches and small sizes were the trees' reaction to the hot, dry environment, but eventually I understood that that had nothing to do it—people don't let them grow. Drive along Sunset Boulevard or any street in a supposedly well-to-do neighborhood, and the trees are just nubs with small desperate clusters of leaves trying vainly to get some sun. Supposedly it all started with rogue bands that were hired by billboard companies to illegally and under cover of night cut the branches on trees lining commercial
streets, so no one will miss an advertisement of yet another terrible movie we all have to see. Then I guess the idiots who move here and buy homes got the impression that that was the L.A. style, and God forbid they not be in on that, so street after street is nothing but brutal, decapitated sticks. Trees, the one thing that would cool down and shade this Saharan land, are desecrated and reduced to nothing. I have never seen anything like it in my life. I want to make everyone in Los Angeles fly en masse to the South and say, “See? This is how a tree is supposed to look, you fucking idiot. Now just leave them alone.”

As I drive around the murderers, I have to squelch my impulse to crash into their truck. I know it's not their fault, that they were just hired to do a job, but all I can think about is trying to stop them somehow. I hit the number on my cell phone that automatically dials Reggie. He's already at the editing room, but I can leave him a message about it. He's from Kansas; he understands. At least the tree outside my living room window still looks like one.

 

The showroom of Vivid Pearls and Gems Company, Importers and Wholesalers, is on the fifth floor of the International Jewelry Center at 550 South Hill Street in downtown. A sad row of tall, sickly palm trees, each trunk barely supporting the fronds, lines the sidewalk in front of the building, which is a large, modern, hulking affair. White horizontal slabs alternate with rows of windows giving the opposite impression of a building you can see into. Transparency and ease of access are not what jewelry vendors want in their place of business. Especially not when the building faces Pershing Square, an elegantly named plaza that holds a few groups of overly pruned trees, but is mostly a small city block of concrete with some permanently installed benches, tables, and chairs that the homeless are periodically roused out of in an effort to show the jewelry businesses that the cops really are doing something about it.

I arrive right on time for my appointment with May Tsou, the owner
of Vivid Pearls and Gems, and I have a feeling it is noted and appreciated by her. She buzzes me into the first security door, and I wait inside the chamber for it to click shut behind me, then the inner door is buzzed open, and I push through it into the showroom. May is a small Chinese woman whose easy smile and unlined face hides two decades of her age and her steely-eyed business sense. I have heard stories about her. She gets the best South Sea pearls because her family has been in the business in Asia for generations, so the quality is guaranteed and that makes it worth the hoops one must jump through to buy from her. This is our second appointment. She wanted time to run a credit check on me and, I think, to talk to other wholesalers about dealing with me. When she called the other day to say come down on Thursday, I knew I was in.

She leads me into a small inner room with light dove-gray carpet, walls, and chairs. A dark, sleek table takes up most of the space in front of a doorway that leads to yet another inner room. May walks around the table and into the back room as I sit down in the chair facing her. She soon returns with long, flat black boxes that she stacks on the table. A high-powered lamp, magnifying glass, and scale are already in place. I feel like I am about to buy heroin. Not that I ever have, and I know the normal place of business for that kind of sale is not like this, but my heart is racing as if what I'm about to look at will change my life, or at least how I feel.

Which it does the minute May opens the first box. Lying inside in three segregated chambers and resting on black felt are dozens of gleaming, lustrous, shimmering pearls. Round and full and rich as if the oysters offered not a covered-up glossed-over irritant, but their own wombs. In the midst of this bedazzlement, I realize that May is looking at me with a small smile on her face.

“Beautiful, huh? Tahitian.” With a pair of very long tweezers, she picks up a perfect pearl, then holds it to the light under the magnifying glass for me to see. Her deftness with the tool makes me think of her using chopsticks, whereas when I hold tweezers to examine gems, my proficiency is thanks to eyebrow maintenance.

She puts the pearl back on the felt, hands me the tweezers, and lets me look at it for myself. It is a stunning specimen with a peacock-green luster and a pearly glow underneath; large, round, and heavy, it must be fifteen or sixteen millimeters. Without even asking the price, I know it is out of my league, and I have a feeling that May knows that as well, but is showing it to me anyway because she knows the joy that can bring. And wants me to know what is possible if my business keeps growing.

The pearls I am able to buy are a few removed from that first grand one, but still they are beautiful. “Department stores buy regular pearls; dye them. These color real,” May says as I put together a group of the ones I will buy in naturally occurring colors of gray, green, pink, and deep brown.

I am in love with them. Each pearl, because of the price range I need to stay in, has a tiny dimple or pit in it, which I wasn't planning on when I sketched the jewelry I will make with them, but as I sit at the table while May totals up my order and writes out an invoice, I start envisioning how to hide that in the designs.

 

The remains of breakfast lie on the table before us. Or mine does. Reggie is two months into his diet and going strong. I can see a difference in him, but he says all that matters is how great he feels, though I have a feeling he is counting pounds. As we get up to leave, the bagel shop starts filling up. A yoga class has let out from the studio up the street and a serene swarm of stretch fabric clamors into line.

We turn left on the sidewalk, walking down Larchmont toward Reggie's car in the warm morning sun, but he stops us in front of Han's optical shop. “I need some new sunglasses. Wanna help me select?”

Hundreds of frames are on display in the mirrored and dark wood cases of the store. Eyeglasses are folded up like butterfly wings, ready to elongate and light upon a face. Reggie and I quickly set into a rhythm: I find a pair, hand them to him; he tries them on, puts them away. Again and again and again.

A woman dressed casually yet elegantly in Saturday attire enters the
store and heads straight to the register. Reggie is peering at himself in a mirror wearing an aggressively hip pair of sunglasses.

“Maybe,” I say, trying to imagine them in life every day, then I hand him a very classic frame. “But try these.” The glasses emphasize the best parts of Reggie's face. “I think those are great on you.”

“Really?” Reggie is doing an odd squinting thing I've never seen him do before.

“Yeah, I like them.”

He moves closer to the mirror. “You don't think they…I don't know.” He takes them off and replaces the hip frames on his face.

“Okay, but these are great frames.” I pick them up, admiring the precision of balance and the craftsmanship. “And they were amazing on you.”

“They were.”

Reggie and I both turn around to see who said this and if it was to us. The woman in the store has stepped closer, appraising Reggie via the mirrors on every wall.