Aftermath of Dreaming(104)
“Do you still love me?”
“Still.” And I am back, as if the five years apart are five seconds and our breakup had never happened and all I know is that I have to see him, have to have him, have to feel him fill me the way his voice is filling the emptiness inside.
“You wanna come over?” For a split second I worry about his personal obstacles to being with me, but I erase them from my mind when he asks for my address. For all I know, they are separated, I rationalize, though I know they probably aren’t because it would have been in the news, but I am like water rushing to Andrew’s shore, unable to do anything but be with him.
I give him directions and run around frantically trying to straighten my apartment and myself as he announces over the phone every major intersection he drives through. I feel like a small boat listening to the radar of an oncoming sub. When he pulls onto my street, Andrew sounds completely flummoxed that a parking space isn’t waiting for him in front of my building. I suggest he look a bit farther down the block, but for an irrational moment I think he might leave. Maybe it has become standard in L.A. for late night trysts to include valet parking. He declares triumph as he pulls into a space, sounding astonishingly proud for so simple a feat. I tell him that I need to hang up now, but he sounds hurt, so I explain that my line has to be open for him to call me from the gate. How long had he intended for us to stay on the line? Maybe there is some new kind of in-person phone sex he wanted to try.
I can hear his footsteps coming up the stairs and with each step my heart beats faster and faster like it is doing the tarantella inside me. Then a gentle knock is on the door and I open it and Andrew comes in as naturally and majestically as the sun rising on the day. We look at each other as his brightness fills the room.
“Look at you,” he finally says. “You look even more beautiful and younger now than you used to.” I have to stop myself from running over to a mirror; maybe that erasing thing is doing more than I thought. “I bet you don’t look much different than that when you’re my age and then—you die.”
He makes a little laugh, I think to make me laugh, but I don’t think it is funny. I am looking at his great face, and for the first time, I see the age on it and suddenly understand something I never contemplated before—what lines on a face actually lead to. Such an obvious answer—the end for us all—but one I never thought about until he spelled it out to me so clearly. I move to him and bury my face in his neck, kissing him again and again while I take off my clothes and undo his pants.
At first when he keeps his sweater on, I figure he is still warming up, but after a while I wonder if it is his body’s temperature or years he is trying to adjust. As much as I want to feel his bare chest against me, the cashmere screen of his sweater becomes another layer of his skin.
Our motions are one, and a kind of multiple time thing happens where past and future and present are here with us, moving with us, coming with us into one endless space where they can always be.
An air pocket of time has filled my apartment, floating us out of the usual dimension, letting us exist in our own realm. Lying with him afterward, rubbing his back as he lies on my stomach, I realize that I had always believed that at a certain predetermined age some other, different older body would descend on top of mine, taking over who I am and rendering me completely gone. That my life and self and sex as I knew it would end and suddenly “old” would begin. That isn’t true with Andrew at all. Everything is so much the way it had been, just a deeper, more layered continuum of his body with me and my body with him. I feel I am able to peek ahead at how growing older will be—experiencing through him a physical reality that I had always thought would erase me even before I was gone.
“How’re Momma and Suzanne?”
“Momma’s dead almost three years now.” I had wanted to call him when she died, but never could.
“Good God, how? She was young.”
“Yeah, fifty-one.”
“Jesus.” I know he is thinking that he’s seven years older than that.
“Car accident. Drunk driver drove straight into her four blocks from her house. Two o’clock in the afternoon. We couldn’t get her to go anywhere once Daddy left, then a drive to the grocery store ended her life.”
“I am so sorry. How’re you doing with it?”
“Fine now. The grief was horrendous, but—”
“Did your daddy ever show back up?”
“No.” We are quiet. The immersion of his time on me is a salve. “Suzanne’s married a few months now.”
He pulls his head up and looks at me with his chin resting on his hands and his elbows resting on the bed, straddling me. “Why aren’t you married?”
He has said it genuinely, but I have no idea how to respond. It reminds me of the times I’m driving my truck on Beverly Boulevard and I stop to offer a ride to one of the older, Jewish women waiting for the bus. They’re never going very far, Cedars Hospital usually, so they get in and we ride along, making small talk, but the only thing they ever ask me is, “So, are you married?” Then when I say, “No,” the only thing they want to talk about is that I’m not, as if every other part of my life has been erased, never to be seen again.
“I don’t know.”
“You are going to make a great mother and wife.”