Aftermath of Dreaming(107)
“Michael who?”
“Newman, you don’t know him, he runs a public radio station, and there’ve been other guys, but—”
“You are going to make a great wife and mother someday.”
After we hang up the phone—Andrew gave me his cell number if I really need to reach him, but it’s better if he calls me—his words float in my head. I wonder why he thinks that and am surprised at how much what he said means to me, because it sounds so embarrassingly June Cleaver—a role I don’t picture for myself. Except with him, and that was a dream I buried a long time ago. Though part of me still wishes it could live. Fuck. I wish Andrew hadn’t unearthed in me this whole wife/mother idea. Suzanne getting married was bad enough, though I thought I did a good job of keeping that longing away from myself, but maybe it has been there waiting to come screaming out. I don’t want to want that again with him. But I can’t imagine wanting that with someone else. Though at some point, I guess I’ll have to.
“Your line has blown out of the store, there’s nothing left.” Linda Beckman’s voice on the phone is like a fairy godmother in my best fantasy. “I want the exact same order in our new Honolulu store, and this time we’ll pay up front, but P and A is still on you, of course.”
When I hang up with Linda, I immediately call Dipen to tell him that I want the same order, super-rushed. I’ll need more pearls and semiprecious stones, but with this windfall, I can stock up and not worry. Life is dreamy.
30
The first thing Andrew does the second time he comes over is search my apartment. He didn’t do that the first time he was here, on my birthday. Then he only saw my living room, bedroom, and bathroom, but as I watch him move through my apartment, half peeking in, half peeking out of the doorways, I wonder if this is some famous-person version of seeing someone’s home. Either that, or he’s checking for intruders. But how dangerous does he think our city is? Okay, we’ve got our bad neighborhoods, but my bedroom isn’t one of them. Anyway.
Being with him again after two months apart was like when we first met, plus our whole relationship all at once. The sex contained every minute of it. The kissing was drinking in every moment we’d been apart, and our moving and touching were like water thrown into the ocean, we were unable to un-merge again.
“Tell me,” Andrew says, “I want to hear everything.”
We are lying on my bed, his chest is on my stomach, my hands on his back, and I weave for him the story of my line selling out of Beverly Hills and getting into the Hawaii store while I knead the muscles of his back.
“So your art’s become jewelry or jewelry is your art, I should say.” He pulls his head up and looks at me with his illustrious eyes. “I want to see.”
I am glad that my body is held securely beneath his, because otherwise I would have fallen off the bed hearing him finally mention my art. “Now?”
“As opposed to?”
I get up and walk out of the bedroom. In the studio, I crouch in front of the safe and spin the dial. The floor feels refrigerated under my bare feet, the steely-cold February night pressing into the room through the windows, but I am warm and even sweating a little at the thought of what I am doing. Showing Andrew my jewelry reveals my physical nakedness to be the easy exposure that it is. I feel the same prickliness under my skin, the same clenching of my stomach, as when he looked at my slides at the Ritz-Carlton. I put the samples from my new line—earrings and bracelets, rings, necklaces and pins—into a felt-lined tray and arrange them perfectly.
As I walk down the hallway to my bedroom, I look down at the jewelry and their colors begin soothing me, the weight of them in the tray, the work I put into them that can’t be taken away. I enter the room and see that Andrew is sitting up in my bed, leaning against the headboard, gazing at me as only he can, way down inside.
He swings his legs around and sits on the side of the bed, and I sit next to him, putting the tray in his lap. As he picks up each piece, he is silent the way he was the only other time he has ever looked at my work.
There are no taxis driving through a park outside my window for me to count, nothing distracting enough in my bedroom to take my attention, so I sit and watch him examining my world. His brow is furrowed as he holds each piece, looking at it from all angles.
“Beauty hanging in the air,” he says, and holds a pearl and tourmaline necklace out toward me as if putting it in context. “Like you. You’re doing great—I can tell.”
I blush. He is the only person who has ever created that response in me, as if certain emotions were staked out and claimed by him.
Andrew puts his hand over mine and looks me in the eyes. “If you and I were where we are now, but just back then—I would never have let you go.” And he pauses for a moment, dividing everything before and since. “You’re a heavyweight.”
The tray of jewelry on his lap holds rings of everlasting gold with wedding-white pearls, as he talks about what could have been for us.
Lying in bed after Andrew has gone, I think about how I was back then, and I finally understand his inability to commit to me. I wouldn’t have fit into his world at all. I would have become a kind of mute appendage of him. Would never have discovered creating jewelry and the joy it brings me. So in a weird and wonderful and terrible way, maybe that was for the best. But I go to sleep with the words “if we were where we are now, but just back then…” filling my head.