Aftermath of Dreaming(109)
And he smiles at me. A tangible smile. Like it could leave with me, too.
As I pass the café’s large front window, I want to see him one more time, so I look inside, pretending it is for another thank-you in the form of a wave. His eyes are already on mine and he lifts his hand to wave before I do.
It has been five weeks since I have seen Andrew and three weeks since we have spoken on the phone. Every day I have to resist not calling his cell phone. He’ll call when he’s back, I keep telling myself, just like after his last trip. But maybe he’s already back and isn’t going to call. No, he wouldn’t do that. He’s never done that. But maybe he’s decided he can’t see me anymore, which I guess is best for me and definitely for his wife, but to not even call isn’t like him, but maybe that’s how he ends things. No, he’s just still in New York on some crazy extended trip and I’ll hear from him. Please God.
Every day I force myself into my studio to work on commissions, or I drive downtown in a daze of Andrew thoughts to pick up work from Dipen. I found a woman to do a Web site for me, so I need to get pictures of the jewelry together and write copy and I still need to go over Greeley’s arcane accounting for the Beverly Hills sales, not to mention see how Honolulu is doing, but my mind is a constant blur about Andrew. I spend lots of time staring at the phone, like it is my mortal enemy for not ringing with him at the other end of the line, while wishing it would and thinking magical thoughts, like “In this next ten minute period, Andrew will call.” Or “If I think about him hard enough, that energy will connect to him and he’ll call.”
I am screaming at the top of my lungs, staring at the empty spot in my bedroom where the black-clad apparition stood. The vision has already faded before my open eyes, but I still give the scream one last burst of energy as if that will make it go away permanently.
“I finally saw something this time.” I am spooning oatmeal into a bowl, the phone is at my ear, and after I pour soy milk in, I take the bowl to the living room and sit on the couch to look at the tree (my tree, as I think of it) outside the window while I talk to Reggie. He isn’t sipping through a straw anymore, but the crunchy sounds I’m hearing from his end of the line indicate that he hasn’t gone back to sausage and eggs. Grape-Nuts, probably. We have tentatively been having telephonic breakfast together again for the last week and so far it’s been okay. As long as I don’t talk about Andrew.
“So tell me already, the suspense is killing me.”
“Some kind of a figure, a man, all in black, near my bed. And menacing. Then he disappeared.”
Reggie is quiet for a moment, then softly says, “Yvette, are you having some kind of a memory come up? About your father, I mean?”
“Oh, God, no. I mean, okay, fine, I have some Daddy issues, who wouldn’t with the way he took off.” I know Reggie is thinking about my relationship with Andrew as more living proof of that, but I decide to ignore that. “But my father never did anything like that to me. I mean, look, I met a woman once at SVA who was an incest survivor and she told me about this therapy group she was in and convinced me that I should check it out, maybe uncovered stuff would come up. So I went a few times and not only didn’t anything come up, but I didn’t relate to it. The symptoms they have and everything.”
Reggie says nothing, so I know he is still convinced his theory is right.
“I just hope they stop soon, honey.”
“So do I.”
31
It has gotten to the point that no matter why I am on the 10 freeway, the minute I pass the 405 interchange heading west, I feel it. Fear, really. Dread. A kind of internal backing up. My body thinks it is going to the boxing gym, where I’ve been going twice a week since November, even if I’m not. Because I am going to get hit at the gym, and my body knows this. I can think all I want about mouth guards and body pads, big pillowy gloves that will never break skin, but the reality is that I am going to get hit. On purpose. Repeatedly.
The fear and dread feels kind of like as a kid when I had to learn how to swim. I was terrified of that. Though I loved playing in the water. I just didn’t want to learn how to swim. “Put your face in the water,” the swimming teacher would say. But I didn’t ever want my face in the water. To this day, I cannot take a shower without a dry cloth nearby. God forbid I am ever on a sinking ship—I’ll be grabbing towels to take to the lifeboat. Just keep my face dry. I have no idea why.
And not only am I going to get hit, but I am being trained to stay forward, closer to the hit. To move, certainly, away from the hits—run and hide is what I want to do, but I ignore that logical instinct and choose to believe my coach as he repeatedly yells to me that the closer I am to my opponent, the less effective his punches will be. No time or space for their impact to build up in. “For it to become something,” he always says.
So if something happens only once, it could be a fluke, an odd beat out of sync with time, but if that same thing occurs a second time, then a rhythm is established and from that I can kind of tell when it will happen again. This works for anything: scream dreams, right hooks, sex with someone. Andrew and I had been on an eight-week rhythm method thing, established by that first night we were together in December and then the second time in February that made the weeks in between those two dates mean something. Eight weeks without him that moved interminably forward through time suddenly landed and connected me on him. Him on me. Again. But now we have skipped what should have been our third time of seeing each other according to the eight-week rhythm we were on. Now there is a long, silent ten-week pause, which, God knows, rhythms can have—thank you, John Cage—but I am stuck waiting for the beat and hating this rhythm of waiting.