Aftermath of Dreaming(120)

I find myself in front of the white and bright SoHo-style café, and as I push open the door, the smell of good food and the sight of people wearing clothes that were probably bought last week envelop me. Coltrane is playing at a pleasant volume and underneath it are the sounds of conversations from the packed tables in the dining area and the customers asking about dishes in the display case. After a good five minutes in line, I order a cappuccino and a grilled-vegetable sandwich. I have paid, gotten my lunch, and am walking outside to sit at one of the wrought-iron tables before I realize that I was hoping I would see that guy who helped me before. At an audition probably.



I almost had a good look this time. As my screaming reached its peak, I almost saw the face of the man about to grab me, but he disappeared.

I sit up on the couch in the glow of the street lamp pouring in. It has been a couple of months since the arboreal massacre and the sad little clumps of leaves growing on the tree almost make it more depressing somehow.

I go to the kitchen to make myself a cup of chamomile tea. As I am waiting for the water to boil, a memory comes to me from when I first started going to meditation sessions at En Chuan’s apartment.

It was a night when I got there before the others, so I helped him set up the circle of cushions on his living-room floor. Water for tea was working its way to a boil, and the open windows were letting a breeze in.

“Do you think all this is real?” En Chuan suddenly said to me. We were sitting across the floor from each other. He was on a black meditation cushion with his back so straight and hands so relaxed on his lap that his short thin body seemed to expand in that cross-legged pose as if it were most powerful like that. “Your life and perceptions, experiences and beliefs—are they real?”

I told him I thought so. They certainly felt real.

He nodded, then said, “While you are having a dream, you believe it is real; your nervous system reacts as if it is real; sometimes you even wake up thinking for a moment it is real.” He paused and his hands refolded themselves on his lap like a cat elegantly finding a new pose. “How do you know you won’t wake up to discover that none of this was real? That an entirely different reality exists for you to one day awaken and see.”

I had no response for that. The kettle began to whistle, so I got up to set out the tea, then Steve and the others arrived. It felt like he had planted something in me, had replaced an organ I didn’t know wasn’t working, and my body was still deciding if it should reject or welcome the foreign aid.

Curling up with my tea on the couch, I have no idea what this other reality is that En Chuan was speaking of, but just the idea that it may exist is comforting. It isn’t heaven he meant, but something else, something here. A way of seeing that is freeing, not limited by dreary reality. I doubt I’ll ever have it the way En Chuan probably does, but even just a peek of it—one altered view—would be enough.





35




I have been trying to avoid what I’ve been thinking lately. I got the order shipped to Greeley’s on deadline three weeks ago, so my prayers that it will blow out fast have begun. I asked Dipen and the vendors if I could have an extension on paying my bills, but they need the money, too, and I can’t afford to jeopardize those relationships.

All last week, I walked into, then out of, every restaurant on Melrose. They all asked for a picture and a résumé.

“I just want a waitressing job,” I said. “I’m not an actress.” I had thought that would help—no auditions for me to bail out of a shift for—but they just shrugged and showed me stacks of other applicants’ glossy eight-by-tens with smiles and sex abounding within. Who knew never being on TV would handicap me to serve food? Not that any of them were hiring anyway.

I even tried nightclubs. Got dressed up in smallish outfits and went around in the early evening hours. Gloria tried to talk me out of it when I told her what I was doing.

“Those real tall girls can do it, but even they wear the heels, ’cause, hon, you have to keep that tray up and over your head to get through those crowds. You never thought of that, did you? It’s hard, hard work. I wouldn’t try it if I were you.” Like I wanted to.

Every nightclub in town was fully stocked with fully stacked girls and my checkbook was in free fall. I was trying to brace myself for my own personal crash, when the last number would hit and the zero would explode up and out and rain poverty on me, silent nothings crushing me in their wake. Years ago, I met a homeless woman when I was volunteering in a food line on Santa Monica City Hall’s front lawn. She was in her early thirties, and I could tell she had been rather pretty once. Long brown hair that she was trying to keep neat, large blue eyes, someone you might meet at a party, not tons of distance between her and me like I always thought there’d be. She was last in line, and as I served her a plate of spaghetti and tomato sauce, she told me about the sliding steps that had gotten her there and how the process back to a rehabilitated life was a sheer vertical cliff. Not that I think I’ll end up where she was, but her sunburned face and hopeless eyes have started peering at me from my mind.



I want to jump out of my skin. But each morning I sit at my worktable with coffee, music on, and the jewelry that Greeley’s sent back along with what was in the safe—a few tourmalines, peridots, citrines, and jet. I play around with ideas to remake the old pieces while I try not to think about my smashed bank accounts and seeing Andrew. I get caught up in the juxtaposition of color and surface and sparkle and matteness, envisioning a whole new line, and I want to run downtown and scoop up more gems and pearls and jet to create this world, then I remember that I don’t have the money, and the panic comes, so I try to get my breath back and look at my options. I could call Matt and Suzanne for a loan, but that’s a phone call I really do not want to make.