Aftermath of Dreaming(21)

“Do you want to be?”

It was palpable in that moment that he had given me a question legions craved from him. I watched his face after he offered it. An idol mask had slipped on and his features set themselves in a practiced, enigmatic openness.

“No.” Then I smiled and shrugged. He clearly liked actresses, thought the profession a good job to have; I didn’t want to appear rude.

“Oh.” This seemed to escape without his consent because he followed it with a small little laugh. “Well, what are you, then, besides beautiful?”

Which made me blush. I didn’t feel beautiful in that polyester lime-green uniform, and I didn’t think of myself that way. With my father I had felt beautiful because he told me I was all the time, even though I figured he said it because I was his offspring, and with widow-man I had, but as a teenager around girls and boys my own age, I felt off, different, like my soul had been in a rush to get to earth, so had just grabbed the first face it saw, one left over from an earlier time, as if all the modern ones were off in a queue getting their magazine-styled, cheerleader-straight hair. “Porcelain” and “cameo” are words I’ve heard to describe me—not such stuff as high school boys’ dreams are made on.

“I’m an artist, a sculptor.” I tried to ignore how absurd I felt saying this in Modern Art’s hometown, and as a coat-check clerk, no less, though it had been worse in Mississippi. Back home, I could see in people’s eyes the cute-kitten and sweet-puppy paintings they decided a girl artist would create. “Sugar pie, that’s so nice,” they’d say, patting my hand as if making a physical prayer to Jesus for his light to shine through my work.

One of Andrew’s eyebrows shot up, and he lowered his chin to examine my face. I felt he was seeing every piece I had ever done.

“I’d like to help you.”

He took no breath for a pause, but it existed nonetheless, disuniting everything preceding it and since.

“Call me tomorrow. I’m at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Will you do that, will you call me tomorrow?”

“Okay, but…What’s your room number?”

Andrew smiled at me. Kindly. And it held me gently in place.

“Just say my name, Yvette, they know me.”

I never wanted his smile to stop.

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

We looked at each other for a long moment, then he knocked on the counter between us twice with his forefinger crooked, like a substitute for the embrace that had begun.

“So I’ll talk to you; we’ll talk; I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Right?”

I nodded.

“Bye, Yvette.” And he turned and disappeared into the men’s room just to the left.

There was a gasp in the air and in me. A loud but silent, all-encompassing “Oh my God” inhaled into space and body and mind. I was too excited to stand still, so I started walking a tiny track in front of the racks. An entire year’s worth of experience had happened in that short exchange, and my mind was racing with its sounds and senses and smells. I noticed The New Yorker folded back to the article about bee-keeping. In that magazine, on that page, lay the sentence that was the point in time when Andrew Madden and I had met. I wanted to frame it. Every word I read henceforth would be infused with him. If I could read at all. My mind held only his words, a necklace of auditory pearls consisting of every syllable he had spoken, one I could listen to, look at, and hold.

Then I remembered he was still in the men’s room. I immediately wished there was someplace else I could be, some option more elegant than being stuck in the coat-check room with the lime-green of my uniform vibrating off my body, a strong signal from the lighthouse of my nonexistent art career. I paced a bit more, than decided my only real choice was just to stand behind the counter as nonchalantly as I could.

Andrew emerged from the men’s room, wagging his finger at me as he walked across the lobby’s marble floor. “Ritz-Carlton Hotel, tomorrow; don’t forget.”

I smiled. A smile I had never smiled before. A smile attached to a retractable cord that he had installed inside me, that pulled out and grew more taut with each step he took up the stairs, only able to snap back and coil up by talking to him again.

I wouldn’t forget. Was he kidding? I couldn’t wait.





8




The minute Andrew disappeared up the stairs, my body jumped in the air. Jumped and lit up, about to explode. Fireworks were inside me lighting up my internal sky. Andrew Madden spoke to me. Came up to me, knew my name, said my name, spoke my name in his voice, which only belonged to him, but now a little bit to me, as well. Andrew Madden spoke to me.

I wanted to pretend he had intuited my name all on his own. Could tell just by looking at me the way he seemed to know me already so well, but it was Seamus, I was sure, who had told him. Then I wondered if any of the other hosts had been standing nearby when that information was exchanged. I didn’t want them to know, wanted to keep this between Andrew and me (and Seamus, unfortunately), not become fodder for the restaurant’s gossip mill. I started to go over in my head who was working that night and who might have been where, then I gave up. All I wanted to do was relive over and over Andrew’s voice in my ears, his eyes locked on mine, his body so near. When customers came in, I tore my thoughts away long enough to look at them. It was easy to smile, joy flowed out of me in waves. Then I’d start the reliving all over again: the moment I realized I wasn’t alone, the looking up and seeing him, my eyes drawn directly to his, his first words to me, and mine to him…