Aftermath of Dreaming(23)

I sank back toward the wall, even allowed myself to lean against it for a moment, before the words of the manager, Mr. Claitor, snapped in my head, “No slouching! Haven’t you got a spine?” Then he’d smile, which should have been anemic considering its size, but it could melt your insides. I stood up straight and away from the dark wood paneling. Seamus was busying himself with the remaining slips of paper that indicated how many more parties were arriving that night. I watched his large, stubby fingers move them around with practiced speed, this one to there, that one next, as I wished I was in the other room seeing Andrew. Which is when I saw them. Next to the slips of paper lay the keys for the side door; the door used only by special people who needed to avoid the paparazzi waiting for them outside the main entrance. Seamus had already helped Andrew secretly leave.

“Andrew Madden speak to you?” Seamus’s dark eyes darted over to me before glancing off, as if checking to make sure he was right about what I had been thinking at exactly that moment. It was funny that the name had become Andrew Madden—funnier even in Seamus’s brogue. Just last week it was Mr. Madden, as if now Seamus felt one step closer to a personal connection with him. I wondered if soon it’d be Andy.

“I told him your name. He came up to me, asked about you. Wanted to know your name, where you were from, and if you were here. So, he did talk to you.” Seamus nodded his head twice, as if he didn’t need me in this conversation. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.” Then he looked at me and grinned before turning around and walking through the swinging kitchen door. I imagined the striking of his match burning bright in the all-white kitchen.

I wanted to ask how he knew that I wanted no one else to know, but by the time Seamus came back out smelling of cigarettes and whiskey, the new hostess had arrived from the dining room, the dining room that no longer held anyone of interest. Seamus gave me a quick wink, then periodically grinned in my direction for the rest of the night. I felt like I was fourteen, had just gotten my period, and the boy’s gym coach, of all people, had found a pad for me—uncomfortable with, but grateful for, our inappropriate alliance.



One of my roommates, Carrie, was still awake when I got home after work. She was also from Mississippi, a school friend of Suzanne’s, and I had found the apartment through her—a terrible three-bedroom on the Upper way-past-the-good-part West Side with rent cheap enough for me to afford. Another woman, Ruth, lived there, in fact had the lease and the biggest bedroom with the cheapest rent, I had a feeling. Ruth was a musical-comedy performer, as she described herself, and was constantly going off on cruise ships for months at a time, subletting her room to an endless line of performers she had met on the ships who wanted to try their luck on the Great White Way. It sounded exhausting. I had a tiny pantry-sized room in the back behind the kitchen that provided no space for my art—other than sitting on my bed and sketching—but it was a place to sleep.

And since I was so new to New York, sleep was the only familiar landscape in my life—my dreams were a visual refuge for me. Though one night right after I moved in, as I was succumbing to slumber on the twin bed I had bought on Broadway at 108th—the salesman’s Puerto Rican accent more at home in the city than my Southern one, him waving off the delivery fee as a welcome gift to the city—I felt a small weight on my foot. I instinctively flicked my ankle, then heard a soft thud and the scamper of claws on linoleum floor. Immediately, I was up, running and screaming through the apartment to the living room couch where I hopped from cushion to cushion, still screaming. Carrie and Ruth came tearing out of their rooms in the front of the apartment, and Carrie bounded on to the sofa when she heard “Mouse!” But Ruth dismissed us with “I can’t believe you two are so afraid of that,” and went back to bed in her far-away-from-the-rodents room, though I noticed she didn’t protest when Carrie came home the next day with a cat.

“How was work?” Carrie asked that Saturday night when I walked in. She was sitting with her back to me on the uneven and pocked living room hardwood floor teasing her cat with a small doll on a string. She had decided to train it to dislike everyone else, though I wasn’t sure how the doll would accomplish that. The whole thing infuriated Ruth, but maybe that was the point. I liked the cat, liked having another living thing in the apartment that was smaller than me who needed care, feeling myself sometimes like a cat the city had taken in but wasn’t doing a very good job of keeping. A half-empty bottle of wine and a small carton of milk sat beside Carrie on the floor.

Her question was perfunctory. She didn’t mind hearing, so was glad to ask, but I could tell it was said as an intro to “good night.” Carrie worked at an answering service for a psychiatry practice and had many tales to tell of Upper East Side traumas the patients called in crisis about.

“It was good.” I hadn’t crossed through the room yet, was still standing in the hall doorway watching her cat leap and flip through the air, a feline ballet. “I met Andrew Madden tonight.”

“You what?” Carrie’s short blond hair fanned out à la Dorothy Hamill as she snapped her head around to face me, pulling the doll too far away from the cat as she did. The cat jumped at it, but grandly missed, swiping at the air, as if a tree would miraculously appear that she could slide down to brace her fall.

“I met Andrew Madden.” The cat banged to the floor, then got up and nonchalantly walked a few steps as if it that were part of her plan.