Aftermath of Dreaming(25)

I wasn’t prepared for that. Not that I didn’t have the answer, but that question never entered my head in the zillion times I had practiced this.

“Yvette Broussard.” I was afraid to not give my last name. Not that there were so many Yvettes calling him, although there might be a curious run on the name, but the operator sounded so officious that it was clear only one name would never do.

“One moment, please, I’ll check.”

Check? That sounded ominous. At least from her it did. She put me on hold, leaving me no idea what to do with the empty, controlled time. I pictured the hotel where it stood across the street from the southernmost part of Central Park. The hotel my call was buzzing through, on hold but still viable, while the operator did what? How long could it take to put my call through? I was waiting in telephonic purgatory.

There was a small pulsing noise on the line, the hotel’s hold sound, rhythmic and thrilling, like step after step after step up a ladder to the high dive. I wondered what view Andrew Madden’s window had that he might be gazing through. Or, oh God, maybe he wasn’t there. Maybe I should have called earlier, maybe he meant this morning, and I had messed up. God, I hoped he was at his hotel. The nicest one I’d ever been in was the Monteleon, a century-old hotel in the French Quarter. My parents would take us there on special weekend trips when we didn’t stay with one of the many relatives that city was filled with. I supposed Andrew’s room at the Ritz-Carlton was a whole lot nicer than the ones at the Monteleon in a Yankee definition-of-luxury way.

“This is Andrew.” His voice suddenly was in my ear, curling up in my head. I jumped, thinking for a second he had somehow appeared.

“Hi,” I said, regaining my composure. “It’s Yvette.” He had used his first name, to direct me as to how to address him. I wondered if the operator had told him that I had asked for Mr. Madden.

“Yvette.” He said my name as if he had been speaking it my entire life. “Yvette, Yvette.” Fluid and comfortable and mellifluous. His voice made the two syllables more familiar while placing them in an atmosphere they had never before been, yet were at home. It was exhilarating. “Yvette from Pass Christian, Mississippi.”

“How’d you know how to say it right?” My accent became happily heavier hearing him speak the name of my hometown.

“I did a movie down there once.” His words sounded muffled.

“Oh.”

I had a vague recollection of the one he meant, but I had never seen it. He might as well have referred to the Napoleonic Wars—I had the same uncomfortable sense that I should know much more about the topic than I did, but fortunately, he didn’t pursue it. I had never been a big movie buff. When we were growing up, Momma rarely took us. Bambi had been too traumatic for her and that apparently sealed the fate for all the rest. By the time I was able to get out of the house on my own, a local bar or an illicit trip to the French Quarter held much more interest than images projected in the dark. Though I had a feeling my own little private video festival of Andrew’s films was about to start.

“And, and, and…How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“Eighteen.” Andrew whistled. “Do you know what age I am?”

“No.”

“Forty-seven.”

I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with that. Feel different? Hang up? As if there were a cutoff point. Widow-man was seventeen years older than me; twenty-nine didn’t seem that much further a leap. “That’s nice.”

Which made him laugh, a lying-back-on-the-bed, chest-and-stomach laugh. I could almost feel how he looked.

“You are so f*cking cute.” I had never much liked the word “cute” before, but I sure did now. “How did you get so f*cking cute?”

It was exquisitely embarrassing. I felt enveloped in his warm brightness, all of me by all of him, even places in me that I hadn’t known before. Who had ever thought I was cute? Not me, not anyone, yet there he was naming and claiming and moving things aside to show me what was underneath.

“Tell me, I want to know…”

And then there was silence. For a long moment I worried the phone line had been cut. I was just about to say “Hello?” when…

“What are Momma and Daddy like?”

“They’re, uh…How’d you know—”

“You’re from the South; you say Momma and Daddy. I still call my parents that. Years ago my brother started saying ‘Mother’ and ‘Father,’ but that to me sounded—”

“Pretentious.”

“Exactly.”

“I know, my sister tries to remember to call them that, too. I think it’s silly.”

“What are they like?”

For so long, no one had asked. Parents in New York City seemed as evolutionarily unnecessary as wisdom teeth, and my friends in high school had had no interest in mine just as I didn’t in theirs probably because we could see how they were, our parent’s behavior marked our bodies like we were little Indians wearing the war paint or peace headdress of our tribe.

“Well, Momma doesn’t talk, and Daddy just sort of…left years ago.”

“Left? Where’d he go?”

“Sarasota, I think. That’s in Florida. Momma heard from Cousin Elsie, a woman she hadn’t talked to in years, just one day out of the blue gets this call from her that she was sure she saw Paul—that’s my daddy—with some woman from the North, who had moved down there, and was making a career of buying rundown houses, fixing them up spit ‘n’ polish nice, then selling them for double the money, saw them at the Heart Ball out on the dance floor, him foxtrotting this woman like he had my momma at their wedding all those years ago, and what did she think about that? Like my momma would be surprised to know he wasn’t in Pass Christian. Like my momma thought he was out in the backyard straightening up his tools one more time on the Peg-Board he put up to keep them in a row.”