Aftermath of Dreaming(27)

I sat on my bed. I looked at the phone. I worried that the ringer had inexplicably died. I considered going into Carrie’s room—not Ruth’s, she somehow would know—to use her phone to dial mine, but what if Andrew happened to call at exactly the same time, got a busy signal, and never called again? It wasn’t worth the risk.

I had forgotten to phone Momma that morning because calling Andrew had taken up all of my mind’s space, but the week before when I rang her, she had just gotten home from mass, as I had known she would, and was preparing her lunch. She sounded surprised to hear from me, like she always did, as though I hadn’t been calling every Sunday since I moved. Like she’d had a daughter once, but that was in the distant past, though given enough time, she would play along in this pretend parental role. Every week, I would ask the same questions, desperately trying to come up with new and improved ones that would inspire conversation. Few did.

Though one time I did get to hear a few sentences about the art league tea she would not be attending that afternoon. Not that she hadn’t been invited. My momma was famous for changing her mind. No event was etched in stone; any and all could be canceled, missed, reneged on at a moment’s notice. Clothes and/or fatigue were the usual reasons. “I just need to sleep!” she’d say, as if the occasion had been specifically coordinated to conflict with her REM time, or the outfit so laboriously planned had unaccountably fallen from grace.

I didn’t want to read a book or fix a meal or do anything really for fear that my involvement in a task would somehow send repeated signals of “unavailable” to Andrew, reaching him no matter where he was and preventing him from calling me.



An hour and a half went by. Still I waited for Andrew to call. I felt hungry and internally cold, even though it was hot as Hades outside. I stared out the open window in my room that led to a fire escape overlooking an alleyway between buildings that were shouldered closer together than any I had ever seen. Refuse and trash from decades past formed a giant mound. Had it ever been nice? Or did this neighborhood immediately sink into disrespect and despair, fulfilling an unspoken obligation for the city to cover all points on the socioeconomic spectrum. Smells of pork and spices from the neighbors’ all-day meal drifted in. On summer weekends, with music blasting, they used a makeshift grill on their fire escape to barbecue all kinds of meat in sauces I was sure I’d never tasted. A couple of weeks after moving in, I had told Suzanne on the phone what it was like—she in Beverly Hills living with her boyfriend—and she had sent me a letter exhorting me to embrace the Puerto Rican culture and indulge myself in their music and food. My sister, sometimes, is out of her mind. My neighbors had as little interest in my embracing their culture as I did. I felt alien enough in New York City without adding a language I couldn’t speak, food I couldn’t digest (had she forgotten I was vegetarian?), and music I couldn’t dance to. Beneath the clamor of their barbecue, my apartment was still. The cat was probably sleeping in Ruth’s loft, gravitating naturally to the spot she was wanted least.



Two more hours went by. Carrie still had not returned home. Ruth was burrowing in her room while Chinese food aromas and Mitzi Gaynor’s voice wafted from her confines. The cat had been duly ejected. I was hungrier. And felt stale, like a piece of bread taken out to make a sandwich then forgotten, my surfaces resistant instead of soft.





10




“What are you doing?”

I had known it would be Andrew when I said hello. Had known it would be him when the phone finally, thankfully, mercifully rang a little after nine P.M. But his voice sounded altered from before; it was on a more intimate note than our first phone call had ended on.

I didn’t know what to say. “Waiting for you” or “Hoping to die if you didn’t call” did not seem appropriate, though accurate they were. Nor did I have anything fabulous, exciting, or even mildly interesting to report from the four and a half hours I had just lived through without him. There was nothing really, so a gap appeared on the line like a Nixonian tape, just blank.

“Umm, I’m…” I got that out, then noticed how similar they sounded in my accent while hoping more words would magically materialize, but Andrew rescued me, ending the conversational flummox.

“Why aren’t you here yet?”

He said it so seriously that for a second I forgot he had only just called and wondered at my own delinquency before I remembered the sequence of events.

“I will be.”

“Will be?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Good.”

We hung up.



The cab driver didn’t flinch when I gave him the Ritz-Carlton’s address, so I tried to borrow his nonchalance. Taking a taxi was extravagant enough without getting all I could from it. I wasn’t surprised that I was nervous; what surprised me was that I wasn’t nervous in any way I had ever been before. I felt keyed up and able to notice each moment and detail as if I were reading microfilm, so much information compacted in such a small space, yet able to be seen.

After crossing the iron curtain of my neighborhood and shuttling down Columbus Avenue, we passed brightly beckoning restaurants with clusters of customers in front talking and gesturing. They looked crucial to the neighborhood, an integral part of this Sunday summer night, sustaining the avenue as it stretched south toward Midtown.