Aftermath of Dreaming(29)

Then the edges of my body disappeared, the room tilted, lifted, and opened up until there was only warmth and light and motion and Andrew’s head buried in my neck.



Afterward, while he lay still on top of me, I rubbed and kneaded and plied his back, the big muscles of his public life and dizzy-heights career that were hard and interlocked. Encouraging his torso to release into gravity, I felt his rib cage expand, his lower back drop, and with a deep expulsion of breath, he relaxed into me.



It was almost one A.M., just the beginning of Monday morning, and Andrew was sitting on the side of the bed, wearing a fresh black T-shirt, and shaking out his jeans. He had decided it was time we leave the bed, the bed it felt like we had spent three incredible years in during the two and a half hours we were there.

“What do you want to eat?”

I was in New York City with Andrew Madden so there were no limits to the answer for that question. The gleanings of the city had never been offered so openly to me, but I was distracted by trying to find my clothes. They appeared to have attempted some sort of freedom run during the interval I wasn’t held in their restraint. By the time I recovered them, dressed, and walked back into the bedroom, Andrew was reading the sports page.

“What did you like the best?” I said, standing before him.

He looked at me over his reading glasses, his right brow heightening the surprise and question in his gaze.

“No, no, not…” I glanced at the rumpled sheets to finish the sentence, as I blushed. “I meant, when you played sports in college, like you told me you did, what’d you like the best?”

“Oh. For a second there, I wondered where the sweet Southern girl I was with had gone. Football. I liked football the best. But they all were great.”

I didn’t understand football. All I knew was that Daddy had gone to Tulane and screamed bloody hell whenever the LSU Tigers scored a point.

“Now, what are we going to get you to eat?”

“Pasta and vodka.” I had come up with that menu selection hours before, while sitting on my bed during one of the interminable intervals in which I had kept deciding that surely in the following fifteen-minute period, Andrew would call. That was all so far away now. My closet of a bedroom, the sitting and waiting, my mind chilling itself to keep from processing the loud menacing question, “What if he doesn’t call?” I was safe from that now, ensconced in Andrew’s glow.

“Pasta with vodka sauce?”

“No.” That sounded odd. “Just…pasta, somehow, and vodka, like to drink.” I hoped the vodka part didn’t bother him since I was underage in New York.

“I see.”

Andrew briefly disappeared inside a closet larger than my bedroom. “Do you like this jacket?” he said, when he came out.

He had put on what is generally referred to as a sports coat, though that phrase has always made me think of the burgundy polyester numbers I’d seen at the business conventions my daddy sometimes made appearances at in Gulfport. Andrew’s was of an entirely different breed. It was a silk cashmere, and each thin thread was a separate shade in a spectrum of mid to dark gray to black, creating an effect of a muted charcoal gloss fitted precisely to his frame.

“It’s stunning.”

“An old girlfriend of mine gave it to me.”

I wondered who she was and how much of him and his life had been hers. I was envious of what the gift implied. She had been able to buy him a jacket, a perfect one for his body and wardrobe and style. I imagined her—exquisite—sitting in a quiet, elegant store, having the time and money and opportunity to give him this gift that had lasted past their relationship’s end. I wanted to give him something like that.

“Let’s go.”

“Where?” I knew New York continued into every hour of any night, but now that my hunger depended upon it, I doubted it would sufficiently come through.

“I know a place, don’t you worry.”



Walking on the quiet, vacant streets with Andrew was having him enter my dreams. The buildings I so often passed alone in similar dark emptiness now saw me with him. I felt a novel lack of need for their reliable stability. The path he was taking us on, unbeknownst to him, was a backward retracing of the route I took as I walked home from work, before catching the Broadway northbound bus the rest of the trip up. Andrew turned us right out of the hotel, heading east along Central Park South, then made another right onto Fifth. The marquee of the Paris movie theater boasted a British film that was getting much attention for its “searing portrayal of human darkness.” A smoldering blonde, cigarette dangling to ensure the point, peered broodingly from the glass-encased poster.

“Didn’t see it—that’s not my cup of tea,” he replied to my question about it.

I wasn’t much interested in the film myself, but I would have enjoyed hearing his personal review so I could see it with his words interpreting the images, like his private subtitles in my head.

Fifth Avenue widened in Andrew’s presence. Buildings sat back; the sidewalk softened. New York turned itself into a reverent country for him.



P. J. Clarkes’ on Third Avenue was barely inhabited when we entered. A white-aproned bartender stood still as a statue in front of the beveled glass behind the bar. Portraits of Lincoln and J.F.K. stared down silently above him. A lone man sat next to a dark wood wall with a pitcher of beer, a mug, and the Daily News on the table before him. Andrew and I walked past them without disturbing their gaze, and into the empty dining room where Andrew settled me down at a large round table.