Aftermath of Dreaming(32)

“And it’s not like he won’t get every cent back, Christ. I mean, it’s gonna sell out.” Her Canadian accent, which was normally under wraps, was on full display in that last word.

She went on to say that Andrew was considering investing some money—“a thousand dollars, like he doesn’t have it”—but had been taking forever to decide. Weeks and weeks had gone by with no answer from him, so she had decided to call to say that she really needed to know, but instead of giving her an answer, all he had said was that he sure would love to f*ck her, if only he wasn’t married.

Big deal, I had thought as Sydney indignantly yammered on, that barely means anything coming from him. It’s the same as a “hi how are you” from anyone else. I couldn’t understand why she was so upset. If she knew him as well as she claimed she did, why was she taking it so seriously? I knew what Andrew would say when he really meant that, and what Sydney described wasn’t it. He had told me once that most of the time he felt women expected that stuff from him, that some even got angry when he didn’t flirt with or flatter them. I could imagine Andrew thinking Sydney would be one of them.

Then Sydney’s diatribe suddenly drew to a climax. “He came on to me like I was some waitress.” She decimated the word more than spoke it.

I had never heard such disdain. She should meet my father, I thought, they’d get along so well on this subject. Then I remembered that Sydney’s career had gone great guns right from the start, that she had never had a lowly job of any sort—luck had protected her from the artist’s usual fate. As she continued on, her Canadian accent a fuzzy moss covering her angry words, I imagined a secret restaurant system that transmitted customers’ attitudes toward the servers slaving over the food, letting waitstaffs everywhere know who the nightmare customers were in advance.

But Sydney’s willingness to be talked to like a waitress had paid off. Andrew obviously had given her the money, then attended her opening night to see his dollars at work.

Why hadn’t I remembered that conversation before I went to her show tonight? Though maybe I did somewhere deep in my mind; but I would have gone anyway, if I had remembered, because I never would have thought Andrew would go to the show. His fame is so huge, his persona so large, that a small theater for a one-person show is not a space or event big enough to hold him. Though it did. Crammed in there, his presence taking up the entire room, leaving no space for anyone else, which was fine, because no one else mattered with him there.

Now that I have finally seen him after all these years, the odds are probably back in favor of it not happening again—at least for a very long time. Like last year when someone broke the taillight on my truck; that was a drag, but living in L.A., a person can only go so long without having some kind of car contretemps, so I was grateful that my turn came up on a little thing. It’s the numbers game theory. So I figure three rows apart in a theater after we haven’t seen each other in four and a half years…I’ve probably got a good long stretch of time before I see him again, before any real dialogue happens between us. Unless of course hand-waving counts as dialogue, I don’t know. But even if it does, I’m sure I won’t see him again now for a really long time. Maybe even forever. Maybe Andrew will die, really clinically decease, before I get a chance to see him again, and tonight in the theater was it. The last acknowledgment from me he will ever see.

And me from him.

Oh, f*ck.

Jesus, I miss him.



“How was Sydney’s show last night?”

“Fine,” I say too quickly to Reggie on the phone, making it sound like she’d laid a big one. “I mean, great. You know, it was what she does.”

My voice sounds hoarse and thin. I’ve had four cups of coffee in the two hours since six A.M. when I finally got out of bed, tired of just lying there all night, unable to sleep. And the few times I did, the dreams I had of Andrew were so real—us at the theater, but wrapped up in each other’s arms with the crazy crowd all around like bedclothes, keeping us warm—that I was even more exhausted upon awakening from them. But at least I didn’t scream.

“And what else?”

“What else what?” Oh, please, Reggie, don’t get all intuitive on me. Please be blithe and vague and unable to figure anything out. In short, please be completely unlike yourself.

“What else happened? Something did—you sound like you slept with someone and don’t want to talk about it.”

“No. God.” I try to sound indignant to mask my shock at his accurate appraisal of my emotional state. “I just couldn’t sleep, that’s all.”

I had decided not to make oatmeal—I couldn’t face those goddamn grains—but I need something to cut the caffeine, so I take an apple from the fridge and get peanut butter out to spread on it.

“Thinking about the wedding?”

For one wild second, I think Reggie means my long-lost fantasy of mine and Andrew’s, then I remember Suzanne’s wedding and wonder if it’s supposed to be weighing on me so heavily that a restless night would not be odd.

“Are you worried about Suzanne’s veil, honey?”

“Oh, no, not really. I still need to work on it, but no, just…you know. What’s going on with you?”



Hanging up the phone from Reggie has an emptiness to it, like I was talking to someone else. But the person who was someone else in our conversation was me, because for the first time, I didn’t tell him everything. I couldn’t bring myself to after how he was about Michael. And anyway, what difference would it make? So I saw Andrew for the first time in four and a half years—big deal. Okay, so I am slightly completely totally a mess about it, but this whole thing will blow over, retreat into the past, become an incident I barely remember, with no more significance or future impact than if I’d switched brands of dental floss. I saw Andrew again—big deal.