Aftermath of Dreaming(38)

“Eight, I get off at eight.”

“Call me then.”

“Okay.” I tried to keep out of my voice how ecstatic I felt about seeing him in only a few hours, to play it cool like it happened all the time.

“Okay?” His voice was patient and kind. Andrew’s living room had people in it—the kind whose daily existence included sessions with him, yet in those few minutes, he gave me the implicit understanding there’d always be time for me.

“Okay.”

“Bye, honey, I’ll talk to you soon.”

I walked slowly up the stairs and into the barroom. My task was to fill bowls with fancy mixed nuts (the nuts we illicitly wrapped in dinner napkins, hid in our pockets, and nibbled on throughout our coat-room shifts) to set along the bar in time for the predinner drinks crowd. All I could think about was how much time there was to endure before calling Andrew at eight, then seeing him when life would begin again.



Andrew and I spoke when I finished my shift, talked when I got home, talked again at ten. Then at ten-thirty, when he promised to call me right back, I knew I would collapse asleep before he did. In a small way, it felt okay not to see him. I was still overflowing from being with him the night before, and that experience could extend further before another encounter with him regulated it to the past.



The next morning, Carrie’s timing to converse about the Andrew escapade, as she called it, coincided with my being in the kitchen preparing to bake bread. I had stopped at the grocery at the end of my daily five-mile run to buy the ingredients, lugging the plastic bags the two long and two short blocks home. I was dying to tell her all about it—especially since it was a whole two days ago and I still hadn’t told anyone. Not that there was anyone else to tell. The only friends I had made so far, like Lydia, all worked at the restaurant, and that was way too gossipy a place for this information, so that left only Suzanne—not really an option. I could already guess how she’d feel about Andrew. She hadn’t liked widow-man, not that she had ever met him since she took off for college soon after Daddy left and had stayed in California, never once coming back. But she used to call me specifically to fuss about my seeing widow-man, what a terrible influence he was, and what kind of real high school experience could I have dating a man in his thirties. I’d do algebra problems during these “You should be…” speeches, throwing in a few “uh-huhs” every now and then until she ran out of steam and hung up. So I had a pretty strong feeling that telling her about Andrew Madden wasn’t going to be a happy sisterly chat.

But Carrie was great. Drinking her protein shake, thrilled to hear everything, wanting all the details, asking questions, squealing when I told her about leaving my art slides with him. Then she told me about Andrew’s girlfriend, Lily Creed, the beautiful British actress who was at the table with him that first night he came to the restaurant.

“But he has always had others on the side,” Carrie said, as if explaining a tricky but essential foreign language verb conjugation. “So you can’t feel bad about her. There’s no way she can think she’s the only one. And as my mother always said, ‘It’s not like he’s married.’”

Which is exactly how I felt, too. Besides feeling constantly like I was in a dream, the dream that Manhattan was meant to be. As if the real New York City had been unlocked for me by Andrew, and for the first time since I moved there, I felt connected to the city and all the energy it held. Every moment was lived in high gear with a perpetual fall crispness in the air, and I felt I could take on the world.



Andrew called as Carrie was in the shower washing henna out of her hair and I was filling the bread pans with dough.

“What are you doing?” he growled to my “hello,” sounding like a lion disguised as a cub.

“I’m baking you bread.”

“You’re what?”

“I’m baking you bread; I thought I’d drop it by this afternoon.” The oven door slipped shut out of my hand. I had had to stack the pots and Pyrex dishes we stored in there on my bed until the baking was done.

“No one has made me anything since I can’t remember when. You are so f*cking cute. When do I get my bread?”

I was so ecstatic, I almost dropped a pan. “An hour or so for it to bake and cool; I can come by around one.”

“If I’m not in, leave it at the desk.” His delight and warmth and protection were palpable over the phone. “You are in such big trouble for this.”

I couldn’t think of a better way to be.



I went to the hotel, dressed to see him, but when I reached the front desk, I was informed that Mr. Madden was out—would I care to leave a message? I opened my bag to take out the loaves. They were in Saran wrap, taped closed, then gift wrapped in pretty paisley paper napkins, and tied with silk bows. I had worried they looked too girly, but I decided it reflected more the giver than the givee, and who doesn’t like to unwrap something? The desk clerk appeared nonplussed as he took the warm bread from my hands. I guessed they didn’t get that very often.



“Do you know what I’m doing right now?” was Andrew’s greeting when I picked up the phone later that afternoon.

“Asking me to come over?”

“Eating your bread.”