Aftermath of Dreaming(42)

I was too busy staring at the mound of refuse in the alley and imagining Suzanne’s pretty little head sticking out of it, like a child buried in the sand, to respond to her needling.

“Right? Yvette, tell me you’re still applying to college.”

“You know what? I have a lot to do; I need to get off the phone.”

“Uhhh, I could kill Mother for never coming out of her room. Just promise me you will—”

“Bye, Suzanne, I’ll talk to you soon.” I hung up, then immediately picked it back up to call Andrew. I wasn’t going to tell him about the conversation with my dear sister, but just to hear his voice in my ear, so near, to refute her words in my head.



“Malaysia,” Andrew answered when I asked him on the phone where was he going, trying to keep the panic and dread from my voice, though I doubted my success. “It may be hard for me to speak to you from there, but I’m not leaving for a while and I’ll be back. Besides, honey, you’re gonna be busy with Tory.”

“Are you not going to be here for the show?” My emotions ran out ahead of my words, pulling sounds along in their torrent.

“I don’t know. Maybe. It depends on how long this goes. I’m not leaving you, sweet-y-vette, I’ll just be gone for a little while.” His words were firmly bracketing me, but I still felt as though I were falling.

After he told me to call him that afternoon, we hung up, and I went for a run in Riverside Park to try to calm myself after the double whammy of Suzanne’s phone call this morning and now Andrew’s terrible news. Andrew leaving New York—f*ck. Okay. I had known that Andrew was about to start shooting his film. Carrie had left a newspaper gossip column on my bed about Paradise Again, the movie he was directing, producing, and starring in with Lily Creed, but I had assumed it’d be here. He was here; she had been here; why couldn’t they shoot the damn movie here? Malaysia, for Christ’s sake. Maybe there’d be a dreadful hurricane that would prevent him from going, if they even had hurricanes there—I didn’t know. Oh, Andrew, please don’t go.

A breeze was attempting to come in off the Hudson, the park was full of people trying to heighten their August Saturday experience by being outdoors whether it was pleasant or not. I ran down the broad path past Ninety-sixth Street toward Seventy-second where I would turn around to head farther uptown than where I began, past Grant’s Tomb—a surprise to me that the joke’s punch line existed in my neighborhood—then over and up into Morningside Heights before returning to the awful stretch of my block.

Exactly two weeks before, I had run in this park and seen Andrew that night for the first time. One week before, I ran in this park—had a great run, actually, my timing nicely improved on the dreadful fifteen-block hill—and met Andrew that night, and in the short time since, he had so completely infiltrated me that not only couldn’t I imagine life without him, I hadn’t thought I’d ever have to. Oh, God, I wished he wouldn’t leave. And he didn’t even know how long he’d be gone. Don’t movies have schedules to keep? Carrie had told me that Andrew lived in L.A., but I still had never thought that he would one day actually leave New York. Fuck.

As I ran past a pushcart hot dog vendor, the cooking infusing the air with more heat than it could hold and causing ripples of steam to move out toward the street, I tried to imagine being here without him, without phone calls to and from him three, four, five times every day, without him at the bottom of the park in the Ritz-Carlton, a sentinel of safety. It was like helium leaving a balloon; it was nothing without that vital energy inside.

I passed the homeless man who I saw on the same bench every time I ran. One morning, when my run was feeling terrible and useless, I decided to just go get a coffee and bagel to eat on my walk home. As I was leaving the park, I saw the homeless man sitting on a bench at the entrance. I had never seen homeless people in Pass Christian. The man was looking toward the ground as if he had lost something—which very clearly he had, lost a lot of things, but this more recently—and I suddenly found myself saying to him, “I’m going to get a bagel, would you like one, with an egg or cheese on it, maybe?”

He looked at me blankly for a moment, then said, “I don’t eat bagels.”

For a second, I understood. They were brand-new to me when I moved to Manhattan—biscuits or beignets being our breakfast fare. Then the oddness of his remark struck me. “It’s just bread,” I almost said but quickly realized that in a life so at the mercy of others, one would grab control wherever one could. I gave him a dollar from the ones I had folded and tucked in the hidden pocket of my running shorts, as I heard Ruth’s voice in my head saying, “They’ll just drink your money up.” But what did she know?

Turning around at Seventy-second Street to head back uptown, I decided that I would do everything I could to see Andrew a lot before he left. I hated Lily Creed for getting to go with him. But maybe he’d get really sick of her there. And maybe we’d have sex a lot before he went, even though he seemed to keep avoiding us doing that, which I could not figure out. But maybe he’d change and we would. Tons of it. Tons of solidifying, unifying, glorifying sex that he’d think about nonstop while he was gone, so he’d come back to me, having forgotten all about Lily Creed, and we’d be together forever, in perpetuity. That’s what I decided had to happen.