Aftermath of Dreaming(43)

My hunger strike wasn’t intentional; I just didn’t want to eat. The late summer heat, I thought, was the reason, so I didn’t give it much thought. Until the fainting began. It happened the first time at work in the coat-check room, so that was easy to hide and not tell anyone, but then a week or so later, it happened again.

I was downtown looking at arts supplies, and suddenly knew I had to get something in me—my skin felt cold and hot all at once, and my blood seemed to have turned to caffeine, so jangly and metallically I felt, so I went into the nearest deli. It was lunchtime and horrendously crowded around the salad bar and buffet, which had steaming trays of sticky sweet meats, vegetables that appeared too fresh to not have been processed in some way, shiny chunks of tofu, noodles swirling like snakes, and all of it revolting me.

I was trying to select a drink, wavering between cold tomato juice, or going up front for a hot tea because the one female waiter at work, a blonde from Wisconsin, had told me that a hot beverage in the heat makes you feel better, something about aligning your internal/external body temperatures. I had thought when she said it that it was crazy Yankee logic, but maybe there was something to it and I should give it a try. But suddenly I felt my eyes and head do a back flip while my legs gave out straight in front of me.

The next thing I knew a bike messenger from Brooklyn was encouraging orange juice on me through a straw, the wax-coated container sweating like me, as he kept saying how he had braced my fall. “Otherwise, that linoleum floor…”

It was humiliating. I was relieved I wasn’t wearing a short skirt, but I felt dirty from being on that floor and shaky from the experience of my legs involuntarily not supporting me. When I was able to make my way out, the heavy woman behind the cash register stared at me stonily as if I were a junkie or something. As I hailed a cab, which would cost the earth to take me all the way home to West 109th, because I didn’t have the energy for the subway, I realized that I had unconsciously formulated the idea in my mind that if I didn’t eat, Andrew would stay. Jesus, that’s so teenaged, I thought. Then with a shock I realized that at eighteen, I still was.

It was impossible not to tell Carrie: she was home, my bath in the middle of the afternoon was out of the norm, and a bruise had developed on the side of my leg where the corner of a milk crate had cut into it, so I told her, but left out the reason for it.

A few nights later, I came home from a party that Lydia had thrown—all of us crammed into the small one-bedroom apartment that she shared on the Upper East Side, drinking vodka greyhounds and Tom Collins—and was greeted by Carrie as soon as I opened the front door, as if she had been waiting for me or something.

“Andrew called,” Carrie announced as I entered our apartment, stumbling a bit over the door’s burglar bar, a long steel rod that when propped against the door and locked into place on the floor supposedly prevented people from breaking in, but I found it wildly unsettling.

“What?” It was late, I was drunk, and I couldn’t believe she had listened to my answering machine while a message was being left on it.

“Andrew called, and he’s very upset about you fainting.” Carrie was speaking her words as if they were lines in a drawing room play that she happened to be quite brilliant in. I remembered she had taught high school drama in Mississippi for three years before ditching that and moving here.

The greyhounds were running through my brain and were not helping me make sense of what she was saying. Had I slipped up and said something about the deli incident to Andrew that he only now on a phone message was addressing?

“We had a good long talk all about it.”

“Oh, my God, Carrie, you talked to him?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Maybe she had also thrown out all my clothes during her rampage into my life.

“Yvette, I’m sorry,” she said, sounding not a bit in the least. “Your phone rang, I was in the kitchen, and this automatic response just kicked in—I swear I need to quit my job—so I picked it up and—oops!—it was him.”

“Oh, Jesus, Carrie. Are you kidding me?” I tried to remember how much I had told Andrew about Carrie on that first marathon phone call we had had when most, if not all, of the important relationships of my life were uncovered and examined. “What did he say? What did you say? Fuck, Carrie, you told him about the fainting?” I wanted to kill her, but she was looking so unguilty and giddy.

“And thank God I did. We had a nice long talk about it—he’s very concerned about you and was glad I told him. He asked me what you eat, that took all of two seconds to describe. ‘She won’t listen to me,’ I told him. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a talk with her when she gets home.’ God, he was just so nice and everything on the phone. Solicitous and polite. I mean, Andrew Madden, just like in his films, but talking to me.” She practically pirouetted and leapt.

It reminded me of how Suzanne used to always play with my dolls instead of hers when we were small. As Carrie prattled on, saying the same stuff two or three times, she appeared so thoroughly resolute in the righteousness of her deed that a rebuttal was pointless. And Andrew was worried about me, concerned enough to talk to my roommate whom he hadn’t even met, only knew about because of what I’d told him. It made me feel floaty and cozy, as though he had taken up residence inside my body.



Andrew wanted to see me. He wasn’t happy about what Carrie had told him, but I was happy that he told me to come to his hotel room that night after work. It had been weeks since I’d had lunch with him and his actor friend, though Andrew and I talked tons of times each day. He’d call first thing every morning; I’d call later on, speaking first to the operator whose voice I now knew and tried to be friendly to, but she acted each time as if our communication were brand-new.