Aftermath of Dreaming(46)

A week or so later, I was at the restaurant working the eleven-to-eight shift. It was a chilly, rainy, early fall day, and the coat room had been hell during lunch. A dense, tangled mass of hats and attachés, wool and cashmere, umbrellas and shopping bags, even a pet carrier case that, thank God, was empty. A day destined to be a labyrinth of garments hiding for minutes on end while the owners waited impatiently for Lydia and me to find their truant coats. But at least we were doing the shift together. We had a good rhythm going, split the tips we procured evenly, and had fun talking about everyone and everything in between the customers coming and going—though I still had never told her about Andrew. Lydia had a full-length Russian sable coat that she wore the minute the thermometer dipped below fifty degrees. She’d hang it on the rack like a customer’s coat, and would let me try it on when no one was around. I never asked where she got it and she never volunteered. I imagined it was the last vestige of a relationship with some European man, a relationship she had hoped would prevent her from being where she had ended up—working the coat-check room of a restaurant in New York. But she was young and there were lots of rich men. “All you need is one,” she’d say to me and laugh as if she didn’t mean it, though I knew she did. It made me think how I had gotten a rich man, but it wasn’t like that with him.

The worst part of the shift that day came toward the end when a customer went upstairs and summoned the British manager, Mr. Claitor, to intercede. Claitor flew down the stairs, solidly upright like an animated arrow moving through the air, while the angry, uncloaked customer straggled behind, demanding that his sacred twenty-year-old Burberry be found. After much sorting through and crawling about, the cloak was discovered snuggling under a Persian lamb, as if the coats had taken an instant liking to each other and had colluded on their own. Claitor soothed the customer in his U.K. tones, like a male Mary Pop-pins calming a truculent child, as he held open the treasured trench coat. But once the customer was safely out the door, the scolding began. “If this happens again, there will be changes around here,” he said, glancing at the hole in the counter to make it explicitly clear what he meant, as if Lydia and I didn’t understand. “Are you doing your job or am I?” He was awful and wonderful in a Night Porter sort of way.

Finally at a little after three, I was able to sneak into the phone booth to call Andrew. His regular call to me that morning had been earlier than normal and brief, just telling me to call him that afternoon.

“Yvette, I have to go now.”

“Okay, I’ll call you later.”

“No, I’m going now, leaving, for overseas.”

“Oh, no.” The tears were in my voice and on my face so immediately that I wondered if they had heard his words before me.

“I’ll try to call you from there, but I may not be able to. Take down my address in L.A. I’ll probably be back here, but I want you to have it just in case.” I hated “just in case.” “Just in case” sounded scary and him-without-me. “Ready?”

The phone booth mercifully had a pencil on a cord and neat pieces of paper in a wooden slot by the inverted hanging directory. I had refilled the scrap paper months before. I had liked that the restaurant supplied it, edges so neat, color so white, but now I hated that it was helping in this parting of Andrew and me.

Some words in Andrew’s address were familiar, like “Bel Air.” That was the brand of the first cigarette my cousin Renée and I smoked. I always imagined it was named after the car, not a land of enchantment where Andrew resided, and probably did four years earlier when I was fourteen and puffing my first cancer stick.

“And if you really need me while I’m in Malaysia, call this number.” He gave me one with the L.A. area code. “Leave a message there and they’ll get it to me wherever I am. Use it if you need to.”

“Thanks, Andrew.”

“C’mon, you’re like a daughter to me.”

And then it all made sense. No one else in his life had that special role, even with all those women circulating through. That “I’m going to be in your life for a very long time” role. Let the others be his girlfriends and then get dumped by him—I knew what I was to him and that was all that mattered.

“Your show’s going to be a big f*cking hit.”

I couldn’t think of doing anything without him. “I love you, Andrew.”

“You, too, sweet-y-vette. And don’t do any drugs. Promise me you won’t.”

“I won’t, I promise.” That was out of the blue.

“Okay, bye, honey. I’ll talk to you soon.”

He will? No, of course he won’t.

“Andrew?”

“Yes?”

“Uhm, bye. Be careful and have a great time.”

He laughed kindly. “Bye-bye, sweet-y-vette.”

I let him hang up first, listening to the emptiness of the line. I knew the “If you’d like to make a call…” recording would come on in a moment, so I figured I’d let it shoo me off. I huddled forward over the hung-up pay phone, crying my goodbye to him, resisting the urge to quickly call back to make sure it would all be okay and I’d see him again, speak to him again one day, but he said I was like a daughter to him, so I knew I would. Andrew was going. Leaving. Gone. To a place far away—a devourer of our communication and physical reminders of us. Oh, Andrew, please think about me every day and come back quick. I wanted to shrink the Ritz-Carlton down to a tiny size and carry it with me all the time: him living there, the unfriendly operator, the yellow silk couch, the front desk clerk, the view from his room, the uniformed doormen, and mostly me with him. I took all of that, made a version I could forever see, and placed it in the foremost part of my mind so I would have to peer around it for anything else to be seen.