Aftermath of Dreaming(58)

I hated that my sculptures were still at the gallery, possibly shoved in the back near the freight door and cleaning supplies. Those people had seen a part of me, sniffed at it, thinly smiled, and turned away. I wanted to slap them and erase all memory of me from Tory and the gallery, the critics and collectors, Raul, C.A., and those stupid numerical assistants. And erase Andrew’s knowledge of this. Erase it and have him not need big f*cking art star success from me. Then he would love me and I could do my art and it would go well or not, but he’d be in my life and I wouldn’t have to see those superior and mean art people again.

I remembered with growing horror that Andrew had never experienced this—being excluded, dismissed, all right, goddamn it, having failed—they were alien concepts to him. One afternoon in February when I was missing him terribly, I went to the Coliseum Bookstore on Fifty-seventh Street and headed straight to the biography section in search of his name. There were volumes on him; two were rather silly, fluff like fanzines between hard covers, but the other four were thorough.

Andrew had been successful and famous his entire life. In school, every award and honor had been bestowed on him by teachers and classmates alike, then in the outside world, he immediately ascended to heavenly heights. Since the age of twenty, when he was discovered by a talent scout at a hotel pool, his name and visage had been internationally, consistently, swooningly adored.

Since Andrew had achieved that kind of success and fame at the age I would be next year, surely he had expected the same from me. Fuck. Fear knocked the breath out of my chest, and a pit opened up inside me that devoured my abilities to reach him and the him-with-me. I had thought that with Andrew in my life, that pit had been pushed far away. When Daddy left, I had fallen into it for the first time, but before that, I hadn’t known it existed—that it was deep inside all of us, only kept at bay by the flimsy fences of parents, home, and school. Not only hadn’t I been aware of it, I had thought my fencing was secure, but one phone call from my mother about Daddy’s departure had changed all of that for me, as it never did for the rest of the girls in my class. Their eyes reflected light and good times, while a frozen and dark solidity came over mine. Hanging up the phone from Peg’s banishment from the gallery and the world that Andrew had expected me to shine in, that frozen and dark solidity took over every part of me.



A couple of days later, after putting it off for as long as I thought I could, I picked up the phone to call Andrew. Not that I didn’t think he knew, but it would be weird for me not to tell him myself. Even though we had still never discussed the opening or the review, this one was too big and obvious to ignore. The late afternoon sun was departing from my room, as I lit a cigarette while wishing the smoke had transformative powers to change what I had to say.

Andrew immediately got on the line. “Hi.”

“Hi,” I said, hoping a comforting chat would somehow miraculously ensue, but only a dismal blankness was on the line.

“Hello?” He sounded annoyed.

“I’m here.”

“I’m in the middle of a meeting, Yvette, is there something you wanted to tell me?”

“Oh, sorry. I, uh, well…I guess you’ve heard.”

“Heard?”

“About Tory?” Knives pushed in and pulled out of me would have been easier than this.

“Yeah.”

Silence again on the line. He clearly hated that, so I said the only thing I genuinely could, “Well.”

“I’ve got people here.”

“Right.”

“I’ll talk to you soon.”

“Okay.” I tried to sound normal, confident. His “I’ll talk to you soon” was a sign to hold on to. I just hoped it were true.

“Bye.”

And before I could answer, a click cut the line.

Six weeks passed of few phone calls between us, and those were just exchanges of emptiness. Andrew offered no information about his work or life—I desperately wished he would—and I had nothing to discuss. My restaurant job was of no interest, particularly to him, and my career—I felt embarrassed even using that word—lay splattered on the ground like a body gruesomely ruined.

I lay in my bed each night unable to sleep, as if my mind needed more hours to feel dread in. Hour after hour of each and every day, all I thought about was Andrew and art, art and Andrew. Getting both back in my life the way they used to be, so I could breathe again.



“He’s waiting for you to ask,” Carrie said one evening over our third glass of wine, after I got home from work. “He’d never offer himself.”

I had a feeling she was wrong, but she kept trying to convince me. “It could make all the difference in the world,” she said, her tone implying I’d be a fool to pass the chance to ask Andrew to buy one of my sculptures. “He loved your work; he wouldn’t have done what he did if he didn’t. Just ask him. If he owned one or two of your sculptures, honey, you could get in any gallery in town. It’s a public stamp of approval for your art. Hell, you could send out a press release.”

That I’d never do, but maybe she was right. He had loved my work and it still looked the same. And he was constantly buying art, okay, only from extremely well established artists and never from newcomers, but maybe he’d break with that pattern just this once.