Aftermath of Dreaming(59)

All week, I rehearsed the question. During runs in the park that were increasingly hard from the cigarettes I was still smoking, and while walking home from work past his hotel—I still thought of the Ritz-Carlton that way. I rehearsed the question constantly, and repeated in my head the things he had said back in the fall about my art like a mentally recorded mantra to shore up my resolve. I picked a Sunday to call him, a little after two, the same day and time of our first great phone call, then spent all of the day before going back and forth about whether it should be ten after two East Coast time or West Coast, but finally decided that later in the day was best.

Dialing his number was like invoking his presence into my room. His overly large persona was there, high above and watching me. As I waited for the operator to put my call through, I remembered that Andrew was always warmer and softer earlier in the day, as if the progressing hours hardened him. I quickly prayed that he’d had a late night and only recently woken up, while I instinctively lit a cigarette.

“Hi.” He was there so quickly on the line. My legs started shaking, so I picked up the cigarette I had lit, thinking I would just hold it to provide me with strength.

“How are you?” I immediately wondered why I had asked since he had never answered that question before.

Andrew was actively quiet, then said, “What’s new?”

Oh, God, not that. Is there a more horrendous question in all the world? Nothing, actually—how’s that for honesty?

“Umm, good.” Fuck. I had answered my own question and not his. I took a long drag off my cigarette. “Uh, Andrew? I was wondering…”

“Are you smoking?” He made it sound like I was taking an ax to a small child.

“No.” I started to put the cigarette out, but changed my mind.

“Right now, you’re not smoking?”

“No, I just finished a run; I’m still cooling off.”

“Huh.” He said nothing for a moment then, “Don’t smoke.”

“I’m not.”

Huge emptiness appeared on the line. I thought of all the states our call was crossing where happy conversations must be taking place. Please, God, make this one of those.

“Andrew, I was wondering if…you…uh…” I had to catch my breath. A strange stoppage had occurred on my last intake, an invisible hand strangling my throat, making my next breath unpleasantly audible. “If you would want to buy one of my sculptures. For not very much, of course, or nothing, really. I’d give you one if you want.”

The cigarette was at my lips, kissing my mouth, and the smoke was hugging my throat, holding me inside. His silence was excruciating. I felt as if I were on the edge of a terrifying cliff, the backs of my knees were so weak.

Andrew cleared his throat. “I don’t want to be anyone’s sponsor.”

Oh. Oh, God. Okay. Sponsor. What did that mean? It sounded so involved, active, a thousand times more than one sale. He didn’t want to be anyone’s—my—sponsor.

“Maybe you should go home,” Andrew said. I nearly fell off the bed. Go home? To the muteness of Momma’s house; the decrepitude of that life? Maybe I should just kill myself instead. “It doesn’t seem to be working there. What do you think?” His dreadful speech was done, but I couldn’t believe he expected an answer from me, like an executioner asking if the rope should be in natural or white. The lifeline he had thrown me months before was being retracted.

“I think…I think I have to go.” I wanted to throw up and my head had begun to spin.

“Yvette.”

“Bye, I’m gonna go.” And before he could say another word, I hung up.

I found the fifth of Jack Daniel’s I had brought with me from Mississippi, grabbed the closest thing we had to a highball glass—a Donald Duck juice cup—and had many Disney-themed drinks full, then curled up on my bed and sobbed myself to sleep. I woke up a little later and sobbed some more. The alternating episodes of sleeping and sobbing became interchangeable—physically engrossing states with wildly precise mental scenes accompanying them.

Carrie must have pushed the curtain back at some point during the night because when I awoke the next morning, the half-empty Jack Daniel’s bottle and Disney glass were out of my room and a blanket from the couch was covering me.

Splashing water on my face in the bathroom, I caught a glimpse of myself in the cheap medicine-cabinet mirror. The glow I’d had when Andrew was so on fire about me was gone.



I was preparing for Andrew to get rid of me. The silence from the West Coast was booming; I could barely hear through its din. I made a tentative call to him a few weeks after the internal massacre that was our last conversation. He asked where I was and I answered before realizing he must have thought I’d gone back to the South. It was an exercise in verbal insignificance. I wondered why we were doing it, though he didn’t sound ready to be off the phone quickly like he had on our last few calls, but there was little to say. This gangplank of a goodbye was long.

After a few more weeks of silence between us, and nonstop dread about when Andrew was going to call to say never call him again, I finally could bear it no longer and decided to take things into my own hands. I called him on a Thursday afternoon in July, almost a year since we had met. My plan was to end it and lock him out of my life so I could get on with it and my art on my own. Somehow.