Aftermath of Dreaming(6)
“You will. It’s gonna be great.”
“Breakfast ma?ana?”
Reggie ends all of our morning phone calls this way. He told me once that his therapist decided that Reggie doesn’t know how to separate effectively from people, that he continues to stay attached to them throughout his day. The evidence of this, the therapist explained, was in the wording of Reggie’s goodbyes—they always contained a reference to when he and the other person would connect again. I told Reggie I thought it was just being nice.
Some therapists want to take all the manners out of you and think they haven’t done their job until they do. Like the phrase “I’m sorry,” for instance. How often have I said that in the course of my life? A hell of a lot more than the therapist I saw for a year was comfortable with, that’s certain. He would say, and rather gruffly considering he was a paid professional, “What are you sorry for? You didn’t do anything.”
Where I grew up in Pass Christian that phrase was an expression of sympathy and concern and solidarity with the person you were visiting with. Such as: “I’m sorry you had a bad day,” or “I’m sorry the hurricane tore your house up,” or “I’m sorry the Saints lost again.” Although sometimes I wonder if the real reason we apologize so much down there is that we still haven’t atoned for that truly horrible crime that we committed.
That apology enters my head a lot when I’m with Suzanne. Sometimes it feels like a spell was cast on me at birth that transforms anything I say or do around her from loving-little-sister to stark-raving-brat. At least, it appears that she views my behavior that way—but maybe some spell was cast on her, too. Though this morning, she definitely will think I’m a brat if I am any more late for my maid-of-honor obligation than I already am, which I might very well be since I seem unable to get dressed.
I have changed my shirt three times. There is almost a gravitational pull from my closet keeping me here as the pile of discarded clothing grows. The phone rings. I imagine it is Suzanne, or at least her energy using someone else’s call to yell “Hurry up!” at me from her house in Santa Monica clear across town. I look in the mirror inside the closet door and only slightly dislike what I have ended up in. All right, just go.
I hurry into the second bedroom that I converted into my office/studio. Morning light streams in, filling the room with a muted quiet, but the air is urgent with the anticipation of work that needs to get done. Sketches of completed and still-evolving designs are tacked to a Peg-Board on the wall above my worktable; tools of all shape and manner are hanging there too, their images outlined à la corpse in black Sharpie pen—a custom I picked up from my father’s work shed which he mimicked from all the detective novels he read; my computer is on and humming with photos of my new pieces waiting to be priced, printed, and organized; invoices and order forms spill from a two-tiered wire basket next to my carat and gram scales; black felt-lined trays filled with seed pearls and toggle clasps and checkerboard-cut amethysts and silk cords and yellow topaz vie for space on the worktable next to loose color-copied pages for press kits that are begging to be assembled. Not everything can be left out before I leave.
Crouching down in front of the gunmetal-gray safe that takes up the whole far corner of the room, I spin the dial quickly three times, right-left-right. Its familiar clicking is such an old song to me now that I can hear if the rhythm is off. Getting the safe into the apartment was hell. I had to pay the landlord extra for a guy to come out and check the building’s structure to make sure an object this heavy and large wouldn’t fall through the floor and crash into the apartment below. The safe’s weighty door slowly swings open, revealing trays of finished pieces that need to be delivered to customers as well as more loose stones; necklaces and earrings; rings, bracelets, and pins; lemony pale citrine gems; rare mint garnets and cabachon-cut red ones; a tiny pile of peridots, known as the evening emerald gemstone; tourmalines of blue, purple, and watermelon pink/green; pieces set and bound with braided eighteen-karat gold, all sparkling and blinking at me from the safe’s squatting bulk.
I take out trays and select earrings, a bracelet, and two pins, then put them on while checking in the mirror on the wall. The peridots are a pale whispering green, the tourmalines a soft lullaby blue, and all are shot through with thin bands of gold cutting across the gems that are then held together and apart by braided embraces of deep yellow gold. Sometimes I wish I could live inside a piece of jewelry. Or at least in a place where everything was smooth and polished and set and the only cuts that occurred were on purpose to make the light more enhanced.
I fill a large fake Louis Vuitton travel case with trays of jewelry, return the other ones to the safe along with the trays of topaz and amethysts and pearls from the worktable, shut the door, spin the dial a few turns, then stand up to look around to see if I’ve forgotten anything. Price sheets, order forms, and business cards with the name of my line, Broussard’s Bijoux, are already in the pocket of the travel case, and I am reminded, for the hundredth time, that I need to get a brochure printed up, as well as a Web site—does it ever end?—but finally I’m ready to run.
I grab my purse in the living room, lock the front door behind me, then race down the stairs and across the courtyard as the soft late May sunshine plays on my skin letting me know how it feels to be out in the clothes I am in that makes me turn around, run up to my apartment, grab my favorite black shirt plus a blue one, relock the front door behind me, run to my truck, and, finally, leave.