Aftermath of Dreaming(61)

Without telling Andrew. I don’t know why, really. I kept thinking I’d tell him in each conversation we had in the weeks I was preparing to move, but somehow I never brought it up. Not that I didn’t want to be in the same city with him again. But I guess I had gotten so used to, and comfortable with, our parental phone relationship that the idea of being in a town where I could see him was unsettling—because what if I didn’t. I landed in L.A. with Suzanne waiting for me outside baggage claim, behind the wheel of her silver convertible Saab, and Andrew still thought I was living in New York.





18




I go downtown a lot. Mostly to the jewelry district to buy materials when I run out of gems. Or check on the progress of my jewelry, like I did on Thursday at Dipen’s. The new prototype for the necklace was perfect, thank God, although it looks like the order will take longer than Dipen thought because his casting machine broke down. But he promised me he’d have the order ready in two weeks, which puts me at exactly half a week before it is due to Rox, so I’ll still meet my deadline easily. I hope. Working with these guys, or let’s be honest, being completely dependent on them to make my jewelry, is having to be two parts sugary sweet plus one part hard-core commando, like some kind of chocolate bullet-chip ice cream. I have to stay on them to make sure the work gets done on time, but if I’m not nice about it, they’ll keep stalling or even stop doing my orders. I’ve seen designers at Dipen’s in tears, pleading with him to keep doing their work, and him standing on the other side of his counter, his face placid but firm, as he repeatedly tells them to never come there again.

But when I don’t have to go downtown for business what I really like to do is drive around downtown a lot, like I did last night when I couldn’t get to sleep because I kept thinking about Andrew. It was almost one A.M. on Saturday morning, and Michael had just left because he had to be at the station for the six A.M. show and the freeways are hell in the mornings. “On Saturdays?” I’d asked. But he’d just kissed me and promised to call me later. I couldn’t handle being in bed by myself. The stillness was too disturbing. I was just lying there with nothing moving but my thoughts, which were doing swoops in my head, so I finally jumped up, pulled on some clothes, got in my truck, and hit the freeway. Suzanne would have been outraged if she knew. “All those drunk drivers on the road,” I could imagine her saying as I got on the 10 heading east. But my truck is big and safe, and it was either drive or tear my hair out thinking about Andrew.

I headed east on the freeway toward downtown and the desert and Texas and what used to be home. But I didn’t go that far. I made the loop I like to make from the 10 up the 110 to the 101 that kind of sideswipes me by all those tall downtown buildings, the only really big ones L.A. has. Okay, Century City has a few and there’s that corridor of condos on Wilshire Boulevard, but for hard-core New York City–style skyscrapers—they’re downtown.

Which is why I went. They make me feel safe, seeing them standing so solid and sure, as if their weight can hold down and secure this slipping, tilting West Coast terrain. And from my truck up on the freeway, they’re almost at eye level so they look smaller in a way, like diamond-encrusted jewelry I can touch, even reach out and pick up if I want and put in my pocket to carry with me, like a memory that is there to look at whenever I want to, but isn’t the only thing I can see. Like how I wish it were with Andrew.

And don’t, honestly.

Usually one loop is enough, but last night, I drove it twice. I took the 110 north to the 101 east until I got off in Hollywood, then I turned back around and got on the freeway, retracing my journey. I passed the buildings a second time, their brightness smiling at me in the dark, I thought I might have to do a triple loop, but once I was completely past them, a lulling feeling kicked in and I knew I could go home. As if the buildings had sung me to sleep.

Some of those buildings it took me a while to like. The DWP building, for instance, on First Street, I could not appreciate at all. Just a tall, simple box of glass and white with black lines running across the front. A big neonothing is what I thought it was. Then one day, driving into downtown on First Street, as I got to the top of the hill, I saw the building there glistening. It was so perfect for its space that I finally understood it couldn’t have been anything other than what it was. I suddenly loved it and do still, partly because I disliked it so much before.

But that change of heart has not happened for me with the Pacific Shopping Center, a building I continue to loathe. Particularly Bloomingdale’s at the Pacific Shopping Center. Okay, actually the bra department in Bloomingdale’s at the Pacific Shopping Center, the locale of the purgatory I am in now.

Suzanne’s bridal shower is today, this lovely Saturday, and besides being groggy from not enough sleep thanks to last night’s nocturnal drive, I have nothing to wear. A fact that should have me in a clothing department, but if I get a new bra, which I’ve needed for a while, then the black top with the black pants I am wearing will look fine, though probably wrong. Sheer and floral and soft come to mind for a nuptial event, but after conjuring a blizzard of outfits in my bedroom, I ended up in my favorite black pants and top. The apparel equivalent of eating oatmeal every morning—I don’t have to think about choices and I know it’s good for my body.

As I stand in front of a rack of bras and flip through the tags on an endless supply of Playmate-appropriate contraptions, I feel like a school-kid who only got three letters of the alphabet: B C C B D D D B.