Aftermath of Dreaming(69)

Two weeks after I started working for Bill, almost my third week in L.A., I finally called Andrew to let him know I had moved. I had been waiting to call him because I wanted to get more settled somehow, but the longing to hear his voice overpowered me. It had been a month since we had spoken on the phone, and that was in New York, so it was beginning to feel like something that had happened in a far-off distant land that wasn’t connected to me but I needed it to be. Needed him to be. It was a Saturday morning, Suzanne and Marc and I had finished breakfast, and I was still sitting at their antique country pine kitchen table while the morning light bounced off the citron walls, studying the book-sized L.A. map to acquaint myself with routes around town. At least streets were clearly marked in this city, with one sign at the corner, and also a larger one a few yards ahead to give a pleasant warning of your future turn. I remembered the small street signs in Pass Christian, mostly hidden by full, luscious trees, and wondered how anyone ever moved there and comfortably got around, but maybe that was the point. Suzanne and Marc came through the kitchen in tennis garb, and told me they’d be back in a few hours. I waved nonchalantly as if I couldn’t care less that I had the house again to myself. And the phone.

I waited for the sounds of the garage door opening, the car doors shutting, the car starting and revving (it was a Porsche), and backing out of the drive, before I walked into the den where large sliding doors led out to the pool, sat down on the gargantuan denim-covered couch, picked up the phone on the side table, and dialed Andrew’s number that I had known by heart for years, but had always had to dial long distance. Now, for the first time, it was local.

The operator answered, and upon hearing my name, told me to hold, so I knew she was getting him. It seemed as if only one person always answered his phone; no matter what hour it was or day of the week, the voice sounded exactly the same, as if there were a woman put on earth just to handle Andrew’s phones. In the years I lived in New York, whenever I called Andrew, I always imagined this operator-woman somewhere in an almost bare, nondescript room, far away from his home, with plastic containers of food and a diet Coke on her desk, always there, never ever gone.

“Where are you?” Andrew said, his concerned voice and large presence suddenly on the line. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m good; I’m in L.A.”

“L.A.? Where?”

I gave him the details, leaving out the length of time I’d been here, until he asked.

“Why haven’t you called me before? I’ve been worried, not hearing from you for weeks, and I couldn’t call you because of Tim-my.” Andrew exaggerated the last syllable the way he had done since I first started seeing Tim. “Is he here, too?”

“No, that’s all over.”

“Good.” He said it as if Tim were a phase I had needed to go through that he had always known would end, and that having done so it signaled my growth. “Not calling me for weeks, no idea where you were—you are in such big trouble for this.”

Thank God.

“Do you still love me?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then why aren’t you up here already? Come on.” He gave me directions to his home in Bel Air, making sure I knew the right way to go. I almost told him I had a map, but I wanted his instructions. As we hung up, the tingly feeling that had been building in me all during the call settled inside, making me glow stronger than the sun outside. I was going to see Andrew. I hadn’t expected that when I called him. I figured we’d just pick up our routine of talking every day, and maybe at some point, one day…But this was so immediate. I wondered what it meant and hoped it was huge and would become habitual.

I changed into a little floral dress I had bought on Melrose and put on some makeup, having to keep my hands steady while I thought back to the last time I had seen him. It was in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton, and we had been sitting on the yellow silk couch looking at pictures of Malaysia when that terrible Suzy girl arrived. Maybe seeing him now could be a fresh start, maybe he’d even ask about my art. I looked in the mirror of Marc’s guest room one last time before I picked up my bag to go. I was finally going to see Andrew again after five years. Five years that in some ways felt like ten, but also felt like five minutes. I left a note for Suzanne, telling her I had borrowed her car to run some errands, and ran out the door.

On the drive up the road in Bel Air to Andrew’s home, I passed huge houses with manicured lawns that became increasing large and more hidden from view the farther up I went. It felt like a dream, being on my way to see him again, real the way dreams feel while I’m having them, yet this one I didn’t have to wake up from. The road kept winding around, then wound back one more time, and there at the very top, as if God had saved it for him, was Andrew’s property. From the street, all I could see was a dense boundary of trees and shrubbery that I was sure hid a tall and fierce fence topped with barbed wire. A large white gate was closed across a driveway that looked like a small road. I stopped the car on the street before I got any closer—I figured he had security cameras rigged all over the place—and checked my makeup in the rearview mirror, then with an expulsion of air from my gut that was meant to relax the butterflies in there but only made them worse, I drove into the driveway and stopped in front of the gate. I pushed the button on an intercom box that protruded toward my car like a land-bound periscope, and a few seconds later, the wide white gate silently swung open, and a camera swiveled, keeping my car in sight as I drove into the property. Access to Andrew’s kingdom had been silently granted.