Aftermath of Dreaming(70)

The curving roadway was flanked by large shady trees and strategically placed groups of shrubs through which I glimpsed tennis courts on the left, then farther up on the right a small house, then the driveway curved once again and his home came into view.

It could have been on the Mediterranean coast, the Italianate architecture was so perfect and grand. Opening the car door, I half expected to smell sea air. It was like an island, a retreat from the intrusion of city life below.

The front door’s heavy wood muffled my knock, but I noticed a doorbell, so I pushed that, and a moment later, the door opened by inches and seconds and feet and minutes and Andrew appeared.

“Hi.” He said the word as only he could, not so much making it two syllables, but with enough space that there was a sunrise in the first part and a sunset in the last with a day in between for us.

I stood on the step taking him in. I’d seen his face and body in photographs and films countless times in the intervening years, but none of it compared to seeing him live. He was stripped down without the celluloid. Available, raw and real. Then our arms and lips and hands and tongues came together as if they had never not.

He led me through rooms of highly polished dark wood floors, satiny cream walls, and exquisite museum-quality antiques. Kellys, Baselitzes, Lichtensteins, Freuds, Twomblys, Johns, and Richters lined the walls. I thought of my sculptures in Momma’s attic and fantasized about one of them being there as we continued through more rooms past more art, then into his bedroom where Andrew sat down on the bed. It was huge. A room of its own. No words were spoken as our garments were removed.

The sex we had didn’t feel like only the second time. It was a continuation, an “and then,” as if the movement and rhythm and heat had been present all along, just under our skin. We fell in.

After a couple of hours, we got up and went to the kitchen for food, bringing a tray of gourmet dishes his chef had made back to the bed with ice-cold bottles of Pellegrino and beer.

“I’m glad you’re here. I’ve missed seeing your beautiful face,” Andrew said. We were lying back on the bed content after feeding each other and devouring the food. I didn’t say anything. It was a huge admission from him. One that I knew he might not have said if he’d thought much about it beforehand. It had come out on its own, unable to stay in, and I let it roll over my skin like the sensations of him during sex.

Andrew reached over to the bedside table and pressed a button, making the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall heavy silk cream-colored curtains slowly open, as if the day outside were a performance for us. The slightest cast of shadow was reaching toward his house. I realized it had to be past three and suddenly remembered Suzanne’s car sitting outside. It seemed ages ago since I had left that note for her. She was probably frantic, but mostly mad.

“Will I see you again soon or is it going to be years?” I said as I reluctantly got up and started to dress.

“What do you think?” He looked at me from his bed, his eyes on mine as if they had never left.

And I knew what he meant.

He kissed me at the front door. “Call me later, sweet-y-vette.”

Despite the annoyance of having to deal with an angry, carless Suzanne, I was ecstatically happy as I flew down the hill in Bel Air. As I turned onto Sunset, speeding into the curves to take them tight and fast, it felt as if Andrew’s arms were still holding me close.



And we were back. Not in the way it had been before, because we weren’t sexually involved before. Okay, once, I know, but that didn’t really count in terms of defining the relationship because the relationship wasn’t sexual. It was parental in a way. But now it was going to be different, that was clear. Though I wasn’t sure what change had suddenly allowed it. But I didn’t care. Andrew was back in my life; that was all that mattered.



Andrew and I started talking a few times every day. He’d call in the morning after Suzanne and Marc had left for work; I’d call him in the afternoon or night. Our New York habit but with the addition that we also talked about the sex we were regularly having. I’d go up to his house late at night, a wind was always high and restless in the trees around his estate even when it had been still as death in L.A. below, and he’d greet me at the front door, the same small “hi” every time before we kissed. Then we’d go into the kitchen if he had to finish up a call he was on with other movie people, I figured, who also conducted business at all hours of the night. The calls sounded important and concerned money or positions of power changing around. I’d sit on a stool waiting for him, listening to him talk and trying to fill in what the other person was saying, clues to Andrew’s life and what consumed him.

The kitchen was completely different from the rest of the house with its dark woods, important paintings, and astonishing antiques; it was a modernist’s dream. Steel and chrome and white and beams. Reflective surfaces absent of color except for an eternally present, exquisitely fresh bowl of fruit whose type of occupant changed every few days and a David Hockney behind glass, one of the Mulholland Drive series, spreading itself across the large kitchen wall like a bird unable to take full flight. Once the calls were done or would no longer be answered, since calls never ceased to come in for him, we would walk the path to his bedroom, the dark and beautiful art-filled journey into the place where his jeans would come down, my clothes would be taken off, usually with him lying on the bed watching, then I would get on top of him and work my way down to the beginning of bliss for both of us.