Aftermath of Dreaming(71)

After a couple more weeks of living at Marc and Suzanne’s when I thought Suzanne and I were going to tear each other’s hair out, I bought an old Chevy truck (good for hauling my sculptures, I thought) and put down a deposit plus first month’s rent on a five-hundred-dollar-a-month rent-controlled studio apartment on a pretty street in Beverly Hills. I had sold most of the work I did for the graduation show at SVA in New York back in May, so I had that money, and I had gotten a waitressing job at a restaurant to supplement my income since a few days a week working for Bill wasn’t covering everything.

The apartment was in an old Spanish-style building from the twenties with huge windows and beautiful tile. It had one large, light-filled room plus an eat-in kitchen, a huge walk-in closet, a decent-sized bathroom, and, the best part, a dressing room that I used as my (tiny) art studio. I had decided to start painting again, wanting to make box-type pieces with objects depicting the juxtaposition of being in two worlds, separate but at once. So the dressing room was messy and full, with a drop cloth covering the hardwood floor and a floodlight clamped onto the door frame so I could work late at night after my restaurant shifts, while I was still wound up from getting customers’ gourmand desires while they were under the delusion that sitting in the new hot spot, eating an overly expensive meal, was going to change who they were, or at least fix their unhappiness.



One afternoon when I was home after a morning of working for Bill, Andrew called me from his car. He asked what I was doing, and when I answered, “Working on a new piece,” he immediately wanted my address. I had a split second of thinking his motivation was to see what I was working on, then I realized, probably not. I gave the address to him, using the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences building as a reference point since it was at the corner of my street and I knew he would know where it was at the very least because of all the premieres he must have attended there through the years, not to mention the two Oscars he had won. My downstairs neighbor had told me what the building was soon after I moved in, as I was cooling down from a run early one evening and watching an impeccably hip phalanx walking past our apartment building. A film premiere, she had explained, at the academy. But Andrew had no response to that information. No “That’s funny, I’m there for screenings quite a bit.” Or “I’m glad you landed on a safe block.” Just “I’ll be right there.” Which was annoying. Was I not supposed to mention that precious part of his world? We didn’t talk about his career regularly, and when we did, he was the one who brought it up, and it took the form of him thinking things through out loud while watching my reaction to see how it sounded, sometimes asking what I thought about a particular point or two, then when he was done, we’d have sex.

Andrew walked into my apartment that afternoon, filling up the space with his tall strong frame, the light from his eyes blinding the room. We had sex on the futon that Bill had given me after assuring me that he had bought it to use as a couch, then changed his mind and never did. I had gotten a down-filled mattress pad to cover it, like gold inlay on a plastic watch, I thought every time I lay down, but it was comfortable, I could sleep, and my checkbook hadn’t been wrecked by buying a bed.

At Andrew’s house, we had a routine, but that afternoon it was altered, the sex a collage of sensations, some motions moved forward, others following while before they had led, and my apartment was the background. Having him there was like a picture of our relationship enlarged. Easier to see, but some things were blurred while others were cut off, as if unnecessary to the subject’s essentiality. The sex was different and familiar, and Andrew became imprinted where my life developed most.

Afterward, Andrew got up to use the bathroom. He walked down the short hall and into the dressing room where I heard him stop, his footsteps muffled slightly by the drop cloth. I could imagine him turning his head to look at my pieces, and I wondered what he thought about them and if he would tell me, as he had with my sculptures all those years ago on his bed at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. A few seconds later I heard more steps, the bathroom door shut, then the faucet turned on. I lay naked on the futon as a soft breeze from the mid-October day blew in through the window, running over my skin the way Andrew’s hands just had, and I waited to see if and what he would say about my art and tried not to care if he didn’t, but wasn’t very successful.

Hopefully, he’d say something. Please, God, say something. I heard water splashing a face, then hands interrupted the spigot’s flow. I tried to remember when I had last washed the towels. Two days ago; not great, not horrible. As my grandmother always said, you were clean when you got out of the tub and used them. I thought of his laundry and linens that were whisked away and invisibly replaced. His clothing retained a perfumed cleanliness, the unsullied perfection of being taken care of by many invisible hands. I could smell it on his garments each time I unzipped his jeans, pushed them down, and opened his fly while he stood, sometimes in his kitchen, when our sex started there at the end of a phone call that had been particularly long, or sometimes during one, if it was useless and annoying to him.

Andrew walked back into the room, got onto the futon with me, and put his head on my stomach with his body lying between my legs. As I rubbed his back, he was quiet and so was I as I waited to see if he’d talk about my art. I knew I couldn’t casually say, “So what’d you think of what you saw?” My voice would belie the importance behind it and I didn’t want him to know that.